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Ten days after the Revolution, officials and employees of the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Empire demonstrated in Petrograd against the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks.
“We have decided to start a general strike and publish a resolution”, wrote Sergei Belgard, secretary of the ministry. The resolution read: “We, employees of the Ministry of Finance, declare that: 1) We do not consider it possible to obey orders from those who have taken power. 2) We refuse to enter into official relations with them. 3) From now on, until the establishment of authorities enjoying national recognition, we interrupt our official activities, imputing the responsibility for the consequences to those who have taken power. “
Sergei Belgard, Secretary of the Ministry of Finance
Archives de Memorial (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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When Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, a Bolshevik leader who Lenin had ordered to manage the State Bank, introduced himself to the finance ministry, the director of the credit and currency bureau, Conrad Sahmen, refused to shake his hand. In return, Menzhinsky declared: “I don’t think of you as the manager of the credit bureau anymore. “ War was declared.
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“Save the national treasure from plunder! “
The Ministry of Finance was of course not the only institution to protest against Bolshevik power. Two days after their resolution, on October 29, cadets from several military schools in Petrograd mutinied against the Bolsheviks. They were quickly suppressed in blood, hundreds of them having been killed and executed.
The cadet mutiny and statesmen’s strike were inspired by the Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution, a counter-revolutionary organization created by members of the Petrograd City Duma on the night of October 26, when the Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace. The Committee declared the Bolsheviks and their power illegitimate and distributed leaflets urging citizens not to recognize the new government.
Officer cadets in the ravaged premises of the Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in the former Ksechinskaya hotel, June 1917
Sputnik
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After the suppression of the cadet mutiny, the Committee devoted itself fully to supporting the strike by civil servants. More than 40,000 employees and civil servants took part in the strike which began in October 1917; Among them were 10,000 bank employees, 6,000 postal workers, 4,700 telegraph operators and 3,000 employees of commercial enterprises. Printing workers threatened to stop printing Bolshevik documents, food industry workers in Moscow decided to stop shipping food to Petrograd.
Anatoli Lounatcharski, People’s Commissar for Public Education
Viktor Bulla / Sputnik
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“The technical staff are rising up against us. We won’t fix anything on our own. The hunger will begin “said Anatoly Lunacharsky, a famous Bolshevik and deputy head of the Petrograd Soviet. Lunacharsky had close ties to the intelligentsia of yesteryear and understood that a strike by Tsarist officials could be fatal. “It is of course possible to act with terror – but what good is it? Right now, you have to take possession of the entire device first. [civil]. »
Furthermore, without access to the Treasury and the State Bank, the Bolsheviks were simply broke. Employees of the State Bank issued a statement aimed at citizens:
“Dear citizens! The state bank is closed. Why ? Because the violence inflicted by the Bolsheviks on the State Bank made it impossible to continue working. The first steps of the People’s Commissars were expressed by the demand for 10 million rubles, and on October 28, they demanded 25 million without specifying what the money would be used for … We, officials of the State Bank, cannot participate in the plundering of the national heritage. We stopped working.
The State Bank in St. Petersburg
Public domain
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Citizens, the money of the State Bank is the money of the people, drawn from your work, your sweat and your blood. Citizens, save the national treasure from plunder and protect us from violence, and we will get to work now. Employees of the State Bank. “
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“Civil servants must leave their apartments within three days”
But the State Bank wasn’t even the biggest problem. Foreign Ministry officials rose up against Leon Trotsky himself, possibly the second most notorious Bolshevik after Lenin at the time. Trotsky, who was the first People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the new government, remembers his first day in the ministry.
Trotsky addresses the soldiers, 1918
TASS
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“I was told there was no one there. A certain Prince Tatishchev said that there were no employees, that they did not show up for work. I asked to gather those who had come, and it turned out that a colossal number did indeed appear … I explained that the question [du nouveau pouvoir] was irrevocable, and that whoever wanted to serve in good faith would remain in service. But all this was for nothing. “
About 600 officials immediately resigned, many returned home, and some of them locked themselves in their offices. Deputy Foreign Minister Anatoly Neratov tried to escape with the originals of the imperial government’s secret treaties. At the Ministry of Labor, the new People’s Commissar Alexander Shliapnikov could not even force employees to light the stoves. Meanwhile, in the Ministry of Finance, international financial documents were burned – this made it impossible to study Russia’s financial relations with other states.
Office of the Minister of Finance of the Russian Empire
Fotoload.ru
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The Bolsheviks adopted urgent measures against the strike. On November 1, 1917, the Petrograd Revolutionary Committee stopped paying Tsarist officials who had joined the strike, and on November 26 declared the counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs “enemies of the state”.
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky issued an order which he personally submitted to officials of the Ministry of Finance: “All employees who do not recognize the authorities of the Soviet of People’s Commissars are considered dismissed without retaining their right to a pension. Employees and officials who want to continue their work and fully submit to the revolutionary power of the SCP are expected to start on Monday. Dismissed officials using state-owned apartments must vacate them within three days. “
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“New sober officials”
On November 17, Menzhinsky broke into the offices of the State Bank; safes and offices were broken into and money was seized. It was the start of the Red Terror – on December 7, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (Cheka) headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky was set up to combat sabotage, and Lenin bestowed on the body “emergency powers.” – in fact, the right to carry out executions.
Viatcheslav Menjinski
TASS
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Almost immediately, the Cheka discovered that the Union of Employees of State Institutions, an organization of former Tsarist officials, was collecting money to financially support the striking employees. To do this, the former ministers of the provisional government seized 40 million rubles from the State Bank – not an exorbitant sum, considering that the country’s budget was estimated at over 2 billion and a living wage was about 400-500 rubles at the time. Money was also collected by subscription among the middle classes. With this money, the striking officials received 1-2 months’ salary in advance. On December 18, a telegram from former ministers of the provisional government calling on all officials to commit acts of sabotage across Russia was intercepted.
It couldn’t have ended well. On December 17, Leon Trotsky declared: “Within a month, the terror will take very strong forms, like the great French revolutionaries. Our enemies will face the guillotine, not just the prison. ” In 1918, the Red Terror came into full force. Officials who refused to sign written obligations of non-cooperation with counterrevolutionary organs were subjected to repression. On September 3, 1918, 512 former officials, ministers, professors, etc. were shot by a firing squad. By then, the civil servants’ strike was long overdue.
Félix Dzerzhinsky and the Cheka staff
Sputnik
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Logically, a large number of vacancies appeared in the state apparatus. They were largely occupied by educated Jewish officials, who previously had no opportunity to serve in state institutions because Tsarist laws limited their rights. Most of the Jewish population of Russia at that time was anti-Tsarist because of this. The Bolsheviks, on the contrary, supported the Russian Jews – on July 25, 1918, the decree On the fight against anti-Semitism and Jewish pogroms was published by the Soviet of People’s Commissars, and the Jews were invited to serve the new state and the Red Army.
Semen Dimanstein, head of the Jewish community at the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities
Public domain
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Semen Dimanstein, a Soviet official responsible for the Jewish community at the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities, wrote: “The fact that a large number of Jewish intellectuals gathered in Russian cities because of the war served the revolution a great deal. They thwarted the general sabotage that we encountered in the aftermath of the Revolution. ” As Dimanstein also wrote, Lenin himself pointed out that the Bolsheviks “Only succeeded in conquering the state apparatus and in significantly modifying it thanks to this reserve of new competent and more or less educated and sober officials”.
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