The Russian Revolution полностью

From these premises it followed that nationalizing banks and syndicates would be tantamount to nationalizing the country’s economy, which, in turn, meant laying the foundations of socialism. In 1917, Lenin argued that the concentration of economic power in the hands of banking institutions and cartels in Russia had attained a level at which finance and commerce could be nationalized by decree.¹⁰ On the eve of the October coup, he made the astonishing statement that the creation of a single state bank would provide, in and of itself, “nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus.”¹¹ Trotsky confirms Lenin’s optimism:

In Lenin’s “Theses on the Peace,” written in early 1918, it says that “the triumph of socialism in Russia [required] a certain interval of time, no less than a few months.” At present [1924] such words seem completely incomprehensible: was this not a slip of the pen, did he not mean to speak of a few years or decades? But no: this was not a slip of the pen.… I recall very clearly that in the first period, at Smolnyi, at meetings of the Council of People’s Commissars, Lenin invariably repeated that we shall have socialism in half a year and become the mightiest state.¹²

During the first six months in power Lenin thought of introducing into Russia a system which he called “state socialism.” It was to be modeled on German Kriegssozialismus, with this difference that it would embrace the entire economy, not only the sector directly relevant to the war effort, and work for the benefit not of “capitalists and Junkers” but of the “proletariat.” In September 1917, on the eve of the coup, he thus described what he had in mind:

Besides the predominantly “oppressive” apparatus of the standing army, police, officialdom, there exists in the contemporary state an apparatus, especially closely connected with banks and syndicates, which carries out a great deal of work of accounting and registering, if one may put it this way. This apparatus cannot and should not be smashed. It must be removed from its subjection to the capitalists, it must be cut off… from the capitalists with their threads of influence, one must subordinate it to the proletarian soviets, one must make it more comprehensive, more all-embracing, more national. And this can be done, leaning on the achievements already accomplished by large-scale capitalism.… The “nationalization” of the mass of employees of banks, syndicates, commercial societies, etc., is fully realizable both technically (thanks to preparatory work done for us by capitalism and finance capitalism) and politically under the condition of Soviet control and supervision.¹³

In late November 1917, Lenin jotted down the outline of an economic program:

Questions of Economic Policy

1. Nationalization of banks

2. Compulsory syndication

3. State monopoly of foreign trade

4. Revolutionary methods to combat looting

5. Publicizing financial and bank looting

6. Finance industry

7. Unemployment

8. Demobilization—of army? industry?

9. Supply¹⁴

This draft made no mention of state monopoly of domestic trade, or of nationalization of industry or transport, or of moneyless economy, which were to become the hallmarks of War Communism. Lenin at this time believed that the nationalization of financial institutions and the syndication of industrial and commercial enterprises would suffice to set the socialist economy on its way.

On October 25, 1917—that is, before he had even obtained from the Second Congress of Soviets the authority to form a government—Lenin approached Iurii Larin, a Menshevik recently turned Bolshevik. In socialist circles, Larin was considered an expert on the German wartime economy. “You have occupied yourself with questions of the organization of the German economy,” Lenin said to him, “syndicates, trusts, banks. Study this subject for us.”¹⁵

Soon afterward, Larin published in Izvestiia an impressionistic sketch of the Bolshevik economic program. It centered on the compulsory syndication of all raw material production, consumer industries, transport, and banks, each subordinated to a comprehensive national plan. Private shares in enterprises would be exchanged for syndicate shares, which would be traded on the open market. In the provinces, organs of self-rule (presumably soviets) would either syndicate or municipalize retail trade and residential quarters. The peasants too would be “syndicated” for the distribution of foodstuffs and agricultural equipment.¹⁶ Under this program, the government would control private enterprise, but not abolish it.