The Russian Revolution полностью

Whatever its formal economic justification, the practice of forced labor meant a reversion to the Muscovite institution of tiaglo, by virtue of which all adult male and female peasants and other commoners could be called upon to perform chores on behalf of the state. Then, as now, its main forms were carting goods, cutting lumber, and construction work. The description of the duty imposed on peasants in 1920 to furnish fuel would have been quite comprehensible to Muscovite Russians:

The peasants were ordered … as a sort of labor service expected of them by the Government … to cut down so many cords of wood in designated forests. Every horse-owning peasant had to transport a certain quantity of wood. All this wood had to be delivered by the peasant to river jetties, cities, and other terminal points.¹³⁵

The principal difference between compulsory labor, or tiaglo, in Muscovite Russia and that in Communist Russia was that in the Middle Ages it had been a sporadic duty, imposed to meet specific needs, whereas now it became a permanent obligation.

In the winter of 1919–20, Trotsky conceived an ambitious scheme of “militarizing labor” in which soldiers in uniform would perform productive economic work while civilian workers would be subjected to military discipline. This throwback to the infamous “military colonies” instituted a century earlier by Alexander I and Arakcheev met with skepticism and hostility. But Trotsky persisted and would not be dissuaded. Back from his triumph in the Civil War, full of his own importance and eager to gain fresh laurels, he insisted that Russia’s economic problems could be resolved only by the same rough-and-ready methods which the Red Army had used to defeat the external enemy. On December 16, 1919, he drafted a set of “Theses” for the Central Committee.¹³⁶ He argued that economic problems had to be stormed with blindly disciplined armies of workers. Russia’s labor force was to be regimented in military fashion: the shirking of duty (refusal to take on assigned work, absenteeism, drinking on the job, etc.) was to be treated as a crime and the culprits turned over to courts-martial. Trotsky further proposed that Red Army units no longer needed for combat duty, instead of being demobilized and sent home, be transformed into “Labor Armies” (Trudarmii). These “Theses” were not intended for publication, but Bukharin, the editor of Pravda, printed them anyway, either inadvertently (as he claimed) or to discredit Trotsky (as others believed). Published in Pravda on January 22, 1920, they unleashed a storm of protests, in which the epithet “Arakcheevsh-china” was commonly heard.

Lenin was won over because of the desperate need to halt the further deterioration of the country’s economy. On December 27, 1919, he agreed to the creation of a Commission on Labor Obligation, with Trotsky, who retained the post of Commissar of War, as president. Trotsky’s program entailed two sets of measures:

1. Military units no longer required at the front would not be demobilized but would be transformed into peacetime Labor Armies and assigned to such tasks as repairing railroad beds, transporting fuel, and fixing agricultural machinery. The Third Army Corps, which had fought in the Urals, was the first to undergo this transformation. Later other units were converted. In March 1921, one-quarter of the Red Army was employed in construction and transport.

2. Concurrently, all workers and peasants were made subject to military discipline. At the Ninth Party Congress in 1920, where this policy provoked intense controversy, Trotsky insisted that the government had to be free to use civilian labor wherever it was needed, without regard to the personal preferences of the workers, exactly as in the armed forces. “Mobilized” labor was to be assigned to enterprises requesting it through the Commissariat of Labor. In 1922, looking back at this experiment, an official of this commissariat stated: “We supplied labor according to plan and, consequently, without taking into account the individual peculiarities or wishes of the worker to engage in this or that kind of work.”¹³⁷

Neither the Labor Armies nor militarized labor fulfilled the expectations of their protagonists. Soldier workers produced only a fraction of the output of trained civilians; they also deserted in droves. The government faced insurmountable technical difficulties in attempting to administer, feed, and transport the militarized labor force. Hence, this prototype of Stalin’s and Hitler’s slave-labor organizations had to be abandoned: industrial mobilization was abolished on October 12, 1921, and the Labor Armies one month later.¹³⁸