Abstract
Bolsheviks wanted the Soviet state to guide all public and private institutions in their expanding republic. Direct and comprehensive dominance was their objective. This is so familiar a notion from later communist and fascist history that the effort has to be made to consider how unusual it was at the time of the October Revolution and Civil War. Bolshevism invented it. Many earlier rulers had wanted and obtained autocratic power; but none had wished to subjugate each and every institution to its will. Even the Romanov monarchy had granted rights and privileges to favoured bodies, groups and individuals. Not even the most absolutist among the Russian emperors had envisaged total control as their objective.
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Notes
See R. V. Daniels, Conscience of the Revolution. Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (New York, 1960), chap. 5.
L. D. Trotskii, Rot i zadachi professional’nykh soyuzov.(K 10-mu s’ezdu partii (Moscow, 1920), pp. 1–32.
See J. Ayes, ‘Industrial Unrest in Soviet Russia during War Communism and the Transition to the New Economic Policy, 1918–1922’ (London University Ph. D. dissertation, 1989), chap. 4 ff.
See I. Getzler, Kronstadt, 1917–1921. The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (Cambridge, 1983), chap. 5 ff.
See O. H. Radkey, The Unknown Civil War in Soviet Russia (Stanford, 1976), chap. 4 ff.; O. Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War. The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921 (Oxford, 1989), chap. 7.
See V. V. Kabanov, Krest’yanskoe khozyaistvo v usloviyakh ‘voennogo kommunizma’ (Moscow, 1988), passim.
See M. Perrie on the limits of popular revolt between February and October 1917 in R.Service, Society and Politics in the Russian Revolution (London, 1992), pp. 12–34.
V.N. Sokolov, Staryi bolshevik, 1930, no. 1, p. 130.
A. Mikoyan, Mysli i vospominaniya o Lenine (Moscow, 1970), p. 124.
See the remarks of N. Kuzmin, Petrogradskaya Pravda, 18 January 1921.
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© 1995 Robert Service
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Service, R. (1995). Less Politics!. In: Lenin: A Political Life. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05594-4_6
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