Study Questions on Daniels for week 3.
pp. 81-85: Bolshevik Revolutionary Legislation
Who now controlled the land? Explain.Why would the Bolshevik government issue a decree that was based upon a Mandate compiled by the SRs?
What kinds of newspapers did this decree shut down, and why?
How did the Bolsheviks justify such censorship?
In this decree the Bolshevik government presents their own version of the history of the national minorities—explain what the Bolshevik "spin" is in this document and why they would take this position.
What does the decree promise, and to whom?
pp. 85-88: Coalition or One Party Government?
What happened at this Bolshevik Party Central Committee meeting? Who quit the Central Committee and why?
How did the majority define the actions of those who resigned? Why?
How did the majority justify the idea of an all-Bolshevik government?
How did the majority, then, explain its "willingness" to form a coalition government?
b) Bolshevik Statements of Resignation (4/17 Nov. 1917)
How did the Bolsheviks who resigned from the Central Committee on 4 Nov. explain their actions?
Why did they want a coalition government, and with whom?
What did they warn would happen if Lenin did not form a coalition government?
pp. 88-89: Industrial Democracy (Decree on Workers’ Control, 14/27 Nov. 1917)
What did this decree mean by "Workers’ Control"?
What rights were the Workers’ Committees and the Soviets of Workers’ Control supposed to have?
Why issue this decree?
pp. 89-90: The Secret Police (Decree on Establishment of the Cheka, 7/20 Dec. 1917)
What did the acronym "Cheka" stand for? What was the Cheka’s funtion supposed to be?
Was the Cheka to be directed only against the bourgeoisie and the "bourgeois" parties? Explain.
What kinds of measures was the Cheka formally authorized to take>
pp. 90-92: The Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly (Lenin’s draft decree of 6/19 Jan. 1918)
What argument did Lenin make to against the legitimacy of the Constituent Assembly?
How did he justify the conclusion that the SRs, who won a majority of votes, do not really represent the will of the lower classes?
What conditions ("proposal") did Lenin set before for the Constituent Assembly? And what happened?
How did Lenin try to link the SRs and Mensheviks to the "counter-revolutionary groups"?
pp. 92-94: Trotsky on the Red Army (from his 27 March 1918 speech "Labor, Discipline, and Order")
Did Trotsky argue that the working class could simply take over running the state apparatus by itself? Explain.
What about the army? Did Trotsky think that the new Red Army could function without using "old" officers ("specialists") from the tsarist army? Explain.
Did Trotsky consider electing officers to be an effective way of running the army? Explain.
In sum, then, how did Trotsky’s views contradict the changes that had taken place in the army during the 1917 revolutions?
pp. 94-98: Lenin on Economic Expedience (from "The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government," April 1918)
Lenin wrote this after the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty had been signed. What did he now define as the main tasks of the revolution? (And how did he define the revolution itself?)
Did Lenin at this point believe that workers on their own could run the factories in an efficient way, and that workers’ control itself would make for a smooth transition to socialism? Explain.
How do the ideas in this essay by Lenin compare to the ideas in The State and Revolution (see week 2 readings)?
What kinds of systems of factory organization did Lenin propose in Spring 1918? Why?
Did Lenin believe that the "transition to socialism" would be peaceful? How did he explain the necessity of dictatorship?
How did Lenin justify individuals having dictatorial powers within the Soviet "democracy"?
Explain the relationship between a) the arguments Lenin makes here about how factories should be run, and b) the ways that workers in 1917 had argued that factories should be run.
Remember that in What is To Be Done (readings, week 2), Lenin had argued that workers on their own can not achieve revolutionary class consciousness. What sorts of statements does Lenin make in this 1918 essay about Russian workers’ class consciousness?
pp. 102-103: One Party Dictatorship (Decree on the Expulsion of the Right Socialist Parties from the Soviets, 14 June 1918)
How did Sverdlov (writing as Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets) explain the "need" to expel the Mensheviks and Right and Center SRs from the soviets in June 1918?
Did this decree actually order all soviets to kick out the Right/Center SRs and the Mensheviks? Explain.
pp. 103-105: War Communism (Decree on Nationalization of Large-Scale Industry, 28 June 1918)
Did the Sovnarkom explain this decree as being aimed at building socialism? How did they explain the need for nationalization?
What did the decree actually order?
Who was supposed to run the nationalized industries?
Who then became the "employers" at these nationalized factories and enterprises? And what would happened to the capital assets of the old owners?
pp. 113-116: Centralization of the Communist Party (8th Party Congress Resolution, "On the Organizational Question," March 1919)
Why was the party worried about the rapid growth in its membership? How did the party want as members? Who did the party not want as members?
Why was the party worried that its members were "loosing touch" with the workers and peasants?
Why did the party organize a Political Bureau (Politburo), and Organizational Bureau (Orgburo), and a Secretariat? Explain the make-up of each body and the relationship between these new bodies and the party’s Central Committee.
Did the party decide to form separate "national" Communist parties in Soviet Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, or Belorussia? Explain.
Did the party now decide to become decentralized and to allow local members to set policy for themselves? Explain.
How did the party try to prevent "localism" (the tendency of local party groups to come to their own decisions on questions that went against the decisions of the Central Committee)?
pp. 116-117: The Civil War (from Lenin, "All Out for the Fight…" July 1918)
How did Lenin define the opponents of Soviet power in this letter? How did he link these opponents to "foreign capitalists" and "world capitalism"?
Who did Lenin include in the "counter-revolutionary camp"?
What did he define as the main tasks of the Communist Party during this military emergency? How must the Soviet Republic organize itself?
How did Lenin justify the use of terror in this letter?
pp. 121-123: Trotsky on Terror and Militarization (from Terror and Communism, 1920)
How did Trotsky justify the need for repression?
Did he see the question of repression as a matter of principles of morals? Explain. What distinctions does he make between Soviet terror and Tsarist terror?
According to Trotsky, how should the Soviet regime use terror?
What did Trotsky mean by the "militarization of labor"? Why did he consider it necessary?
Think about what workers were demanding in 1917; why might workers oppose does Trotsky’s conception of the Labor State?
pp. 136-138: The Kronstadt Revolt (from the Kronstadt Izvestiia, 8 March 1921)
Did the sailors and workers at Kronstadt in 1921 think that the Bolsheviks had emancipated the working class? Explain.
What about Communist rule did the Kronstadt workers and sailors oppose the most?
Were these people anti-socialist? Anti-Soviet? Explain.
How did the people rebelling at Kronstadt understand and define their own actions?
pp. 138-143: Institution of the Monolithic Party.
According to this resolution, would the party tolerate the creation of "factions" among the communists? Explain.
How did the party define the danger of factionalism?
How were party organizations supposed to prevent factionalism from occurring? Did the party congress ban all internal criticism of the party? Explain.
What would happen to party members who formed factions? Who had the power to punish factions?
How did the party congress explain the causes of "deviations" within the party?
Did the party congress accept the idea that the views of the "deviationists" were valid interpretations of Marxism?
Who, according to this resolution, had the authority to decide what was and was not "properly" Marxist?
Think back to Lenin’s What Is To Be Done. Some historians argue that there is a "straight line" from What Is To Be Done to this 10th Party resolution. What similarities do you see between the two documents?
How did the party define the class nature of deviations like the "workers’ opposition"?
How did the party congress propose dealing with the deviationists? Did it call for an end to all debate? Explain.