Just as the party came to overshadow the work of Sovnarkom, so Sovnarkom came to overshadow the work of the Soviet Executive. Although the Bolshevik seizure of power had been carried out in the name of the Soviet Congress, Lenin had no intention of ruling through the Congress, or its permanent executive. He did not believe in the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, even when the parliament in question was a Soviet one with, technically at least, an inbuilt Bolshevik majority. In the first weeks after the October coup the Soviet Executive was a real parliamentary brake on Sovnarkom. The Left SRs, the Anarchists and the tiny group of Menshevik Internationalists grouped around Gorky’s Novaia zhizn’, were a vocal opposition, which, if joined by the Bolshevik moderates, could almost overturn the Leninist majority. In mid-November, when the leaders of the Peasant Soviet, or rather its left wing,fn7 were added to the Soviet Executive, the potential strength of this opposition was even further increased. On 24 November it actually gained a majority of one for a motion of censure against the Bolshevik closure of the Petrograd City Duma eight days before, although on a recount the decision was reversed.
Yet the merger with the Peasant Soviet was also a critical turning point in the demise of the Soviet Executive as a legislative institution (which was almost certainly what Lenin had intended). To the 108 peasant deputies were added a further 100 delegates from the revolutionary organizations in the army and navy, and half that number again from the trade unions. This more than tripled its size, to 366 members, which was far too many to serve as an effective executive body. The burden of decision-making was thus shifted to Sovnarkom. From mid-November the Soviet Executive began to meet less often (once or twice a week), while Sovnarkom meetings became more frequent (once or twice a day). The volume of legislative acts brought before the Soviet Executive also sharply diminished, as Sovnarkom began to rule by decree. On 4 November Sovnarkom decreed itself the right to pass urgent legislation without approval from the Soviet — a clear breach of the principle of Soviet power. The Bolshevik moderates voted with the opposition against the decree, but it was still passed by two votes in the Soviet Executive. Kamenev resigned as the Chairman of the Soviet Executive and joined the opposition in a concerted effort to defend the sovereignty of the Soviet. But the Leninists pushed on. Sverdlov, who replaced Kamenev, was an ardent advocate of the party dictatorship and faithfully carried out Lenin’s instructions to bring it about by centralizing power through Sovnarkom. On 17 November he presented the Soviet Executive with a ‘constitutional instruction’: while formally reiterating that Sovnarkom was responsible to the Soviet and had to present it with all its legislative acts for approval, it did not specify when this had to be done. Sovnarkom, in other words, could publish a legally binding decree without the prior approval of the Soviet, which increasingly became its practice. On 12 December the Soviet Executive met for the first time in two weeks: during its recess Sovnarkom had begun peace talks with the Central Powers, declared war on the Ukraine and introduced martial law in Petrograd and Moscow. As Sukhanov protested, all these measures had been implemented without discussion in the Soviet. The principle of Soviet power, by which the Bolsheviks claimed their right to rule, had been buried; the Soviet Executive had been reduced to a ‘sorry parody of a revolutionary parliament’.45
From the first days of the new regime the Bolsheviks had set out to destroy, as ‘counter-revolutionaries’, all those parties which had opposed the October seizure of power. On 27 October Sovnarkom banned the opposition press. The ban was greeted with outrage. The Bolshevik moderates voted against it in the Soviet Executive on 4 November; the five resignations from the Bolshevik Central Committee that day, followed by an equal number of resignations from Sovnarkom, were also partly in protest against the ban; while the Printers’ Union threatened a national strike unless the freedom of the press was restored. But none of this was enough to prevent the MRC from sending in Bolshevik squads to smash many of the opposition presses, to confiscate their newsprint and arrest their editors. Most of the opposition papers were simply driven underground and soon reappeared with a slightly altered name. The SR paper, Volia naroda, reappeared the next day as Volia, and later on as Narod. The socialist paper, Den’ (Day), appeared as Morning, Midday, Afternoon, Evening, Night, Midnight, and so on.46
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