HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

156 ANDREA GRAZIOSIsection), which had some points in common with Lenin's thinking butwhich differed in important aspects. 40 Piatakov's reflections developed tosome extent in contrast with the forms and dynamics of the nascent Sovietbureaucratic system, which was growing chaotically. Through criticism ofwhat was to be called "war communism," some typical negative traits of allbureaucratic systems were determined: for example, the tendency to giverise to a sort of "centralized feudalism," if a strong central power is lacking.This economic feudalism became known then as glavkizm, but it was toappear again and again in Soviet history under different names (for example,as "ministerialism").Trotsky and Piatakov elaborated a complex strategy to deal with thebureaucratic chaos. The military experience—the only successful one—convinced them that one possible solution was to extend it. Hence the proposalfor "militarization" (another case of adopting a movement "backward"as a goal, since the army is one of the "original" bureaucratic systems).Locally, this took the form of the Labor Armies, which centralizedpower at the level of large economic "regions" (the Urals, Ukraine, etc.).The armies were created in order to get the local economies moving again,in military-style, and to combat the paralysis caused by the conflictsbetween the "plenipotentiaries" of the various central organs.These experiences have not been studied extensively. Having becomethe chairman of the First Labor Army in the Urals (February-May 1920),Piatakov championed edinonachalie and clashed violently with the localpowers and with the workers, in this case the Cheliabinsk miners. The latterclash is particularly interesting because it sheds some light on that interplaybetween Russian "traditions," contingencies, and ideology which presidedover the rapid appearance within the new elite of a rather strong antiworkerbias and which soon hardened into a model for the consideration and treatmentof labor. For Piatakov, traditions were represented by his childhood,spent in a company "town" of the Russian type, strongly influenced by theheritage of serfdom and "modernized" by his father's progressive40True to their analytical consistency (or logical extremism), Trotsky and Piatakov went asfar as theorizing the necessity for a "good" bureaucracy and of its progressive expansion.Lenin, instead, reluctantly admitted that "in a peasant country" it was indeed possible "to throwout the tsar, the landowners and the capitalists" but not, unfortunately, the bureaucracy, which"could only be reduced by slow and stubborn effort." This position was of course quite unrealistic,since one cannot reduce bureaucracy while increasing its tasks. This theoretical inconsistencywas one of the sources of the recurrent, Sisyphean efforts led in the 1920s and 1930sby well-intentioned Bolshevik leaders. One might think, for example, of Ordzhonikizde'stenure at the RKI, spent pruning an apparatus which grew stronger with each cut (as well asless efficient because of the havoc wrought by the primers' efforts).