When was sovnarkom setup

Look out for the full audio version soon. Lara Douds is an Assistant Professor of History at Durham University specializing in the history of the institutions and political culture of the early Soviet government.

What is Sovnarkom? The Bolsheviks have seized power. They are 11 fellow commissars and a trio who are responsible for military affairs. In some ways they are carrying over a similar sort of division of business as the Provisional, and the Tsarist government.

They have commissars for things like Labor, Post and Telegraph, Foreign Affairs and Enlightenment, which Anatoly Lunacharsky is famously the commissar.

Trotsky remarks in his memoir that they just thought it had a sort of more revolutionary ring to it. Sovnarkom is supposed to be accountable to a larger standing body, the Russian Central Executive Committee.

The Central Executive Committee is a standing body made up of hundreds of representatives that was formed by the Second Congress of Soviets. I say quasi- because the Bolsheviks were not keen on the idea of the division of powers. They saw that as something that bourgeois parliamentary systems did, and that the division was a fig leaf for bourgeois democracy to con people.

Official Soviet historians have an agenda to portray the Politburo as the natural executive of the government from day one. Also Cold Warriors from the Anglophone side also want to portray this as the natural state of affairs. They want to condemn so-called Soviet democracy as an ultra-centralized, repressive monolithic system from day one. State and Revolution is a strange, old text, and it has divided opinion among all the scholars that have sought to interpret its meaning. Some focus on its ultra-democratic-utopian-withering of the state, and others focus more on its violent themes.

There were all sorts of elements of the state apparatus, and the way that Lenin and the other Bolsheviks were talking about what they were trying to achieve in de-bureaucratizing the state apparatus that reminded me of the broader principles of State and Revolution.

The main thing really was that Lenin is absolutely emphatic in State and Revolution that the state is a special kind of organization of force for the suppression of one class over another.

Lenin is arguing very strongly against this, and that some kind of violent break is needed to smash the bourgeois state. Wonderful commune democracy and the withering away of the state is all great in the long term, but there has to be something in the interim before we get to that point.

It has to be a representative government, but not parliamentary. That the business of administration has been simplified by capitalism. What does he say? Any old kitchen maid can be a state administrator or something. One of those things was what I call collegiality in the book. Like the use of collegium as commission boards made up of equally empowered members. You can draw in members of the proletariat or specialists who are responsible for a particular area of government, or administration into these collegiums.

Their goal was to spread authority away from a ministerial hierarchical government. They also experimented with paying everybody fairly equal wages in the state administration. A lot of other things too like drawing proletarian human material but this gave way because of the sheer lack of suitable literate people to staff them.

That gave way to things like the setting up Rabkrin, the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate, which was set up a couple of years later. And also things like the receptions, which I talk a bit about in the book. Receptions are a way of having some real contact between the state administration and ordinary workers and peasants who could enter into the space of the government to present their complaints or requests, and there could be a sort of responsive relationship between state and society.

So, in all sorts of ways, I found that the early Bolshevik government was trying to incorporate some of the broad ideas of State and Revolution into this new apparatus to de-bureaucratize. We can imagine Sovnarkom as a fairly standard government cabinet, in that it held weekly meetings with the chairmen of the commissariats. They were tasked with dealing with the range of challenges that faced this young Soviet government.

Basically, all of the commissariats could propose policy measures or legislation and points to the agenda of Sovnarkom. And then all Sovnarkom members would discuss them. They would ideally read briefing papers before the meeting and discuss them for a few hours in a Sovnarkom meeting. Then decisions were taken by majority vote with Lenin as chair. There was a real effort regularize its operation.

Quite quickly, rules were brought in about how many minutes people could stand up and present their proposals. And how many people could then speak for and against this afterwards. This kind of systematization surprised me a lot. While it was true that in January the Constituent Assembly had been dispersed, this was of course a fledgling institution and certainly not an established state organ.

In reality much of the old state apparatus remained almost unchanged. A later statement by Lenin from is quite instructive in this respect and completely at odds with his earlier declaration :.

Indeed, as T. This, of course, was something that could not be achieved immediately and for the first few weeks after the insurrection the first steps toward asserting the authority of the new regime were coordinated by the body that had organised the seizure of power in the capital — the Military Revolutionary Committee.

Membership of Sovnarkom would comprise the chairs of various commissions, or commissariats, that would constitute governmental branches of the revolutionary state, with Lenin as the chair of this central council.

Even at this very early stage, at the time of this decree, the similarities between the proposed structure of commissariats and the old ministerial structure inherited by the Provisional Government from the Tsarist regime are very striking.

For one thing the division of responsibilities between the various commissariats was virtually identical to that between the old ministries, and further, there seemed little to distinguish Sovnarkom from the pre-revolutionary government executive. As Rigby comments, only two apparently important innovations were incorporated into the new structure of government.

The second major innovation was in terminology. As Rigby puts it:. But even here — at the level of mere terminology — differences with the old regime can be exaggerated. As Rigby comments:. Within a few months the new government had also moved literally to incorporate the extant administrative apparatuses including most of their personnel left over from the old regime. This arrangement did not last long, since with the German advance in the period before Brest-Litovsk, followed by the territorial concessions made under the terms of that treaty, the decision was made to move the seat of the government from Petrograd to Moscow.

The main point here, however, is that what was transferred to Moscow and re-established there were, for all intents and purposes, the old ministries — their existing structures and much of their personnel more or less in toto. None of this is to say that there were no significant changes to the state structures seized by the Bolsheviks.

But even here in the case of the NEC, there were strong lines of continuity with the old Ministry of Trade and Industry in terms of its functions and structures.