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The Moscow workers' movement in

1921 and the role of non-partyism
Simon Pirani
Version of record first published: 05 Oct 2010

To cite this article: Simon Pirani (2004): The Moscow workers' movement in 1921 and the role of
non-partyism, Europe-Asia Studies, 56:1, 143-160

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 EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES
Vol. 56, No. 1, January 2004, 143–160

The Moscow Workers’ Movement in 1921

and the Role of Non-partyism
S.PiraniUniversity of ExeterColchesterUKsmpirani@hotmail.com

SIMON PIRANI
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THE THEME OF THIS ARTICLE is the upsurge of the workers’ movement in Russia in 1921
following the end of the civil war, with specific reference to Moscow. There were two
main aspects to this movement: first, the wave of protests triggered in February 1921
by supply shortages, and second, the resurgence of working-class political activity in
March–April 1921, during the Moscow soviet elections that immediately followed the
tenth Communist Party congress and the adoption of measures that formed the basis
of the new economic policy (NEP). The article will argue, first, that the protests over
supply were less political, and less united against the Bolshevik government, than has
been presumed, and that, in terms of the resurgence of working-class politics, the
soviet election campaign was more significant. Second, it will argue that the principal
form this political resurgence took was not support for the Mensheviks and SRs but
the development of a non-partyist tendency among workers that has received less
attention than it deserves. This non-partyist tendency included elements close to SR
and Menshevik ideas, but also egalitarian and workerist strands that in October 1917
had sided with the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks’ refusal to co-operate with this
tendency was an important blow against post-civil war hopes of reviving participatory
democracy and reversing progress towards a one-party state.

Non-partyism
I use ‘non-partyism’ to denote a political tendency among workers specifically
opposed to party organisation. Several historians have noted the significance of
non-partyism among Russian workers in 1917. The progenitor of non-partyism was
the basic striving for unity felt by workers entering political struggle for the first time,
which was strong in workers’ movements against tsarism and arguably at its height
in the February 1917 revolution. Between March and November 1917 soviet elections
moved generally from their initial form—direct, unmediated elections from bodies of
workers, soldiers, peasants etc—to systems of competing party lists. Getzler con-
cludes that the advance of partisanship ‘encroached on and weakened the participa-
tory democracy of the rank-and-file workers and soldiers’; on the other hand
McDaniel argues that the ‘unresolved tension between unity and partisanship’ was
rooted in two basic conditions of the workers movement: its need for solidarity and
its need for political direction. In a small minority of soviets, e.g. Helsingfors,
ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/04/010143-18  2004 University of Glasgow
DOI: 10.1080/0966813032000161473
 144 SIMON PIRANI

non-partyism was expressed by a ban on election by party list. But in any case, as
partisanship took hold—faster in the main centres than in the provinces, and faster
among workers than among soldiers—there grew together with it what Getzler
describes as a ‘self-consciously non-party fraction’.1 In Kronshtadt, one of the most
politically developed soviets, the non-partyists were the largest fraction during the
declaration of the ‘Kronshtadt republic’ in May 1917, and joint largest with the
Bolsheviks from elections in August, shortly after which they declared themselves SR
Maximalists. In Moscow, the striving for unity, and lack of understanding of parties’
differences, meant that until the summer there was no party fraction system in the
soviet; even after it was adopted in June, and the party differences became much
clearer after the July Days, Koenker argues that non-partyism was manifest, for one
thing, in donations to the Municipal Fund (a political fund shared between all
workers’ parties), which in August–September continued to dwarf donations to
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separate parties.2
The circumstances that produced the huge wave of working-class support for
Bolshevism in the autumn and winter of 1917—workers’ loss of confidence in the
provisional government, the Kornilov events and the split in the SR party—also
undermined a key assumption of 1917 non-partyism, that differences among workers’
parties were secondary. Presumably many workers who earlier in the year had
expressed non-partyism in various ways moved in October–November to support the
Bolshevik stance on soviet power. Nevertheless, non-partyism emerged in a new form
in the first significant workers’ movement under the Bolshevik government, i.e. the
unrest in Petrograd in the spring of 1918, which gave rise to the Emergency Assembly
of Factory Representatives and ended with the shooting of strikers at Kolpino and
arrests of opposition socialists. Terrible supply problems, and hunger, were catalysts
for the movement. Yarov, a social historian of Petrograd, considers that, politically,
it was inspired on one hand by disillusionment in the soviets and on the other by ‘the
strengthening of “non-party” moods that are usual among workers, but that had
now … taken on a strong anti-Bolshevik colouring’. The Mensheviks and SRs, many
of whom quit the soviets in late 1917 and some of whom were now subject to
repression, were keen to influence non-soviet workers’ bodies such as the Emergency
Assembly, and this poses a question that comes up again in 1921: were these
organisations simply a cover for opposition socialist activity?
Yarov considers that the initiative ‘doubtless’ belonged to the Mensheviks and the
SRs, but that it met ‘the most active sympathy’ among other workers. The historian
of the Mensheviks, Vladimir Brovkin, says the movement was an expression less of
support for the SRs and Mensheviks than of ‘painful disappointment’ in the hopes
raised by the Bolshevik seizure of power.3 Furthermore, an articulate non-partyist
tendency, the United Workers party, participated in the Petrograd protest movements
in early 1918 and early 1919. This group was led by Nikolai Glebov, a metalworker
who joined the Social Democratic party in 1901, was a delegate to the St Petersburg
soviet in 1905 and a collaborator of Plekhanov in exile from 1906, returned to
Petrograd in 1917 and took a job at the Putilov works; and Aleksandr Rozenshtein,
also a Putilov worker, a member of the Putilov factory committee and in mid-1917
of the Menshevik fraction on the Petrograd soviet, who was arrested in 1918 by his
brother Mikhail Rozenshtein, a Bolshevik Putilov worker. Both sat on leading bodies
 MOSCOW WORKERS IN 1921 145

of the Emergency Assembly. They sought liberation from the ‘yoke of partyism’, and
at the Emergency Assembly’s first meeting Glebov, quoting Marx and Engels’
insistence that the liberation of the working class ‘is the task of the working class
itself’, attacked ‘the Bolshevik and Menshevik party bureaucrats alike’. At the Putilov
works non-partyist declarations appeared in resolutions that accepted soviet power; at
the Obukhov works, where Glebov’s group was also active, non-partyism was linked
to demands for the reconvocation of the Constituent Assembly. A resolution, drafted
by Glebov and adopted by a mass meeting of Putilov workers at the height of the
1919 strike wave, on 8 March, called—vaguely, without mentioning organisational
forms—for a ‘united socialist front and the mobilisation for socialist construction of
all in the revolutionary democracy who are able to work’.4 Glebov joined the
Bolshevik party in 1920 and remained in it until being shot in the 1938 purge, while
the non-partyism he advocated revived in Moscow in 1921.
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The Petrograd movements also apparently helped into being one of the Bolsheviks’
most effective means of relating to workers, the calling of ‘non-party meetings’.
Yarov writes that such meetings were first called in early 1918 by opposition
socialists, and soon adopted by the Bolsheviks.5 From 1921 organisation of non-party
meetings became a standard task for party workplace organisations. In line with the
Bolsheviks’ view that they alone could be considered a legitimate, pro-soviet party,
they used the term ‘non-party’ to denote all workers outside the Bolshevik party, and
differentiated this mass according to their own criteria, e.g. ‘petty bourgeois’ or
‘declassed’ workers who opposed Bolshevik policies, or ‘conscious’ ones ‘sympath-
etic to Bolshevism’. This was the sense imparted to the term ‘non-partyism’
(bezpartiinost’) after the decline in 1922 of non-partyism in the sense defined above.
The distinction should be borne in mind.

The unrest of January–February 1921

Immediately after the civil war, in January 1921, supply shortages, aggravated by
general economic collapse and a transport crisis, threatened industrial workers with
hunger. The inequalities and inadequacies of the rationing system were exacerbated
and rations cut. In Moscow this resulted in a wave of strikes. This movement arose
straight out of extreme hardship, and its central political demand, ‘equalisation of
rations’, was directed against the privileges of bureaucrats, specialists and officials.
Non-partyism as such was not yet apparent, but once opportunities arose for political
discussion outside the Bolshevik party, egalitarian and workerist tendencies could be
heard, along with SRs and Mensheviks.6
The ‘equalisation’ slogan originated during the civil war, when rationing was the
main source of Moscow workers’ food supplies. The system was continually altered
to give priority to certain recipients (Red Army soldiers, workers in defence industries
etc.), and then readjusted to overcome glaring inequalities; corruption and trade in
fake ration cards were rife; rations often arrived late or not at all. To many workers,
the worst injustice was the abuse of the rationing system by government officials and
white-collar staff—of whom there were as many in Moscow as there were industrial
workers—who continually found ways of getting themselves included in higher
categories, leaving those further from the sites of decision making to go without. The
 146 SIMON PIRANI

tramworkers’ strike of 13–15 August 1920, the most widespread stoppage that
summer, demanded ‘equalisation’. A Bolshevik commission set up to investigate the
causes highlighted the strikers’ desire to end inequalities and ‘destroy all extra rations
for responsible officials’. The strikers, among whom the Cheka could detect no
Menshevik–SR or anarchist agitation, believed ‘that in a working people’s republic,
every worker and member of office staff should receive a ration, but only a working
person’s ration’.7
Towards the end of 1920 the inequalities in the rationing system in Moscow were
exacerbated as the policy of ‘shock working’ (udarnichestvo) in industry, including
the prioritisation of some factories and use of incentive bonus payments, came into
widespread use and widened ration differentials.8 Simultaneously, as a modest
recovery in industrial production fuelled over-optimism among some Bolsheviks and
the use of accelerated ‘war communist’ methods to push the economy forward, the
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Cheka clamped down on private trade, and on 14 December it triumphantly closed

the city’s main market, the Sukharevka, depriving families of a fallback if rations
were unavailable.9 The optimism was misplaced: the crippled national transport
system was at that moment failing to deliver food to Moscow. By January rations
were being distributed 51 days late; they were cut on 20 January and again on 1
February. By late February food supplies were pouring into the city, but they came
too late to contain the workers’ protest movement.10 Under these conditions the
demand for equalisation of rations ran ‘like a red thread through all the resolutions
and speeches by non-party speakers at any workers’ meeting’, the Bolshevik trade
union leader Solomon Lozovsky told the tenth party congress in March 1921:
‘During the civil war we created a ration system that—before we even mention the
privileges of the high-ups—comprised among workers themselves no less than 13
categories: extra-shock, half-shock, and so on’. Once the war ended, ‘this issue made
itself felt’. Rations and privileges were central issues during a wave of strikes in
Moscow in late January and early February: a nine-day sit-down strike at the Gustav
List engineering works from 18 January was attributed by Cheka agents to ‘the
distribution of unequal rations’ and a sit-down stoppage at machine-building factory
no. 5 to ‘the absence of rations’; strikes in the Rogozhsko-Simonovsky district
focused on pay, as did a host of strikes in the Moscow region; at a city-wide bakers’
meeting on 21 February resolutions were passed denouncing ‘privileges and inequal-
ities’.11
In the face of the supply shortages and the surge of working-class opinion, sections
of the Bolshevik party swung behind the ‘equalisation’ demand. On 20 January, when
it decided to cut rations, the Moscow soviet also took measures to reduce inequalities,
cancelling some academic rations and putting some workplaces off the ‘shock’ list.
The soviet then met with the Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars, i.e. the
soviet government) in mid-February to demand the abolition of all privileged rations;
three days later Sovnarkom scrapped most, but not all, of the extras. The discussion
on rations was related to the debate that raged in the party in 1920 on privileges,
‘bureaucratic centralisation’ and the gap between leadership and ranks: the non-party
workers shared with inner-party oppositionists such as the Democratic Centralists,
Ignatov group and Bauman group a contempt for the communists who worked in the
state apparatus and were adapting themselves to it. Up until the tenth congress, at
 MOSCOW WORKERS IN 1921 147

which the party leadership rounded sharply on the opposition and pushed the issue of
bureaucratisation into the background, it had acknowledged the dangers of apparatus
privilege and supported the oppositionists’ resolutions on the subject.12
Minutes of the Moscow metalworkers’ meeting on 2–4 February, previously
unavailable, provide further insight into the politics of the workers’ movement. The
meeting is considered by historians as a key moment in the transition to NEP, because
the metalworkers, traditionally a strong base of Bolshevik support, rounded angrily on
the party and not only denounced rationing policy but also adopted a resolution
moved by SR sympathisers calling for the replacement of requisitioning by a tax in
kind. This was the first significant gathering in the capital in 1921 to make this call,
and helped force a rethink by Lenin, who attended the discussion and within a week
had drafted his notes proposing the tax in kind, with which NEP was effectively
launched. Moreover, the meeting passed a resolution on the equalisation of rations—
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calling for the abolition of all privileged rations ‘be they Sovnarkom rations,
academic rations, specialists’ rations or whatever’, for an ‘equalised, unified’ supply
system for ‘all labouring people’ and for greater union involvement in running
it—which was pushed by an egalitarian, workerist tendency clearly separate from the
SRs. Representatives of this tendency also denounced the bureaucratic apparatus in
terms similar to those used by internal party oppositionists, supported trade union
control of industry in the form advocated by the Workers Opposition in the
contemporaneous trade union debate, and attacked the Bolsheviks not for their
hostility to free trade and capitalism—as some SR sympathisers did—but for
betraying the ideals of 1917.13
There is no question that some metalworkers responded to desperate economic
hardship with a measure of self-interest. Kolyshkin of the Ustinsky works actually
advocated ‘equality of distribution, with advantages for the workers’. A resolution on
pay condemned the injustice of arbitrary rewards for specialists and the power of
industrial administration bodies (glavki) to bestow bonuses in kind as they saw fit, but
also advocated ‘unlimited piece-work bonuses’ for industrial workers. But there was
more here than narrow-minded self-interest. For the egalitarian workerists there was
a principle at stake: privileges for officials and specialists strengthened the apparatus
and distanced the ‘workers’ state’ from the workers still further. The instrument to
deal with this was the union, not the party. Portnov from the Motor factory said the
issue was to ‘clean out all the glavki and throw out all the bourgeois. The whole thing
should be put under the metalworkers’ union’s control’. Kraevsky said ‘all distri-
bution and supply must be put into the hands of our association, our metalworkers’
union; take it away from the bureaucratic glavki’. The factory committees should take
charge of distribution, he added; the union had to ‘get its workers’ hands on those
glavki’. The pro-SR group at the meeting, of which Epifanov from the 1886 power
station and Kazenkov of Dobrovykh-Navgolts were among the leaders, specifically
countered the egalitarian arguments on rationing. Epifanov said ‘the root of evil is not
the privileges in rationing but the economic policy’—and, above all, grain requisition-
ing. Against them, the egalitarian Portnov stated his opposition to ‘reopening the
Sukharevka’. The Bolsheviks, who on 20 January had backed a resolution at the
Moscow soviet advocating complete equalisation of rations, tried to mend their fences
with the egalitarians on this account: when Ivan Kireev, a member of the strong
 148 SIMON PIRANI

non-party group at the AMO car factory (see below), denounced privileged rations,
the Bolshevik Moisei Rafes referred to the soviet’s stand.
The egalitarian workerists were the Bolsheviks’ natural constituency, and had
supported them in the October revolution and the civil war. At least one of them,
Mosolov from the Ustinsky works, was close enough to Bolshevism to regard
cleansing its ranks of bourgeois elements—also the main aim of internal party
oppositionists—as a central task: ‘We did everything for the communists, but that was
for the honest strivings of the communists, not for hangers-on and parasites. We will
do everything we have to, to improve the economic situation, but at the same time we
will free the ranks of the Russian Communist Party of rubbish. … It is communist
ideas that we are for; we will throw the rubbish out [of the party]’. The affinity
between some aspects of Bolshevism and the non-party egalitarians was also evident
in a session on the trade union question then being debated within the party. After a
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report by Lozovsky, four non-party speakers rose in turn to back the Workers
Opposition line of trade union control over industry. The first of them, Kamenetsky
from the Metallo-khimik factory, said that ‘if the communists and commissars can
manage us, then elected workers could do it better’. A fifth speaker, Korfilin,
advanced Menshevik arguments: the unions were not doing their job because they
were subordinate to the government, and should be ‘shaken up from the roots … on
the basis of free elections’. The resolution adopted on trade unions not only advocated
participation by union delegates in industrial administration but also made a call,
more radically democratic than that of any of the Bolshevik factions, for ‘the
re-election of all trade union bodies on a strictly democratic basis’. On issues of
democracy, the egalitarian workerists allied with the SRs and Mensheviks against the
Bolsheviks. Barkovsky and Pozden, who backed the WO proposals on industry, both
said so: the latter called for ‘freedom of the press, freedom of speech and freedom of
assembly’ as preconditions of effective working-class action.
These elements—sympathy for the fight against ‘bureaucratism’ in the Bolshevik
party, unanimity with the SRs and Mensheviks on democracy, and divisions on
economic questions—were carried over into the Moscow non-partyist tendency that
flowered in March–April. But in the strike wave that came to a head at the end of
February, three weeks after the metalworkers’ meeting, desperation and hardship were
at the fore. This is not to say that the workers’ movement, taken in the context
of widespread peasant unrest and economic breakdown, was not a threat to the
Bolsheviks. Certainly some of them perceived one, and on 13 February Cheka and
military leaders based in Moscow wrote to the CC warning that workers ‘may even take
action against soviet power’.14 But in the event the Moscow strike movement fell
short of that. First, it was divided. Its high point was a stoppage by relatively privileged
workers—7,000 staff at the Goznak mint in Khamovniki who printed the bank
notes demanded by hyperinflation—protesting at their loss of privileges. Goznak’s
‘shock’ rations (1.5 funt (614 grammes) of bread per day) were reduced as a result
of the soviet’s decisions to ‘equalise rations’ as far as possible. On 23 February the
works struck, and a crowd of 3,000 marched to the nearby barracks and neighbouring
factories to win support. At the barracks the demonstrators clashed with sentries
who feared that 700 recently demobilised Red Army men, reported by the Cheka to
be ‘of a clearly anti-soviet disposition’, might join in. A woman worker received a
 MOSCOW WORKERS IN 1921 149

superficial injury and a Komsomol member was fatally wounded.15 (Several histori-
ans, relying on the memoirs of the SR S.S. Maslov, wrote that troops were brought
in and refused to fire on the workers, and that a special security detachment
intervened, killing and wounding several people. Archives now available throw doubt
on this.)16
Other industrial workers declined to strike in support of the Goznak strikers—not
surprising, perhaps, since the latter were championing the very inequalities that other
workers decried. The strikers called an open meeting in the Khamovniki district on
the evening of 23 February, to which 5,000 workers came. Stanislav Messing, head
of the Moscow Cheka, reported that in two of three auditoria anti-strike resolutions
had been passed while, in a third, the president of the soviet republic, Mikhail
Kalinin, had convinced strikers to return to work. Apart from being divided on the
issue of Goznak, the movement was generally hesitant on political issues. On the day
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after the Goznak strikers’ demonstration, a ‘wave of mass meetings’, with some
strikes, washed over the city. Messing reported that ‘everywhere the discontent has
the same cause: deterioration in the conditions at particular workplaces. The general
character of the movement is economic, and so far there are only isolated political
actions’. The leading Bolshevik Anatolii Lunacharsky, who spoke at Dinamo,
reported to Lenin afterwards that the mood was ‘gloomy’, but workers had listened
‘without protest’. There were instances in which SRs and Mensheviks moved political
resolutions—at the auto repair plant, where the Bolshevik soviet delegate was
mandated to vote for Menshevik resolutions, and at the Bogatyr chemical factory,
whose workforce adopted a Menshevik resolution for ‘unity of all socialist parties in
the struggle to counter the destruction of the economy’—but these were not predomi-
nant.17
At this stage the Moscow workers were extremely angry about the supply crisis,
but divided as to its causes and not ready to mount a political challenge to the
Bolshevik government. The Bolsheviks were aware of these divisions, and responded
with a combination of renewed efforts to resolve supply problems, dispersal of
untrustworthy demobilised soldiers and selective repression, concentrated against the
Mensheviks, SRs and anarchists, hundreds of whom were imprisoned. The limits of
the workers’ movement in Moscow were again defined when a political challenge to
Bolshevism was mounted at Kronshtadt, just a few days later. It inspired scarcely any
active support in Moscow. Workers there applauded pro-Kronshtadt speakers at mass
meetings, but at no point during the Kronshtadt events did this sympathy translate into
action, however limited. On 25 March workers at the Bromlei factory, who passed a
resolution supporting Kronshtadt, were punished with arrests, and the mass sacking
and selective re-employment of the entire workforce, which in turn triggered some
solidarity strikes in nearby factories. But that was all.18 Strikes in Petrograd, which
began on Vasilevsky Island on 24 February and spread just as Moscow quietened
down, were of longer duration and more widespread than those in Moscow. They did
not succeed in co-ordinating with the Kronshtadt revolt either. There is more evidence
of political opposition among workers in Petrograd than in Moscow, but still no unity
of purpose to overthrow the government is apparent.19 The main causes of the protest
strikes were supply shortages and anger at supply policies, but there was no concerted
political challenge to the Bolsheviks outside Kronshtadt. Interpretations of the strikes
 150 SIMON PIRANI

as a political movement to overthrow Bolshevism or part of a ‘revolutionary situation’

comparable to February 191720 are therefore hard to sustain.

The soviet election campaign

Non-partyism was not evident as a tendency in the Moscow’ workers protests of
January–February 1921. There were isolated expressions of it even before that: for
example, in November 1920, after a discussion at the Soviet rolling mill no. 1 in
Sokolinki district on the military situation, workers voted for a Bolshevik resolution
that ended ‘Long live the Red army’ and ‘Long live Red Poland’, but amended the
slogan ‘Long live the Communist Party’ to ‘Long live the workers’ party’—and,
according to a Cheka agent’s account, said ‘We do not want any one party to rule on
its own’.21 But such discussions do not seem to have been widespread either in late
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1920 or during the supply crisis. Things changed rapidly after Kronshtadt though, in
the elections for the Moscow city soviet in March–April. Lists of non-party candi-
dates were organised in most of the big factories and often defeated Bolshevik lists.
The Mensheviks, SRs and anarchists in Moscow had been subject to extensive
repression during and after the Kronshtadt revolt, and it seems likely that in some
instances members of these organisations, or sympathisers, participated in non-party
activity. But they neither initiated it nor predominated over it.
The official election results suggested a solid Bolshevik victory: of 2,116 delegates
elected, 1,543 were communists, 533 non-party, 29 members of other parties (six Left
SRs, four SR maximalists, 12 Mensheviks, two anarchists, two anarcho-universalists,
two anarcho-syndicalists and one right SR) and 11 unidentified. But the Moscow
party leadership considered this a disaster, because most large factories elected
non-partyists. The Moscow party secretary, Isaak Zelensky, opened a post-election
meeting of the party’s Moscow committee (MC) by saying that ‘in some industries
the party was so weak that it failed to attain a majority … Some groups that are of
no interest to us … gave us the majority’. In context this meant that the Bolsheviks
relied for their majority on the votes of bureaucrats and office workers (sluzhashchie),
of whom there were slightly more in Moscow than there were industrial workers.
Mikhail Boguslavsky, deputy chairman of the Moscow soviet and a leader of the
Democratic Centralist opposition, noted sarcastically that the sluzhashchie had all
suddenly became ‘arch-communists’.22
The elections were characterised by ‘the most active participation by the non-par-
tyists, who organised in the workplaces’, the Menshevik Boris Dvinov wrote in his
memoirs. The Bolsheviks lost more heavily in larger enterprises, the Cheka reported.
They lost more heavily among male industrial workers, who tended to abstain, than
among women, who tended to vote Bolshevik, according to Zelensky. In
Zamoskvorech’e the party was defeated in all big factories; ‘our majority consists of
delegates from small enterprises and associations’, the Cheka reported; in the big
factories there was sympathy for other parties and in the small ones an ‘inclination
to non-partyism’. In Krasnopresnya, where workers ‘took the most active part’ in the
elections, the Communists won 83% of Moscow soviet mandates and 67% for the
local soviets, but large groups of workers were a problem: the elections were ‘ruined
twice’ at Gustav List engineering workers (no reason given), at the Il’in factory three
 MOSCOW WORKERS IN 1921 151

anarchists were elected and at the Presnensky tram depot ‘the communist list was
rejected and three non-party loudmouths elected’. The Cheka reported from Bauman
that 42% of metalworkers’, 71% of leatherworkers’ and 66% of food workers’
delegates were non-party; only textile workers and the military garrison produced
Bolshevik majorities, while chemical workers who had previously supported the
Mensheviks voted 50% communist. In Rogozhsko-Simonovsky district, the commu-
nists won an absolute majority, but not among the biggest concentrations of workers,
including the Kursk railway repair depot, long a left SR stronghold, and the Guzhon
steel works and AMO car factory.23
The extent of organisation in non-partyist election campaigning varied widely. The
non-partyist group at AMO, which scored its first victory over the Bolsheviks in the
soviet election campaign, was well organised: it held meetings and issued leaflets. In
February 1921 it convinced a mass meeting at the factory to reject a proposal by the
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Bolshevik district organiser Yakov Dorofeev to support a Bolshevik list for the soviet
elections, and decided on a secret ballot; in early March two prominent non-partyists,
Vasilii Davydov and Vasilii Nastas’yan, were arrested and released after strenuous
protests by the workforce; they, together with Fedor Chukhanov and Ivan Kireev,
were voted onto the soviet against a Bolshevik list by 277 votes to 136. In other
workplaces non-partyism was more spontaneous. From Zamoskvorech’e the Cheka
reported a rush to find any non-communist prepared to join the soviet: small
enterprises that took no part in previous elections banded together to organise
hustings, and at ‘practically every elective gathering’ the restriction of candidates to
those registered 24 hours beforehand with the district electoral commission was
ignored.24
The evidence available suggests that, politically, those who voted for non-partyist
candidates were first and foremost striving towards some sort of soviet rule, with
broader participation and without the Bolsheviks’ dictatorial impositions. At their post
mortem on the elections MC members concluded that workers had become politically
active, and that while jailings and newspaper closures had virtually silenced the other
parties, workers had wanted not to vote for the Bolsheviks but to go into the soviets
themselves. Zelensky said that supply shortages were an additional factor, but that the
main problem was a non-partyist rejection of Bolshevism. While there had been some
limited electoral freedoms, ‘the overwhelming majority of the Mensheviks were
sitting in Butyrka [prison]. There simply was no anarchist press. In comparison with
other parties, we had much better conditions. But then we witnessed a high level of
activity by the masses and a striving to be in power themselves [emphasis
added]. … The workers do not trust the Mensheviks and SRs, but they have stopped
voting for communists’. Boguslavsky reported hearing calls ‘for non-party sovi-
ets. … The worn-out workers did not consider that slogan counter-revolutionary. They
didn’t vote for popular communists, loyal communists or even their favourite
communists. They voted for non-party people “on a trial basis”. … Along with the
decline of our influence, faith in the other parties has been completely exhausted’.
Several MC members blamed the defeat in large part on the parlous state of the
Bolshevik factory cells: Lozovsky complained about cell members who ‘think that
they are God’s representatives on earth’ and never listen to workers; the highly
decorated Red Army commissar Nikita Tulyakov said that in many factories the
 152 SIMON PIRANI

communist cells (komyacheiki) had ‘turned into “komishcheiki” and lost their auth-
ority’. (The evocative slang term ‘komishcheiki’ adds the prefix ‘kom-’ to ‘ishcheika’,
a sniffer dog of the type used by police forces.)25
When the newly elected soviet convened for the first time on 13 May, a group of
non-partyists tried to turn the disillusionment with Bolshevism expressed at the polls
into a constructive opposition in the soviet’s executive bodies—and were blocked by
the Bolsheviks’ sluzhashchie-based majority. The non-partyist fraction met before the
plenary session; Dvinov describes how this gathering greeted former Mensheviks
(who were perceived as having abandoned their party in the face of adversity) with
disdain, and former Bolsheviks (who had eschewed the easy option) with applause—
and was adamant that no current member of any party would be admitted. The
non-partyists elected as their spokesman S.M. Mikhailov, a metalworker from the
Bogatyr chemical works in Sokolniki, who worked with both Mensheviks and
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Bolsheviks, championed the right of all parties to a voice, but had never joined one.
He served on the Menshevik-controlled factory committee in 1917–18, lost his
position in early 1919 when it swung to the Bolsheviks, and returned, this time as
factory committee chairman and a Moscow soviet delegate, by early 1920. He
chaired, without participating in, mass meetings during which the factory’s Men-
sheviks and Bolsheviks pushed their respective resolutions on the civil war; he was
sufficiently pro-Bolshevik to have been elected to negotiate with the Cheka to secure
the release of arrested Bogatyr workers.26
The soviet met in the Bolshoi theatre, apparently amid hopes that under NEP some
participatory democracy could be revived. Dvinov recalled that 2,000 non-party
people were present, the soviet delegates being supported by observers from district
soviets and factory committees.27 Once Lev Kamenev, the soviet’s chairman, had
opened the meeting, the non-partyists strongly supported challenges by the tiny
Menshevik fraction to Bolshevik attacks on democratic procedure. During a dispute
about the authenticity of some delegates’ mandates, Menshevik speakers said the
mandate commission should review the ‘general atmosphere of intimidation’ in which
the elections were held. When the Bolshevik majority started to shout them down,
Mikhailov scorned the Bolsheviks for denouncing anyone they disagreed with, and
said the mandate commission should consider the Mensheviks’ allegations. He
continued: ‘We came here not to jabber and yell, but to work together frater-
nally. … You don’t have to try to silence everyone who tries to express his
opinion … we should declare freedom of speech for all members of the soviet’. Next,
the Mensheviks called for an agenda item on the assault on political prisoners in
Butyrka jail on 25–26 April, to which the Bolshevik majority responded by voting
that the matter be investigated by the (all-Bolshevik) presidium. Kamenev allowed
Bolshevik hecklers to shout down minority speakers, and a non-partyist, Ozerov,
again protested, declaring his ‘deepest contempt’ for Kamenev’s ‘shameful behav-
iour’.28
Another issue of democratic procedure that brought the non-partyists together with
the Mensheviks and SRs was the Bolsheviks’ attempt to adopt a public meeting-style
format that emasculated 1917-style participatory democracy. In contrast to typical
1917 style, in which gatherings would discuss a report, elect a drafting commission
to synthesise a resolution that then returned to the larger assembly for amendment and
 MOSCOW WORKERS IN 1921 153

final approval, the Bolsheviks had Leonid Krasin give a lengthy report on the
‘domestic and international situation’ and brought two pre-prepared declarations, one
to the Russian and one to the international proletariat. The first was passed unani-
mously. When the second was put, a non-party speaker said that he had ‘absolutely
no objection’ to the declaration by the communists, for whom he was ‘filled with the
greatest respect’, but wanted to know ‘how can you ask us to vote for this resolution
when you, comrades, shut us up and don’t allow us even to say who we are?’ The
left SR leader Isaak Shteinberg29 derided Krasin’s ‘pedantic, unnecessary, schoolroom
report’ and unsuccesfully moved a proposal for a more participatory procedure.
The conflict between non-partyists and Bolsheviks came to a head over elections
to the soviet executive. The two sides had agreed prior to the plenary session that the
Bolshevik fraction would vote 20 non-party people onto the executive to work with
the Bolshevik majority. At the non-party fraction meeting, a list of 20 non-partyists
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had been approved by a 339–20 majority but rejected by Bolshevik representatives

who ‘checked’ it and claimed it was full of ‘artists and lawyers’ rather than workers.
This was hotly disputed in the plenary session by a building worker, who said he
expressed the non-party fraction’s ‘collective opinion’. After an almighty row, during
which Mikhailov said that the non-party fraction was being ‘silenced’, the Bolshevik
majority threw out the non-party fraction’s list and elected 17 Bolshevik-approved
non-party people to the executive instead. Kamenev made clear that the Bolsheviks
would no more accept non-partyism as a soviet tendency than they would accept
Mensheviks, SRs or anarchists. He challenged Mikhailov’s right to speak as the
non-partyists’ representative on the grounds that non-party people could not take
collective political positions; ‘they are brought together exactly by the fact that they
do not have a worked-out programme and do not answer for each other’. The meeting
ended in uproar and hopes of a revival of soviet democracy undone. Subsequently,
according to Dvinov, ‘the Moscow soviet died of boredom. Politics was driven off the
agenda, and so-called “business-like issues” were discussed, most of which were
neither interesting nor comprehensible. … Delegates left, and the hall became rather
empty’.30

Non-partyist politics in 1921

If non-partyism was conditioned in mid-1917 by the striving for unity that character-
ised the first months of the revolution, and in 1918 by the breakdown of inter-party
unity that resulted from October, in 1921 it was conditioned both by hopes for a
revival of participatory democracy after the civil war and by the active repression of
Mensheviks, SRs and anarchists. Where it was most organised, the non-partyist
tendency appears to have been a loose coalition of the egalitarian workerists
mentioned above, workers who had supported the Bolsheviks in October but become
disillusioned, and SRs (particularly left) and Mensheviks who valued their links with
other workers more highly than their participation in party groupings which were the
Cheka’s chief targets.31 The Bolsheviks regularly claimed that the non-partyists were
undercover Menshevik–SRs, and some historians agree. D.B. Pavlov, quoting Sotsial-
isticheskii Vestnik, the Menshevik newspaper published in Berlin, argues that the
threat of repression (arrests, mass sackings, interruption of supplies) dissuaded
 154 SIMON PIRANI

workers from voting for Menshevik–SR candidates or resolutions, and that non-party-
ism was essentially used as a cover. But there is significant evidence to the contrary.
First, Cheka repression was not comprehensive, and in some bases of worker support
opposition parties continued to operate openly (e.g. the Mensheviks among chemical
workers’, anarchists and left SRs among bakers). Second, the Moscow Mensheviks on
principle retained the maximum possible legality until 1922. Third, on the Moscow
soviet, the non-partyists held a separate Menshevik group in high regard but were not
hidden Mensheviks. ‘If they had been [Mensheviks] we would have been overjoyed’,
Dvinov wrote: ‘Unfortunately it wasn’t like that’.32
The archive of the AMO factory shows that the well-organised non-partyist group
included both egalitarian workerists and workers sympathetic to SR and Menshevik
politics, but provides no evidence of Menshevik or SR organisation at factory level.
The non-partyists started organising and occasionally distributing leaflets in early
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1921. At this time AMO was being revived as the centre of Russian car production
with the help of a group of American communist car workers, mostly from Russian
émigré families, who in agreement with the Soviet government took a measure of
management control. The non-partyists swept the board in elections for the factory
committee, the Moscow soviet (mentioned above) and the Rogozhsko-Simonovsky
district soviet. In August 1921 a concerted attempt by the party cell to dislodge them
from the factory committee failed: they won one election, which was annulled by the
metalworkers’ union, and then won a second one. In January 1922 the party won the
soviet seats back from the non-party group, but the latter’s senior figure, Fedor
Chukhanov, stayed as factory committee chairman until late 1922.33 Chukhanov, a
skilled metalworker, was widely respected, and nicknamed ‘valeryanka’ (after the
sedative valerian) for his ability to calm angry mass meetings. He came from
Petrograd and worked until 1918 at the Obukhov factory, where it is likely he knew
of Glebov’s United Workers party. In an interview with the AMO factory history
commission, given in 1932, Chukhanov (who joined the Bolsheviks in 1924) said in
1920–21 he had been a non-partyist on principle, ‘with democratic Menshevik views’.
Contemporaneous records show that his speeches to the February Moscow metal-
workers meeting exuded egalitarian workerism: there he said that the Russian
economic crisis was due to the failure of western European workers to follow the
Bolsheviks’ revolutionary path; he expressed support for the fight inside the Bol-
shevik party against ‘bourgeois elements’ and implicitly accused the Moscow party
leader, Kamenev, of petty corruption. He railed against the apparatus in general, and
overpaid specialists and the glavki in particular, saying ‘the trade unions should take
power away from them’. Another leading AMO non-partyist, Kireev, also concen-
trated at the meeting on attacking apparatus privilege. The AMO non-party group
brought together these workerist socialists and a group, largely of emigrants from
Nizhny Novgorod, largely of left or centrist SR political sympathies. The group’s
most active members were older, skilled workers: two of them, the highly vocal Ivan
Volodin and Zezyulin, had younger brothers in the Bolshevik party. Those with the
most pronounced SR sympathies, Vasilii Davydov and Sivkov, argued for ‘all land to
the peasants, distributed equally’, or so Chukhanov recalled; they persuaded their
fellow workers to invite both leading left SRs in Moscow, Shteinberg and Mariya
Spiridonova, to speak at AMO in late 1921. A factory committee resolution of April
 MOSCOW WORKERS IN 1921 155

1921 also suggests a mixture of SR-ism and workerism: it advocates free movement
of labour and ‘healthy criticism’ of the glavki. There are repeated references by Cheka
agents and Soviet historians to the group as ‘Menshevik’ or ‘Menshevik–SR’. Against
this there is abundant evidence that they worked with each other, but none that they
had contact with the Menshevik or SR Moscow organisations; and the opinion of
senior Bolsheviks at the factory who knew them, e.g. Andrei Lidak, was that ‘they
weren’t destructive’ and ‘they were not genuine ideological advocates of the Men-
shevik line: that’s a fact’.34
Another aspect of the non-partyists’ politics, which emphasises their varied
character and speaks against the supposition that they were closet SRs or Mensheviks,
is the dialogue between some of them and Bolshevik dissidents who left the party in
early 1921. These dissidents, who protested against Bolshevik failure to combat the
apparatus and/or the retreat from war communism to NEP, sought unity with the
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non-partyists. For example, among the stream of departures from the Kauchuk rubber
factory cell in Khamovniki was a worker, Viktorov, expelled in early March 1921 for
proposing a resolution ‘of the most anarchist character’ and ‘publicly insulting the
communist party’. The text of Viktorov’s resolution has not been found, but we know
it made a link with non-partyism: the cell recorded that it had been ‘proposed in the
name of the non-party workers’.35 In May 1921 a direct appeal to the Moscow
non-partyists was made by the Workers and Peasants Socialist Party (Rabochaya-
Krest’yanskaya Sotsialisticheskaya Partiya, RKSP), a Moscow-based dissident group
that left the party led by Vasilii Panyushkin, a Bolshevik since 1907, collaborator with
Lenin and leader of the inner-party opposition group in the Bauman district of
Moscow in 1920. The RKSP’s declared aims were to combat the ideological and
organisational degeneration of Bolshevism ‘under the sway of elements alien to the
workers’ and to establish genuine rule by soviets. In May it published a leaflet
addressed to the non-partyists on the Moscow soviet, to which Panyushkin was a
delegate.36 The appeal decried the transformation of the soviet from a body that
‘transmits and expresses the proletariat’s will’ to ‘a screen for, a blind weapon of, the
party of nanny-communists’37 and claimed that, during the soviet election campaign,
everything the proletariat had fought for was cynically ‘trampled on by these
nannies’—and therefore it was no wonder that there were so few genuine workers’
representatives in the soviet. The soviet had degenerated into ‘executive committee-
ism’ (ispolkomovshchina) and must be resurrected in its 1917 form. The appeal
proposed that the chairman of the soviet and the chairman of the executive should be
different individuals, to ensure a division between decision-making and executive
functions and prevent interference by ‘behind the scenes secrets’ and ‘personal
sympathies’. It also demanded political rights for pro-soviet anti-Bolshevik parties
that ‘have not betrayed the working class’, the freeing of imprisoned members of
those parties and extensive limitations on the death penalty. It set out an economic
programme resting on the idea of ‘production unions’, in the form proposed by the
Workers Opposition in 1920. The publication of this appeal was one of the RKSP’s
few political acts before it was broken up by the Cheka, and its leaders arrested, in
June 1921.
Many participants in the 1920 inner-party oppositions who remained inside the
Bolshevik party after the tenth congress would have shared Panyushkin’s hostility to
 156 SIMON PIRANI

the apparatus, but hardly any of them agreed with him that participatory democracy
involving non-party workers was a means to fight it. For the mainstream Bolshevik
majority, such democracy was positively dangerous: this majority sought to bring
non-party workers into the apparatus to counter the predominance of the middle class
there, and approved of non-party workers taking responsibility for production, welfare
and other carefully defined tasks in factories—but wanted to allow non-party workers
into decision-making bodies only under party ‘leadership’. In Moscow in April 1921
the party appealed for ‘honest non-party workers’ to take jobs in the district soviet
apparatus, while simultaneously, at the MC meeting referred to above, party leaders
laid down the limits of non-party participation in decision making: Anton Tsikhon
argued against allowing any non-party fraction in the soviets and Zelensky said that
the party should ‘carry out [among non-party workers] a differentiation of those that
can be won to us’; the only non-party representatives that could be tolerated in soviet
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bodies were those that supported the party. At a national-level organisation com-
mission set up in May 1921 the caution exercised by the Bolshevik majority was
expressed by Boris Vasil’ev from Tambov: counter-revolutionaries ‘are especially
hiding behind non-party people’, he said, and therefore all non-party candidates for
responsible posts should be approved by trade union and soviet executives, ‘and not
by non-party conferences’. He said non-party workers should be brought in the first
instance into the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate, supply committees, cooperatives
and economic organisations, i.e. not onto soviet executives.38
Organised non-partyism in 1921 was ephemeral. The non-party fraction on the
soviet ceased to function some time in 1921. The AMO group lost some of its
members when the factory workforce was sharply reduced in November 1921.
Chukhanov and some others remained active as non-partyists until late 1922, but lost
control of the factory committee to the Bolsheviks. I suggest three main causes of the
rapid decline of non-partyism in its 1921 incarnation: first, the Bolsheviks’ conscious
effort to develop a role for ‘honest non-party workers’ in rebuilding the economy that
made controlled use of their creative energy but kept them at arm’s length from
decision making; second, the increasingly systematic repression of non-Bolshevik
pro-soviet political groupings from left Menshevism to the RKSP; and third, the
diffuseness of non-partyism itself, which in its most organised manifestations (in the
soviet fraction and at AMO) was broadly united on political issues (i.e. soviet
democracy) but not on economic ones.

Conclusion
The workers’ protests over supply in Moscow in February 1921 were not united or
directed toward overthrowing the Bolsheviks. Figes argues that the strikes in the two
capitals were ‘a last desperate bid to overthrow’ Lenin’s government, and as such
formed part of a ‘revolutionary situation’ comparable to that in February 1917. Pipes
also draws a comparison with February 1917.39 But in Moscow the movement was
unsure of itself and internally divided. By the time the Kronshtadt revolt posed a
serious challenge to Bolshevik rule, the Moscow movement had died down. Many
workers in the city detested Bolshevik policy on supply and, furthermore, bitterly
opposed the Bolsheviks on democracy and the soviets. But the question of challeng-
 MOSCOW WORKERS IN 1921 157

ing Bolshevik power was not mooted. The Bolsheviks, and their advocates for many
decades afterwards, argued that a cause of the 1921 workers’ movement was that
workers had become, in Lenin’s phrase, ‘deproletarianised’. But the evidence from
Moscow shows that the metalworkers, who were less seriously affected than others
by the dispersals and disruptions of the war and civil war, were central to the
movement. Activists with long records in the workers’ movement participated in it.
The available evidence also throws doubt on Soviet-era assumptions that the move-
ment was led by the opposition socialist parties, an argument often made by Soviet
historians, and by some of their Western counterparts who relied largely on Men-
shevik and SR sources.40 These parties were active in the movement, but there was
by no means a unanimous acceptance of their policies. The metalworkers’ minutes
show that the SRs clearly disputed the egalitarian workerists’ proposals for ‘equalis-
ation of rations’, a slogan whose content had more in common with dissident
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Bolshevik arguments. On the trade union question too, non-party workers had
common ground not only with the Mensheviks but also with opposition Bolsheviks.
These political tendencies among non-party workers were further evident in the soviet
election campaign. The repression of Mensheviks, SRs and anarchists was one factor
in the growth of the non-partyist bloc, but not the only one. The non-party tendency
reflected a strong desire for more democratic types of soviet rule; where it was more
organised, it embraced both workers with Menshevik and SR sympathies and those
who had supported the Bolsheviks in 1917. The question that deeply divided this
tendency from the Bolsheviks was participatory democracy, to which the Bolsheviks
were in practice opposed. Although at this time they used slogans about ‘self-activity’
of the working class, they conceived of such activity only under Bolshevik ‘leader-
ship’. This meant that while they were keen to mobilise working-class energy to
rebuild the economy, they did not see a place for non-party workers in decision-mak-
ing bodies such as the Moscow soviet. For this reason they made no effort to
collaborate with the non-partyists, and hastened the eradication of soviet democracy
and the triumph of the anti-democratic one-party state.

University of Essex

The following archives are cited: State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF); Russian
State Archive for Social and Political Research (RGASPI); Central Archive of Social Movements of
Moscow (TsAODM); Central State Archive of the Moscow Region (TsGAMO); Central Municipal
Archive of Moscow (TsMAM).This article was presented at a panel at the British Association of
Slavonic and East European Studies conference in Cambridge, 29–31 March 2003. It is based on PhD
research, supervised by Professor Steve A. Smith at the University of Essex, on changes in relations
between the Communist Party and the working class in Moscow during, and as a result of, the
transition from the civil war to the NEP (1920–24).
1
Israel Getzler, ‘Soviets as Agents of Democratisation’, in E.R. Frankel, J. Frankel & B.
Knei-Paz (eds), Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917 (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1992), pp. 17–33; Tim McDaniel, Autocracy, Capitalism and Revolution in Russia (Berkeley
and London, University of California Press, 1988), pp. 373–377; I. Ya. Grunt, Moskva 1917-i,
revolyutsiya i kontrrevolyutsiya (Moscow, 1976), p. 226.
2
Israel Getzler, Kronstadt 1917–1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1983), pp. 37–38, 55–56, 66 and 134–142; A.F. Zhukov, Ideino-politicheskii krakh
eserovskogo maksimalizma (Leningrad, Izdatel’stvo LGU, 1979), pp. 48–49; Diane Koenker, Moscow
Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton and Guildford, Princeton University Press, 1981),
 158 SIMON PIRANI

pp. 189–192, 290–291; Kh.M. Astrakhan, Bolsheviki i ikh politicheskie protivniki v 1917-m godu
(Leningrad, 1973), pp. 364–370.
3
S.V. Yarov, Gorozhanin kak politik: revolyutsiya, voennyi kommunizm i NEP glazami petro-
gradtsev (St Petersburg, 1999), p. 24; V.N. Brovkin, The Mensheviks After October: Socialist
Opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press,
1987), pp. 165–166; the movement is also discussed by Mary McAuley, Bread and Justice: State and
Society in Petrograd 1917–1922 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991), pp. 94–99 and elsewhere; David
Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Seizure of Power (London, Macmillan, 1983), pp. 379–383
and 390–413; William G. Rosenberg, ‘Russian Labor and Bolshevik Power After October’, Slavic
Review, 44, 2, 1985, pp. 213–238, followed by comments by Moshe Lewin and Vladimir Brovkin,
and a reply; there are documents in Piterskie rabochie i ‘Diktatura Proletariata’ Okt. 1917–1929:
ekonomicheskie konflikty i politichestkii protest (St Petersburg, Blitz, 2000), pp. 55–113.
4
Piterskie rabochii, p. 66 (Rozenshtein biography) and p. 71 (Glebov biography); Brovkin, The
Mensheviks After October, p. 167; Yarov, Gorozhanin kak politik, pp. 28–29; Piterskie rabochie,
pp. 113–115 (resolutions of 1918); Yarov, Gorozhanin kak politik, pp. 38–39 (resolution of 1919).
For Marx and Engels on the self-emancipation of the working class see F. Engels, ‘Preface to the
English Edition of 1888’, in K. Marx & F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (Moscow,
Progress, 1977), p. 20, and K. Marx, ‘Provisional Rules of the Association’, in The General Council
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of the First International 1864–1866 (Moscow, Progress, n.d.), p. 288.

5
Yarov, Gorozhanin kak politik, p. 24.
6
For a more detailed discussion of issues raised in this section see S. Pirani, ‘Class Clashes With
Party’, Historical Materialism, 11, 2, 2003.
7
On rationing see Grazhdanskaya voina i voennaya interventsiya v SSSR: entsiklopediya
(Moscow, 1983), pp. 396–397; Lars I. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia (Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1990), pp. 162–192; McAuley, Bread and Justice, pp. 282–297. On the tram
workers see TsAODM, f. 3, op. 1a, d. 11, l. 38.
8
The principle of udarnichestvo had been adopted during the civil war, but came into
widespread use only in the second half of 1920, when, in the metal industry for example, the number
of ‘shock’ plants rose from 20 to 240. By the end of the year there were 1,716 ‘shock’ enterprises
and by the spring of 1921 a speaker at a trade union conference said there were more ‘shock’ than
non-’shock’ plants; see Thomas Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia (Pittsburgh,
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), pp. 157–161; and E.H. Carr, History of Soviet Russia (London
and Basingstoke, Macmillan Press, 1970), vol. II, pp. 216–217.
9
Kommunisticheskii trud, 14 December 1920.
10
Pravda, 22 January 1921; S.A. Pavlyuchenkov, Krest’yanskii Brest, ili predystoriya bol-
shevistskogo NEPa (Moscow, Russkoe, 1996), pp. 259–260; Shmidt quoted in Shirokaya konfer-
entsiya fab-zavkomov g. Moskvy 29 Okt. 1921 (Moscow, 1921), p. 55; N.M. Aleshchenko, Moskovskii
sovet 1917–1941 (Moscow, 1976), pp. 297–299; Bertrand M. Patenaude, ‘Bolshevism in Retreat: the
Transition to NEP 1920–22’, PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1987, pp. 118–129; E.B.
Genkina, Gosudarstvennaya deyatel’nost’ V.I. Lenina 1921–1923gg. (Moscow, Nauka, 1969), p. 62.
11
For Lozovsky see Desyatyi s”ezd RKP(b): stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, Gosizdat, 1963),
p. 291; GARF, f. 393, op. 43a, d. 1714, l. 253; TsGAMO, f. 66, op. 12, d. 879, l. 26; Maslov quoted
in Richard Sakwa, Soviet Communists in Power (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1988), p. 222; information
on the bakers’ meeting from Jonathan Aves, Workers Against Lenin (London and New York, Tauris,
1996), pp. 137–138, quoting Kommunisticheskii trud.
12
I have read extensively on the inner-party discussions, including minutes of national, Moscow,
district and factory party bodies, as part of my PhD research, and this passage is based on this
reading.
13
The verbatim minutes of the meeting are at TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 236, ll. 6–66 (all
quotations from speeches are taken from these minutes) and at TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 235; other
materials are at TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 237. See also Vyshinsky’s account in Pravda, 8 February
1921, and the resolutions published in Kommunisticheskii trud, 8, 15 and 16 February 1921.
Discussions of the meeting include Aves, Workers Against Lenin, pp. 131–136; Paul Avrich,
Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1991); pp. 35–36; and Patenaude, ‘Bol-
shevism in Retreat’, pp. 129–140, but none of these historians was able to read the minutes.
14
Letter from Podvoisky, Muralov and four others, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 84, d. 265, ll. 1–2,
published in Kronshtadt 1921 (Moscow, Mezhdunarodnyi fond Demokratiya, 1997), pp. 24–25.
15
RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 166, ll. 2–2ob and f. 76, op. 3, d. 166, l. 3, published in Kronshtadt
1921, pp. 27–29.
16
Maslov’s account, in S.S. Maslov, Rossiya posle chetyrekh let revolyutsii (Paris, 1922), along
with other published material, is used by Aves, Workers Against Lenin, p. 139, and Sakwa, Soviet
 MOSCOW WORKERS IN 1921 159

Communists in Power, pp. 244–245. But Messing’s correspondence with Dzerzhinsky, previously
unavailable, throws doubt on Maslov’s claims; the incident in which Kuzmenko was shot so
concerned Messing that he reported it in detail and referred to it again in two subsequent telegrams,
but he made no mention of other casualties. Also, while Messing referred to the dangerous mood of
the demobilised soldiers, he made no mention of them, or other troops, being ordered to shoot at the
crowd, or of them refusing to do so.
17
RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 166, ll. 3 and 6, published in Kronshtadt 1921, pp. 29 and 34; Sakwa,
Soviet Communists in Power, p. 245, quoting the Soviet historian Manevich; meeting at Dinamo,
TsMAM, f. 100, op. 5, d. 5, l. 16, and V.I. Lenin & A.V. Lunacharsky, Literaturnoe nasledstvo:
perepiska, doklady, dokumenty (Moscow, Nauka, 1971), pp. 253–254.
18
On the repression see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 57, ll. 1–2, published in Kronshtadtskaya
tragediya 1921 goda: dokumenty (Moscow, Rosspen, 1999), vol.2, pp. 364–365; RGASPI, f. 76,
op. 3, d. 166, ll. 2–2ob; B. Dvinov, Moskovskii Sovet Rabochikh Deputatov, 1917–1922: Vospomi-
naniya (New York, Inter-University Project on the History of the Menshevik Movement, 1961),
p. 100; RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 167, l. 24, published in Kronshtadtskaya tragediya, vol. 1, p. 105.
On the Bromlei workers’ action see GARF, f. 393, op. 43, d. 1714, ll. 259–259ob.
19
McAuley, Bread and Justice, pp. 403–411; Getzler, Kronstadt, pp. 212–213; Yarov,
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Gorozhanin kak politik, pp. 68–79.

20
This argument is put by Orlando Figes and Richard Pipes; see the conclusion of this article.
21
TsAODM, f. 3, op. 1a, d. 11, l. 70.
22
On the make-up of the soviet see TsGAMO, f. 66, op. 12, d. 814, l. 82; for the Moscow party
committee minutes see TsAODM, f. 3, op. 2, d. 23, ll. 51–53. The voting system gave equal weight
to workers, sluzhashchie and soldiers (who had one representative per 500 or part thereof above 100);
some other groups, including pensioners and domestic workers, were entitled to one representative
per 500 voters; and trade unions sent one delegate per 5,000 members, effectively giving workers an
extra 10% weighting. There were 671,927 eligible voters, and 340,061 voted (50.5%); officially in
late 1920 there were 205,427 workers and 233,375 sluzhashchie in Moscow (no figures are available
for 1921), and along with garrison soldiers they made up the vast majority of the electoral college.
Clearly, the Moscow committee’s analysis accords with the figures: provided the Bolsheviks retained
some support among sluzhashchie, they could easily have won the majority they did (73% of soviet
delegates) while their support among industrial workers collapsed. On the voting system see
Aleshchenko, Moskovskii sovet 1917–1941, pp. 248–249; on the occupational structure of Moscow
see William J. Chase, Workers, Society and the Soviet State: Labour and Life in Moscow 1918–1929
(Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 311. The election defeat so candidly
acknowledged by Zelensky is a ‘black spot’ of party history: two official histories of the soviet
(Moskovskii sovet rabochikh, krest’yanskikh i krasnoarmeiskikh deputatov 1917–27 and
Aleshchenko, Moskovskii sovet 1917–1941) and one of the Moscow party (Ocherki istorii
Moskovskoi organizatsii KPSS kn. 2, noyabr’ 1917–1945 (Moscow, Moskovskii rabochii, 1983))
make no mention of it.
23
B. Dvinov, Ot legal’nosti k podpolyu 1921–22 (Stanford, Hoover Institution, 1968), p. 42. The
Cheka reports are at TsAODM, f. 3, op. 2, d. 48, ll. 15ob–18.
24
For the elections at AMO see TsGAMO, f. 186, op. 1, d. 598, l. 3ob (on the conduct of the
vote), l. 10 (on arrests); TsMAM, f. 415, op. 16, d. 318, l. 9 (election results). Davydov and Nastas’-
yan were probably sympathetic to left SRism, Chukhanov was torn between left Menshevism and
Bolshevism; this is further discussed below.
25
Moscow party committee minutes.
26
Dvinov, Ot legal’nosti, pp. 42–43. Dvinov was a Moscow soviet delegate from 1917 to 1922,
and then went into exile. On Mikhailov see TsMAM, f. 337, op. 2, d. 29 and A.M. Panfilova, Istoriya
zavoda ‘Krasnyi Bogatyr’ (Moscow, 1958), pp. 61, 75–81; he told the soviet he had ‘never’ been in
a party.
27
Dvinov, Moskovskii sovet, p. 104. All quotations are from the verbatim minutes of the
meeting, at TsGAMO, f. 66, op. 12, d. 814, ll. 4–5.
28
No biographical information on Ozerov is available, except his statement to the soviet that he
was ‘an old activist, long a party member, now non-party’.
29
Ibid., ll. 40–44. The speaker who identified himself as a representative of the Left SRs and SR
maximalists is named ‘Shternberg’ by the stenographers; I presume this was Isaak Shteinberg, who
served as commissar of justice in the Bolshevik–Left SR coalition of 1917–18 and was by far the
most prominent Left SR in Moscow in 1921.
30
Dvinov, Moskovskii sovet, p. 107.
31
Yarov, Gorozhanin kak politik, pp. 79–88, notes the importance in Petrograd in February–
 160 SIMON PIRANI

April 1921 of non-party meetings, at which anti-bureaucratic and ‘Makhaevist’ tendencies were
manifested on one hand, and strong support for the slogan ‘free trade’ on the other.
32
D.B. Pavlov, Bolshevistskaya Diktatura protiv sotsialistov i anarkhistov 1917—seredina
1950-kh godov (Moscow, Rosspen, 1999), pp. 59–60; Dvinov, Ot legal’nosti, p. 47.
33
Sources on AMO at TsMAM, f. 415, op. 16, include factory committee minutes in d. 317,
general meeting minutes in d. 318, party cell records in d. 586, d. 587 and d. 590 and memoirs of
V. Rudakov in d. 657; see also Istoriya Moskovskogo avtozavoda imeni I.A. Likhacheva (Moscow,
1966), especially pp. 80–105.
34
Sources on the non-party group include an interview with Chukhanov at TsMAM, f. 415,
op. 16, d. 262, ll. 1–37; metalworkers meeting, TsGAMO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 236, ll. 9–10, 13, 35, 36;
April 1921 resolution, TsMAM, f. 415, op. 16, d. 314, l. 13: interview with Lidak, TsMAM, f. 415,
op. 16, d. 167, ll. 59–60. Information on 13 members of the non-party group who held soviet or
factory committee positions shows these political sympathies: three, SR centrist; two, left SR; one,
Menshevik; four, positive indications of non-partyism on principle; three, no information.
35
TsGAMO, f. 475, op. 1, d. 2, ll. 4–5 and 33–34.
36
For Panyushkin’s background see Vasilii M. Katanov, Michman Panyushkin (Moscow,
Priokskoe, 1976); Dvinov, Ot legal’nosti, p. 55. RKSP material is at RTsKhIDNI, f. 5, op. 1, d. 2572,
l. 52; also see TsAODM, f. 3, op. 2, d. 18, l. 4a.
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37
The expression ‘opekuny-kommunisty’ is used. An opekun is a guardian appointed to safeguard
the interests of minors or incompetents, but the translation ‘guardian-communists’ obviously would
not do justice to the sense, that the communist ‘high-ups’ treated workers as incapable children. This
was a common accusation by party oppositionists at the time, e.g. Efim Ignatov’s speech at the tenth
congress, during which he called on party leaders to ‘cut out the petty nannying (otbrosit’ melochnuyu
opeku)’ (Desyatyi s”ezd, p. 238). The Tatar communist S.G. Said-Galiev (not to be confused with M.
Sultan-Galiev) wrote to Lenin protesting at Russian communists playing ‘pedagogues and nurse-
maids’ (pedagogov i nyanek) to Tatar workers (V.I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 36
(Moscow, Gosizdat, 1966), p. 661).
38
On mobilisation of ‘honest non-party workers’ see for example TsMAM, f. 415, op. 16, d.
317, 1l. 42 and 44; Moscow party committee minutes; Vasil’ev, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 84, d. 145, l. 12.
39
Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: the Russian Revolution 1891–1924 (London, Jonathan
Cape, 1996), pp. 758–759; Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (London, Harvill,
1994), p. 380. Pipes’ view is that the strike movement was contained principally by Lenin’s readiness
to use military force against it: ‘Confronted with worker defiance, Lenin reacted exactly as had
Nicholas II …: he turned to the military. But whereas the last tsar … soon caved in, Lenin was
prepared to go to any length to stay in power. … Whereas in February 1917 the main source of
disaffection had been the garrison, now it was the factory’.
40
For discussions on the character of the working class and ‘deproletarianisation’ see for
example L. Siegelbaum & R. Suny, ‘Class Backwards? In Search of the Soviet Working Class’, in
L. Siegelbaum & R. Suny (eds), Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity (Ithaca and
London, Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 1–27; Diane Koenker, ‘Urbanization and Deurbaniza-
tion in the Russian Revolution and Civil War’, Journal of Modern History, 57, September 1985,
pp. 424–450. The standard Soviet history of the Moscow party states that ‘SRs, Mensheviks,
anarchists and other enemies of soviet power, speculating on the post-war difficulties … penetrated
the factories, carried out hostile agitation and instigated workers to go on strike’ (Ocherki, p. 191);
the standard Western history of the Moscow party in 1917–21, relying of necessity largely on SRs’
and Mensheviks’ accounts, perceived a ‘Moscow protest movement for the three freedoms—labour,
trade and political—and for a freeing of the soviets from party control’ (Sakwa, Soviet Communists
in Power, p. 246).