Council of People's Commissars

The Council of People’s Commissars, Sovnarkom for short in Russian, was the government of Soviet Russia. It was set up by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on the night of 8–9 November 1917, after the Bolshevik coup, and was chaired by Vladimir Lenin. It took Russia out of the war and within little more than a year laid the foundations of the Soviet state.

A government of commissars

The Congress established the Council as a “provisional workers’ and peasants’ government” that was to hold power until the Constituent Assembly met. Each branch of the state was run by a commission, and the government was the collegium of their chairmen, the people’s commissars. The Bolsheviks avoided the word “minister”, which was associated with the old regime. Above the Council stood the Congress of Soviets and its Central Executive Committee, which could change its membership.

The first Council was wholly Bolshevik. Leon Trotsky took foreign affairs, Joseph Stalin nationalities, and the army and navy were to be run by a three-man committee that included Ensign Nikolai Krylenko. The railways portfolio was left empty because the railwaymen’s union did not recognise the coup. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries at first refused to join the government, later became the Bolsheviks’ coalition partner, and in March 1918 left the Council in protest at the peace with Germany.

Rule by decree

The Council ruled by decree. The new regime’s first acts, the decrees on peace and on land, were still passed by the Congress, but later decisions were taken at the commissars’ meetings. On 20 December 1917 the Council created the Cheka under Felix Dzerzhinsky, on 28 January 1918 it resolved to form the Red Army, and its decree meant that in Russia 31 January was followed directly by 14 February. After the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly the word “provisional” disappeared from the government’s name. In September 1918 the Council passed the resolution on the Red Terror, which allowed “class enemies” to be shot or locked up in camps.

War and peace

The most urgent matter was the war. On the night of 20–21 November 1917 the Council ordered the high command to offer the enemy an armistice. The Entente governments did not recognise it, and their ambassadors kept no official relations with it. When the talks at Brest-Litovsk stalled and the Germans went on the offensive, on the night of 18–19 February 1918 the Council informed Berlin by radio that it would accept the dictated terms. On 3 March its delegation signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, in which Russia lost Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Finland, among other lands.

The Germans then stood at Narva, about 150 kilometres from Petrograd. On the night of 10–11 March the government secretly moved to Moscow, and the Kremlin became its seat. The move was meant to be temporary but proved permanent.

The Council and the Polish question

On 31 December 1917 the Council recognised Finland’s independence, and on 29 August 1918 it annulled the partition treaties concluded by the tsarist state with Prussia and Austria, recognising the Polish nation’s right to independence. That did not stop Lenin from sending the Red Army against Warsaw in 1920. After Germany’s defeat, on 13 November 1918, the Soviet authorities declared the Brest peace void. The government kept the name Council of People’s Commissars until 1946, when it was replaced by the Council of Ministers.