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Russian Working Class in Revolutionary Russia

Дата публикации: 20 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) - Soviet Russia (1917-53) →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1190294295


Russian Working Class in Revolutionary Russia

Was the Russian working class united behind Vladimir Lenin in 1917?

Viewpoint: Yes. The Bolsheviks commanded the allegiance of a large majority of the working class.

Viewpoint: No. Working-class support for the Bolsheviks has been overstated and often rested on a misunderstanding of what the Bolsheviks meant when they said they favored democracy.

______________________________

This chapter evaluates the validity of the claim made by the Soviet regime and its sympathizers that the Bolshevik Revolution enjoyed the nearly unanimous support of Russia's workers. On the one hand, worker support for Bolshevism seems self-evident. Workers wanted an end to World War I, the defense of the more democratic revolution of February 1917, control of their factories, higher standards of living, and opportunities for social and education advancement. Honestly or not, the Bolsheviks made many promises and offered the greatest degree of credibility in these areas. Their opponents did not, or talked about postponing their resolution to a future time. Workers, guided by their interests, supported the Bolsheviks in a manner demonstrated by Bolshevik majorities in soviets, by mass voluntarism for the Red Guards, Red Army, and new bureaucracy, and by other actions taken in defense of the revolution.
Opponents are quick to point out the nuances of the real situation. Many workers in fact supported the Bolsheviks on false premises and switched their allegiance to moderate socialists and other anti-Bolshevik forces as soon as they realized the truth. Many workers never supported the Bolsheviks at all and rued the high-handed treatment they received from Soviet government officials. Unanimous worker support was thus never guaranteed.



Viewpoint: Yes. The Bolsheviks commanded the allegiance of a large majority of the working class.

The Bolsheviks enjoyed the overwhelming majority of worker support in 1917 because they posed, honestly or not, as defenders of democracy and the most genuine embodiment of the revolution that had deposed the tsarist government in March 1917. At least in official pronouncements, their seizure of power was not a unilateral coup but a preemptive measure to safeguard the accomplished democratic revolution. History revealed that this claim was untrue, but the public statements of Vladimir Lenin and his associates all indicated that their purpose was to invest power in the soviet (council) institutions that had been elected by workers in Petrograd and all over Russia over the course of 1917, a measure that many workers had advocated for months and that few other political parties were prepared to back. Bolshevik rhetoric responded meaningfully to most other worker demands. Every measurable indicator of worker political sentiment strongly favored Bolshevism in the revolutionary year.

The first major case of unrest after the collapse of the monarchy, protests launched upon the revelation in April 1917 that the Provisional Government was continuing to pursue imperialist aims in World War I, indicated that one major and well-publicized plank in the Bolshevik platform--ending Russia's participation in the conflict--enjoyed mass support. As a result of the demonstrations, the responsible ministers were forced from government, and the Provisional Government's cabinet became more radical in composition. A second massive public demonstration in early July, touched off by news that military units would be transferred from Petrograd to the front for the first time since the collapse of the monarchy, brought an estimated four to five hundred thousand workers and soldiers into the streets of the capital. Once again they called for an end to Russia's participation in World War I, but added to their demands the abolition of the "bourgeois" Provisional Government and the creation of a workers' state governed by the soviets. The Bolsheviks played hesitant roles in these events as they unfolded, but their leaders could see that huge numbers of the capital's workers shared what were essentially their own political goals. Although the unrest abated without forcing major political change, some Bolshevik leaders advocated using the turmoil to seize power, while others were emboldened to create a military organization within the ranks of the party. This military organization became a lasting feature throughout 1917 and rose in stature in late August, when suspicious troop movements suggested that the army commander in chief, General Lavr Kornilov, was moving to crush radical movements in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks portrayed the situation, rightly or wrongly, as an attempt by reactionary military units to crush supporters of the revolution. They mobilized thousands of their rank-and-file party members to resist it. In the process they emerged in public view as Kornilov's most resolute opponents and the revolution's most fervent defenders. They also managed to cast public doubt on the Provisional Government and its leader, Aleksandr Kerensky, who, rumor suggested, was either secretly in league with Kornilov or too weak and indecisive to stop him on his own. The collapse of the "Kornilov Affair" greatly improved the Bolsheviks' credentials and stimulated a further rise in their support among the urban masses. The Menshevik memoirist Nikolai Sukhanov recalled that "after the Kornilov revolt Bolshevism began blossoming luxuriantly and put forth deep roots." More than a few of those roots were among Russia's workers.

In addition to what was happening in the streets of Petrograd, formal membership in the Bolshevik Party, a more precise barometer of its popularity, rose dramatically, registering a far greater rate of increase over the course of 1917 than that of any other political group. Between February and August its ranks grew more than tenfold, from 23,600 to more than 250,000. By the eve of the October coup d'état, the party's membership had surged to an estimated 350,000. While these figures still did not account for all or even a majority of Russian workers, it is important to bear in mind that party membership was selective, restricted, and defined not by passive sympathies, as membership in modern mass political parties usually is, but by active commitment and work.

Less active supporters among Russia's workers nevertheless made themselves known. Many urban soviets, dominated for the most part by Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary delegates for the first several months after February 1917, came firmly under Bolshevik control by late summer. The Petrograd soviet, the most prominent organization of its kind in Russia, the first to be founded, and one of the few legitimized by a legacy in the Revolution of 1905, came under the control of a Bolshevik majority on 31 August--almost two months before the coup--when it passed a motion condemning the Provisional Government and repeating earlier calls for national soviet power. Shortly thereafter the Bolsheviks were elected to a majority of seats on its executive committee; their prominent leader Leon Trotsky became its chairman. Earlier in August, the Bolsheviks had already taken control of the soviets of Ivanovo- Voznesensk, Ekaterinburg, Samara, Tsaritsyn, Riga, Saratov, and other important industrial centers. The party won another significant majority in the Moscow soviet on 5 September and then added further victories in the soviets of Kiev, Kazan, Nikolaev, and Baku.

Bolshevik successes in other representative urban institutions were also impressive. Later in September they won an absolute majority of seats on the Moscow city council (duma), while in Petrograd municipal elections held just before the Kornilov Affair delivered to them one-third of the capital's city-council seats. Petrograd's Central Bureau of Factory Committees, a body specifically representative of the city's industrial workers, had come under Bolshevik control as early as May 1917, as had the worker committees of most of the capital's largest factories. In national politics, the Bolsheviks won another absolute majority of seats--390 out of 650--in the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which assembled in Petrograd at the time of the October coup. Although not perfect, these institutions were the most representative bodies functioning in urban Russia at the time, and none of the Bolsheviks' successes in them would have been possible without tremendous support from Russian workers.

Elections to the Constituent Assembly--the democratically elected body intended to determine Russia's political future--further revealed worker support for Bolshevism. Held a month after the October coup but generally in accordance with democratic procedures set down earlier, Russia's voters gave the Bolsheviks 24 percent of the national poll. It was clearly a defeat, but in raw statistical terms their share of the vote exceeded the size of the country's urban population, which only accounted for 20 percent of the total. Some peasants, intellectuals, and other nonworkers voted for the Bolsheviks, and some urbanites voted against them, but most of the party's 10 million ballots came from workers or from enlisted military personnel stationed in or near urban areas. In Petrograd, Moscow, and other industrial centers, the Bolsheviks again won absolute majorities of the vote.

Even without systematized coercion, undisputed domination of the state, ironclad control of the armed forces, and other characteristics of their future government, the Bolsheviks could thus honestly claim widespread working-class support in 1917. In yet another testament to their success, rival left-wing parties saw their support among Russia's workers evaporate over the course of the revolutionary year. In the same Moscow city-council elections that catapulted the Bolsheviks to majority control, the Menshevik Party, the Bolsheviks' only serious competitor within the Russian Marxist movement, received a paltry 4 percent of the vote. The Socialist Revolutionaries, who had held a majority of their seats since June, won only 14 percent. Bolshevik control of the soviets also tended to be quite strong. In Saratov, for example, Bolsheviks accounted for 75 percent of the soviet's executive committee when they took control in August. Although they decisively lost the Constituent Assembly elections to the Socialist Revolutionaries, who took over 50 percent of the national vote, their rivals' support came almost exclusively from Russia's vast peasant population. A substantial faction within the Socialist Revolutionary Party, based mostly in urban constituencies where workers were prevalent, campaigned on a platform that approved of the Bolshevik coup, moreover. Some of the party's leaders joined Lenin's government, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), in December 1917. The Mensheviks, who never built a substantial rural organization or following, took just 3 percent of the Constituent Assembly vote.

What made the Bolsheviks so appealing to workers in Russia's electoral politics? Their advocacy of virtually the same political goals held dear by most Russian workers went a long way toward attracting their support. Along with much of the rest of Russia's population, workers wanted an end to World War I, a new political order dominated by egalitarian democracy and led by the soviets, managerial control of their factories and working conditions, and the defeat of individuals, forces, and political programs that they perceived to be inimical to those goals. Lenin unambiguously favored Russia's withdrawal from the war and began to negotiate for an armistice and peace treaty with Germany shortly after taking power. He and other Bolshevik leaders at least claimed that they wanted to endow the soviets with supreme political authority, end social and economic hierarchies, and establish worker control of production. By opposing Kornilov, Kerensky, political parties that did not advocate transferring power to the soviets, and later the antirevolutionary White armies and interventionist foreign nations, they showed themselves to be enthusiastic defenders of the revolution.

Many Russian workers came to rue the ruthlessness and cruelty of the Bolshevik regime as it evolved into an authoritarian police state. Many suffered from its repressive policies and institutions, violations of fundamental democratic rights, and deep betrayals of their ideals. Yet, in 1917 these sad outcomes were impossible to predict. Most workers liked what they saw in Bolshevism, and the Bolsheviks could honestly claim their support.

-- John Pawl, Washington, D.C.


Viewpoint: No. Working-class support for the Bolsheviks has been overstated and often rested on a misunderstanding of what the Bolsheviks meant when they said they favored democracy.

In his Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), the American journalist John Reed depicted the October Revolution as a triumph for Petrograd workers, who supported the Bolshevik Party "almost unanimously." Many historians have agreed with Reed and written that the Bolsheviks in 1917 were, as they depicted themselves to be, the party of the working class. On the other hand, a sizable contingent of academics has insisted that the Bolsheviks lacked a popular mandate and that their "workers' revolution" was really an illegal coup. Although this debate may never be settled to everyone's satisfaction, the evidence currently available indicates that Russian workers were far from being "united behind Lenin." The Bolsheviks did enjoy a great deal of working-class support by October 1917. Most of their supporters, however, did not support a one-party government such as that created in October. In addition, some workers actively opposed the Bolsheviks.

Conditions in Russia certainly favored the party's growth. As 1917 wore on, Russia's economic and military situation deteriorated. The Provisional Government became associated with failure, and so did the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who favored cooperation with the Provisional Government. While some Russians responded to the setbacks by becoming more conservative, others turned radical. The Bolsheviks' uncompromising stances against the war, for soviet power, and in favor of "worker control" of the economy proved attractive to many wage earners. The most radical tended to be workers who had lived in urban areas for a long time and who were highly skilled and educated; Petrograd factory workers in particular were among the Bolsheviks' strongest adherents. Workers helped the Bolsheviks gain majorities in city soviets in Petrograd, Moscow, and elsewhere in the wake of General Lavr Kornilov's failed coup. They also pushed the party's membership rolls as high as 350,000 by October.

Workers did not support the Bolsheviks unconditionally, however. They believed in the Bolshevik campaign slogan "All Power to the Soviets." In an article summarizing historical research on industrial workers, Robert Service writes:


A. F. Butenko's collation of answers to a questionnaire issued at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies revealed that workers, when they voted for Bolsheviks in the autumn, were voting for 'soviet power' rather than a Bolshevik- dominated political system. Alexander Rabinowitch's account of Petrograd politics has confirmed this finding in relation to the country's capital.

Thus, any backing the Bolshevik leaders gained before October did not extend to a one-party revolution at odds with their rhetoric. On 16 October, Aleksandr Shliapnikov warned the Bolshevik Central Committee that "a Bolshevik uprising is not popular" among Petrograd workers, "and rumors of this even produce panic."

More importantly, workers could not be "united behind Lenin" because they themselves were not a single, monolithic body. Bolshevik writers dealt with the working class's diversity by trying to define it out of existence. Calling the most radical factory laborers members of the "true" working class, they dismissed other workers as either "lacking in social consciousness" (if they were factory workers who still had ties to the countryside, for instance) or "bourgeois" (if they were better educated or well-to-do government employees, for instance). Their politically motivated restrictions on the definition of "worker" persisted for decades in Soviet histories and still affect both Russian and non-Russian views of the Revolution.

In fact, the views of Russian working class displayed a considerable amount of variety in 1917. In the providence of Saratov alone, workers labored in such disparate industries as food preparation, woodworking, metallurgy, and printing; they also processed consumer goods, leather and fur, stone, chemicals, and textiles. Different industries and different positions within an industry required different levels of skill and training. And those were only the factory jobs. Outside the factories, there were railway workers, postal workers, telegraph workers, builders, miners, shop assistants, pharmacists, electricians, plumbers, and janitors. The central and local governments employed clerks, accountants, and other bureaucrats. Well-to- do citizens employed domestic servants. Russia's working class included men and women, residents of big cities and inhabitants of smaller towns and villages, longtime urbanites and new arrivals from the countryside.

Workers' differing employment, skill levels, geographic locations, and personal backgrounds all affected their political leanings. In addition, a few persuasive or powerful workers within a factory or shop could often exert a controlling influence over political opinion within the factory. Thus, one should not be surprised to find that opinions on the Bolsheviks varied from place to place and person to person. In June 1917, for example, while Pravda published a pro-Bolshevik resolution from workers at a Petrograd metal and machine factory, employees of a textile factory in Moscow drew up a resolution expressing distrust of the Bolsheviks. Workers in the town of Kuznetsk favored the Socialist Revolutionaries. In elections to the Constituent Assembly, held after the Bolsheviks took power, workers chose Bolsheviks over other parties, but the vote was far from unanimous. Bolsheviks received less than a third of the civilian votes cast in the city of Saratov, for example. Historian Donald J. Raleigh has found that soldiers' votes, not workers', were the Bolsheviks' main support in Saratov province--and most soldiers had peasant rather than working-class origins.

Large numbers of workers protested against the Bolshevik Revolution. On 15 November 1917, employees at the Baltic Shipbuilding Works in Petrograd approved a resolution stating that the "seizure of [government] power by a single political party would be an incorrect step." (The resolution added that other parties were not justified in boycotting the Congress of Soviets after such a seizure "has been accomplished and become fact.") A day earlier, employees of the Kushnerev Printing Works in Moscow had passed a resolution condemning the fact that "'All power to the soviets' has for all intents and purposes been transformed into the power of the Bolsheviks" and demanding that the Bolsheviks "recognize the Constituent Assembly, as soon as it convenes, as the sole spokesman for the people's will, and until then that we put an immediate halt to all those violations of the law whose indignant witnesses we have been." The Kushnerev workers were not an anomaly; most printers throughout Russia preferred the Mensheviks to the Bolsheviks.

Some workers expressed their disapproval of the Bolsheviks' actions by threatening to strike. On 29 October/11 November, Vikzhel, the railway workers' union, announced that railway operations would cease unless the Bolsheviks formed a coalition government including the other socialist parties. "Hundreds of factories, garrisons, Front and Fleet assemblies sent petitions to Smolny [Bolshevik headquarters in Petrograd] in support of the Vikzhel plan," historian Orlando Figes notes. "The workers in Moscow and other provincial cities . . . also expressed strong support."

Other workers went beyond threats to actions. According to Raleigh,


The belief that Bolshevik power would collapse or that the party would be forced to broaden the ruling coalition encouraged many Saratovites to go out on strike or otherwise subvert the functioning of the administrative machinery in the weeks following the Revolution. A strike originating in Petrograd that spread to Saratov's postal and telegraph workers made information hard to come by, while bank officials diverted much-needed funds from the soviet.

Similar situations existed in other cities. Government employees proved particularly unwilling to cooperate with the Bolsheviks. They walked out of their offices, locked doors, hid documents, and refused to release state funds. Eventually, the Union of Unions of Employees of Government Institutions organized its workers' resistance to the new government. Its strike continued into January 1918, when the new Bolshevik police force, the Cheka, suppressed it.

The idea that the working class stood "united behind Lenin" may have been the party line during the Soviet era, but the evidence does not support it. Like the rest of the citizenry, Russian workers divided on the question of how their country should be governed. Before October, they split their support among several political parties. Among those who voted Bolshevik, many did so to show support for the soviets, not to champion a one-party revolution. After October, workers voted against the Bolsheviks in elections to the Constituent Assembly, composed resolutions protesting the revolution, and went on strike. Some of these protesters grew reconciled to Bolshevik government as the months wore on. Other workers continued their resistance, which contributed to the development of the civil war.

-- Catherine Blair, Georgetown University


WORKERS' CONTROL

Vladimir Lenin issued this decree in late 1917 in an attempt to reconcile Russian economic needs with communist ideals:

27 November 1917

1. In order to provide planned regulation of the national economy, workers' control over the manufacture, purchase, sale and storage of produce and raw materials and over the financial activity of enterprise is introduced in all industrial, commercial, banking, agricultural, co- operative and other enterprises, which employ hired labor or give work to be done at home.

2. Worker's control is exercised by all the workers of the given enterprise through their elected bodies, such as factory committees, shop stewards' councils, etc., whose members include representatives of the officer employees and the technical personnel.

3. In every city, guberniya and industrial district a local workers' control council is set up which, being an agency of the Soviet of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, is composed of representatives of trade unions, factory and office workers' committees, and workers' co-operatives.

4. Pending the convocation of the congress of workers' control councils, an All- Russia Workers' Control Council is instituted in Petrograd, with the following representation: five members from the All-Russia Central Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies; five from the All-Russia Central Executive Committee of Peasants' Deputies; five from the All-Russia Council of Trade Unions; two from the All-Russia Workers' Co-operative Center; five from the All-Russia Bureau of Factory Committees; five from the All-Russia Union of Engineers and Technicians; two from the All-Russia Union of Agronomists; one from every all-Russia union of workers having less than 100,000 members; two from every all-Russia union of workers having more than 100,000 workers; two from the Petrograd Council of Trade Unions.

5. The supreme bodies of workers' control establish inspection commissions of specialists (technicians, bookkeepers, etc.) which are dispatched, either on the initiative of these bodies or at the insistence of lower workers' control bodies, to inspect the financial and technical activities of an enterprise.

6. The workers' control bodies have the right to supervise production, establish output quotas and take measures to ascertain production costs.

7. The workers' control bodies have the right of access to the entire business correspondence of an enterprise, concealment of the same by the owners is punishable by a court of law. Commercial secrecy is abolished. The owners are obliged to present to workers' control bodies all books and accounts for both the current and previous fiscal years.

8. Decisions of workers' control bodies are binding upon the owners of enterprises and may be revoked only by higher workers' control bodies.

9. The entrepreneur or the enterprise management has three days within which to appeal to a higher workers' control body against decisions of lower bodies of workers' control.

10. At all enterprises the owners and the representatives of the wage and salary earners elected to exercise workers' control are declared answerable to the state for the maintenance of the strictest order and discipline and for the protection of property. Those guilty of concealment of materials, products and orders, improper keeping of accounts and other such malpractices are held criminally responsible.

11. The district (as in Paragraph 3) workers' control councils settle all disputes and conflicts between lower control bodies, handle owner's complaints, issue instructions comfortably with the specificity of production, the local conditions and the decisions and instructions of the All-Russia Workers' Control Council, and supervise the activity of the lower control bodies.

12. The All-Russia Workers' Control Council works out general plans of workers' control, issues instructions and ordinances, regulates relationships between district workers' control councils, and serves as the highest instance for all matters pertaining to workers' control.

13. The All-Russia Workers' Control Council co-ordinates the activity of workers' control bodies with that of all other institutions concerned with the organization of the national economy. Instructions on the relationships between the All-Russia Workers' Control Council and other institutions organizing and regulating the national economy will be issued separately.

14. All laws and circulars hampering the activity of the factory and other committees and councils of wage and salary earners are repealed.

In the name of the Government of the Russian Republic, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars,

VL. ULANOV (LENIN)

Source: Martin McCauley, ed., The Russian Revolution and the Soviet State, 1917-1921: Documents (London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 233-235.

FURTHER READINGS


References


Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

Robert V. Daniels, ed. and trans., A Documentary History of Communism in Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev (Hanover, N.H. & London: University Press of New England, 1993).

Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 (New York: Penguin, 1996).

Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution 1917-1932 (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

Geoffrey Hosking, The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within, second edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Daniel H. Kaiser, ed., The Workers' Revolution in Russia, 1917: The View from Below (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Diane P. Koenker and William G. Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police: The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (December 1917 to February 1922) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power: From the July Days 1917 to July 1918 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984).

Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: Norton, 1978).

Donald J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia's Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919).

Robert Service, ed., Society and Politics in the Russian Revolution (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992).

S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Опубликовано на Порталусе 20 сентября 2007 года

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