During its initial three weeks, the Sovnarkom led a paper existence since it had neither a staff to execute its orders nor money to pay its own people. The Bolshevik commissars, barred from their offices, operated from Room 67 at Smolnyi, where Lenin had his headquarters. Lenin, ever fearful of attempts on his life, ordered that no one except People’s Commissars be allowed into his office: he rarely left Smolnyi, where he lived and officiated closely guarded by Latvians.* 62 As the Secretary of the Sovnarkom he picked the twenty-five-year-old N. P. Gorbunov. The new secretary, who had no administrative experience, confiscated a typewriter and a table and proceeded to peck out decrees with two fingers.63 V. Bonch-Bruevich, a devoted Bolshevik and a student of religious dissenters, was appointed Lenin’s private assistant. The two men hired clerical personnel. By the end of the year, the Sovnarkom had forty-eight clerical employees; in the next two months it acquired seventeen more. Judging by a group photograph taken in October 1918, a high proportion of these were clean-cut bourgeois young ladies.
73. Latvians guarding Lenin’s office in Smolnyi: 1917.
Prior to November 15, 1917, the Sovnarkom held no regular sessions: according to Gorbunov one meeting took place on November 3, but its only order of business was to hear a report by Nogin on the fighting in Moscow. During this period such decrees and ordnances as came out were the work of Bolshevik functionaries, who acted independently, often without consulting Lenin. According to Larin, only two of the first fifteen decrees issued by the Soviet Government were discussed in the Sovnarkom: the Decree on the Press, drafted by Lunarcharskii, and the Decree on Elections to the Constituent Assembly, prepared by himself. Gorbunov says Lenin authorized him to cable directives to the provinces on his own, showing him only every tenth telegram.64
The first regular meeting of the Sovnarkom took place on November 15, with an agenda of twenty items. It was agreed that the commissars would move out of Smolnyi as expeditiously as possible and take over their respective commissariats, which they did in the weeks that followed, with the help of armed detachments. From that day onward, the Sovnarkom met almost daily on the third floor of Smolnyi, usually in the evening: the meetings sometimes ran all night. Attendance was not much restricted, with many lower-level officials and non-Bolshevik technical experts brought in as the need arose. The commissars, lifelong revolutionaries, felt awkward. Simon Liberman, a Menshevik timber expert who occasionally attended Sovnarkom sessions, recalls the meetings as follows:
74. Lenin and secretarial staff of the Council of People’s Commissars: October 1918.
A peculiar atmosphere prevailed at the conferences of the highest administrative councils of Soviet Russia, presided over by Lenin. Despite all the efforts of an officious secretary to impart to each session the solemn character of a cabinet meeting, we could not help feeling that here we were, attending another sitting of an underground revolutionary committee! For years we had belonged to various underground organizations. All of this seemed so familiar. Many of the commissars remained seated in their topcoats or greatcoats; most of them wore the forbidding leather jackets. In wintertime some wore felt boots and thick sweaters. They remained thus clothed throughout the meetings.
One of the commissars, Alexander Tsuriupa, was nearly always ill; he attended these sessions in a semi-reclining position, his feet stretched out on a nearby chair. A number of Lenin’s aides would not take their seats at the conference table but shoved their chairs around helter-skelter all over the room. Lenin alone invariably took his seat at the table as the presiding officer of the occasion. He did so in a neat, almost decorous way. Fotieva, as his personal secretary, sat beside him.65
Lenin, irritated by the unpunctuality and verbosity of his colleagues, worked out strict rules. To prevent chatter, he insisted on strict adherence to the agenda.* To ensure that his commissars showed up on time, he set fines for lateness: five rubles for less than half an hour, ten for more.66
75. One of the early meetings of the Council of People’s Commissars. Lenin in the center. Behind him, hand at mouth, Stalin.
According to Liberman, the meetings of the Sovnarkom which he attended never decided on policy but dealt only with implementation:
