Abstract

The article re-examines the key debates concerning the relationship between the Russian factory-committee movement and the Bolshevik Party and Soviet state in 1917‐18. It does so with reference to a four-volume collection of documents in Russian on the history of the factory-committees in 1917/18 which first began to be published in 1927 and completed publication in 2002. Rather than the traditional totalitarian view of a movement which was cynically manipulated and dominated by an authoritarian party, what emerges is a much more complex and dynamic relationship. The article in particular argues that the so-called bureaucratisation of the factory-committee movement after the October Revolution emerged out of the practical dilemmas faced by the committees in the economic chaos of 1917/18 and the factory-committee leaders’ own desires to promote a rational, planned alternative to that chaos.