The Sovnarkom now became in theory what it had been in fact since its inception, an organ combining executive and legislative authority. The CEC was allowed for a while longer to enjoy the right to debate the actions of the government, a right which, even if it had no eifect on policy, at least provided opportunities for criticism. But after June–July 1918, when non-Bolsheviks were ejected from it, the CEC turned into an echo chamber in which Bolshevik deputies routinely “ratified” the decisions of the Bolshevik Sovnarkom, which, in turn, implemented decisions of the Bolshevik Central Committee.*
This sudden and complete collapse of democratic forces and their subsequent inability to reclaim constitutional powers recalls the failure of the Supreme Privy Council in 1730 to impose constitutional restraints on the Russian monarchy: then, as now, a firm “no” from the autocrat proved sufficient.
From this day on, Russia was ruled by decree. Lenin assumed the prerogatives that the tsars had enjoyed before October 1905: his will was law. In the words of Trotsky: “From the moment the Provisional Government was declared deposed, Lenin acted in matters large and small as the government.”† The “decrees” which the Sovnarkom issued, although bearing a name borrowed from revolutionary France and previously unknown to Russian constitutional law, corresponded fully to imperial ukazy in that like them they dealt indiscriminately with the most fundamental as well as most trivial matters, and went into effect the instant the autocrat affixed his signature to them. (According to Isaac Steinberg, “Lenin was ordinarily of the opinion that his signature had to suffice for any governmental act.”)45 Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin’s executive secretary, writes that decrees acquired force of law only after being signed by Lenin, even if issued on the initiative of one of the commissars.46‡ These practices would have been entirely understandable to a Nicholas I or Alexander III. The system of government which the Bolsheviks set in place within two weeks of the October coup marked a reversion to the autocratic regime that had ruled Russia before 1905: they simply wiped out the twelve intervening years of constitutionalism.
The intelligentsia was the one group that did not participate in the nationwide duvan and would not allow itself to be diverted by “clinking bags.” It had welcomed the February Revolution with boundless enthusiasm; it rejected the October coup. Even some Communist historians have come to concede that students, professors, writers, artists, and others who had led the opposition to tsarism, overwhelmingly opposed the Bolshevik takeover: one of them states that the intelligentsia “almost to a man” engaged in “sabotage.”47 It took the Bolsheviks months of coercion and cajolery to break this resistance. The intelligentsia began to cooperate with the Bolsheviks only after it had concluded that the regime was here to stay and boycotting it would only make matters worse.
The most dramatic manifestation of the refusal by Russia’s educated class to accept the October coup was the general strike of white-collar personnel (sluzhashchie). Although the Bolsheviks then and since have dismissed this action as “sabotage,” it was, in fact, a grandiose, non-violent act of protest by the nation’s civil servants and employees of private enterprises against the destruction of democracy.48 The strike, intended to demonstrate to the Bolsheviks their unpopularity and, at the same time, make it impossible for them to govern, broke out spontaneously. It quickly acquired an organizational structure, first in the shape of strike committees in the ministries, banks, and other public institutions and then in a coordinating body called the Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution (Komitet Spaseniia Rodiny i Revoliutsii). The committee originally consisted of Municipal Duma officials, members of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets dissolved by the Bolsheviks, representatives of the All-Russian Congress of Peasant Soviets, the Union of Unions of Government Employees, and several clerical unions, including that of postal workers. Gradually, representatives of Russian socialist parties, the Left SRs excepted, also joined. The committee appealed to the nation not to cooperate with the usurpers and to fight for the restoration of democracy.49 On October 28 it called on the Bolsheviks to relinquish power.50
On October 29, the Union of Unions of Government Employees in Petrograd, in cooperation with the committee (which apparently financed the strike), asked its membership to stop work:
