Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
business
by the Nomenklatura) admits that real privileges came in the thirties50. For the toilers this is a bit academic for their standard of living was just as badly hit by the infant nomenklatura's desire to control economic life as it would have been if the new class had been siphonining off a massive surpluses for their own benefit. Further however sincere socialists the Bolsheviks were, once established as a ruling class it was only a matter of time before they were either corrupted by their new class position or replaced by a new group who had none of their scruples.
It may be objected here that the Bolsheviks did not have sufficient power to merit the title 'ruling class'. By the spring of 1918 however capitalist management had been virtually eliminated51 and the factory comities had been subordinated to state direction. True the Bolsheviks had only the most crude administrative machinery and often issued orders in complete ignorance. They did however have the force to ensure that in the cities those orders, however stupid, would be obeyed.
The grain monopoly was not however obeyed. It's been estimated that 60% of grain supplied to the cities was by means of bagtraders.52 It is only by seeing the Bolsheviks as a new class that the Bolshevik phobia towards the bagtraders makes sense. Unless the Bolshevik new class imposed the grain monopoly the key areas of economic life would be controled by the peasantry. Lenin, as a Marxist would have believed that ultimately economic realitys would reasert themselves over politics. Hence if the bagtaders succeeded the Bolshevik regime would be a house built on sand.
The emerging Soviet system echoed that of Tsarist Russia. Under Tsarism the state had always been the dominant exploiter. The nobility had their origins as state officials and unlike their Carolingian counterparts they were never able to form a feudal class independent of the state. (The officials of the Carolingian empire of Charlamaigne that ruled France and Germany around 900 AD eventually became the hereditary Counts of feudalism) More recently it was the state's financing of industrialization by turning on the screws on the peasants that had produced the discontent that had led to revolution.
A party of toilers should have fought against state control (this is not to say they need necessarily have been anarchist). Indeed during 1917 while the Mensheviks were extolling the virtues of state control53 the Bolsheviks attacked this as Chinovnik control54. Ah but the new state was a Soviet state and so under the toilers control. Wasn't it?
The Bolsheviks practiced manipulation from the first.55 When the Bolsheviks were faced with an SR peasant soviet in Voronezh (a province in Southern Russia) they simply organised another56. When Antonov-Ovseenko entered Rostov in February 1918 he declared: "Truly power belongs to the soviet but your soviet is no good and we will disband it!"57
It was in the spring that the Bolsheviks showed how little they really supported the soviets. As discontent grew soviet after soviet [next page]