From the report of the Supreme Council of National Economy, March, 1919, we learn that in the vast majority of the branches of Russia’s industry the labor required for production had increased from 400 to 500 per cent. The Congress of Salesmen’s Unions, held at the end of April, 1919, adopted a resolution, published in Izvestia (No. 97), which said, “The nationalization of commerce, owing to the pell-mell speed of the methods employed in carrying it out, has assumed with us extremely ugly forms, and has only aggravated the bad state of affairs in the circulation of goods in the country, which was poor enough as it was.”
These statements show that in the early part of last year the Bolshevist régime was in a very critical condition. Demands for the “liquidation” of the system were heard on every hand. Instead of this, the resourceful rulers of Soviet Russia once more revolutionized their methods. The period of nationalization we have been considering may be described as the first phase, the period of the rule of industry by the professional politicians of the Communist Party. When, in March, 1919, Leonid B. Krassin[53] undertook the reorganization of the industrial life of the nation, Bolshevism entered upon a new phase.
[53] Krassin’s first name is usually given as “Gregory,” but this is an error. His full name is Leonid Borisovitch Krassin. He is a Siberian of bourgeois extraction.
X
THE NATIONALIZATION OF INDUSTRY—II
The second phase of nationalization may be characterized as the adoption by a political state of the purest capitalist methods. Krassin was not a Bolshevik or a Socialist of any kind, so far as can be learned. He severed his rather nominal connection with the Socialist movement in 1906, it is said, and, thoroughly disillusioned, devoted himself to his profession and to the management of the Petrograd establishment of the great German firm of Siemens-Schuckart. He is said to have maintained very cordial relations with Lenin and was asked by the latter to accept three portfolios, namely, Commerce and Industry, Transports, and War and Munitions. He agreed to take the appointment, provided the Soviet Government would accept his conditions. He demanded (1) the right to appoint specialists of his own choosing to manage all the departments under his control, regardless of their political or social views; (2) that all remaining workers’ committees of control be abolished and that he be given the power to replace them by responsible directors, with full powers; (3) that piece-work payments and premiums take the place of day-work payment, with the right to insist upon overtime regardless of any existing rules or laws.
Of course, acceptance of these conditions was virtually an abandonment of every distinctive principle and ideal the Bolsheviki had ever advanced. Krassin immediately set to work to bring some semblance of order out of the chaos. The “iron discipline” that was introduced and the brutal suppression of strikes already described were due to his powerful energy. A martinet, with no sort of use for the Utopian visions of his associates, Krassin is a typical industrial despot. The attitude of the workers toward him was tersely stated by the Proletarskoe Echo in these words: “How Comrade Krassin has organized the traffic we have all seen and now know. We do not know whether Comrade Krassin has improved the traffic, but one thing is certain, that his autocratic ways as a Commissary greatly remind us of the autocratic policy of a Czar.”[54]
[54] Quoted by H. W. Lee, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, p. 7.
Yet Krassin failed to do more or better than prolong the hopeless struggle against utter ruin and disastrous failure. He was, after all, an engineer, not a miracle-worker. Trades-unions were deprived of power and made mere agencies for transmitting autocratic orders; tens of thousands of useless politicians were ousted from the factories and the railways; the workers’ control was so thoroughly broken that there were not left in Soviet Russia a dozen workers’ committees possessing the power of the printers’ “chapel” in the average large American newspaper plant, or anything like the power possessed by hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of shop committees in our industrial centers.[55] But Krassin and his stern capitalist methods had come too late. The demoralization had gone too far.
[55] In view of the denials of the dissolution of workers’ control, circulated by Soviet Russia and the whole body of pro-Bolshevist propagandists, it may be well to clinch the statements made on this point by quoting from an indisputable authority. In the issue of Economicheskaya Zhizn, November 13, 1919, appears the following paragraph:
“Schliapnikoff, Commissar of Labor in the Soviet Republic, writes: ‘The principal cause of the deplorable situation of the Russian industry is a total absence of order and discipline in the factories. The Working Men’s Councils and the Shop Committees, created with the purpose of establishing order in the factories, exercised an injurious influence on the general course of affairs by destroying the last traces of discipline and by squandering away the property of the factories. All those circumstances put together have compelled us to abolish the Working Men’s Councils and to place at the head of the most important concerns special “dictators,” with unlimited powers and entitled to dispose of the life and death of the workmen.’”