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Lara Douds
Bloomsbury Academic
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Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2018
© Lara Douds, 2018
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Note on Dates and Transliteration vii
List of Abbreviations viii
Introduction 1
1 State and Revolution and the Idea of Soviet Democracy 11
2 Sovnarkom as Cabinet, 1917–19 21
3 The Sovnarkom Administration Department and Reception:
The ‘Anti-Bureaucratic’ Apparatus 55
4 Sverdlov, the Soviets and the Secretariat 83
5 Collegiality in the Early Soviet Government 97
6 The Decline of Sovnarkom and Rise of the Politburo, 1919–23 125
7 The Politics of Illness: Lenin and the Deputies, 1921–4 149
Conclusion 169
Notes 175
Bibliography 213
Index 225
Acknowledgements
This book employs the Library of Congress system of transliteration from the
Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet, with some simplifications. Some frequently used
proper names are spelled in their more usual English forms where appropriate
(Trotsky and Osinsky, but Krestinskii).
Dates before January 1918 (when the Soviet government modernized their
calendar) are given according to the Julian calendar then in use in Russia, which
ran thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar in the West.
newgenprepdf
List of Abbreviations
the Petrograd Soviet to carry out this action. On 24–25 October the Bolshevik
and Left Socialist Revolutionary MRC staged a nearly bloodless coup, occupying
government buildings, telegraph stations and other strategic locations, timed to
coincide with the opening of the Second Congress of Soviets, to pass power into
its hands. The Bolsheviks came to power, not because they were cynical oppor-
tunists, but because their policies, formulated by Lenin from April onwards and
shaped by the events of the following months, placed them at the head of a genu
inely popular movement.
The October Revolution delivered the birth of the world’s first workers’
and peasants’ socialist state, the Soviet Republic. In constructing their post-
revolutionary government, Lenin and his fellow Soviet leaders were inspired by
Marxist ideals of freeing the working masses from oppression and inequality and
aimed to introduce the ‘most democratic’ society in history. Instead, they inad-
vertently ushered in an authoritarian Communist party-state dictatorship which
was even more brutal than anything even the tsars had managed to impose. Yet,
as Smith has warned, ‘We shall never understand the Russian Revolution unless
we appreciate that the Bolsheviks were fundamentally driven by outrage against
the exploitation at the heart of capitalism and the aggressive nationalism that had
led Europe into the carnage of the First World War. The hideous inhumanities
that resulted from the revolution, culminating in Stalinism, should not obscure
that fact that millions welcomed the revolution as the harbinger of social justice
and freedom.’1
But the shadow cast by the party-state monolith, which occupied the Soviet
political landscape from the early 1920s until Gorbachev’s attempt to disentan-
gle it in the 1980s, obscured the fact that there was an initial delay in institu-
tionalizing the party’s monopolistic and overbearing ‘leading and directing role’
by which its organs became the actual machinery of government. This delay
poses an inconvenient problem for the elegant logic of the totalitarian paradigm
which presented this repressive party-state system as the direct and inevitable
development of pre-revolutionary Bolshevik ideology. In the earliest years after
the October Revolution, the government was conducted not through the party
machinery, but through the Soviet state institutions, with the Council of People’s
Commissars, or Sovet Narodnykh Kommissarov (abbreviated to Sovnarkom)
at the apex. In fact, the earliest years of Lenin’s government were a fluid period
of improvisation, experimentation and negotiation of the nature of power and
legitimacy during which the Soviet leaders believed that they were construct-
ing a novel and superior democratic system, but were unsure of the particu-
lar organizational and structural forms that this new government should take.
Introduction 3
and making the Soviet government responsive to and interactive with the
masses. All of these innovative experiments in ‘Soviet’ democracy were, how-
ever, short-lived. Within a couple of years it became clear that these innova-
tive measures had failed to deliver the desired results. Instead they impeded the
effective functioning of government, with its pressing tasks of restoring eco-
nomic stability, and were side-lined. Instead of guaranteeing ‘proletarian democ-
racy’ Rabkrin’s observation led to surveillance and policing from above, and the
Reception became a form of personalized, manual control. Collegiality in the
administrative organs and collegial commissariats led to inefficiency in oper
ation of the government machinery and a failure to develop strong ministers to
populate the commissariats and cement them as a real locus of authority. Also,
from 1919 the expanding Communist Party machinery, in particular its apex,
the Politburo, began to encroach on Sovnarkom’s authority in matters of gov-
ernment during the Civil War. The shift in executive power from state to party
in this early period resulted in an abnormal situation where, as Leon Trotsky
commented in 1923, ‘leadership by the party gives way to administration by its
organs’.4 Thus, the history of the first years of Lenin’s government illustrates that
the monolithic, authoritarian party-state was not the immediate nor conscious
outcome of Bolshevik ideology and intentional policy, but instead the result of
ad hoc improvisation and incremental decisions shaped by both the complex,
fluid ideological inheritance and the practical exigencies on the ground.
The centenary of the birth of the Soviet regime in 1917 presents an ideal
opportunity to reassess the formative period of the first socialist workers’ and
peasants’ government and to return to the political questions which preoccu-
pied Western scholars of Soviet Russia during the height of East-West tensions
in the 1950s and 1960s. A century on, a monograph on the functioning of the
supreme central Soviet government apparatus in its first phase, utilizing the
archival materials available since the 1990s, does not exist in English. As one
expert noted a decade ago ‘Soviet political history has been under a cloud for the
past 20 or 30 years’.5 From the 1970s onwards the focus of historiography on the
Soviet Union turned to social and then to cultural approaches. This ‘turn’ away
from high politics and the early revolutionary period has meant that many key
issues of early Soviet political history have not yet received full, scholarly treat-
ment. Even the post-1991 archival turn in Soviet history refocused scholarship
towards provincial and social history, so that central state institutions remained
side-lined. Those few political historians working on Soviet Russia in recent
years have focused on the Stalin and post-Stalin era, leaving the revolutionary
period fallow. Further, Soviet political history has predominantly focused on
Introduction 5
the Communist Party and ignored ‘state’ institutions. The apparatus of ‘Soviets’,
or workers’ councils in whose name the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, has not
received the attention it deserves.
During the Cold War both defenders and detractors of the Soviet system were
united in their desire to discern the existence of an all-powerful Communist
Party from immediately after the October Revolution of 1917. They colluded
in imagining the existence, as early as that, of a party-state, a state in which the
Communist Party controlled and decided everything. In the USSR, Soviet his-
torians produced little more than rudimentary surveys of the structure of Soviet
institutions and their corresponding constitutional arrangements. From the
mid-1960s, scholars such as M.P. Iroshnikov, E.B. Genkina and E.N. Gorodetskii
were granted limited archival access and produced the first valuable works on the
central state apparatus.6 These works, however, were coloured by official hagiog-
raphy and demonology, avoiding important but controversial issues such as the
change in party-state relations in the early years of the Soviet regime. Iroshnikov
studied neither the operation nor the policies of the new government, but instead
the physical creation of the Sovnarkom and the People’s Commissariats in the
first six months of Soviet power. Genkina’s major works analyse Lenin’s state
activity as chairman of Sovnarkom only in the New Economic Policy (NEP)
period. She looked at what Sovnarkom did, rather than how it did it, and her
post-1921 chronology meant she too avoided addressing Sovnarkom’s change in
status over its first five years. Thus Soviet scholars avoided the controversial issue
of the creeping encroachment of the party’s Politburo on what was previously
the Sovnarkom’s jurisdiction.
The ‘totalitarian school’ of history dominant during the 1950s and 1960s in
Western scholarship also focused on Communist Party ideology, institutions
and personalities and wrote off the Soviet institutions as irrelevant. According
to this interpretation, as Stephen Cohen summarized, ‘In October 1917, the
Bolsheviks, a small, unrepresentative, and already or embryonically totalitar-
ian party, usurped power and thus betrayed the Russian Revolution. From that
moment on, as in 1917, Soviet history was determined by the totalitarian political
dynamics of the Communist party, as personified by its original leader, Lenin –
monopolistic politics, ruthless tactics, ideological orthodoxy, programmatic
dogmatism, disciplined leadership and centralized bureaucratic organization.
Having quickly monopolized the new Soviet government and created a rudi-
mentary party-state, the Communist won the Russian civil war of 1918–21 by
discipline, organization and ruthlessness.’7 Thus, as a result of undue emphasis
on the party’s activities in the initial years after the October Revolution, the
6 Inside Lenin’s Government
which monopolized the functions of the Soviet government lay unresolved. His
book The Bolsheviks in Power then situated the emergence of a repressive, dic-
tatorial party-state among the various political, military and economic crises
of the immediate post-revolutionary period. He clearly demonstrated how cir-
cumstances, such as the crisis in food supply, industrial collapse, violent oppos
ition from various groups, mass unemployment and the dwindling of Bolshevik
personnel, shaped the agenda and decisions of the regime. Yet when he writes
that ‘neither revolutionary ideology nor an established pattern of dictatorial
behaviour are of much help to explain the fundamental changes in the character
and political role of the Bolshevik party or of the soviets in Petrograd, between
November 1917 and November 1918’, he throws the baby out with the bathwater,
so to speak.
Despite much fruitful revisionist scholarship, there has been little attention
paid to the actual Soviet apparatus itself. Even Oscar Anweiler, the foremost
Western scholar of the Soviets, is pessimistic about the fate of these bodies in
the immediate post-revolutionary period, writing that ‘the Bolshevik October
Revolution turned the Russian soviets from militant revolutionary organs into
pillars of the new state power’ but that ‘this fusion of new soviet power and the
Bolshevik insurrection proved disastrous for the soviets themselves; after this
they were merely servants of the party and a cover-up for Bolshevik dictator-
ship’.16 Anweiler concluded that while ‘the Bolshevik battle cry for the October
Revolution was “All Power to the Soviets” ’, the assumption of power was ‘desired
and executed by only some workers, soldiers and peasants soviets…Nevertheless,
Lenin and Trotsky by force and demagogy eliminated this opposition and laid
the groundwork for their party dictatorship behind the façade of the soviets.’17
In contrast, T.H. Rigby was the only historian to acknowledge the early vital
importance of the Soviet state apparatus in Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom
1917–1922. He challenged the accepted wisdom by highlighting the neglected
fact that the dictatorship of the proletariat did not at first mean government by
the party, but by the Sovnarkom.18 Rigby was the first Western scholar to dis-
cuss in detail how this supreme central state apparatus operated and claimed
that in the earliest period of Soviet power it was state rather than party bodies
which governed. Many scholars subsequently recognized that the party organs
did not achieve primacy until the Civil War years.19 But in his pioneering study
Rigby acknowledged that ‘the evidence available does not allow us to chronicle
the evolution of this dependence in detail’ and that while ‘the broad outlines
are clear enough…precise information on agendas is lacking’. This book is an
institutional history of the supreme central Soviet state apparatus which uses the
8 Inside Lenin’s Government
what subsequently occurred under his leadership and that of Stalin. The virtues
of libertarianism, spontaneity, proletarian creativity, self-emancipation, and the
aspirations for a truly free society based upon tolerance, equality and fraternity
all resound through the writing. Such is the contrast, at first sight, between the
argument of State and Revolution and the manner in which the Soviet regime
had actually developed by the early 1920s that the text appears to offer no help
in understanding what actually happened in practice. More recently, however,
James Ryan has resurrected the practical significance of State and Revolution,
arguing that it needs to be reconciled with the Lenin of the Red Terror and War
Communism, and proposing that an interpretive framework be created ‘that
does not in essence re-impose the traditional antagonistic duality between the
“good” and the “bad” Lenin. It is more accurate to understand this duality as
existing simultaneously in Lenin’s thought. In this way, Ryan argues, ‘State and
Revolution, ‘contains the seeds of the destruction of human life that was inflicted
on the Soviet populace from late 1917 through to the Civil War period’.4 While
Ryan has reclaimed the text’s heritage of violence as played out in practice in
the early years of Soviet power, this book similarly seeks to reconcile the demo
cratic impulses also expressed in the text with the experimentation in features
designed to deliver proletarian democracy in practice during this same period.
On closer inspection it can be observed that certain assumptions in State and
Revolution were incarnated in the regime’s practices, from both the democratic
and the potentially ‘authoritarian’ strands of the work. State and Revolution saw
Lenin struggling to work out what the post-revolutionary state would look like.
Lenin claimed that ‘democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the
rich –that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into
the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the supposedly
“petty”, details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women),
in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the
right of assembly (public buildings are not for “paupers”!), in the purely capit
alist organization of the daily press…we see restriction after restriction upon
democracy.’5 We can see in early Bolshevik state building that certain principles
highlighted in State and Revolution were to be avoided, such as the ‘con’ of sep-
aration of powers and the dangers of bureaucratic organization, and others to
be valued, including delegatory politics and an urge to blur the line between
state and society through the use of collegia, direct contact with the masses
through public reception facilities and proletarian composition. These features
of the central Soviet state apparatus in its early years, outlined in the following
chapters, can be seen to be inspired by notions pervading Lenin’s text. Yet these
State and Revolution and the Idea of Soviet Democracy 13
ideas inherited from Marx on what the transitional ‘dictatorship of the prole-
tariat’ would look like were underdeveloped, and Lenin’s attempts to expand
on them lacked depth and sophistication. Nevertheless, State and Revolution is
misunderstood if dismissed as an aberrant tract that is characteristic only of the
months before the October Revolution; its connections with the post-October
era were significant but complex.
For most historians State and Revolution stands apart from Lenin’s other
writings. His other major texts are all practical and timely: all originated
as a response to a specific political problem and are characterized by real-
ism, rejecting any impracticality, abstract morality or ethical motivations.
Interpretations of State and Revolution vary from suggestions that it was a
sincere ‘moment of madness’ inspired by the excitement of the revolutionary
year, but unconnected to anything that later transpired, to the discovery in it
of less sincere, more calculated and tactical motives and that the democratic
instincts it espouses are a mask for something more sinister. Nevertheless, for
most scholars the discrepancies between author, text and history are so pro-
found and obvious as to deprive the text of any genuine substance.6 But per-
haps it is possible to set State and Revolution in some concrete context. Writing
the book in summer 1917, Lenin was excited by the hope that anti-capitalist
revolutions were imminent throughout Europe. He desired to advise social-
ists on the ways to bring about a new political and social order and tried to
work out for himself what this might look like in practical terms. After 1914
the First World War proved to radical socialists the inability of parliaments
to control and subdue the tendencies that brought war. Lenin also witnessed
the Provisional Government as a ‘bourgeois’ cabinet serving the interests of
capitalist imperialists, particularly with the revelation of Miliukov’s telegram
of April 1917 pronouncing secret expansionist war aims. Everywhere Lenin
saw signs that the view of German social democrats Karl Kautsky and Eduard
Bernstein that socialism could be achieved peacefully through parliamentary
means and that the socialist state would possess a ‘sort of parliament’ and use
bureaucratic organizational forms for some administrative functions was fun-
damentally flawed. Until 1914 Lenin had not objected to this but now he repu-
diated it as ‘bourgeois parliamentarianism’. Lenin was not the first to do so.
Dutch socialist and leading Marxist theorist Anton Pannekoek had attacked
Kautsky’s lack of revolutionary zeal and Lenin agreed now that he was right to
criticize Kautsky for failing to recognize the dismantling of the bourgeois state
as essential to Marxism. Yet even Pannekoek was too vague about the institu-
tional framework which would take its place.
14 Inside Lenin’s Government
So what was Lenin’s solution? The basic premise of State and Revolution is
that all states are instruments for the oppression of one class, or set of classes, by
another. The state form constructed under the capitalist mode of production was
appropriate only for that social system. For a new class power, it was therefore
necessary that the old state machine be destroyed and a new one constructed.
This new state is termed the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. The ‘dictatorship of
the proletariat’ will, however, involve less need for a state machine than any pre-
vious regime because, first, the ruling class will for the first time be the majority
of the population and, second, the administrative tasks of the state had, accord-
ing to Lenin, been simplified by the development of the forms and forces of pro-
duction under capitalism. This state will, from its inception, be set on a course
of withering away, as the conflicts it exists to resolve are eliminated in the course
of development of the socialist economy. Nevertheless, initially a state of some
form will be needed to suppress the remnants of the old ruling classes, and to
regulate the distribution of economic resources and rewards during the transi-
tional period leading to a socialist economy.
According to Lenin, then, socialist forces could achieve power only in a vio-
lent break with the bourgeois state. State and Revolution was as much about the
necessity of a revolution, as the shape of the new state. The work condemned
‘parliamentarianism’ both as a means of achieving power and as a way of gov-
erning. He argued that the structure of parliaments establishes false barriers
between rulers and the ruled so the political system must become delegatory
rather than representative. For Lenin, parliaments elevated the principle of separ
ation powers, which reduces or eliminates the possibility of democratic control
over the functions of the state. Thus, all functions must be conferred on a single
institution; the new state would not recognize the division of powers established
by capitalist regimes. Distinctions between representative, legislative, executive,
administrative and judicial functions would be removed. The socialist state,
therefore, will not be of a parliamentary type, but of a Soviet type. The tasks
of running the state could be fulfilled by any member of society and to ensure
maximum participation in these tasks, and remove the possibility of the devel-
opment of a bureaucratic elite, the holding of office would be governed by prin-
ciples of rotation of office, instant recall for violation of mandate and payment of
average workingmen’s salaries to all officials and administrators.
Richard Sakwa explored this concept of ‘Commune democracy’, as expressed
by Lenin in State and Revolution, pointing out that it was the antonym of lib-
eral democracy: ‘Both have their roots in the patterns of Greek democracy, but
whereas the liberal democratic tradition of John Locke and J. S. Mill stresses
State and Revolution and the Idea of Soviet Democracy 15
tactical: Lenin realized that by entering into too much detail he would spoil the
bright image of the future that he was delineating.’10 Instead, however, it can
be argued that the text demonstrates Lenin’s desire to create a type of socialist
commune democracy, but his failure to grasp the complexity of the task and to
construct a viable alternative to liberal ‘parliamentarism’. There are gaps and mis-
conceptions in Lenin’s ‘masterpiece’, and the implications arising from his super-
ficial conceptions of bureaucracy and democratic control in State and Revolution
were disastrous in the long-run. But Lenin was not hiding anything: a genuine
democratic impulse existed, but in the end his concrete solutions proved naive,
impractical and ultimately inadequate.
Lenin believed that economic development resulted in a reduction in the tasks
and responsibilities of the state but this notion appears naive in view of the growth
of the administrative functions of twentieth-century states. Though he paid lit-
tle attention to the actual functions of the modern state apparatus in his text,
Lenin was aware of the tendency of administrative organs to establish their own
autonomy. Yet when he addressed this problem he did not extend nor improve
on the writings of Marx or Engels, relying on their analysis of the example of
the Paris Commune to advise measures against bureaucratism: ‘Against this
transformation of the state and the organs of the state from servants of society
into masters of society –an inevitable transformation in all previous states –the
Commune used two infallible means. First, it filled all posts –administrative,
judicial and educational, by election and on the basis of universal suffrage of all
concerned subject to recall at any time by the electors. Second, it paid all officials,
high or low, only the wages received by other workers…In this way a dependable
barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the binding
mandates to delegates to representative bodies, which were added on besides.’11 In
discussing political forms to enable the expression of the will of the people, a sub-
stitute for the parliamentary form which fulfils that task in bourgeois democra-
cies, Lenin looked to 1871: ‘The Commune, wrote Marx, was to be a working, not
a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.’12 Thus, in State
and Revolution Lenin stumbled towards an alternative model: ‘The way out of
parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and
the elective principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from
talking shops into “working” bodies…A working, not a parliamentary body –this
is a blow straight from the shoulder at the present day parliamentarians and par-
liamentary lapdogs of Social Democracy! Take any parliamentary country from
America to Switzerland, from France to Britain, Norway and so forth –in these
countries the real business of state is performed behind the scenes and is carried
State and Revolution and the Idea of Soviet Democracy 17
Thus, State and Revolution proposes the creation of a state of the commune
type without a standing army, police or bureaucracy. The process of administra-
tion, production and distribution had been so simplified that all could ‘take part
in the administration of the state’. That this was intended not just as a theoretical
project for the distant future is clear from Lenin’s other programmatic state-
ments, popular brochures and speeches of this period, such as ‘The Impending
Catastrophe and How to Combat It’ and ‘Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power’
which emphatically restates the theme that ‘the Soviets are a “state apparatus” of
the Paris Commune type that dissolves the state apparatus and merges it with
the armed people, made possible through the mechanisms created by monopoly
capitalism’.16 Here Lenin asserts that ‘we can at once set in motion a state appar
atus consisting of ten if not twenty million people’. This text brings together
Lenin’s theoretical analysis of finance capitalism, theory of the socialist state and
faith in the transformative potential of mass participation in socialist practice.17
Later, in ‘Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government’, Lenin continues to expli-
cate the themes of State and Revolution, while simultaneously insisting upon
the recruitment of bourgeois specialists, one-man management, salary differ-
entials and control of the press as a response to practical pressures of economic
dislocation. Lenin argued that ‘we cannot imagine democracy, even proletarian
democracy, without representative institutions’, but he insisted that ‘we can and
must imagine democracy without parliamentarianism’. As Sakwa summarized,
‘It was envisaged that through the soviets the whole proletariat not only could
but should take part in governing. The soviets provided the mechanism to over-
come the state as alienated social power. The society to whom power was to
be returned, however, was to be one thoroughly purged of the strife typical of
civil society.’18 As Sakwa indicated, however, there were weaknesses built into
this conception of the revolutionary ‘democratic’ government: ‘The participa-
tory mechanisms were insufficient on their own to establish a self-regulating
political apparatus. Lenin was unwarrantedly optimistic about the compatibility
of democratic mass participation from below and a centralized economy …The
other limiting factor for the development of a self-regulating system of com-
mune democracy was the dominant though at this early stage as yet unspecified
role of the Communist Party’,19 although, as Neil Harding has pointed out, only
in July 1919 did Lenin concede that the dictatorship of the proletariat meant, in
fact, dictatorship of the party.20
Ultimately, Lenin suggested that ‘the apparatus we need not and must not
destroy. It must be arrested from subjection to the capitalists…must be cut
away…and it must be subjected to the proletarian soviets, it must be broader,
State and Revolution and the Idea of Soviet Democracy 19
more all-embracing, more part of the whole people.’21 The remainder of this
book explores the ways in which Soviet leaders attempted to do just this in
practice and argues that themes of State and Revolution can be observed in the
institutional arrangements of the early Soviet government. The first means of
blending state and society and ensuring a ‘proletarian’ form of democracy was
drawing the working classes into government and administration. Lenin’s vision
in State and Revolution stressed the active participation of the masses ‘not only
in voting and elections, but also in the everyday administration of the state…
Under socialism all will govern in turn and soon will become accustomed to
no one governing.’22 This tactic has received much attention from scholars and
so will not require a substantive chapter in this book. E.G. Gimpel’son, a lead-
ing Soviet scholar of state building in the early years of Soviet power, devoted
much time and energy to demonstrating the incorporation of the working class
into administration during the first few years of Lenin’s government. A founda-
tional principle of official Soviet interpretations of the October Revolution and
the meaning of Soviet power was that the revolution established the hegemony
of the working class and enabled social mobility and the widespread participa-
tion of blue-collar workers in the new institutions of the Soviet state. Gimpel’son
provided supporting statistics from a variety of key government institutions to
show that workers participated in these institutions. Many blue-collar work-
ers were co-opted into state service in the new Soviet and party apparatus, and
the entire range of state administrative, military, police and other institutions.
Gimpel’son provided figures for these institutions at all levels, from the villages
and volosts up to central government. He found that workers made up anywhere
from 10 to 60 per cent of the officials in the bureaucracy.23 In political institu-
tions, blue-collar workers represented 30 per cent to 40 per cent of congress del-
egates.24 Yet, as Daniel Orlovsky has highlighted, Gimpel’son was ‘so concerned
to uphold the cherished myth of proletarian revolution and hegemony that he
ignores the presence in the Soviet government of just as many or more employ-
ees who were not blue-collar workers. He does not deny their existence, since he
includes them in the statistics, but he uses shopworn arguments about working
class and party control of their activities while refusing to come to terms with
either their social or political significance.’25 Gimpel’son conceded that workers
were often not ready for administrative work and that the Soviet state relied
upon non-workers in many key capacities and recognized the existence of the
petit bourgeois mass or the ‘old bureaucrats’ (chinovnichestvo) in Soviet institu-
tions. He argued that they brought to the state apparatus ‘the psychology and
habits’ of the old bureaucracy. Government policy was to control them and to
20 Inside Lenin’s Government
lure more workers into administration but this process was long term, requiring
‘political education, cultural development, and practical experience’.26
One response to this problem of incomplete ‘proletarianization’ of the state
apparatus and the supposed ‘sabotage’ by ex-tsarist petty bourgeois bureaucrats,
which become an obsession of Lenin towards the end of his life, was the col-
onization of the state apparatus by party members. This ‘party-ization’ of the
state apparatus, as discussed in Chapter 3, the populating of government insti-
tutions with loyal Communists subject to party discipline, was intended to
increase the likelihood of the alien bureaucracy faithfully executing the deci-
sions of the Soviet government. This colonization, though, meant that ultimately
state organs lost their independence from the party. Yet, there were not enough
workers or even Communists to fulfil this brief and the limitations of coloniza-
tion meant that the Soviet government turned to oversight mechanisms, such as
Rabkrin and the party control commissions instead.27 Overall, the ‘proletarian-
ization’ of political and administrative organs through drawing in workers was,
first, impracticable in terms of the human material available. Second, the notion
that ‘proletarianization’ would actually deliver the required blending of state and
society and bring a more ‘democratic style of work’ to government and admin-
istrative bodies fell flat in practice. Finally, it led to the introduction of oversight
instruments which, inadvertently, resulted in more top-down control and sur-
veillance. By the end of the Civil War Lenin’s hopes of proletarian participation
in administration had been disappointed by practical experience. In October
1917 when the worker A.V. Shotman had dared to question whether ‘even a cook
or housekeeper’ could administer the state, as Lenin had claimed in State and
Revolution, Lenin responded angrily ‘Rubbish! Any worker will master any min-
istry within a few days; no special skill is required here and it isn’t necessary to
know the techniques of this work since this is the job of the bureaucrats whom
we’ll compel to work just as they make the worker-specialists work at present.
Yet by 1920 an exasperated Lenin exclaimed to the gathering of the Congress of
Mineworkers: ‘Does every worker really know how to run the state? Practical
people know that this is fairy story.’28
2
The Soviets first appeared during the St. Petersburg disorders of 1905, when
representatives of striking workers acting under socialist leadership formed the
Soviet of Workers’ Deputies to coordinate revolutionary activities. This body
was eventually suppressed by the government, but shortly before the abdica-
tion of Tsar Nicholas II and the creation of a Provisional Government in March
1917, socialist leaders re-established the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and
Soldiers Deputies, composed of one deputy for every 1000 workers and one for
each military company, around 2500 altogether. This Petrograd Soviet stood as
a ‘second government’ opposite the Provisional Government and challenged
the latter’s authority. Soviets sprang up in cities and towns across the Russian
Empire. Much of their authority and legitimacy, in the public opinion, came
from the Soviets’ role as accurate reflectors of popular will. Delegates had no
set terms of office, and frequent by-elections gave ample opportunity for quick
exertion of influence by the voters. In June 1917 the first All-Russian Congress of
Soviets, composed of delegations from local Soviets, convened in Petrograd with
a Socialist Revolutionary majority and elected a Central Executive Committee
to be in permanent session. Three months later, as the Provisional Government
continued to flounder as social, economic and military crises intensified, the
radical Bolshevik faction of the Petrograd Soviet, having gained a majority in
this body, engineered the overthrow of the Provisional Government by the Red
Guards and some supporting troops and timed this action to coincide with the
opening of Second Congress of Soviets.
As the revolution played out on the streets of the capital on 25 October, Lenin
gave a speech to the Petrograd Soviet assembled for an emergency meeting in
the Smolny Institute where he announced ‘Comrades! The workers’ and peas-
ants’ revolution, which the Bolsheviks have all this time been talking about the
need for, has been accomplished…the significance of this coup consists in the
fact that we’ll have a Soviet government as our own organ of power without any
22 Inside Lenin’s Government
and of the tactics suited to the present moment. In these critical times we do not
consider ourselves entitled to separate ourselves from the mass movement…
Faced with the fact of Bolshevism…we shall exert all of our efforts to minimize
the harm it is doing to the revolutionary cause and to make use of it in the ser-
vice of that cause.’10
Before 1914, the neo-populist Socialist Revolutionary Party was already
divided into rightist and leftist factions, but the First World War sparked a wid-
ening schism between those who considered it necessary to defend the country
and those hardliners who stuck to a defeatist position. In early 1917, Left SRs
distanced themselves from their own central committee by openly allying with
other leftists, in particular the Bolsheviks.11 During the revolutionary year Left
SR and Bolshevik programmes had much in common. In summer and autumn
1917 the Bolshevik Party’s public political platform stood for democratic ‘people’s
power’ exercised through an exclusively Socialist, Soviet, multiparty govern-
ment. They also stood for more land to individual peasants, stronger worker
influence in factories, prompt improvement to the food supply and an end to
the war. The Left SR programme shared these objectives: immediate, organized
transfer of land to land committees, peace, an eight-hour day and the right to
unions and workers’ control. Crucially, they too adopted the slogan ‘All Power
to the Soviets’.12
At the opening of the Second Congress of Soviets on 26 October 1917, the
Bolsheviks approached the Left SRs about establishing a joint administra-
tion. The Left SRs did not walk out of the congress alongside the moderate
socialists who protested the ‘Bolshevik adventure’ in toppling the Provisional
Government, but also initially declined the invitation to formally join the gov-
ernment, suggesting instead that a broad socialist coalition be established com-
prising all parties represented in the newly elected VTsIK. Nevertheless, the Left
SRs accepted the revolution as a fait accompli and the faction doubled in size
as many SR delegates swung to the Left. Leading Left SRs Kolegaev, Kamkov
and Karelin supported the congress’s programmes of land and peace. Karelin
remarked on Lenin’s peace declaration, ‘we will vote for it because it is close to
our ideas’ and Kolegaev greeted Lenin’s draft on land as a ‘celebration of our
programme’.13 Both decrees were adopted by an overwhelming vote. But on the
question of Soviet power, the Left SRs demanded a government that would ‘unify
all democracy around it’ and threatened a boycott if the moderate socialists were
not involved. Nevertheless, Lenin’s decree on the exclusively Bolshevik govern-
ment passed without difficulty. After electing a new VTsIK of 62 Bolsheviks, 29
Left SRs, 6 United Social Democratic Internationalists, 3 Ukrainian Socialists
26 Inside Lenin’s Government
and 1 SR Maximalist, the congress agreed that this body could be expanded with
representatives of peasant Soviets (mostly likely SRs), army organizations, and
other groups that had walked out the day before.14
A month-long courtship brought the Left SRs formally into government in
early December 1917 after the intransigence of Mensheviks, SRs and Bolsheviks
exhausted attempts to build a broader coalition. Fundamentally, the moderate
socialists rejected the class-based nature of the Soviet Congress and argued that
legitimate sovereignty could come only from a Constituent Assembly elected
by all classes. The Left SRs, like the Bolsheviks, accepted the sovereignty of the
Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ deputies as the basis for a legit
imate revolutionary government, although they had preferred to include repre-
sentatives of the bourgeoisie in order to quell the social struggle this exclusion
would incur. This shared platform for the legitimacy of Soviet power as an
expression of popular will was the basis for collaboration of the two parties from
December 1917 and for their joint dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in
January 1918.
The convocation of a Constituent Assembly, a representative body, elected
on the basis of universal male suffrage was one of the earliest and most popular
demands to emerge from the February Revolution. The Provisional Government
postponed elections until 12 November by which time it had been overthrown.
The Soviet government permitted the elections to proceed. In the elections the
various factions of the SRs received approximately half of the 42 million votes
cast, the Bolsheviks polled about ten million (24 per cent) including roughly
half of the soldiers’ vote, the Kadets received two million (5 per cent), and the
remaining 8 million votes went to other non-Socialist Parties, the Mensheviks,
and parties representing national minorities. In a series of 19 ‘theses’ published
in Pravda on 13 December, Lenin made it quite clear that the Bolsheviks had no
intention of being bound by the results of the election. First, he argued, the ballot
was undemocratic because it had failed to distinguish between the Left SRs who
had supported the October Revolution and other factions of that party that had
opposed it. Second, he reaffirmed the primacy of class, arguing that the repub-
lic of Soviets, which was then in the process of formation, was a higher form
of democracy than the ‘bourgeois’ Constituent Assembly because, he insisted,
it represented the true interests of the working masses. Indeed, the decrees on
peace and land as well as other measures adopted by the Soviet government
made the Constituent Assembly less important in the eyes of many workers and
soldiers. Approximately 700 delegates to the Constituent Assembly met for a
single session on 5 January 1918 in the Tauride Palace. Having chosen the Right
Sovnarkom as Cabinet, 1917–19 27
During the whole of the initial period of the Russian revolution the Soviets multi
plied in number, grew and gained strength and were taught by their own experi
ence to discard the illusions of compromise with the bourgeoisie and to realize
the deceptive nature of the forms of the bourgeois-democratic parliamentary
system; they arrived by practical experience at the conclusion that the eman-
cipation of the oppressed classes was impossible unless they broke with these
forms and with every kind of compromise. The break came with the October
Revolution, which transferred the entire power to the Soviets. The Constituent
Assembly, elected on the basis of electoral lists drawn up prior to the October
Revolution, was an expression of the old relation of political forces which existed
when power was held by the compromisers and the Kadets. When the people at
that time voted for the candidates of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, they were
not in a position to choose between the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the sup-
porters of the bourgeoisie, and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, the supporters
of socialism.
…The working classes learned by experience that the old bourgeois parlia-
mentary system had outlived its purpose and was absolutely incompatible with
the aim of achieving socialism, and that not national institutions, but only class
institutions (such as the Soviets) were capable of overcoming the resistance
of the propertied classes and of laying the foundations of socialist society. To
relinquish the sovereign power of the Soviets, to relinquish the Soviet Republic
won by the people, for the sake of the bourgeois parliamentary system and the
Constituent Assembly, would now be a step backwards and would cause the col-
lapse of the October workers’ and peasants’ revolution.15
The main condition of the Left SR entry into government had been the prin-
ciple of peasant parity in the VTsIK. Instead of the Bolshevik ‘dictatorship of the
proletariat’ they advocated the ‘dictatorship of the democracy’, that is a class-
based dictatorship of the whole army of toilers, the exploited peasantry or ‘rural
proletariat’ alongside the urban workers.16 On 28 November the resolutions of
28 Inside Lenin’s Government
the First Left SR Party Congress confirmed this principle of the legitimate basis of
the revolutionary regime: ‘The dictatorship of the democracy, arising now in the
Russian Republic as the dictatorship of the overwhelming majority of the popu-
lation, does not stop short of the use of repression against encroachments on it
by enemies of the revolution, yet at the same time it is not necessary to pursue a
system of terror as this disorganizes the power of the revolutionary democracy.’17
A fortnight earlier, the Extraordinary Second Congress of Soviets of Peasants’
Deputies, which convened on 11 November 1917 in Petrograd, made coalition
government possible. This national gathering had a solid Left SR majority, sup-
ported the land decree of the revolutionary government and agreed to a merger
with the VTsIK of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. Lenin laid out the theoretical
groundwork for a Soviet system based on a coalition between the Bolsheviks and
the Left SRs at this congress on 18 November 1917. He envisaged Soviet power
not as the dictatorship of a vanguard party, but as ‘workers’ and peasants’ author-
ity’ expressed through the Soviets and conveyed at the apex of power through
an alliance between the Bolsheviks, the party of the proletariat, and the Left SRs,
the party representing and supported by the majority of labouring and exploited
peasants. His speech proposed that ‘the alliance of the peasants and workers was
a basis for an agreement between the Left SRs and the Bolsheviks. It was an hon-
est coalition… a close alliance between the workers and the exploited peasantry,
a firm, unwavering struggle for the power of the soviets, that would lead to social-
ism.’18 Lenin dwelt on the points that could closely unite the Bolsheviks and Left
SRs and envisaged compromise; while Bolsheviks were against the socialization
of the land (in favour of nationalization) this did not mean that they could not
come to an agreement with the Left SRs. Lenin explained how this comprom
ise would work in practice: ‘Today or tomorrow the Left SRs would nominate
their Minister of Agriculture, and the Bolsheviks would not vote against a law
on the socialization of the land if he proposed it: they would abstain from vot-
ing.’19 In an open letter to Pravda, Lenin reiterated that an ‘honest alliance’ was
viable ‘for there is no radical divergence of interest between the wage workers
and the working and exploited peasants. Socialism is fully able to meet the inter-
ests of both.’ The Bolsheviks would abstain from voting on questions which con-
cern purely Socialist Revolutionary points in the land programme approved by
the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. Lenin explained that this did not
amount to a Bolshevik betrayal of principles: ‘By abstaining from voting on such
a point the Bolsheviks would not be changing their programme in the slightest.
For, given the victory of socialism…the workers would be obliged to agree to the
transitional measures proposed by the small working and exploited peasants,
Sovnarkom as Cabinet, 1917–19 29
provided such measures were not detrimental to the cause of socialism.’ Lenin
envisaged a bargaining system where ‘we Bolsheviks would be obliged to abstain
from voting when such a point was being decided in the Council of People’s
Commissars or in the Central Executive Committee, for if the Left SRs (as well
as the peasants who support them) agree to workers’ control, to the nationaliza-
tion of the banks, equal land tenure would be only one of the measures of tran-
sition to full socialism. For the proletariat to impose such transitional measures
would be absurd; it is obliged, in the interests of the victory of socialism, to
yield to the small working and exploited peasants in the choice of these tran-
sitional measures, for they could do no harm to the cause of socialism.’20 Thus,
Lenin showed willingness to make concessions to persuade the Left SRs to join
the Soviet government and to bring to the new regime the peasant sanction or
‘iarlykh’. He heeded Kamkov’s warning that the peasantry, ‘the “infantry of the
revolution” ’, would not follow the Bolsheviks and strove to widen the social base
of the revolutionary government.
The terms of the merger were confirmed by the congress and now made
Soviet power, in theory, representative of city and countryside. A total of 108
members of the existing workers’ Soviet VTsIK were joined by an equal number
of representatives from the peasant congress, with 100 representatives of soldier
and sailor committees and 50 trade union representatives to follow shortly. The
new peasant members formally joined in a spirit of celebration and ceremony
on 15 November 1917.21 On 9 December, having received their mandate from
the Congress of Peasant Soviets and held their First Congress as an independent
party in late November, the Left SRs formally accepted Bolshevik terms for entry
into the Sovnarkom proportionate to their representation in the newly merged
Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies.
On 25 November 1917, the Left SR Andrei Kolegaev was appointed
Commissar of Agriculture (he had attended Sovnarkom sittings as early
as 19 November). On 9 December, six more Left SRs officially entered the
Sovnarkom: Kolegaev as People’s Commissar for Agriculture, Isaac Shteinberg
as People’s Commissar for Justice, Prosh Proshyan as People’s Commissar for
Post and Telegraphs, Vladimir Trutovskii as People’s Commissar for Local Self
Government, Aleksandra Izmailovich as People’s Commissar for Property of the
Republic (although in practice she did not take up the post, continuing her work
in the VTsIK instead), Vladimir Karelin as co-People’s Commissar for Military
and Naval Affairs (then additionally taking on Izmailovich’s post), and Vladimir
Algasov as People’s Commissar with deciding vote in Sovnarkom but without
portfolio, entering the collegium of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs.22 Then
30 Inside Lenin’s Government
A.N. Brilliantov occupied the final Left SR seat on the Sovnarkom with a decid-
ing vote, but without portfolio, and joined the collegia of the Commissariat of
Finance. Left SRs were named to the collegia of all other People’s Commissariats
and central government institutions.23 When Sovnarkom’s narrow ‘executive
committee’ was formed on 20 February 1918 it was composed of Lenin, Trotsky,
Stalin and two Left SRs Proshyan and Karelin. Thus, the Left SRs had been rep-
resented on Lenin’s inner ‘group of five’.
The Left SRs N.N. Alekseev, G.D. Zaks and A.A. Shreider became Deputy
People’s Commissars in the Commissariats of Agriculture, Enlightenment and
Justice respectively. The collegium of the Commissariat of Agriculture was par-
ticularly dominated by Left SRs, with L.L. Kostin, I.A. Maiorov, A.E. Feofilaktov
and N.I. Faleev appointed there. Other Left SR collegia members included L.E.
Kronik in the Commissariat of Post and Telegraphs and P.E. Lazimir in the
military.24 The Left SRs, from January 1918, had 122 delegates in the Central
Executive Committee and their charismatic leader Maria Spiridonova headed
its ‘peasant department’. In addition, eight Left SRs were elected to the Central
Executive Committee’s presidium. Left SR Boris Malkin was appointed co-editor
of the government newspaper Izvestiia.
As well as their Sovnarkom and collegia posts, the Left SRs also had their
man, People’s Commissar for Local Government Vladimir Trutovskii, as one
of three who made up the ‘Malyi’ or Little Sovnarkom, a committee which
dealt with second-order business, especially financial matters requiring top-
level resolution. Its decisions acquired legal force once signed by Lenin as
chairman of Sovnarkom, unless challenged by another member of the cab
inet. The need arose to devolve minor matters from Sovnarkom and the Little
Sovnarkom (Malyi Sovet Narodnykh Kommissarov or MSNK) emerged in
late 1917 to deal with routine business. Minutes of this body survive from 9
January 1918 on and demonstrate that in its early phase this body was made up
of three members –Bolsheviks Shliapnikov and Menzhinskii and the Left SR,
Trutovskii –with reporters and representatives attending to discuss particular
departmental issues.25 Like its parent body, MSNK showed early tendencies
towards formal institutionalization. In its first recorded sitting it prescribed
that items must be sent for inclusion in its agenda no later than 48 hours before
the sitting, and could be refused if the necessary ‘detailed reports…and all fac-
tual materials’ were not presented.26 The range of minor matters, ‘not raising
issues of principle’, considered by MSNK in its first months were wide ranging.
These included (most frequently) granting financial credit to state agencies, as
well as cultural, industrial, economic, medical and labour and administrative
Sovnarkom as Cabinet, 1917–19 31
questions.27 In solving these questions, the MSNK either made a decision there
and then and instructed the corresponding commissariat to implement it, or,
if a unanimous decision was not achieved or if they judged it to be an issue of
importance, transferred it to the full Sovnarkom. Lenin, as Sovnarkom chair-
man, read over the decisions of MSNK. If he agreed with the decisions, he
signed them off and they gained the force of law. If he disagreed, he could
send decisions back for MSNK to reconsider, or could add the issue to the
Sovnarkom agenda for solution. The MSNK was intended to sit ‘not less than
three times a week’.28 However, the practice did not live up to intentions and
the MSNK met just five times in the last three weeks of January, and only twice
in February 1918. By early March a regular pattern of sittings was developing,
with the MSNK meeting every other day in the first week of March. The work
of the MSNK was temporarily disrupted by the transfer of the government to
Moscow, but it was quickly re-established by a decree of the parent body on
26 March 1918.29 From this point, it sat regularly and considered a mass of
routine questions crucial to the functioning of the Soviet government. While
its prerogatives and formal status fluctuated over the course of Lenin’s govern-
ment, it remained a key instrument of day-to-day administration.30 Thus, the
appointment of Trutovskii ensured that the Left SRs maintained a supervisory
presence over the routine matters of government business.
The Left SRs also held important posts in regional Soviet government insti-
tutions such as the Moscow Oblast, Siberian and Turkestan Sovnarkoms, the
Supreme Collegia for Romanian Affairs, the Commissariat for Cossack Affairs
and Left SR E.P. Terletskii entered the government of Soviet Ukraine.31 The
depth and breadth of Left SR participation in the supreme central (as well as
regional and local) organs of government was considerable and does not suggest
their intentions nor those of the Bolsheviks were for a temporary or superficial
alliance. Radkey claimed that the influence of the Left SRs in the Sovnarkom
was negligible because ‘the cast had already hardened when the Left SRs entered
the government and they were unable to change it’.32 In fact the Left SRs made
a significant contribution to the work of the Sovnarkom and were able to have
a qualitative influence on the shape, scope and tempo of policy in the early
months of Soviet power.
Sovnarkom met 53 times between December 1917 and March 1918 as a
dual-party cabinet. All of the Left SRs appointed as People’s Commissars were
dedicated, regular Sovnarkom attenders. Often all seven Left SR commis-
sars attended the Sovnarkom meetings, but on average five Left SR Central
Committee (CC) members were in attendance.33 On 13 December the Left SR
32 Inside Lenin’s Government
The debates at the congress offer useful insights into how the minority coali-
tion partners evaluated their influence in the government. Shteinberg, the com-
missar who most frequently clashed with Bolshevik colleagues in his attempts
to curtail terror, demonstrated his frustration (and perhaps underestimated
his own practical influence) when he declared: ‘We did not possess real power
in Sovnarkom. We had only two commissars who had real power to represent
our special class, the labouring peasants. We were occupied up to the neck in
state work, but still did not take care of them.’44 He argued against immediately
rejoining Sovnarkom: ‘We can, in the future, build an “honest coalition” with the
healthy elements of the Bolsheviks, but the coalition must have a new ideological
hegemony.’45 Nevertheless, many other leading Left SRs disagreed and pressed
the importance of their contribution to the work of Sovnarkom. Proshyan,
Kolegaev, Spiridonova and Mark Natanson all emphasized the value of Left SR
participation in Sovnarkom and urged the party to reconsider the withdrawal.
Kolegaev, Commissar for Agriculture, stated that in his area of expertise ‘on the
fundamental question for us, the socialization of land, although in the minor-
ity, we held full power’. He highlighted how the Left SRs had resisted Bolshevik
amendments to their project and were ‘victorious’.46 He raised an interesting
point in relation to coalition politics on ‘the question of ‘power’ (vlast’) and the
question of ‘force’ (sil)’.47 While the Left SRs could not dominate in the sense of
holding ‘power’ they still exercised ‘force’ in shaping policy. Kolegaev also tried
to present a more positive picture of Shteinberg’s work, remarking, ‘I cannot
boast for the commissar of justice that we published a million instructions, but
we published some. I think that in this lies our merit.’48 He concluded with evi-
dence for the sway Left SRs had exercised by remaining within the highest gov-
ernment organs: ‘Before there was not a single Bolshevik in the central People’s
Commissariat of Agriculture’, but in the weeks since the Left SR withdrawal the
Bolsheviks were leading its work in a different direction.49 Spiridonova agreed
that withdrawing from the ‘power structures’ at a time when the Left SRs were
achieving their fundamental law on land socialization was ‘a most grievous
crime’.50 Ultimately, the motion adopted by the congress reflected the prevail-
ing mood of the party: it approved the withdrawal of the Left SR delegates from
Sovnarkom, but did not rule out future participation if the political situation
changed regarding peace with Germany; and it confirmed that Left SRs were to
remain in the collegia of the commissariats and other Soviet institutions.
Serious disagreement between the two parties, beyond the normal day-to-
day wrangling of coalition politics, broke out over the signing of a separate
peace with Germany. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty, which provoked the rupture
Sovnarkom as Cabinet, 1917–19 35
between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, also created a devastating internal
split within the Bolshevik Party. Since 1915, Lenin’s writings had highlighted
the opportunity to transform imperialist war into revolutionary war, but in
1917 the Bolsheviks won support in the Soviets largely through their promise
of peace, in effect, at any price. Thus, the party was thrown into turmoil as they
debated whether to accept Germany’s harsh, imperialist terms of annexations
and indemnities. Initially, Trotsky’s ‘no war, no peace’ won broad acceptance
among Bolsheviks and Left SRs when it was announced on 28 January 1918. But
when news reached Smolny on the night of 16 February that Germany’s armis
tice with Russia would expire and that a state of war would be re-established at
noon on 18 February, the debate over this issue raged virtually non-stop inside
and outside both parties for the next week. Like the Left Communists within the
Bolshevik Party, the Left SRs were unable to accept Lenin’s choice of a humiliat-
ing peace with the imperialists rather than a revolutionary war. The Left SRs as
a faction owed their origin to revulsion at the slaughter of peasants and workers
in the interests of world imperialism.51 Yet, the peace that the Left SRs had in
mind was one of ‘no annexations and indemnities’, which would be compatible
with the revolutionary conscience. Like many Bolsheviks, the Left SRs found the
devastating imperialist German conditions at Brest-Litovsk wholly unaccept-
able. After the final ratification of the treaty by the VTsIK, the Left SR People’s
Commissars withdrew from Sovnarkom on 18 March. They maintained a lim-
ited cooperation with the Bolsheviks, retaining their positions on the collegia of
commissariats as well as their membership in the VTsIK and the local Soviets.
It is clear that that there was only one reason for the Left SR party’s withdrawal
from the central Sovnarkom: the Fourth Congress of Soviets had adopted a reso
lution, the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, that the Left SRs were con-
vinced had undermined the October Revolution. The Left SRs, if they allowed
their representatives to participate in Sovnarkom, would be collaborating in pol-
icies they were sure would lead to the smothering of the revolution. This did
not mean that they were ready to abandon the Bolsheviks completely: ‘as far as
Sovnarkom brings to life the programme of the October Revolution, the party
promises its support and assistance’.52 Their resignation statement confirmed
that when the Bolshevik Party returned to the revolutionary path from which it
had strayed, the two parties would collaborate in government again.
Programmatic differences with the Bolsheviks quickly widened after the Left
SR departure from Sovnarkom and any moderating influence in regards to use of
terror or relations with the countryside quickly dissipated. To Leninist Bolsheviks
the solution to the continuing disintegration of economic and political life, and
36 Inside Lenin’s Government
to the threats posed by foreign and domestic enemies, increasingly lay in institu-
tional centralization, and the utilization of bourgeois specialists. To the Left SRs,
and moderate Bolsheviks such as the Left Communists, who were committed
to the ideal of worker and peasant empowerment exercised through democratic
Soviets, these policies were very distasteful, as Karelin made clear to the VTsIK
on 29 April when he challenged Lenin’s fundamental assumptions and policies.53
After the Left SR’s resignation from Sovnarkom, its policy towards the coun-
tryside also began to change direction, and the tendency towards the use of force
to solve the urgent urban hunger crisis grew. The increasing antagonism between
the two parties over policies towards the peasantry and grain procurement had
an adverse impact on the Central Executive Committee’s peasant section, a Left
SR bastion headed by Spiridonova. During the first months of 1918 this body
was Soviet Russia’s primary coordinating institution for organizing and prepar-
ing peasants for land reform, mobilizing them in support of Soviet power, estab-
lishing Soviets in outlying regions where they did not yet exist, and identifying,
articulating and defending peasant interests. The additional purpose of the
peasant section, as Spiridonova explained, was ‘to unite peasants and workers
into one integrated whole … to unite city and country’ under the Soviet banner.
In a report on the peasant section on 17 April 1918, Spiridonova stressed that
Bolshevik goodwill (and funding) to the section had ended in mid-March after
the Left SRs’ resignation from Sovnarkom. With the Left SR influence removed,
the now wholly Bolshevik cabinet began to move towards a more confronta-
tional position towards the countryside in its food procurement policy. On 9
May 1918, eight weeks after the Left SR resignations, the government passed
the decree ‘On the food dictatorship’, which involved the formation of food pro-
curement detachments to seize surplus grain from peasants by force. This anti-
peasant move was followed a month later by the ‘Decree on Committees of the
Village Poor’ (kombedy), a new institution to assist in gathering foodstuffs by
dividing the village into rich and poor and setting the latter against the former in
order to locate and confiscate surplus grain. Both decrees were anathema to the
Left SRs and seem to represent the Bolsheviks reverting to the ‘dictatorship of
the proletariat’ now that the party of the peasantry was not present to represent
their constituents’ interests in the cabinet.
The Bolsheviks’ strangulation of the peasant section and their increasingly
aggressive stance towards the peasantry prompted some Left SR members of
the Central Executive Committee to call for the convocation of a separate All-
Russian Congress of Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies. To pull apart the peasant’s
Soviets from those of the workers would have signified a fundamental split in
Sovnarkom as Cabinet, 1917–19 37
the legitimate basis of the regime. Spiridonova and her Left SR central commit-
tee colleagues resisted, preferring to press for an early convocation of the All-
Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Their
aim was to force fundamental policy changes by subjecting the government’s
domestic and foreign policy to criticism in the broadest possible popular forum.
Naturally the Bolsheviks opposed a separate congress of peasants’ Soviets which
would have destroyed the de facto consolidation of national Soviet institutions.
The Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’, Soldiers’ and
Cossacks’ Deputies was convened on 28 June 1918. The Bolshevik intra-party
conflict encouraged the Left SRs to think that the Left Communists might
side with them at the National Soviet Congress and that they might even win
a majority. Left SRs were confident that they would have at least 40 per cent of
the delegates to the forthcoming Fifth Congress of Soviets, a good platform on
which to advance a resolution ending the hated peace and, thus, allow them to
rejoin the government. As the opening of the congress on 4 July approached,
the scale of Bolshevik gerrymandering became clear. Official figures gave the
Bolsheviks 678 delegates and the Left SRs 269. Rabinowitch recalculated these
figures and suggested that if the 399 Bolsheviks challenged by the Left SRs are
taken out, and the 90 Left SRs denied admission by the Bolsheviks are included,
then the picture was Bolsheviks 378, Left SRs 379 with 30 SR Maximalists, who
were in the process of merging with the Left SRs, holding the balance of power.54
This was in line with contemporary press reports and Left SR expectations. As
Izmailovich, a member of the Left SR central committee, later wrote: ‘The Left
SRs failed to consider the Bolsheviks’ capacity to work miracles.’55 In frustra-
tion, Left SRs turned to terrorism to try to end the peace, remove the main issue
dividing the coalition, and reinvigorate their partnership.56 This tactic backfired
spectacularly and led to the final break in Bolshevik–Left SR relations.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had already acted as a catalyst for the formation of
anti-Bolshevik groups both inside and outside Russia, pushing them into action
against the new regime by early summer 1918. The Russian Civil War which
raged from summer 1918 until the start of 1921 now emerged from widespread
resistance to the Soviet order. A loose confederation of anti-Bolshevik forces
aligned against the Soviet government, including former landowners, con-
servatives, republicans, middle-class citizens, reactionaries, pro-monarchists,
liberals, army generals, non-Bolshevik socialists who still had grievances and
democratic reformists voluntarily united only in their opposition to Bolshevik
rule. The Bolsheviks faced ‘White Armies’, led by former officers of the tsar-
ist state, and also intervention by the forces of foreign countries. Three White
38 Inside Lenin’s Government
Army commanders posed a serious threat to the Bolshevik regime based around
Moscow: in 1919 Kolchak attacked from the East, Denikin from the South and
Yudenitch from the West. This movement, which had in total over 250,000
troops, was united by a hatred of the Bolsheviks and a desire to restart the war
against Germany. This latter objective won them the support of Russia’s former
allies, who invaded Russia themselves. Soldiers from Britain, France, the United
States and Japan were sent to Russia along with arms, funding and munitions
to support the White Armies. These combined in the East and attacked along
the Trans Siberian Railway. Britain and France took control of Murmansk and
Archangel in the North, while the Americans attacked from the Far East, helping
Japan to take control of Vladivostok. At one stage, the Bolsheviks had lost con-
trol of almost three-quarters of Russia with the Whites having advanced as far
as Perm. In 1919 the forces of General Kolchak were defeated by the Red Army
and most foreign troops were withdrawn from the Russian Civil War, though
funding continued. Trotsky’s Red Army then advanced north, taking Archangel
and to the south it defeated opponents in the Caucasus.
The crisis of Civil War pushed the Bolsheviks towards a drastic economic pol-
icy, later referred to as ‘War Communism’ which included the rapid nationaliza-
tion of all industry and the requisitioning of all surplus grain from the peasants.
While this succeeded in meeting the immediate needs of the state, it created
deep resentment in both the proletariat and the peasantry which eventually
escalated into outright rebellion. ‘War communism’ involved abolition of pri-
vate trade, labour discipline, nationalization of all large-scale industry, and at
its height in 1920, replacement of the money system with a universal system of
state rationing. The grain monopoly was introduced in May 1918 in response to
the urban food crisis. Millions fled the hungry cities and travelled to the coun-
tryside to barter with the peasants or live closer to the sources of food. The great
industrial cities of the north, the power-base of the Bolsheviks, lost half their
population between 1918 and 1920. Under the grain monopoly all the peasants’
harvest surplus became state property. Armed brigades were sent into the vil-
lages to requisition grain by force. Where they found none, it was assumed that
it was being hidden by ‘kulaks’ and a violent struggle began. In January 1919 the
grain monopoly was replaced with a general Food Levy (prodrazverstka) which
extended the monopoly to all foodstuffs and took away the powers of the local
food organs to set the levies in accordance with the harvest estimates: henceforth
Moscow would take what it needed from the peasantry without any calculation
as to whether it was taking its last stocks and food and seed. By the end of 1920,
armed opponents of the Bolsheviks had been defeated, but the Russian Civil
Sovnarkom as Cabinet, 1917–19 39
an average of 22 sittings per month, or around five per week, between January
and August.62 By late 1918 Sovnarkom’s sitting pattern had regularized at an
average of three days per week, on a Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.63 Thus,
by January 1919 there were an average of 12 sittings of Sovnarkom per month.
The body was sitting around half as frequently as in the first post-revolutionary
months, but in a more systematic pattern.64 From its creation in December 1918
the Defence Council’s sittings were held in a regular pattern, sitting twice a week,
usually on a Wednesday and a Sunday,65 although it became more ad hoc in
1919 as the Civil War escalated.66 Despite the almost daily sittings during the
early months, the workload of Sovnarkom tended to be heavy. In the hectic
weeks of late November 1917 agenda items averaged 14, sometimes exceeding
20.67 The length of agenda decreased over the following couple of months, with
December 1917 averaging 11 items per sitting, January 1918, 9 and February
1918, 8.68 This decline does not indicate any wane in the functioning or author-
ity of Sovnarkom. In fact it indicates the opposite; the accumulated experience
of handling business accelerated work, and the increasingly formal regulations
introduced over this time streamlined Sovnarkom’s work. From Sovnarkom’s first
months Lenin worked to bring about full and proper preparation of items sub-
mitted to the Sovnarkom (and later the Defence Council) agenda. Shortly after
the move to Moscow on 20 April 1918, Lenin reissued his instructions requiring
Sovnarkom members to submit agenda items in advance, with a brief outline of
the relevant facts and a draft decision.69 In order to avoid unnecessary conflict
at Sovnarkom meetings, particular emphasis was placed on giving all interested
departments the opportunity to consider draft decisions in advance and obtain-
ing their agreement wherever possible. This responsibility was placed on the
initiating department, which also had to secure the approval of the Finance and
State Control Commissariats if the measure required non-budgeted financial
allocations. Heads of interested departments were expected to supply written
comments on projected measures for inclusion in the agenda papers, though
they might simply minute the draft decision ‘no objection’ or ‘agreed’ if they did
not wish to oppose or amend it.70 In a further step to ensure full preparation for
sittings, in August 1918, acceptance of agenda items the day before the meeting
was banned. This rule was intended to ensure that Sovnarkom members had
time to acquaint themselves with the papers in advance.71 There was a way of
getting around the rule which forbade the introduction of agenda items on the
day of Sovnarkom meetings. Members could move the inclusion of an item in
the sitting itself as a matter of urgency. Lenin invariably opened meetings with a
call for removing or adding items.
Sovnarkom as Cabinet, 1917–19 41
Moscow and the Left SR debacle in March and April 1918, this figure fell to
7,82 but by January 1919 it had risen again to 10, although only around half of
commissars even at this stage were members of the Party Central Committee.83
The major personalities of Sovnarkom in its early months, and its most regu-
lar attenders, included a diverse array of colourful characters, many of whom
despite working shoulder-to-shoulder in cabinet meetings, would go on to have
contradicting opinions in many areas of government policy and populate the
various branches of opposition during and after the Civil War. Among the elder
statesmen of Sovnarkom were 48-year-old Lenin and Aleksandr Tsiurupa who
was only few months his junior. With his splendid white beard and candid eyes,
Ukrainian Tsiurupa was the son of a minor civil servant who had trained as an
agronomist and worked as a statistician before his underground revolutionary
activity led to multiple arrests.84 He belonged to a group of Social Democrats
in Ufa who agitated among local railwaymen and factory workers where he
first worked alongside Lenin and Krupskaia.85 He was valued in the Bolshevik
Party as ‘a modest person, not an orator, not a writer, but a wonderful organ
iser, a practical worker who knew the villages well’.86 In 1917 Tsiurupa was a
member of the local RSDRP Committee and working as a food supply official
in Ufa.87 He arrived in Petrograd in November 1917 as a delegate to the All-
Russian Foodstuffs Congress, was soon appointed Deputy People’s Commissar
for Foodstuffs and from February 1918 he assumed the role of a full People’s
Commissar.88 Tsiurupa built a strong apparatus which was later described by
Lenin as ‘one of our best People’s Commissariats’.89 He was one of the major fig-
ures in Sovnarkom, one of the institutions ‘big names’ and a constant presence
in its meetings, debates and commissions.90 Tsiurupa even chaired some sittings
of Sovnarkom after Lenin was shot in August 1918.91 Despite the strict rules on
speaking in Sovnarkom debates, his opinion was often sought by Lenin, even
on matters in which he was not directly involved with Tsiurupa insisting ‘But
I did not ask for the floor!’ and Lenin responding ‘We ask you!’92 Unfortunately
Tsiurupa ‘was nearly always ill’ with a heart condition and when he attended
meetings he had to sit ‘in a semi-reclining position, his feet stretched out on a
near-by chair’.93 On one occasion Tsiurupa fainted in a Sovnarkom sitting and
sometimes felt so ill that he had to go into the Sovnarkom telephone booth to
lie down on the sofa inside.94 Tsiurupa’s weak heart was the main reason Lenin
insisted on a lift being installed in the Kremlin.95
Just a few years younger was Georgii Chicherin, also rather unwell and over-
weight by the revolution, but perhaps most qualified of all the Soviet leaders
for his role in government. Born into an old noble family, his father, Vasily
Sovnarkom as Cabinet, 1917–19 43
in pressing for a more positive attitude towards the newly emerged Soviets and
for unity of the party factions. In exile from 1908 for her involvement in revolu
tionary politics, she was active as a speaker and writer in Europe and the United
States. On her return to Russia in 1917 at the time of the February revolution,
she opposed cooperation with the Provisional Government and was elected
a member of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. In April she
was the only speaker other than Lenin to support the demand for ‘All Power
to the Soviets’. In October Kollontai participated in the decision to launch an
armed uprising against the government and in the revolt itself and was elected
Commissar of Social Welfare in the new Soviet government. In 1918 she lead a
delegation to Sweden, England and France to raise support for the new govern-
ment. Upon her return, she argued against ratification of the Treaty of Brest-
Litovsk and resigned from the government. The closest to a true proletarian
government member was Kollontai’s one time partner, 33-year-old Alexander
Shliapnikov, a former metal-worker and an Old Bolshevik from 1903 who was
from a poor Russian Old Believer family. Arrested and imprisoned at various
times for his radical political activities, including his involvement in the 1905
revolution, Shliapnikov spent much of the previous decade in Western Europe,
where he worked in factories and was a trade union organizer. Shliapnikov
returned to Russia in 1916 and was one of the senior Bolsheviks in Petrograd at
the time of the February Revolution in 1917. He was a member of the Executive
Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and was
also was elected to chairmanship of the Petrograd Metalworkers’ Union and
later of the All-Russian Metalworkers’ Union. In this role he led negotiations of
a wage agreement between Petrograd metalworkers and factory owners in 1917
and following the October Revolution, Shliapnikov was appointed Commissar
of Labour, but left for supply work during the Civil War, before establishing the
Workers’ Opposition alongside Kollontai in 1920. Valerian Osinsky-Obolensky,
another persistent critic of Leninist policy throughout his government career,
was a mainstay of Sovnarkom in its early years, first as head of the Supreme
Economic Council, and later as acting Commissar for Agriculture. Osinsky, an
old Bolshevik from a minor landowning family of civil servants, not the princely
family as some assumed, was well-educated, erudite and fluent in several lan-
guages, and in his early thirties when he joined the Soviet government, coming
to the position as a trained economist.96
The youngest of the Sovnarkom stalwarts in its early months was the
28-year-old Vladimir Karelin, viewed by the Left SRs as their most tact-
ful member; if they wanted to raise a potentially controversial question in
46 Inside Lenin’s Government
a conciliatory way, then he was the man for the job. Already a member of
the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, in December
1917 he became People’s Commissar for State Properties and was also a mem-
ber of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Justice, as well as part of
the Soviet delegation at the peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk. According to
Shteinberg, Karelin ‘knew how to present delicate issues in calm and winning
ways’.97 Prosh Proshyan, People’s Commissar for Posts and Telegraphs, on the
other hand, was a 34-year-old Left SR firebrand, son of an Armenian poet, and
seen by the Bolsheviks as the most radical and sympathetic to their principles
from among the Left SR camp, sometimes even going against his own party
members when debating issues in the meetings.98 The withdrawal of the Left
SRs and the resignation of the Left Communist Commissars in response to the
signing of the peace with Germany neutered, to some extent, the lively range
of opinion in the cabinet, although some later returned to their work in the
state apparatus.
The leaders of the Soviet government dealt with the range of challenges that
faced them and developed and implemented their revolutionary programme
through Sovnarkom. Government administration took up a significant portion
of Sovnarkom’s energies, 48 per cent between November and February, although
this subsided slightly over the course of these first few months, once the new
government had taken shape.99 The major issues that were discussed were hiring
and firing,100 interdepartmental relations and resolving of conflicts,101 direction
of finance and budgets,102 practicalities such as government supplies of paper,
ink and premises,103 and finally, conducting relations with local government
bodies, Soviets, and initially the Constituent Assembly, Dumas and zemstva.104
The second largest category of business dealt with by Sovnarkom was economic
policy. Economic questions were crucial in the Bolshevik ‘re-making’ of Russia
on socialist principles and the leaders of the new regime conducted the social-
ization of the economy through Sovnarkom. These included confiscations or
requisitions of enterprises and property of the bourgeoisie and capitalists, and
nationalization of factories and plants.105 Sovnarkom presided over the regula-
tion of internal trade and the nationalization of the banks.106
Sovnarkom also faced the fundamental economic problems which were tear-
ing the country apart, the ‘bread and land’ part of the Bolsheviks 1917 slogan. It
Sovnarkom as Cabinet, 1917–19 47
directed the new regime’s response to the foodstuffs and land questions,107 and
led the massive agricultural and industrial changes that the revolution spelt.108
A similar proportion of Sovnarkom’s energies were spent on domestic questions.
Obviously the maintenance and improvement of the country’s basic infrastruc-
ture of transport and communications was a major issue.109
The new government also developed and implemented its radical social pol
icies through Sovnarkom. These programmes included its social welfare schemes
(workers’ pensions and insurance, healthcare, education)110 and religious pol
icies such as the separation of the church and state.111 It also handled issues of art
and culture.112 Sovnarkom managed the government’s relations with the indus-
trial working class,113 a crucial issue for a so-called dictatorship of the proletariat.
Legal and juridical matters also populated Sovnarkom’s agenda, where the set-
ting up of the new ‘revolutionary tribunals’ was worked out.114 Sovnarkom also
handled the introduction of the new socialist civil laws, such as the reform of
marriage and divorce legislation.115 At this early stage, Sovnarkom was in charge
of the key areas of foreign and military affairs. It dealt with questions of for-
eign trade, international relations and diplomacy.116 Also crucial was Russia’s
nationalities issue, and Sovnarkom dealt with relations with the minorities of the
republic, including the Cossacks.117 Finally, Sovnarkom handled some military
issues, including the logistics of building the new Red Army.118
One issue which Sovnarkom prioritized early on it its existence was the mat-
ter of salaries of officials and administrators. Soviet leaders saw that one way of
creating an anti-bureaucratic state apparatus was to equalize pay across govern-
ment and governed. Lenin quoted directly from Engels in State and Revolution
when he wrote: “Against this transformation of the state and the organs of the
state from servants of society into masters of society…the Commune used two
infallible means… it paid all officials, high or low, only the wages received by
other workers. The highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone was 6,000
francs. In this way a dependable barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set
up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates to representative bod-
ies, which were added besides. Engels here approached the interesting boundary
line at which consistent democracy, on the one hand, is transformed into social-
ism and, on the other, demands socialism. For, in order to abolish the state, it
is necessary to convert the functions of the civil service into the simple opera-
tions of control and accounting that are within the scope and ability of the vast
majority of the population, and, subsequently, of every single individual. And if
careerism is to be abolished completely, it must be made impossible for “honour-
able” though profitless posts in the Civil Service to be used as a springboard to
48 Inside Lenin’s Government
specialists’ who expected higher pay. The ‘specialists’ to whom the new regime
felt compelled to make concessions were paid a wage 50 per cent higher than that
received by the members of the government.125 Lenin admitted in ‘Immediate
Tasks of the Soviet Government’ that ‘naturally, in a developed socialist soci-
ety it would appear quite unfair and incorrect for members of the bourgeois
intelligentsia to receive considerably higher pay than that received by the best
sections of the working class… Under the conditions of practical reality, how-
ever… we must solve this pressing problem by means of this (unfair) remu-
neration for bourgeois specialists at much higher rates.’126 In May 1919, when
the Soviet Republic was on the verge of collapse, further urgent measures were
taken. Lenin’s government had to make concessions to the engineers and techni-
cians with material incentives to bring their skills to bear to restore the Soviet
economy. The draft decision on ‘Salaries for Specialists’ was proposed by the
Sovnarkom on 23 May 1919 and the decision was grudgingly taken to allow,
under a very tight reign, specialist salaries of 3000 roubles: ‘On June 15 only
those whose salaries have been endorsed by the Council of People’s Commissars
shall receive the rate of 3,000 roubles and more.’127 This concession constituted a
specialist wage of six to one, given that the average skilled wage at this time was
500 roubles. This differential was exceptional and could be paid only after it was
endorsed by the government itself.
By early 1919 the breakdown of types of business considered by Sovnarkom
was little changed. Administering the state institutions still took up the majority
of Sovnarkom’s attention, claiming 49 per cent of agenda space. Issues of person-
nel and appointments to state posts were still mainly dealt with by Sovnarkom
in January 1919, including the appointments of Liubovich as Deputy People’s
Commissar of Posts and Telegraphs, Vasiliev and Antonov as members of the
collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs and Elizarov as a
member of the collegium of the Commissariat of Trade and Industry.128 The
basic budgetary estimates and financial allocations which were so frequent in
the Sovnarkom agendas of the early months of the Soviet regime were now
replaced with straightforward confirmation of decisions of the ‘Maly’ or ‘Little’
Sovnarkom (MSNK) which now resolved these matters. Confirmations of the
minutes of MSNK occur repeatedly on almost every Sovnarkom agenda from
mid-1918.129 In early 1919, economic issues, such as procurement of food-
stuffs,130 agricultural or agronomical matters,131 and questions of industry,132
transport and communications,133remained the second most common items at
28 per cent. These are followed by domestic questions at 15 per cent, ranging
from the struggle with typhus, to social welfare projects, to library affairs.134
50 Inside Lenin’s Government
However, foreign affairs were conspicuously absent from the 1919 Sovnarkom
agendas. Discussion of military issues was now more rare, due partly to the cre-
ation of the Council of Defence in late 1918.
Commissions of Sovnarkom members were often created to consider issues
needing further attention. Commission members were nominated in the
Sovnarkom meeting and were instructed to draft a project proposal to present
to Sovnarkom for confirmation within an appointed period (usually a week or
two). Commissions with a longer life-span were instructed to give a weekly sum-
mary of their work. Although not unheard of earlier, the regular use of com-
missions by Sovnarkom increased from April 1918. In this month, Sovnarkom
appointed at least seven different commissions, including the ‘Commission on
Finland’ of 2 April.135 From early 1919 the use of commissions accelerated fur-
ther and the Sovnarkom bodies spawned a constant stream, of which several
dozen were normally in existence at any given time.
Thus, while one tenet of the totalitarian school was that the Party Central
Committee operated as the supreme decision-making body of the early Soviet
government from the birth of the regime, archival records confirm that in no
way could the Party Central Committee be viewed as the effective government
of the nascent Soviet regime. Instead, it is clear that Sovnarkom occupied this
position. In fact, during the first months after the revolution, the Party Central
Committee continued instead to manage internal party affairs. Once Sovnarkom
had become operational, the Bolshevik Party Central Committee concentrated
on party work, including Bolshevik publications, party representation in various
types of assemblies and the arranging of party conferences and congresses.136
Its limited forays into non-party affairs, most tackled before Sovnarkom was
properly up and running, were concerned with facing the extremely urgent food
supply problem, the pressing nationalities question, and some appointments of
party members to state posts.137
The peace issue dominated proceedings in the Central Committee until late
Spring 1918. The highly controversial issue of peace dominated party discussions
and tested Bolshevik ideology to the limit. While, of course, the peace issue had
huge practical and military significance, it was in a sense a fundamental ‘polit
ical’ question. The debates in the Central Committee dealt not with the practical
ities of the treaty, but with the rights and wrongs of Marxists negotiating peace
with a capitalist, imperialist government when they should have been foment-
ing Europe-wide revolutionary war. Peace-making demanded reinterpretation of
deeply held ideological tenets. The sittings of the CC of 21 January and 17, 18, 22,
23 and 24 February were wholly devoted to discussion of this topic.138
Sovnarkom as Cabinet, 1917–19 51
this had a negative effect, argued some delegates, because Sovnarkom began
to be filled by ‘departmental people’ who only ‘fight for the interests of their
own department’ and ‘do not understand or are not interested in wider gen-
eral policy’.160 Proposals were made that ‘a majority of members of the Central
Committee enter Sovnarkom…a significant quantity of CC members must enter
the government’ in order to ensure its ‘real government’ status.161 One state
activist, Osinsky-Obolensky, even suggested that Sovnarkom be made into a
‘Politburo’ consisting of 12 Central Committee members.162
The Eighth Party Congress resolutions confirmed as the correct basis of gov-
ernment the Soviet apparatus, emphasizing that ‘the Party must implement its
decisions through the Soviet bodies, within the framework of the Soviet constitu-
tion. The Party strives to direct the activities of the Soviets, not to replace them.’163
Yet concrete measures proposed to strengthen the position of Sovnarkom were
not followed through in the congress resolutions. In the wake of the death of Iakov
Sverdlov, head of the Party Secretariat who had up to this point been respon
sible for record keeping and organization, the congress resolutions focused upon
developing the party apparatus which was perceived to have gone into decline
since the revolution as the energy of members had been diverted into Soviet
work. Developments were put into motion which inadvertently allowed the cen-
tral party machine to gain the expanded apparatus necessary for its eclipse of
Sovnarkom as de facto cabinet. The Politburo was created as a permanent organ
of the Central Committee composed of five members of the Central Committee
to ‘take decisions on questions that cannot wait’, but to answer to the assembly
of the Central Committee.164 The resolutions also provided for the creation of an
organizational bureau and an expanded Party Secretariat. On 25 March 1919,
at the next plenum of the Central Committee, five Central Committee mem-
bers were elected as members of the Politburo: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Krestinskii
and Kamenev, as well as Zinoviev, Bukharin and Kalinin as candidate members.
The Politburo began to meet from mid-April 1919. From its first months, unlike
the Central Committee before it, this smaller, more dynamic party body began
to meet more frequently and gradually widened its jurisdiction to encompass
important areas of government business, as Chapter 6 will explore.
3
but these features were not directly ‘inherited’ in the same way as in the commis-
sariats. In State and Revolution, Lenin made no distinction between government
officials in the political sense and bureaucrats in the administrative sense. He
seems to have believed that having administrative staff serving the government
imbued with a sense of proletarian, revolutionary democracy would deliver
some kind of authentic democratic quality to the government itself. This anti-
bureaucratic measure proved rather naive and ineffective in practice, however,
and the ‘revolutionary’ nature of Sovnarkom’s administrative practices did not
deliver any significant democratic quality to the Soviet government.
In the 1960s, as a result of the limited archival access granted to Soviet schol-
ars, Iroshnikov, Genkina, Klopov, Orlov and Liubysheva published the first
studies of Lenin’s activity as chairman of Sovnarkom with some discussion
of the body’s administrative apparatus; however no account covers the whole
Lenin period. T.H. Rigby was the only anglophone historian to touch upon
Sovnarkom’s administrative machinery, but his brief discussion is based almost
solely on Iroshnikov’s 1960s research.2 There is disagreement in the existing his-
toriography concerning the basic details of the size and structure of Sovnarkom’s
Administration Department and no scholar has yet attempted to go beyond
the physical structure and personal composition of the apparatus to exam-
ine the ethos and culture inside this, or any other, Soviet state institution. This
chapter examines the size, personal composition and internal structure of the
Sovnarkom Administration Department from 1917 to 1921 and then turns to its
internal culture. The chapter considers the Sovnarkom staff ‘collective’ to tease
out the operational norms and the gradual ‘party-ization’ of the state apparatus
over the course of the first few years of the Soviet regime. The chapter high-
lights the distinguishing features of the revolutionary, anti-bureaucratic state
administration which members strove to create in the Sovnarkom apparatus.
The Sovnarkom Administration Department exemplified this concept inspired
by values outlines in State and Revolution and was intended to act as a model to
diffuse these practices throughout the rest of the state apparatus.
The Sovnarkom administrative apparatus was distinct from that of the com-
missariats largely inherited from the old regime, in that it was built from scratch.
A few weeks after the establishment of the Soviet government most People’s
Commissariats moved to occupy the premises of the former imperial minis-
tries. Over half of the central commissariat officials, and around 90 per cent
of upper echelon officials, had worked in some administrative position before
October 1917.3 Thus, hold-over white collar staff predominated in the People’s
Commissariats. In the Sovnarkom administrative apparatus this was not the
The Sovnarkom Administration Department and Reception 57
of that year,22 and in 1919–22 the size of the Sovnarkom staff remained fairly
stable.23
The core secretarial and administrative staff, with minor exceptions (such
as Maria Skrypnik who apparently wanted to join the government in Moscow,
but was refused by Bonch-Bruevich), were transferred with the government in
March 1918. There was stability and continuity in the staffing of the Sovnarkom
Administration Department despite the evacuation of the government to
Moscow. Head of the Administration Department Bonch-Bruevich, head sec-
retaries Gorbunov and Fotieva, secretaries Agranov, Koksharova, Shakhunova,
Sergeeva, Utevskii, Glotov, Korotkov, Fedorov, clerks Ozerevskaia, Belenkaia,
Fediushin, and accountants Alekseev, Markelov, and Mikhailova were all trans-
ferred, along with technical staff such as the telegraphists Kizas, Shkvarina,
Sobolev and Liuter.24 The Latvian Rifle Unit that had been responsible for
Sovnarkom’s security in Petrograd also accompanied it to the Kremlin to con-
tinue their duty in Moscow.25
Nevertheless some restaffing was necessary. Prominent new recruits at
this time included M.I. Gliasser, M.I. Volodicheva, N.S. Allilueva, and N.S.
Lepeshinskaia. In May 1919 Sofia Brichkina, previously secretary to the Moscow
Military Revolutionary Committee, joined the Sovnarkom staff.26 As noted
above, however, once the Sovnarkom administrative staff reached the 100 mark
in summer of 1918, there was no further expansion and low turn-over of staff
which made for a consistent and settled contingent. The department prided itself
on being ‘quite small in comparison with the swollen, unwieldy apparatus of the
commissariats’27 and the staff numbers remained stable for the rest of the Lenin
period.
After the transfer of the government from Petrograd to Moscow, the new
premises of Sovnarkom in the Kremlin consisted of a row of six rooms. After
refurbishments were complete, the premises of Sovnarkom moved to another
wing of the building which was connected to Lenin’s apartment by a long corri-
dor.28 The Administration Department remained here throughout the rest of the
Lenin period. Lenin’s Kremlin office as Sovnarkom chairman had three doors,
one of which opened into the hall of Sovnarkom sittings. Initially the meeting
hall was a modest size room with two windows, named the ‘Red Hall’. In 1921
this hall was expanded by joining it with a neighbouring one, so the meeting hall
now accommodated four windows. In the Lenin period the Secretariat worked
in the Red Hall due to both a shortage of suitable premises, and the necessity to
be close to Lenin’s office in order ‘to fulfil his instructions without delay’.29
60 Inside Lenin’s Government
the Information Bureau and sent decrees and decisions for publication in print.
N.S. Allilueva was responsible for Lenin’s Sovnarkom archive: she sorted, sys-
tematized and preserved its documents.35 From 1917 until mid-1918, Fotieva,
Gorbunov and Skrypnik shared the task of taking Sovnarkom minutes.36 In 1919
and early 1920, Fotieva shared this role with Gliasser and Brichkina, sometimes
alternating, sometimes jointly signing the minutes.37 However, from spring 1920
it seems that the role of the Sovnarkom secretary became a more stable one,
largely reserved by Fotieva herself.38
The lack of experience of Sovnarkom’s early secretaries is clear from their
own recollections. Gorbunov wrote of his experience as secretary at the first
sitting of Sovnarkom in November 1917: ‘I was summoned to the sitting by
Vladimir Ilich. Not having a notion of how to take minutes, I attempted to write
down the contents of a report, but of course, did not have time because a stenog-
rapher I was not!39 Fotieva also recalled that ‘(in sittings) Lenin dictated minuted
decisions of Sovnarkom. Usually he spoke his formulation very quickly and hav-
ing finished, he asked “Written it down?” or “Managed to get it?”, and at once
requested the materials for the next question. It was difficult to write it all down,
there was no stenographer. Attention and memory were strained to the utmost
degree, but I did not tell Vladimir Ilich that he wore me out. Usually I managed
to write down only the first letters of each word of Vladimir Ilich’s rapid speech.
The deciphering of these notes was postponed until the end of the sitting.’40
The next stage for the Secretariat was the processing of the minutes after the
sittings, to be presented to Lenin, the Sovnarkom chairman, the next morning at
10 am.41 After Lenin’s checking and redacting of the previous night’s Sovnarkom
minutes, they were sent back to the Secretariat to be copied and distributed
among the commissariats. Initially only certain decisions corresponding to the
relevant commissariats were copied and sent out but on 15 May 1918, following
to the proposal of People’s Commissar of Justice, Stuchka, a decision was taken
to print the entire minutes to distribute them to all People’s Commissariats.
Fotieva noted that this decision systematized and simplified the communication
of government decisions to the rest of the state apparatus: ‘This relieved us of the
issue of endless information letters to People’s Commissars on decisions taken
by Sovnarkom.’42
The Secretariat acquired considerable influence over priorities in deal-
ing with government business, over which bodies matters were channelled to
(Sovnarkom, STO or Maly Sovnarkom) and the form in which they came up
for decision. Staff were instructed to refuse to include items on the Sovnarkom
agenda unless there was evidence that interdepartmental consultations and
62 Inside Lenin’s Government
the ‘bureaucratic’ culture that seeped into the commissariat apparatus. Instead,
inside the Sovnarkom apparatus a new, ‘revolutionary’ political culture was fos-
tered.68 After the October Revolution Lenin developed the idea, first expressed
in State and Revolution, of what the anti-bureaucratic organizational culture
of the state apparatus should entail and his conception was embraced and
internalized by the staff of the Sovnarkom Administration Department. This
organizational culture displayed a few key elements, which attempted to work
against what Lenin saw as the ‘bureaucratic’, ‘empty’, ‘formal’, ‘dead’ manner of
work of the imperial state apparatus. First, interpersonal relations among the
staff should not be strongly hierarchical, with those of superior rank acting
dictatorially over those below. This pattern of behaviour started from the very
top, with Gorbunov remarking, ‘Speaking with Vladimir Ilich one felt him
not a ‘boss’ (nachal’nik), but simply as an older comrade.’69 Fotieva also testi-
fied to this collegial atmosphere. She recalled, ‘In his activity as leader of the
Soviet state Lenin strictly observed the principle of “collegiality”.’70 ‘He encour-
aged initiative in every worker and did not press his authority. Flattery, grov-
elling and servility were unthinkable…He considered it especially vile…to be
rude and impolite to those standing lower in position and therefore unable to
reply.’71
Related to this anti-hierarchical atmosphere was the concept of internal self-
discipline.72 Lenin conceived of the revolutionary state as staffed by workers
who were not just pen-pushing bureaucrats or ‘time-servers’ who simply obeyed
orders from above without care. The staff had to be ‘self-disciplined’, show initia-
tive and have an independent attitude towards their individual tasks. According
to Lenin, this mindset was opposite to the ‘formal, soul-less’ (bezdushnyi) atti-
tude of imperial bureaucrats. Fotieva confirmed that Lenin was continuously
concerned ‘to improve the work of the soviet apparatus, to overcome bureau-
cratism and Red Tape in Soviet organs, by…encouraging the cultivation in
Soviet employees of an irreconcilable attitude towards all displays of a… formal,
soulless attitude towards affairs’.73
As well as the collegial, self-disciplined working atmosphere, the polit-
ical culture of the Sovnarkom apparatus encompassed further ideals of work
which were, according to Lenin, contrary to the ‘bureaucratic’ work mode of
the imperial state. These ideals were personal attention to detail, the check-
ing of execution of decisions, and brevity and efficiency in paperwork. Fotieva
explained that Lenin was convinced that ‘attention to detail makes the soviet
apparatus genuinely democratic, not formally democratic, but democratic in
the proletarian sense’.74 Checking of execution was another major weapon in
The Sovnarkom Administration Department and Reception 67
The Sovnarkom archive provides some interesting documents which throw light
on the internal culture of the Administration Department, the interpersonal
relations and expectations of behaviour prevailing there.80 Staff correspond
ence reveals a troubled situation developing inside the department in summer
1918 which ‘for the majority of employees there are absolutely impossible and
intolerable conditions of work and many are compelled to consider leaving for
alternative jobs’. Problems had arisen because the conduct of the head of the
Administration Department, Bonch-Bruevich, had abused its collegial norms.
Gorbunov, head of the Sovnarkom Secretariat, wrote to Lenin: ‘In Petrograd we
appointed almost all responsible employees…by agreement of all comrades. We
carefully thought over each candidature and almost always requested a written
recommendation from well-known “non controversial” comrade-party workers.
In such a way the Administration Department was composed and work went
well. All of us knew each other well, vouched for each other and worked agree-
ably (soglasovanno) and all together (druzhno), as one living organism…’
68 Inside Lenin’s Government
staff that he had a dying sister, but then his family called us to ask where they
had sent him. Comrades reported that Ruslanov was ‘a suspicious man, known
in artistic circles as a petty thief, but Vladimir Dmitrievich informed us that he is
a member of a fine family, membership of which is sufficient to absolutely trust
a person’.
Gorbunov then presented the terms suggested by the staff to solve the
problems: ‘to immediately reinstate the collective (its members can be party-
colleagues of the Administration Dept. or colleagues who, although have not
joined the party, are proven to unconditionally sympathize with its conduct in
the October days). To return to the Administration Dept. immediately those
comrades planning to leave…the re-employment of M.N. Skrypnik.’ He also
advised the transfer of the Ruslanov affair to Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka to investi-
gate. The staff felt that if it was necessary to keep Vladimir Dmitrievich in the
position of head of Sovnarkom’s Administration Department, then it should
only be for the sake of representation and he should not be involved in the
work of the Secretariat. Instead they proposed to make the Secretariat directly
responsible before Sovnarkom, to make it independent from the Administration
Department and the hiring of employees for the Secretariat and ‘Chancellery’
should be handled in agreement with their staff collective.
The response of the Administration Department staff to Bonch-Bruevich’s dic-
tatorial, uncollegial conduct in appointing new employees to the Administration
Department, who in their opinion were unsuitable, was to form a collective. The
collective began to insist that staff were appointed exclusively with its approval,
but Bonch-Bruevich ‘did not wish the collective to decide, and began to slight
us in an insulting manner and announced that the function of the collective was
only to work’. They were concerned ultimately that in their revolutionary appar
atus ‘administration began to be carried out by persons alien to Soviet power’.81
Thus, Gorbunov’s letter demonstrates both the collegial norms within the
Sovnarkom apparatus and the importance of personal composition in combat-
ing the bureaucratism which inhibited the ‘democratic spirit’ of the government.
What was Lenin’s response as chairman of Sovnarkom? Bonch-Bruevich
was an old personal friend of Lenin. He had acted as Lenin’s right-hand man
in October 1917 and played a vital organizational role in the pre-revolutionary
Bolshevik Party and in creating the Sovnarkom apparatus. Although he was not
sacked immediately as a result of this conflict, Bonch-Bruevich soon ‘retired’
to ‘devote himself to scholarly duties’. Rigby remarked that ‘the circumstances
of his resigning his vital work in the Sovnarkom apparatus remain unex-
plained’.82 According to Nikolai Valentinov, ‘he fell into disfavour with Lenin
70 Inside Lenin’s Government
over some misdemeanours’.83 It seems likely that Lenin’s confidence in him had
been shaken by his improper, uncollegial conduct as head of the Administration
Department.84 In November 1920 the CC decided ‘for reasons of business-like
expediency, to free Bonch-Bruevich from his post as head of the Sovnarkom
Administration Department, and to leave the rest in their places’.85 Gorbunov
had sent the letter on the occasion of his leaving Sovnarkom to take up an import
ant post in his area of specialism. A scientist by training, Gorbunov had, since
the revolution, been involved in the development of the Academy of Sciences, of
which he was a former student. Gorbunov’s efforts resulted in the establishment
of the Science-Technology Section of the Supreme Economic Council. He was
appointed by Lenin as its manager in August 1918. The Sovnarkom staff collect
ive did not take kindly to the reassignment of their preferred head administra-
tor. The collective wrote to Lenin remonstrating for Gorbunov to remain in his
current position as he was ‘an irreplaceable comrade and worker-organizer, with
whom we have worked from the start of the October Revolution. It will be very
difficult to lose such a comrade as Gorbunov.’86 After Bonch-Bruevich’s retire-
ment, Lenin personally intervened to bring Gorbunov back to the Sovnarkom
Administration Department to take over as its head,87 no doubt a popular choice
with the staff collective, which by this time had developed into a Communist
Party fraction.
remained stable at around 100 people in these years, so the party cell was not the
majority of the staff. Indeed, only around a quarter were involved. The party cell
members ranged from top secretaries and administrative staff to cleaners and
canteen assistants.
Bonch-Bruevich’s membership of the cell seems to have been, however, only a
token gesture. By the time the group had become ‘party-ized’, it would have seemed
unusual for such a prominent party member not to join the Sovnarkom cell. But
Bonch-Bruevich did not participate in the cell’s general activities. From 1919
the cell met regularly. The meetings were a formal affair: a chair, secretary and a
bureau of the cell were elected, attenders listed, an agenda prepared and minutes
and records of decisions kept in a very similar way to the system employed by
Sovnarkom itself. The cell’s activities involved party duties: arrangement of mili
tary training, subbotniki duties and selection of delegates to represent the cell
at larger party regional committees. The Kremlin Regional Party Committee,
to which the Sovnarkom Administration Department Cell belonged, arranged
meetings and lectures on political matters which all members were expected
to attend. For example, the Sovnarkom party cell received notes in September
1919 requesting their presence at a lecture by Olminskii on ‘The Revolutionary
Movement in Russia at 7pm on 19 September’,89 and a meeting for a report on
and discussion of ‘The Role of the Trade Unions on Saturday at 8pm.’90
Besides its ‘party’ activity, the major preoccupation of the party cell, like the
collective in 1918, was appointment to the staff of the Sovnarkom Administration
Department. The staff of the state institutions were feeling a desperate shortage
of capable, reliable workers. They seem not to have set up personnel bureaus,
HR departments, and bureaucratic ways of screening resumes but instead
driven by their experience in the revolutionary underground they reached out
to the party to send ‘good’ people. The minutes of a sitting of the party cell on
10 October 1919 revealed a discussion of ‘the dismissal from the “Chancellery”
of ill-disposed elements’. The party cell ruled that it was ‘necessary to carefully
profile all staff employees of Sovnarkom’ and recommended the removal of four
named staff members.91 The collective relied on party connections to provide it
with worthy comrades to replace those they found unsuitable. A note of mid-
1919 to the Moscow Party Committee reads: ‘Dear Comrades! The Bureau of
the Collective addresses you with the request to accelerate your sending to the
Bureau of the Collective… some good comrades, well-known to the Moscow
Party Committee, to replace non-party employees of the Chancellery.’92
This ‘party-ization’ of the Sovnarkom collective, and increasingly its wider
staff, developed gradually from 1919. By late 1919 the Sovnarkom Administration
72 Inside Lenin’s Government
Information Bureaus all carried out crucially important functions in the run-
ning of the early Soviet government and were geared towards Lenin’s revolution-
ary manner of administration. The development of Sovnarkom’s administrative
apparatus facilitated the regularization of Sovnarkom’s work, particularly in
interdepartmental consultation, preparation of agenda and checking of execu-
tion of government decisions.
Around six months after its creation, the staff size of the Administration
Department stabilized at around 100, and remained relatively small in compari
son to the swelled, overstaffed commissariat apparatus. A strong organizational
culture of collegiality and non-hierarchical, internal self-discipline prevailed
among those staffing the Sovnarkom Administration Department. Not only the
small quantity of staff, but also the ‘quality’ of those working in it was import
ant. From mid-1918 the staff collective was at work purveying a strong sense
that fellow comrades had the right to choose who worked alongside them as
personal material was key to making the state ‘revolutionary’ instead of ‘bureau-
cratic’. This bottom-up staff activism was, from 1919, ‘party-ized’ as the collect
ive became the party cell. This fusing of party and state was initiated, it seems,
not by party leaders, but by the staff of the state institutions themselves in their
struggle to gather suitably ‘revolutionary’ colleagues.
tsarist period.99 The traditional under-government at the local level under the
Romanov regime which encouraged the tsar-batiushka myth, patrimonialism
and practice of petitions directly to the ruler (as the ‘scourge of the boyars’) was
exacerbated further in the chaos of revolution and decentralized Soviet power.
As Perrie and Field demonstrated, ‘naive’ or ‘popular monarchism’ was a deeply
ingrained element of Russian political culture.100 As Figes and Kolonitskii have
highlighted in their study of language and symbols of 1917, peasants and even
soldiers and workers, found it difficult to distinguish between the person of the
tsar (gosudar’) and the abstract institutions of the state (gosudarstva). Popular
conceptions of the new post-revolutionary order were often couched in similarly
personalized terms and so the practice of personal petitions was carried over to
the Soviet government.101 Yet no historical analysis of this important institution
exists. Iroshnikov mentioned peasant visits to the Sovnarkom Reception in his
work on the early months of the Soviet government, but noted that ‘an abun-
dance of materials on these meetings of the Sovnarkom Chairman V.I. Lenin
with the workers of Russia could serve as a basis for so far unrealized, special-
ist research’.102 Genkina also looked briefly at the Sovnarkom Reception in her
period (1921–3), but noted that ‘There is, unfortunately not yet a precise account
of Lenin’s reception during the years of his state activity (1917–21).’103
The Sovnarkom Reception was established in Smolny soon after the revo
lution. The staff of the reception in these early months were its head Maria
Skrypnik, the senior reception secretary, E.Z. Utevskii, three reception secretar-
ies and three assistant secretaries.104 From the first days of the Soviet government
a system was established where every visitor who received a pass to Smolny
could come freely to the Sovnarkom premises to announce their requests or
complaints. Thus, the Sovnarkom Reception was attended daily by delegations
of workers, soldiers and peasants during the early months after the revolution.
Bonch-Bruevich, head of the Sovnarkom Administration Department set about
arranging suitable premises to receive these visitors, explaining how he obtained
tables, chairs, benches, made partitions separating the hall into parts where the
secretarial staff worked and where they built the reception rooms.105 The initial
Sovnarkom Reception was a large inter-joining room with a low, wooden barrier
to split it into two parts, separating a large area of the room where visitors arrived
with a table for registration of visitors, from a smaller area which was a reception
proper. The desk of the duty secretary of the reception stood at the barrier and a
Red Guard was posted there to maintain security.106 Bonch-Bruevich, who was
heavily involved in the work of the reception, explained its appeal from the start.
The Sovnarkom Reception received, he recalled, a numerous letters, petitions
The Sovnarkom Administration Department and Reception 75
and requests, as well as visits from delegations, deputations and peasant envoys
because ‘power was still very poorly organized in the localities and it was diffi-
cult to survive…People were drawn to the centre, to the central power, wishing
to gain answers to hundreds of essential questions. And the peasants, of course,
had most questions of all…power was often interpreted very differently than in
the centre.’107
Much of Lenin’s day, as Sovnarkom chairman, was taken up in receiving visi-
tors to the government. After his visit to the reception in 1918, Albert Rhys
Williams attested to the volume and diversity of visitors, from diplomats, mili
tary men, former bourgeoisie, correspondents, but also many workers and
peasants. During his visit, he was kept waiting for a long time, a highly unusual
phenomenon because according to Williams, Lenin always received visitors at
the appointed time. He assumed that the Sovnarkom chairman was held up by
some highly urgent state matter or some exceptionally important person. He
recalled, ‘Half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half, we sat waiting in the recep-
tion. The even voice of the visitor carried from the office…Finally the door of
the office opened, and to general surprise out stepped not a diplomat nor some
other highly-positioned person, but a bearded muzhik in a long sheepskin coat
and bast shoes, a typical poor peasant.’ Lenin apologized to Williams for the
delay, explaining, ‘This peasant came from Tambov. I wanted to find out what he
thought about electrification, cooperation and economic policy. He talked about
such interesting things that I completely lost track of time.’108
The Sovnarkom Reception proved popular among urban workers, but among
peasants in particular, fitting with their traditional culture of petitioning. From
all over Russia, peasants, nominated by their local community, and travelling on
mir-assembled money, came to meet with the ‘head Bolshevik’, to discuss peas-
ant affairs. Lenin received the visitor peasants, workers and soldiers delegations
either in his office or behind a round table in the Sovnarkom Secretariat if the
party was too large. The peasants brought with them instructions worked out by
the farm assemblies. These instructions included questions requiring solution in
the capital. These questions were diverse: ‘How and on what basis to distribute
horses, cattle and equipment confiscated from landlords?… How must Volost
Land Committees act if Uezd Land Committees resist the bringing to life of the
Decree on Land? According to Koksharova, Lenin listened, asked questions and
gave the visitors instructions.’109
The ritualized behaviour of the peasant envoys is clear from the testimony
of Sovnarkom Reception staff: ‘Despite all persuasion peasant delegates did
not want to return to the localities without having seen Lenin. Some, after
76 Inside Lenin’s Government
visiting the reception, asked the secretary to give them a note. In this note they
demanded to write that so and so had really been received by Lenin. Very often
we had to issue such papers. The peasant envoys took these documents and like a
sacred object carefully placed it to their bosom, having wrapped it in a clean rag.
Peasant envoys, having seen Lenin and heard his advice were then considered
the ‘first’ person in the village.’110
In 1918 the Sovnarkom Reception was open daily from 12 noon. Bonch-
Bruevich and the reception secretaries listen to the requests and complaints of all
the peasant and proletarian visitors and noted them down.111 Peasants appeared
in the Sovnarkom Reception in groups demanding resolution of land needs,
solution of land disputes, petitions on taxes, obligations and requisitioning of
farm produce.112 After the day’s work the reception staff reported to Lenin on all
‘interesting and socially important visits’. He read the written reports prepared
by reception staff, gave resolutions and directions on tasks arising and demanded
the tracing of their implementation.113 The reception secretary also passed notes
to Lenin every morning and reported to him on who asked for receptions with
him personally, and what they wanted to discuss.114 Lenin appointed a special
day, Friday, to personally receive guests in his capacity as Sovnarkom chairman.
The Sovnarkom Reception in the Administration Department was open on
Tuesdays and Thursdays in the first year after the move to the Kremlin, where
visitors could see the secretaries and deliver petitions.115
The volume of visitors to the reception continued to be considerable even as
the revolutionary tumult died down. Bonch-Bruevich claimed, ‘In the course
of close to six months we received more than 6000 people, each of whom was
a representative of a large group of the population.’116 Gorbunov also testified
‘thousands and thousands of people. Who did not come!’ to the Sovnarkom
Reception.117
The number of visitors was so large that a year after the move to Moscow
an ‘external reception’ was created. Bonch-Bruevich was responsible for the
practical setting up of Sovnarkom’s External Reception during his time as head
of Sovnarkom’s Administration Department in early 1919. He recommended
that because the number of peasant visitors was increasing, it was necessary to
relocate the reception to outside the walls of the Kremlin, where it would be eas-
ily accessible to all wishing to visit. He lamented that many peasant visitors did
not manage to arrive because ‘they are not allowed to enter as they cannot explain
why they have come and our Commandant is very concerned by the many
strange persons entering the government building’.118 Thus, a new Sovnarkom
Reception was set up close to the Kremlin, on Mokhovaia Street. It occupied a
The Sovnarkom Administration Department and Reception 77
number of large rooms where visitors could sit calmly, relax and drink tea, where
they could write their announcements and where illiterates were given ‘all the
help they wished for’. Bonch-Bruevich appointed some ‘very sensible, thought-
ful workers and Red Army men who willingly took on this important business’,
including the Duty Guard at the reception and the sailor M.D. Tsygankov.119
After Bonch-Bruevich’s departure from his job as head of the Administration
Department in December 1920, the external Sovnarkom Reception was re-
established under his successor Nikolai Gorbunov, this time at Vozdvizhenka, 4.120
In March 1921 the external Sovnarkom Reception was united with that of
the VTsIK under the control of its chairman and Soviet Head of State Mikhail
Kalinin.121 Kalinin was viewed as an expert on peasant matters. He was propa-
gandized by the Bolshevik press as ‘the All-Russian Village Headman’, in photo-
graphs such as ‘Kalinin, back on his farm during harvest’, which reinforced the
notion of a personal link between the reception and the peasant masses.122 As
head of state and chairman of the VTsIK, Kalinin ran a very popular reception
and was one of the biggest recipients of letters from citizens. He was said to have
received more than one and a half million written and oral petitions during the
1923–35 period.123
As well as meeting visitors in person, the Sovnarkom Reception also oper-
ated a ‘letter reception’. The secretary of the Sovnarkom Reception was obliged
to process citizen’s letters to the Soviet government and to report once every
fortnight to Lenin on the general sum. From January 1921, reception staff were
encouraged to use the newspaper Izvestiia VTsIK as a post box in which to reply
to correspondence, complaints and inquiries, to place articles in the newspapers,
especially notices to questions most frequently addressed to Sovnarkom and the
VTsIK by workers and peasants. Lenin also demanded a personal response to
all citizens’ letters to report to their authors that the affair had been directed
somewhere.124
Lenin also pressed for ‘careful surveillance over the execution of my resolu-
tions on these complaints’.125 Until 1921, the Sovnarkom Chancellery handled
letters sent to the government by Soviet citizens. One section of the govern-
ment archive contains a multitude of letters from Soviet citizens to Lenin. Most
expressed opinions, good wishes or complaints on the activity of the new gov-
ernment and many were requests for advice or assistance.126 But not all of these
letters were positive or constructive in tone. Files covering 1917–22 also contain
‘anonymous slanderous letters addressed to Lenin and Sovnarkom’ but remain,
at present, inaccessible to researchers.127 One secretary, Koksharova, confirmed
that the Sovnarkom Chancellery received many letters ‘to remind us that the
78 Inside Lenin’s Government
the masses. In a letter of 3 December 1921 to state officials who dealt with the
statements and complaints from petitioners to the Sovnarkom Reception Lenin
wrote: ‘From the work of the Sovnarkom Reception in handling complaints and
statements, it is clear that especially serious and urgent cases have demonstrated
the usefulness of the Reception as a “living connection”.’136
A letter from the Sovnarkom chairman to the Commissariat of Foodstuffs in
1922 on one peasant’s petition demonstrates how Lenin hoped to build a close
link between state and people via the Sovnarkom Reception. Lenin wrote: ‘I ask
you to show assistance to the peasant Sergei Frolov, in buying and receiving of
bread for his village Alakaevka, Samara Guberniia…Because I was personally
acquainted with this village, I consider that it would be politically useful if the
peasant does not leave without any help for sure. I ask you to try to help and to
report to me on what is achieved.’137 As a young man, in the summer of 1889,
Lenin moved with his family to Samara from Simbirsk and bought a small farm
near the village of Alakaevka. The Ul’ianovs spent their summers at the farm,
which was also called Alakaevka, until the autumn of 1893 when V. I. Lenin
moved to St. Petersburg, the rest of the Ul’ianovs moved to Moscow, and the
farm was sold. Lenin’s action seemed to have the desired effect. Having received
bread, the peasants replied: ‘We, those authorised, returning home to Samara
Guberniia, attest that the centre really does offer special care to overcome great
hunger and calamity and that our great leader Lenin took close to his heart all
the needs of the suffering peasantry.’138 The formulaic nature of this response
transcends regime change and demonstrates that the masses responded to this
particular feature of the Soviet government because they were familiar with it.
It, unintentionally, replicated paternal aspects of the political culture of tsarist
autocracy –and the practice of petitioning and receptions, as immortalized in
Nikolai Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’.
The Sovnarkom Reception proved popular among the masses, and among the
peasants in particular, because they knew how to play the game. The reception
system appealed to a personalized comprehension of power and a patrimonial
culture. Peasants understood that they could go in person and appeal to the
‘Head Bolshevik’, as they had done to the tsar, for help with their needs. Thus the
‘living connection’ which the Soviet leadership felt they were creating as part of
their new anti-bureaucratic, revolutionary state inadvertently reinforced trad
itional customs and ‘manual control’ from the top-down rather constructing
representative democracy.
Lenin was so convinced of the usefulness and necessity of receiving rep-
resentatives of the masses that he extended this system of reception beyond
80 Inside Lenin’s Government
Iakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov was a crucial figure in the early Soviet government.
In November 1917 he added the post of chairman of the All-Russian Central
Executive Committee of Soviets to his pre-existing role leading the Bolshevik
Party Secretariat. The apex of both party and state machinery were united in
a single individual and Sverdlov had crucial influence in mediating their rela-
tions in the first year and a half after the October Revolution. His personality
and ideas shaped the functioning of the government and informed party-state
relations in the earliest years of Soviet power. Sverdlov did not, nor intend to,
subjugate the Soviets to an expanding party apparatus. In fact, his presence in
the party-state system, as a bridge between the two apparatus, actually protected
the operation of the Soviet organs.
Sverdlov’s early demise meant that he became the subject of politicised myth-
making. His image emerged as an example of a Bolshevik ‘saintly life’1 and the
loaded panegyric surrounding Sverdlov, handed down from memoir and Soviet
accounts, was reiterated by scholars in their general histories. Stalin set the tone
for Sverdlov’s role in a 1924 article for Proletarskaia Revoliutsia, praising him
as a great ‘organization man’ and strong leader who promoted the expansion of
the party machine.2 In reality no love was lost between these two men who had
a long history of clashes dating back to their time in exile in Siberia together.
An editorial footnote to Stalin’s article complained that there was insufficient
attention given to Sverdlov and encouraged those who knew him to write down
their memories of his activities so that ‘the party will have a full image of one
of its best leaders, whose entire life was the party’.3 Two years later a collection
of memoirs on Sverdlov by leading Bolsheviks was published, and the contribu-
tors all emphasized Sverdlov’s key role in the development of the Communist
Party.4 By the late 1920s Stalin’s supporters began to equate Sverdlov with Stalin
as the party’s great ‘organization men’.5 Western historians largely followed the
pattern set by their Soviet counterparts and inherited the Sverdlov myth intact.
84 Inside Lenin’s Government
This image of Sverdlov as a devoted party organizer who deployed his skills to
expand the party machinery and faithfully execute Lenin’s orders complemented
the reigning totalitarian paradigm.
In the first significant attempt to revise this accepted wisdom, William Odom
echoed the line that Sverdlov was first and foremost a party man who worked to
subjugate the Soviets to the party, and the party to Lenin’s wishes.6 Odom, how-
ever, noting the lack of development of the party machine under Sverdlov’s ten-
ure, questioned Sverdlov’s organizational ability. Odom claimed that ‘the general
trend of his management policies at this time casts grave doubt on Bolshevik
claims that he was a gifted organiser’.7 But Odom dispensed with the wrong pil-
lar of the ‘Sverdlov myth’. It was not the case that Sverdlov was not a talented
organizer, but instead that Sverdlov prioritized the Soviet apparatus over that
of the party in his post-October career. The lack of expansion and development
of the party machine under Sverdlov was not due to lack of practical ability, but
lack of will to do so. That he believed the new regime should govern through
the Soviet apparatus, not the party machine, is clear in both the way he devoted
his time and energies on a daily basis and also from his writings and speeches
of the time.
Charles Duval claimed that under Sverdlov ‘the process of party centralization
began in mid-1917…and had become firmly established before 25 October 1917’8
and that ‘long before Stalin’s accomplishments, the director of the Secretariat
became de facto head of government’.9 It seems, however, that while Sverdlov
came to work for the party in the capital after the April Conference, he was not
appointed to the Secretariat until August 1917. Before this date Elena Stasova
was the leading figure in the Secretariat, running it alongside a handful of female
comrades.10 Throughout August and September 1917 Sverdlov did devote his
considerable energies and talents to work in the Secretariat. He focused on build-
ing links with local party organizations and attempting to gather information on
the size and shape of the Bolshevik Party across Russia.11 From October 1917,
however, Sverdlov was busy with work in the Military Revolutionary Committee
and in the Central Committee, planning and executing the October Revolution.
Again, much de facto responsibility for the work of the Secretariat fell to Stasova.12
Instead of moving the Secretariat to Smolny where Sverdlov was based, Stasova
continued to lead the Secretariat’s activities at Furshtatskaia Street.13
Sverdlov, the Soviets and the Secretariat 85
party membership drained into the Soviets either because of acceptance of the
‘All power to the Soviets’ slogan or because these institutions were seen as need-
ing to be captured by the party.23 In one report Sverdlov even remarked, ‘It is no
secret to anyone that in the centre and in the localities party organization was
in disarray’24 and that party organizations in the localities ‘consider it their duty
not only to impede the work from the centre, but even not to fulfil the directions
of central party organs’.25
Sverdlov’s performance at the Seventh Party Congress in late March 1918
confirms that since the revolution the Soviet rather than the party apparatus
had been his priority. Here he explained that ‘from the October months there
emerged before the soviets absolutely new tasks…Our party put its whole soul
into the soviets. Through the soviets and in the soviets it conducted its main
work.’26 He defended this practice, arguing, ‘Up to now the greatest attention
has been turned to Soviet organizations. The achievements of the October
Revolution had to be strengthened by Soviet work. At the present time, the tasks
of strengthening these gains, and deepening them, remain before us and we,
with our whole soul, pour all our main forces up now into Soviet work. It is
entirely impossible to reproach either individual workers or the whole party, for
this. It flows from the situation.’27
In another speech to the Seventh Party Congress, Sverdlov made a general call
for party unity and improvement of party organization, but failed even to pre-
sent the official organizational report which he, as party secretary, was obliged
to deliver. He announced: ‘Allow me, comrades, to propose the removal of the
organizational question from the agenda…it is extremely difficult to reckon up,
to give an exact account of what has been done by the party in the organizational
respect for the whole period since the last Congress. Besides this, it is neces-
sary to finish the Congress as soon as possible, I would say today. On 12th, in
Moscow, will be held the Congress of Soviets. Huge preparatory work is neces-
sary for the convocation of this congress…many of us, working on the congress,
are burdened by practical soviet work.’28
In his final address to the Seventh Party Congress, Sverdlov suggested that
the party now take over some tasks from the Soviets, namely agitation against
Germany and military construction, ‘because the soviets, which are “the state”,
are bound to Germany by the treaty, whereas the party is independent of
this and so free to agitate’.29 He explained that ‘now our political position has
changed sharply in connection with ratification (of the peace). Up to now we
undertook all work through the soviets, and so the party organization withered.
Now we cannot do this and consequently the time comes when a part of the
Sverdlov, the Soviets and the Secretariat 87
active workers migrate from the soviets to the party.’ He proposed: ‘Now again
our party work must be central’ because the ‘soviets cannot conduct these tasks
as the government, sharply and openly’, and so it was necessary to ‘conduct it
through the party… in this area of work, which the soviets cannot conduct now.
It is true that our party organization carries responsibility for all activity of the
present government, but only morally, not legally. The government cannot bear
responsibility for all steps of the party.’
In the last few months of his career, Sverdlov had begun to initiate some
steps towards developing closer links and hierarchical discipline in the party
organization.30 He ordered that the local party organizations establish secretar-
iats to enable a more systematic compilation of information through personal
and organizational questionnaires. In late 1918 the Secretariat instructed local
branches to establish registration files so that the party would have a better idea
of its numbers.31 Yet party centralization did not progress very far by the end
of 1918. In fact it was Sverdlov’s removal from the scene which brought about
the expansion of the party apparatus, rather than his presence. By the time of
Sverdlov’s death the Party Secretariat still lacked a formal internal organizational
structure and its staff were few in number. The challenge posed by Sverdlov’s
death was met by efforts to institutionalize the Secretariat’s structure and place its
operations on a more regular, formal footing after the Eighth Party Congress of
March 1919.32 The Secretariat apparatus had expanded dramatically by the mid-
1920s into a very different animal than had existed during Sverdlov’s tenure.33
In early November 1917 Lenin offered Sverdlov the chairmanship of the All-
Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets, effectively becoming head
of state of the Soviet government.34 He replaced L.B. Kamenev in this role –
Kamenev was increasingly seen as a political liability by the Central Committee
at this time. In the preceding weeks, Kamenev’s relationship with the Central
Committee majority had become increasingly strained. He firmly opposed the
Bolshevik seizure of power and in mid-October tried to prevent it by leaking
Lenin’s plans to the press. After his election as chairman of the Second Congress
of Soviets he conducted talks with Vikzhel on the highly contentious issue of
the composition of the new government; he disagreed with the Leninists that
it should be solely Soviet power. Kamenev believed, contrary to the main party
line, that the new government should contain representatives of parties not
88 Inside Lenin’s Government
but other parties, albeit in a very small minority, did continue to participate in
the work of the VTsIK.
At the Second Left SR party Congress Spiridonova was confident that they
would have at least 40 per cent of the delegates to the forthcoming Fifth Congress
of Soviets, a good platform on which to advance a resolution ending the ‘breath-
ing space’. If the resolutions were adopted, the Left SRs planned to rejoin the
government. As the opening of the congress on 4 July approached, the scale of
Bolshevik gerrymandering became clear. As Aleksandra Izmailovich, a member
of the Left SR Central Committee, later wrote: ‘the Left SRs failed to consider the
Bolsheviks’ capacity to work miracles’.52 The election of the VTsIK at the Fifth
Congress of Soviets in July 1918 was the point at which the Bolshevik majority
became overwhelming. This Soviet assembly now contained 157 Bolsheviks, 11
Left SRs, 4 SR Maximalists and 26 others.53
A few months later, in October 1918, the Menshevik Central Committee
repudiated their ‘political collaboration with classes hostile to soviet power’ and
in view of these declarations the VTsIK declared as void its resolution of 14 June
excluding them. A similar process occurred in February 1919 with regard to a
section of the SRs where the VTsIK again declared void its ban on their entering
the assembly.54 The fractions of the minority parties participated in debates in
the VTsIK until at least spring 1919 but the Bolshevik majority was so large that
if its fraction all voted in tune, there was no danger that they could be outvoted.
Scholars have commonly assumed that the VTsIK was redundant from mid-
1918. Gill, for example, argues: ‘It’s (the VTsIK’s) decreasing importance is
reflected in the diminishing frequency with which it met…between July 1918
and February 1920 it appears not to have met at all.’55 Yet the stenographic rec-
ord of the fifth convocation of the VTsIK, beginning in July, show that up to the
Sixth Congress of Soviets in November 1918 the VTsIK met nine times around
once a fortnight. The sittings on 15 and 29 July, on 2, 16, 30 September, on 4, 22,
30 October and on 4 November, usually held in the early evening, lasted around
three hours with Sverdlov in the chair.56
There is some uncertainty as to how early the sixth convocation of the VTsIK
(November 1918 to December 1919) stopped convening. There is evidence that
the VTsIK had a joint sitting with the Moscow Soviet and Second Trade Union
Congress on 17 January 1919.57 Sverdlov’s speeches also reveals three further sit-
tings of the VTsIK on 30 November 1918, 23 December 1918 and 10 February
1919.58 It appears that the VTsIK continued to meet at three weekly intervals
until mid-February 1919. From then on the practical exigencies of the Civil War
disrupted the routine operation of the Soviet assembly. At the Seventh Congress
92 Inside Lenin’s Government
of Soviets in December 1919, Martov remarked that the VTsIK had not met
over the past year. This was not denied by the Bolsheviks, with Trotsky simply
interjecting ‘They were at the front!’59 The Civil War meant that large numbers
of VTsIK members were sent out of the capital to the fronts to fight, hampering
the VTsIK’s functioning. This was part of the reason for the wider decline of the
Soviets across Russia as Civil War conditions revealed their inadequacies for
effecting the decisive, flexible and disciplined executive action rightly deemed as
essential by the Moscow leadership.60
Sverdlov’s major contribution to the Bolshevik Party from November 1917 was
his skilled representation of their interests in the VTsIK. This was a crucial role
if the Bolshevik-led Sovnarkom was to get their policies passed as law in the
VTsIK as their initially small majority there meant they were not guaranteed
compliance.
Managing the VTsIK was not an easy task during its Second Convocation
(October 1917–January 1918) in particular, where two fifths of the members
were composed of Mensheviks, Left SRs and United SDs. The number of Left
SRs and Mensheviks reached half in some sittings because Bolshevik members
of the VTsIK had left to organize Soviet power in the localities or were busy with
other activities.61 Also, it was by no means certain that partisan voting would
take place. On some occasions, Bolshevik members of the VTsIK voted with the
SRs and Mensheviks against their own party.62
Again, the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty was a highly contentious decision which
required very careful handling by the Soviet leaders to ensure a favourable out-
come in the VTsIK. The climax of this process of gaining acceptance of the treaty
in the Soviet assembly began with a joint meeting of the Bolshevik-Left SR frac-
tions of the VTsIK at 11 pm on 23 February 1918.63 The German ultimatum
expired at 7 am the following morning. Sverdlov announced that as time was
short each fraction was allowed only two speeches: one in favour of peace and
one against. No discussion was permitted. For the Bolsheviks, Lenin spoke in
favour of accepting the German ultimatum, and Radek spoke against it. The Left
SRs refused to nominate a speaker favouring peace because Kamkov insisted
that there was unanimity in his fraction against accepting Germany’s terms.
As a result, the only Left SR to speak was Shteinberg, a vehement proponent
Sverdlov, the Soviets and the Secretariat 93
of revolutionary war. No vote was taken at the end of this joint meeting, since
the Left SR fraction had already decided against accepting the terms and the
Bolshevik fraction had not yet discussed the matter independently.
Immediately after the joint meeting Sverdlov held a meeting of the Bolshevik
fraction of the VTsIK in which he proposed that the assembled Bolsheviks
should dispense with further discussion of whether to accept the German
peace terms and immediately vote on the issue. One participant of this meet-
ing, L. Stupochenko, recorded the happenings of this night in memoirs. He
recalled: ‘But can’t we at least ask questions? one fraction member inquired. “By
all means”, replied Sverdlov. Opponents of peace bombarded Lenin with ques-
tions each more venomous than the last.’64 When a vote was finally taken, Lenin’s
position to accept the terms received 72 votes as against 25 for the anti-peace
Left Communists.65
Finally Sverdlov was able to convene the VTsIK plenum at 3 am, only four
hours before the German ultimatum expired. Sverdlov, on behalf of the VTsIK
presidium, proposed that after hearing the German peace terms and listening
to a 15-minute report from a Sovnarkom representative, one speaker from each
party fraction express their faction’s view on whether to accept or reject the peace
terms. A vote on the issue would then be taken.66 This proposal was accepted,
eliminating the possibility that the Left Communist view would even be articu-
lated. Three proposals on the peace issue emerged at the meeting: the Bolshevik
majority’s, expressed by Lenin and Zinoviev; the Left SRs’, voiced by Kamkov;
and the views of the Menshevik Internationalists, the SRs, and the United Social
Democratic Internationalists, represented, respectively, by Martov, Mikhail
Likhach, and Gavril Lindov. Lenin and Zinoviev argued for the acceptance of
the peace terms while the other speakers were strongly against.67
The absence of a number of VTsIK members, many of them Left Communists,
meant that the Bolsheviks did not have a straightforward majority among 230
participants at this meeting. Even if all the Left Communists present maintained
party discipline of the Bolshevik fraction and voted to accept Germany’s peace
terms, Lenin still needed help from another quarter to assure their acceptance.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Left SR opponents of the Brest peace worked to
try to attract Left Communist Bolsheviks to vote with them.
A preliminary vote was registered by a show of cards, followed immediately
by a roll-call. First Sverdlov called for the ‘yes’ votes –112. The outcome was
too close to call. Then the ‘no’ votes and abstentions were counted –86 and 22
respectively. At the sight of some Bolshevik soldiers applauding this outcome,
Left SR and Commissar for Justice Shteinberg screamed in rage and pounded
94 Inside Lenin’s Government
his fists on the railing of the government box where he sat.68 At 4:30 am, two
and a half hours before the German ultimatum was due to expire, the roll-call
balloting began. The moderate socialists and Left SRs applauded early in this
process when the golden boy of the Bolshevik Party Nikolai Bukharin voted
against accepting the peace terms.69 The results of the roll-call were only slightly
different from those of the preliminary vote: 116 in favour; 85 opposed; and 26
abstentions, of which 22 were Left SR proponents of peace. Submitting to party
discipline and voting for acceptance of German peace terms were several ardent
Left Communists including Bokii, Volodarskii, Kossior, and Ravich. Riazanov
and Piatnitskii joined Bukharin in breaking ranks and voting against accepting
the treaty. Kollontai, Dzerzhinsky, Krestinskii, Ioffe, Bubnov and Uritskii were
among prominent Left Communist non-attenders.70 Finally Lenin’s Sovnarkom
had its mandate and was authorized to formally accept Germany’s peace terms.
Rabinowitch acknowledges that conflict over this issue in the VTsIK ‘could have
resulted in the breakup of the Bolshevik-Left SR coalition, and, indeed, the pos-
sibility cannot be excluded that they might have brought down Lenin’s govern-
ment’. He cites the VTsIK chairman, the ‘tactically astute’ Sverdlov, as responsible
for dodging this potentially lethal bullet.71
Sverdlov had been laying the groundwork for successful management of
the Bolshevik fraction of the VTsIK since the day of his appointment as chair-
man. After the meeting in early November 1917 where Lenin offered him the
role of VTsIK chairman, Sverdlov immediately got to work organizing the
party fraction. Sverdlov instructed Bonch-Bruevich, head of the Sovnarkom
Administration Department, to send word out to all the Bolshevik members
of the VTsIK, search for them ‘in the Petrograd Soviet and other places where
there may be members of the VTsIK, and inform all those who came to the
Administration Department of Sovnarkom, or to visit Lenin, that ‘absolutely
everybody, at the direct request of the chairman of Sovnarkom, go to the sitting
of our fraction of the VTsIK’ which he set for 7 pm that very evening. Bonch-
Bruevich recalled: ‘At 7pm our faction was so full as never before…Discipline
was most firm. Tickets were examined and were registered in the list. To all
those present it was announced that it was necessary to attend without fail’ with
punishment by the party authorities for those breaking this rule. According to
Bonch-Bruevich Sverdlov brought ‘something new, some strong hand, perman
ent, persistent…as had never occurred in the VTsIK’. Sverdlov gave a ‘brief but
imposing speech’ that members of the party fraction were ‘particularly obliged at
such a serious moment when some highly responsible cadres had deserted their
posts’ and proposed a meeting to hear a report on important issues. After this
Sverdlov, the Soviets and the Secretariat 95
sitting of the Bolshevik fraction, which took around two hours, the non-party
assembly was due to open. Sverdlov warned the assembled Bolshevik fraction
that although ‘in such a moment it is natural to go home and drink tea’, it was
essential, by order of party discipline, to be present at the full VTsIK assembly.
He proposed a named vote on his proposal, then turned to the secretary and
asked him to read the list of members of the faction, who voted for and who
against. Sverdlov discovered that of those present, half had left before the end of
the assembly and reprimanded ‘some comrades cannot sit down until the end of
such an important moment’, warning that this behaviour constituted the break-
ing of party discipline and ‘to let this go is impossible’.72
Another technique which Sverdlov employed to strengthen party discipline
was careful selection of candidates to the Bolshevik VTsIK fraction. He used
his vast knowledge of party activists, amassed during his years in the revolu-
tionary underground, and consulted other state activists and members of local
delegations for nomination of suitable candidates to represent the party line. His
1918 chairman’s notebook demonstrates that he personally drew up preliminary
lists of suitable candidates to be presented at the congresses of Soviets.73 The
Bolshevik fraction became so well organized that by mid-1918 it had acquired
its own secretary, E. Tsirlina.74
One of Sverdlov’s final sessions chairing the VTsIK sitting was on 17 January
1919. By this time the process of managing the Bolshevik fraction ran like clock-
work to ensure a favourable vote through of Sovnarkom’s policy. The sitting
opened at 6 pm in the Bolshoi Theatre. Despite the cold due to lack of heating
and the central chandelier burning half descended, delegates were in good s pirits
and the hall resounded with cheerful voices, jokes and revolutionary songs. The
appearance of the presidium on the stage, including Lenin, aroused a stormy
ovation. Sverdlov opened the sitting of the fraction by declaring a moment of
silence in mourning for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, murdered two
days earlier, and then passed the floor to Lenin for a report on the foodstuffs
question. Lenin delivered a report on the foodstuffs issue and proposed a reso
lution. There was no debate in the fraction, and the resolution was passed unani
mously. Then, after a short break, the non-party representatives entered the hall
and at 7:40 pm the joint sitting opened. Lenin gave another speech on the ter-
rible situation in the country in conditions of foreign intervention and famine,
explained the foodstuffs policy of Soviet power and set out to describe in detail
each point of the resolution of the Communist Party fraction. The Commissars
for Foodstuffs and Labour then spoke in support of the resolution. Next the
maximalist Svetlov spoke against the resolution and instead spoke for free
96 Inside Lenin’s Government
In the first year or so after the October Revolution, the Soviet leadership experi-
mented with a new, ‘revolutionary’ form of collegial government. During the
radical experiment of the collegium system, the sole authority of a single min-
ister leading a department found in the imperial and Provisional Government
was replaced by a collegial body responsible collectively for policy-making
and general administration. Communist historian L. Kritsman described col-
legial administration as ‘the specific distinctive mark of the proletariat, dis-
tinguishing it from all other social classes…the most democratic principle of
organization’.1 The significance of these collegial bodies was twofold. First, the
Bolsheviks, in these earliest years of Soviet power, felt that there was something
anti-bureaucratic about removing dictatorial ministers and replacing them
with a group of equally empowered individuals. Second, the collegia allowed
the Soviet leadership to bring specialists and representatives of the broader
population, albeit to a limited extent, into government administration, a key
feature of pre-revolutionary Bolshevik ideology on the state and an attempt to
implement concrete measures based on the principles expressed in Lenin’s State
and Revolution. In fact, however, the experiment in collegiality proved short-
lived and instead of contributing to the development of superior form of anti-
bureaucratic ‘proletarian’ form of democratic government as intended, instead
militated against the construction of a strong, dynamic government cabinet
with authoritative ministers possessing a sense of responsibility for general
policy and leadership. In a similar way to the Petrine colleges created 200 years
earlier, collegiality in the early Soviet government prevented the Soviet state
apparatus from being populated by strong, dynamic, authoritative figures
and, unintentionally in the Soviet case, undermined the efficient functioning
of departmental decision-making. Whereas the Petrine colleges strengthened
the tsar’s personal autocracy by removing any possibility of the emergence of
powerful figures who might accrue significant influence in the bureaucracy
98 Inside Lenin’s Government
and challenge his position, in Lenin’s government the Communist Party and
its Politburo were able to step into the breach to offer resolute and authoritative
action via manual control from above.
The collegia system emerged from November 1917 onwards and was stron-
ger and longer lasting in commissariats with less ‘urgent’ jurisdictions, such
as Social Welfare, Education, Nationalities and Labour. In the Transport and
Military Commissariats, on the other hand, the collegial principle was eroded
much more quickly. Although not clearly defined in early Soviet legislation, in
practice collegiality moulded day-to-day activity of Sovnarkom and many com-
missariats, with frequent appeals to higher authorities when collegium members
felt a commissar had acted in an uncollegial manner. Nevertheless, even in those
commissariats where collegiality had been strong from the earliest days after
the October Revolution, it gradually came to be viewed by some as a hindrance
to clear, firm decision-making and implementation. By late 1920, the collegial
principle in state administration had fallen foul of the same urges to centralize,
improve efficiency and impose hierarchical authority that had earlier destroyed
the post-revolutionary democratic, collective ethos which had existed in the fac-
tories and military.
In 1979 Rigby wrote, ‘The early history of the commissariat boards still awaits
systematic study.’2 Beyond recent work by James Heinzen, there has been little
Russian or Western scholarship on this subject in the subsequent three decades
to address the gap.3 Even among specialist scholarship on the early Soviet state,
the functioning and significance of the commissariat collegia has been over-
looked.4 Most historians whose work has touched on the operation of the colle-
gia in Vladimir Lenin’s government have dismissed them as merely consultative
bodies.5 Many of the scholars who have studied the early Soviet state take a view
of continuity over change.6 Even Rigby, who conceded that a different model of
government emerged in the shape of commissions, did not recognize the critical
import of the collegia.7
The collegia system was an important method in attempting de-
bureaucratization and proletarianization of the Soviet state. While Fitzpatrick’s
study of the Commissariat of Enlightenment emphasizes that the work of this
institution was led not simply by Commissar A.V. Lunacharsky, but by the col-
lective effort of the whole collegium, in more recent scholarship only the work
of Alexander Rabinowitch has acknowledged the use of the collegial method in
the early Soviet state apparatus.8 The only scholars to directly examine collective
decision-making as a feature of the commissariat collegia in detail, however,
were Soviet jurist I.L. Davitnidze9 and historian M. Gribanov.10 Gribanov’s work
Collegiality in the Early Soviet Government 99
was concerned more with the theory rather than the practice of collegiality in
the early Soviet government. His article is steeped in Stalinist rhetoric and relies
far too heavily on ‘evidence’ drawn only from the uncritical repetition of the
speeches and writings of Lenin and Stalin. Davitnidze’s 1972 work was primar-
ily concerned with collegiality versus one-man management in contemporary
Soviet government institutions, but he did provide a chapter on the creation and
early history of the collegia of the People’s Commissariats. In this chapter he rec-
ognized that in the first years of Soviet power the collegia represented an attempt
to create a decision-making system of collective bodies infused with ‘revolu-
tionary spirit’.11 To draw an accurate picture of the collegia is not an easy task
if one relies, like Davitnidze, solely on official legislation. Davitnidze himself
acknowledged that legislative acts of this time did not define sufficiently clearly
the respective legal positions of the People’s Commissar and the collegium.
Certainly, from formal government decrees and the 1918 RSFSR Constitution,
it is not immediately obvious that there had been a move away from ministerial
government. However, from other evidence, including internal state papers of
Sovnarkom and the commissariats and memoirs, a clearer picture of the com-
missariat collegia emerges.
It seems that the idea of the collegia originated even before the October
Revolution. While there is little surviving evidence of pre-revolutionary prac-
tical plans for the establishment of the Soviet government institutions beyond
Lenin’s State and Revolution, it is clear that on the eve of October the Bolsheviks
were leaning towards collective decision-making bodies. Lenin’s fragmentary
‘Sheet of Jottings’ from 24 October 1917 outlined a plan for the revolutionary
government which featured ‘Commissions of People’s Commissars’.12
By 26 October 1917 in the ‘crazy whirlpool’ of Smolny, the revolutionaries
busily replaced and reorganized the old network of administration. Lev Trotsky
described how the Bolshevik Central Committee ‘was deciding the problems of
the new government in Russia here…the evening session was to create a cab-
inet of ministers. Ministers? What a sadly compromised word! It stunk of the
high bureaucratic career, the crowning of some parliamentary ambition. It was
decided to call the new government the Soviet of People’s Commissars: that at
least had a fresher ring to it.’13 Vladimir Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruevich, head
of the Sovnarkom Chancellery, concurred with Trotsky’s account, writing in
his memoirs that it was ‘necessary to set up commissions for the administra-
tion of the country…the commissariats. The chairmen of these we will name
People’s Commissars. The collegium of chairmen will be the Council of People’s
Commissars.’14
100 Inside Lenin’s Government
of representatives from this body.27 He recognized the fusion between Soviet and
trade union institutions, stating that:
the right to take decisions personally on all questions in the jurisdiction of the
commissariat, and the collegium could only appeal to Sovnarkom or the VTsIK
if they disagreed. Closer analysis of the relevant articles of the constitution, how-
ever, reveals that the image of the dominant commissar may not be so straight-
forward. Article 44 stated that the People’s Commissar was the ‘chairman’ of the
collegium, rather than the ‘leader’ or ‘head’. Thus, he was not necessarily granted
greater rights than other members in decision-making, but simply had respon-
sibility for running sittings. Article 47 stated that collegium members, as well as
the People’s Commissar, were fully responsible for the activity of the commissar-
iat. This passage demonstrates that the collegium members were not just back-
stage advisers, but could appeal against decisions they did not agree with. They
must have been involved in decision-making if they were to be held accountable
for the commissariat’s activity.
Rather than the commissar acting as ‘boss’ of the collegium, as in ministerial
government, he was instead the representative of the collegium at Sovnarkom
meetings. It was necessary to keep this post stable for the sake of consistency and
continuity of government.31 He also acted as chairman of the collegium sittings
to ensure that they ran effectively. He had the right to make decisions personally
in order to prevent the work of the commissariat grinding to a halt on contro-
versial issues, if the situation called for it. He was, however, not expected to do
so as normal procedure. The right of appeal of the collegium members was set
up in law as a guarantee of collegiality in decision-making. There are further
indications in other early Soviet legislation that collegiality, rather than one-man
management, was the intended form of relations in the commissariats.
One of the first acts of Soviet power, the ‘Decree of the All-Russian Congress
of Soviets to Form the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’ of 27 October 1917
supports this view. It stated: ‘The management of individual branches of state
activity is entrusted to commissions whose members shall ensure the fulfilment
of the programme announced by the Congress, and shall work in close contact
with mass organisations of men and women workers, sailors, soldiers, peasants
and office employees. Governmental authority is vested in a collegium of the
chairmen of these commissions, the Council of People’s Commissars.’32
At this early stage, the new titles of ‘People’s Commissar’ and ‘Commissariats’
with their ‘collegia’ were not yet settled. However, the initial idea of collective
authority and responsibility, in this case by ‘commissions’ and whose ‘chairman’
would represent them in the Sovnarkom, itself a collegial organ, is made plain.
The legislation does not indicate when and why the title of these bodies changed
from commissions to collegia, but both terms express the same idea of collective
104 Inside Lenin’s Government
he would lose patience, but he never made it evident during the sessions. On
these occasions, when in consequence of our endless discussions his patience
was exhausted, he would suddenly disappear, doing it with extraordinary
skill: ‘just for a moment’ he would disappear from the room and hide in one of
the recesses of the Smolny, and later the Kremlin. It was impossible to find him.
In the beginning we used to wait for him. But finally we would adjourn. I would
remain alone in our common office, patiently awaiting his return, but to no
avail… I would go for a long walk through the endless corridors of the Smolny
and the Kremlin in search of Stalin. I would find him in the most unexpected
places. A couple of times I found him in the apartment of the sailor, Comrade
Vorontsov, in the kitchen, where Stalin was lying on a divan smoking a pipe and
thinking over his thesis.43
for confirmation by Sovnarkom’ (i.e. not just the commissar).47 Finally, fur-
ther evidence of the necessity for collective decision-making comes from
September 1918, when a reprimand was sent to the People’s Commissariats of
Finance and State Control because a decision had been made as a ‘conclusion
of certain employees of the commissariat, instead of conclusion by the whole
collegium.’48
A key indication of the strength of the collegium vis-à-vis the commissar
was the frequency of appeals against unilateral decisions, and the serious-
ness with which appeals were dealt. In the constitution this right of appeal
may seem like a small nod to collegiality which may not have held much
weight. In practice, however, this right of appeal was not an empty threat. It
was frequently wielded by collegium members. These appeals were taken ser
iously by Sovnarkom, dealt with urgently, and decisions often went in favour
of the collegium. For example, on 15 November 1917, the case of ‘frictions in
the collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Posts and Telegraphs between
People’s Commissar Avilov and the collegium’ was put before Sovnarkom.
A commission of three Sovnarkom members was appointed to resolve it. They
made an impartial report to Sovnarkom the following day and instructed
the collegium on how to ‘liquidate the conflict’.49 In January 1918 conflict
broke out in the collegium of the Commissariat of Justice, where the Left
SR I.N. Shteinberg was People’s Commissar, and the Bolshevik P.I. Stuchka
was deputy commissar. Stuchka announced a protest at the Sovnarkom sit-
ting against the ‘Decree on Law’, which had been passed the previous day.
Shteinberg had ‘presented the project decree to Sovnarkom as if it had been
accepted unanimously by the Justice collegium, but in reality agreement had
not been reached’. In response, Sovnarkom proposed to Stuchka and ‘others
having principal objections to the decree On Law’ to bring statements to
the following day’s Sovnarkom sitting where they subjected the decree to
reconsideration.50
Similar conflicts broke out in spring 1918 in other commissariats. Trotsky
reported on ‘the difficulties and frictions in the Commissariat of Foodstuffs
in February 1918 in connection with the petition of comrades Manuilsky
and Maliutin’,51 which led to the resignation of the People’s Commissar for
Foodstuffs.52 Another major conflict over policy broke out between the mem-
bers of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat of State Control on 25
March 1918. Sovnarkom instructed that the ‘members of the collegium sit-
uated in conflict must send, urgently, all materials for consideration of the
question to Sovnarkom’.53 It is clear that the collegia frequently exercised
108 Inside Lenin’s Government
would eventually lead to the fierce battle between the collegium members and
Shliapnikov. On 2 August 1918 the collegium turned to the implementation of
this decree, which it had been responsible for producing, in relation to its own
staff. Eleven collegium members were present, but Nogin was noticeably absent.
Instead Kushner acted as the chairman. The collegium considered the question-
naires filled out by commissariat staff concerning family ties within the insti-
tution. The minutes reveal that ‘in principle it was recognised that employees
related by blood or marriage to colleagues and responsible workers of the insti-
tution, not serving as irreplaceable specialists in the Commissariat of Labour,
are subject to dismissal, in accordance with the decree of Sovnarkom’.69
The collegium decided to dismiss ‘responsible’ workers with two weeks’
notice, and technical workers with one month’s notice and a pay advance. They
listed ‘employees subject to dismissal from the Commissariat of Labour: within
two weeks without a pay advance: a) Head of the Housekeeping department,
Comrade Kovalenko, related to the People’s Commissar for Labour, A. G.
Shliapnikov by marriage (not an irreplaceable specialist) b) Comrade Tiutereva,
bookkeeper of the People’s Commissariat of Labour, related to the People’s
Commissar of Labour by blood (also not an irreplaceable specialist). With a
pay advance of one month: Employee of the accountancy department Kuznetsov
(father), as a relative of an official of the same department, Kuznetsov (son)…
Comrade Radus-Zenkovich, although related by marriage to Deputy People’s
Commissar of Labour V. P. Nogin, is not subject to dismissal as he is an irreplace-
able specialist.’70 The collegium also instructed the Labour Market Department
of the commissariat to present its completed questionnaires and dismiss those
relatives, in accordance with the decree, in a three-day period. The remaining
dismissals were worked out the following week in the sitting of 13 August when
the collegium decided, ‘concerning staff of the Statistical Department, of the
brother and sister Shishkins, to dismiss A. A. Shishkina, a machinist, and keep
V. N. Shishkin who was recognised, as a statistician, as irreplaceable and there-
fore must remain in employment’.71
This appeared to be the end of the matter. However, when Shliapnikov
returned from his food procurement duties to rejoin the collegium of the
People’s Commissariat of Labour two weeks later the issue of the dismissal of his
relatives came to a head. The explosive sitting of 29 August 1918, Shliapnikov’s
first after his return to Moscow, saw the beginning of the revolt of the colle-
gium against Shliapnikov’s overriding of their decision. The meeting opened
with Shliapnikov announcing the agenda. However, affairs were immediately
hijacked by Radus-Zenkovich (the brother-in-law of Nogin who had kept his
112 Inside Lenin’s Government
job as an ‘irreplaceable specialist’) who requested the floor to make the follow-
ing announcement: ‘apparently the decree on relatives has been abolished in
the Commissariat of Labour, as Comrades Kovalenko and Tiutereva, dismissed
according to this decree, are again employed in the commissariat without the
consent (vedoma) of the Collegium. Today a meeting was held of “department
heads” at which it was decided that there cannot be joint work if the decisions
of the collegium are evaded so. The legal decision of the collegium was abol-
ished by the commissar.’72 Nogin waded in with support. He stated bluntly that
‘the collegium has the right to appeal in the plenum. The Commissar does not
possess the right to rescind decisions of the Deputy Commissar.’73 Shliapnikov,
initially irritated, replied that: ‘the Heads of Departments must be only Heads
of Departments, and not interfere in the conduct of the collegium. I possess
the right to cancel a decision of the collegium and that includes decisions of
my Deputy. This I cancel with the authority (vedoma) of the Presidium of the
Central Executive Committee. If you are not satisfied with my actions, you can
appeal.’74
At this point tensions escalated. The surviving minutes are edited. At least
one page is missing. When we return to the action, Shliapnikov is still on the
offensive, arguing that ‘Comrade Kovalenko was invited by the collegium of the
Commissariat of Labour, but I do not see members confirmed by Sovnarkom
here.’75 This infuriated the collegium further. Nogin protested that ‘all these
members were confirmed by Sovnarkom in your absence’.76 Stopani joined the
quarrel. He remonstrated that
this was said not only by department heads, but by members of the collegium.
Bumazhny, Puzanov, R-Zenkovich, Deputy Comrade Khodorovskii, comrades
Anikst and Nogin are members. The decision concerning the decree on relatives
was carried by a legal composition of the collegium. The collegium wished to
bring to execution the decree, as we are the initiators of the decree and must
firmly defend the reputation of Soviet power. The decision of the collegium is
fully legal.77
Shliapnikov, finding himself isolated in the collegium, could only repeat his
claim that ‘I did this with the authority of the Presidium of the Central Executive
Committee. If you like you can make an appeal. Make a written statement,
bring it here and I will pass it to Sovnarkom along with the minutes of the col-
legium.’78 Nogin, however, would not accept this solution and pushed for a vote
to continue the debate. Another collegium member, Gindin, supported him.79
Shliapnikov again attempted to stifle further debate and carry on with normal
Collegiality in the Early Soviet Government 113
government business. He stated firmly, ‘Further debate I cannot permit’, but the
collegium would not accept this. Instead Nogin proposed ‘to interrupt the sitting
of the collegium in advance of elucidation by Sovnarkom. In such a situation it
is impossible to work together’. His proposal was put to the vote and carried by
a majority of six for and one (only Shliapnikov) against. Eleven were recorded as
present and hence four collegium members must have abstained. The sitting of
the collegium, by a majority of votes, was broken off.80
The following day a collegium sitting was held in which Shliapnikov re-
attempted to compel the collegium to continue business as usual. However, the
question of ‘whether the work of the collegium can take place under normal
conditions’ arose immediately.81 Shliapnikov stated that ‘the appointment of a
special commission for clearing up what occurred in the sitting of the collegium
on 29 August will be decided in the VTsIK’.82 Nogin and the collegium were
still spoiling for a fight, having made a formal complaint to Sovnarkom and the
VTsIK Presidium the previous evening. He talked with Sverdlov and learnt that
Sovnarkom had not made any final decisions on the matter.83 Some collegium
members were more inclined to calm the situation and try to carry out commis-
sariat business. A.M. Anikst proposed ‘to consider the present meeting of the
collegium as legal and normal in order to decide questions together with the
representative from the Trade Unions and to elucidate the future work of the
collegium’.84 Nogin, however, continued to obstruct normal working relations
in the collegium. He tried to drag the Trade Unions into the fray to support his
case, proposing ‘to the representative of the Trade Unions to give his opinion
regarding the current situation’.85 Trade Union representative Shmidt remained
diplomatic. He argued that as the issue of the conflict had not been sent to the
presidium of the Trade Unions, he could not definitively give his opinion as rep-
resentative of the Trade Unions. Instead, he proposed ‘either to discuss the point
on the agenda and carry a certain decision, or completely not discuss it until the
clearing up of the question of the normal work of the collegium’.86 It seemed that
the majority of collegium members were not willing to carry out work as nor-
mal. Most preferred to wait for Sovnarkom’s decision. Nogin proposed to hold
a collegium sitting the following morning, Saturday, 31 August 1918. ‘This is
plenty of time to clear it up’, he added.87
This proposal was supported by the other infuriated members of the colle-
gium. Radus-Zenkovich remarked: ‘We have many urgent questions to decide.
This confirms the impossibility of work in the current conditions.’88 Nogin again
tried to bring the authority of the Trade Unions into the conflict: ‘In view of the
fact that the Trade Union does not yet have an opinion, and we want to work
114 Inside Lenin’s Government
together with the Trade Unions, I propose to Comrade Shmidt to explain the
question in the presidium of the Trade Unions on who has the right to cancel
the decisions of the collegium.When there is an answer we will decide all ques-
tions jointly.’ The sitting closed with Stopani’s ominous statement: ‘Somebody
among us has rendered a crime against Soviet power, either the collegium or the
commissar.’89
The planned sitting opened at 1.30 pm on Saturday, 31 August, despite the
attempt on Lenin’s life the previous evening. Although all members unanimously
decided ‘to send to Nadezhda Konstantinova, to Lenin, deep condolences and
wishes for a quick recovery’, even this shock was not enough to bring the colle-
gium members and Shliapnikov together. The initial disruption in Sovnarkom’s
work due to Lenin’s shooting meant that the question of the conflict in the
Labour collegium had not yet been dealt with. The arguments dragged out for a
further sitting despite Shliapnikov’s attempts to eschew the conflict and continue
normal work. Shmidt returned to this sitting with the formal decision of the
Trade Unions on the conflict. It was not favourable to either side. He announced
that ‘the All-Russian Trade Union carried a resolution concerning the conflict
in the People’s Commissariat of Labour. This resolution says that this is a small
practical disagreement and it is impossible to create such disorganisation due to
such a small question. It recommends the appointment of a commission from
the VTsIK to sort out the question of the relationship of the commissar to the
members of the collegium. The Trade Union proposes to consider the conflict
exhausted and that it believes that it is necessary to begin considering agenda
items without further delay.’90
Tomskii then waded into the debate to urge the continuation of the work of
the commissariat. He acknowledged that this was ‘a serious moment and also
very annoying’ but that the question of tariff policy was urgent as it involved
the issue of millions of roubles by the state treasury. He added, ‘The question of
relatives can be cleared up by the investigative commission of the presidium of
the VTsIK and State Control.’91 However, the more militant members of the col-
legium were still not satisfied to let the issue lie. Radus-Zenkovich again stated
that ‘the collegium cannot work in general…In such conditions the possibil-
ity of work is absolutely excluded…the question of decisions by the collegium
is not provided for in the Soviet Constitution: whether the commissar decides
all, or that the collegium must be able to work collegially.’92 Tomskii appealed
to the poorly defined formal legislation on this issue: ‘But we wrote the Soviet
Constitution! In point 45 this question was decided. This point says that in
the case of divergence of the collegium it is not possible to cancel the position
Collegiality in the Early Soviet Government 115
of the commissar. We are not lawyers, but in our understanding it breaks the
Soviet Constitution. On the question of the dismissal of relatives there should
not emerge such a conflict, but the whole course of events shows that there is
still serious disagreement… In my personal opinion it is necessary to consider
the question exhausted, for Kovalenko to tender his resignation, and the ques-
tion will be exhausted.’93 Point 45 of the constitution was then read aloud and
the debate escalated further, despite Shliapnikov’s repeated attempts to stop it.
Nogin, speaking on behalf of the hardliners of the collegium, refused to continue
working and reiterated the need ‘to pass the conflict of the Commissariat of
Labour onto the VTsIK and Sovnarkom for consideration’.94
Tomskii still occupied the middle ground. He implored that despite the
difficult issue ‘it is impossible to suspend the work of the collegium’.95 Nogin,
convinced of the correctness of his own position, refused to compromise and
allow the collegium to continue functioning until a decision had been passed
by higher authorities: ‘I talked to Lenin regarding Shliapnikov’s interpretation,
that he acted with the consent of the presidium of the VTsIK. He said to me that
if the VTsIK cancelled the decision, this was incorrect: this is clearly unlaw-
ful action.’96 Shliapnikov again attempted to defend his actions to reinstate dis-
missed staff members, but he was drowned out by further recriminations from
Bumazhnyi, Gulan, Tomskii and Stopani. Nogin and the hardliners got their
way and the collegium did not meet again until 5 September, after the matter of
the conflict had been considered in Sovnarkom. Nogin attended the Sovnarkom
sitting on 4 September in person to make the case for the collegium. Shliapnikov
was not afforded this same opportunity.97 Nogin’s ‘Deposition’ to Sovnarkom
on this affair explained his version of events and his perception of the rights of
the collegium versus the commissar. He stated that Shliapnikov’s suspension of
his order was ‘a breach of my rights as Deputy People’s Commissar’ and added
that when he raised this point with the commissar: ‘My remark to Comrade
Shliapnikov concerning the incorrectness of his behaviour remained without
an answer.’98 Nogin explained that when he again complained about the return
of the dismissed persons at the collegium sitting, Shliapnikov claimed ‘that this
was done in accordance with an order of the presidium of the VTsIK’. Nogin,
unsatisfied with this explanation, chased the issue through the channels of
state authority to V.A. Avanesov, a member of the VTsIK Presidium. Avanesov
stated that although a written order had not been composed by Ia.M. Sverdlov,
chairman of the VTsIK, he had allowed Comrade Shliapnikov, in advance of
the reconsideration of the decree, to take back into employment those staff
dismissed by the collegium. However, when challenged on the issue, Sverdlov
116 Inside Lenin’s Government
himself announced that he had given no such order on the return of the dis-
missed persons, but that Shliapnikov told him that in his opinion the collegium
itself would allow the dismissed persons to return to employment.99 Besides his
annoyance at Shliapnikov’s illegal cancellation of the collegium’s decision, Nogin
also felt that the commissar had acted in an insulting and inappropriate manner
towards the collegium members by expressing doubt that before him sat the col-
legium. Nogin indicated to Comrade Shliapnikov that ‘…the collegium had been
confirmed by Sovnarkom and therefore is legally authorized [pravomochno]’.
In answer to this Comrade Shliapnikov asked the Secretary to present to him
the named list of the collegium. ‘When I said to him, “Aleksandr Gavrilovich,
how can you speak so shamelessly?”, he, pointing me to the door, said “Victor
Pavlovich, please.” Nogin closed his statement by pointing out that ‘thanks to
the activities of Comrade Shliapnikov, at the present time such conditions have
taken shape in the Commissariat that planned and quiet work is unthinkable’.
As a result, ‘almost all responsible staff will leave the commissariat if Comrade
Shliapnikov remains as People’s Commissar of Labour’.100
Nogin’s anger was abated after his performance in Sovnarkom. As mentioned
above, the collegium met the following day, 5 September, and considered work-
ers’ tariffs and other pressing issues. The minutes of this sitting, unusually, did
not record any person as chairman. The next collegium sitting was two weeks
later. The sittings then continued at regular intervals until early October with
debate and discussion proceeding as normal. Shliapnikov did chair the remain-
der of these sittings, but it was Nogin’s proposals which were mainly accepted by
the collegium.101
Behind the scenes, the higher authorities were considering this complicated
matter and working towards a solution. Where and how this solution was worked
out, and its final outcome, are indicative of the locus of power in the Soviet
government at this time. Both Nogin and Shliapnikov, in their remonstrances
to higher authorities, made reference to the state institutions Sovnarkom and
the VTsIK as the legitimate bodies to solve the conflict. However, after Nogin’s
deposition in Sovnarkom, the crux of the matter seems to have been actually
worked out in the Party Central Committee. On 16 September 1918 the sitting
of the Central Committee (unusually, with Nogin present) ‘decided to appoint
Comrade Shmidt as People’s Commissar for Labour’.102 This decision was not
enacted immediately, however, and the matter lay for another fortnight before
formal changes were executed. In the Central Committee sitting of 2 October
the conflict in the Commissariat of Labour was discussed further: ‘It was
decided that neither Shliapnikov, nor Nogin can remain in the Commissariat of
Collegiality in the Early Soviet Government 117
Labour.’103 Sverdlov’s proposal, which indicated that ‘Shliapnikov was not right
in his relations towards the collegium and to the responsible workers of the com-
missariat, but that on the other hand also the collegium itself acted incorrectly’,
was accepted.104 Next, ‘distribution of cadres’ was discussed, and ‘it was decided
to send Comrade Shliapnikov to the disposal of Trotsky on the Southern Front.’105
These decisions of the Central Committee on the departure of Shliapnikov and
Nogin from the Commissariat of Labour, and the appointment of Shmidt as the
new People’s Commissar, were confirmed six days later at the Sovnarkom sitting
on 8 October 1918. Again, Nogin was present at this sitting, but Shliapnikov,
now clearly out of favour, was not.106
Shmidt seamlessly took over the duties of the Commissar for Labour and the
collegium continued its work without disruption. In his first sitting as the com-
missar on 12 October 1918 Shmidt was named as chairman, but in all the subse-
quent minutes no person was singled out in this role.107 This implies that collegial
spirit was triumphant and that Shmidt, having previously been one of the colle-
gium members, avoided any pretension of supremacy over the others. This argu-
ment is supported by the reconfirmation of the collegium by Sovnarkom in early
November, which listed Shmidt’s name not separately, but alongside those of his
counterparts in the collegium.108 As for the fate of the two major protagonists
in this conflict, it seems Nogin fared better than Shliapnikov. Nogin secured
a prestigious job in the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy (VSNKh or
Vesenkha) and continued to participate regularly in Sovnarkom sittings and
activities the following year.109 Shliapnikov, on the other hand, although not offi-
cially condemned, was sent to almost political exile organizing supplies in the
far-flung reaches of the country. A letter from Lenin reveals he was working
in Astrakhan in December 1918.110 Naturally, this complex series of events was
affected by individual personalities, personal relationships and the particular
circumstances of the time. However, it is possible to consider some interesting
conclusions. This case study suggests that an internal political culture of colle-
giality existed in at least part of the Soviet state apparatus in 1918. Although not
precisely defined by the law, the relations, in practice, between the commissar
and collegium were characterized by equality and collective decision-making.
In this particular dispute, the sympathy of the higher authorities lay with the
collegium. The leadership felt that the commissar had acted inappropriately in
his relations with the collegium by overturning its decision, and in the manner
in which he did this. The conflict came to be about more than just the issue of
employment of relatives. It grew into a significant consideration of the correct
relationship between commissar and collegium.
118 Inside Lenin’s Government
By the start of 1919, as the Civil War intensified, the attention of the more prac
tical minded Soviet leaders turned from centralizing industrial and military admin-
istration, to work on simplifying and improving the efficiency of the state apparatus.
A reduction in the size of the commissariat collegia was carried out. For example, the
collegium of the Commissariat of Nationalities up to February 1918 had consisted
of eight people, rising to 16 people in July 1918. However, in September that year the
number of collegium members was reduced to ten persons by Sovnarkom. Just over
a year later, in December 1919, a further simplification of the state apparatus was
carried out and the collegium was reduced to just four people.111
Even at this stage of the Civil War, however, the collegial principle remained
strong in the party. In 1919, in opposition to bureaucratic excesses of the party
leadership, the Democratic Centralist faction emerged (including N. Osinsky,
T.V. Sapronov and V.M. Smirnov). The role of opposition to the introduction of
one-man management now fell to this minority of extreme idealists, who held
to the anti-authoritarian principles enunciated in the spring of 1918. These Left-
wing diehards set themselves determinedly against the bureaucratic and dicta-
torial expedients which the Civil War impelled most of the leadership to adopt.
The Democratic Centralists kept alive a tradition of struggle for the democratic
aspect of the 1917 programme, but their objective of administrative democracy
in government and economy ultimately proved chimerical in the face of prac
tical pressures for centralization.
While in December 1919, the Seventh Congress of Soviets passed a resolution
endorsing collegial management, Lenin, supported by Trotsky, was preparing a
firmer stance.112 They began to develop the argument that collegiality had been
important and necessary in the destruction of the old regime and the drawing
of the masses into construction of the new, but no longer suited current condi-
tions which required efficiency above all. In January 1920 Lenin defended the
introduction of one-man management as necessary for the next phase of Soviet
building, stating that ‘the transition to practical work is connected with indi-
vidual authority’.113 Lenin argued that the current debate on collegiality versus
one-man management was being conducted on too abstract a basis and ignored
the urgent practical tasks of the present time: ‘Collegiality…gives huge waste of
forces and does not allow speed and accountability in work demanded by the
conditions of centralized, large-scale industry. If you take the defenders of colle-
giality, you see in their resolutions unmeasured, abstract formulations that each
member of a collegium must have sole responsibility for execution of tasks…
But each of you who has practical experience knows that in reality this only
applies to one of every hundred cases!’114
Collegiality in the Early Soviet Government 119
party, the army, and industry, and by early 1920, the state apparatus. Their ide-
als were local autonomy and administration of every sort of activity by elected
collegia.
At the Ninth Party Congress in April 1920 Trotsky presented his scheme of
militarization. By now it was clear that the Bolsheviks were going to win the
Civil War, but the economy was in ruins, famine was looming, peasant rebellion
stirring as a real threat and the working class has melted away. War Communism
had been a disaster in terms of the productive capacity of the economy and
party leaders began to explore alternatives to restore stability and prosperity.
The alternative path eventually taken, the New Economic Policy, would split
the party as it was viewed by many as an ideological retreat. But pragmatism,
rather than ideals, were now the order of the day, and Trotsky’s militarization of
labour reflected this new ethos of practicality. Osinsky criticized this militariza-
tion scheme as a violation of basic revolutionary principles of democracy and
collective decision-making:
It seems that the collegia system did not allow for decisive, clear decision-
making that corresponded to the wider interests of the state. The internal weak-
nesses inside the collegia were an obstacle to the efficient working of government
as a whole, and in the demarcation of spheres of responsibility. The collegia sys-
tem influenced the relationship of the higher bodies (Sovnarkom, VTsIK) and
the commissariats, with factional disputes inside the collegia being carried into
Sovnarkom for arbitration or resolution. Finally, the divisions within the collegia
provided the basis for other interests to advance their case, including divergent
interests within the commissariat itself or interests outside the commissariat.
The collegial system assumed that all participants would objectively address
the question of the ‘general good’, but in reality it showed that individual, group
and sectional interests came to the fore very quickly. Thus, it might be argued
that the collegial model of administration was flawed from the outset. It revealed
a naive understanding of the way decision-making is conducted in any organ
ization and the inexperience of most of those involved in administration. The
attempt to implement collegiality in the state bureaucracy reflected certain ideo-
logical assumptions about how administration would be different under social-
ism, and a perhaps utopian belief that democratic principles could and should
be applied wherever possible.
Indeed, most scholars who have examined collegial leadership have been
inclined to stress its limitations, and even its ‘obsolescence as a mode of govern
ance in complex modern societies’.133 Max Weber, for example, concluded that
collegiality is fundamentally at odds with the principles of rational bureaucratic
organization, arguing that it ‘unavoidably diminishes the promptness of deci-
sion, the unity of leadership, the clear responsibility of the individual, and the
absolute disregard of external influence and the maintenance of internal dis-
cipline’.134 Therefore, according to Weber, while collegiality in purely advisory
bodies may be expected to persist indefinitely, ‘the collegial sharing of decisional
authority is anachronistic and must give way to the technical superiority of
monocratic organisation’.135
Nevertheless, some scholars have argued in defence of collegial systems.
Bernard Silberman, working from the Japanese case, has shown that ‘the col-
legial approach to power management is useful when powerful bureaucratic or
patriarchal elites confront unprecedented problems’.136 Thomas Baylis has also
provided a positive interpretation of collegial government, while acknowledging
that they tend to take more time to reach decisions. He refuted Weber’s assertion
that collegial decision-making is obsolete in modern government, arguing instead
that ‘collegial leadership remains fully consistent with modern bureaucracy in a
124 Inside Lenin’s Government
with this plan, supervise its fulfilment’.2 In the next few months STO became
increasingly involved in resolving economic issues raised by the commissari-
ats and mediating between them on economic matters. STO was granted the
right to issue decrees and directives, and to take steps for their correct and rapid
fulfilment. These measures could be overruled only if commissariats protested
to Sovnarkom or VTsIK. As the Civil War wound down and it refocused on
wider economic functions, its official membership increased to nine: Lenin as
chairman, the Commissars of Military Affairs, Labour, Transport, Agriculture,
Food Supplies and Rabkrin, the Vesenkha chairman, a representative of the
All-Russian Union of Trade Unions (with the director of Central Statistical
Administration attending as tenth a non-voting member). As in Sovnarkom,
however, attendance at meetings was not restricted to official members. The offi-
cial members had deputies who often served in their place. From the establish-
ment of STO there was a lack of clarity about its constitutional position and
remit vis-à-vis Sovnarkom. The common membership and shared administra-
tive and secretarial support apparatus encouraged this confusion. These shared
features also encouraged STO to adopt similar procedures and norms of oper
ation to Sovnarkom which, by the same token, hampered its development into
an authoritative war cabinet.
The patterns of the sittings of the Politburo, vis-à-vis those of Sovnarkom and
the Defence Council suggest that the Politburo was a more flexible, responsive
body, able to adapt to urgent demands more easily than the state organs. By
mid-1920, Sovnarkom met once a week, usually on a Tuesday.3 STO held sittings
twice weekly, one administrative on Wednesdays and one plenary on Fridays.4
While Sovnarkom and STO held regular sittings at even intervals, the
Politburo worked on a less uniform basis. In its first three months, the Politburo
met spasmodically, between three and six times a month.5 Its average number of
meetings per month increased over the course of the year, but due to demand,
not an institutionalized pattern. The first attempt to ‘regulate’ the Politburo sit-
tings was suggested by the Head of the Party Secretariat N.N. Krestinskii on 26
October 1919. He proposed to arrange on Thursdays, ‘regularly, once a week, a
sitting of the Politburo’, but this regulation had little impact in practice.6 It was
not until February 1922, two and a half years later, that attempts were again
made to regulate the Politburo sittings. Members decided to hold a sitting once
a week to consider ‘non-urgent questions of a predominantly economic char-
acter’.7 In March 1922 this was developed further into a decision to ‘appoint on
Mondays and Thursdays obligatory Politburo sittings at 11am’.8 Meanwhile, the
Politburo continued to work flexibly. In January 1920, it met ten times. Four
128 Inside Lenin’s Government
meetings were held in a row on 17, 18, 19, 20 January.9 In contrast, during the
next month, February 1920, it held only three meetings, spread throughout the
month, on 6, 17 and 28 February.10
At the end of 1920 the Politburo began to meet more frequently, and also
developed the practice of carrying out telephone surveys to consider questions
even more quickly.11 From September 1921 to March 1922 it presided on an
average of 21 days per month.12 In April–December 1922, following the Eleventh
Party Congress, the average number of meetings and telephone surveys fell to 12
per month, but it was now meeting regularly enough to function as an effective
cabinet.
This regular versus spasmodic pattern of sittings of state and party organs is
linked to the contrasting methods of preparation for the sittings. For Sovnarkom
sittings there were detailed, formal practices of prior distribution of paperwork.
Preparation of reports which required lengthy interdepartmental consultation
before presenting items to the Sovnarkom Secretariat for admittance to the
agenda. Further regulation of the preparation of Sovnarkom agenda was adopted
in April 1922 but no such stringent rules were yet in place for adding items to the
Politburo agenda in this period.13 It was a more simple process to present items
to the Party Secretariat for inclusion in the Politburo agenda. It was not until
mid-1922 that the party secretary, Stalin, complained about ‘some institutions
sending materials for the Politburo sittings late’. The Politburo decided ‘to bring
to the attention of all institutions that those which do not present their material
to the CC Secretariat by four o-clock on the day before the sitting, cannot count
on solution of their questions by the Politburo’.14
Once a state official managed to get an item on to the Sovnarkom or STO
agenda, there were further strict rules for taking it up for discussion in the sit-
tings. In April 1919 a set of standing orders was formally adopted, which prob-
ably codified conventions and practices that had emerged earlier. These allowed
reporters a maximum of ten minutes to introduce each agenda item. On dis-
puted matters, ten minutes were then allowed for a counter-report. Members
could speak no more than twice to each agenda item, five minutes the first time,
and three the second. They were to be given the floor in strict order of their indi-
cating their wish to speak. Lenin took down the names of those who signalled
an interest in participating in the debate in a list in his notebook. He meticu-
lously included his own name in the list when he wished to join the debate. All
Sovnarkom members had the right, at any time, to propose to close the discus-
sion on any item. Such motions were decided by simple majority vote. Points of
order could be put forward at any time, the mover being allowed one minute
The Decline of Sovnarkom and Rise of the Politburo, 1919–23 129
to state his point, and one person disagreeing could also speak for a minute.15
Lenin policed these rules strictly, keeping a constant eye on his watch, and stop-
ping speakers when their time was up.16 Discussions in the Politburo appear to
have been much more free-flowing and less formal than in Sovnarkom.17
The work of Sovnarkom and STO was also hampered by their reliance
on commissions which were prone to delay and confusion. For example, the
commission on national labour conscription appointed by Sovnarkom on 28
December 1919 had still not confirmed its members nor held a meeting by 20
January, almost a month later.18 Thus Sovnarkom and STO began to appoint
chairmen of their commissions who were named as personally responsible for
arranging meetings. They also specified, in many cases, that the members named
for participation could not be changed for other representatives of their institu-
tion.19 From 1919 the state organs spawned a constant stream of commissions,
of which several dozen were normally in existence at any time. In almost every
Sovnarkom and STO sitting, one or two new commissions were set up to deal
with state affairs. The commissions covered the whole range of state business,
from administrative, domestic, economic to military.20 A number of these were
standing bodies, and a few, notably the State Planning Commission (Gosplan),
the Supreme Arbitration Commission and the Commission on Domestic Trade
evolved in due course into government departments in their own right. The
vast majority, however, were ad hoc groups of commissars and lesser officials
charged with either putting decisions approved into final form or with reconsid-
ering unresolved matters and agreeing new proposals for submission to a later
meeting. By 1921 this practice was deeply ingrained. In the first four months of
1921, STO set up 73 commissions, including the Transport Commission which
ran from January to May.21 Sovnarkom and Little Sovnarkom set up a further
74 between them, including the ‘Commission on Bonuses-in-Kind’ and the
‘Moscow Premises Commission’ in January 1921,22 and the ‘Fuel Commission’
in February.23 Of the 147 commissions set up in January–April 1921, 47 com-
pleted their tasks within two weeks and went out of existence, and almost two-
thirds were dissolved within the four-month period.24 As these figures indicate,
however, many commissions persisted for prolonged periods, either because of
delays in resolving the matters referred to them or because they took on new
issues.
Commissions suffered problems with attendance, the tendency to prolifer-
ate and the difficulty of keeping track of them. Members often missed meet-
ings or demanded to swap their duties with colleagues, causing much confusion.
In March 1920 Sovnarkom created a commission, led by Varlam Avanesov, to
130 Inside Lenin’s Government
work out punitive measures ‘in relation to members of committees and com-
missions attending sittings irregularly’.25 In June 1920 a regulation was adopted
laying down rules on the creation and operation of commissions and interde-
partment committees, but was unsuccessful in reducing their numbers and
controlling their operation.26 By early 1921 the number of commissions created
by Sovnarkom and STO had increased further. At the Sovnarkom sitting of 1
February 1921, seven agenda points were taken up with the hearing of reports
of different commissions, including those on the ‘Reform of High Schools’,
‘Measures against Incorrect and Illegal ration Distribution’, ‘Concessions in
Siberia’ and, ironically, ‘the Simplification of the Soviet Apparatus’.27
Lenin recognized this chaotic situation in his Eleventh Party Congress
Speech in March 1922 and recommended that the number of commissions of
Sovnarkom and STO be reduced. He complained that Sovnarkom and STO
must ‘know and settle their own affairs and not split up into an infinite number
of commissions’. A recent overhaul of live commissions discovered 120 active
commissions, of which only 16 were actually required. Lenin recognized that
the proliferation of commissions was symptomatic of a deeper malaise in the
state apparatus: a lack of confidence and sense of authority in decision-making,
remarking, ‘Instead of accepting responsibility for their work, preparing a deci-
sion for Sovnarkom and knowing that they bear responsibility for this decision,
there is a tendency to take shelter behind commissions.’28 Despite Lenin’s recom-
mendations, commissions continued to complicate and slow the functioning of
Sovnarkom and STO.29
In terms of the types of business under Sovnarkom’s remit, in the earlier
period, general organizational questions predominated. These made up 20.5 per
cent of items considered in Sovnarkom sittings. Next were financial questions
at 13.7 per cent, followed by economic questions (such as supply of food, raw
materials and fuel) at 10.5 per cent. Of the questions, 8.3 per cent concerned
labour and labour duty. Questions of industry, transport and construction made
up 6.1 per cent, and 5.8 per cent were questions regarding education, health
care, social security and national building, while questions of agriculture, tax in
kind. International relations were 5 per cent, and questions of trade and goods-
exchange, legal issues, and points on accounting and ‘kontrol’ all making up
between 3 and 4 Per cent. The least discussed area was military affairs, which
saw a significant fall to just 0.5 per cent.30 The main focus of STO’s activity was
economic questions: 23.8 per cent were on supply of food, raw materials and
fuel, and 19.6 per cent on industry, transport and construction. The next most
frequent questions on STO’s agenda were labour and labour duty at 12.3 per
The Decline of Sovnarkom and Rise of the Politburo, 1919–23 131
cent, and 7.5 per cent of its business was of a general organizational nature.
Questions of trade, finances, education, health and social security, international
relations and military questions each made up 2–4 per cent of issues under STO
consideration.31
While these statistics of the type of business on the Sovnarkom and STO
agenda are not very revealing on the trend of authority away from the state
bodies, the same figures for the party organs of the same period illuminate
the wider interference of the Politburo in state affairs. In the first months after
its creation in April 1919, the Politburo mainly discussed party organiza-
tional and military questions. Party business made up a steady proportion of
Politburo agenda items until 1921, but then fell significantly in 1922. Items in
this category included discussion of party congress and conferences, relations
between central and local party organs, party publications, questions of admit-
ting members and ‘cleansing’ of the party. Unsurprisingly, the discussion of
military affairs dominated the Politburo’s remit during the Civil War, but from
1921 other topics crept on to its agenda.32 Government administration was one
area in which the Central Committee had earlier been involved along with, to
a limited extent, in state affairs. The Politburo greatly expanded this party role
in appointments to government posts and restructuring of state bodies. The
Politburo also carved out a major role in handling foreign affairs. It took over
this domain from Sovnarkom relatively quickly, which dealt with them less
frequently from 1919. From 1920, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs
virtually withdrew from work in Sovnarkom and directed the majority of his
commissariat’s business directly to the Politburo. Domestic affairs were a small
proportion of issues considered by the Politburo in 1919 and 1920, but rose dra-
matically in 1921, and further in 1922. The domestic affairs considered by the
Politburo from 1921 were predominantly economic, including consideration
of the introduction of NEP, food supply issues and taxes,33 but also included
discussion of schools, transport, religious issues, workers cooperatives and pay
tariffs.34 As the Politburo’s initial focus of military issues during the Civil War
receded, instead of returning to focus on party organization and questions of
ideological principle, it widened its jurisdiction over those domestic matters
which had previously been the preserve of Sovnarkom and STO. The Civil
War fostered the Politburo’s inadvertent take-over of Sovnarkom functions by
necessitating rapid, flexible and authoritative decision-making that did not suit
the formal, lengthy, collegial practices which had developed in the state organs.
It was by no means certain, however, that the supreme party organ would main-
tain and expand the position it had acquired.
132 Inside Lenin’s Government
in all high levels of authority would not have occurred.’ Osinsky disagreed, how-
ever, with Lenin’s analysis of the cause of these problems in the state appar
atus: ‘Lenin reduced the defects in its work to this, that the personal connection
in the person of Lenin made this problem vanish. In his absence the wheels of
the Politburo and Sovnarkom began to spin in different directions, and from this
the difficulties arose? Nothing of the kind! The same thing was going on when
Lenin was in the Politburo.’38
Osinsky complained that the Politburo’s inappropriate interference in routine
state affairs had resulted in their conceding their proper role of general polit-
ical direction. He gave the example of his failed attempts to get the Politburo
to take a principled line on the agronomy question after the transfer to NEP.39
Osinsky put this inappropriate situation down to ‘Not communist conceit…but
an unsuitable system of government’ and his analysis had a certain constitu-
tional slant: ‘We have Sovnarkom as a legislative institution, issuing decrees. In
essence, we inherited this tradition from the Provisional Government, which
had no parliament and began to legislate themselves. We absorbed this habit at
the revolutionary moment. It was necessary to legislate extraordinarily quickly.’
Osinsky’s solution was to return to the early principles of Soviet democracy, ‘to
take away Sovnarkom’s legislative functions and to concentrate them exclusively
in VTsIK. Sovnarkom must be the executive organ of VTsIK.’40
Osinsky claimed that Sovnarkom suffered from a lack of official commissars
attending its sittings: ‘The People’s Commissars do not attend Sovnarkom, but
only their deputies, those actually working, but not officially the responsible
persons, deputies who are not obliged to look into general policies. So, what
happens? The Politburo appears as the deciding level of authority. If there is
a Politburo directive to decide the question a certain way, this stops the state
machine and the commissars fall silent. If it is necessary to reconsider the issue,
and you try to reconsider, our commissars escape because there is a special direct
ive. Such a situation is impossible: an institution composed of sixteen people
with little or no responsibility, just representing their departments, cannot write
and decide laws! This created an astounding flow of vermicelli, departmental
decay and disintegration of the central organ of authority.’41 Again, his solution
was radical: ‘we must have a cabinet of commissars. Only if this cabinet was
formed, with its chairman responsible to the VTsIK…will the necessary cohe-
sion occur… If we do not accept this with full clarity and seriousness, and do
not implement it on our class basis, within our soviet system…we will have an
unsuitable, obsolete system of government unable to deal with the complex tasks
of class society.’42
The Decline of Sovnarkom and Rise of the Politburo, 1919–23 135
the Soviet Republic there are two supreme government organs (keeping to one
side the VTsIK Presidium). One of them is Sovnarkom. Members of the Central
Committee do not sit here: from the staff of the government, not including the
deputy chairmen, there are only two there from the Central Committee (really
working). Persons carrying themselves full and formal responsibility for their
departments do not often sit here. Instead, the “technical deputies” sit here, and
if the People’s Commissars do sit, they are not those of the category of first-class
political activists of the party.’50
From its creation, membership of Sovnarkom had been office-specific rather
than person-specific. The collegiality principle in the early Soviet government
meant that provisions were made to allow deputies and assistants to attend in the
place of the official People’s Commissar and there was no quota set of members
to be present for voting. Decisions were made on the majority vote of whoever
was present at that time with the right to a ‘deciding’ vote. During the first four
months of Soviet power, the average number of official People’s Commissars
attending Sovnarkom sittings was 11 of a possible 14.51 In May–June 1919 there
were an average of eight official commissars attending Sovnarkom sittings.52 This
average remained the same for the next two years.53 In April 1921, this figure was
still an average of seven official commissars per Sovnarkom sitting but from this
point the figure fell steadily and in 1922 declined to just three per sitting.54 Thus,
the Sovnarkom records do bear out Osinsky’s claim that from 1921 fewer pres-
tigious party members, and certainly fewer People’s Commissars were partici-
pating in sittings than in 1917–20. Some People’s Commissars had never been
regular attenders of Sovnarkom, preferring to send their assistants instead. Due
to his military obligations, for example, Trotsky was not a regular Sovnarkom
attendee from August 1918 onwards. Yet on the whole it seems that the decrease
in commissars attending Sovnarkom actually occurred after the Civil War had
begun to wind down. The decrease in official commissars attending Sovnarkom
sittings acted as both a cause and self-reinforcing effect of Sovnarkom’s decline
into a subordinate technical apparatus for the Politburo. It was felt that the fewer
important people present, the fewer important decisions could be made. Thus,
more questions were transferred to the Politburo for definitive solution.
Osinsky contested Lenin’s assertion that the practice of referring ‘every t rifle’
to the Politburo had only developed during his illness. On the contrary, as he
had mentioned at the Eleventh Party Congress, this practice had long been
endemic. He stated ‘Nothing of the kind! The same thing was going on when
Lenin was in the Politburo…The Politburo was occupied with vermicelli in a
colossal quantity.’55
The Decline of Sovnarkom and Rise of the Politburo, 1919–23 137
Osinsky seems to have a point. From 1920, archive records reveal a growing
trend of appealing questions already decided by Sovnarkom for reconsideration
by the Politburo. There were 5 cases in 1920,56 rising to 17 in 1921,57 peaking at
26 in 1922.58 The protests or appeals covered all areas of government decision-
making. The first case of an explicit appeal against a Sovnarkom decision in
the Politburo found by the author is from 23 January 1920. Commissar for
Foodstuffs Alexander Tsiurupa sent a protest to this Politburo sitting against the
Sovnarkom decision of 3 January which granted permission to Vesenkha organs
to stockpile fodder.59 In another Politburo sitting a week later Krestinsky pro-
posed ‘to reconsider the Sovnarkom decision of 27 January’ (three days before)
on the resumption of the potato campaign.60 There were three further protests in
Politburo sittings this year, the last by Trotsky (later a critic of party interference
in state matters) against the Sovnarkom decision on the preservation of Lugansk
as the centre of Donets Guberniia.61
Examples from the 17 noted cases in 1921 include Fomin’s protest against
the Sovnarkom decision on the transfer of Petrograd port to the jurisdiction
of the People’s Commissariat for External Trade on 16 February,62 and the
appeal of Kamenev of 20 April against the Sovnarkom decision on transport
in Ivanovesnesenkh.63 Appeals of Sovnarkom decisions from 1922 include
that of the Politburo sitting of 15 March, which heard the ‘protest of a minor-
ity of Sovnarkom members (Tsiurupa, Krasin and Sokol’nikov) against the
Sovnarkom decision of 14 March on increasing the working funds of the People’s
Commissariat of External Trade’.64 Further examples from 1922 include discus-
sion of the STO decision on the transfer of Moscow’s two best publishing houses
to the State Publishing House,65 and discussion of Sovnarkom’s decision on
negotiations with Urquart,66 both brought to the Politburo agenda by Kamenev.
April 1922 saw the Politburo discuss cancellation of Sovnarkom’s decisions on
the transfer of agricultural education to the Commissariat of Agriculture,67 on
the procedure of the departure of foreigners abroad,68 and on sugar joint-stock
companies (aktsiz).69 In August, one Sovnarkom decision ‘reconsidered’ by the
Politburo was the rate of the tax in kind.70 Ironically, even Osinsky, the most
militant defender of the state’s autonomy, appealed a Sovnarkom decision to the
Politburo in July 1922. As Deputy Commissar for Agriculture he was dissatisfied
with the proposal accepted by Sovnarkom on 18 July on sowing plots. He wrote a
detailed letter to the Politburo the next day criticizing this decision and pointing
out that it ‘liquidated the plan set out by Lenin and Tsiurupa’.71
Another interesting case confirms Osinsky’s claim that Sovnarkom decisions
were not just appealed in Lenin’s absence.
138 Inside Lenin’s Government
first year, but by 1920 this practice appeared more frequently. Examples from
1920 include the discussion of Trotsky’s proposals on the Labour Armies and on
labour obligations these were first discussed in the Politburo on 3 January,78 then
in Sovnarkom on 13 January.79 The Politburo discussed the issues further on 17
January80 and the final conclusions were confirmed into law by Sovnarkom on
29 January and 5 February.81
In spring 1920 the question of the division of the Commissariats of Labour
and Social Security was first discussed by the Politburo on 2 March.82 Sovnarkom
then took up consideration of this question a week later, on 9 March.83 On 15
April the Politburo discussed it once again, and the following day, 16 April, it
was confirmed into law by Sovnarkom.84 Examples of Politburo and Sovnarkom
agenda overlap from 1921 include considerations of the questions of ‘tax-in-
kind’ and ‘bread-tax’, discussed by the Politburo on 29 and 30 March and 5
April,85 and then in Sovnarkom on 5 April.86 Also, the issue of consumer cooper-
atives was discussed by both the Politburo and Sovnarkom: first by the Politburo
on 30 March,87 then in both the Politburo88 and Sovnarkom sittings on 5 April,89
and the decree was finally confirmed in Sovnarkom on 7 April 1921.90 Also, from
mid-1921 the Politburo acquired the right to confirm all grants of large amounts
of money by the state bodies. Various cases appeared on the agendas where the
Politburo examined and confirmed Sovnarkom and STO decisions on granting
of funding to institutions, projects or organizations in this year.91 The year 1922
saw the continuation of ‘confirmations’ of funds granted by the state organs.92
Finally, party records show that it was only from mid-1921 that Sovnarkom
began sending information on its decisions to the party organs. For the period
January 1918–July 1919 Sovnarkom sent only 17 pages of paperwork on its
activity to the CC.93 For the year 1921 this rose to 1113 pages.94 This increased
observation of the party organs over the work of the state enabled the Politburo
to control government decision-making effectively.
By the time of the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923 the Soviet government was
still facing internal and external volatility. Industrial prices were running at
three times the level of agricultural prices and Trotsky compared the growing
gap between agricultural and industrial prices to the blades of a pair of scissors.
Socially the policy also remained deeply divisive. Rumours circulated that NEP
140 Inside Lenin’s Government
really stood for ‘New Exploitation of the Proletariat’, many members of which
remained frustrated with the slow progress towards socialism and detested the
new breed of Kulaks, retailers and traders known as Nepmen. This partial revival
of capitalism in the NEP in 1921 created even deeper divisions in the party.
The Right-wing of the party, led by Bukharin, vigorously defended the grad-
ual, peasant-based socialism of the NEP. The Left Opposition, however, quickly
came to feel that more emphasis needed to be placed on a programme of massive
and rapid industrialization if the regime was to survive. They were represented
most powerfully by Trotsky and his ‘platform of 46’, who described the NEP as
‘the first sign of the degeneration of Bolshevism’.
Against this troublesome backdrop, as Lenin lay incapacitated by another
stroke, the ‘theoretical’ debate on party-state relations continued into spring
1923. Lenin continued to dictate his final articles criticizing the existing govern-
ment apparatus and suggested methods to constrain the activity of the Politburo.
Other government figures, including Trotsky and Osinsky still shared Lenin’s
concerns about the Politburo acting as government executive, although per-
haps with rather distinct motives. The final showdown between these ‘pro-state’
activists and the Politburo majority, who jealously guarded their new found
authority, was at the Twelfth Party Congress, in April 1923. Here Osinsky struck
a lonely figure, with few colleagues coming out to support his attack on party-
state relations. Trotsky expressed his opposition views on party-state relations
to his fellow Politburo members in private letters in preparation for the con-
gress, but ultimately toed the party line and did not come out in public against
the Politburo’s overbearing involvement in state affairs. With Lenin now too ill
to attend, Zinoviev delivered the Central Committee’s Political Report at the
congress, with Trotsky preparing the Central Committee’s ‘Thesis on Industry’,
in which he had expounded the necessity of long-term, systematic state eco-
nomic planning, in direct contrast to the opinions of the Politburo majority at
this time. In mid-March 1923 Trotsky presented his thesis to the Politburo and
Central Committee for confirmation. But his report attracted major criticisms
from Politburo members. One paragraph in particular, on ‘the question of the
inter-relationship between party and soviet organizations’ or ‘party institutions
and economic organs’, was strongly censured. Here Trotsky argued for more full
and systematic carrying out of the resolution of the Eleventh Congress on the
delineation of party and Soviet work in the centre and in the localities.95 The
Central Committee accepted Trotsky’s theses, but when it was brought for final
confirmation before the Politburo, Kamenev and others proposed major cor-
rections. Trotsky wrote a secret letter to the Politburo members protesting these
The Decline of Sovnarkom and Rise of the Politburo, 1919–23 141
do sit, they are not those of the category of first-class political activists of the
party. All work of Sovnarkom is reduced to the passing of this or another
decree… In Sovnarkom no events of an external or internal character demand-
ing government measures are considered, no programmes of action created, no
reports on the work of this or another department are made, no organizational
or administrative directives are given to anyone. In a word, Sovnarkom does not
govern, it only passes a continuous paper ribbon of decrees or estimates. All this,
starting from the selection of staff of Sovnarkom and the “multi-headed-ness”
(mnogogolovosti) of the actual chairmanship…explains how the actual supreme
government organ… appears as a Party organ, the Politburo…the Politburo nat-
urally converts Sovnarkom into a technical apparatus, in order not to create dual
power…In its turn, the Politburo, composed of seven people, has in its ranks
only two people continuously working in Sovnarkom, where they learn about
how the work of the central Soviet state apparatus goes in general. The others do
not have this technical experience…only in the Politburo do they consider con-
crete events of an external and internal character, requiring soviet measures, and
take decisions on them. It is clear that the Politburo has little time remaining for
“cleanly” party questions or even for large-scale political questions.’ Osinsky rec-
ognized that the Politburo’s dominance in the government system had emerged
as a result of the Civil War: ‘From where did such a position arise…It was cre-
ated in the epoch of the civil war, when there was a necessity for quick and
bold decisions. Then a sixteen-headed government could not exist. Full power
direction by three to five people was necessary. The form for it was at hand. The
Politburo, which could decide everything… Since this time the situation has
changed, but all forms and habits remained. With each year the “emergency”
(pozharnaia) structure became all the more unsuitable for systematic, planned
construction.’106
Osinsky also saw that one reason the incorrect system continued was that the
Politburo majority jealously guarded their newly acquired power: ‘The Politburo
leads by patriotism…Naturally, Comrade Kamenev urgently defends the insti-
tution…its members label our proposals as “liberal-bureaucratic methods”, “left
radicalism” and god knows what else. But, Kamenev, we do not pretend to such
leftism. Not blinded by the “patriotism of the Politburo”, we are, simply, in a
position to see clearly the situation in all its unattractive nudity. Like the boy
from Anderson’s tale, when we say that “the emperor goes naked”, we point out
the simple truth.’107 Despite not appearing as a delegate, Osinsky did in fact get
the chance to address the Twelfth Party Congress. Zinoviev opened the congress
with the Central Committee’s Political Report, announcing that he would ‘say a
The Decline of Sovnarkom and Rise of the Politburo, 1919–23 145
few words on the theme of party and state’.108 He argued that this question could
not have been raised in the Civil War years when ‘the party was nine-tenths of
the Red Army and the state was organized for war, when all affairs were reduced
to victory over the Whites’.109 Now that the Civil War was over, he stated, it was
inevitable that the question would be raised by people who ‘proposed to recon-
sider the coordination’ of party and state. He argued, however, that the strong
support of workers, especially non-party workers, for ‘the dictatorship of the
party’ meant that ‘it is not necessary to weaken things, to rebuild and so on’. He
labelled those questioning the prevailing party-state relations as ‘smenovekhite’
and exaggerated their arguments, stating that they called for the end of the lead-
ing role of the party.110
Zinoviev argued that ‘at the present, new stage of the revolution the lead-
ing role of the party…must be strengthened’. He ridiculed the ‘bashful atti-
tude’ of those comrades for whom ‘the dictatorship of the party is done, but
not said: why must we be shy to say what is, it is impossible to conceal it…It is
impossible to allow any revisions in this area…the division of labour –yes, the
division of power –no!’111
He defended the party’s interference in economic questions which had previ-
ously been under the jurisdiction of the state bodies. He criticized Krasin’s plea,
made in an article before the congress, to ‘give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’ and
for the party not to meddle in state affairs. Zinoviev conceded that ‘undoubtedly
we must improve’ the work of the Politburo, but that improvement meant not
the Politburo giving up routine decision-making over state affairs, but ‘to spend
more time, to bring more of a plan, to sit more frequently, perhaps have one sit-
ting a week designated specially for general planning directive questions’.112 He
concluded, on the inter-relationship of the party with state organs, ‘We, the old-
Bolshevik Leninists, insist that the party must interfere in the area of nine-tenths
of all work, in the area of the economy. In literally all areas of the economy the
party must lead…The party will lead even more.’113
Osinsky’s speech followed, echoing the sentiments expressed in his letter, to
a hostile reception from the majority of congress delegates: ‘Allow me to pass
on to the serious theme of the inter-relationship of party and state…concerning
this question, Zinoviev put forward the formulation “do not divide power, but
divide labour”…I must say that this formulation is extremely unclear and does
not help in this question…on the delineation of who does what, what belongs
to the Politburo, what to Sovnarkom.’114 Osinsky again criticized the situation
where Sovnarkom was simply a ‘technical organ’ where ‘responsible officials are
afraid to sit, because they sit in the Politburo’. For him the ‘competition’ between
146 Inside Lenin’s Government
Sovnarkom and the Politburo was ‘startling unhealthy’ in light of policy, and
deviated from the healthy relationship that he had observed in his work in the
localities between Party Guberniia Committees and Soviet Guberniia Executive
Committees. He criticized the hypocritical situation where ‘they want all soviet
affairs to be in the jurisdiction of the Politburo, of a party organ. But at the same
time they refuse to govern from the Politburo because one cannot govern from
a party organ’.115
Despite his private views expressed to the Politburo before the congress,
Trotsky observed party discipline and did not join the calls against the Politburo
domination. He recognized the necessity for the state economic organs STO and
Gosplan to direct the economy, but did not explicitly criticize the Politburo’s
behaviour.116 A couple of other Bolsheviks came out in support of Osinsky’s criti-
cism of existing central party-state relations. Lutovinov stated, ‘I want to say a few
words on party participation, or interference as Zinoviev puts it, in our economic
organs…If the Politburo, where there are only two people actively taking part in
the economic life of the country, practically decides all questions of economic
life, from small to great, unless it was Soloman, cannot solve all these questions
correctly…it is necessary to leave this to the economists.117 Krasin also came out
against the Politburo line, defending himself from Zinoviev’s attack and stating
that he did not want to weaken the party dictatorship, but rather wanted to raise
political leadership to a higher level.118 Despite Krasin’s plea to the congress, ‘You
are no longer an underground party, but a government of a vast country’,119 the
delegates supported the Politburo line and the pro-state speakers had negligible
effect on the outcome of the congress. The Twelfth Congress resolutions paid
lip service to confirmation of the resolution of the Eleventh Party Congress ‘on
the need for a precise division of labour between soviet and party institutions’
but then diluted Lenin’s proposals on changing party-state relations, indicating
that the Politburo would not relinquish its grip on day-to-day decision-making
on state affairs. The resolution ‘On the Central Committee Report’ stated: ‘The
Twelfth Congress confirms the decision of the Eleventh Congresses that “party
organizations settle economic questions only in those cases where, and to the
extent that, such questions actually require a decision of principal by the party”.
But the congress warns against an excessively broad interpretation of these deci-
sions, as this could create political dangers for the party. At the present time the
Russian Communist Party is guiding, and must guide, all the political and cul-
tural work of the state organs, and is directing and must direct the activities of all
the economic organs of the republic. The party’s job is not only to distribute its
personnel correctly among the various branches of state, but also to define and
The Decline of Sovnarkom and Rise of the Politburo, 1919–23 147
verify in all essentials the actual course of this work. In no way can the party now
limit its role merely to general propaganda and agitation.’120
Despite his silence at the Twelfth Party Congress in autumn 1923, Trotsky was
moving towards open confrontation with his Politburo colleagues over not only
economic planning but also the issue of party-state relations, perhaps because
of the bearing that the domination of the Politburo had over his first concern
rather than any deeply held democratic impulse.121 In December 1923, Trotsky
took the issue to the party as a whole. He contended that the apparatus was try-
ing to ensure that the ‘leadership by the party gives way to administration by its
executive organs’.122 But Trotsky, by this point, standing isolated, was in no pos
ition to force the changes to remedy this. Lenin had never denied that the party
was the ultimate authority and that all members had the right to appeal to it. He
also rejected plans (such as Osinsky’s) to reconstruct the party-state system for-
mally. Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders could not countenance the introduction
of constitutional limits on the Soviet system such as division of legislative and
executive powers between Sovnarkom and VTsIK, as Osinsky proposed, because
this was viewed as despised ‘bourgeois parliamentarianism’. Instead they worked
from the Paris Commune model where combining the executive and legislative
was key, as Lenin had indicated in State and Revolution. The result was that while
Lenin was able to recognize the incorrect situation in the party-state relations,
his freedom of movement to remedy the problem was limited by his Marxist
ideology. The solution he proposed, to focus on ‘de-bureaucratizing’ the appar
atus through the Rabkrin and greater proletarian composition of government
which were the focus of his final articles, and merely to instruct the Politburo
to regulate and limit its own control over state affairs, to give up the privileges
it had accrued in the Civil War years, was woefully inadequate. Unsurprisingly,
it did not.
7
Lenin had been the guiding force in Sovnarkom since its inception. With rare
exceptions he chaired every sitting in its first three years. As his health failed,
however, from winter 1921 his participation declined. While in 1921 Lenin
presided over 42 of 50 Sovnarkom sittings, the following year he participated
in only 7 out of 83 of the meetings of this state cabinet.1 As his health failed,
Lenin brought in a series of deputies of Sovnarkom and STO to support the
work of these bodies in his prolonged absences: A.I. Rykov in May 1921, A.D.
Tsiurupa in December 1921 and L.B. Kamenev in September 1922. From late
1922 Lenin also made persistent attempts to convince Trotsky to take on the post
of Sovnarkom deputy, but to no avail.
Lenin’s illness and the deputies’ predicament undermined Sovnarkom’s
authority in the Soviet government in a number of ways. First, Lenin refused
to accept that his illness would prevent him working for long and so failed to
appoint a single, strong, consistent replacement during the periods of his illness
following December 1921. He could not envisage the government without him-
self present until the last weeks of his political life, and by then it was too late. He
jealously guarded his bailiwick of the Sovnarkom chairmanship and appointed
deputies to cover for and support him, rather than replace him. He sought to
breach the gap with a collegium of less prestigious, inconsistent and conflicting
deputies who also suffered poor health throughout the same period, which ham-
pered their own work. His fellow Bolshevik leaders also hesitated in addressing
the problem of appointing a full replacement –even temporarily –for Lenin.
Lenin’s armchair at the head of the long table in the Sovnarkom sittings hall
was left empty throughout his illness and even after his death, a symbol of how
Lenin’s status as head of government, and the fear not to encroach on it, ham-
pered the work of the deputies and any possible successor. As Trotsky wrote in
150 Inside Lenin’s Government
1923, the Politburo members feared that ‘the party will be ill at ease if one of us
should attempt to take Lenin’s place’.2
Moreover, the ill-health and personal weaknesses of those chosen to depu
tize further undermined Sovnarkom’s leadership of government business.
Furthermore, Lenin was determined to restructure the central state apparatus to
deal with the incorrect system of party-state relations and ‘bureaucratism’ which
had emerged, but his analysis of the cause of these problems and the solutions he
devised were fundamentally flawed. He overburdened his already heavily taxed
deputies with a series plans to reform central government in addition to their
day-to-day work actually running Sovnarkom and STO. Sovnarkom stagnated
and the resulting confusion and weakness paved the way for the Politburo to
ascend to the position of governing executive body. Again, the decline of the
Sovnarkom as government executive was not part of an intentional plan, but the
inadvertent side effect of the failure of those in Lenin’s government to appoint
firm leadership of Sovnarkom in his absence for both personal and political rea-
sons. If Lenin had assigned a sole, strong, politically prestigious successor to the
Sovnarkom chairmanship in late 1921or 1922, then Sovnarkom would have had
a fighting chance against the encroachments of the party organs. Rigby argued
that Sovnarkom was built firmly around the personality and superior abilities of
Lenin; in Lenin’s absence it would inevitably decline because no person could
fill his shoes.3 Yet the fact is that nobody was ever given a fair chance to do
so. Instead the politics of illness dragged on, with Lenin and the other party
leaders believing that he would return and so failing to appoint a real successor
as Sovnarkom chairman. With Lenin’s incapacity, other party leaders began to
position themselves for the succession. The government institutions became a
battleground for this fight, and Sovnarkom suffered collateral damage to its sta-
tus as a result. Leading players in the succession struggle had built their power
bases in institutions outside the state cabinet and pursued a strategy of pitting
their own bureaucratic constituencies against it. For certain leaders Sovnarkom
was not as familiar a turf as the party organs and so their allies forced stalemates
there by exploiting the practice, explored above, of the appeal of its decisions to
the Politburo and Central Committee.
seriously debilitating.4 It seems likely that he had suffered a series of mild strokes.
Although no permanent disablement was expected, Lenin saw fit to appoint a
deputy to ease his workload so that state affairs did not suffer. In May 1921 Rykov
was appointed as Lenin’s first deputy in STO.5 Old Bolshevik Aleksei Ivanovich
Rykov was born into a peasant family in Saratov and worked in the revolution-
ary underground, taking an active part in the 1905 revolution. They had parted
ways over Lenin’s attempt to formalize the RSDLP split into separate parties in
1912, but the dispute was interrupted by Rykov’s exile to Siberia. Rykov returned
to Petrograd after the February Revolution, became a member of the Petrograd
and Moscow Soviets, was elected to the Bolshevik Party Central Committee in
August 1917 and was a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee in
Moscow during the October Revolution.
On 29 October 1917 Rykov was appointed People’s Commissar for Internal
Affairs; yet a week later he was among those moderate Bolsheviks who resigned
their Party Central Committee and state posts, demanding the formation of
a broader socialist coalition government. Rykov quickly returned to govern-
ment service, serving as the chairman of the Supreme Economic Council from
April 1918. Rykov was chosen for this role because he was an administrator
and ‘practical-generalist’, rather than an economic specialist.6 Rykov gave the
Supreme Economic Council firm direction for almost three years.7 He became
a member of the Revolutionary Military Council in July 1919, and served as the
Council of Labour and Defence special representative for foodstuffs for the Red
Army and Navy.8 He was re-elected to the Party Central Committee and entered
the Orgburo on 5 April 1920.
With the introduction of NEP, Lenin saw less need for stringent organiza-
tional centralization of the economy and was more interested in uniting eco-
nomic direction in STO.9 After the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 and the
introduction of the NEP, the Supreme Economic Council declined in importance
and STO took over functions and role previously ascribed to it in general eco-
nomic direction of the country.10 Thus, Rykov was an obvious choice as Lenin’s
deputy in STO. For three years, as chairman of the Supreme Economic Council,
he had been engaged successfully in these economic and general organizational
tasks. On 24 May 1921 the Politburo discussed ‘the appointment of Rykov as
Deputy to the Chairman of STO’ and two days later the VTsIK Presidium con-
firmed his appointment, retaining his right of a deciding vote in Sovnarkom.11
This 40-year-old, stocky, ruddy-complexioned, brown-bearded Great Russian,
with a kindly, intelligent face and a well-known liking for vodka, brought his
down to earth practical ability and experience in economic matters to the job
152 Inside Lenin’s Government
Lenin’s choice for second deputy was the 50-year-old Aleksandr Dmitrievich
Tsiurupa. With a splendid white beard and candid eyes, this son of a minor civil
servant had trained as an agronomist and worked as a statistician before his under-
ground revolutionary career led to multiple arrests.25 The selection of Tsuirupa as
second deputy chairman confirms that Lenin’s intention was to appoint another
supporting colleague, not a replacement for his own leading role. Tsuirupa was val-
ued in the Bolshevik Party as ‘a modest person, not an orator, not a writer, but a won-
derful organiser, a practical worker who knew the villages well’.26 A reliable, trusted
old Bolshevik with administrative experience as an official in the economic sphere,
since 1917 he had worked closely with Lenin in the government apparatus.27 He
arrived in Petrograd in November 1917 as a delegate to the All-Russian Foodstuff s
Congress and was soon appointed Deputy People’s Commissar for Foodstuffs and
from February 1918 full People’s Commissar.28 Tsiurupa built a strong apparatus
which was later described by Lenin as ‘one of our best People’s Commissariats’.29
He was one of the major figures in Sovnarkom, one of the institutions ‘big names’
and a constant presence in its meetings, debates and commissions.30 Tsiurupa even
chaired some sittings of Sovnarkom after Lenin was shot in August 1918.31 Despite
the strict rules on speaking in Sovnarkom debates, his opinion was often sought by
Lenin, even on matters in which he was not directly involved with Tsiurupa insist-
ing ‘But I did not ask for the floor!’ and Lenin responding ‘We ask you!’32
Despite his long career as a Bolshevik in the revolutionary underground,
Tsiurupa was not a Central Committee member until 1923, although he did
attend and participate in debates of the Central Committee and Politburo on
his areas of expertise.33 As a ‘blind fanatic’ of requisitioning, he participated in
the 1921 Politburo discussions on the introduction of food tax.34 He and Lenin
took the main parts in the debate and disagreed sharply. Tsiurupa called Lenin
a pedant and a doctrinaire on this issue, but this wrangle did not affect their
relationship negatively.35 In the weeks before the introduction of the NEP, Lenin
made frequent evening visits to Tsiurupa’s Kremlin apartment. Despite the noise
and bustle of Tsiurupa’s four children, he and Lenin ‘argued, discussed, agreed
and argued again’.36 Tsiurupa resisted the repeal of grain requisitioning, but
was gradually weaned away from war communism. Lenin joked to Tsiurupa’s
wife about his ‘unbreaking stubbornness’. After the official introduction of NEP,
Tsiurupa threw his weight behind the policy and reported on the introduc-
tion of the food tax at the Tenth Party Congress. As one of Lenin’s closest and
154 Inside Lenin’s Government
most capable comrades in the state apparatus, Tsiurupa was a natural choice as
the second STO deputy. But he was selected as an able administrator and state
organizer with expertise and experience in economic affairs, rather than as a first
rate political leader, demonstrating Lenin’s hesitance in appointing a full succes-
sor to take over his Sovnarkom duties.
Unfortunately Tsiurupa, like Lenin and Rykov, was also plagued by chronic
ill-health. He suffered from angina pectoris, poor blood supply to the heart caus-
ing severe chest pains and tightness, shortness of breath, light-headedness, faint-
ing, nausea and irregular heartbeat. In its stable form episodes occur on a regular
basis, mostly set off by physical exertion or mental and emotional stress. In its
worsened state it can become unstable and can result in heart attacks. Liberman
recalled that Tsiurupa ‘was nearly always ill’ and that when he attended meet-
ings he had to sit ‘in a semi-reclining position, his feet stretched out on a near-by
chair’.37 On one occasion Tsiurupa fainted in a Sovnarkom sitting. He sometimes
felt so ill that he had to go into the Sovnarkom telephone booth to lie down on
the sofa inside.38 Tsiurupa’s weak heart was the main reason Lenin insisted on a
lift being installed in the Kremlin.39
As early as 1919 doctors advised Tsiurupa to rest and ease his workload, but
like many Soviet leaders, he did not take care of his health. There were bouts of
illness in December 1920 and in summer 1921 the illness worsened and Tsiurupa
was forced to take three months leave for treatment.40 In autumn 1921 he was
sent to Germany for treatment.41 Meanwhile, between Rykov’s sick leave from
late July and Tsiurupa’s appointment in early December, Lenin had begun to
rely informally upon L.B. Kamenev to assist with running Sovnarkom and STO.
On 26 October 1921 Lenin wrote to Kamenev: ‘The question on tariffs stands
before us in Sovnarkom. Will you go on Tuesday? For sure? It would be better
to put you on to Sovnarkom formally.’42 Further correspondence reveals Lenin’s
reliance on Kamenev in this role, although he would not be officially appointed
as Lenin’s third deputy for over a year.43
As well as appointing the deputies to cover the chairman’s duties in Sovnarkom
and STO meetings, Lenin was also developing a plan for a new, permanent role
for them. He began to conceive of the STO deputies as supreme state ‘instructor-
inspectors’. In addition to their taking over chairmanship of the leading state
organs, their role would involve checking of execution of decisions of Sovnarkom
and STO and the surveillance of the performance and efficiency of the govern-
ment apparatus. Lenin set out the rights and duties of the deputies as a casting
vote in Sovnarkom and STO, the chairing of the meetings in the absence of the
chairman, all the rights of the chairman as far as participation in the collegia and
The Politics of Illness 155
institutions, and the right to give instructions in regard to practical work to the
People’s Commissars on questions pertaining to the integration and direction of
economic activities. Their task was to integrate and improve the economic work
of the Soviet government as a whole: ‘To make a first-hand study of the specific
features and work of all the economic commissariats and gain an acquaintance
with all the members of their collegia and a number of the top local and regional
workers in this field. To personally attend important collegia meetings of the
respective commissariats…and check…the most vital functions.’44
Tsiurupa agreed to Lenin’s plan and the next day, 1 December 1921, the
Politburo approved Lenin’s proposal ‘On the Work of Tsiurupa’.45 Tsiurupa was
freed from his position as People’s Commissar for Foodstuffs and confirmed
him as second deputy chairman of STO. Two days later the Politburo granted
Lenin further leave due to illness. As a result they also decided to discuss the
issue of ‘Lenin’s Deputy in Sovnarkom’ as opposed to just STO as Lenin himself
had arranged.46 On 7 December 1921 the Politburo went beyond Lenin’s brief
and made Tsiurupa deputy chairman of Sovnarkom as well as STO.47
With Rykov still undergoing medical treatment in Germany, Lenin sent a let-
ter informing him of Tsiurupa’s appointment and an ‘outline of a plan for the
organization of his work and yours’. He added that ‘the first and second deputies,
as you will see from the plan, will have to break new ground’. Lenin explained
that ‘until your return and the experiment with Tsiurupa, this plan will not be
turned into a decision. We shall first try it out and check it in practice.’48 Lenin’s
illness meant that he too was forced to spend the winter of 1921–2 away from the
Kremlin and was instructed by the Politburo to involve himself only in ‘the most
important questions’. In the absence of both Lenin and Rykov in winter 1921–2,
Tsiurupa led the work of both STO and Sovnarkom, chairing all sittings of the
state bodies between 6 December and Rykov’s return to work on 4 April 1922.
Almost as soon as Lenin was forced to withdraw from work, attempts to reverse
Sovnarkom decisions taken under his chairmanship were made. Lenin expected
the deputies to fight his corner.49 As well as chairing sittings, Tsiurupa signed
all telegrams and letters on behalf of the government and was present at some
Politburo meetings, often with a consultative vote, to present proposals and to
participate in debates.50
Lenin’s optimism of a swift return to work as Sovnarkom chairman was dis-
appointed. On 21 January 1922 he informed Tsiurupa: ‘I cannot return to work
earlier than three, maybe four weeks. The present moment is very difficult, and
the Central Committee members cannot tear themselves from other affairs for
close participation in the work of Sovnarkom and STO…The doctor orders that
156 Inside Lenin’s Government
you must only work eight hours. I absolutely insist that you limit yourself in
the next four weeks, and furthermore take a full rest on Saturdays, Sundays and
Mondays…I am quite sure in the opposite case that you will not manage four
weeks and that, in the current political situation, would be a disaster. From four
o’clock, for two hours you must participate in sittings of Sovnarkom and STO
which are arranged twice a week. The remaining two hours are exclusively for
signing protocols and the necessary minimum conversation by telephone and in
person. If you conduct affairs in such a way, our apparatus will not weaken for
these four weeks.’51 The volume of work connected with chairing of Sovnarkom
and STO did not permit such short hours. In full health, Lenin’s work pattern
in this role had been a minimum 12-hour day, and very often he worked into
the early hours.52 Tsiurupa’s correspondence on state business from this period,
running into hundreds of pages, demonstrates the huge workload he took on.53
Tsiurupa did not submit to the prescribed regime and became indignant when
Sovnarkom Secretary Lidiia Fotieva and his wife ‘terrorised him…to remember
about lunch or the end of his working day’.54
In January and February 1922, in addition to the day-to-day running of sit-
tings, Lenin and Tsiurupa also worked together on a plan ‘to radically reform’
the state organs. They exchanged a series of letters on restructuring the work of
Sovnarkom, STO and MSNK.55 In Lenin’s analysis, ‘The most radical defect of
Sovnarkom and the STO is the absence of any checking-up on fulfilment. We
are being sucked down by the rotten bureaucratic swamp into writing papers,
jawing about decrees, drawing up decrees –and in this sea of paper “live” work is
being drowned. Clever saboteurs are deliberately luring us into this paper swamp.
Most of the People’s Commissars and other grandees are, quite unconsciously,
“sticking their heads into the noose”.’56 Lenin repeated his proposals on the role of
the deputies as supreme state-inspectors: ‘The centre of gravity of your activities
must be just this refashioning of our disgustingly bureaucratic way of work, the
struggle against bureaucracy and red tape, the checking-up on fulfilment.’57 Lenin
outlined the essential tasks of the deputies as relieving the Sovnarkom and STO
of unnecessary burdens and transferring all minor questions to the MSNK and
the administrative sittings of STO. He complained, ‘This has begun. But it will
come apart into two weeks, given our damned Oblomov ways, if it is not followed
up, chased up, flogged along with three knots. The Head of the Administration
Department must be taught…to watch very closely to see that petty questions
are not brought before the Sovnarkom and STO, and that all questions first go
through a triple filter (an inquiry to the appropriate People’s Commissariats; their
urgent reply; the same from the Codification Department)…work out written
The Politics of Illness 157
regulations for the bringing forward and consideration of questions and check
not less than once a month, that the regulations are being observed and whether
they are achieving their object, i.e., reduction of paper work, red tape, more fore-
thought, more sense of responsibility on the part of the People’s Commissars,
replacement of half-baked decrees by careful, prolonged, businesslike checking-
up on fulfilment…establishment of personal responsibility.’58
Lenin and Tsiurupa continued to develop this plan on the role of the deputies
in reforming and simplifying the state apparatus throughout the rest of February
1922.59 Finally, on 27 February 1922 Lenin wrote up the ‘Draft Directive on the
work of the STO, Sovnarkom, and MSNK’. It announced: ‘The chief defect of
these institutions is that they are over burdened with trivial matters. As a result,
they are floundering in bureaucracy instead of fighting it.’60 Lenin ascribed
the causes of this ‘evil’ as the weakness of the Sovnarkom Administration
Department, the inability of the People’s Commissars to ‘climb out of the mire
of trivialities and bureaucratic details’, the desire of the People’s Commissars
and that of their departmental bureaucrats who ‘egg them on, to shift respon-
sibility on to the Sovnarkom.’ Without these changes Lenin feared ‘we shall not
climb out of the bureaucracy and red tape which are throttling us’.61 In concrete
terms: ‘The staff of the Administration Department of Sovnarkom must regard
as its main task the practical realisation of the following: to reduce the number
of matters coming before the MSNK, STO and Sovnarkom, and to ensure that
the People’s Commissars (jointly) should decide more themselves and answer
for it; to shift the centre of gravity to checking up on effective fulfilment. For the
same purpose, Lenin recommended that the Deputy Chairmen of Sovnarkom,
Comrades Rykov and Tsiurupa, must free themselves of trivial matters and com-
missions, fight against attempts to drag them into matters which should be set-
tled by the People’s Commissars; devote two or three hours a day, as a minimum,
to making the personal acquaintance of the responsible workers, not the gran-
dees, of the…People’s Commissariats, in order to check up and select people;
make use of the staff of the Administration Department of Sovnarkom and some
of the members of the MSNK, and also the Rabkrin, to check up on the work
actually done and what success it has had; in short, they should become practical
instructors in administrative work.’62 On 21 March 1922, with Rykov finally back
from sick leave, Lenin held his first meeting with both deputies to discuss the
current work of Sovnarkom and STO. On 24 March, Rykov lightened Tsiurupa’s
load, chairing his first STO sitting since returning from Germany and on 4 April
led a Sovnarkom sitting.63 His return meant that Lenin could now attempt to put
the programme of the work of his deputies in to practice.
158 Inside Lenin’s Government
Ten days after the congress closed, Lenin completed his final ‘Decision on
the Work of the Deputies’ and sent it to the Politburo on 11 April 1922. This
detailed document was made up of five sections: ‘The general and main func-
tions of the Deputy Chairman’, ‘Specific questions concerning the work of the
deputy chairmen, ‘The deputy chairmen’s methods of work and their staffs’,
‘Co-ordinating the work of the two deputy chairmen’, and ‘Distribution of func-
tions between the deputy chairmen’.67 Lenin outlined the main functions of the
Deputy Chairmen as exercising executive control over the fulfilment of decrees
and decisions, reducing the staffs of Soviet government offices and supervision
of reorganization of the state apparatus along rational lines to combat bureau-
cratic methods and red tape. To counteract the swing in authority towards the
party bodies, their duties included ensuring that no question concerning Soviet
affairs was discussed by other government or party bodies (Presidium of the
VTsIK, Politburo or the Orgburo) without their knowledge and participation.
The deputies were also tasked with relieving Sovnarkom and STO of minor mat-
ters, which should be settled by the administration departments. The deputy
chairmen also had to ensure that MSNK and STO did not assume more func-
tions than necessary and that the People’s Commissars be more self-reliant and
responsible for their duties.68
According to Lenin the deputies should prioritize the work of the economic
commissariats, and ‘devote nine-tenths of their efforts’ to these, and one-tenth
to the rest. Each deputy chairman should, having studied the latest German and
American literature on management and organization of labour, undertake to
organize one or two exemplary departments to enable him to arrive at a stand
ard size of staffs, verify the correctness of this standard, and establish the best
methods of conducting and supervising affairs, with a view to gradually intro-
ducing them into all Soviet offices.
Lenin even suggested a system of bonuses to Soviet employees, in proportion
to turn-over, to improve their work. Lenin saw these exemplary offices as essen-
tial ‘in view of the stubborn resistance of the Soviet bureaucrats who want to
cling to the old bureaucratic methods…they are needed as a means of tightening
up and testing the rest’.69 Lenin also referred to the law being drafted by Tsiurupa
which granted the deputies greater powers to impose penalties for bureaucratic
methods, red tape, inefficiency and neglect. The penalties for the worst offences
must be dismissal or legal prosecution.
Lenin instructed that the deputy chairmen free themselves as far as possible
from minor details and from unnecessary meetings with People’s Commissars
and members of collegia, and from attending commissions. The deputy
160 Inside Lenin’s Government
chairman should also make efforts to dissolve existing commission and pre-
vent the formation of new ones. He repeated his insistence on a minimal staff
for the deputy chairmen and use the MSNK and Rabkrin apparatus for their
work. Lenin also made provision for the crucial issue of how multiple deputies
should coordinate their work. They should send each other copies of all their
important instructions and written and oral reports. In important cases the
deputies should confer in order to reach a common understanding regarding
aims and activities, to avoid duplication and running at cross-purposes in the
course of their work. In the event of a disagreement arising between the deputy
chairmen, the issue should be settled by the chairman of Sovnarkom, or if he is
absent, by the Politburo. Thus, the deputies programme was intended to reverse
the incorrect party-state relationship that had developed, but in failing to pro-
vide for conflicts between the deputies to be resolved in-house in his absence,
Lenin only reinforced the reliance on the Politburo as the ultimate executive
institution.
Lenin instructed that during the next few months Tsiurupa should preside
over meetings of Sovnarkom and sign the decisions of Sovnarkom and its tele-
graphic orders, and also supervise the work of the commissions of the main and
‘Little’ Sovnarkoms. He should also closely supervise the work of the executive
secretary and the Secretariat of Sovnarkom and be responsible for coordinating
the activities of this staff with those of STO staff and see that there is contact and
‘harmony’ between them. The duties prescribed to Rykov were identical, but in
regards to the STO. The presence of the non-presiding chairman was obligatory
at Sovnarkom and plenary STO sittings. For the purpose of executive control,
the People’s Commissariats were divided as follows: to Tsiurupa: the People’s
Commissariats of Agriculture, Railways, Vesenkha, Posts and Telegraphs, Justice,
Internal Affairs, Nationalities, Education. To Rykov: the People’s Commissariats
of Finance, Foreign Trade, Labour, Public Maintenance, Food, Army and Navy,
Foreign Affairs, Public Health, and the Internal Trade Commission, Central
Council of Cooperative Societies, Central Statistical Board, Regional Economic
Conferences, Concessions Committee, Gosplan.70
Lenin submitted his plan for the restoration of Sovnarkom and STO through
the deputies programme to the Politburo and left the Kremlin to undergo an
operation to remove the bullet lodged in his neck since the assassination attempt
of August 1918.
The Politburo members had a mixed response to the deputies programme.
Rykov and Tomsky made critical remarks on elements of the programme,
but Trotsky’s criticisms were most substantial. He complained that the role of
The Politics of Illness 161
the deputies was ‘everything and nothing’, and that the Rabkrin was ineffective
and should be scrapped and that Gosplan suffered from ‘academic methods’.71
As soon as he was well enough, in early May, Lenin sent his ‘Reply to Remarks
Concerning the Functions of the Deputy Chairman of Sovnarkom and STO’
to the Politburo where he defended the deputies programme against Trotsky’s
critique. The Rabkrin, Lenin argued, could not be dispensed with as Trotsky
suggested due to the ‘hidebound departmentalism that prevails among even
the best communists, the low standard of efficiency of the employees and the
internal intrigues of the departments’. Lenin conceded there were problems with
Rabkrin, but instead of abolishing it, ‘a lot of hard and systematic work has to be
put in to convert it into an apparatus for investigating and improving all govern-
ment work’ as there was no other means to do so.72 Lenin also defended his ideas
on Gosplan, refuting the complaint that it suffered from ‘academic methods’ but
instead had simply been ‘overloaded with vermicelli’ up to now.73
April 1922 saw the introduction of the deputies programme in practice.
Tsiurupa took over chairmanship of Sovnarkom sittings until the first week of
June.74 Yet, he fell ill again within a month, and Rykov stepped in to alternate
Sovnarkom chairmanship with Tsiurupa’s sittings until early July. At this point
Tsiurupa was forced to take leave. Rykov took over Sovnarkom chairmanship
until Lenin’s return to work in October 1922.75 Rykov, who had been made a
Politburo members at the Eleventh Party Congress, also chaired plenary STO
sittings until the end of the year.76 From April to July 1922, Tsiurupa also turned
his attention to implementing the improvements to the state apparatus outlined
in the deputies programme. He was appointed People’s Commissar of Rabkrin
on 25 April 1922 to allow him to follow through the checking of the function-
ing of the state apparatus.77 First, he addressed the sending of questions to
Sovnarkom and STO, and on reducing their overloaded agendas. He established
a commission devoted to this aim and instructed the Sovnarkom Secretariat to
remove all minor questions which overburdened the state agendas.78 Tsiurupa
then started supervising and checking the work of the MSNK. In June he sent a
note to the chairman of MSNK with a list indicating all the delays he had noted
in its work of preparing decrees in the month of May. He wrote: ‘I ask you to
make sure that such defects are removed by the root.’79 Tsiurupa also worked
to ensure that state officials fulfilled their responsibilities. For example on 24
June Tsiurupa reprimanded the People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatolii
Lunacharsky, after his commissariat failed to send the necessary reporter to a
MSNK sitting for consideration of one of its questions. Tsiurupa wrote: ‘This
procedure is completely inadmissible. Allow me to turn your attention to these
162 Inside Lenin’s Government
circumstances and to ask you to require most strictly that those who are obliged
to take care of sending reporters do so.’80
Despite his continuing illness, Lenin still managed to involve himself and
interfere in matters coming before Sovnarkom and STO and to attempt to micro-
manage the work of the deputies. In a note to Rykov and Tsiurupa of 15 May
1922 on organization of the state apparatus, Lenin advised that he was against
the merging of People’s Commissariats which the deputies were considering.
Instead, Lenin stressed that he was in favour of simplification of the apparatus
and departments. He also insisted on the introduction of his scheme of bonuses
for simplification of the apparatus and for fast turnovers.81 Lenin also intervened
in day-to-day decision-making. For example, on 16 May, he was again micro-
managing Rykov’s activity, writing the following note: ‘Rykov! It is necessary by
telephone to carry out the decision of STO to send two steamships of the best
Donets coal and to press for its execution.’82
On 23 May 1922, Lenin was forced fully withdraw from politics and take
several months of complete rest at Gorky. Before his departure he instructed
that all current and urgent documents on government business be addressed
to his deputies. He had a severe attack of illness three days later. He was then
absent for four months, only returning to work in mid-October 1922, although
he demanded that Tsiurupa keep him up to date on the work of Sovnarkom with
daily reports. Lenin had not left the state organs in steady hands. First Tsiurupa,
and then Rykov, relapsed into ill-health in mid-1922. They were both completely
out of action by September.83
On 11 September 1922, in light of this erratic leadership of the government,
Lenin proposed to the Politburo the appointment of two more deputies (a dep-
uty chairman of Sovnarkom and a deputy chairman of STO), and selected two of
their own members, Trotsky and Kamenev, for the job.84 Stalin and Rykov were
‘in favour’, Kalinin ‘did not object’, and Kamenev and Tomskii ‘abstained’. Trotsky,
however, ‘categorically refused’.85 Three days later Kamenev was appointed as a
deputy.86 This official appointment, however, only formalized the work Kamenev
had been carrying out already in bearing ‘a treble load to maintain contact’
between party and state.87 Already in June 1922, he had tried to make ‘the two
wheels run together’ more smoothly. Working to coordinate their activities,
Kamenev proposed in the Politburo that the deputies of the Sovnarkom present
a weekly written report on its activity to the Politburo.88 Now Lenin intended
Kamenev to help lift the burden of work from the other two deputies even further.
Lenin returned to work in late-September 1922. He resumed most of his
former duties in Sovnarkom and STO after an absence of almost six months.
The Politics of Illness 163
approved the article in the part referring to the enlistment of Central Committee
members, but doubted whether it was possible for the Rabkrin to discharge all
its present functions with a reduced staff.
In early February Lenin dictated his final article, still on the issue of
improvement of the state apparatus, ‘Better Fewer, but Better’. He insisted that
the letter be sent to Tsiurupa to look over before it went to press. Again, on 7
February, Lenin asked his secretary whether the Rabkrin collegium intended
to make any decision based on his article, ‘to take a step of state importance’, or
was it putting things off until the congress. On 9 February Lenin confirmed he
would move the question of Rabkrin at the congress and requested Tsiurupa
or Kamenev to check statistics for him.101 On 10 February Lenin asked that
‘Better Fewer, but Better’ article be sent to Tsiurupa to be read urgently.102
Lenin’s condition then deteriorated. On 5–6 March he wrote two final letters,
one to Stalin and one to Trotsky. On 10 March 1923 Lenin suffered his sec-
ond major stroke, and from this date, until his death in January 1924, he was
permanently incapacitated, unable to speak or walk again. He died of a heart
attack ten months later.
leader and never regained the primacy it had possessed in its first years under
Lenin’s full chairmanship.
The reluctance of both Lenin himself along with the Bolshevik leaders to find
a proper replacement for him during his illness made the build-up of power
in an alternative location likely. Lenin, on the advice of his doctors, felt that he
would be able to return to work in the near future. As a result, he only envisaged
people ‘deputizing’ for him, rather than replacing him. While all eyes were on
who would replace Lenin as Sovnarkom chairman, the Troika worked to concen-
trate power in the party’s supreme organs, where Lenin had never held an official
post, without appearing to insult Lenin’s memory or grab power for themselves.
If Lenin had stepped aside for the duration of his illness and appointed in his
place one strong, politically prestigious, able, chairman to lead Sovnarkom as it
had been under Lenin from 1917 to 1920, then it may have been able to reclaim
its role as executive organ of the Soviet government. Instead those in the leading
party organs benefitted from the ‘politics of illness’. Sovnarkom had stagnated
under two years of inconsistent, politically un-prestigious leadership, and the
Politburo had become the real locus of power.
Conclusion
In the year and a half after the October Revolution, Sovnarkom was the prin-
cipal executive body of the early Soviet government, until the supreme party
organ, the Politburo, gradually usurped this role during the Civil War. At this
early stage the Party Central Committee, yet to be expanded into its Politburo-
Orgburo form, played a minor role in ‘government’. By mid-1919, however, once
the Civil War was underway, Sovnarkom began to relinquish direction of some
urgent affairs to the Politburo. Sovnarkom continued to direct business that did
not demand immediate solution: general governmental administration, legal
and domestic issues, and wider economic questions. It was not until mid-1921
that the Politburo, rather than surrender its gains after the Civil War, began to
extend its reach to the full range of ordinary, ‘non-urgent’, government business.
This shift was not a conscious process. When leading state activists, including
Lenin by 1921, observed the change, they protested and proposed measures to
reverse it.
In explaining the decline of the Sovnarkom vis-à-vis the Politburo, Rigby
pointed to immediate features of the state body. He argued that ‘the ever-
increasing flow of government business to the Politburo…was clearly aided by
the defects of Sovnarkom itself as a decision-making body….the relatively minor
matters cluttering its agendas and the numerous second flight officials attending
its meetings seriously limited its capacity to deal with larger issues’.1 He also
blamed Lenin’s failure to appoint a successor to the Sovnarkom chairmanship as
his health worsened from 1921: ‘His failure to make satisfactory arrangements
for its leadership when he fell ill…unable to perform the prime ministerial role
himself, he would not give any of his colleagues a chance to perform it…it was
his failure to entrust the resources of the Sovnarkom chairmanship to another
that disastrously accelerated their dissipation.’2
While archival sources do bear out some elements of Rigby’s explanation,
these are contributing factors to a process already underway. Sovnarkom’s
decline was in motion well before the onset of Lenin’s illness and the ‘minor
matters’ and ‘second rate officials’ were as much a symptom than a cause of
170 Inside Lenin’s Government
rest of the Soviet hierarchy –from the local and regional Soviet apparatus, to the
VTsIK and the Congress of Soviets.
Finally, Rigby’s explanation of Sovnarkom’s decline also highlighted that the
emergency conditions of the Civil War necessitated a more urgent, authoritative
style of decision-making which did not suit the formalized, bureaucratic culture
which Lenin had institutionalized in the state apparatus. Sovnarkom was not
a body fit to deal with critical contingencies demanding immediate decision-
making and implementation. Sovnarkom’s relatively large membership was good
territory for lengthy debate, but the collegial style of decision-making was not
befitting to wartime emergencies. Parliamentary democracies usually develop
smaller ‘war cabinets’ to operate in their stead in emergency conditions, and in
the Russian Civil War, this is where the Politburo came in. The heavy require-
ments for lengthy interdepartmental consultation and voluminous reports prior
to consideration by the Sovnarkom gave the more flexible Politburo, from March
1919, a head start in rapid and authoritative decision-making. But Sovnarkom’s
operational sluggishness could have been overcome and it could have developed
into a war cabinet proper that could compete with the Politburo. It could have
become a smaller, more flexible authoritative executive if its members possessed
a genuine sense of their mandate emanating from the Soviets, not just the party.
Ultimately, the Sovnarkom as government executive made sense only in the con-
text of some semblance of ‘Soviet’ power and legitimacy, which by 1922 had
almost completely disappeared.
The major problem undermining the authority of Lenin’s Sovnarkom was its
decline into ‘departmentalism’ (vedomstvennost’). By 1921 it had become a col-
lection of less politically prestigious individuals interested mainly in pushing
the interest of their own narrow department, rather than a cabinet of leaders
who created joined-up government policy on issues across the board. Why was
this the case? The commissars lacked the sense of legitimacy afforded as repre-
sentatives of the people via the Soviets. Instead, more and more, their positions
and the legitimacy of the government came to rest on the role of the vanguard
party, and thus it was the supreme party apparatus to which the government was
responsible.
Why did this shift in basis of legitimacy of the government occur? Part of the
answer lies in the flaws and internal contradictions built into the Sovnarkom
and Central Executive Committee political system. Drawing from their Marxist
heritage, Bolsheviks felt that moving away from the capitalist economy was as
important in guaranteeing democracy than constructing particular state insti-
tutions, which would only ‘wither away’ eventually anyway. Thus, not enough
172 Inside Lenin’s Government
attention was paid to the particular forms and relationships of Soviet govern-
ment bodies to enable them to function healthily and independently without
leadership by a charismatic ruler or vanguard party.
The institutions brought forward across the revolution –the Soviets, the
imperial bureaucracy and the party complicated this task even further and
meant that the Bolshevik state builders confusedly welded two different forms of
cabinet government together –one obstructing the other. The Bolsheviks inher-
ited the Soviets, which had come to be seen as organs of revolutionary power,
the hierarchy of which stretched from the local level to the central coordinat-
ing body in the Central Executive Committee of Soviets –essentially a multi-
party representative body –sometimes described as a workers’ parliament. In a
sense the Sovnarkom system established at the Second Congress of Soviets and
enshrined in the 1918 Soviet Constitution replicated, despite the leaders’ reser-
vations about the separation of legislative and executive power as a feature of
bourgeois parliamentary democracy, a British style cabinet government where
a small executive body is, in theory at least, composed by and responsible to a
larger legislative chamber which can cancel its decisions and recall its members.
In this sense the source of legitimacy for the cabinet decisions lie in the repre-
sentative body and the masses who elected it, from below. In this system the
prime minister or chairman and ministers or commissars decide both the broad
outlines of policy (although this can be negotiated outside the structures of gov-
ernment first in their own party) and the issues under their own portfolio. This
system could sustain multiparty Soviets and government as was the case up to
June 1918, and to a limited degree for some time after.
But the Bolsheviks inherited a governmental structure from the tsarist regime
which followed the path of cabinet government owing its legitimacy to powers
from above: tsar and then Communist Party. Perhaps more similar to a presi-
dential system, the council of ministers were not drawn from the representative
assembly but appointed from above. Cabinet work required the sanction and
guidance from the higher power to deliver joined-up government and direction
of policy. As the Soviet regime moved towards exclusion of other parties from
politics, Soviets atrophied during the Civil War, and the notion of legitimacy
of the dictatorship of the proletariat flowing not from the Soviets, but from the
vanguard party, the earlier cabinet-style system began to falter and could not
deter intrusion by the rapidly expanding organs of the party after 1919. It was
these complexities which undermined the work of Sovnarkom as the apex of
the Soviet state structure, but which Lenin could not see nor accept as necessary
for changes or formal delineation, despite recognizing the ‘incorrectness of the
Conclusion 173
Introduction
1 S.A. Smith, The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 167.
2 V.I. Lenin (trans. Robert Service) State and Revolution, (London: Penguin,
2009) p. 79.
3 Daniel T. Orlovsky, ‘The Lower Middle Strata in Revolutionary Russia’, in Edith
Clowes (ed.), Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public
Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991),
pp. 248–68; Daniel T. Orlovsky, ‘The Hidden Class: White-Collar Workers in the
Soviet 1920s’, in Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Ronald Grigor Suny (eds), Making Workers
Soviet: Power, Class and Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Daniel
T. Orlovsky, ‘State Building in the Civil War Era: The Role of the Lower Middle
Strata’, in Diane P. Koenker, William G. Rosenberg and Ronald Grigor Suny (eds),
Party, State and Society in the Russian Civil War (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1989), pp. 180–209; E.A. Rees, The Rise and Fall of the Workers’ and Peasants’
Inspectorate, 1920–34 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1987).
4 Quoted in Max Shachtman, The Struggle for the New Course, published in one
volume with his translation of Leon Trotsky’s The New Course (New York: New
International Publishing Company, 1943), p. 54.
5 Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Politics as Practice: Thoughts on a New Soviet Political History’,
Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter 2004), p. 27.
6 M.P. Iroshnikov, Sozdanie sovetskogo tsentral’nogo gosudarstvennogo apparata: Sovet
narodnykh komissarov i narodnye komissariaty oktiabr’ 1917 g.–ianvar’ 1918 g.
(Moscow and Leningrad: Nauka, 1966); E.B. Genkina, Gosudarstvennaia deiatel’nost’
V.I. Lenina 1921–23 (Moscow: Nauka, 1969), E.B. Genkina, Lenin-predsedatel’
sovnarkoma i STO; iz istorii gosudarstvennoi deiatel’nosti V.I. Lenina v 1921–22 gg.
(Moscow: Nauka, 1960); E.B. Genkina, Perekhod sovetskogo gosudarstva k novoi
economicheskoi politike 1921–22 (Moscow: Gospolizdat, 1954); E.N. Gorodetskii,
Rozhdenie sovetskogo gosudarstva 1917–18 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1965); E.I.
Korenevskaia, Stanovlenie vysshikh organov Sovetskogo gosudarstvennogo upravleniia
(Moscow: Nauka, 1975); E.I. Korenevskaia, ‘Organizatsionno-pravovye formy
deiatel’nosti SNK RSFSR (1917–22gg.)’, Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, No. 7 (1968),
pp. 94–6.
176 Notes
7 Stephen Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience. Politics and History since 1917
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 5–6.
8 Leonard Schapiro, Origin of the Communist Autocracy (London: Macmillan,
1955); Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 2nd edition
(New York: Vintage Books, 1960); Robert Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 11–12, 111; Adam Ulam,
Lenin and the Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of
Communism in Russia (London: Fontana, 1965); Richard Pipes, The Formation
of the Soviet Union, Communism and Nationalism, 1917–23 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1954); Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution
(London: Collins Harvill, 1990); Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime
(London: Fontana, 1994); Richard Pipes, The Three Whys of the Russian Revolution
(Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1995); Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled, Revised
edition (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).
9 Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, pp. 39, 243.
10 Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956).
11 Schapiro, Origin of the Communist Autocracy; T.H. von Laue, Why Lenin? Why
Stalin? A Reappraisal of the Rusian Revolution, 1900–1930 (Michigan: Lippincott,
1964); Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime; Martin Malia, The Soviet
Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: The Free
Press, 1994).
12 Robert Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary 1879–1929: A Study in History and
Personality (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1973); Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and
the Bolshevik Revolution (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1973).
13 Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants & Soviet Power (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1968; Sheila Fitzpatrick ‘The Civil War as a Formative Experience’ in Abbott
Gleason, Peter Kenez and Richard Stites (eds), Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and
Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
14 A. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd
(New York: Norton, 1976); Smith, The Russian Revolution.
15 A. Rabinowitch, The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991) and The Bolsheviks Come to Power.
16 Oscar Anweiler, The Soviets. The Russian Workers, Peasants and Solders Councils,
1905–21 (Pantheon, New York, 1974), p. 218.
17 Ibid., p. 193.
18 T.H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom 1917–22 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979).
19 A. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2007); Simon Pirani, ‘The Party Elite, the Industrial Managers and the
Notes 177
Chapter 1
1 See Adam Ulam, Lenin and the Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History
of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (London: Fontana, 1965), pp. 176–82;
Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1899–1919 (London: Collins Harvill,
1990), pp. 359–61; L. Shapiro, Origins of the Communist Autocracy, 2nd edition
(London: Macmillan, 1977); Roeder, Red Sunset. The Failure of Soviet Politics (New
Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 44.
2 Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the democratic
revolution (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1977).
3 Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered. What Is to Be Done? In Context
(London: Brill, 2005).
4 James, Ryan. ‘Lenin’s The State and Revolution and Soviet State Violence: A Textual
Analysis’, Revolutionary Russia, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2007), pp. 151–72.
5 Lenin, The State and Revolution, 79.
6 For full discussion of the historiographical framework on State and Revolution, see
A.J. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984), chapter one.
7 Richard Sakwa, ‘Commune Democracy and Gorbachev’s Reforms’, Political Studies,
Vol. XXXVII (1989), pp. 224–43. See also David Priestland, ‘Soviet Democracy,
1917–91’, European History Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 1 (2002), pp. 111–30. See also
David Priestland, ‘Bolshevik Ideology and the Debate over Party‐State Relations,
1918–21’, Revolutionary Russia, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1997), pp. 37–61.
8 Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics, p. 82.
9 Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978),
see ‘Appendix 2: Parliament and Government in a Re-constructed Germany’,
p. 1416.
178 Notes
10 John L.H. Keep, The Debate on Soviet power: Minutes of the All-Russian Central
Executive Committee of Soviets, Second Convocation, October 1917–January 1918
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 22.
11 Lenin, State and Revolution.
12 Ibid., p. 42.
13 Ibid., pp. 42–3.
14 Ibid.
15 Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics.
16 Lenin, ‘Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power’, Collected Works, Vol. 26,
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 87–136.
17 Neil Harding, Leninism (Duke University Press, 1996), p. 309.
18 Sakwa, ‘Commune Democracy and Gorbachev’s Reforms’.
19 Ibid.
20 Harding, Leninism, p. 310.
21 Lenin, PSS, 5 izd, tt.33, 307.
22 Lenin, State and Revolution.
23 E.G. Gimpel’son, Rabochii klass v upravlenii sovetskim gosudarstvom. Noiabr’ 1917–
1920 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1982).
24 Ibid.
25 Daniel Orlovsky, ‘Gimpel’son on the Hegemony of the Working Class’, Slavic
Review, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Spring 1989), pp. 104–6.
26 Gimpelson, Rabochii klass v upravlenii sovetskim gosudarstvom. Noiabr’
1917–1920 gg.
27 Roeder, Red Sunset, pp. 48–9.
28 S.A. Smith, Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017), p. 215.
Chapter 2
107 Ibid., p. 52 (25 November), p. 59 (27 November), p. 78 (4 December), p. 84
(5 December), p. 128 (19 December), p. 195 (8 January), p. 203 (11 January),
p. 205 (14 January), p. 324 (31 January).
108 Ibid., p. 53 (25 November), p. 62 (29 November), p. 85 (5 December), p. 88
(6 December), p. 96 (9 December), p. 114 (15 December), p. 258 (23 January).
109 Ibid., p. 49 (24 November), p. 117 (16 December), p. 159 (24 December), p. 301
(27 December), p. 341 (16 February), p. 414 (4 March).
110 Ibid., p. 20 (15 November), p. 26 (18 November), p. 52 (25 November), p. 65 (30
November), p. 103 (11 December), p. 107 (13 December), p. 111 (15 December),
p. 222 (16 January), p. 257 (23 January).
111 Ibid., p. 59 (27 November), p. 69 (30 November), p. 103 (11 December), p. 247 (19
January), p. 249 (20 January,).
112 Ibid., p. 170 (30 December), p. 289 (24 January).
113 Ibid., p. 90 (7 December), p. 119 (17 December).
114 Ibid., p. 21 (15 November), p. 28 (19 November), p. 41 (16 November), p. 43 (22
November), p. 87 (6 December), p. 116 (16 December), p. 200 (9 January).
115 Ibid., p. 26 (18 November), p. 27 (19 November), p. 36 (20 November), p. 118 (16
December).
116 Ibid., p. 21 (15 November), p. 28 (19 November), p. 37 (20 November), p. 60
(27 November), p. 72 (2 December), p. 76 (3 December), p. 88 (6 December),
p. 95 (9 December), p. 200 (9 January), p. 210 (15 January), p. 247 (19 January),
p. 305 (29 January), p. 351 (19 February), p. 384 (27 February), p. 395 (28
February).
117 Ibid., p. 53 (23 November), p. 73 (2 December), p. 84 (4 December), p. 98 (9
December).
118 Ibid., p. 36 (20 November), p. 42 (23 November), p. 118 (16 December), p. 210
(15 January).
119 V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (Penguin: London, 1992), pp. 69–70.
120 ‘Tariffs of Pay of the Work of Employees of Central State Institutions’ in
Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 4085 (RSFSR Rabkrin
1917–23), op. 1, d. 8, ll. 1–6.
121 Amiantov, Protokoly zasedanii Soveta Narodnykh Kommissarov, p. 23.
122 Ibid., p. 26.
123 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 35 (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976), p. 333.
124 Victor Serge, Memories of a Revolutionary (London: Writers and Readers,
1984), p. 79.
125 Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 42, pp. 37–8.
126 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, 2nd English edition, vol. 42 (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1971), p. 78.
127 Ibid., pp. 136–7.
Notes 185
128 RGASPI, f. 19, op. 1, d. 241, l. 1 (2 January), d. 249, l. 1 (23 January), d. 251, l. 1 (28
January).
129 Ibid., d. 243 (9 January), d. 245, l. 1 (January 19), d. 251, l. 1 (28 January).
130 Ibid., d. 243, l. 1 (9 January).
131 Ibid., d. 247, l. 1 (18 January), d. 251, l. 1 (28 January, points).
132 Ibid., d. 241, l. 1 (2 January).
133 Ibid., d. 241, l. 1 (2 January), d. 243, l. 1 (9 January), d. 247, l. 1 (18 January).
134 Ibid., d. 241, l. 1 (2 January), d. 245, l. 1 (19 January), d. 251, l. 1.
135 GARF f. 130, op. 2, d. 1(2), l. 218 and also ll. 213, 235, 289, 290, 292, 297.
136 Protokoly Tsentral’nogo Komiteta RSDRP(b). Avgust 1917-Fevral 1918
(Moscow: Gosizdat, 1958), pp. 146–227.
137 Ibid., pp.146–227.
138 Ibid., pp. 189–231.
139 RGASPI f. 17, op. 2, dd. 1–15.
140 Ibid.
141 Ibid.
142 Ibid., d. 1, l. 3 (30 March 1918).
143 Ibid.; op. 2, d. 2, l. 1 (16 September).
144 Ibid., d. 1, l. 5 (31 March); f. 17, op. 2, d. 1, l. 7 (7 April), l. 8 (26 April), l. 9
(3 May).
145 Ibid., l. 8 (26 April).
146 Ibid., l. 1 (15 March), l. 8 (26 April).
147 Ibid., l. 8 (26 April) f. 17, op. 2, d. 3, l. 1 (2 October).
148 Ibid., l. 1 (15 March).
149 Ibid., l. 9 (3 May).
150 Ibid., l. 1 (15 March), d. 5, l. 1 (25 October).
151 Ibid., l. 7 (7 April).
152 Ibid., l. 1 (15 March), l. 3 (30 March), l. 6 (4 April).
153 Ibid. (15 March), l. 3 (30 March), l. 6 (4 April).
154 Ibid., d. 3, l. 1 (2 October).
155 Ibid., op. 2, d. 1, l. 1 (15 March), l. 6 (4 April), l. 9 (3 May), d. 5, l. 1 (25 October).
156 Ibid., op. 2, d. 1, ll. 6, 9, d. 2, l. 1, d. 3, ll. 1, 2, d. 4, l. 1, d. 5, l. 1.
157 For more information see T.H. Rigby, ‘Staffing USSR Incorporated: The Origins
of the Nomenklatura System, Soviet Studies, Vol. 40, No. 4 (October, 1988), pp.
523–37.
158 Vos’moi s”ezd RKP(b) mart 1919. Protokoly (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1959),
pp. 27–9, 164–8.
159 Ibid., pp. 166, 192.
160 Ibid., pp. 193, 222.
161 Ibid., pp. 166, 168.
186 Notes
1 62 Ibid., p. 325.
163 Ibid., p. 429.
164 Ibid., pp. 424–5.
Chapter 3
14 GARF f. 130, op. 1, d. 99 and F. 130, op. 1, d. 45, ll. 107-107 ob.
15 E.V. Klopov, Lenin v Smol’nom. Gosudarstvennaia deiatel’nst’ V.I. Lenina v pervye
mesiaty Sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow: Mysl’, 1965), p. 11.
16 V.S. Orlov, ‘V.I. Lenin i sozdanie apparata pervogo v mire raboche-krestianskogo
pravitel’stva’, Voprosy Istorii¸ No. 4 (1963), p. 17.
17 M.P. Iroshnikov, Sozdanie sovetskogo tsentral’nogo gosudarstvennogo apparata: sovet
narodnykh komissariv i narodnye komissariaty, oktiabr 1917-ianvar 1918
(Moscow: Nauka, 1966), p. 76.
18 Koksharova, ‘V.I. Lenin v sovnarkome v 1917 gody’, p. 291.
19 RGASPI, f. 5, op. 1, d. 1805, l. 2.
20 Iroshnikov, Sozdanie sovetskogo tsentral’nogo gosudarstvennogo apparata, pp. 76–7.
Rigby relied on the memory of Lidiia Fotieva and the work of Genkina, to state
that: ‘Its total staff in mid-1918 was 61… it grew only modestly after that, reaching
102 in January 1921’ see Rigby, Lenin’s Government, p. 102.
21 GARF f. 130, op. 2, d. 382, l. 2.
22 Ibid., l. 3.
23 GARF f. 130, op. 5, d. 1088, l. 13. Genkina’s figure of 102 staff members by January
1921 holds up when checked against lists in the Sovnarkom archive.
24 GARF f. 130, op. 2, d. 73, ll. 8–9, f. 130, op. 1, d. 99; RGASPI, f. 5, op. 1, d. 738(1), ll.
9, 12, 19, 28, and d. 404, l. 5.
25 V.D. Bonch-Bruevich, ‘Pereezd sovetskogo pravitel’stva iz petrograda v moskvy’, in
Izbrannie sochineniia, vol. 3 (Moscow: Nauka, 1963), p. 159.
26 RGASPI, f. 5, op. 1, d. 738(1), ll. 9,12,19,28 and GARF f. 130, op. 5, d. 1040, ll.
74, 115–16, d. 1088, ll. 4, 43 ob. and RGASPI f. 17, op. 2, d. 17, l. 8. See also S.B.
Brichkina, ‘Maloe o velikom’ and ‘Leninskaia shkola raboty v apparate sovnarkoma’
in O Vladimir Ilich Lenine: Vospominaniia 1900–22 gody (Moscow: Gosizdat,
1963), pp. 468 and 472–7 and M.A. Volodicheva, ‘Otryvki iz vospominanii’ in
Vospominaniia o V.I. Lenine tom 2 (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1957), p. 671.
27 Fotieva, Iz zhizni V.I. Lenina, p. 141.
28 Ibid., p. 199.
29 Ibid., p. 125.
30 Rigby devoted only two pages to the physical creation and functioning of
Sovnarkom’s bureaucracy, spending more time looking at the commissariat
apparatus instead. John Keep later produced a chapter ‘Lenin’s time budget: the
Smolny period’ which touched upon the work Sovnarkom Administration
Department in its earliest months while examining the daily work load of its
chairman. Soviet scholars too largely overlooked this machinery of government.
Rigby, Lenin’s Government, pp. 40–1, 55–6. Rigby’s chapter ‘Acquiring a
Bureaucracy’ focuses mainly on the commissariats and their administrative
machinery, not that of Sovnarkom. John Keep, ‘Lenin’s Time Budget: The Smolny
188 Notes
55 Ibid., op. 1, d. 99.
56 Gorbunov, ‘Kak sozdavalsia v oktiabr’skie dni rabochii apparat soveta narodnykh
komissarov’, pp. 283–4.
57 Iroshnikov, Sozdanie sovetskogo tsentral’nogo gosudarstvennogo apparata, p. 87.
58 Bonch-Bruevich, ‘Pervye dni sovnarkomovskogo apparata’, p. 275.
59 Fotieva, Iz zhizni V.I. Lenina, p. 123.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid, p. 113.
62 Koksharova, ‘V.I. Lenin v Sovnarkome v 1917 g.’, p. 291.
63 K. Shrivastava, News Agencies from Pigeon to Internet (New Dawn: Elgin, 2007).
64 Iroshnikov, Sozdanie sovetskogo tsentral’nogo gosudarstvennogo apparata, p. 83.
65 Ibid., p. 84.
66 Ibid., p. 86.
67 See SSSR God Raboty Pravitel’stva. Materialy k otchetu za 1924/25. Pod obshchei
redaktsiei N.P. Gorbunov i A.V. Stoklitskogo (Moscow: Otdel pechati i informatsii
SNK SSSR i STO, 1926). Further editions published yearly until 1930s.
68 Fotieva, Iz zhizni V.I. Lenina, p. 141.
69 Gorbunov, ‘Kak sozdavalsia v oktiabr’skie dni rabochii apparat soveta narodnykh
komissarov’, p. 58.
70 Fotieva, Iz zhizni V.I. Lenina, pp. 97–8.
71 Ibid., pp. 97–109.
72 Ibid., pp. 82, 137.
73 Ibid., pp. 71, 79
74 Ibid., p. 89.
75 Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 44, p. 254.
76 Fotieva, Iz zhizni V.I. Lenina, p. 141.
77 Ibid., p. 141.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid.; letter from the Sovnarkom Secretary Nikolai Gorbunov to Lenin, appended
with a list of the signatures of 19 administrative staff.
80 RGASPI f. 5, op. 1, d. 404, l. 3.
81 Ibid., l. 1.
82 Rigby, Lenin’s Government, pp. 266–7.
83 Nikolai Valentinov, Encounters with Lenin (London: Oxford University Press,
1968), p. 169.
84 RGASPI f. 5, op. 1, d. 404, l. 2. Gorbunov made further allegations of corruption
against his boss: ‘I ceased to respect him after he thought to use his position for
illegal evacuation of his property from Petrograd. I knew from Sverdlov that
the warehouses belonged to Vladimir Dmitrievich personally, not to the CC of
the Party, as Vladimir Dmitrievich said. I refused then to fulfil his demand…
190 Notes
We evacuated the part of the list which really belonged to the Party. I think that
Vladimir Dmitrievich’s attitude to me also caused much damage. In Petrograd
in all conflicts I tried to justify Bonch in the eyes of colleagues, inventing
explanations in every way possible for his behaviour and attitude to comrades.
Now I cannot do this as I have no more justifications for him. His colleagues have
not respected him for a long time.’
85 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 44, l. 1.
86 Gorbunov, ‘Kak sozdavalsia v oktiabr’skie dni rabochii apparat soveta narodnykh
komissarov’, pp. 192–4.
87 Ibid., p. 196 (See note of Lenin to Krestinskii 8 December 1920 ‘I propose to
appoint as head of the Administration Department, Nikolai Gorbunov (former
Secretary). I ask the Orgburo to send me Nikolai Gorbunov’).
88 GARF f. 130, op. 3, d. 738(1), l. 9. The 23 members were Abramova, Agranov,
Allilueva, Anni, Afananseva, Belenkaia, Bonch-Bruevich, Brichkina, Berzina,
Volodicheva, Gliasser, Kazak, Kizas, Lekhmus, Meerson, Orlova, Simak,
Stepanova. Siroeshkina, Fediushin, Fotieva and Iagunov. In addition, others
appearing as cell members in various documents were Lepeshinskaia, Avilova and
Ozerevskaia.
89 Ibid., l. 40.
90 Ibid., l. 43.
91 Ibid., l. 48.
92 Ibid., l. 69.
93 Ibid.
94 Ibid., l. 64.
95 RGASPI f. 125, op. 1, d. 1, l. 19.
96 Al’bert Ris Vil’iams (Albert Rhys Williams), O Lenine i oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii
(Moscow: Gosizdat, 1960), p. 68.
97 John Keep, ‘Review of T.H. Rigby Lenin’s Government’, The Slavonic and East
European Review, Vol. 58, No. 2 (April 1980), p. 306.
98 N.P. Eroshkin, Istoriia gosudarstvennyk uchrezhdenii dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii
(Moscow: RGGU, 2008), pp. 249, 263.
99 Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately (eds), Accusatory Practices. Denunciations
in Modern European History 1789–1989 (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 85–7.
100 M. Perrie, Pretenders and Popular Monarchism in Early Modern Russia: The False
Tsars of the Time of Troubles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
D. Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
101 O. Figes and B. Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and
Symbols of 1917 (London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 93.
102 Iroshnikov, Sozdanie sovetskogo tsentral’nogo gosudarstvennogo apparata, p. 79.
Notes 191
Chapter 4
3 Ibid., p. 107, fn. 1.
4 N.V. Nelidov (ed.), Iakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov: sbornik vospominanii i
statei (Leningrad: Komissiia po istorii Oktibr;skoi revoliutsii i Rossiisskoi
kommunisticheskoi partii, 1962).
5 S. Vereschak, ‘Stalin v tiur’me: vospominaniia politicheskogo zakliuchennogo’, Dni
(22 January 1928), p. 2.
6 William Odom, ‘Sverdlov: Bolshevik Party Organiser’, The Slavonic and East
European Review, Vol. 44, No. 103 (July 1966), pp. 421–43.
7 Ibid., p. 442. See also C. Duval, ‘The Forgotten Bolshevik. Jacob Mikhailovich
Sverdlov 1885–1917’, PhD Dissertation, 1971, University of Texas at Austin,
Department of History.
8 C. Duval, ‘Iakov Mikhailovch Sverdlov. Founder of the Bolshevik Party Machine’,
in R. Carter Elwood (ed.), Reconsiderations on the Russian Revolution (Cambridge,
MA: Slavica, 1976), p. 221.
9 Ibid., p. 223.
10 Elena Stasova, Stranitsy zhizni i borb’y (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1960), pp. 97–8.
11 See Perepiska secretariata TsK RSDRP(b) s mestnymi partiinymi, vol. 1
(Moscow: Gosizdat, 1957).
12 Ibid., p. 101.
13 Stasova, Stranitsy, pp. 100–101.
14 Stasova cited in E.N. Gorodetsky and Iu. Sharapov, Sverdlov: zhizn’ i deiatel’nost’
(Moscow: Gosizdat, 1961), p. 175.
15 Jointly signed letters of secretariat papers Ia.M. Sverdlov, Izbrannie Proizvedeniia,
vols 1–3 (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1957, 1959, 1960), vol. 2, pp. 55, 56.
16 K.T. Sverdlova, Iakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1960), p. 364.
17 L. Trotsky, On Stalin (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1968), p. 347.
18 Ibid., p. 347.
19 RGASPI, f.17, op. 86, d. 240, ll. 1–4.
20 See Protokoly TsK RSDLP(b), pp. 19, 39 and L. Shapiro, Origin of the Communist
Autocracy, 2nd edition (London: Macmillan, 1971).
21 Deviatyi S”ezd RKP(b) (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1960), p. 806.
22 See Janice Ali, ‘Aspects of the RKP(B) Secretariat, March 1919 to April 1922’, Soviet
Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3 (July 1974), pp. 396–416; Robert Daniels, ‘The Secretariat
and the Local Party Organizations in the Russian Communist Party 1921–23’,
American Slavic and East European Review, Vol. 16, No. 1 (February 1957),
pp. 32–49; and Robert Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution 1917–23. A Study
in Organizational Change (London: Macmillan, 1979).
23 G. Gill, The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990).
24 Sverdlov, Izbrannie Proizvedeniia, vol. 2, p. 154.
194 Notes
25 Ibid., pp. 155–7.
26 Sedmoi S”ezd RKP(b). Protokoly (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1924), p. 95.
27 Ibid., p. 195.
28 Ibid., p. 186.
29 Ibid., p. 154.
30 See circular letter, ibid., vol 3, p. 198, Sverdlov, Izbrannie Proizvedeniia, vol. 2,
p. 268 and vol. 3, p. 156. GARF, f. 130, op. 2, d. 788a, l. 23.
31 See Charles Duval, ‘Iakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov: Founder of the Bolshevik
Party Machine’, in R.C. Elwood (ed.) Reconsiderations on the Russian Revolution
(Cambridge MA: Slavica, 1976), p. 231.
32 Vos’moi S’ezd RKP(b), mart 1919 goda. Protokoly (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1959),
pp. 424–5.
33 See Janice Ali, ‘Aspects of the RKP(B) Secretariat, March 1919 to April 1922’, Soviet
Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3 (July 1974), pp. 396–416; R.V. Daniels, ‘The Secretariat
and the Local Party Organizations in the Russian Communist Party 1921–23’,
American Slavic and East European Review, Vol. 16, No. 1 (February 1957),
pp. 32–49; and Robert Service The Bolshevik Party in Revolution 1917–23. A Study
in Organizational Change (London: Macmillan, 1979).
34 Vladimir Bonch Bruevich, who claims to have been present at the time, recalls
that Sverdlov was initially not keen to take on this role: ‘I have too much party
work as it is, but you invite me to join the government…You should surely appoint
somebody of our plenipotentiaries’; V.D. Bonch-Bruevich, Vospominaniia o Lenine
(Moscow: Nauka, 1969), p. 143.
35 Gorodetskii and Sharapov, Sverdlov, p. 172.
36 Duval, Bolshevik Party Organiser, p. 230.
37 Ibid., p. 121.
38 Petrogradskii golos (21 February 1918), p. 2 and Novyi Den (21 February 1918), p. 3
cited in A. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power. The First Year of Soviet Rule in
Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 165.
39 GARF f. 1235, op. 18, d. 7, l. 39.
40 George Denicke (a contemporary Menshevik) quoted in L. Haimson,
The Mensheviks from the Revolution of 1917 to the Second World War
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 160–1.
41 See nineteenth session of VTsIK on 12 December 1917 in J. Keep (trans.), The
Debate on Soviet Power: Minutes of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee of
Soviets October 1917-January 1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 201, 249.
42 Keep, The Debate on Soviet Power, p. 257.
43 Ibid., p. 265.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., p. 109.
Notes 195
Chapter 5
Suny (eds) Party, State and Society in the Russian Civil War, (Michigan: Indiana
University Press, 1989), p. 198; Heinzen, Inventing a Soviet Countryside, pp. 16–22.
This ‘continuity’ view is also seen in D. Rowney and E. Huskey, Russian Bureaucracy
and the State Officialdom: Officialdom from Alexander III to Vladimir Putin
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), p. 23.
7 Rigby, Lenin’s Government, p. 12.
8 See S. Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment. Soviet Organization
of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–21
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); A. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in
Power. The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2007), p. 19.
9 I.L. Davitnidze, Kollegii ministerstv. Pravovoe polozhenie i organizatsiia raboty
(Moscow: Iuridicheskaia Literature, 1972).
10 M. Gribanov, ‘K istorii razvitiia edinonachaliia i kollegial’nosti v narodnyk
komissariatakh’, Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, no. 3 (1930), pp. 61–9.
11 Davitnidze, Kollegii ministerstv, p. 33.
12 Quoted in Rigby, Lenin’s Government, pp. 4–5.
13 Lev Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Anchor Foundation,
1980), p. 322.
14 Quoted in Rigby, Lenin’s Government, p. 4.
15 Krupskaia, Vospominaniia o Lenine, pp. 338–9
16 N.K. Krupskaia, Vospominaniia o Lenine, 2nd edition (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo
Politcheskoi Literatury, 1968), pp. 339–40.
17 RGASPI f. 5, op. 1, d. 1806, l. 69.
18 Ibid., l. 34.
19 Ibid., l. 36.
20 Shliapnikov in Krupskaia, Vospominaniia, p. 28.
21 DSV, vol. 1, pp. 59–63 (Decree on Education).
22 See Decree on Commissariat of Paths of Communication, DSV, vol. 2, 18–19.
23 See minutes of Central Committee sitting December 1918 RGASPI f. 17 (Central
Committee of the Russian Communist Party, Bolsheviks), op. 3, d. 7, l. 2: ‘On the
work of the collegia and commissariats, to revive the work of the collegia by the
introduction to them of outstanding local workers from corresponding sections
of local soviets…Recognise that the work undertaken in this direction by Internal
Affairs is correct.’
24 RGASPI f. 5 (Lenin’s Secretariat), op. 1, d. 1806, l. 25.
25 V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution (Penguin: London, 1992), p. 37.
26 Vestnik Narodnogo Komissariata Truda, Nos. 2–3 (1918), pp. 27–28.
27 J.B. Sorenson, The Life and Death of Soviet Trade Unionism (New York: Atherton,
1969), p. 79.
198 Notes
51 Ibid., p. 339.
52 Ibid., p. 184.
53 GARF f. 130, op. 2, d.1 (2), l. 191. On 1 April, Sovnarkom transferred this question
to ‘a commission of representatives from the Commissariats of Internal Affairs,
Labour and Finance entrusted to work out the question and present a report on
it in Sovnarkom’. The following day, Sovnarkom, having heard the report of this
commission, proposed to ‘transfer this issue to a commission made up of five
members of the VTsIK. Entrust the commission to present the assessment of the
organisation of state control, and to send the project for implementation to the
collegium.’
54 For collegiality in Red Army see D.N. Collins, ‘The Russian Red Guard of 1917
and Lenin's utopia’, Journal of Russian Studies, No. 32 (1976), pp. 3–12; Erickson,
‘The Origins of the Red Army’; John Erickson, ‘Some Military and Political Aspects
of the “Militia Army” Controversy, 1919–1920’, in Essays in Honour of E. H. Carr
(London: Macmillan, 1974); D. Footman, Civil War in Russia (London: Routledge,
1961); On Workers’ Control see: Paul H. Avrich, ‘The Bolshevik Revolution
and Workers’ Control in Russian Industry’, Slavic Review, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1963),
pp. 47–63 ; M. Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control (London: Solidarity,
1970); J.-M.Chauvrier, ‘Controle ouvrier et “autogestion sauvage” en Russie’, Revue
des pays de t'Est, No. 1 (1973), pp. 71–100; Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism: The
Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy (London and New York: Verso, 1990); E.G.
Gimpel’son, ‘On Workers’ Control after the Passage of the Decree Nationalizing
Industry in the USSR’, Soviet Studies in History, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1984), pp. 34–54;
C. Goodey, ‘Factory Committees and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 1918’,
Critique, No. 3 (1974), pp. 27–47’; Fredrick I. Kaplan, Bolshevik Ideology and the
Ethics of Soviet Labor. 1917–1920: The Formative Years (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1968); Michael Perrins, ‘Rabkrin and Workers’ Control in Russia, 1917–
34’, European History Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1980), pp. 225–46; W. Rosenberg,
‘Workers and Workers’ Control in the Russian Revolution’, History Workshop, No.
5 (Spring 1978), pp. 89–97; L. Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955).
55 V.I. Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenia, 3rd edition, XXII (Moscow: Politizdat,
1955–65), p. 41.
56 Daniels, Conscience of the Revolution, pp. 104–10.
57 Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenia, vol. XXIII, p. 430.
58 Ibid., pp. 447–8.
59 For background biographical information on Shliapnikov see L.E. Holmes, ‘Soviet
Rewriting of 1917: The Case of Alexander Shliapnikov’, Slavic Review, Vol. 38, No. 2
(June 1979), pp. 224–42 and Barbara Allen, Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885–1937: Life
of an Old Bolshevik (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2015).
200 Notes
60 See John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 232
and A.G. Shliapnikov, ‘Vospominaniia’, Proletarskaia Revoliutsiia, No. 10 (1922),
pp. 24–32.
61 Shliapnikov, ‘Vospominaniia’, p. 28: ‘Of all the government institutions the People’s
Commissariat of Labour was organised first.’ See also GARF f. 382 (RSFSR People’s
Commissariat of Labour), op. 1, dd. 10–11.
62 GARF f. 382, op. 1, d. 19, l. 113–22.
63 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972–80), vol. 44, p. 95.
64 Lenin, Collected Works, vols 42, 63–6, 98, 128, 143, vol. 36, pp. 520–3.
65 For background biographical information on Nogin, see V. Arkhangel’sky,
Nogin: zhizn’ zamechatel’nikh lyudei (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1964).
66 GARF f. 130, op. 2, d. 1 (2), l. 233.
67 GARF f. 382, op. 1, d. 19, ll. 111–68.
68 DSV, vol. 3, pp. 104–6.
69 GARF f. 382, op. 1, d 19, l. 88.
70 GARF f. 382, op. 1, d 19, ll. 92–8.
71 GARF f. 382, op. 1, d. 9, l. 85
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.
74 GARF f. 382, op. 1, d. 3, l. 65.
75 Ibid., l. 66.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid.
80 GARF f. 382, op. 1, d. 9, l. 65.
81 Ibid., l. 64
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid., l. 64 ob.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid., l. 57.
91 Ibid., l. 56.
92 Ibid., l. 55.
93 One of the relatives reinstated illegally to the commissariat staff by Shliapnikov.
Ibid., l. 56.
Notes 201
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid., l. 51.
96 Ibid.
97 GARF f. 130, op. 2, d. 11, l.15.
98 Ibid.
99 Ibid.
100 Ibid.
101 GARF f. 382, op. 1, d. 9, ll. 51–40.
102 RGASPI f. 17, op. 2, d. 2, ll. 1–2.
103 Ibid., l. 2.
104 RGASPI f. 17, op. 2, d. 3, l. 1.
105 Ibid., l. 2.
106 RGASPI f. 19 (Sovnarkom and STO RSFSR), op. 1, d. 205, l. 1. The Sovnarkom
minutes read: ‘4. Announcement of Nogin on his leaving the collegium of the
People’s Commissariat of labour in view of his entering Vesenkha. 5. Appointment
as People’s Commissar for Labour (instead of Shliapnikov) of Comrade Shmidt.
Sverdlov suggested it, send for confirmation to VTsIK. 6. Appointment of Radus-
Zenkovich as Deputy People’s Commissar for Labour.’
107 GARF f. 382, op. 1, d. 9, ll. 10-45.
108 Ibid., l. 20.
109 See Nogin still participating in Sovnarkom sittings in May and June 1919: RGASPI
f. 130, op. 3, dd. 39, 40, 42, 47.
110 Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 44, p. 170. However, even in this remote location
Shliapnikov still managed to get himself into a conflict with fellow organizers
in the Gubkom of the CP of Astrakhan (p. 170).The Central Committee got
wind of this and on 19 December Shliapnikov’s new conflict was discussed at
its sitting: ‘From communications with Trotsky it emerges that a conflict has
arisen between Shliapnikov and Bosh from one side, and Zaks from the other. It
has emerged that Bosh has already left for Moscow so that the conflict has been
liquidated. Concerning the future, it was decided that in the case of the emergence
of conflict to allow Trotsky to decide the question and summon Shliapnikov
from Astrakhan through the CC.’ In the end, however, this was not necessary and
Shliapnikov remained in Astrakhan until at least February 1919 (p. 193). Further
correspondence reveals that Shliapnikov was back in Moscow by April 1921 at
the latest (vol. 45, p. 114), but that Lenin was dissuaded from appointing him
to certain positions in the government because of his heavy-handedness. In one
note of this period Lenin wrote, in relation to a government appointment, that
‘Shliapnikov will not do…great tact is essential’ (vol. 45, p. 253).
111 DSV, vol. 7, pp. 48–9.
112 Daniels, Conscience of the Revolution, p. 108.
202 Notes
113 V.I. Lenin, ‘Speech to 3rd All-Russian Congress of Economic Work Councils’,
January 1920 in Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenia, vol. XXV, p. 17.
114 Ibid., pp. 17–19.
115 Ibid.
116 Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenia, 5th edition, vol. XXXX, p. 378.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid.
119 Ibid.
120 Ekonomicheskaia Zhizn’, No. 63 (28 March 1920), p. 3.
121 Deviatyi s”ezd RKP(b), Mart-aprel’ 1920 goda. Protokoly (Moscow: Gosizdat
Politicheskoi Litertury, 1960), pp. 115–27.
122 Ibid., pp. 150–5.
123 Leon Trotsky, Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): A Reply to
Karl Kautsky (New York: Workers Party of America, 1922), pp. 115, 161.
124 Deviatyi s”ezd RKP(b), pp. 410–11.
125 Ibid., p. 204.
126 Krupskaia, ‘Sistema Teilora i organizatsiia raboty sovetskikh uchrezhdenii’,
Krasnaia Nov’ No. 1 (1921), pp. 140–5.
127 Ibid., 140–1.
128 Ibid.
129 Ibid.
130 Ibid.
131 Ibid., pp. 140–5.
132 1924 USSR Constitution, articles 56 and 57 in A.L. Unger, Constitutional
Development in the USSR (New York: Pica Press, 1981), p. 70.
133 Baylis, Governing by Committee. Collegial Leadership in Advanced Societies
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 3.
134 Max Weber, A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, The Theory of Social and
Economic Organization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 392–407.
135 Ibid. Baylis, Governing by Committee, p. 156. This negative characterization of
collegiality in modern political systems seems to be confirmed by the rarity
of collegial government in practice. Baylis highlights that in modern history,
‘Switzerland is the only nation in which both formal and de facto collegial
leadership have persisted…over an extended and uninterrupted period of time,
now some 140 years’ (p. 21). While Baylis’s case study of collegial leadership in
the Swiss political system demonstrates that it is not impossible for a system of
this type to survive, it also highlights specific features that allow it to occur: the
‘political culture and social peculiarities of Switzerland’ provide a highly
favourable setting for collegial government: in particular the cross-cutting
pluralism of language, religion and class, and its strong institutional traditions.
Notes 203
Moreover, its relative ‘economic success’ (i.e. its leading position in international
finance and large foreign investment) make collegiality possible as the affluent
Swiss are able to tolerate inefficiencies in policy-making. If these are the necessary
conditions for successful collegial administration, then it seems that its chances of
survival in the conditions of the early Soviet period were very slim (pp. 32–3).
136 Cited in D. Rowney, Transition to Technocracy. The Structural Origins of the Soviet
Administrative State (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 10.
137 Baylis, Governing by Committee, p. 156.
138 Ibid., p. 156.
139 Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organizations, pp. 329–41.
Chapter 6
1 L.D. Trotsky, quoted in Shachtman, The Struggle for the New Course, published
in one volume with his translation of Leon Trotsky’s The New Course
(New York: New International Publishing Company, 1943), p. 54.
2 Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii raboche-krestianskogo pravitel’stva RSFSR
(Moscow and Petrograd: 1917–22), pp. 1–2.
3 RGASPI, f. 19, op. 1, dd. 370–406.
4 RGASPI f. 19, op. 3, dd. 150–376. See also G.I. Leplevskii, O rabote V.I. Lenina v
Sovnarkome v 1921–1922 gg. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1971).
5 RGASPI f. 17, op. 3, dd. 1–15.
6 Ibid., d. 33, l. 2.
7 Ibid., d. 261, l. 4.
8 Ibid., d. 277, l. 1.
9 Ibid., dd. 52–60.
10 Ibid., dd. 61–3.
11 Ibid., dd. 127–57. The practice of telephone surveys originated in late December
1920 and the frequency quickly accelerated in early 1921. Ibid., d. 137.
12 RGASPI f. 17, op. 3, dd. 195–286.
13 V. Durdenevskii, ‘Sovet Narodnykh Komissarov’, Sovetskoe pravo, No. 1 (1922),
pp. 66–7.
14 RGASPI f. 17, op. 3, d. 310, l. 2.
15 DSV, vol. 5, pp. 425–6.
16 Lidiia Fotieva, Iz zhizni V.I. Lenina (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury,
1967), p.107. Ia.I. Gindin, Vospominaniia o Vladimire Iliche (Moscow: Politizdat,
1973), p. 9.
17 See K.M. Anderson (ed.), Stenogrammy zasedanii Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) 1923–
1938 gg., 3 vols (Moscow: Rosspen, 2007).
204 Notes
39 Ibid., pp. 86–7.
40 Ibid. 87.
41 Ibid., pp. 86–8.
42 Ibid., p. 88.
43 Ibid., p. 144.
44 Ibid., p. 145.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., p. 525.
47 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, dd. 62–77.
48 N.S. Simonov, ‘Reforma politicheskaia stroiia: zamysly i real’nost’ (1921–1923gg.)’,
Voprosy istorii KPSS, No. 1 (1991), p. 47.
49 RGASPI f. 50, op. 1, d. 6, ll. 200–5.
50 Ibid., ll. 201.
51 Iu.N. Amiantov (ed.), Protokoly zasedanii Soveta Narodnykh Komissarov RSFSR
(Moscow: Rosspen, 2006), pp. 20–398.
52 GARF f. 130, op. 3, dd. 39–49.
53 Ibid., op. 4, d. 1, ll. 58–101.
54 RGASPI f. 19, op. 1, dd. 416–20. RGASPI f. 19, op. 1, dd. 458–540.
55 Odinadtsatyi s”ezd RKP(b), p. 86.
56 RGASPI f. 17, op. 3, d. 58 (point 6), d. 60 (point 1), d. 85, d. 97, d. 122.
57 Ibid., dd. 134, 153, 155, 183, 184, 187, 210, 213, 227, 233, 234, 241, 242, 244,. 245.
58 Ibid., dd. 259, 261, 263, 265, 268, 270, 272, 278, 281, 283, 284, 288, 290, 304,. 307,
316, 317, 320 and f. 17, op. 86, d. 17, l. 119.
59 Ibid., d. 58.
60 Ibid., d. 60.
61 Ibid., d. 122.
62 Ibid., d. 134.
63 Ibid., d. 153.
64 Ibid., d. 281.
65 Ibid., d. 263.
66 Ibid., d. 316.
67 Ibid., d. 284.
68 Ibid., d. 288.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid., d. 307.
71 Ibid., op. 86, d. 17, ll. 119–20.
72 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 45 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972–80),
pp. 428–9.
73 Ibid., p. 706.
74 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 251.
206 Notes
75 Ibid., d. 253.
76 Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 45, p. 707.
77 RGASPI f. 17, op. 3, d. 280.
78 Ibid., d. 52, ll. 1–2.
79 Ibid. f. 19, op. 1, d. 340, ll. 1–2.
80 Ibid. f. 17, op. 3, d. 55, ll. 1–2.
81 Ibid. f. 19, op. 3, d. 344, l. 1 and d. 246, l. 2.
82 Ibid. f. 17, op. 3, d. 64, ll. 1–2.
83 GARF f. 130, op. 4, d. 1, l. 68.
84 RGASPI f. 17, op. 3, d. 69 and GARF f. 130, op. 4, d. 1, l. 90.
85 Ibid., dd. 143, 144, 146.
86 Ibid. f. 19, op. 1, d. 416, ll. 1–3.
87 Ibid. f. 17, op. 3, d. 144, ll. 1–2.
88 Ibid. d. 146, l. 1.
89 Ibid. f. 19, op. 1, d. 416, ll. 1–3.
90 Ibid., d. 417, ll. 1–2.
91 Ibid. f. 17, op. 3, dd. 210, 213, 233, 242.
92 Ibid., dd. 268, 270, 272, 278.
93 Ibid., op. 87, d. 29, ll. 1–7.
94 Ibid., dd. 31–5.
95 Ibid., f. 50, op. 1, d. 3, l. 20.
96 Ibid., ll. 117–19.
97 Ibid.
98 Ibid., l. 120.
99 Ibid., ll. 121–22.
100 Ibid., l. 122.
101 Ibid., ll. 122–7.
102 Ibid., ll. 134–47.
103 L.D. Trotsky (trans. Max Shachtman) The New Course (New York: New
International Publishing Company, 1943).
104 L.D. Trotsky (trans. Brian Pierce), Tasks Before the Twelfth Congress of the Russian
Communist Party (London: New Park Publications, 1975), pp. 27–30.
105 RGASPI f. 50, op. 1, d. 3, l. 200.
106 Ibid.
107 Ibid., op. 2, d. 3, ll. 200–5.
108 Dvenadtsatyi s”ezd rossiskoi kommunisticheskoi partii (bolshevikov).
Stenograficheskii otchet. 17–25 aprelia 1923 (Moscow : Izdatel’stvo krasnaia nov’,
1923), pp. 40–1.
109 Ibid., pp. 41–3.
110 Ibid. pp. 42–4. Stalin expressed similar sentiments in his organizational report, stating
that Lenin ‘said that the leading role of the Party must be strengthened’, pp. 55–6.
Notes 207
1 11 Ibid., pp. 42–4.
112 Ibid., p. 44.
113 Ibid., pp. 43–4.
114 Ibid., p. 119.
115 Ibid., pp. 119–20.
116 Ibid., p. 319.
117 Ibid., p. 106.
118 Ibid., p. 114.
119 Ibid.
120 Ibid., pp. 617–21.
121 Quoted in Max Shachtman, The Struggle for the New Course, published in one
volume with his translation of Trotsky’s The New Course, p. 54.
122 Trotsky, The New Course, p. 25.
Chapter 7
1 RGASPI, f. 19, op. 1, dd. 407–57 and 57 out of 105 STO sittings. Ibid., dd. 458–
540. and even less in STO, just 5 out of 96. Ibid., op. 3, dd. 281–376.
2 L. Trotsky, My Life (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), p. 482.
3 T.H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom 1917–22 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979), pp. 107–8, 112, 119, 225–6.
4 V.I. Lenin, Lenin, V.I., Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenia (PSS), vol. 52, p. 36.
5 Rykov was not, as is mistakenly written in his official Granat Biography, appointed
as Sovnarkom deputy chairman. He was appointed only as Lenin’s deputy in STO
at this time. V.I. Zhelieznova (ed.), ‘Rykov, Aleksei Ivanovich’, Entsiklopedicheskii
slovar’ Granat, 46, Part 2, Columns 223–30 (Moscow: Granat, 1910–48).
6 Samuel Oppenheim, ‘The Supreme Economic Council 1917–21’, Soviet Studies,
Vol. 25, No. 1 (July 1973) pp. 3–37, p. 7.
7 Ibid., pp. 3–27.
8 Odinadtsatyi s”ezd RKP(b), Mart-aprel’ 1922 goda. Stenograficheskii otchet
(Moscow: 1961), pp. 36–7.
9 S.A. Oppenheim, ‘The Supreme Economic Council 1917–21’, Soviet Studies, Vol.
25, No. 1 (July 1973), pp. 11, 23–4.
10 S.A. Oppenheim, ‘Aleksei Ivanovich Rykov (1881–1938): A Political Biography’,
PhD Dissertation, 1972, Indiana University, p. 215: ‘STO was the body which did
what Vesenkha had been organized for, i.e., to unify the economic activities of the
government’.
11 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 169, l. 1.
12 Simon Liberman, Building Lenin’s Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1945), p. 65.
208 Notes
13 Ibid., pp. 65–6.
14 RGASPI f. 19, op. 3, dd. 111, 113, 117, 122, 126, 130, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139,
140, 144, 148, 150, 152, 154, 156, 158, 159, 162, 164, 168, 170, 172, 173, 177, 179,
180, 182, 185, 194, 197, 198, 200, 202, 204, 206, 208, 210, 212, 214, 216.
15 Ibid., dd. 220–39.
16 Ibid., f. 17, op. 3, d. 185, l. 2.
17 Ibid., f. 19, op. 1, dd. 430, 434, 435.
18 Ibid. and op. 3 dd. 220, 221, 223, 226, 228, 231, 234, 236, 237, 238.
19 Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenia, vol. 53, pp. 4, 5, 13, 23, 26–7, 50, 65, 198, 289.
20 Oppenheim, ‘Aleksei Ivanovich Rykov’, p. 218.
21 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3,d. 184, l. 2. As early as 20 April 1921 the Politburo had
discussed ‘Rykov’s illness’ RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 153, l. 2. On the day of Rykov’s
appointment as deputy Lenin wrote a letter to Rykov’s wife, enquiring on his
health.
22 Ibid., f. 19, op 1, dd. 436–9.
23 Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenia, vol. 53, p. 140–2.
24 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 237, l. 1. (point 1. Telephone survey 27 Nov 1921 ‘on the
illness of Rykov’).
25 Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967),
p. 179; N.K. Krupskaia, Vospominaniia o Lenine (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1957), p. 427.
26 Krupskaia, Vospominaniia o Lenine, pp. 428.
27 Krupskaia, Vospominaniia o Lenine, pp. 427–8. Lars Lih, Bread and Authority in
Russia 1914–21 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 79.
28 There is some confusion among Tsiurupa’s biographers as to the precise date of
his appointments as deputy, and then full People’s Commissar for Foodstuffs. This
confusion was complicated by the fact that Krupskaia incorrectly recalled in her
memoirs that Tsiurupa was made commissar in early 1919. However the archive
sources allow as to pin-point the precise dates of his appointments. Tsiurupa was
made deputy People’s Commissar for Foodstuffs on 29 November 1917 (RGASPI
f. 19, op. 1, d. 14, l. 2). He was confirmed by Sovnarkom as full People’s Commissar
for Foodstuffs on 25 February 1918 (ibid., d. 69, l. 1 ob).
29 Odinadtsatyi s”ezd RKP(b), p. 37.
30 G.M. Leplevskii, On the Work of V.I. Lenin in Sovnarkom 1921–22
(Moscow: Politizdat, 1971), p. 11.
31 V.A. Tsiurupa, Kolokola Pamiati (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury,
1986), p. 122.
32 Leplevskii, On the Work of V.I. Lenin in Sovnarkom 1921–22, pp. 11–12.
33 RGASPI f. 17, op. 2, dd. 16, 24, 45.
34 Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967),
p. 179.
Notes 209
73 Ibid., p. 379.
74 RGASPI, f. 19, op.1, dd. 478–503.
75 Ibid., dd. 504–18.
76 Ibid., op. 3, dd. 301–76.
77 Ibid., d. 290, l. 3 (point 30).
78 GARF f. 5446, op. 31, d. 17, l. 140.
79 Ibid., l. 62.
80 Ibid., d. 40, l. 86.
81 Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenia, vol. 33, p. 261.
82 Ibid.
83 Lenin’s letter to Avanesov on Tsiurupa’s illness on 1 September 1922 in Polnoe
Sobranie Sochinenia, vol. 54, pp. 277–8. The Politburo discussed Rykov’s leave due
to illness on 7 September 1922. See RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 311, l. 3 (point 18).
84 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 312, l. 4.
85 Richard Pipes (ed.), The Unknown Lenin. From the Secret Archive (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1996), p. 171.
86 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 312, l. 2 (point 16).
87 Odinadtsatyi s”ezd RKP(b), p. 35.
88 RGASPI f. 17, op. 3, d. 297, l. 2 (point 6).
89 Ibid., p. 7.
90 Ibid., op. 3, dd. 357–76.
91 Ibid., op. 1, dd. 519–40.
92 Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenia, vol. 45, p. 323.
93 Ibid.
94 ‘Journal of Lenin’s Duty Secretaries’, Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 42
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), p. 470.
95 Ibid., p. 10.
96 Ibid., pp. 328–9.
97 Ibid., pp. 331–2.
98 Ibid.
99 Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenia, vol. 54, p. 327.
100 Ibid.
101 Journal of Lenin’s Duty Secretaries, p. 11.
102 Ibid., p. 12.
103 Isaac Deutscher claimed that ‘On the 11th April (1922) at a session of the
Politburo, Lenin proposed that Trotsky should be appointed deputy chairman
of the council of People’s Commissars.’ Archival sources reveal no sitting on this
date, and no mention of appointing Trotsky as deputy can be found in any of
the Politburo minutes of spring–summer 1922. Deutscher gives the citation ‘The
Trotsky Archive’ as his source, but subsequent researchers have not come across
Notes 211
proper context the speech seems more like a discreet excuse. Trotsky had often
reiterated the real reason for his refusal over the course of the preceding two years.
Cited in R.V. Danilov, ‘We Are Starting to Learn about Trotsky’, History Workshop,
No. 29 (Spring 1990), pp. 143–4.
115 Liberman, Building Lenin’s Russia, p. 67. See for example Tsiurupa’s contrasting
views with the other deputies on the external trade monopoly in letter in RGASPI,
f. 158, op. 1, d. 108, l. 5.
116 Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 2009), p. 299.
117 L. D Trotsky, The New Course (New York: New International Publishing Company,
1943), pp. 78–85.
Conclusion
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Fond (f.), Opis (op.), Delo (d.)
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Central Control Commission of the Party 167 seventh 118
Central Executive Committee of Soviets. sixth 91
See VTsIK sovereignty of 26, 170,
Central Statistical Administration 127 171, 173
Cheka 52, 69, 80 third, fourth 35
Chicherin, G. V. 42–3 Constituent Assembly 22,
Civil War 12, 20, 37–8, 118, 120, 125, 133 26, 46
effect on regime 4, 6, 9, 24, 39, 40, 52, dissolution of 24, 27, 33, 125
85, 91–2, 118, 121, 125, 126, 127, 131, Constitution of the RSFSR 99, 102, 103,
144–5, 169, 1171, 72, 173, 174 107, 108, 114–15, 122, 172
226 Index
Council of People’s Commissars. See Kremlin 42, 59, 60, 63, 64, 70, 71, 76, 80,
Sovnarkom 106, 153, 154, 155, 160, 164
Krestinskii, N. N. 53, 94, 127, 152,
Defence Council 39–40, 126–7. See also 190n. 87
STO Kronstadt uprising 125–6
Democratic Centralists 118–19, 121, 126 Krupskaia, N. K. 42, 100, 121, 122, 153
Deputy Chairmen of Sovnarkom 150–68
dictatorship of the proletariat 3, 7, 14, 18, ‘labour armies’ 139
27, 36, 47, 172 Latsis, M. I. 90, 180n. 23
Duma 1, 46, 88 Left Communists 36, 37, 93, 94, 108,
Dzerzhinsky, F. E. 69, 94 126, 133
resign from Sovnarkom 35, 46
economy 39, 46, 118, 120, 126, 145, 146, Left SRs 9, 22, 23, 45, 46, 51, 88, 104, 107,
151, 171 108
coalition government 23–4, 25–37,
Fomin, V. V. 137 89–94, 101
food supplies 1, 7, 25, 32, 36, 38, 42, 47, Mirbach assassination 90
49, 50, 95, 96, 110, 126, 130, 131, 153 resign from Sovnarkom 52
foreign policy and relations 37, 38, 47, 50, legitimacy 2, 6, 22, 24, 33
95, 125, 131 regime’s two sources of 170, 171,
Fotieva, L. A. 55, 59, 60–1, 62, 64, 66, 172, 173
67, 156 Lenin, chairman of Sovnarkom, chapters
2, 3 and 6
Germany 15 assassination attempt 42, 153, 160
peace with 23, 34–5, 38, 46, 86, 88, 92, illness chapter 7, 133, 136, 169
93, 94 writings 6, 12–20, 35, 108, 164,
Rykov goes for treatment in 152, 154, 165, 173
155, 157 Little Sovnarkom. See Malyi Sovnarkom
Gorbunov, N. P. 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, Lunacharsky, A. V. 32, 44, 98, 161
66–70, 76–7
Gosplan 129, 142, 146, 160, 161, 165, 167 Malyi Sovnarkom 30–9, 49, 50, 156, 157,
159, 160, 161
industry 38, 39, 49, 118, 120, 124, 130, Martov, Iu. O. 89, 92, 93, 104
140–1 Marxism 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 13, 16, 50, 132,
interdepartmental consultation 61, 73, 147, 171
128, 171 Mensheviks 22, 26, 89, 90, 92, 104, 105
Izmailovich, A. A. 29, 37, 91 Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC)
1, 2
Kadets 26, 27 Miliutin, V. P. 119, 121
Kalinin, M. I. 53, 77, 162
Kamenev, L. B. 53, 87, 88, 137, 140, 141, NEP (New Economic Policy) 120, 126,
142, 144 131, 133, 134, 139–40, 151, 153
as Sovnarkom Deputy Chairman 149, Nevskii, V. I. 39, 106, 180n. 23
154, 158, 162–5, 166 Nicholas II (Tsar) 1, 21, 64, 81
Karelin, V. A. 25, 29, 30, 32, 36, 45, 46, 89 Nogin, V. P. 109–17
Kautsky, Karl 13
Kolchak, Admiral A. V. 38 Osinsky, N. (V. V. Obolenskii) 45, 53, 118–
Kolegaev, A. K. 25, 29, 32, 34 21, 132–8, 140, 141, 142–7, 170, 173
Kollontai, A. M. 44, 45, 94, 126
Krasin, L. B. 39, 137, 145, 146, 152 Pannekoek, Anton 13
Index 227
Paris Commune 16, 18, 147 Shliapnikov, A. G. 30, 45, 62, 105, 109–17,
Parliament, as bourgeois con 3, 13–18, 126
27, 174 Shreider, A. A. 30, 179n. 21
Congress of Soviets as Soviet Shteinberg, I. Z. 32, 34, 46, 92, 93, 107
parliament 89–90, 96, 172 Skrypnik, M. 58, 59, 60, 61, 68–9, 74
parliamentarism and separation of Smirnov, V. M. 118–19
powers 23, 147 Smolny Institute 21, 22, 35, 57–8, 63, 65,
peasantry 1, 3, 22, 23, 25, 28–30, 36–8, 74, 80, 84, 99, 106
74–9, 101, 125, 126 ‘Soviet Democracy’ 3, 22, 27, 80–1, 125,
Committees of the Village Poor 134, 174
(Kombedy) 36 idea of 11–20
Peasants’ Congress 29, 37 Soviets 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 18, 21–3, 24–8, 29,
People’s Commissariats 30, 42, 56, 61, 80, 33, 35, 36, 45, 46, 48
102, 106, 107, 108, 153, 156, 157, 158, local soviets 63
160, 162 relationship between party and soviets
Pestkovskii, S. S. 105 53, 84
Petrovskii, G. I. 32, 180n. 23 Sverdlov and 86–92
Podbelskii, V. N. 100 Sovnarkom 21–54, 55, 83, 125, 148
Pokrovskii, M. N. 90 and agenda 40–1, 128–31
political police. See Cheka appeals against decisions of 137–9
Pravda 26, 28, 51, 60, 132 business 46–50
Proshyan, P. O. 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 46 Spiridonova, M. A. 30, 34, 36, 37, 91
Provisional Government 1, 8, 13, 21, Stalin, I. V. 30, 32, 39, 43, 44, 51, 52, 53,
23, 25, 26, 45, 65, 98, 109, 134, 60, 81, 83, 84, 119, 128, 142, 162, 163,
186n. 2 165, 166
as People’s Commissar for Nationalities
Rabkrin (Workers’ and Peasants’ 43, 105–6
Inspection) 3, 4, 20, 72, 127, 138, 147, Stasova, E. D. 84, 85
157, 160, 161, 164–5 STO (Labour and Defense Council, just
Reception (priemnaia) 3, 4, 10, 12, 56, 63, Defense until March 1920) 41, 62,
73–81 65, 67, 126–7, 128–30, 137, 139, 142,
Red Guards 21, 27, 74 149, 150–7, 160–3, 167
Revolutionary Military Council 39 Stuchka, P. I. 61, 80, 107
Right (and moderate) SRs 22, 26, 90–1, 92, Supreme Economic Council.
93, 104, 105 See Vesenkha
Russian past, continuity with 3 Sverdlov, Ia. M. 10, 32, 33, 43–4,
in personnel 41, 55, 98, 67, 109 51, 113
in political culture. See reception as chairman of CEC and Party
Rykov, A. I. 52, 119, 121 Secretariat 83–96
as Sovnarkom deputy
149–67 Tomskii, M. P. 109, 110, 114–15, 119, 121,
162
Sapronov, T. V. 118–19, 121 Trotsky, L. D. 4, 7, 30, 32, 35, 38, 39, 43,
Schmidt, V. V. 101–17 51, 53, 85, 88, 92, 99, 100, 106, 107,
Secretariat of Communist Party 52–3, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 125, 136, 139,
84–5, 128 140–2, 146–7, 160–1, 162
growth of proposed as Sovnarkom Deputy 149,
Secretariat of Sovnarkom 41, 57, 60–9, 72, 165–7
75, 78, 128 Trutovskii, V. Ie 29, 30, 31, 32
Semashko, N. A. 152 Tsiurupa, A. D. 42
228 Index
as deputy chairman of Sovnarkom 149, VTsIK 28, 29, 25–36, 39, 52, 72, 77, 85,
153–66 88–96, 102, 103, 114, 115, 116, 123,
as People’s Commissar for Food Supply 127, 133–6, 138, 147, 151, 157, 159,
64, 67, 78, 137 170–1, 173
Vesenkha (Supreme Economic Council) ‘war communism’ 12, 38, 120, 125, 126, 153
32, 45, 52, 70, 117, 127, 133, 137, 151, Workers’ Opposition 45, 126
160, 166, 207n. 10
Vikzhel 87, 105 Zaks, G. D. 30, 179, 201
Volodicheva, M. A. 59, 60 Zinoviev, G. E. 53, 93, 140, 142, 144–6