Gendarme of the Revolution: The Soviet Union in the Interregnum Era (Part 2/3)

Gendarme of the Revolution: The Soviet Union in the Interregnum Era
Part 2 of 3: Constructing the Worker’s State, Forging the Mass Party
​

The Soviet Union has the virtues of its vices, and the vices of its virtues, and anyone who believes otherwise has not been paying attention.

Julius Martov, Memoirs of the Revolution in Russia , Berlin, 1925

We are the first revolutionary society, and this has meant that we have been wrong in ways no one had been wrong before, and right in ways no one had expected.

Yakov Sverdlov, address to the All-Union Congress of Soviets, 1931

Weber turned in despair to the notion that a charismatic leader might by force of personality be able to slow down the advance of bureaucracy. This was wishful thinking, and subsequent European history has shown that such leaders, far from inhibiting, actually tend to facilitate bureaucratic self-aggrandizement.

Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution, 1917​

**Interview: Sverdlov and the Moscow Workers’ Channel, June 1934

AN:** Comrade Sverdlov, we are so pleased to see you again. It has been… allow me a moment…

YS: I believe, Comrade Alexander, it was in March of 1932 when we spoke last.

AN: Yes, that was it. Pardon my memory, please.

YS (speaking wryly): I am afraid I shall soon be in no position to grant many more pardons.

AN: Well, this is what our listeners are most interested in. We are all grateful for your service to our Union, but we were quite startled when you announced your retirement from your posts in the Central Executive Committee and Politburo.

YS: It has not been painless. It has been a great joy to serve the Soviet people and to participate in the building of socialism. But I have great trust in my comrades to continue the work that has begun.

AN: There are a great many rumors about your decision to retire. There are reports that Amadeo Bordiga visited your residence in Leningrad a few weeks ago.

YS: Comrade Bordiga is a brilliant man, but he occasionally allows his intellect to outstrip his sense of reality. He was a pleasure to speak with; I have always insisted that we have a great deal to learn from the Europeans. I hope that his visit allowed him to learn something, too, about the socialism we have built here in the Soviet Union.

(A pause.)

The Bolivian Crisis has confirmed us Communists in our assessment of the international situation. We cannot embark on utopian experiments when imperialism still holds much of the world in its thrall, and when American aggression is directed against proletarians attempting to free themselves from its yoke.

AN: I do not intend to flatter you, Comrade Sverdlov, but there are some who wonder whether the same does not hold true of your retirement: at such a delicate time, can the Soviet state function as effectively without your own genius for organization?

YS (chuckling weakly): I can assure you that, in the words of a famous American, the reports of my indispensability are greatly exaggerated. The socialism we have built here is not the property of any one man, but of the entire Soviet people.

(Another pause.)

We are now beyond the days when we had to resort to emergency measures. The comrades of the Central Executive Committee and the Politburo have proved their loyalty to the Soviet people and their insight, both practical and theoretical. But this is not a question of men. We have made great strides in the building of socialism here. The most difficult question, the resolution of the agrarian question and the collectivization of the countryside, is in the process of receiving its resolution.

AN: May I ask you about some of these comrades? We are all aware of your reputation as a judge of character.

YS: Why, of course. It is a pleasure to speak of the virtues of my comrades.

AN: What of Comrade Bukharin?

YS: Comrade Bukharin is a man of great learning and unfailing fealty to socialism. But above all, one must praise his political judgement, which has more than once corrected my own errors.

AN: And of Comrade Kollontai?

YS: Comrade Kollontai remains the conscience of our revolution and the voice of Soviet women everywhere.

AN: And of Comrade Trotsky?

(A short pause.)

YS: Comrade Trotsky can often be more than a simple irritant, though we in the Council of People’s Commissars have determined to bear his depredations for the sake of the Soviet people, for one does not frequently encounter a man of such varied talents.

(Laughter.)

AN: One last question, Comrade Sverdlov. What would you most want our listeners to carry away from your years of service?

YS (after a brief pause): That we did not know what we were doing. Not entirely. We made it up as we went along, and we made a great many mistakes, and the people of this Union paid dearly for some of them. But we learned from the workers, from the peasants, from the women who came into the soviets and told us our decrees had not reached the village, from the soldiers who told us our orders made no sense at the front. We did not lose faith that socialism was possible, and in the end, it proved to be.

That is not a comfortable lesson. Those who come after us will have to make their own mistakes without the consolation of being the first.

(A pause.)

I would ask your listeners to give my regards to their families.

Excerpts from The Road to Collective Leadership: Soviet Politics and Political Institutions in the Interregnum Era, in Socialist Construction , Claus Offe (Vienna: 1974)

I. The Soviet State-form as Bureaucratic-Proletarian Developmental Party-State

The Interregnum-Era Soviet Union provides a set of crucial object-lessons for the construction of socialist relations in the post-colonial world. As in India and much of the African continent, feudal or semi-feudal relations persisted inside in the countryside. Ethnic and national heterogeneity was the rule, with minority language and religious groups incorporated into Empire at the end of the bayonet. The old Russian Empire also displayed similar signs of dependency within its industrial life: French and British capital had been instrumental in the organization of factories and in selecting which enterprises were viable and which were dead. Even the railways of the Russian Empire were constructed primarily for the purposes of troop mobilization, just as in India.

The new state-form which emerged in Russia following the victory of the revolution was the party-state. The party-state did not involve, as in some pathological cases, the merging of the Party with the Civil Administration, but instead required the relative autonomy of each. During the first decade of Soviet political history, the most influential state and party institutions became functionally specialized, taking on particular tasks in the Soviet ecology of government. The state performed daily governance, welfare provision, and policy formation. Its more representative structure aided it in incorporating proletarian factory workers as well as the broader urban strata. The hard, coercive arms of government - the police, intelligence, and military - were also all formally part of the state administration.

The Party fulfilled a set of very different functions. Firstly, it acted as an educational institution, serving as a transmission belt which transformed proletarians into socialist theorists and administrators. As part of this pedagogical function, it also engaged in mass propaganda drives, organized the youth, and ran the secondary and tertiary education systems. As a consequence, the state was dependent upon the party for new trained cadres equipped with the technical skills and ideological training to serve as effective administrators. Secondly, it behaved as a compliance monitor and pressure group, employing its considerable prestige to ensure the commissariats, sovnarkom, and national republic governments adhered to revolutionary principle. Finally, the Party served as a supremely organized and disciplined reserve army of worker-activists, capable of mobilizing to reinforce the most important modernization, socialization, and education drives of the revolutionary state . In short, the party did not so much replace the state as stand beside it, above it, and behind it: beside it as a source of trained bureaucrats, above it as an organ of ideological supervision, and behind it as a reserve of mobilizational power.

The social content of the Party-State was the intellectual-bureaucratic and proletarian joint developmental dictatorship. By this phrase, we do not intend to cast aspersions or speak pejoratively. The bureaucratic-intellectual and proletarian joint developmental dictatorship is a political response to a novel historical problem: the construction of socialism in an adverse set of conditions, where the proletarian class comprises only a small minority of the overall population. Its failures and successes in the transition to socialism must be reckoned with objectively.

This was not, some theories to the contrary, a situation of “Dual Power” in which Party and State represented different class interests. In fact, both the proletarian and intellectual-bureaucratic elements were integrated differently in the Party and State. The Bolshevik Party represented one of the only developed Parties which could plausibly claim to represent the entirety of its national working-class. Whereas the parties in Germany and Italy only ever represented specific demographic-cum-occupational fractions of the working-class, in the Soviet Union party membership for urban workers was mandatory and universal. Local party committees achieved an organizational depth and social embeddedness which was only rivalled by the German Revolutionary Worker’s Front. Over the interregnum era, the Central Committee of the Party was increasingly run by educated worker-activists trained in Party schools and institutes. These constituted a new, organic intellectual-bureaucratic class rooted in a proletarian social constituency but receiving their education from an institution designed primarily by Bolshevik Party intellectuals. The basic mechanism of proletarian-bureaucratic integration in the Party was therefore transformation: the worker-activist who ascended through political education and revolutionary practice was not simply a proletarian who had acquired administrative competence but a figure who partially dissolved the boundaries between the intellectual-bureaucratic and proletarian class positions. They had the crucial capacity to mediate between socialist theory and working-class practice, to bring revolutionary socialism into those neighborhoods and factories which had yet to fully absorb it.

The state apparatus reflected a different history and a different logic of integration. Sovnarkom, the Council of People’s Commissars, had emerged as an emergency executive body which rapidly aggrandized a dizzying array of prerogatives during the Civil War era. Ostensibly accountable to both the Executive Committee and the All-Union Congress of Soviets, it attained a troubling degree of autonomy in the latter half of the Lenin years. The return of the left-communists and the ascendancy of Sverdlov, however, brought reforms which aimed to ensure Sovnarkom was accountable to a broader proletarian constituency. New procedures were codified: regular and secret Soviet elections, mandatory reporting, twice-yearly meetings of the All-Union Congress, and new investigative and recall capacities for both the All-Union Congress and Executive committee. Arguably, this process of codification and limitation of executive powers was still partially formal than substantive in the 1920s: Sverdlov possessed sufficient organizational genius and prestige to steer the All-Union Soviet Congress in the direction he wished, and only with the advent of collective leadership did a more genuinely co-equal relationship between Sovnarkom, the executive committee, and the All-Union Congress emerge. We will return more to the particular mechanics of these institutions - and their histories - later.

For now, what is important is the distinction between the integratory logic of the Party and the State. The state’s apparatus produced a representative logic which incorporated the urban, proletarian class while excluding peasants and the traditional middle-class. It produced a political process which was more transparent, more formally democratic, and more susceptible to mass pressure than the Party, but one which was also more procedurally constrained and less capable of mobilizing rapid responses to emergency conditions. In contrast, the party apparatus did not have the same mechanisms of public accountability, but it offered a more dynamic and organizationally flexible field of power in which exceptional workers could quickly rise to prominence on the strength of their revolutionary knowledge and personal charisma. The Party, unlike the Congress of Soviets, was trained in and capable of mobilizing collective energies in directions that the more formal procedures of representative democracy could not easily reach. The Soviet political system’s specific character derives not from either logic alone but from the sometimes creative, sometimes destructive interplay of their coexistence.

II. Building Worker’s Power, Channeling Worker’s Power: Factory Committees, Trade Unions, and the All-Union Congress

The fundamental characteristics of the Soviet political structure emerged less in 1917, when the Bolsheviks governed a narrow swathe of imperial Russia in uneasy coalition with Martov’s left-mensheviks and the left-SR’s, then in 1921, when the Party was forced to contend with the revolt of the Petrograd and Moscow workers who had initially propelled them into power in Soviet elections. The worker’s revolt was itself a consequence of the strains that the civil war and its long aftermath placed on the institutions of the Soviet state. Scrambling to preserve the revolution amidst peasant resistance, the reactionary armies funded by the Entente, and imperial German aggression, the party adopted emergency measures which concentrated power in the hands of Sovnarkom. The era of emergency rule weakened the two key elective, collegial bodies which appointed Sovnarkom members: the 100-person executive council which selected the ministers that composed Sovnarkom, and the All-Union Congress, which in turn elected the executive council. Executive impunity enabled choices which may not have survived a more dispassionate, deliberative decision-making process: the banning of the Left-Sr and Internationalist Menshevik parties, the suppression of their press, and the suspension of bodies of worker’s self-management under the guise of economic rationalization. The most important effect of the drive against the other socialist parties was to place powers in the hands of Sovnarkom which could be employed to wreck not just oppositional politicians, but also trade unions and factory committees which sought to exercise significant autonomy from the center.

It was, however, not discontent with an abstract change in political form which catalyzed the worker’s revolt, but the party’s slow-walking of its promised end to emergency rule following the victory in the civil war. By the time of the worker’s revolt in 1921, the most active phase of civil conflict had already been concluded, but the suppression of rural resistance and the consolidation of Bolshevik Power in the ethnic-minority peripheries of the Caucuses and Central Asia was still in motion. The workers of major Russian cities, however, were more distant from these conflicts, and found that, contrary to their initial expectations, the implantation of bourgeois specialists claiming managerial authority and disruption of trade union activities were increasing, rather than declining, in their frequency. The demands of the revolt’s leaders, such as Shliapnikov, were oriented principally around restoring what had been lost: real, as opposed to symbolic powers for factory committees and other institutions of worker’s self-management, a voice for trade unions in the national government, and Soviet elections free of overweening party interference and gerrymandering. Notably, the demands did not include the return of the brief, multi-party system of 1917 and 1918.

The Soviet government, under quiet diplomatic pressure from Germany and internal dissension from the ranks of the Bolshevik party left, chose to conciliate rather than confront the worker’s revolt. The demands were not accepted outright, and importantly, they were not the demands of Soviet society writ large but of a narrow but exceptionally politically conscious layer of the industrial working class. The political settlement between the Bolshevik Party and its proletarian base defined the mold in which Soviet politics would grow.
The most crucial, animating concerns for the workers concerned the disbanding of factory committees and the place of bourgeois specialists. These were also the questions the Party itself believed it had the most room to negotiate on, since they did not immediately affect the overall shape of Soviet political society. The specialists - engineers, experts in Taylorist production techniques, and accountants - possessed vital knowledge necessary for the proper functioning of Soviet industry. They would not be expelled from the factories. But the party’s left was willing, within certain limits, to renew the role of workers’ management.

The emergency restrictions on factory committees were rescinded, and their control over hiring and firing decisions was restored in all industries where they were currently constituted. Specialists would be permitted to make technical decisions freely, but committees would hold a veto where these were clearly also organizational in character, affecting the conditions of employment or the basic rhythm of factory life. Who adjudicated the boundary between technical and organizational decisions was itself a question the settlement left deliberately open: in practice, it became a site of continuous low-level negotiation, with factory committees pressing the interpretation as broadly as they could and specialists resisting it. Specialists who attempted to pass off organizational decisions as purely technical ones faced sanctions and potential removal. With a super-majority, factory committees could escalate a disputed decision to a state official, though the threshold was set high enough that this remained an exceptional rather than routine recourse.

Workers in union-controlled factories attained significantly more power. In industries where trade unions were sufficiently organized to take on genuine management functions, elected trade unionists ran the workplace with specialist support. Although the distinction between management and worker would remain, specialists were now accountable to union assemblies rather than to external state officials, giving individual workers considerably more practical influence over those who directed their labor. The union-controlled model was, with some exceptions, limited to industries particularly suited to it: textiles, food processing, and consumer goods, where detailed knowledge of the production process was held primarily by workers themselves rather than by formally trained engineers. By the late 1920s, most textile enterprises had essentially become state-owned cooperatives, the distinction between workers and management existing only tenuously. Unions also won seats on the highest all-union planning bodies, giving the organized working class an official and permanent voice in national economic governance.

In the steel, mining, and heavy engineering sectors, the knowledge gap between workers and specialists was widest, and the settlement reflected this. Committees retained meaningful control over safety procedures and the pace of work, but production planning and most technical decisions were devolved primarily to managers. In a number of select unionized workplaces in Leningrad and Moscow, there were successful experiments in supplementary workplace education on technical decision-making, allowing workers to take over a range of managerial functions themselves; but these constituted a decided minority of workplaces overall, and their significance lay as much in what they demonstrated was possible as in what they immediately achieved.

The party’s most far-reaching industrial promise was a decade-long programme to re-educate existing specialists and train a new cadre of technicians, engineers, and management experts formed within the Soviet system rather than inherited from the old order. By 1931, all party specialists would be required to hold established party standing alongside their technical qualifications, with everything that implied: accountability to party commissions for personal conduct, regular training in socialist doctrine, and thorough screening for past counter-revolutionary activity. The measure expressed a commitment to produce a managerial class that was both socially and culturally closer to the factory floor than the bourgeois specialists of the civil war period had ever been.

The core of the political settlement, however, was the automatic and mandatory extension of party membership to all urban workers. This was a revolution unto itself. Party membership expanded from under two percent of the population to over fifteen percent in a matter of days, and the number of delegates from urban districts to regional Soviets was simultaneously doubled. In practice, individual Soviet districts became far smaller and a vast new layer of workers was empowered to stand as delegates by virtue of their new party membership. A genuine if limited electoral democracy emerged alongside these changes: with the ban on party factions now lifted, workers could choose between candidates presenting distinct programs. At first, competitive Soviet elections, defined as contests in which more than one candidate received over fifteen percent of the vote, were relatively rare, confined to the heartlands of organized proletarian power. But the figure climbed steadily, from around twelve percent of elections in 1922 to over forty percent by 1935, as urban workers grew more organizationally experienced, the decisions of the All-Union Congress became more legible at the district level, and factional differences sharpened.

One tension the settlement did not resolve was the relationship between mass membership and the party’s claim to be a vehicle of exceptional political formation. If every urban worker was automatically a party member, the selective pressure that had previously guaranteed a degree of ideological coherence was gone. The party schools and political education apparatus consequently grew not less but more important: with membership no longer an index of commitment, political formation had to be achieved through the educational function rather than assumed from it. This was the institutional pressure that drove what would come to be known as the permanent campaign, and which the Komsomol, the Zhenotdel, and the dense apparatus of worker political education represented in their most visible forms.

III. The Communist Party, the Permanent Campaign, and the Making of Soviet Nationhood

By 1945, the Russian Communist Party and its regional affiliates had attained a membership of over 95 million individuals, roughly a third of the Union’s overall population. Over eighty-five million of these were factory workers and other urban laborers for whom party membership was mandatory and universal; the remaining ten percent were, for the most part, a mixture of city-dwelling party bureaucrats, rural party leadership and sympathetic peasants activated by mobilization drives, and the civil staff of the peripheral republics in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Ukraine.

At the level of formal institutions, the Soviet Party remained the indispensable partner of the Soviet State, a substantial standing reserve of power which could be mobilized to assist in social transformation. Looking more closely at the individual Soviet citizen, however, reveals a significantly more complicated reality. The 95 million party-members were simultaneously citizens of the Soviet Union, residents of a national republic, and members of the Communist Party. As citizens, they were bound by a formal structure of conventional law whose consequences were, outside emergency circumstances, mostly predictable. If they were state administrators, they had special responsibilities to their superiors judged by the standard metrics of instrumental rationality: efficiency, consistency, and productivity. Violations of the law would be met with official, criminal punishment; administrative incompetence would be punished by formal sanctions and pay cuts. In this dimension of their existence, the Soviet Union was utterly unexceptional, not just amongst socialist states, but amongst the majority of functional twentieth-century polities.

Unlike formal accountability to law, party membership made claims not just on the individual’s regular behavior but on their consciousness and political formation. Party-members were expected to display “purity of conduct” and “proper socialist consciousness”. Even the lowest-level member was subject to a range of disciplinary measures, and endowed with corresponding responsibilities, especially in their interactions with non-party members, where they were expected to model the “new socialist human”. Attending a set quota of party events was mandatory; failure to engage in party business would lead to visits from local party chapters and, eventually, expulsion. Excommunication from the party carried immediate consequences, particularly for those seeking white-collar and government careers; even for unskilled and semi-skilled laborers, the social stigma of expulsion was sufficient to motivate most workers to take the necessary measures to remain in good standing.

Party discipline applied most stringently to higher-ranking members, many though not all of whom were also public servants. Where the state evaluated its bureaucrats against the often measurable, quantitative standards of planning, the party launched inquiries and investigations of broader concern. Did the party member attend to their work with due conscientiousness? Where decisions demonstrated self-interest but were justified by principle, what was the true motivating factor? Had the party member agreed to an un-proletarian dictate from a superior out of opportunism, and were they now prepared to report their conduct to the Party?

The possibility of any administrative act being called to political account created a unique institutional condition. The administrator who failed to meet a plan target faced not merely the bureaucratic consequence of administrative review but the political consequence of accounting for their conduct before a party body empowered to assess whether that failure reflected insufficient commitment to socialist construction. This dual accountability was the party-state’s most penetrating instrument of governance. The conditions that made it most politically necessary, such as the accelerated tempos and ambitious targets of the collectivization drives, also made it most prone to generating the specific abuses the official record has not been able to conceal: the falsified returns, the coerced votes, the extra-legal pressures whose cumulative weight cannot be evaded.

There was, however, a certain built-in flexibility to the party-state’s accountability system, which was nonetheless the subject of considerable controversy. This was the so-called system of Partiynaya korrelyatsiya, or “party correlation”. On the whole, the upper heights of the civil administration required higher party rank and attracted increased scrutiny. But there were always de facto exemptions to this rule. Positions in the All-Union Congress, for example, required mere party membership, a product of the 1921 reforms deliberately intended to preserve that body’s practical autonomy from the party apparatus. Other technical positions in which there were shortages remained open to lower-ranking members well into the 1920s. By contrast, considerably more stringent standards were applied to those involved in the more coercive arms of the state - the military, the police, and the security apparatus - reflecting a broader theory of accountability calibrated to the power each position commanded. In short, the party-state’s disciplinary attention was concentrated where the potential for abuse was greatest.

The accountability mechanism was, however, only one face of the party’s power. The other was positive and mobilizational: the party as a standing reserve capable of being called upon to advance the most ambitious campaigns of socialist construction. It was through the permanent campaign apparatus of Komsomol chapters, Zhenotdel branches, party schools, and worker-activist brigades that the party exercised its deepest social reach and generated the political capital that its most consequential figures deployed. Unlike in Central Europe, where intermediate workers’ organs provided alternately resistance to and ballast for modernizing drives, the Soviet Union possessed no significant civil society outside the Party. This made the party more integral to sweeping social transformations such as collectivization, and left individuals who stood outside it more vulnerable and less protected from its reach.

The trajectory of Alexandra Kollontai from Zhenotdel organizer to party chairwoman illustrates in concentrated form what the permanent campaign apparatus was capable of producing when its mobilizational logic operated successfully. Kollontai was close to the commanding heights of the state in 1919 as a Sovnarkom member, but she was a marginal rather than core member of the body. She was able to use her position there to prevent the Zhenotdel from being dissolved outright during the Civil War, though it remained starved of funds. Retaining considerable links to the party’s left wing, she was nonetheless voted out of Sovnarkom following Sverdlov’s rise to power. Forced to vacate her post in the civil administration, she threw herself into the women’s leagues, which accumulated a mass membership over the 1920s. In 1925, her organizing work was recognized with an appointment to the Politburo; two years later, she leveraged her party position and considerable popularity among female workers to launch a new mass organizing campaign amongst women in the countryside. This campaign was directed not only on behalf of women but also against rural party members and state officials deemed too ideologically or personally comfortable with the patterns of the pre-revolutionary rural world. Over three years, the “Struggle for the Peasant Woman” became simultaneously a tool of mobilization and a mechanism of surveillance and purge. In this respect, the mobilizing and disciplining faces of Soviet party power were mirror images of one another. Recent studies have argued that this clearing of the field was itself crucial as a prelude to collectivization.

Kollontai used the substantial organizational power of the Zhenotdel to demand the creation of a new commissariat of women, to which she was appointed in 1929, following the conclusion of the First Five-Year Plan. Within Sovnarkom, she emerged as a crucial broker between competing visions of collectivization, often standing in for Sverdlov himself as a mediator. She solidified her hold over the party’s organizational apparatus in 1931, when she was appointed Chairwoman of the Komsomol. Although it was Trotsky who had urged on the deployment of the worker-activists, most of them belonged formally to Komsomol chapters, and with control over its executive, Kollontai had the ability to modulate the drive’s intensity and targets at a far more granular level than either of her colleagues could manage from their own institutional positions. This structural leverage, grounded not in personal authority but in control over the organizational machinery through which the permanent campaign operated, was what made her mediation between Bukharin, who had long proved adept at managing Sovnarkom procedures, and Trotsky, whose popularity amongst Petrograd workers had won him the chairmanship of the Executive Council, something more than personal diplomacy. She commanded resources neither of them controlled, which is what made her indispensable to both.

The permanent campaign was not only an instrument of governance and social transformation but also, in time, the primary mechanism through which a new Soviet identity was constructed in practice rather than merely proclaimed in theory. We would therefore be remiss to close without discussing the party’s role in the making of a Soviet people. Under Lenin, the Soviets had embarked on an intentionally generous nationalities policy, affording substantial rights to individual republics to promote the titular nationality against minority groups. Under Sverdlov, this policy came under sustained attack as a capitulation to bourgeois nationalism. It would survive, in diminished form, only in Ukraine, where the depth of the cooperative movement’s national character and the critical importance of Ukrainian grain to the entire IntRevMar trading system gave regional interests a leverage they could nowhere else exercise. Elsewhere, titular nationalities would remain formally recognized, but equal access to Soviet universities and state positions would be guaranteed for all peoples of federal republics.

In place of the old nationalities policy came that of Sovietization. This was, contrary to the charges of its critics, something different from Russification. It entailed the creation of a new Soviet identity which could coexist with individual national ones, and perhaps, some thought, eventually displace them entirely. On the peripheries, this effort was frequently coercive; in the daily life of the heartland republics, it involved a more capacious and wide-ranging process in which the party played an absolutely instrumental role. The two registers of compulsion and persuasion were not sequential but simultaneous and mutually conditioning: the coercive reach of party campaigns on the periphery was itself part of what demonstrated that Soviet identity was a real political condition with genuine stakes rather than a rhetorical aspiration. The Soviet identity was constructed, by and large, out of the new social rights which the Soviet State afforded its citizens and the Union’s self-proclaimed identity as the first revolutionary society. Party campaigns were themselves attempts to create this new constituency through political action. By addressing the people as a Soviet people and reminding them of their world-historical vocation, they would themselves be made Soviet.

IV. Toward Collective Leadership: Trotsky, Bukharin, Kollontai and the Coordination of the Party-State

By the early 1930s, three substantial and distinct centers of power had emerged in the Soviet Union. Firstly, there was Sovnarkom, the Council of People’s Commissars, which had achieved predominance in the days of the Civil War and then found itself steadily forced to concede power elsewhere in the following decades. Secondly, there was the Executive Committee, directly elected by the All-Union Soviet Congress and now closely identified with representing the proletarian democracy of the city soviets. Finally, there was the Party itself, in which both the Politburo and Secretariat continued to play important roles. Sverdlov held commanding positions in each institution except the Executive Committee; in the latter, he could still win the hundred-member body to his cause through charisma, persuasion, and above all his individual relationships with its delegates. But even so, the growth of each of these institutions had created responsibilities which were beyond even Sverdlov. A look at changes in the man’s schedule reveals something important: during the Lenin years, he worked, on average, fourteen-hour days; when he came into leadership, this increased to sixteen hours. Over the 1920s, this crept up to eighteen hours, even as he delegated responsibilities to Bukharin, Kollontai, Pyatakov, and Tomsky; by 1933, the year before he retired, he had, on average, twenty and a half hours of meetings, speeches, and work scheduled per day. It is fairly clear that he died less of an undisclosed illness than of simple overwork.

In large part, Sverdlov’s role had been to coordinate the different governing institutions of the Soviet Union, which had by this point achieved functional specialization and significant autonomy. But this was not a task that could practically be accomplished by any one individual alone, and its performance had depended on a quality of personal authority — the accumulated weight of decades of relationships, obligations, and trusted judgments — that no successor could simply inherit. The troika which succeeded Sverdlov would each bring their own base of power to the arrangement, and Sovnarkom would serve as the site where their differences were managed and, when necessary, resolved.

Bukharin had closely allied himself with Adolf Joffe and Nikolai Krestinsky, the key figures in the Soviet diplomatic world who maintained both the trading relationship with Germany and the Soviet Union’s integration into IntRevMar. This was not merely a personal alliance but also a structural one: as the political guarantor of the relationship on which the entire Soviet developmental model depended, Bukharin’s position rested on something more durable than party faction or personal loyalty. His long service in Sovnarkom had also won him allies in the state’s bureaucratic apparatus, particularly in the internal affairs commissariat, which he chaired. He was, by the time of Sverdlov’s retirement, the figure most naturally identified with the Soviet state’s ongoing governance: its daily functioning, its planning apparatus, its diplomatic architecture.

Trotsky had experienced a far more unusual rise. He had looked to return to government with the rest of the party left following the Civil War years, but found himself outmaneuvered by Bukharin and Sverdlov, and tarnished by a more direct association with the entente-backed conspiracy whose exposure had strengthened Lenin’s position in 1918. Ironically, Trotsky had taken a generally harsher line against many of the demands of the workers’ opposition than others on the left, but stranded in the political wilderness during the early 1920s, he found himself in growing sympathy with their concerns about the government’s apparent preference for agricultural over industrial development. Involving himself in Petrograd politics, he employed his considerable oratorical gifts to win a position on the City Executive Committee; from there, he allied himself with the city’s unions in pressing for an expansion of its industrial enterprises. By 1927 he had used the new electoral system to secure a seat at the All-Union Congress, and by 1929 he had been vindicated by the results of the Second Five-Year Plan and emerged as the natural voice of an empowered Executive Committee, the representative of a working class which had waited long enough for the industrial expansion it had been promised.

Kollontai’s path to the party chairmanship, traced in greater detail in the preceding section, had taken her from the Zhenotdel’s organizational margins to the commanding heights of the party apparatus through a sequence of campaigns that demonstrated the permanent campaign’s specific capacity for generating political power from below. Her Komsomol chairmanship from 1931 had given her the most direct form of institutional leverage available: formal control over the organizational machinery through which the collectivization drive’s worker-activist brigades were coordinated. Where Bukharin’s power rested on the state apparatus and Trotsky’s on the democratic legitimacy of the soviets, Kollontai’s rested on the party’s mobilizational infrastructure itself.

The three figures were not natural allies and their differences were real. Trotsky’s perpetual demands for immediate industrialization sat in tension with Bukharin’s defense of the slower, more measured pace and stability that the Soviet-German trading relationship required. Kollontai’s insistence on her ultimate control over the mobilizational drive’s intensity occasionally placed her at odds with both: with Bukharin over the pace of collectivization, and with Trotsky over the specific character of the worker institutions she was willing to subordinate to party direction when the campaign logic demanded it. Collective leadership was effective not because it resolved these tensions, but because it institutionalized them, forcing the different arms of the Union to cooperate. Sovnarkom had developed procedural norms that were crucial for this ongoing negotiations: structured agendas, formalized reporting requirements, rules governing which commissariats could bring disputes to the full body and under what conditions. The arrangement was slower than Sverdlov’s personal coordination had been, more susceptible to deadlock, and occasionally frustrating to all three of its principal figures.

Collective leadership represents the culmination of the functional specialization model this article has traced throughout. The Soviet party-state arrived through a process of political struggle, developmental pressure, and accumulated institutional learning. The three logics of the Party-State - the representative democracy of the executive committee, the administrative capacity of the bureaucracy, and the mobilizational, disciplining, and educative functions of the party - each found expression in a figure who embodied and defended them. What remained, as the Interregnum Era drew toward its close and the pressures of a new revolutionary conjuncture began to make themselves felt, was the question of whether an arrangement designed to coordinate three relatively stable institutional centers could adapt to the destabilizing conditions that the Second Revolutionary Era would bring.

Zhenotdel Propaganda Document, distributed in Central and North Russia, the Volga, Ukraine, and Western Siberia, 1928

_Women Are Members of the Soviet People!

Socialism cannot be built without the liberation of the laboring woman_​

Peasant woman! You have endured the war and buried your husbands and sons. You fed your children from half-empty bowls while the capitalists made war on the peoples of the earth. You survived all of this, and now Soviet power has come! The question before you is simple: will you take up your rights as a full member of our new society, or will the old chains bind you still?

The revolution did not make these chains but has come to deliver you from them. The oppression of the peasant women began long ago, in the backwardness of village custom, in the decrees of priests, and in the condescension from the landlord and merchant. The revolution has broken the old law, but the liberation from the law is not enough. Old habits do not die because decrees are issued, and old men will not surrender their power because a paper says they must. It is your task, peasant women, to take up the task of Soviet power.

What has the old life taken from you?

In the village, the old life said: the women is the property of her husband. It said: she has no voice in the commune. It said: she works from before dawn until after dark, and receives no wages, no recognition, no authority over her offspring. It said: it is her husband’s right to beat her. She could be thrown from her home, deprived of the efforts of her labor, without redress.

Is this the life you will continue? Did your sons die in the Great Trial so that the old life of humiliation, silence, and suffering could continue with new adornments?

We know there are those in your village who say that things should remain as they always have been. The church, the kulak, and the wife-beater all agree on this. Pay careful attention to who speaks these words and what interest they serve. They are the enemies of the Soviet people and the enemies of Socialism.

What is Soviet Power For? Who is Soviet Power for?

Soviet Power is for all the laboring peoples of our Soviet Union. It has established rights that no power can lawfully take from you. They are not promises for the future but realities of today.

1. You have the right to vote in your local Soviet election and to stand as a delegate. Anyone who prevents you from exercising this right is an enemy of the Soviet people.
2. Marriage is a free and equal union between woman and man. No marriage can be imposed by force, by family pressure, or by economic compulsion.
3. Divorce is available to you on the same terms as it is to your husband. You do not require the permission of him or the blessing of a priest.
4. Children born inside and outside of marriage have equal rights. The father of a child has legal obligations toward the child’s maintenance, whatever claims he may make.
5. You may own property, may enter contracts, and conduct legal affairs in your own name. Your husband’s signature or permission is not required. Those who attempt to interfere in this right are either criminals or lack education in the new rights of Soviet women.
6. Beating, coercion, and all other acts of physical violence are criminal acts, even if performed by a husband or family member. These are not a husband’s right but crimes against you which you have the right to seek redress against.

What must you do when your rights are violated?

Awareness of your new place in our Soviet community is just the beginning. You must also act to claim your rights when they are violated. Ignorance still exists, and it is your job, Soviet woman, to combat it by speaking up. There are those who will tell you that the local official will not listen, that the courts still favor men, and that nothing has changed. Do not listen to them. Soviet justice exists to serve you as much as any man.

If your rights have been violated, act immediately. Go to the appropriate place. Bring a witness if you can. State your complaint clearly, and place it in writing if you can. Demand that it be recorded and do not leave without knowing what action will be taken and when.

Where to seek justice

• The Local People’s Court for matters of marriage, divorce, child maintenance, property disputes, and criminal complaints including assault.
• The V olost Executive Committee for complaints against local officials who obstruct your rights, including your right to participate in Soviet elections.
• The local branch of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection for complaints against employers who violate equal pay provisions or dismiss women unlawfully.

Finally, you may come to your local Zhenotdel Chapter if you seek additional assistance. We will advise you, accompany you if necessary, and ensure your complaint reaches the right place. We can also assist with recording and writing down complaints. Be assured that our services come free of charge, as we are servants of the Communist Party. If an official tells you that your complaint is not his concern, or instructs you to return home and submit to your husband, write down his name and the date and bring this information to the Zhenotdel. Such an official is violating his oath to the Soviet state. He will be reported to the appropriate party body and held to account, and you will be doing your duty as a Soviet woman to build socialism.

Click to expand…

Click to shrink…

Komsomol Circular, Distributed to Chapters and University Cells, 1939

On Race Prejudice and the Duty of the Soviet Youth ​

In recent months, a series of incidents in Moscow and Leningrad have brought shame upon the Soviet people in the eyes of the world. Students from the colonies who came to our universities at great risk to learn and to carry the flame of socialist science back to their peoples were subjected to harassment, mockery, and in several cases physical assault at the hands of Soviet citizens. The Central Committee of the Komsomol considers these incidents a matter of the gravest political seriousness which must be addressed forthrightly.

I. Race Prejudice Destroys Class Consciousness ​

Race prejudice is more than an incidental failing, a matter of individual bad manners to be corrected by a reprimand and forgotten. It is the consequence of a specific ideological formation, constructed over centuries by the ruling classes of the imperialist powers to justify the subjugation of the colonial peoples and make the exploitation of hundreds of millions of human beings appear natural. When a Soviet citizen looks upon a student from India or Ghana with contempt, he is not expressing a personal opinion or speaking from ignorance. He has allowed the ideas of the class enemy to colonize his thinking and corrode his class consciousness. In the midst of our socialist society, he is reproducing the ideological weapons of imperialism.

II. The International Meaning of Race Prejudice ​

Twenty years ago, when the great revolutionary wave first swept Europe, some comrades believed that the liberation of the European proletariat would be sufficient to break the back of world capitalism. Events have taught us otherwise. The British Empire and American Republic have maintained their domination of the colonial world precisely because their working classes have been bought off with the super-profits extracted from India, Africa, and Asia. The defeat of imperialism in the colonial periphery is now a central front in the global struggle for socialism.

The socialist world today is watched by hundreds of millions of colonial subjects who have not yet won their freedom. They watch to see whether it practices what it preaches: whether the Soviet Union, which proclaims the equality of all peoples, treats the peoples of the oppressed nations as genuine comrades or as objects of condescension. The foreign student who studies in our institutions and returns home bearing the memory of racial condescension and insult carries back with him the most effective propaganda that the enemies of socialism could desire. Every incident of racial insult directed against a student from the colonial world is, therefore, not only a personal injury to that individual, but an act of treason against the Soviet Union and international socialism.

III. Race Prejudice is an Inheritance of Imperialist Ideology ​

Some comrades have argued that the incidents in question reflect nothing more than ignorance. Many members of the Soviet Union had not encountered peoples of different appearance, they have argued, and consequently they did not understand how to conduct themselves. This explanation is inadequate. Ignorance may explain awkwardness or confusion but it does not explain racial prejudice, which arises from specific histories. The task of political education is to identify these histories and help us eradicate their malevolent influence.

In our Soviet society, race prejudice derives from two distinct sources. The first is the survival of pre-revolutionary attitudes inherited from Tsarist society, which reproduced many of the ideological structures of European colonial thought in its treatment of the peoples of the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia. The second is the persistent and insidious penetration of imperialist ideology through cultural channels, such as the films, novels, and popular attitudes imported from or modeled on the capitalist world. The Komsomol member who laughs at a racial caricature or ridicules a foreign student has absorbed and surrendered his intellect to a piece of bourgeois ideology. Those who dismiss the meaning of these incidents have normalized the corrosion of class-consciousness and thereby done the work of the enemy.

IV. What Is Required of Every Komsomol Member ​

As the colonial peoples intensify their struggle against imperialism, the behavior of Soviet citizens toward colonial comrades has become a political act with international consequences. The Komsomol member must understand this and act accordingly. To assist him, we have laid out four guidelines, for the purposes of political education in socialism:

1. Every Komsomol member is obligated to treat the foreign students in our universities, technical institutes, and party schools as equal comrades in the international struggle against capitalism and imperialism, regardless of their national origin, language, or appearance.

2. Any Komsomol member who witnesses racial insult, harassment, or physical violence directed against a foreign student is obligated to intervene, to report the incident to the chapter secretary, and to ensure that the incident is brought before the appropriate party or state organ.

3. Chapter secretaries are directed to devote at least one meeting per quarter to political education on the national and colonial question, drawing on the resolutions of the IntRevMar Anti-Colonial Committee, the works of Lenin and Luxemburg on the national question, and the statements of representatives of the colonial liberation movements. This is a core component of Marxist political education.

4. Komsomol chapters in universities and technical institutes are directed to establish relations with the associations of foreign students in their institutions, to ensure that these students have access to Komsomol cultural and political activities.

V. The Struggle Against Race Prejudice is the Struggle for Socialism! ​

The Soviet Union has declared itself the enemy of imperialism in all its forms. This declaration must be practiced by all Komsomol members in their daily lives. The struggle against racial prejudice is not a matter of courtesy or tolerance, but of class consciousness and revolutionary practice.

Our revolution was made in the name of all the laboring peoples of the earth, not of the Russian people alone. The Soviet Union is the first and most powerful bastion of a world struggle that encompasses billions of human beings who have not yet won what we have. To look upon any one of those billions with contempt because of the color of his skin or the character of his features is to betray the revolution. The Struggle against Race Prejudice is the Struggle for Socialism!

Click to expand…

Click to shrink…

​