True to their word, the Bolsheviks declared the intention of introducing labor conscription on their first day in office. On October 25, 1917, almost in the same breath in which he announced the deposition of the Provisional Government, Trotsky told the Second Congress of Soviets: “The introduction of the universal labor obligation is one of the most immediate objectives of a genuine revolutionary government.”128 Probably most of the delegates thought this statement applied only to the “bourgeoisie.” And, indeed, in the first months of his dictatorship, Lenin, driven by personal animosity, went out of his way to humiliate the “bourgeoisie,” compelling people unaccustomed to manual labor to perform menial chores. In the draft of the decree nationalizing banks (December 1917), he wrote:
Article 6: universal labor obligation. The first step—consumer-labor, budget-labor booklets for the rich, control over them. Their duty: to work as ordered, else—“enemies of the people.”
And in the margin he added: “Dispatch to the front, compulsory labor, confiscation, arrests (execution by shooting).”129 Later it was a common sight in Moscow and Petrograd to see well-dressed people performing menial duties under guard. The benefit of this forced labor was probably close to nil, but it was intended to serve “educational” purposes—namely, to incite class hatred.
As Lenin had indicated, this was only the first step. Before long, the principle of compulsory labor was extended to other social strata: it meant not only that every adult had to be productively employed but that he or she had to work where ordered. This obligation, which returned Russia to the practices of the seventeenth century, was decreed in January 1918 in the “Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Masses,” which contained the following clause: “For the purpose of destroying the parasitic elements of the population and for the organization of the economy, there is introduced the universal labor obligation.”130 Inserted into the 1918 Constitution, this principle became the law of the land and has served ever since as the legal basis for treating anyone shirking state employment as a “parasite.”
The principle of labor conscription was worked out in practical detail at the end of 1918. A decree of October 29, 1918, established a nationwide network of agencies to “distribute the labor force.”131 On December 10, 1918, Moscow issued a detailed “Labor Code” which provided for all male and female citizens between the ages of sixteen and fifty, with some exceptions, to render “labor service.” Those who already held regular jobs were to stay at them. The others were to register with Departments for the Allocation of the Labor Force (Otdely Raspredeleniia Rabochei Sily, or ORRS). These organs had the authority to assign them to any work anywhere they saw fit.
Not only did the decrees on compulsory labor apply to minors (children sixteen to eighteen) but special ordinances permitted children employed in war industries or other enterprises of special importance to the state to be made to work overtime.132
By late 1918, it became common practice for the Bolshevik authorities to call up workers and specialists in various fields for state service exactly as they drafted recruits into the Red Army. The practice was for the government to announce that workers and technical specialists in a specified branch of the economy were “mobilized for military service” and subject to court-martial: those leaving jobs to which they had been assigned were treated as deserters. Persons with skills in critical fields, but not currently employed in jobs where they could use them, had to register and await a call-up. The first civilians to be “mobilized” were railroad workers (November 28, 1918). Other categories followed: persons with technical education and experience (December 19, 1918), medical personnel (December 20, 1918), employees of the river and ocean fleets (March 15, 1919), coal miners (April 7, 1919), postal, telephone, and telegraph employees (May 5, 1919), workers in the fuel industry (June 27, 1919, and November 8, 1919), wool industry workers (August 13, 1920), metalworkers (August 20, 1920), and electricians (October 8, 1920).133 In this manner, industrial occupations became progressively “militarized” and the difference between soldiers and workers, military and civilian sectors, was blurred. Efforts to organize industrial labor on the military model could not have worked well in view of the plethora of decrees on this subject, setting up ever new punishments for “labor deserters,” ranging from the publication of their names to confinement in concentration camps.134
