The Russian Revolution полностью

Not a single glavka or tsentr disposes of adequate and exhaustive data which would enable it to proceed to a genuine regulation of the country’s industry and production. Dozens of organizations conduct parallel and identical work of collecting similar information, as a result of which they gather totally dissimilar data.… The accounting is conducted inaccurately, and sometimes up to 80 and 90 percent of the inventoried items escape the control of the relevant organization. The items which are unaccounted for become the object of wild and unrestrained speculation, passing from hand to hand dozens of times until finally reaching the consumer.⁸⁵

As for the regional branches of the council, these were said to be in a state of constant friction with their Moscow headquarters.⁸⁶

In sum, contemporary accounts depict the council as a monstrous bureaucratic jumble which meddled instead of administering and whose main function was to provide a living for thousands of intellectuals. At the beginning of 1920, the council’s regional branches and the economic departments of provincial soviets gave employment to nearly 25,000 people,⁸⁷ overwhelmingly members of the intelligentsia. A crass example of bureaucratic bloating was the Benzene Trust (Glavanil), which had on its payroll 50 officials to supervise a single plant employing 150 workers.* One of the Supreme Economic Council’s officials has left a colorful description of the types who attached themselves to it. It deserves citation since it depicts a situation not unknown to other agencies of the Communist Government:

The lower posts were occupied mainly by hordes of young ladies and gents, previously bookkeepers, shop assistants, clerks, or university, gymnasium, or “external” students. This whole army of youths was attracted to the service by the relatively high salary and the low amount of work required. They spent entire days loitering in the many corridors of the vast structure; they flirted, ran out to buy halvah and nuts for the office pool, distributed among themselves the theater tickets or meat conserves which one of their number had managed to get hold of, and, as a sort of accompaniment to these business dealings, cursed the Bolsheviks.…

The next, most numerous category [of employees] consisted of onetime officials of the tsarist ministries. In joining the Soviet service they were motivated either by material need or, no less often, by longing for the accustomed work, to which each had devoted more than a decade of his life. One had to see with what passion they threw themselves on the “outgoing” and “incoming” materials, on “memoranda,” “reports,” and the rest of secretarial archwisdom, to understand that they found it more difficult to live without this atmosphere of paperwork than to make do without bread and shoes. These people tried to serve conscientiously; they were the first to come and the last to leave, they stuck to their chairs as if chained. But perhaps precisely because of this conscientiousness nothing ever came of their work except unbelievable nonsense, because the disorder and impulsiveness of the higher authorities confounded all the “incoming” materials and “memoranda” that they spun out with such loving care.…

Finally, the non-Communist majority of middle-level officials and a segment of higher ones consisted of intelligenty? of various types. There were here, so to say, romantic natures for whom service in one of the enemy’s citadels smacked of high adventure. There were people of no principle, entirely indifferent to everything in the world except their own well-being. There were ordinary shady characters who sought to attach themselves to the Bolshevik chaos so as to be able, under the cover of its darkness and confusion, to loot for all it was worth. There were people of another type as well: specialists who hoped to salvage the work that they held dear, and those, like myself, who joined in order to “soften the regime.”⁸⁸

So much for Lenin’s pet idea, “the transformation of the whole of the state economic mechanism into a single huge machine” operating on a “single plan.”