At the dawn of USSR regime: Restoration of serfdom
Journey into the history with Mikhail Shereshevskiy

ANALYTICS  06 December 2022 - 15:02

Discourse on early Bolshevism - the era of Lenin and Trotsky (1918-1923), the times when these two major leaders of the regime ruled - reproduces romantic mythology. Bulat Okudzhava's famous song about "commissars in dust helmets" dedicated to the Civil War, numerous films, and some books contribute to this perception of reality. The Bolsheviks were supposedly romantics who dreamed of giving freedom and various material benefits to the working people, although they sometimes "made mistakes". Some Bolsheviks may indeed have thought of themselves in this way, although it is not clear how such thoughts were compatible with their deeds.

Critics usually respond with many words about mass terror and starvation. The fear of ending up in the cellars of the new regime's powerful secret service, the Cheka, was indeed present at the time. Millions of people died from the famine caused by the Bolsheviks' poor economic system and, in part, by the Civil War. Still, even opponents of the Bolsheviks and the USSR like to talk about "workers' power" or about the wars between the Reds and Whites as manifestations of a "class struggle," as a clash between the "ruling working class" and the "former ruling classes of Tsarist Russia." But here even many critics of the Bolsheviks are mistaken. The regime of the Reds, i.e., the Bolsheviks, had nothing to do with the power of the working class.

Thanks to documents published today, such as the collection "Workers' Opposition Movement in Bolshevik Russia 1918" (edited by Dmitry Pavlov) or the works of Dmitry Churakov (e.g., The Working State and the Working Class: The Anatomy of Conflict), we are fairly well informed about how the Bolsheviks destroyed the Soviet system (the elected bodies of worker self-government controlled by assemblies of labor collectives) during 1918.

An alliance of Bolsheviks who made up the country's top leadership, the leadership of its ministries and departments, and non-party officials, that is, an alliance of party Bolsheviks with the tsarist bureaucracy who occupied most seats in the ministries of the new regime, had actually taken power in the country by the spring and summer of 1918. In the autumn of that year, this alliance included thousands of former Tzarist officers in charge of the Red Army. This alliance destroyed all manifestations of worker autonomy. In 1918, the special services and armed formations of the new regime dispersed the Soviets when they made decisions against the Leninist leadership. The regime banned/falsified elections to the Soviets, arrested recalcitrant deputies, and liquidated opposition parties and groups (including socialists and anarchists). The poorly educated rural youth drafted into the Red Army and its commanding officers send troops to suppress workers' protests, strikes, and uprisings.

The power of the workers' councils, which had more or less governed public life on the ground, collapsed in 1918. It turned into a screen behind which hid the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party's top brass and former Tzarist officials. It was this strange symbiosis of bureaucrats (former revolutionaries and those who had persecuted them in the past) under Lenin and Trotsky, a union that relied on power tools, above all the Red Army (its soldiers consisted mainly of several million poorly educated young peasants and were ruled by 20,000 Tzarist officers) that governed the state in the first years after the 1917 revolution.

Paradoxically, the Bolshevik regime, which throughout Soviet history called itself "Soviet Power," was in reality the enemy of the Soviet system. It was born out of a counterrevolutionary anti-Soviet coup in 1918, orchestrated by Lenin and his party in alliance with the former Tzarist officialdom (or part of it).

The state of Lenin and, later, the state of Stalin was, to quote the Russian historian Sergei Pavlyuchenkov, "a matryoshka system". One structure of government was nested in another, and that in a third. The state bureaucratic apparatus of ministries became the owner. It owned factories, managed the process of labor, and appropriated its results; part of it was used to develop industry, part was spent on its own privileged consumption, and part was given to workers in the form of wages (as, in general, any capitalist does). However, the state apparatus itself was owned by the Bolshevik Party, whose cells (party collectives) ran all the departments. The heads of ministries and departments, in turn, were subordinate to the Central Committee of the Party.

Thus, the workers became the property of the state, whose orders they were obliged to obey, while the state became the property of the party bureaucrats, and the party bureaucrats themselves became the property of the party hierarchy, the chiefs, to whom they were obliged to obey without question. This pyramid, based on the domination of a bunch of oligarchs from the Party Central Committee and on a system of exploitation, was what is called the "USSR regime". If we consider socialism to be a society without exploitation, without appropriation of the results of someone else's labor, then there is no socialism in Bolshevik Russia, i.e. in the RSFSR and the USSR, there never was.

However, in some respects, above all with regard to the oppression of factory workers, the Bolshevik regime probably surpassed its Tzarist predecessors or, at any rate, returned to the most savage forms of oppression that existed under Tzarism long before the 1917 revolution.

Thanks to documents published today, such as the collection "The Workers of St. Petersburg and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat", we know that one of the main demands of the workers on strike in Petrograd in 1921 was "to liberate the workers, together with their wives and children, from the factories and plants". The fact is that at that time workers could not voluntarily change their jobs and, accordingly, their place of residence. They, along with their relatives, became serf slaves or semi-slaves, like the serfs of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Historian Leonid Preisman points out that the Kronstadt uprising (February-March 1921) against the Bolsheviks was connected in part to the fact that the sailors who had come to town were shocked by the situation of the workers in the St. Petersburg factories (there were strikes in the city at the time). The problem was not only that the city was starving. The factories and plants were organized in such a way that, according to Kronstadt residents, they resembled prisons. This was one of the factors that influenced the decision of the Kronstadt sailors to oppose Lenin's regime, demanding freedom for the working class and the right of free elections to the Soviets.

Curiously, the Bolsheviks did not conceal from anyone the measures connected with the enslavement of the workers. On the contrary, they discussed them openly. Thus, Lev Trotsky, in his report to the IX Congress of the Bolshevik Party (March-April 1920), stated: "The worker now moves from factory to factory, from factory to factory, not 'at will' as it was called under capitalism, that is, not under the pressure of impersonal economic coercion, not under the shock of hunger, as it was under the reign of capital, - he is and must be sent to certain work at the direction of the union, in accordance with a single economic plan conducted by the corresponding bodies of the workers' state. It follows that workers are now attached to factories and plants, and are moved only on the basis of an order".

The words about the "workers' state" can only raise a smile - we saw above how the workers' councils were replaced by an unelected party dictatorship. But in everything else Trotsky is truthful and there is no reason not to trust him.

In the same report, Trotsky admits that the workers resist this policy: "It follows that workers are now attached to factories and plants and move only by order. Of course, one worker experiences this appointment as a public service, which he performs according to his inner conviction, in the interest of raising the national economy, while another does not yet understand it; the third, the most backward, experiences the new regime today as compulsion and resists it. There are such, and there are many; the best testimony to this is the statistics of the professional movement. In the most important branches of industry, we have 1,150,000 workers, but in reality, we have 850,000, and that was a month and a half or two months ago. Where have 300,000 gone? - They left. Where? - To the countryside, to other fields, to other industries, to speculation. 300,000 to 800,000 is a huge percentage. What do you call that in relation to the soldiers? - Desertion."

Having recounted this, the leader of the Bolsheviks suggests that harsh measures be taken against deserters from the labor front.

Serfdom was abolished in Tzarist Russia in 1861 by Alexander II. However, many people still did not have true freedom of movement. Revolutionary and Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, who was in opposition to the tsarist regime, wrote in his 1903 work "To the Rural Poor": "The Social Democrats demand complete freedom of movement and industry for the people. What does this mean: freedom of movement? It means that in Russia, too, passports must be destroyed (there are no passports in other countries for a long time now) and that no uriadnik (village policeman), no rural chief of police must dare prevent any peasant from settling, and working wherever he pleases. The Russian peasant is still so enslaved by the officialdom that he cannot freely move to the city, and cannot freely go to the new land. The minister orders the governors not to allow unauthorized relocations: the governor knows better than the peasant where the peasant should go! A peasant is a child, he dares not move without authority! Is this not serfdom? Isn't it an outrage on the people, when every impoverished nobleman commands the grown-up owners of the land?"

It is surprising, or perhaps, on the contrary, natural, that by seizing supreme power and becoming a group of oligarchs running the country, Lenin and his associates restored in one form or another the "abuse of the people". It existed in this form in 1919-1921 and, similarly, in 1940-1956. In all, for about a third of the time the Bolshevik regime existed, workers were forcibly attached to their enterprises.

It is no accident that Bolshevik critics referred to Lenin's regime as "commissarocracy"-an analogy to the Tzarist autocracy. The continuity with the policies of the Tzarist regime was manifested not only in the destruction of the legacy of the revolution, the dispersal of the Soviets, the suppression of strikes, and the restoration of the serf system, but also in the attacks on neighboring countries, including Turkestan and the republics of the South Caucasus, and in the suppression of uprisings there, that is, in a repeat of the colonial Tzarist policies.

The Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries (PLSR or Left Essers) advocated the return of "pure Soviet power," i.e., workers' self-government. Many of them fought against the Bolsheviks with arms in their hands, supporting strikes. A conference of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries of the Northern Region was held in Petrograd on January 20, 1919. It adopted the resolution which stated that "the Tzarist counterrevolution and the Bolshevik counterrevolution are identical. In order to finally defeat the Tzarist counterrevolution, it is necessary to eliminate and defeat the Bolshevik one, because it generates it... The centralist, autocratic power of the Bolsheviks is restoring the same gendarme bayonet system as it was under the Tzarist regime."

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