ABSTRACT
The political expropriation of the working class was not a simple act of
theft. The Bolsheviks’ rivals in the workers’ movement – the non-partyists,
other socialist parties and communist dissidents – had by early 1922 been
silenced or isolated. It remained for the party to fashion new methods to
mediate its relationship with the majority of the working class. Forms of
mass mobilization – including big public campaigns against the church and
the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) party – were used to subvert and replace
the forms of democratic mass participation that had begun to take shape in 1917. The fora in which participatory democracy might have developed, the
soviets and unions, were assigned limited functions that involved imple-
menting decisions made by the party – and, increasingly, the elite that was
now bringing the party under its control. Mechanisms for isolating leaders
of both political and economic strikes, usually by expulsion from unions,
were refined. The rapid upturn in the economy in 1922 made possible an
improvement in workers’ living standards, which provided the basis for
most workers to accept such arrangements. The unemployed, who could not be included in the social contract, were pushed to the political margins.
