The Russian Revolution полностью

The “unconquerable stubbornness of small production in its insistence on the methods of commodity economy,” as one Soviet economist described the vitality of the free market,¹¹⁷ defeated all government efforts to monopolize distribution. The government found itself in the absurd situation in which the strict enforcement of its prohibitions on private trade would have caused the entire urban population to starve to death. A Soviet economic publication in early 1920 ruefully conceded that the private (“speculative”) market was flourishing at the expense and with the help of the state supply system. “One of the most striking contradictions of our current economic reality,” it wrote,

93. A common sight on the streets of Moscow and Petrograd in 1918–21.

is the contrast between the gaping emptiness of Soviet stores with their signs “Haberdashery Store of the Moscow Soviet,” “Bookstore,” … and so on, and the teeming activity of the market trade on Sukharevka, the Smolensk market, Okhotnyi Riad, and other centers of the speculative market.… [The merchandise for the latter] has its exclusive source in the warehouses of the Soviet Republic and reaches Sukharevka by criminal routes.¹¹⁸

So powerful did the private sector become that when in early 1921 the government finally faced reality and (temporarily) gave up the monopoly on trade under the New Economic Policy (NEP), it was only acknowledging the status quo. “In certain respects,” writes E. H. Carr, “NEP did little more than sanction methods of trade which had grown up spontaneously, in defiance of Government decrees and in face of Government repressions, under War Communism.”¹¹⁹

In October 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in the name of the “proletariat.” The Soviet state was declared the embodiment of the will of the working class and the “vanguard” of the socialist order. This being the case, one might have expected Bolshevik labor policies greatly to improve, if not necessarily the economic, then certainly the social and political status of industrial labor compared with what it had been under the “bourgeois” Imperial and Provisional governments. But in this respect, too, the effects were the very opposite of proclaimed intentions: the status of Russia’s working class deteriorated significantly in every respect but the symbolic. In particular, it now lost its hard-won right to organize and to strike, the two indispensable weapons in labor’s self-defense.

It can be argued, of course, and the argument has been made, that under conditions of revolution and civil war the Bolsheviks had no choice but to curb the rights of labor in order to keep the economy going: to save the “proletarian revolution” they had to suspend the rights of the “proletariat.” In this interpretation, Bolshevik labor policies, like the rest of War Communism, were regrettable but unavoidable expedients.

The trouble with this interpretation is that the anti-labor measures introduced when the Bolshevik regime was indeed struggling to survive turned out to be not just temporary devices but expressions of a whole social philosophy which the situation made it possible to justify as emergency measures but which outlasted the emergency. The Bolsheviks regarded compulsory labor, the abolition of the right to strike, and the transformation of trade unions into agencies of the state as essential not only for victory in the Civil War but for the “construction of communism”: which is why they retained their anti-labor policies after the Civil War had been won and their regime was no longer in danger.

The concept of compulsory labor was embedded in Marxism. Article 8 of the Communist Manifesto of 1848 called for the “equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.” Obviously, in a regimented economy, without a free commodity market, it made no sense to maintain a free market in labor services. Trotsky, who often spoke on the subject, reinforced the economic argument with a psychological one—namely, that man is basically indolent and driven to work only by the fear of starvation: once the state assumed responsibility for feeding its citizens, this motive disappeared and it became necessary to resort to compulsion.* In effect, Trotsky presented forced labor as an inseparable feature of socialism. “One may say that man is rather a lazy creature,” he said. “As a general rule, man strives to avoid work.… The only way to attract the labor power necessary for economic tasks is to introduce compulsory labor service.”¹²⁰ Lest some Soviet citizens delude themselves that compulsory labor was only a transitional measure, meant for the “duration” of the crisis, Trotsky put them on notice this was not so. In March 1920, at the Ninth Party Congress, convened after the Whites had been for all practical purposes defeated and the Civil War was virtually over, Trotsky minced no words: