This step marked the end of independent political parties in Russia. The monarchist parties—Octobrists, Union of the Russian People, Nationalists—had dissolved in the course of 1917 and no longer existed as organized bodies. The outlawed Kadets either shifted their activities to the borderlands, where they were beyond the reach of the Cheka, but also out of touch with the Russian population, or else went underground, where they formed an anti-Bolshevik coalition called the National Center.157 The June 16 decree did not explicitly outlaw the Mensheviks and SRs but it did render them politically impotent. Although, as a reward for their support against the White armies, the two socialist parties were later reinstated and allowed to rejoin the soviets in limited numbers, this was a temporary expedient. Essentially, Russia now became a one-party state in which organizations other than the Bolshevik Party were forbidden to engage in political activity.
On June 16, the day the Bolsheviks announced the Fifth Congress of Soviets, which neither the Mensheviks nor the SRs would attend, the Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries called for the convocation of an All-Russian Conference of Workers.158 This body was to discuss and solve the most urgent problems facing the nation: the food situation, unemployment, the breakdown of law, and workers’ organizations.
On June 20, the head of the Petrograd Cheka, V. Volodarskii, was assassinated. In its search for the killer, the Cheka detained some workers, which set off protest meetings in factories. The Bolsheviks occupied the Neva worker district with troops and imposed martial law. The workers of Obukhov, the most troublesome factory, were locked out.159
It was in this highly charged atmosphere that elections to the Soviet took place in Petrograd. During the electoral campaign, Zinoviev was booed and prevented from speaking at Putilov and Obukhov. In factory after factory, workers, ignoring the decree prohibiting the two parties from participating in the soviets, gave majorities to Mensheviks and SRs. Obukhov chose 5 SRs, 3 partyless, and 1 Bolshevik. At Semiannikov, the SRs won 64 percent of the vote, the Mensheviks 10 percent, and the Bolshevik–Left SR bloc 26 percent. Similar results were obtained in other establishments.160
The Bolsheviks refused to be bound by these results. They wanted majorities and obtained them, usually by tampering with the franchise: some Bolsheviks were given as many as five votes.* On July 2, the results of the “elections” were announced. Of the 650 newly chosen deputies to the Petrograd Soviet, 610 were to be Bolsheviks and Left SRs; 40 seats were allotted to the SRs and Mensheviks, whom the official organs denounced as “Judases.”† This rump Petrograd Soviet voted to dissolve the Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries: a delegate from the council who sought to address the gathering was prevented from speaking and physically assaulted.
The Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries sat in almost daily session. On June 26, it voted unanimously to call for a one-day political strike on July 2, under the slogans “Down with the Death Penalty,” “Down with Executions and the Civil War,” “Long Live the Freedom to Strike.”161 SR and Menshevik intellectuals again came out against the strike.162
The Bolshevik authorities posted placards all over the city which described the organizers of the strike as hirelings of White Guardists and threatened to turn all strikers over to Revolutionary Tribunals.163 For good measure they set up machine gun posts at key points in the city.
Sympathetic reporters described the workers as vacillating: the Kadet
The events of July 2 confirmed this assessment. The first political strike in Russia since the fall of tsarism sputtered and went out. The workers, discouraged by socialist intellectuals, intimidated by the Bolshevik show of force, uncertain of their strength and purpose, lost heart. The organizers estimated that between 18,000 and 20,000 workers obeyed the call to strike, which was no more than one-seventh of Petrograd’s actual labor force. Obkuhov, Maxwell, and Pahl struck, but most of the other plants, Putilov included, did not.
This result sealed the fate of independent workers’ organizations in Russia. Before long, the Cheka closed down the Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries in Petrograd along with its provincial branches, sending the most outspoken leaders to prison.
Thus ended the autonomy of the soviets, the right of workers to their own representation, and what was still left of the multiparty system. These measures, enacted in June and early July 1918, completed the formation in Russia of a one-party dictatorship.
