Hildemeier writes:
Dass die neuen Herren aus anderem Holz geschnitzt waren als die Provisorische Regierung, machten sie noch am Morgen nach der Machtübernahme klar. Ihre ersten beiden Dekrete bestätigten den Bauern den Besitz des Landes, das diese sich mit Gewalt genommen hatten, und verkündeten einen sofortigen Waffenstillstand. Damit sicherten sie sich die Loyalität der breiten Masse der Bevölkerung. Demagogie siegte über zögerliche Realpolitik.He's referring to the Bolshevik government's immediate promise to put those major platforms in motion. However much demagoguery may have been involved in their advocacy, Lenin's government was serious about land redistribution and ending the war. Which the Provisional Government was so obviously not.
[That the new rulers were cut from different wood than the [Kerensky] Provisional Government became clear even on the morning after the seizure of power. Their first two decrees confirmed that the farmers' ownership of the land that they had taken by force and declared an immediate ceasefire. Thereby they secured the loyalty of the broad mass of the population. Demagoguery won over hesitant Realpolitik.]
After the February Revolution, the peasants began to seize property in what we might call a "wild" expropriation, seizing land from big landowners and taking it for themselves. Sarah Badcock gives a summary version of that process in The 1917 Peasant Revolutions Jacobin 08/23/2017:
The rural revolutions exposed the national and regional authorities’ powerlessness. Neither the Provisional Government nor the Petrograd Soviet addressed peasant concerns and demands. They asked the rural population to wait patiently for the Constituent Assembly to enact land redistribution.The Constituent Assembly was scheduled to be elected later in the year; the actual elections took place in November, after the Bolsheviks took power.
Peasants largely ignored these appeals, and the central government couldn’t prevent their actions. Regional authorities started 1917 with the belief that rural revolutions emerged from misunderstandings and assumed that conciliation and education would halt disturbances. By that summer, the self-conscious assertiveness of rural communities who sought to make their own revolutions without recourse to central plans had eroded these beliefs.Rex Wade in The Russian Revolution (1917) summarizes the seizures this way:
Regional authorities increasingly relied on armed force to control rural areas. A handful of more perceptive leaders tried to control the peasantry by preemptively authorizing the transfer of privately held land to local committees. But the uprisings continued unabated because no central or regional power could implement any policy.
The peasants identified revolution with obtaining land. ... The February Revolution and the collapse of authority that followed it created an opportunity for the peasants to fulfill these ancient aspirations. The revolution removed or seriously weakened the traditional coercive vehicles – police, courts, army – by which state and landlords controlled peasant actions and enforced the old relationships in the countryside. The peasants quickly grasped the fact that, with the weakness of the state and of landowners, they could now act with little fear of the customary retribution. The thousands of scattered villages moved to fulfill their vision of the right order of things and, instead of the usual failure, the cumulative result produced a sweeping agrarian revolution. [my emphasis]
Badcock describes the policy followed by Lenin's government after the October Revolution:
After the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, Lenin quickly issued the Decree on Land, which transferred all privately held land to peasant use. Ironically, this order demonstrated the central government’s impotence, as peasants had already seized most private land by October. Lenin’s land decree presaged the battle for control of the rural economy that became a key feature of Russia’s civil war. [my emphasis]As Hildemeier explains elsewhere, this was an important political mood that provide a major boost to support for the Bolshevik Party and the new government. The main peasants' party, the Social Revolutionary Party, had welcomed the February Revolution. But their supporters quickly became disillusioned when Kerensky's government seemed to be reluctant and slow to back land reform or recognize the de facto land reform that the peasants were implementing on their own.
Wade describes how prior to October, the peasants made maximum use of the limited reform that the Provisional Government would countenance:
Land seizures often took the guise of putting idle land to cultivation. During the war considerable private land had fallen idle. The government, concerned with the spring sowing, moved to maximize the sown acreage. A law of April 11 provided that, if a landowner refused to sow land, it “shall be placed at the disposal” of the local food supply committees and rented “for a fair price to local landowners [including peasants].” The peasants quickly took advantage of the law, using it as a justification for appropriating private estate lands. Sometimes they also took over agricultural equipment, livestock, pastures and other assets, either on the basis that they too were underutilized or else were necessary for working the land which had been seized. Another decree on July 16 sanctioned the taking over of idle land in preparation for the harvest and hay gathering as well as readying land for the fall planting. Although the decree admonished the peasants against illegal action, they simply saw it both as vindication of their prior actions and justification for more seizures.The new Bolshevik government also demonstrably followed up on the "peace" part of their program. Right away, on October 26, the new government issued a decree on peace, as Rex Wade describes in The Russian Revolution (2017):
Moreover, the peasants were sometimes enterprising in getting at the land by ensuring that it was “idle” or the harvesting of it in doubt. They often took advantage of the landowners’ need for hired peasant labor or renting out of land by demanding higher wages or lower rents; where landlords resisted the peasants sometimes refused them labor and then appropriated the land on the claim that it was idle. Where prisoners of war or refugees were being used to work estate land, the peasants sometimes forcibly blocked this. [my emphasis]
It called upon all of the belligerent powers to enter into immediate negotiations for a just peace without annexations or indemnities. It appealed to the workers of France, Britain and Germany to support the Soviet’s peace effort. The decree is notable for the absence of Lenin’s usual vituperative language attacking Western governments and capitalism and predicting the forthcoming international revolution. ... The problem was implementation, and neither the decree nor Lenin’s speech introducing it addressed what the new government would do if the other powers did not respond, or whether it would consider a separate peace with Germany. For now what was important was a dramatic gesture to secure the loyalty of the weary troops – and especially the Petrograd garrison – as well as taking some sort of step that might actually lead out of the morass of war.The "bread" part of the slogan, ending the food shortage, was far more difficult to address immediately. And feeding the urban population during the civil war that developed in 1918 brought the government in severe conflicts with many peasants over the requisitioning of grain.
But the Bolshevik government in their first proclamation addressed the interests of the workers, promising "workers' controls over industry," followed up a month later with a law to that effect. Obviously, the nature of control over industry would vary over the life of the Soviet Union. But in terms of consolidating political support and control, this was a key appeal to urban workers, who were very receptive to the idea. And they took other immediate actions welcome to urban workers and their families.
In his Geschichte der Sowjetunion, 1917-1991, Hildermeier writes:
Kernforderungen der Gewerkschaftsbewegung wurden endlich erfüllt. Schon wenige Tage nach dem Umsturz erhob die Regierung den Achtstundentag und die Achtundvierzigstundenwoche zur Norm. Kinderarbeit wurde verboten, die Diskriminierung der weiblichen Arbeitskräfte formal beseitigt, Kranken- und Arbeitslosenversicherung verbindlich vorgeschrieben und die Handlungsfreiheit des Managements drastisch eingeschrankt. Anfang Dezember wurden alle Mietshauser in Petrograd enteignet und den Bewohnern zur Selbstverwaltung übergeben. Gegen Ende desselben Monats annullierte ein Dekret - nach der Nationalisierung der Banken - alle Dividenden und Wertpapiereinkünfte. So gesehen bedeutete Sowjetmacht anfangs in der Tat Arbeitermacht und Herrschaft der
Key demands of the union movement were finally realized. A few days after the overthrow, the [new] government raised the eight-hour day and the 48-hour week to the norm. Child labor was banned, discrimination against female workers formally abolished, health and unemployment insurance were mandated by statute, and management freedom of actions drastically reduced. At the beginning of December, all rental units in Petrograd were expropriated and given over to the self-administration of the residents. By the end of the same month, a decree annulled - after the nationalization of the banks - all dividends and income from capital gains. Seen from this perspective, soviet power initially really meant power to the worker and the rule of the "servants."Concerns about what we today call a "democratic deficit" would soon become more pressing. But the Bolsheviks had learned from the experience of the February Revolution that they needed to signal very clearly to their supporters that the new rulers took their concerns seriously. Hildermeier stresses the pragmatic motivations of those policies at that moment: "Bei alledem ging das machtpolitische Kalkül der Bolschewiki vorerst auf." ("With all of this, the Bolshevik's power-political calculation took first priority.")
No comments:
Post a Comment