Georgy Oppokov 1918
First Published: in Kommunist. Ezenedel'nyi zurnal ekonomiki, politiki i obsenstvennosti. Organ Moskovskago Oblastnogo Byuro RKP (bol'sevikov) [The Communist. Weekly Magazine for Economics, Politics and Social Questions. Organ of the Moscow District Office of the RCP(B)], No. 1, April 20, 1918.
Source: Internationalist Communist Tendency.
Online Version: Marxists Internet Archive 2021
HTML Markup: Zdravko Saveski
In the history of the proletarian and peasant revolution in Russia, the second peace of Brest-Litovsk is the boundary between the offensive period and that of the gradual retreat of the revolutionary wave. After the conclusion of peace, many people did not understand that capitulation in the field of international legal relations leads to a change in all the tactics of the Russian revolution. It affects the politics first outside and then inside, but a whole series of immediate facts in the field of economic and financial policy is also evidence of this turning point.
The characteristic features of the period after Brest-Litovsk are, on the one hand rumours of the de-nationalisation of banks, associated with the new Commissar for Finance, Comrade Gukovsky[1] (who has never been a strong supporter of nationalisation either of banks, or of production); on the other, a period of slowdown and even complete cessation of the nationalisation of the industry.[2] If we were previously thinking of forming a united and centralised People's Bank for the Soviet Republic, now, according to press reports which have not been refuted, there is a proposal to re-open all private banks in Petrograd, currently being used for other purposes if the truth were known, under the flag of the Soviet Republic. There is no longer even a trace of the old plans to centralise [financial] operations. In addition, a series of proposals to create special banks for wheat, textiles, etc. which will not have to be entirely Soviet are seriously being discussed in governmental circles. Alongside state capital, capital will have to be invested by the bourgeoisie, in accordance with which it must be distributed between the state and the bourgeoisie. These banks for wheat, textiles, etc. will basically have to fulfil all the functions of the old banks.
According to the proposal for the textile bank, the founding capital will come from 500 million [rubles] assigned by the Government and 500 million in shares issued by the bank; these shares must be held mainly by members of the workers and employees union, cooperatives and other organisations and individuals. The government guarantees a minimum return of 3% on the capital invested, and an "additional dividend" dependent on profits, etc. As one can see from this information, a new textile bank with its guaranteed income and its "additional dividends" differs little from the old ones. If the authors [of this project] think they maintain their socialist innocence because part of the profits and "additional dividends" will be "mostly" distributed among the members of unions of workers and employees, in the same way as the project of the Statute already discussed at the Centrotextile[3] meetings, it is a feeble consolation for a communist.
This is to say nothing about the creation of special banks for each branch of industry, with their complex operations ("receiving deposits, opening cheque accounts, discounting notes, granting short-term loans and commission") which gradually reduce the functions of the Soviet Central Bank. And if this creation of bank branches goes ahead quickly, we will hardly even need the Soviet Bank at all. It is interesting that the proposal for a Wheat Bank is very close to the original "socialist" Wheat Bank of Kerensky. By the way, it is said that the Commissar for Finance, Comrade Gukovsky, approved this measure in principle.
In the field of our economic policy, nationalisation projects multiply in the Donetsk mining industry - either because the mines were abandoned by their old bosses or because there is fighting in this region occupied by the German Ukraine - or in the large railway trusts, the textile industry and metallurgy. According to the conditions [of the Brest-Litovsk Peace], Soviet Russia retains the rich coal mines near Taganrog.[4]
Furthermore, there is the question of creating these forms of organisation in industries other than trusts (e.g. in building of trains and rolling stock, industry in the Urals, etc.) at the head of which capitalist forces, all those powerful industrial swindlers, would find opportunities to participate. The public admission of this desire to rely on capitalist organisers comes from an accidental "interview" with comrades, Lunacharsky,[5] Trotsky, etc. If during the period prior to Brest-Litovsk our economic policy had counted on proletarian initiative, it has changed since the conclusion of peace. Now we give the proletarians wise and firm slogans: "Do not be dissolute!", "Don't steal!", "Be disciplined!", etc. In fact, some readers will consider these formulas as having little relation to economic policy and more accurately resemble the famous bourgeois maxims of Samuel Smiles of the "be thrifty" type. But it's a mistake. Taking on board the attitude of the capitalist organisers is a turning point. Certainly, during the first period, nobody denied the need to invite engineers, technical specialists and employees to work in companies nationalised by the workers' and peasants' government. The problem was how to invite them, and solve the question of how the government workers and peasants could make use of them, without giving them managerial functions.
Now the situation is changing. Instead of using them there is the danger that we are being used by them. In order to organise new trusts a leading role is given to former industrial sharks. The organisation based on the activity of the working class is being replaced by help from experienced capitalist leaders. It is no accident that the now defunct newspaper Nashe Slovo ["Our Word"] wrote enthusiastically about this "new course" and called on the entire conscious bourgeois intelligentsia to follow the Bolsheviks hoping that bourgeois science and experience will fundamentally transform the very essence of Bolshevik policy.
We have no intention of denying the dilapidation of the economy. We know and do not hide the fact that of all the metallurgical plants in our industrial South, only the Petrovsky soviet factories that work, while others are stopped or in the process of doing so; we know that coal mining plants in Russia are in a catastrophic situation; we do not deny all the disorder in the railways, etc. The question is to know where the exit from this impasse lies. Our point of view, our way, is the inexorable nationalisation of the banks, supported by a nationalisation of industry that must be just as inexorable.
The recruitment of technical staff and qualified employees must be managed by workers. In using their knowledge and experience, under no circumstances should the worker lose control and total mastery of production.
A. L. [Lomov]
Notes
[1] Isidor Emmanuelovich Gukovsky (1871-1921), a son of a merchant, participated in a group of revolutionary workers in 1989. He became a Menshevik and imprisoned for inciting workers to strike. In 1904 he was sent as an agitator amongst the oil workers of Baku. Editorial secretary of the journal Novaya Zhizn, he continued a wandering life (Odessa, foreign exile) before being arrested on his return to Russia. He was acquitted in 1908. After October 1917 he became a Bolshevik and was appointed People's Commissar for Finance by Lenin. He carried on his career as a leading functionary as a diplomat representing Russia in Estonia. He died of pneumonia in March 1921.
[2] These rumours became so strong that Gukovsky was forced to deny them at the All-Russian Congress of the Council of National Economy (Vesenkha) in May, 1918.
[3] "Central Committee for the Textile Industry". It was one of the special state institutions known as "glavki" which were based on a similar organisation of the Tsarist regime.
[4] Port city of the Don region near Rostov situated on the Gulf of Taganrog in the Sea of Azov.
[5] Anatoly Vassilievich Lunacharsky (1875-1933), writer, literary critic, and militant from a very young age. First a Bolshevik then a Menshevik of the Inter-district Committee (Mezhraontsy), he rejoined the Bolsheviks with this group in July 1917. He was the first People's Commissar for Education.