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Inside Lenin's Government: Ideology, Power and Practice in the Early Soviet State
Lara Douds examines the practical functioning and internal political culture of the early Soviet government cabinet, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), under Lenin. This study elucidates the process by which Sovnarkom's governmental decision-making authority was transferred to Communist Party bodies in the early years of Soviet power and traces the day-to-day operation of the supreme state organ.The book argues that Sovnarkom was the principal executive body of the early Soviet government until the Politburo gradually usurped this role during the Civil War. Using a range of archival source material, Lara Douds re-interprets early Soviet political history as a period where fledging 'Soviet' rather than simply 'Communist Party' power was attempted, but ultimately failed when pressures of Civil War and socio-economic dislocation encouraged the centralising and authoritarian rather than democratic strand of Bolshevism to predominate.Inside Lenin's Government explores the basic mechanics of governance by looking at the frequency of meetings, types of business discussed, processes of decision-making and the administrative backdrop, as well as the key personalities of Sovnarkom. It then considers the reasons behind the shift in executive power from state to party in this period, which resulted in an abnormal situation where, as Leon Trotsky commented in 1923, 'leadership by the party gives way to administration by its organs'.
240 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 22, 2018
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May 16, 2025
É curioso como adoitamos prestar tan pouca atención a un proceso tan complicado como os primeiros anos da URSS. Semella que despois da Revolución de Outubro só nos interesa a guerra civil e xa posteriormente a IIGM. O proceso interno de conformación do Estado soviético e o PCUS e os seus debates internos quedan nun segundo plano.
É un texto curto para o complexo da temática pero inda así consigue tratar con moitísimo detalle os debates políticos de calado sobre a burocracia e o papel do Estado transitorio no tempo transcurrido entre a Revolución e a morte de Lenin, a creación do Sovnarkom, os debates cos socialrrevolucionarios de esquerda e a influencia do empeoramento na saúde de Lenin.
Se de algo pode pecar é de partir de certas conclusións preconcebidas sobre a legado político de Lenin pero creo que, inda que se poda discrepar, sería deshonesto tratar de facer unha crítica imparcial ao proceso revolucionario máis importante do s. XX.
Adxunto unha ligazón a un curso da mesma autora sobre este mesmo periodo e deixo un par de citas interesantes.
https://massolit.io/courses/russia-th...
"Various individuals who worked in the Sovnarkom Administration Department attested that due to its novelty, this machinery had not inherited the ‘bureaucratic’ culture that seeped into the commissariat apparatus. Instead, inside the Sovnarkom apparatus a new, ‘revolutionary’ political culture was fostered. After the October Revolution Lenin developed the idea, first expressed in State and Revolution, of what the anti-bureaucratic organizational culture of the state apparatus should entail and his conception was embraced and internalized by the staff of the Sovnarkom Administration Department. This organizational culture displayed a few key elements, which attempted to work against what Lenin saw as the ‘bureaucratic’, ‘empty’, ‘formal’, ‘dead’ manner of work of the imperial state apparatus. First, interpersonal relations among the staff should not be strongly hierarchical, with those of superior rank acting dictatorially over those below. This pattern of behaviour started from the very top, with Gorbunov remarking, ‘Speaking with Vladimir Ilich one felt him not a “boss” (nachal’nik), but simply as an older comrade.’ Fotieva also testified to this collegial atmosphere. She recalled, ‘In his activity as leader of the Soviet state Lenin strictly observed the principle of “collegiality”.’ ‘He encouraged initiative in every worker and did not press his authority. Flattery, grovelling and servility were unthinkable…He considered it especially vile…to be rude and impolite to those standing lower in position and therefore unable to reply.’
Related to this anti-hierarchical atmosphere was the concept of internal self-discipline. Lenin conceived of the revolutionary state as staffed by workers who were not just pen-pushing bureaucrats or ‘time-servers’ who simply obeyed orders from above without care. The staff had to be ‘self-disciplined’, show initiative and have an independent attitude towards their individual tasks. According to Lenin, this mindset was opposite to the ‘formal, soulless’ (bezdushnyi) attitude of imperial bureaucrats. Fotieva confirmed that Lenin was continuously concerned ‘to improve the work of the soviet apparatus, to overcome bureaucratism and Red Tape in Soviet organs, by… encouraging the cultivation in Soviet employees of an irreconcilable attitude towards all displays of a… formal, soulless attitude towards affairs’.
As well as the collegial, self-disciplined working atmosphere, the political culture of the Sovnarkom apparatus encompassed further ideals of work which were, according to Lenin, contrary to the ‘bureaucratic’ work mode of the imperial state. These ideals were personal attention to detail, the checking of execution of decisions, and brevity and efficiency in paperwork. Fotieva explained that Lenin was convinced that ‘attention to detail makes the soviet apparatus genuinely democratic, not formally democratic, but democratic in the proletarian sense’. Checking of execution was another major weapon in Lenin’s war on bureaucratism in state institutions. Indeed, in a letter of 1921 to People’s Commissar for Foodstuffs Tsiurupa, Lenin stated explicitly that due to ‘the most basic insufficiencies of Sovnarkom and STO – absence of checking of the execution of decisions… we are dragged down the foul bureaucratic mine of writing papers, talking about decrees, writing decrees and in this sea of paperwork living (zhivaia) work drowns.’ Lenin also encouraged brevity and efficiency in the work of the Sovnarkom apparatus. Fotieva remarked that the hold-over bureaucrats and specialists in the commissariat staff did not possess the notion of the ‘revolutionary pace of work’ and carried over their old, bureaucratic habits. She complained that they wrote voluminous reports, considering the longer the report, the higher the merit and that these reports went to Sovnarkom under the signature of the commissars as material for the agenda of the sittings. For example, for the Sovnarkom sitting of 14 May 1918 there were five agenda points, but 120 pages of addenda reports. Fighting this abundance of paperwork, Lenin strove for brevity in expression by the administrative staff and government officials, and often repeated that ‘of course, nobody reads long reports.’ ‘Write briefly in telegraph style!’ he implored in a letter of September 1921."
"The collegial system assumed that all participants would objectively address the question of the ‘general good’, but in reality it showed that individual, group and sectional interests came to the fore very quickly. Thus, it might be argued that the collegial model of administration was flawed from the outset. It revealed a naive understanding of the way decision-making is conducted in any organization and the inexperience of most of those involved in administration. The attempt to implement collegiality in the state bureaucracy reflected certain ideological assumptions about how administration would be different under socialism, and a perhaps utopian belief that democratic principles could and should be applied wherever possible.
Indeed, most scholars who have examined collegial leadership have been inclined to stress its limitations, and even its ‘obsolescence as a mode of governance in complex modern societies’. Max Weber, for example, concluded that collegiality is fundamentally at odds with the principles of rational bureaucratic organization, arguing that it ‘unavoidably diminishes the promptness of decision, the unity of leadership, the clear responsibility of the individual, and the absolute disregard of external influence and the maintenance of internal discipline’. Therefore, according to Weber, while collegiality in purely advisory bodies may be expected to persist indefinitely, ‘the collegial sharing of decisional authority is anachronistic and must give way to the technical superiority of monocratic organisation’."
"With Lenin’s incapacity, other party leaders began to position themselves for the succession. The government institutions became a battleground for this fight, and Sovnarkom suffered collateral damage to its status as a result. Leading players in the succession struggle had built their power bases in institutions outside the state cabinet and pursued a strategy of pitting their own bureaucratic constituencies against it. For certain leaders, Sovnarkom was not as familiar a turf as the party organs, and so their allies forced stalemates there by exploiting the practice, explored above, of the appeal of its decisions to the Politburo and Central Committee."
"The reluctance of both Lenin himself along with the Bolshevik leaders to find a proper replacement for him during his illness made the build-up of power in an alternative location likely. Lenin, on the advice of his doctors, felt that he would be able to return to work in the near future. As a result, he only envisaged people ‘deputizing’ for him, rather than replacing him."
"Lenin insisted that the socialist democracy he attempted to implement in the early Soviet government was more democratic than liberal parliamentary systems because it included not only liberation from economic exploitation but also the conversion of representative institutions from ‘talking shops’ into ‘working bodies’. Yet Soviet experience highlights certain theoretical and historical tendencies that reduce the effectiveness of commune democracy as a democratic method. The rejection of liberal democratic principles of individual rights was accompanied by the abolition of its procedures. Ultimately, it is not surprising that the synthesis of executive and legislative functions in one body gives great scope for the accumulation of executive power at the expense of legislative power. Fledgling ‘Soviet’ rather than simply ‘Bolshevik’ power was trialled in the first year after the October Revolution, but its naive methods of ‘anti-bureaucratic’ Soviet democracy failed under pressures of Civil War and socio-economic dislocation. The legacy of the political culture of the tsarist past combined with the Bolshevik leaders’ ideologically driven innovations in governance to hamper the practical functioning of their state cabinet and opened the door to the unforeseen growth of a party-state monolith which would dominate the Soviet political system until its collapse."
É un texto curto para o complexo da temática pero inda así consigue tratar con moitísimo detalle os debates políticos de calado sobre a burocracia e o papel do Estado transitorio no tempo transcurrido entre a Revolución e a morte de Lenin, a creación do Sovnarkom, os debates cos socialrrevolucionarios de esquerda e a influencia do empeoramento na saúde de Lenin.
Se de algo pode pecar é de partir de certas conclusións preconcebidas sobre a legado político de Lenin pero creo que, inda que se poda discrepar, sería deshonesto tratar de facer unha crítica imparcial ao proceso revolucionario máis importante do s. XX.
Adxunto unha ligazón a un curso da mesma autora sobre este mesmo periodo e deixo un par de citas interesantes.
https://massolit.io/courses/russia-th...
"Various individuals who worked in the Sovnarkom Administration Department attested that due to its novelty, this machinery had not inherited the ‘bureaucratic’ culture that seeped into the commissariat apparatus. Instead, inside the Sovnarkom apparatus a new, ‘revolutionary’ political culture was fostered. After the October Revolution Lenin developed the idea, first expressed in State and Revolution, of what the anti-bureaucratic organizational culture of the state apparatus should entail and his conception was embraced and internalized by the staff of the Sovnarkom Administration Department. This organizational culture displayed a few key elements, which attempted to work against what Lenin saw as the ‘bureaucratic’, ‘empty’, ‘formal’, ‘dead’ manner of work of the imperial state apparatus. First, interpersonal relations among the staff should not be strongly hierarchical, with those of superior rank acting dictatorially over those below. This pattern of behaviour started from the very top, with Gorbunov remarking, ‘Speaking with Vladimir Ilich one felt him not a “boss” (nachal’nik), but simply as an older comrade.’ Fotieva also testified to this collegial atmosphere. She recalled, ‘In his activity as leader of the Soviet state Lenin strictly observed the principle of “collegiality”.’ ‘He encouraged initiative in every worker and did not press his authority. Flattery, grovelling and servility were unthinkable…He considered it especially vile…to be rude and impolite to those standing lower in position and therefore unable to reply.’
Related to this anti-hierarchical atmosphere was the concept of internal self-discipline. Lenin conceived of the revolutionary state as staffed by workers who were not just pen-pushing bureaucrats or ‘time-servers’ who simply obeyed orders from above without care. The staff had to be ‘self-disciplined’, show initiative and have an independent attitude towards their individual tasks. According to Lenin, this mindset was opposite to the ‘formal, soulless’ (bezdushnyi) attitude of imperial bureaucrats. Fotieva confirmed that Lenin was continuously concerned ‘to improve the work of the soviet apparatus, to overcome bureaucratism and Red Tape in Soviet organs, by… encouraging the cultivation in Soviet employees of an irreconcilable attitude towards all displays of a… formal, soulless attitude towards affairs’.
As well as the collegial, self-disciplined working atmosphere, the political culture of the Sovnarkom apparatus encompassed further ideals of work which were, according to Lenin, contrary to the ‘bureaucratic’ work mode of the imperial state. These ideals were personal attention to detail, the checking of execution of decisions, and brevity and efficiency in paperwork. Fotieva explained that Lenin was convinced that ‘attention to detail makes the soviet apparatus genuinely democratic, not formally democratic, but democratic in the proletarian sense’. Checking of execution was another major weapon in Lenin’s war on bureaucratism in state institutions. Indeed, in a letter of 1921 to People’s Commissar for Foodstuffs Tsiurupa, Lenin stated explicitly that due to ‘the most basic insufficiencies of Sovnarkom and STO – absence of checking of the execution of decisions… we are dragged down the foul bureaucratic mine of writing papers, talking about decrees, writing decrees and in this sea of paperwork living (zhivaia) work drowns.’ Lenin also encouraged brevity and efficiency in the work of the Sovnarkom apparatus. Fotieva remarked that the hold-over bureaucrats and specialists in the commissariat staff did not possess the notion of the ‘revolutionary pace of work’ and carried over their old, bureaucratic habits. She complained that they wrote voluminous reports, considering the longer the report, the higher the merit and that these reports went to Sovnarkom under the signature of the commissars as material for the agenda of the sittings. For example, for the Sovnarkom sitting of 14 May 1918 there were five agenda points, but 120 pages of addenda reports. Fighting this abundance of paperwork, Lenin strove for brevity in expression by the administrative staff and government officials, and often repeated that ‘of course, nobody reads long reports.’ ‘Write briefly in telegraph style!’ he implored in a letter of September 1921."
"The collegial system assumed that all participants would objectively address the question of the ‘general good’, but in reality it showed that individual, group and sectional interests came to the fore very quickly. Thus, it might be argued that the collegial model of administration was flawed from the outset. It revealed a naive understanding of the way decision-making is conducted in any organization and the inexperience of most of those involved in administration. The attempt to implement collegiality in the state bureaucracy reflected certain ideological assumptions about how administration would be different under socialism, and a perhaps utopian belief that democratic principles could and should be applied wherever possible.
Indeed, most scholars who have examined collegial leadership have been inclined to stress its limitations, and even its ‘obsolescence as a mode of governance in complex modern societies’. Max Weber, for example, concluded that collegiality is fundamentally at odds with the principles of rational bureaucratic organization, arguing that it ‘unavoidably diminishes the promptness of decision, the unity of leadership, the clear responsibility of the individual, and the absolute disregard of external influence and the maintenance of internal discipline’. Therefore, according to Weber, while collegiality in purely advisory bodies may be expected to persist indefinitely, ‘the collegial sharing of decisional authority is anachronistic and must give way to the technical superiority of monocratic organisation’."
"With Lenin’s incapacity, other party leaders began to position themselves for the succession. The government institutions became a battleground for this fight, and Sovnarkom suffered collateral damage to its status as a result. Leading players in the succession struggle had built their power bases in institutions outside the state cabinet and pursued a strategy of pitting their own bureaucratic constituencies against it. For certain leaders, Sovnarkom was not as familiar a turf as the party organs, and so their allies forced stalemates there by exploiting the practice, explored above, of the appeal of its decisions to the Politburo and Central Committee."
"The reluctance of both Lenin himself along with the Bolshevik leaders to find a proper replacement for him during his illness made the build-up of power in an alternative location likely. Lenin, on the advice of his doctors, felt that he would be able to return to work in the near future. As a result, he only envisaged people ‘deputizing’ for him, rather than replacing him."
"Lenin insisted that the socialist democracy he attempted to implement in the early Soviet government was more democratic than liberal parliamentary systems because it included not only liberation from economic exploitation but also the conversion of representative institutions from ‘talking shops’ into ‘working bodies’. Yet Soviet experience highlights certain theoretical and historical tendencies that reduce the effectiveness of commune democracy as a democratic method. The rejection of liberal democratic principles of individual rights was accompanied by the abolition of its procedures. Ultimately, it is not surprising that the synthesis of executive and legislative functions in one body gives great scope for the accumulation of executive power at the expense of legislative power. Fledgling ‘Soviet’ rather than simply ‘Bolshevik’ power was trialled in the first year after the October Revolution, but its naive methods of ‘anti-bureaucratic’ Soviet democracy failed under pressures of Civil War and socio-economic dislocation. The legacy of the political culture of the tsarist past combined with the Bolshevik leaders’ ideologically driven innovations in governance to hamper the practical functioning of their state cabinet and opened the door to the unforeseen growth of a party-state monolith which would dominate the Soviet political system until its collapse."
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