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In 1917, Bolshevik demands for "soviet power" resonated broadly with Russian workers, who embraced participatory democracy as essential to their dream of social liberation. In this multi-faceted study of working-class politics in Moscow from 1920 to 1924, Simon Pirani offers new insight into a "traditional" topic - the revolution's retreat away from its original democratic promise towards one-party dictatorship. Drawing on rich new materials from local party, factory, and police archives, he documents workers' ongoing struggles to keep a broader, more politically inclusive revolution alive, against the Bolshevik party's increasingly intensive efforts to consolidate its rule in the process of rebuilding a shattered economy. While not minimizing the Bolsheviks' reliance on repressive tactics, Pirani emphasizes the party's success in forging a new "social contract" with workers under the New Economic Policy (NEP): capitalizing on their shared desire for economic recovery, the party promised workers better working and living conditions in exchange for their political voice.
In late 1920, Pirani begins, the "super-optimism" of civil-war communists was quickly eclipsed by a crippling crisis in food supply and transport. Suffering from hunger and postwar exhaustion, Moscow workers - especially those in the male-dominated and traditionally Bolshevik metalworking industries- were still quick to protest against non-egalitarian policies like unequal rationing and shock work. Rank-and-file communists, like those associated with the strongly workerist Bauman group, spoke out with equal outrage about evidence of increasing privilege and corruption within the party, and (echoing earlier concerns of the democratic centralists) demanded the shifting of more authority to local soviets. Mounting discontent resonated in heated party debates, and in a revival of working-class collective action, most notably, in the mass strikes of February 1921.
Though economic issues predominated through early spring, Pirani shows that the workers' movement took a political turn after the Kronstadt rebellion, reflected in the surprising victories of non-party candidates at all major factories in the April-May 1921 elections to the Moscow soviet. Contrary to Bolshevik claims about undercover Menshevik or SR influence, the rise of non-party oppositionists brought together a diverse coalition of socialist workers and activists who shunned party affiliation. Operating in a unique political space, the non-partyists forged temporary unity with former SRs, Mensheviks, and Bolsheviks based on shared hopes...