A valuable explanation of the organs of power in the Soviet state as established by the 1918 Constitution and developed in the first years of the Revolution. In six parts: I. The All-Russian Central Executive Committee, II. The Council of People’s Commissars, III. The Council of Labor and Defence, IV. The All-Russian Congress of Soviets, V. Local Soviet Congresses, VI. Town Soviets.

‘How the Soviet Government Works III: The Council of Labor and Defence’ from Soviet Russia (New York). Vol. 6. No. 3. March, 1922.

THE main task of any civilized Government, apart from the preservation of its authority, the organization of education, and the promotion of public health, lies in the assurance of peaceful economic progress for its citizens. For the Soviet Government in particular, which came into existence pledged to assist the complete transformation of the social order and the economic foundations existing in Russia before the October revolution, these economic tasks were necessarily of primary importance from the first. And this circumstance was only the more emphasized by the utter anarchy in production prevalent in the capitalist regime of pre-revolutionary days, and by the complete bankruptcy and breakdown brought about by the death struggles of Tsarism between 1915 and 1917.

Building in this sphere, as in all others, entirely anew, without experience or any material or moral aid save its own resolution and the backing of the vast majority of the Russian workers, industrial and agricultural, the Soviet Government at the outset put before itself the bold and seemingly hopeless task of establishing a central economic authority, which should unify and co-ordinate the work of the various People’s Commissariats whose activity affected the economic interests of the community, without in any way impeding their labors. It was felt that such a body should exist specifically for the purpose of drawing up and applying, through the various People’s Commissariats, a general, all-Russian, economic plan of production, distribution, and commerce. Such a plan would provide for the requisite utilization of raw materials; the necessary import of supplies from abroad; the general progress of industry; the maintenance and improvement of the transport system; the most rational utilization of labor power; the development of agriculture (not merely in the sense of ensuring an adequate supply of food to the population through State or other channels, but with the object of bringing it up-to-date and ultimately of directing it on to large-scale Communist lines); the disposal abroad of surplus products and raw materials in such a manner as to produce the maximum benefit. for the whole of the community; the regulation of State currency and banking; and so on.

For this purpose there was organized in 1918 the Supreme Economic Council (Vysshy Soviet Norodnogo Khozaistva), at first as a People’s Commissariat, built up in the ordinary way and headed by a Chairman and Board selected by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee from amongst its members. Its first task was to take over and administer the national industries as they one by one passed, from June 1918, onwards, into the hands of the State. In this it worked as the central unit of a network of local economic councils, each built up out of a section of the local Soviet Executive Committee with a number of additions from trade union and technical circles. But very clear and unmistakable indications were given that the future functions of the S.E.C. were to be far wider than those involved in regulating industry: at first by agreement with the other “economic Commissariats”, and ultimately by absorbing them, it was to develop into that organ of universal co-ordination and national housekeeping which has already been described.

Circumstances, however, decided otherwise. The civil war which began in the spring of 1918, passing in the summer into a war of national defence against foreign aggression and invasion, for three years obliged the Soviet Government to consider the work of each Commissariat in the light, not of its harmony with the best economic interests of the people as a whole, but of its adaptability to military requirements and the needs of a besieged fortress—as Soviet Russia felt herself to be from 1918 to 1920. Certain Commissariats (Food, Transport) developed into powerful organizations with a nation-wide scope and a sense of independence; others (Labor, Agriculture, Foreign Trade) had their vitality destroyed or their activities seriously limited from the very beginning by the conditions of war-time. The Supreme Economic Council itself found its hands more than full with the problem of adapting industry for war-time purposes and (when peace returned with the autumn of 1920) of reviving those branches which had had perforce to be allowed to fall into decline or decay. After three years of concentration on purely industrial affairs, it was no longer capable of assuming the all-embracing role assigned to it by the original planners of its existence. It had become to all intents and purposes the People’s Commissariat for Industry.

A new organ was necessary: and such a one was at hand. In April, 1920, the Council of Defence (an inter-departmental “war Cabinet” set up within the Council of People’s Commissars in November, 1918, for the express purpose of winning the war, like its counterparts in Western Europe) had been re-organized on a wider basis as the Council of Labor and Defence (Soviet Truda і Oborony), “with the object,” in the words of the decree, “of the closest possible unification of all forces on the labor front.” It was hoped that warfare was at an end, and that peaceful work was once more possible: more especially the military formations previously at the disposal of the Council of Defence could now, it was anticipated, be utilized in a more rational manner, in the form of “Labor armies”, by the same Council with a wider personnel, and thus the painful stage of demobilization and industrial re-absorption might to a large extent be avoided.

Once again sanguine hopes were thwarted, and the Polish attack, together with Wrangel’s renewed activity in the south, effectively postponed all thought of peaceful revival for nearly twelve months. More than this, it was quite clear by the end of this new and (so far) conclusive chapter in the Soviet Republic’s military life that the general exhaustion was then too marked to permit of the measures planned earlier in the year. Demobilization was therefore decided upon and carried out; and the Eighth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which met in December, 1920, to consider the new situation of Soviet Russia, was placed in a position to utilize the Council of Labor and Defence for a purpose of vaster and more far-reaching import than the direction of labor armies—namely, to carry out the work of general economic unification outlined earlier in this article.

In the decree of the All-Russian Congress, the work of the Council of Labor and Defence was defined as follows:

The С.L.D. co-ordinates and develops the activity of all departments of State in the interests of the defence ef the country and of economic reconstruction.

To carry out the task imposed upon it the C.L.D. publishes its decisions, regulations, and instructions, end takes all the measures necessary to ensure their accurate and rapid execution; in particular, it determines the single economic plan of the R.S.F.S.R., submits it for ratification by the А.R.C.E.C., directs the work of the Economic People’s Commissariats in accordance with this plan, supervises its application, and decides in cases of necessity on any modifications of its provisions.

The constitution of the C.L.D. which, in practice, meeting weekly, works as a Committee of the Council of People’s Commissars, and publishes minutes of its proceedings in its official daily organ Economic Life (Ekonomicheskaya Zhizn), is laid down by the same decree. The chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars is chairman of the C.L.D.; its permanent members are the People’s Commissars for War, the Supreme Economic Council, Labor, Transport, Agriculture, Food, and Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, together with a representative of the All-Russian Council of Trade Unions. The director of the Central Statistical Department attends the sessions in a consultative capacity, and the People’s Commissar for Finance with a decisive vote when financial questions are being discussed.

It is of great importance to note that, while the decisions of the C.L.D. are binding on all institutions, central and local, and may be altered or set aside only by the A.R.C.E.C. or the Council of People’s Commissars, the C.L.D. has set up no apparatus of its own to carry out these decisions. They are communicated in the requisite form to the Commissariats concerned, and their execution is the work exclusively of the latter; thus unnecessary bureaucracy has been avoided. On the other hand, it has a definite and extremely energetic apparatus for assisting it in arriving at its conclusions. At the centre, in the capital, it has subordinated to it a series of thirteen or fourteen great inter-departmental commissions, which work up the material and collect the data from the appropriate People’s Commissariat, each in its own delimited sphere of work, but together covering all the more pressing economic problems. The chief of these is the State Economic Planning Commission (Gosplan), which draws up the economic program for the year in all its encyclopedic variety on the basis of the reports of the People’s Commissariats, and submits it to the C.L.D. for discussion and approval. Others, scarcely less prominent, but actually more specialized, are the State Electrification Commission (Goelko), the Committee for Improving the Lot of the Working Class, the Committee for Utilization (which until the most recent period controlled the distribution of all the raw and partly worked-up materials of production), the Committee for Investigating the Agricultural Conditions of the South-Eastern Region (set up since the beginning of the famine on the Volga); and so on.

Further, the C.L.D. has at its disposal, since October, 1921, a constant and regular stream of reports from the network of local organs of similar type, set up in large numbers following a special decree of the A.R.C.E.C. of June 30, 1921. Regional “economic conferences” (ekonomicheskoye soveshchanie) —this was the name given to the new bodies partly to distinguish them from the old “economic councils”, which are now purely industrial bodies, and partly to emphasize their super-departmental character—may be set up in any of the recently marked out economic regions or groups of provinces by special decision of the C.L.D. They are composed of representatives of the same institutions as the C.L.D. itself, who have to be personally confirmed in their appointments by the latter body; and the conferences as a whole are directly responsible to the С.L.D. Provincial, county, and area (a term which includes both rural areas and the towns) economic conferences are composed of the chairmen or directors of the following departments of the appropriate local Soviet Executive Committee; economic council, land, food, labor, workers’ and peasants’ inspection, municipal affairs, statistical (with a consultative voice), and the chairman of the council of trade unions for the given territory. The chairman of the local executive committee is chairman of the conference. In rural districts (sub-divisions of counties, which are smaller than *areas”) the conference is constituted by the chairman of the executive committee, the directors of the land and municipal affairs department, the chairman of the local co-operative society, and a representative of the workers’ and peasants’ inspection. In all these lower bodies, technical experts and representatives of other institutions are invited for consultative purposes on special questions. Finally, the lowest units of all are the village “agricultural committees” (selkom), set up by the Eighth All-Russian Congress for the express purpose of raising the level of agriculture; and, in the case of large factories which express a desire in this sense, factory economic conferences, composed of the chairman or vice-chairman of the Board of Management, the chairman of the Workers Committee, the chairman of the Local Valuing Committee (set up in connection with the introduction of free trading under the new economic policy), and a representative of the local group for assisting the workers’ and peasants’ inspection.”

All these local organs, from the provincial economic conference to the factory or village bodies, act as sub-committees, meeting weekly or fortnightly, of the Soviet Executive Committee for the given territory or of the Soviet of the given town or village; and are directly and entirely responsible ‘о these bodies, forming no apparatus of their own. They thus bear exactly the same relations to these general organs of State authority as the C.L.D. itself bears to the Council of the People’s Commissars; and their tasks are defined by the decree of June, 1921, in a similar way: “to unify and develop the activity of all local economic organs, to co-ordinate their work, and to ensure that they meet the problems dictated, not only by local interests but also by those of the State as a whole.

In other words, in addition to providing the “economic plan” for strictly local requirements, each grade of this gigantic economic machine is charged with supervising the execution, in the territory for which it is responsible, of that section of the general State plan which affects that territory, in all its details.

It is therefore natural that each of these economic conferences should be required to render regular quarterly reports—on lines worked out and laid down by instructions to cover all sides of local economic and social life  from the С.L.D. itself, to the economic conference immediately above it, that is, village committees to the rural district body, rural districts and small towns to the county bodies, counties and large towns to the provincial organs, and so on. The reports of the principal bodies are printed in a fixed number of copies, and sent, in addition to the recognized central economic bodies, to the principal libraries, universities, academies, institutes of economic research, etc., in the Republic. Other reports district, village, and small town) are handed in manuscript form to the appropriate superior economic conference, and are abstracted for the central authorities by the provincial statistical departments.

In conclusion, we may refer to the figures available to illustrate the work of the Council of Labor and Defence, which show that in six months (November 1, 1920, to April 30, 1921) it examined 991 questions, twenty per cent of which were raised by the Supreme Economic Council, thirteen per cent by the Commissariat for Food, and twelve per cent by the War Department; while in the first four months of 1921 seventy-three sub-commissions for special current questions (apart from the principal permanent group mentioned earlier) were set up. No statistics are yet available of the work of the lower organ; but for the last three months Economic Life has been steadily printing abstracts of the reports of the provincial economic conferences now coming in. These reports on the whole, in spite of many obvious defects born for the most part of inexperience, show that the general principles indicated by the C.L.D. have been correctly grasped by the local Soviet workers and economic bodies and that an earnest and systematic effort is being made to introduce an element of co-ordination and forethought into local economic activity. There is thus slowly but surely being built up a more and more solid guarantee that the new economic policy in all its ramifications will be intelligently applied, and the foundations of the new social order firmly and unshakably laid.

Soviet Russia began in the summer of 1919, published by the Bureau of Information of Soviet Russia and replaced The Weekly Bulletin of the Bureau of Information of Soviet Russia. In lieu of an Embassy the Russian Soviet Government Bureau was the official voice of the Soviets in the US. Soviet Russia was published as the official organ of the RSGB until February 1922 when Soviet Russia became to the official organ of The Friends of Soviet Russia, becoming Soviet Russia Pictorial in 1923. There is no better US-published source for information on the Soviet state at this time, and includes official statements, articles by prominent Bolsheviks, data on the Soviet economy, weekly reports on the wars for survival the Soviets were engaged in, as well as efforts to in the US to lift the blockade and begin trade with the emerging Soviet Union.

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