Revolutions - 10.75- The People's Commissars

Episode Date: November 15, 2021

The Bolsheviks caught the car. Now they had to figure out what to do with it.

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 10.75, the people's commissars. So last time, we finally reached zero hour. The Bolsheviks have now come to power. But as I said at the end of last week, it was only in retrospect that we know how important the events of October 1917 were to the history of Russia and the history of the world. Lots of people at the time. including a fair number of Bolsheviks,

did not think the Bolsheviks had the personnel, the support, the talent, the wherewithal, or the popularity to actually survive in power. The American journalist John Reed, observing things from the wings in the days after October 25th, said the bourgeoisie lay low, abiding its hour, which could not be far off, that the Bolsheviks would remain in power longer than three days

never occurred to anybody, except perhaps to Lenin, Trotsky, the Petrograd workers, and the simpler soldiers. The Bolsheviks took power with the support of tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors, workers, and red guards in Petrograd. But they claim that power on behalf of the all-Russian Congress of Soviets and the millions of Russians it allegedly represented. Bolshevik speeches and proclamations emphasized that they spoke on behalf of the workers, soldiers, and peasants of the empire in their many millions. But this did not exactly line up with reality. Most people in the Russian Empire, frankly, had never heard of such a lot of.

a thing as a Bolshevik. As we talked about two episodes back, though, Lenin and Trotsky did not much care that they did not command an actual popular majority in October 1917. They believe that the seizure of power itself, and more importantly, how they wielded the power they had seized, would earn them all the popular support they would ever need. So they spent their first days in power issuing bold decrees designed to win the support of four critical groups. The peasants, the soldiers, the workers, and the minority nationality groups. The February Revolution had given each of these four groups, hopes and dreams and ambitions, which had been stymied, put off, and delayed by the fundamentally ineffective provisional government.

The Bolsheviks believed that if they delivered on the promises of the revolution, there was no reason to believe they would not become the most popular political party. Those four groups, after all, made up the vast majority of the population of the Russian Empire. The second Congress of Soviets reconvened on the evening of October 26th, now shed of the SRs and Mensheviks who had walked out the day before and composed entirely of Bolsheviks and left SRs. They got right to work. The first thing, above all, was the question of peace. So to immediately win over all those soldiers and sailors out there, the Congress of Soviets approved the decree on peace, which called for, and I'm quoting here, immediate peace. peace without annexations, i.e. without the seizure of foreign lands, without the forcible incorporation

of foreign nations, and without indemnities. The decree also said, the government considers it the greatest crime against humanity to continue this war over the issues of how to divide among the strong and rich nations, the weak nationalities they have conquered, and solemnly announces its determination immediately to sign terms of peace to stop the war on the terms indicated. until such a peace was signed, the decree said, the government proposes an immediate armistice to the governments and peoples of all belligerent countries. So the decree on peace was aimed at that most vital of constituencies, all the soldiers and sailors out there who were sick of fighting and sick of dying.

The Bolsheviks had always been the anti-war party, and now that they had a chance to end the war, they planned to end the war. But the decree on peace also said, our appeal must be addressed both to the governments and to the peoples. We cannot ignore the governments, for that would delay the possibility of concluding peace, and the people's government dare not do that, but we have no right not to appeal to the peoples at the same time. The Bolsheviks, remember, see themselves as the speartip of a European-wide proletarian revolution,

and they plan to encourage the people of Europe to follow their lead if their respective governments refuse to end the war. The second major decree on the night of October 26th was the decree on land, meant to win the support of the peasantry. The decree on land offered the sweeping transfer of property to the peasant villages. It was a four-point plan that was brief and to the point, and so I'll just go through it. One, landed proprietorship is abolished forthwith without any compensation. 2. The land of estates, as also crown, monastery, and church lands, with all their livestock, implements, buildings, and everything pertaining thereto shall be placed at the disposal of the land

committees and Soviets of peasants' deputies pending the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. 3. All damage to confiscated property, which henceforth belongs to the whole people, is proclaimed a grave crime to be punished by the Revolutionary Courts. The Soviet of peasant's deputy shall take all necessary measures to assure the observance of the strictest order during the confiscation of the landed estates to determine the size of estates and the particular estates subject to confiscation, to draw up exact inventories of all property confiscated, and to protect in the strictest revolutionary way all agricultural enterprises transferred to the people, with all buildings, implements, livestock, stocks of produce, etc. 4. The following peasant mandate shall serve everywhere to guide the implementation of the great land reforms until a final decision on the latter is taken by the constituent assembly. Now a couple of notes on this. First, this is not the Bolshevik land program. Lenin was a staunch believer in nationalization and consolidation. He had never advocated local peasant committees taking direct possession of the land, which was the program outlined in the decree on land. One outraged SR said,

Ah, the land decree. It is our decree. It is the socialist revolutionary program intact. My party framed that policy after the most careful compilation of the wishes of the peasants themselves. Asked how he felt about the Bolsheviks putting this out there under their own name,

he said, it is an outrage. But Lenin didn't care about being doctrinaire at the moment, even about his own doctrines. The Bolsheviks needed to secure what they had never had, mass support of the peasantry. So, they announced a program that embodied everything the peasants wanted, local control over the former largest states in their area. When challenged that the land decree was not in keeping with his own nationalization program,

Lenin said, that is unimportant. As a democratic government, we cannot simply ignore the wishes of the popular masses, even if we are in disagreement with them. At a session of the Petrograd Soviet a few days later, Lenin would say, the SRs charge us with stealing their land program. If that was so, we bow to them. It is good enough for us. The Bolsheviks enacting the SR program may have rankled the SRs,

but for Lenin, that was their problem, not his. When the SRs held power in the provisional government and in the Soviets, they had refused to enact their very popular land program. And this was part of the Bolshevik pitch, that other parties do nothing while we act now. immediately, without apology or hesitation. That was the Bolshevik way. The last thing to come out of this session of the Soviet Congress

was the formation of a new government. Thanks to the right SRs and Mensheviks walking out of the Congress the day before, and the left SRs declining to participate, the Congress approved a government made entirely of Bolshevik Party members. Declining to call themselves ministers in order to break with the past, they dubbed themselves the Council of People's Communists. SARS. Lenin became chairman of the council at the insistence of the Bolshevik Central Committee, who were not interested in the chief not being directly on the hook for the consequences of the

thing he had so relentlessly pushed them to do, which was seized power. Lenin tried to make Trotsky minister of the interior, but Trotsky begged off, saying the Russian people would not accept a Jew in that position. Of what importance are such trifles? Lenin asked. Trotsky replied, there are still a good many fools left, to which Lenin scoffed, surely we don't step with fools. But Trotsky said, sometimes one has to make allowances for stupidity. Instead, Trotsky took over as commissar of foreign affairs, a role which probably better suited him anyway. I won't bore you with the whole list of names except to note that at the bottom, the Georgian Joseph Stalin, was made chairman of nationality affairs. With a new government in place and a couple of sweeping decrees proclaimed,

the Second Congress finished its work by electing a standing executive council of about 150 members to serve as the sovereign host of Lenin's new government. In theory, the government would be answerable to this executive committee of the Soviet, but this executive committee of the Soviet was of course chaired by the Bolshevik Kamenev, composed of a supermajority of Bolshevik members with a minority faction of left SRs. With this work done, the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets closed up shop on October 27th, having existed for just about 48 hours, serving mainly as the midwife of a regime composed entirely of revolutionary Bolsheviks. In the chaotic atmosphere of the next few weeks, the Bolsheviks improvised their way through a minefield that everyone assumed would blow them up.

And because they needed to improvise a course through this minefield, they did not put a lot of stock in the form of, maladies of legislation. After the Second Congress formally dissolved, decrees would simply be published signed by Lenin or some other commissar, most of them aspirational because frankly the Bolsheviks didn't have the means to implement most of what they were announcing. On October 27th, for example, the Bolsheviks made their pitch for the third of the four groups they needed to win over with their draft regulations on worker control. It was an eight-point plan that started workers control over the production, storage, purchase, and sale of all products and raw materials shall be introduced in all industrial, commercial, banking, agricultural, and other enterprises.

So henceforth, worker committees were supposed to have the final say over what was going on in their workplace, not managers and not owners. The regulations further said, the decisions of the elected representatives of the workers and office employees are binding upon the owners of enterprises and may be annulled only by trade unions and their congresses. The regulations also said, The elected representatives shall be given access to all books and documents and to all warehouses and stocks of materials, instruments and products, without exception.

So this is all very Marxist. The regulations are putting the means of production in the hands of the proletariat. But if you read between the lines, it's also an admission the Bolsheviks don't really have the ability to embark on anything more ambitious than simply telling the workers to take control of their own factories and manage their own affairs for themselves. That same day, Lenin issued another decree not aimed at winning support, but on silencing dissent. It was a decree concerning the press. It said, in the trying critical period of the revolution and the days that immediately, followed it. The Provisional Revolutionary Committee was compelled to take a number of measures against the counter-revolutionary press of different shades. It further said,

Everyone knows that the bourgeois press is one of the most powerful weapons of the bourgeoisie, especially at the crucial moment when the new power, the power of workers and peasants, is only affirming itself. It was impossible to leave this weapon wholly in the hands of the enemy, for in such moments it is no less dangerous than bombs and machine guns. The decree then laid out three criteria that would justify the government shutting down a journal or a newspaper. One, if they call for open resistance or insubordination to the workers and peasant's government. Two, so sedition through demonstrably slanderous distortion of facts. Three, instigate actions of an obviously criminal, i.e. criminally punishable nature.

This decree sent howls through the opposition, and even, even, protests from people who were sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, because they all quite rightly feared that the Bolsheviks would apply this criteria however they wanted and simply shut down anyone who opposed them. As the Bolsheviks flooded Petrograd with these decrees and proclamations, they were met by a very hostile and very vocal opposition. There's a reason Lenin was trying to shut their presses down. The rivals and enemies of the Bolsheviks gathered to ensure the nascent regime was smothered in its grotesque infancy. The core of this group was the 300 or so demonstrators who had been threatened with a good spanking when they tried to go to the Winter Palace on the night of October 25th. They were

leading members of the Petrograd Municipal Duma, nearly all of whom were SRs, including the mayor of the city, the delegates who had walked out of the Soviet Congress, representatives from another assembly that we're going to talk about next week, which is the all-Russian Congress of peasant Soviets, plus leaders of the Union of Government Employees and other professional unions, and then just also random SRs and Mensheviks. Their position was that whatever was going on over at the Smolny Institute was neither valid nor legitimate. In fact, their claim was that the second all-Russian Congress of Soviets had never, in fact, convened that what was going on over there was simply a private assembly of Bolsheviks. They all gathered at the Assembly Hall of the municipal Duma

and declared themselves to be the Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution. They believed they represented the true spirit of legal democracy against a criminal gang of Bolsheviks. Among other things, the Committee of Salvation put out a call for workers to strike, particularly white-collar professionals, functionaries, bureaucrats, bankers, doctors, lawyers, and engineers. The educated professional middle classes of Petrograd did not. support the Bolshevik insurrection, and this call to strike was heated in force. When Bolshevik commissars tried to take over leadership of the various ministries, they found the offices empty, but not just deserted. Also in many cases trashed, typewriters destroyed,

funds, files, documents, and records were destroyed or disappeared. The few workers who showed up the Central Telegraph agency refused to transmit commissar dispatches, both private, and state banks were closed, and the Bolsheviks struggled to find anyone who would cash checks or provide funds. In the communist telling of all this, it's an example of the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries nefariously sabotaging the people's government. But all of these people opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power. They thought it was illegal, and they responded by playing by the same rules as Lenin. Do what it takes to win. History has shown time and again that strikes are a good way to get your way. They knew they were indispensable cogs, not just in the machinery of state, but in the machinery of society.

There's nothing particularly nefarious about the white-collar strike, unless you think that only one side should be allowed to play for keeps, while everyone else has to just roll over. It wreaked havoc with the Bolsheviks' ability to run the country in the early days of their rule, which was entirely the point. As the Bolsheviks grappled with this generally frustrating work stoppage, they also saw. faced a more acute threat. The railway workers' union, led primarily by Mensheviks and SRs, threatened to go on strike unless the Bolsheviks agreed to form a coalition government with the other socialist parties. This was a real threat that had to be taken seriously. The railroads were the vital artery of the whole empire. Everyone remembered that it was their strike in 1905 that had brought Nicholas to his knees. They told the Bolsheviks, either come to the

negotiate with the other parties under our auspices or we will go on strike. The Bolsheviks could not afford to ignore this threat, so they sent Kamenev over to represent them, while Lenin and Trotsky focused on the looming military threat from Kerenzky that we're going to talk about here in a second. Kamenev was, of course, the Bolshevik most against his own party's recent behavior and most in favor of cross-party coalition. But when he received their terms, even he was shocked by how extreme the demands were. First, all troops must be placed under the authority of the municipal Duma.

Second, all workers must be disarmed and Kerenzky's forces must be allowed to enter the city. Third, all arrested persons released. And four, dissolve the MRC. This was not coalition or compromise. This was a demand for the total capitulation of the Bolsheviks. The demand from the other parties was essentially that they repudiate everything that they had done and give away everything that they had gained. The reason the terms were so one-sided

was because the members of the Committee of Salvation did not believe the Bolsheviks would last the week. What military forces they had at their disposal, the MRC, the Red Guards, and the workers generally, were currently in the midst of succumbing to an epidemic of mass drunkenness. With the revolution of soldiers and workers now in full swing, the wine-sellers of peters of peters, Petrograd were raided with enthusiastic abandon.

Workers got wasted. Soldiers got wasted. Sailors got wasted. Men got wasted. Women got wasted. Everyone got wasted. Anatov, the MRC leader who had arrested the provisional government on the night of October 25th, noticed the problem right away.

The problem was particularly serious with the cellars at the Winter Palace, he said. One regiment, which had been put in charge of guarding them, got drunk and became quite useless. Another regiment went the same way. This pattern repeated for the next several days and several weeks and several months. Those who were supposed to guard or destroy caches of booze just drank it down and then sold off the excess to waiting crowds. Let's drink the Romanov leftovers, was the order of the day.

There were also plenty of rumors and anecdotes out there that mass quantities of booze were just suddenly appearing out of the blue. possibly supplied by the enemies of the Bolsheviks to keep the workers and soldiers on a fatal bender. With the Bolsheviks grappling with all this inside Petrograd, they also had to deal with a great hammer looming over everything. Alexander Kerensky had slipped out of Petrograd on the afternoon of October 25th and gone to Paskoff, where Nicholas had signed his abdication. Once there, he tried to rally troops to help him retake the capital from the criminal Bolsheviks. He also issued his own flurry of grandiose proclamations, reiterating his authority and rejecting any claim that he had been driven out of power. But here's the rub, and this remains the rub of the whole thing.

No one responded to this call. No one wanted to fight for Kerensky. The only person he could convince was General Piotr Krasnoff, a right-wing ally of Cornelov, and the commander of the Third Cavalry Corps, which was the same corps that had been dispatched to Petrograd if, months earlier during the Cornelof affair. The men of this corps had no love for Kerenzky, who they felt betrayed the Honorable Kornilov and caused the death of their esteemed commander, who, you will recall from the end of that episode, shot himself in the heart.

But though the men were standoffish, General Krasnof agreed to put them at the disposal of Kerenzky. They marched first from Pskopf to Gachina, about 40 miles southwest of Petrograd, and then on October 28th, move forward to Zarski-Saldo on the outskirts of the city. Karenski tried to win over the troops there, but most of them were either neutral or pro-Bolshevik. They were certainly not going to fight for Kerenzky. In the meantime, not knowing exactly what forces Kerenzky would be able to muster, the Bolsheviks scrambled to defend Petrograd. They tracked down a couple of regular army colonels willing to oversee the artillery placed

on the Polkovo Heights defending the southwest approach to the city. Unable to find anyone more reliable, Lenin tapped Colonel Mikhail Moraviev, an adventurous and ambitious officer known to have previously taken somewhat gleeful part in the suppression of the Bolsheviks back in July. But Moraviev swore he was more than happy to go blast the hell out of Karenski, and without a better option, Lenin and Trotsky gave him command. Although Trotsky would also be on hand to oversee things, plus Moravev was assigned a couple of political minders

with orders to put a bullet in his brain if he so much as hinted at betrayal. They then managed to order, rally, and harangue about 10,000 soldiers in the MRC chain of command. They were ordered to dig in on the Polkovo Heights to defend the revolution. Meanwhile, inside Petrograd, the Committee of Salvation was doing their part to instigate an uprising on the inside that would support Kerensky and Krasnoff's invasion from the outside. On October 27th, they issued a call to the citizens and soldiers of Petrograd. Armed to resist the mad adventurers of the Bolshevik MRC,

we call on all loyal troops of the revolution to assemble at the Nikolai Military College and unite around the Committee of Public Salvation. But here's the thing. No one came. All the Committee of Salvation managed to do was incite a couple hundred military cadets to briefly launch a little revolt, taking over a military installation in the telephone exchange. These cadets were quickly suppressed and forced to surrender by MRC forces. But no one else heeded the call.

The dynamic inside the Petrograd garrison remained what it had been from the start. The vast majority were neutral. The rest? Pro-Bolshevik. For all their pretensions to representing popular democracy against a tiny clique trying to seize power in an unpopular coup d'etat, the Committee of Salvation had to confront the fact that while it was true the Bolsheviks only had a very little bit of active support in the streets, they themselves had none at all. In the Kingdom of the Blind, the one-eyed man is king, and in October 1917, the Bolsheviks were the one-eyed kings of Petrograd.

Until October 30th, though, it did really look like the Bolshevik adventure was not going to last a week. That was the day Karenski and Krasnoff put their force of about a thousand Cossacks in motion. When they set out, they believed they would be toasting victory in the reclaimed Winter Palace, and the Bolsheviks would all be deader in hiding. But then something very unexpected happened. As the Cossacks approached the Pukovov Heights on the outskirts of the city, the artillery under Moravef and Trotsky started lobbing shells, blowing the Cossacks to pieces, forcing them to retreat, and leaving hundreds dead on the field.

They had absolutely not expected stubborn resistance. They had not expected any resistance at all. Karenski and Krasnoff retreated back to Kachina. The men were furious. Having only reluctantly gone into battle, they were now done. Angrier than ever, so many of their comrades lay dead on Kerenzky's worthless behalf. Now surrounded by sullen and angry soldiers, and with rumors swirling the men planned to offer Kerenzky to the troops in Petrograd in exchange for Lenin, Kerenzky contemplated suicide. But a small group of loyal SRs managed to break him out of headquarters by having Kerenzky don a sailor's uniform and aviator glasses so nobody would recognize him.

Escaping from the army that was supposed to be restoring him to power, Karenski will spend the next several months on the run. lurking in the vicinity of Petrograd on the assumption the Bolsheviks couldn't possibly maintain their hold on power forever. And he got out just in time. The Third Cavalry Corps surrendered on October 31st and handed General Krasnoff over to the Bolsheviks. The little Battle of Polkovo upended the political situation inside Petrograd. The Committee of Salvation had been high-handed with the Bolsheviks on the assumption that they would be pretty quickly dispatched by a superior military force. But with the surrender of the Third Cavalry Corps, no such force now existed. The Committee of Salvation modified their terms for a coalition, but Lenin and Trotsky now had no interest

in giving even an inch. Why should they? Even the leaders of the railway workers' union now hesitated to pull the trigger on their threatened strike. They were no longer sure they could even get their workers to go along with it. Feeling their power base solidified, the Bolshevik government continued issuing decrees, and on November 2nd, they announced a big one aimed at securing the support of the fourth of those four important groups we talked about at the beginning of the show. Bidding for the support of the minority nationalities in the empire, Lenin and Chairman of Nationality Affairs Stalin issued a declaration of the rights of the people's

of Russia. This declaration opened. The October Revolution of the Workmen and Peasants began under the common banner of emancipation. The peasants are being emancipated from the power of the landowners, for there is no longer the landowner's property right in the land. It has been abolished. The soldiers and sailors are being emancipated from the power of autocratic generals, for generals will henceforth be elective and subject to recall. The working men are being emancipated from the whims and arbitrary will of the capitalists, for henceforth there will be established the control of the workers over mills and factories. Everything living and capable of life is being emancipated from the hateful shackles. There remain only the peoples of Russia,

who have suffered and are suffering oppression and arbitrariness, and whose emancipation must immediately begin, whose liberation must be affected resolutely and definitely. The decree then announced a four-point program. 1. The equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia. 2. The right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination, even to the point of separation and the formation of an independent state. 3. The abolition of any and all national and national religious privileges and disabilities. 4. The free development of national minorities and ethnographic groups inhabiting the

territory of Russia. Like all the other decrees we've talked about today, this appeared to be a renunciation of centralized domination. All the dreams of liberation and self-determination were wholeheartedly being embraced. Even if the empire itself continued, and it was not entirely clear that it would, it would certainly be some kind of confederation of autonomous peoples. When we take all the decrees issued by the Bolsheviks in their first week on the job, a very clear program emerges, and it was emphasized in the Declaration of the Rights of the Pupils of Russia when it talked about emancipation, emancipation, emancipation. Workers, peasants, and minority nationalities were all told the future of Russia would be radically decentralized and emphasizing

at every point local self-direction. The local village and the individual factory committee would wield most of the power. Minority nationality groups would be completely autonomous. It was an inverted power structure that was practically drawn straight out of the pages of the anarchists. But while these decrees proliferated in the streets, Lenin and the Bolsheviks simultaneously crafted the foundation of the opposite of all that, a highly centralized one-party dictatorship. Well, not all the Bolsheviks. Kameneff and his faction still believe they needed to enter some kind of coalition government with the other socialist parties in order to survive. Camineff also doubled as chairman of the executive committee of the Soviet, and so had to deal directly with the Left SR members of that executive committee who were growing very concerned Lenin and his fellow commissars were just issuing decrees without debate or even consultation.

One Left SR said in a session, Accountability and strict order in detail are mandatory not only for bourgeois government. Let us not play on words and cover up our mistakes. stakes and blunders with a separate odious word. Proletarian government, which is in its essence popular, must also allow controls over itself. This hasty cooking of decrees, which not only frequently abound in your additional omissions, are often illiterate, leading to still greater confusion of the situation. Opposing a move towards a government composed only of Bolsheviks that unilaterally issued decrees that were often vague and didn't make a lot of sense,

Kamenev and a half-dozen other commissars resigned their government posts, also their leading positions in the Soviet Executive Committee, and their response on the Bolshevik Central Committee. On November 6th, they published a statement defending themselves that said, We believe that it is necessary to form a socialist government, including all the parties of the Soviet. Only such a government can assure the fruits of the heroic struggle of the working class and the Revolutionary Army in the October and November. days. We believe that a government which is exclusively Bolshevik can maintain power only by political methods of terror. The Council of People's Commissars is starting on this road. We cannot follow it. These were prophetic words, and a warning echoed by all of Lenin's critics going all the way back to the original Bolshevik-Menshevik split in 1903, that at heart he was nothing but an iron-willed authoritarian.

But even as Lenin is very clearly setting up a system whereby he and the other Bolshevik commissars could issue decrees rubber-stamped by the Bolshevik-dominated Soviet Executive Committee, all acting under Bolshevik party disciplined, and that, in retrospect, all of the decrees we talked about today might be taken as nakedly cynical ploys to lull the masses to sleep. It's not at all clear at this point, at least not in my reading, that Lenin didn't think the masses would follow the party and that they would all go forward together

destroying the machinery of the bourgeois state and building a new world of worker and peasant power. That all of these decrees weren't just temporary emergency expedients necessary to secure the decisive transition towards the dictatorship of the proletariat in the classic Marxist sense, that for the first time in history, the majority would wield power.

But next week, theory and fantasy will begin to meet reality. The long-delayed elections to the Constituent Assembly began in mid-November, and the Bolshevik government would very soon have to grapple with the threat posed not only by Korenski or Cossacks, white-collar workers on strike, bourgeois capitalists and angry liberals, but the voters of Russia.