a) Soviet democracy starts to breakdown

At first, every workers’ state will have to operate with the economic means and many of the methods it has inherited from capitalism. It will also have to use the skilled people trained under capitalism too. Through mass working-class participation in the running of every state organ, these remnants of capitalism can be eradicated.

In Russia, the revolution had smashed the tops of the old Tsarist state, driving out the most reactionary generals and nobles at the head of the government ministries and the armed forces. Communists took their places wherever possible.

But a thorough-going transformation of the state apparatus was impossible with the resources of the isolated Soviet Union. By the time of the Party Congress in March 1918 – where the name ‘Communist Party’ was adopted – membership was reported to have risen to about 300,000. But only minority of this number formed the cadre of the party, able to lead others in struggling for party policy. The state apparatus, on the other hand, numbered hundreds of thousands of officials. ‘Specialists’ and skilled administrators of the old regime could not be replaced; they had to be kept on, even at the cost of paying them higher salaries.

Civil War made things worse again. The basis for workers’ democracy – the unity, organisation and revolutionary energy of the working class – had been shattered by the superhuman effort of winning the war. By 1920, the output of large-scale industry was down to just 14 % of the 1913 level. Steel production stood at 5% of the 1913 level. This collapse meant that by 1920, there were fewer than half of the numbers of industrial workers as there had been in 1917. The workers’ political cadre – the class-conscious activists who had mobilised their workmates, led the strikes, taken up arms, created and led the soviets – was almost eradicated. Thousands of the most revolutionary cadres had gone to the front and perished in the war. Most of the survivors were absorbed into the ministries of the workers’ state.

With the class-conscious workers decimated and dispersed, with the raw, semi-peasant workforce in the factories struggling night and day to continue production with the dilapidated equipment and constant shortages, soviet democracy began to breakdown. Day-to-day administration was left in the hands of an army of non-Communist officials, representing the outlook of the privileged layers in society.

The All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which had been supposed to meet every three months, was meeting only once a year by 1918; and even those meetings were insufficiently prepared. Through utter exhaustion, the masses were no longer able to exercise power directly, nor keep the officials and bureaucrats in charge of state administration sufficiently in check. This factor was decisive in the degeneration of the Russian workers’ state.

b) ‘War Communism’

1918 to 1921 marked the period known as ‘war communism’. Having been forced – by the need to defeat counter-revolution – to rapidly nationalise more of the economy than the overstretched workers’ state was really able to efficiently plan and control, the Soviet government also applied strict control over the distribution of the country’s scarce goods, rather than relying on ‘market forces’.

Manufactured goods became almost unobtainable, while food supplies were requisitioned from the peasantry to feed the Red Army and the cities. But the October revolution had depended on an alliance between the working class and the peasantry. The peasants had supported the workers’ state because it offered them peace and land. But the deprivations of the war and ‘war communism’ eroded the peasants’ support for the revolution. Harvests shrank. Famine raged in east and south-east Russia during 1921 and 1922, killing five million people.

Only the savagery of the White armies, and their intention of giving land back to the landlords, prevented large sections of peasants from going over to the counter-revolution.