No systematic account yet exists of the early history of the Soviet administrative machine. This book is concerned with the command centre of that machine, the Council of People's Commissars, and the internal structure and operation of the various commissariats and other agencies of government lie outside our field of investigation. Nevertheless the steps whereby Sovnarkom acquired a functioning bureaucracy, largely inherited via the Provisional Government from the Imperial regime, deserve our attention, since they tell us much about the emergent character of Sovnarkom itself.

The establishment of the central bureaucracy of the Soviet state passed through three stages. First each of the people's commissars set up an office in Smolny, from which he proceeded to establish contact with his ‘ministry’ elsewhere in Petrograd. These offices, consisting of a handful of assistants and office-workers, were the original people's commissariats. In the second stage the people's commissars moved into their ‘ministries’, sometimes with a considerable retinue, but leaving the commissariats themselves behind in Smolny, where they themselves spent part of their time. Finally one by one the commissariats were moved out to the ‘ministries’, and the two apparatuses began to coalesce. The whole sequence, seriously delayed by the hostility and passive resistance of the bulk of civil servants, and complicated by the confused political events outlined in the previous chapter, dragged on into the early weeks of 1918 and was still incomplete when the Soviet Government moved to Moscow.