The rapid disintegration of Russia from lack of firm leadership resulted in the weakening of all national institutions, including those run by the socialists, a process which gave the Bolsheviks an opportunity to outflank the Menshevik and SR leadership in the All-Russian Soviet and the major trade unions. Marc Ferro has noted that after the formation of the coalition government, the authority of the All-Russian Soviet in Petrograd declined while that of the regional soviets rose. A similar process occurred in the labor movement, where the national trade unions lost authority to local “Factory Committees.”80 The regional soviets and Factory Committees were managed by politically inexperienced individuals amenable to Bolshevik manipulation.
The Bolsheviks enjoyed little influence in the major national trade unions, which were dominated by the Mensheviks. But as transport and communications deteriorated, the large national unions, centered in Petrograd or Moscow, lost touch with their members, scattered over the vast country. The workers now tended to shift loyalties from the professional unions to the factories. This process occurred despite the immense growth of the national trade union membership in 1917. The worker organizations which enjoyed the most rapid rise in power and influence were the Factory Committees, or Fabzavkomy. These had come into existence at the beginning of the February Revolution in the state-owned defense plants, after the disappearance of their government-appointed managers. From there, they spread to privately owned enterprises. On March 10, the association of Petrograd industrialists agreed with the Ispolkom to introduce Factory Committees in all the plants in the capital.81 The following month, the Provisional Government gave them official recognition, authorizing Factory Committees to act as representatives of workers.82
Initially, the Fabzavkomy adopted a moderate stance, concentrating on increasing production and arbitrating industrial disputes. Then they radicalized. Unhappy over worsening inflation and shortages of fuel and raw materials which led to plant closures, they charged the employers with speculation, false bookkeeping, and resort to lockouts. Here and there, they chased away the proprietors and managers and attempted to run the factories on their own. Elsewhere, they demanded a stronger voice in the management. The Mensheviks viewed with disfavor these anarcho-syndicalist institutions and sought to integrate the Factory Committees into the national trade unions. But the trend ran in the opposite direction as the immediate, day-to-day concerns of the workers became increasingly more linked with fellow workers employed under the same roof than with their occupational counterparts elsewhere. The Bolsheviks found the Fabzavkomy an ideal device with which to neutralize Menshevik influence in the trade unions.83 Although they disapproved of the syndicalist idea of “workers’ control” and after seizing power would liquidate this institution, in the spring of 1917 it was in their interest to promote it. They helped form Factory Committees and organized them nationally. At the First Conference of Petrograd Factory Committees, which they convened on May 30, the Bolsheviks controlled at least two-thirds of the delegates. Their motion calling for workers to be given a decisive vote in factory management as well as access to the firms’ accounting books passed with an overwhelming majority.84 The Fabzavkomy were the first institution to fall under Bolshevik control.*
Because he envisaged the power seizure as a violent act, Lenin needed his own military detachments, independent of both the government and the Soviet and accountable only to his Central Committee. “Arming the workers” was central to his program for the coup d’état. During the February Revolution, crowds had looted arsenals: tens of thousands of guns had disappeared, some of them concealed in factories. The Petrograd Soviet organized a “People’s Militia” to replace the dissolved tsarist police, but Lenin refused to have the Bolsheviks join it: he wanted a force of his own.85 So as not to be accused of building up an instrument of subversion, he disguised his private army, initially called “Workers’ Militia,” as an innocuous guard to protect factories from looters. On April 28, this militia was incorporated into a Bolshevik Red Guard (Krasnaia Gvardiia), which had the additional mission of “defending the Revolution” and “resisting reactionary forces.” The Bolsheviks ignored objections of the Soviet to this, their own army.86 In the end, the Red Guards proved something of a disappointment because they turned either into an ordinary civil police or else merged with the People’s Militia, in either case failing to develop that spirit of class militancy that Lenin had expected of them.87 In October, when needed, they would be conspicuous by their absence.
