Lenin, following in the footsteps of Marx and Engels, continuously grappled with the problems of revolutionary strategy and tactics, as well as the problems of socialist construction in a backward country. His 53 volume Collected Works (in the Russian edition) are testimony to the depth of his life-long contribution to Marxism. He always put matters honestly and refused to lull the Russian workers with ‘official’ illusions and smug pronouncements. Above all he based his whole outlook on the success of the international revolution. Lenin explained that the overthrow of capitalism and consolidation of a proletarian democracy in an advanced country would be difficult enough, but for backward Russia it was an impossible task without immediate help from the West. In all the writings of Lenin, and especially of this period, there is a burning faith in the ability of working people to change society, and a fearless honesty in dealing with difficulties. He always revealed unpalatable truths, in full confidence that the working class would understand and accept the need for the greatest sacrifices, provided the reasons for them were explained honestly and truthfully. The arguments of Lenin were designed, not to stupefy the Soviet workers with ‘socialist’ opium, but to steel them for the struggles ahead – for the struggle against backwardness and bureaucracy in Russia and for the struggle against capitalism and for the socialist revolution on a world scale.
Using the same scrupulous approach Lenin returned repeatedly to discuss the chronic deficiencies of the Soviet state and the terrible predicament that faced the Russian workers. The objective backwardness of Russia – with its high rates of illiteracy and weak working class – forced the Soviet government to rely heavily on the services of hundreds of thousands of ex-tsarist bureaucrats, who in thousands of ways were sabotaging the efforts of the new regime. This was no small matter, but one that threatened an internal degeneration of the whole revolution. Marx had already explained that the danger of bureaucratic degeneration was possible on the basis of material backwardness. However, he never developed this point, believing that such a problem would be resolved on the basis of the revolution in the advanced capitalist countries. In backward, isolated Russia it was another matter.
Marx and Engels were well aware of the danger of bureaucracy in a workers’ state and tentatively proposed methods for combating it. Basing himself on the experience of the Paris Commune, Engels had written: “In order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must … safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.” To ensure that the state will not be transformed “from servants of society into masters of society – an inevitable transformation in all previous states – the Commune made use of two infallible means. In the first place, it filled all posts – administrative, judicial and educational – by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time by the same electors. And, in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. The highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone was 6,000 francs. In this way, an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates to representative bodies which were added besides”. (MESW, The Civil War in France, by Marx, Vol. 2, pp. 187-8.)
Taking as his point of departure Marx and Engels’ analysis of the Paris Commune, Lenin put forward four key points to fight bureaucracy in a workers’ state in 1917:
1) Free and democratic elections to all positions in the Soviet state,
2) Right of recall of all officials,
3) No official to receive a higher wage than a skilled worker and
4) Gradually, all the tasks of running society and the state to be performed by everyone in turn, or as Lenin put it: “Any cook should be able to be prime minister.”We shall reduce the role of state officials to that of simply carrying out our instructions as responsible, revocable, modest paid ‘foremen and accountants’ (of course, with the aid of technicians of all sorts, types and degrees). This is our proletarian task, this is what we can and must start with in accomplishing the proletarian revolution. (LCW, Vol. 25, p. 431.)
Under Lenin, the maximum wage differential was to be kept to a ratio of 1:4, which he honestly described as a ‘capitalist differential’. This, however, was made necessary by the lack of skilled personnel needed to run industry and the state in a country where the cultural level of the masses was extremely low. As the dissident Soviet historian Roy Medvedev points out:
The first Soviet wage scale established a ratio of 1:2.1 between the lowest and the highest earnings. At the beginning of 1919, the gap between the two extremes was narrowed even more and became 1:1.75. This lasted until the beginning of NEP in the autumn of 1921; with the approval of the Central Executive Committee and the Party Central Committee, the Council of People’s Commissars passed a resolution that stated: “When setting wage rates for workers with different qualifications – office staff, middle-range technicians and senior administrative personnel – all thought of equality must be abandoned.” The new wage scale contained broad differentials according to qualifications, and divided staff into four groups: apprentices, workers with varying degrees of skill, accountants and office workers, and administrative and technical staff. The ratio between the lowest level and the highest (the 17th category) was set at 1:8.
The question of payment for employees of state administrative bodies was dealt with in a different way. In the first months after October, the minimum subsistence wage based on the exchange rate and the level of prices was calculated to be eight roubles a day; this was confirmed by a decree of the 16th January 1918. (Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy, pp. 221.)
About the same time, Lenin drafted a bill “On the Salaries of Senior Personnel and Officials”, which was approved by the Council of People’s Commissars with slight amendments. The text was as follows:
Since it is considered necessary to adopt the most energetic measures to lower the salaries of officials in all state, communal, and private undertakings and institutions, without exception, the Council of People’s Commissars decrees:
1. There shall be a maximum limit to the salary of a People’s Commissar of 500 roubles a month, with an allowance of 100 roubles for each child; the size of apartments is limited to one room per member of the family.
2. All local Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies are asked to prepare and implement revolutionary measures for the special taxation of senior personnel.
3. The Ministry of Finance and all individual Commissars shall make an immediate study of the accounts of ministries and shall reduce all excessively high salaries and pensions.
During the first months of Soviet rule the salary of a People’s Commissar (including Lenin himself) was only twice the minimum subsistence wage for an ordinary citizen. Over the next years, prices and the value of the rouble often changed very rapidly and wages altered accordingly. At times the figures were quite astonishing – hundreds of thousands and millions of roubles. But even under these conditions Lenin made sure that the ratio between lowest and highest salaries in state organisations did not exceed the fixed limit – during his lifetime the differential apparently was never greater than 1:5. Of course, under conditions of backwardness, many exceptions had to be made which represented a retreat from the principles of the Paris Commune. In order to persuade the ‘bourgeois specialists’ (spetsy) to work for the Soviet state, it was necessary to pay them very large salaries. Such measures were necessary until the working class could create its own intelligentsia. In addition, special ‘shock-worker’ rates were paid for certain categories of factory and office workers, and so on. Speaking at the Seventh Moscow Provincial Party Conference on 29 October 1921, Lenin honestly explained this:
Even at that time we had to retreat on a number of points. For example, in March and April 1918, the question was raised of remunerating specialists at rates that conformed, not to socialist, but to bourgeois relationships, i.e., at rates that corresponded, not to the difficulty or arduousness of the work performed, but to bourgeois customs and to the conditions of bourgeois society. Such exceptionally high – in the bourgeois manner – remuneration for specialists did not originally enter into the plans of the Soviet government, and even ran counter to a number of decrees issued at the end of 1917. But at the beginning of 1918 our party gave direct instructions to the effect that we must step back a bit on this point and agree to a ‘compromise’ (I employ the term then in use). (LCW, Vol. 33, p. 88.)
However, such compromises did not apply to Communists. They were strictly forbidden to receive more than a skilled worker. Any income they received in excess of that figure had to be paid over to the Party. The chair of the Council of People’s Deputies received 500 roubles, comparable to the earnings of a skilled worker. When the office manager of the Council of People’s Deputies, V. D. Bonch-Bruyevich paid Lenin too much in May 1918, he was given ‘a severe reprimand’ by Lenin, who described the rise as ‘illegal’. Due to the isolation of the revolution, and the need to employ bourgeois specialists and technicians, the differential was increased for these workers – they could earn a wage 50 per cent more than that received by the members of the government. Lenin was to denounce this as a ‘bourgeois concession’, which should be reduced as rapidly as possible.
In the words of Roy Medvedev:
With respect to Communists, even those who held the highest posts, Lenin demanded moderation. He showed concern for their health and food and living accommodations, but insisted that their salaries, his own included, be kept within certain limits. No luxuries were allowed.
In April 1918, Lenin characterised the introduction of material incentives and differentials as “a step backwards on the part of our socialist, Soviet state power, which from the very outset proclaimed and pursued the policy of reducing high salaries to the level of the wages of the average worker”. (LCW, Vol. 27, p. 249.) Medvedev continued:
In general, Lenin opposed both the equalisation of wages and excessively high salaries, especially for party members. This policy resulted in the so-called party maximum – a wage ceiling for all Communists. Lenin considered any excessive inequality in pay or living conditions “a source of corruption within the party and a factor reducing the authority of Communists”. (Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 841.)
There are many examples which show the living conditions of the leaders of the workers’ state. Writing about the civil war period, Victor Serge recalls the living conditions of the deputy chief of the Cheka:
All this time, Bakayev of the Cheka was going around with holes in his boots. In spite of my special rations as a government official, I would have died of hunger without the sordid manipulations of the black market, where we traded the petty possessions we had brought in from France. The eldest son of my friend Yonov, Zinoviev’s brother-in-law, an Executive member of the Soviet and founder and director of the State Library, died of hunger before our very eyes. All this while we were looking after considerable stocks, and even riches, but on the State’s behalf and under rigorous control. Our salaries were limited to the ‘Communist maximum,’ equal to the average wage of a skilled worker. (Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1941, p. 79.)
The English writer Arthur Ransome, who was well acquainted with Russia and made several visits at this time, reports an extraordinary incident which he experienced first-hand while on an official delegation with Radek and Larin to the town of Yaroslavl in 1921. The Yaroslavl prison was a notoriously bad place under Stalin. But the Bolsheviks took prison reform seriously and tried to improve the conditions of the prisoners. In conditions of terrible food shortages, the food at the Yaroslavl prison was actually better than that available to the local soviet leadership!
It so happens, Rostopchin explained, that the officer in charge of the prison feeding arrangements is a very energetic fellow, who had served in the old army in a similar capacity, and the meals served out to the prisoners are so much better than those produced in the Soviet headquarters, that the members of the Executive Committee make a practice of walking over to the prison to dine. They invited us to do the same. Larin did not feel up to the walk, so he remained in the Soviet House to eat an inferior meal, while Radek and I, with Rostopchin and three other members of the local committee walked round to the prison. (Arthur Ransome, The Crisis in Russia, p. 56.)
The housing space at the disposal of government ministers or commissars was also restricted to one room for each person in the household. Lenin’s office was sparsely furnished with the bare essentials. According to Karl Idman, a member of the Finnish government who met Lenin in December 1917: “Lenin received us cordially, apologising for keeping us waiting. The room in which we found ourselves was divided into two by a board partition… The room was in no way different from any of the other rooms in Smolny. It was as simple as all the rest. The walls were painted white, there was a wooden table and a few chairs.” This policy was in stark contrast to the exorbitant privileges and luxurious life-styles of the masters of the Kremlin under Stalin and his successors. This is confirmed by Victor Serge:
In the Kremlin, he [Lenin] still occupied a small apartment built for a palace servant. In the recent winter, he, like everyone else, had had no heating. When he went to the barber’s he took his turn, thinking it unseemly for anyone to give way to him. (Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1941, p. 101.)
The same applied to Trotsky, who was, in effect, Lenin’s second in command:
During the first days of the Bolshevik revolt I used to go every morning to Smolny to get the latest news. Trotsky and his pretty little wife, who hardly ever spoke anything but French, lived in one room on the top floor. The room was partitioned off like a poor artist’s attic studio. In one end were two cots and a cheap little dresser and in the other a desk and two or three cheap wooden chairs. There were no pictures, no comfort anywhere. Trotsky occupied this office all the time he was Minister of Foreign Affairs and many dignitaries found it necessary to call upon him there… Outside the door two Red Guards kept constant watch. They looked rather menacing, but were really friendly. It was always possible to get an audience with Trotsky. (Louise Bryant, op. cit., p. 103.)
This was no exception. The Bolshevik leaders were always accessible and close to the masses. They walked in the streets with no escorts. Lenin was shot and seriously wounded by a Left SR assassin while doing just that. When one considers the luxurious conditions and privileges of the bureaucracy under Stalin and his successors, shut off from the Soviet population behind high walls, or rushing at great speed in huge limousines accompanied by armies of bodyguards, we see what a gulf separated the democratic regime of Lenin from what replaced it. And it is necessary to emphasise the point that Lenin even considered the relatively small differentials of that time to be unacceptable capitalist differentials which would gradually be reduced as society progressed towards socialism.