From this point on the Bolsheviks began to encourage the process of nationalization, the second major plank of War Communism after the war against the market. Until then, it had developed largely from below, on the initiative of the local Soviets and workers’ organizations, and had assumed the character of a revolution in the factories with the workers using the process to impose their own control on the managers. Now, with Lenin’s backing, it was taken over by the central state and its All-Russian Council for the Economy (VSNKh), which used the process to replace the workers’ system of factory management with state-appointed (‘bourgeois’) managers aiming to restore discipline on the shop floor. This in effect meant shifting the centre of industrial power from the factory committees and the trade unions to the managerial apparatus of the party-state.65
The change in policy was clearly motivated by the growing threat from the working class. The easiest way to stop the factory organizations from acting as a channel for the workers’ opposition movement was to bring them under central dictation. The Sovnarkom Decree of 28 June, by which most of Russia’s large-scale industry was nationalized, came just three days before a general strike in Petrograd called by the Extraordinary Assemblies in protest against the Bolshevik regime. Although the decree had been in preparation for several weeks, there is no doubt that its precise timing was largely dictated by the need to preempt this strike.fn6 Since 9 May, when the Cheka had opened fire on a crowd of demonstrating workers in the Petrograd suburb of Kolpino, there had been a spiral of strikes and workers’ protests, industry had been brought to a virtual halt, and in those cities where free polling was allowed, the Mensheviks and SRs had swept the board. In short, it appeared as if the Petrograd strike, if it was allowed to go ahead, might easily develop into a national strike, perhaps leading to the downfall of the regime. This was also a critical moment in the civil war, with the Czechs and the SRs building up a power base on the Volga and widespread revolts in the Red rear. The Bolshevik Commissar for the Press, Volodarsky, was assassinated by an SR on 20 June. The Bolshevik leadership was afraid that this might be the start of a coup d’étât by the SRs and the Mensheviks. They thought it was essential to bring the factories under state control and to head off the threat of a general strike in their last remaining stronghold of power.
The Decree on Nationalization transferred the management of the factories from the workers’ organizations to the party apparatus. The party bosses used it to threaten the workers with dismissal if they went ahead with their planned strike. The strike organizers were arrested — especially those who were known to be connected with the SRs and the Mensheviks — and dozens of them shot as ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Not surprisingly, given this intimidation, very few workers came out on to the streets for the general strike. The Bolsheviks drove home their victory: the Extraordinary Assemblies were outlawed, their leaders imprisoned and the dissident trade unions purged. The Mensheviks and SRs were now expelled from the Soviets, denounced as ‘counter-revolutionaries’, and driven underground. The last of the opposition newspapers were shut down. Even Gorky’s Novaia zhizn’, which had helped to organize the Petrograd strike and which had often declared its support for the Extraordinary Assemblies, was finally closed on 16 July. ‘We are heading for a total civil war,’ a despondent Gorky wrote to Ekaterina, ‘and it seems that the war will be a savage one … Oh, how hard it is to live in Russia! We are all so stupid — so fantastically stupid.’66
iii The Colour of Blood
Strange though it may seem, Lenin only became a Russian household name and image in September 1918 — and then only because he had nearly died. During the first ten months of Bolshevik rule, he was rarely seen in public. Shots fired at his car on New Year’s Day had left the leader of the world revolution fearful for his life; and after that he seldom ventured out of his closely guarded quarters in the Smolny or the Kremlin. ‘Nobody even knew Lenin’s face,’ Krupskaya wrote of those early weeks. ‘In the evening he would often stroll around the Smolny and nobody would ever recognize him, since there were still no portraits of him then.’fn767
