In this course, Peter Kenez, Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz, explains the events of modern Russian history and introduces its most significant actors—from Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin.
The One-Party State
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Del curso dictado por University of California, Santa Cruz
Russian History: from Lenin to Putin
148 calificaciones
De la lección
The 9th Century to the 1920s
Conoce a los instructores
Peter KenezProfessor Emeritus
History
We must not think that when the Bolsheviks took power,
they came with a fixed set of principles and a blueprint,
and then on their success, introduced that system.
In fact, the Bolsheviks had no choice but to improvise.
They really expected a world revolution.
They expected support from the great majority of the Russian people.
They expected that they will understand that what they want to
create is a better and more just society.
So consequently, they were forced to improvise.
War communism was a great improvisation.
Historians since were debating whether with the principles which the Bolshevik's game,
whether war communism was actually more
congruent with what they wanted rather than the NEP.
Because both war communism and the NEP,
came into existence as a result of immediate needs
rather than as a result of the carefully-thought-through ideologies.
Interestingly, at the time of war communism, some Bolshevik leaders,
most prominently rather attractive figure among the Bolshevik leaders,
Bukharin, argued, "Look, money has disappeared.
We are already reaching the stage of communism."
Then, by the way, in the 1920s,
Bukharin came to see things very differently and came to
justify a very different economic political system.
But what is to emphasize here is that,
neither war communism nor the NEP was something which
the Bolsheviks had thought through ahead of time.
So, what is real communism?
Those who were sympathetic to socialism in the human phase,
argue that really is the NEP which the Bolsheviks really would have liked.
But a country, those who were hostile to the entire idea,
were saying that really they just gave a concession here because they could,
but they would really like was the complete elimination of
private enterprise and everything which came with it.
The very idea of the party was not something which was originally envisaged.
In fact, what was the role of the party?
The problem which the Bolshevik raised,
which goes back to Czarist history which I mentioned before,
namely the country was very likely administered.
And now, the time of the civil war, everything collapsed.
So, the party had to play the role of a quasi-government.
At first, it was envisaged that the government
which will be re-established and the government would be the more significant entity.
And the role of the party would be ideological,
discussions, propaganda, choosing cadres for various jobs.
In reality however, it turned out that the party,
in importance, superseded the government.
It is worth mentioning perhaps that Lenin who
was the outstanding leader of the revolution,
not questioned by any of his comrades,
took the job of being,
in effect, head of the government.
It was called the Commissar,
the Soviet of the Commissars,
and this is the job which Lenin took rather than party secretary.
Now, in the course of the 1920s,
the party evolved into something else.
The party, after all, before the revolution,
was a small group of professional revolutionaries
whose task was to propagandize among the working classes.
Now, the party came to be an administrative institution,
and in the course of that,
the nature of the party changed.
First of all, it greatly grew in size.
At the end of the civil war,
there were three quarter of a million party members.
And then, in the first years,
it grew up to be two million.
Then the Bolshevik leadership were concerned
all sort of characters joined the party who had very little understanding of
communist principles and they wanted to go
through a stage of getting rid of the elements who,
in their opinion, did not belong to the party.
But the party changed.
The party changed from a small group of
professional revolutionaries into a bureaucratic institution.
And it is in this context that the name, Stalin, appears.
Stalin played a role in 1917,
to be sure, and in the course of the Civil War.
But he became the secretary of the party in 1922 where
his job was to oversee the party groups,
the party cadres, the party cells in different parts of the country,
which was fundamentally a bureaucratic job.
And Stalin, of course,
managed to make something more out of it.
But this is perhaps to be discussed later.
The other change which occurred in the party
was the gradual diminution of party democracy.
In the tenth party congress in 1921,
perhaps the most significant party congress,
this is the same which introduced the NEP,
outlawed sections within the party.
Factional struggles outlawed between the party.
Nonetheless, in the course of 1920,
such factions continued to exist.
What I mean by the diminution of democracy within the party is
that on people who disagreed with
the expressed position of the top leadership were excluded from the party organization.
This was understandable because once the Bolsheviks came into power very
quickly they suppressed
all other competing political parties and political organizations.
The Mensheviks, the social-revolutionaries were outlawed.
Now, and the consequence was that
whatever disagreement continued to exist was within the party itself.
That is views which might have been expressed by the Mensheviks now somewhat
similar views were expressed by some of the Bolshevik leaders.
The Bolsheviks in the course of the 1920s still did not
have the means to create a well-functioning government.
Did not have the organization,
the man power to actually control society.
What they managed to control in the course of the 1920s were the cities.
The countryside remained beyond Bolshevik control.
And, arguably, we can say that
the 1920s were the best period of
the life of the Russian peasantry because willingly they had to be left alone.
The great change would occur with collectivization.
Collectivization meant, the expansion of party control over the entire country.
Another aspect of this one party state was the Bolsheviks created
organizations which they described as transmission belts, social organizations.
One of these was the Komsomol, Communist Youth Organization.
And, the other was the Zhenotdel, the Women Organization.
Now, these were not autonomous organizations.
It was not that the Komsomol represented the interest of the younger workers,
and it is not that the Zhenotdel represented the interest of the Russian women.
These organizations were simply means
to convey the Bolshevik message to certain target audiences.
The Bolsheviks still regarded themselves to a very great extent as propagandists.
Let me turn to the question of social changes which occurred in the course of the 1920s.
Well, of course the revolution introduced fundamental changes of Russian society,
most obviously the upper class,
might say the ruling class,
lost its position in power.
About 2 million left the country.
And, obviously, the people who left the country,
who became emigrants did not represent the cross-section of the population but
were the ones who had most to lose by and large better educated younger.
Now arguably, before 1917,
two separate culture existed in Russia.
One was peasant Russia which is folk tradition and religiosity,
Orthodox religiosity and the other is a thin layer of
the upper classes very much part of the European world, highly educated.
Consequence of the Russian revolution was that this great split has disappeared.
A new culture was created,
Soviet culture which was as far removed from the culture
of the peasantry as it was from that of the old aristocracy.
When we look at social classes but as I say first eliminated the aristocracy.
The workers, it was the workers,
and must the workers name that the revolution was carried out,
they were not the beneficiaries.
During the Civil war,
it was the workers who suffered most.
Factories closed down, were no raw material.
The peasants were the beneficiaries if
anybody was beneficiary of
that great social upheaval to the extent that they had been left alone.
Finally, they could cultivate all the land.
And, the peasant institution,
the peasant commune to a great extent was
the most significant social political institution in the countryside.
The peasants cultivated their land and some were more successful than others.
And, this resurfacing of stratification
among the peasants was something
disturbing from the point of view of the Bolshevik leadership,
because they were concerned that the Kulaks,
this was the name which they called the better-off peasants.
Peasants who were able to hire help.
They were concerned that this will become a hostile social entity.
But their problem was that they very much needed what
the peasants could produce but they very much needed what the Kulaks could produce.
The Kulaks were the ones which produced for the market.
And, this duality in the case of
the peasantry was ultimately the source
of the failure of the NEP which had occurred within a few years.
The Bolsheviks faced the same problem with the NEPmen.
They needed their services,
they needed what they could do but they ultimately disliked who they
were and tried to impose on them all sort of limitations,
all sort of regulations and it was clear that they operate
in a system in which they were disliked.
When we talk about Russian society in the course of the 1920s,
the paradox here is that the Bolsheviks stood
for liberation of all different kinds, liberation of women.
Introducing progressive education meaning bringing
together the education of children with labor.
All these were very attractive policies,
however they did not have the means to carry through.
All right, you can introduce easy divorce and easy abortion,
but it turned out that this is not what the peasants wanted at this point.
So, the Russian social structure actually changed not as
a consequence of announced idealistic and progressive principle,
s but the change will occur with collectivization where the changes occurred as
a result of necessity and as a result of
greater resources which became available for example,
in the arm of education.
The greater change in enabling
the Russian people to acquire literacy occurred
not when the Bolsheviks talked about the need for literacy,
but in the 1930s when they were able to establish a large number of schools.
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