The Russian Revolution полностью

In an attempt to bring some order the Bolshevik Government created in the spring of 1918 territorial entities called oblasti. There were six of them, each composed of several provinces and enjoying quasi-sovereign status:* Moscow with nine adjoining provinces; the Urals, centered on Ekaterinburg; the “Toilers Commune of the North,” embracing seven provinces with the capital in Petrograd; Northwest, centered on Smolensk; West Siberia, with the center in Omsk; and Central Siberia, based on Irkutsk. Each had its own administration, staffed by socialist intelligentsia, and convened Congresses of Soviets. Some even had their own Councils of People’s Commissars. A conference of the soviets of the Central Siberian Region held in Irkutsk in February 1918 rejected the peace treaty with Germany which the Soviet Government was about to sign and, to demonstrate its independence, appointed its own Commissar of Foreign Affairs.¹⁷

Here and there gubernii proclaimed themselves “republics.” This happened in Kazan, Kaluga, Riazan, Ufa, and Orenburg. Some of the non-Russian peoples living in the midst of Russians, such as the Bashkirs and Volga Tatars, also formed national republics. One count indicates that on the territory of the defunct Russian Empire there existed in June 1918 at least thirty-three “governments.”¹⁸ To have its decrees and laws implemented, the central government often had to request the assistance of these ephemeral entities.

The regions and provinces, in turn, broke up into subunits, of which the volost’ was the most important. The vitality of the volost’ derived from the fact that for the peasants it was the largest entity within which to distribute the appropriated land. As a rule, peasants of one volost’ would refuse to share the looted properties with those of neighboring volosti, with the result that hundreds of these tiny territories became, in effect, self-governing enclaves. As Martov observed:

We have always pointed out that the popularity of the slogan “All Power to the Soviets” among peasants and the backward segment of the working class can be in large measure explained by the fact that they invest this slogan with the primitive idea of the supremacy of local workers or local peasants over a given territory, much as they identify the slogan of worker control with the idea of seizure of a given factory and that of agrarian revolution with the idea of a given village appropriating a given estate.¹⁹

The Bolsheviks made some unsuccessful military forays into the separated borderlands to bring them back into the fold. But by and large, for the time being they did not interfere with the centrifugal forces inside Great Russia, because these furthered their immediate objective, which was the thorough destruction of the old political and economic system. These forces also prevented the emergence of a strong state apparatus able to stand up to the Communist Party before it had the time to consolidate its power.

In March 1918, the government approved a constitution for the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Lenin entrusted the drafting of this document to a commission of judicial experts, chaired by Sverdlov: its most active members were Left SRs, who wanted to replace the centralized state with a federation of soviets, on the model of the French communes of 1871. Lenin left them undisturbed although their intention ran entirely contrary to his own goal of a centralized state. He who paid scrupulous attention to the least details of administration, to the extent of deciding what soldiers guarded his office in Smolnyi, stayed out of the deliberations of the constitutional commission, and merely scanned the results of its work. It was indicative of his contempt for the written constitution: it suited his purposes to give the state structure a loose, quasi-anarchic façade to conceal the hidden steel of party control.²⁰