Their first priority was to win control of the Soviets and other vital organs, such as the trade unions. The Mensheviks and SRs still had a presence in these bodies, albeit as ‘non-party’ delegates after their parties were banned in the summer of 1918.fn8 All the Communist electoral tactics employed in this century to subvert democratic bodies were first developed in the Russian civil war. The Bolsheviks engaged in widespread ballot-rigging and intimidation of the opposition. Voting at Soviet and trade union congresses was nearly always done by an open show of hands so that to vote against the Bolsheviks was to invite harassment from the Cheka, whose presence was always strongly felt at election meetings. With a secret ballot the Bolsheviks would not have won very many elections. ‘Soviets without the Communists!’ was increasingly the slogan of the workers and the peasants. But the Bolsheviks did away with this ‘convention of bourgeois democracy’ on the grounds that a secret ballot was no longer needed in the ‘higher form of freedom’ apparently enjoyed by the Soviet people. And with the system of open voting — which was the tradition of the Russian village commune — there were very few elections they could lose. Even the artists of the Marinsky Opera, hardly a bastion of Communism, voted unanimously for the Bolsheviks in the Soviet elections of 1919.
The enforcement of voting by party slates also worked to the advantage of the Bolsheviks. As the only legal party within the Soviets, they alone could meet as a caucus to co-ordinate strategy, whereas other parties and factions remained divided on the Congress floor. It meant that, even as a small minority, the Bolsheviks could often win elections in the local Soviets by presenting themselves as the only party capable of being held responsible for the actions of the central government. With a bare majority the Bolshevik slate in its entirety would often form the Soviet executive rather than seats being allocated according to the strength of the different factions. It was a case of winner takes all.
Once in command of the Soviet executives, the Bolsheviks aimed to centralize power under their control. Soviet congresses were seldom called and, in their absence, power was exercised by the Soviet executives along with their permanent departmental staffs, which were appointed in each policy area. The socialist opposition called this the ispolkomshchina, or executive dictatorship. During the revolutionary period the Soviet executives had been largely made up of peasant and worker volunteers. But they were now increasingly made up of full-time professional bureaucrats paid by the central party-state and only seldom reelected. Plough-pushers were giving way to pen-pushers.
Increasingly, the work of the Soviets was driven by the party apparatus. The party was expanding its control into both the administrative and the political branches of the state. Until 1919, the party as such had all but disappeared as its forces entered the Soviets. The Central Committee barely existed — Lenin and Sverdlov did most of its work together on the back of an envelope — and had only the weakest connections with the local party cells. Some Bolsheviks even suggested that the party had served its purpose and could be abolished now that it controlled the Soviets. It seemed to many of the Bolsheviks that the party cells were, in Nikolai Krestinky’s words, no more than the ‘agitation departments of the local Soviets’. All this changed in the spring of 1919. For one thing, the sudden death of Sverdlov, who had stood at the head of both the party and the Soviet bureaucracies, suggested the need for separation between the two structures. For another, it now appeared to the Bolsheviks, struggling to cope with the chaotic Soviet apparatus in the civil war, that the party structure could be used to introduce more centralized forms of Soviet control.
