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Life in USSR under Stalin

Stalin’s control over Russia meant that freedom was the one thing that people lost. The people of Russia had to read what the state allowed, see what the state allowed and listen to what the state allowed. The state’s control of the media was total. Those who attempted to listen, read etc. anything else were severely punished. Everybody knew of the labour camps and that was enough of a deterrent.

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Education was strictly controlled by the state. In 1932, a rigid programme of discipline and education was introduced. Exams, banned under Lenin , were reintroduced. The way subjects were taught was laid down by the government – especially History where Stalin’s part in the 1917 Revolution and his relationship with Lenin was overplayed. Books were strictly censored by the state and Stalin ordered the writing of a new book called “A short history of the USSR” which had to be used in schools.

Outside of school, children were expected to join youth organisations such as the Octobrists for 8 to 10 year olds and the Pioneers for the 10 to 16 year olds. From 19 to 23 you were expected to join the Komsomol. Children were taught how to be a good socialist/communist and an emphasis was put on outdoor activities and clean living.

There was a marked increase in the attacks on the churches of the USSR throughout the 1930’s. Communism had taught people that religion was “the opium of the masses” ( Karl Marx ) and church leaders were arrested and churches physically shut down. Stalin could not allow a challenge to his position and anybody who worshipped God was a challenge as the “personality cult” was meant for people to worship Stalin.

For a short time under Lenin , women had enjoyed a much freer status in that life for them was a lot more liberal when compared to the ‘old days’. Among other things, divorce was made a lot more easy under Lenin. Stalin changed all this. He put the emphasis on the family. There was a reason for this. Many children had been born out of marriage and Moscow by 1930 was awash with a very high number of homeless children who had no family and, as such, were a stain on the perfect communist society that Stalin was trying to create.

The state paid families a child allowance if their were a married couple. It became a lot harder to get a divorce and restrictions were placed on abortions. Ceremonial weddings made a comeback. In the work place, women maintained their status and there was effective equality with men. In theory, all jobs were open to women. The only real change took place in the image the state created for women. By the end of the 1930’s, the image of women at work had softened so that the hard edge of working became less apparent.

Living standards : these generally rose in the 1930’s despite the obvious problems with food production and shortages elsewhere. Some people did very well out of the system especially party officials and skilled factory workers. Health care was greatly expanded. In the past, the poorer people of Russia could not have expected qualified medical help in times of illness. Now that facility was available though demand for it was extremely high. The number of doctors rose greatly but there is evidence that they were so scared of doing wrong, that they had to go by the rule book and make appointments for operations which people did not require!!

Housing remained a great problem for Stalin’s Russia. In Moscow, only 6% of households had more than one room. Those apartments that were put up quickly, were shoddy by western standards. In was not unusual for flat complexes to be built without electric sockets despite electricity being available – building firms were simply not used to such things.

Leisure for the average Russian person was based around fitness and sport. Every Russian was entitled to have a holiday each year – this had been unheard of in the tsar’s days. Clubs, sports facilities etc. were provided by the state. The state also controlled the cinema, radio etc. but an emphasis was placed on educating yourself via the media as it was then.

Was Stalin a disaster for Russia?

•  the country did become a major industrial nation by 1939 and her progress was unmatched in the era of the Depression in America and western Europe where millions were unemployed.

•  those workers who did not offend the state were better off than under the  reign of the tsar.

•  Russia’s military forces were benefiting from her industrial growth.

•  there was a stable government under Stalin.

•  people had access to much better medical care some 10 years before the National Health Service was introduced in GB.

• millions had died in famine after the failed experiment of collectivisation .

• Russia’s agriculture was at the same level in 1939 as in 1928 with a 40 million increased population.

• Russia had become a ‘telling’ society. The secret police actively encouraged people to inform on neighbours, work mates etc. and many suffered simply as a result of jealous neighbours/workers.

Also many of Russia’s most talented people had been murdered during the Purges of the 1930’s. Anyone with talent was seen as a threat by the increasingly paranoid behaviour associated with Stalin and were killed or imprisoned (which usually lead to death anyway). The vast Soviet army was a body without a brain as most of her senior officers had been arrested and murdered during the Purges.

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Understanding Tsarist and Communist Russia, 1855–1964

Studying an entire century of a country’s history is always going to be challenging, especially one as dramatic and complex as Russia. Include in this the different political movements and the dramas of revolution and war and it can seem overwhelming.

This article is a helpful guide to deal with the daunting nature of this period of study for the aqa history exam board and it’s based on one simple practice – breaking down each phase of the past to help you have a greater understanding of the period. We’re going to look at nine segments of Russian history and try to understand each one in its own right. So that we don’t have to consume an entire textbook in one blog post here, I’m going to give a brief overview to each section, not a detailed description. Some of these periods are longer than others, and in some short phases crucial events take place. In each period we will examine one core theme that defined the political, social and economic changes during that time. This article is based on specification content and will focus on the key events of the period. For full details of each section of the module click here .

1855-1881: Alexander II

Core theme: The tension between reform and autocracy. 

In a nutshell: Alexander II, not a natural reformer, realised that Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War was the product of its backwardness. Alexander also knew that unless serfdom was ended by the autocracy, it would end itself through peasant revolts that would consume Tsarist Russia. Alexander therefore wanted to modernise and strengthen the institutions of the Russian state (army, judiciary, education etc) and end serfdom. He wanted to do this without reforming the autocracy. Alexander’s reforms brought improvements to some areas of Russian life such as equality before the law but his halfway-house attempts to reform serfdom actually led to more unrest and anger in the countryside. Overall Alexander’s limited reforms led to greater revolutionary tensions in Russia, which in part led to his assassination in 1881. 

1881-1894 Alexander III

Core Theme: Re-establishing reaction

In a nutshell: Alexander III was a deeply reactionary Tsar and believed that his father’s reforms had been a mistake. Instead of binding the chaotic Russian empire together with reform of its institutions, Alexander sought to use Russian language, culture and Orthodox Christianity to unify the country through a policy of Russification. He also believed that the emancipation of the serfs had been a disaster and empowered the nobles to take back control of a restless countryside by creating the land captains, rural policemen (often nobles) who could harshly discipline the peasantry. Alexander’s attempts to restore what he believed had been lost under his father ended in failure, as the revolutionary tensions that were unleashed in the 1860s endured. 

1894-1917 Nicholas II

Core Theme: The incapable autocrat

In a nutshell: When Nicholas II came to the throne he inherited the problems of his father and grandfather. Unlike his forebears, however, Nicholas lacked the skills, abilities and temperament to rule. Nicholas was a weak autocrat who was dedicated to maintaining the autocracy but lacked the skill and judgement to do it effectively. In 1905 the Tsar came close to losing his throne in a revolution and was only saved by the skill of his Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Sergei Witte and the creation of the October Manifesto. In 1914 the Tsar was swept towards war and the resulting revolutionary pressures led to the collapse of the autocracy in February 1917. Note that in February the regime collapsed rather than was overthrown, the Russian Revolution happened because the state stopped functioning.

1917-1924 Lenin

Core Theme: The trapped revolution

In a nutshell: When Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power in October 1917, Lenin anticipated a civil war and even welcomed one, knowing that it would be ideal in order for him to institute the massive changes he wanted in Russia. A civil war would lead the introduction of mass terror and class warfare against the bourgeoisie and nobility. Lenin hoped that the revolution would spread to Europe, but by 1919 this had failed to occur. Without Germany, France and other countries falling to revolution, there was no chance that they would help Russia rapidly industrialise and escape its backward peasant society and economy. As a result, by 1921 the USSR had established itself as a powerful one party state, presiding over a mainly peasant economy, one which would need intense coercion in order to transform it into a socialist economy. By the time of Lenin’s death two policies had followed one another, War Communism, the brutal wartime control of the economy and the New Economic Policy, the limited introduction of markets into the USSR. The latter policy was introduced to stave off total economic collapse caused by the former. 

1924-1928 Power Struggle

Core Theme: Deciding the future of the USSR

In a nutshell: Lenin’s death in 1924 after three debilitating strokes had left the country directionless. Nobody was sure how long the NEP was meant to last for and the issue had divided the party. Two competing philosophies presented by different wings of the party also vied for dominance. Permanent revolution, favoured by Leon Trotsky, competed with Socialism in One Country, the approach of Joseph Stalin. Permanent revolution was the idea that spreading revolution beyond Russia’s borders was the key to achieving international socialism and subverting capitalist countries. Stalin believed that soon the USSR would face a counter revolutionary invasion (as had happened in the Russian civil war) and the building of socialism in one country through collectivisation, forced industrialisation and the creation of a huge defence industry would be the key to saving the revolution. The triumph of Stalin in the power struggle to succeed Lenin decided the outcome of this debate and the future direction of the USSR. 

1928-1941 High Stalinism

Core Theme: The brutal construction of socialism in one country

In a nutshell: Forced industrialisation could only happen in the USSR by establishing the complete control of the state over the production of food. Collectivisation was the means by which Stalin could export enough grain to buy foreign industrial machinery and also feed workers cheaply in the towns and cities. The immense violence and famines that followed also helped Stalin break what he saw as the ‘kulak’ class. Forced industrialisation and its failings were always blamed on saboteurs and class enemies; Stalin saw Russia existing in a state of siege from capitalist powers and this created conditions for revolutionary terror in the second half of the decade. Stalin saw himself in a race against time to eliminate class enemies before a future war with Germany could begin. He believed that if ‘traitors’ were not taken care of, they they would assist Germany or another foreign invader when the next war began.

1941-1953 Wartime Stalinism and Cold War

Core Theme: Changing enemies

In a nutshell: In August 1939 Stalin signed a non aggression pact with Nazi Germany and covertly assisted Hitler with his war on the west for the next two years. In June 1941, the surprise Nazi invasion of the USSR led to Stalin rapidly establishing alliances with Britain and then the USA. All three powers cooperated until 1945, defeating Nazi Germany and then Imperial Japan. From 1945 to his death in 1953, Stalin shaped the early years of the Cold War, as wartime alliances soured in 1945. Within the USSR, he reasserted control that had been disrupted by the chaos of the war, politically purging rivals and commencing a final anti Semitic purge which was curtailed by his death. The development of rivalries with Maoist China and Stalin’s involvement in the Korean War shaped the early Cold War in Asia

1953-1964 Khrushchev

Core Theme: Finding a path after Stalin

In a nutshell: Stalin had economically, politically and psychologically shaped the Soviet Union for three decades and Khrushchev needed to find a way of holding together the USSR whilst dismantling Stalinism itself. The abolition of the gulag system, the Secret Speech in 1956 and the ‘thaw’ all signalled that change was coming and some overly optimistic onlookers in Eastern Europe also hoped that it might mean the end of communism. However, Khrushchev demonstrated in his crushing of the Budapest uprising and his collaboration in building the Berlin Wall that he would defend Soviet communism. The country was still deeply scarred by collectivisation and Khrushchev’s attempts at boosting grain yields through the Virgin Lands campaign were a failed attempt at providing an alternative. 

Important Note: This blog doesn’t constitute an essay, an answer or anything that is remotely likely, on its own, to get you serious marks. It’s a framework for thinking about each phase of the course. Also, in each period studied a bunch of other social, cultural, political and economic change happened which you need to know about in depth (I’ve left most of that out here for obvious reasons).

If you found this brief guide to Tsarist and Communist Russia for AQA useful, check out the Explaining History store for modern history study guides and ebooks here

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What was ordinary life like in the USSR?

Soviet Children

“Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!” This phrase coined at an athletic parade on the Red Square in 1936 soon became one of the most memorable Soviet propaganda slogans.

Indeed, childhood in the Soviet Union was not without its merits. Parental leave in the USSR was only six months long before it was extended to 18 months in the 1970s. Children had to socialize early: nurseries for newborns were followed by kindergartens for toddlers, followed by school at the age of 7, and followed by the Pioneer organization system at the age of 9.

Click here to learn more about childhood in the USSR.

Pioneer camps in the USSR

During school holidays, Soviet children would goto Pioneer camps located all over the USSR. The luckiest of them went to Artek, considered the most prestigious and famous Soviet Pioneer camp, located in Crimea, on the shore of the Black Sea. With time, the camp became iconic, not only for the Soviet Union, but also for foreign nations, as it increasingly began welcoming children from other fellow communist regimes.

Click here to read about the famous Artek camp and what it has become today.

Soviet parenting

Although Soviet parents usually worked, as opposed to staying home to raise their children, Soviet parenting had established customs and traditions. A lot of attention was devoted to a child’s routine from a very early age. Sleeping, eating, playing, studying usually took place in accordance with a strict timetable. 

Soviet propaganda advocated raising children in traditions of modesty, love for sport, self-devotion, and responsibility.

Click here to read 10 handy Soviet rules for raising kids.

Soviet Education

At the beginning  of the 20th century, only 21 percent of the country’s population was literate. When the Bolsheviks came to power after the 1917 Revolution, they resolved to fight illiteracy by all available means. The first milestone was the launch of the ‘Likbez’ (liquidation of illiteracy) campaign that established a foundation for the Soviet education system.

In only a few decades, the Soviets were able to transform a largely illiterate state into one of the two superpowers that was also home to some of the greatest minds of the time. Special attention was devoted to mathematics and natural sciences.

Click here to learn why the education system in the USSR was considered among the best in the world. 

Soviet asceticism

The Soviet government’s goal was to eradicate the elitist lifestyle practiced by groups of people in Imperial Russia. This desire affected millions of people all over the vast Soviet Union. For example, spacious apartments in Moscow and St. Petersburg were transformed into communal apartments (known as kommunalki) to optimize housing: owners had only one room for their family and belongings, having to share the rest with strangers and their families.

Manifestations of luxury were loathed and harshly criticized by fellow communists, even if they secretly wished the same benefits. “We were taught that comfort was akin to philistinism,” said a woman who grew up in the USSR. 

Click here to read more about the Soviet asceticism and living in communal apartments. 

Soviet dreams

Even though the official ideology encouraged asceticism, many Soviet citizens craved luxurious material goods that were scarce.

Those living in communal apartments dreamed of moving into their own apartments that they would not need to share with others. This particular problem was partially resolved when Nikita Khrushchev launched the mass construction of affordable houses, later known as ‘khrushchyovkas’.

Yet, many material benefits remained scarce and unattainable for most citizens of the USSR. Cars, vacation vouchers, trips abroad, and scarce foreign goods were objects of intense desire of ordinary Soviet people.

Click here for a list of 5 things Soviet citizens dreamed of having.

The Soviet diet

“Our food is shchi (cabbage soup) and porridge,” was a common proverb used in the USSR to describe the simplicity of the Soviet cuisine and peoples’ gastronomic preferences. Many people remember shortages of food products and long lines to virtually every scarce product that came as a result.

Those who had an opportunity to travel to Moscow usually brought back rare products to their hometowns, where it was impossible to procure those, giving birth to a phenomenon people humorously referred to as “sausage trains”.

Click here to find out what ordinary Soviet people ate.

Soviet frugality and other habits

Since Soviet people were used to the deficit, they never threw anything away, transforming their balconies and garages to permanent warehouses. Discarding stuff was considered wasteful. 

Some unique, rare, or otherwise valuable objects were often not even utilized, but saved for a brighter future. Sets of china and porcelain or suits and dresses were usually collecting dust in wardrobes until they came out of fashion and were put together with the remaining stuff that was not discarded in time.

Click here to read about 6 habits from the Soviet Union that Russians can’t shake.

Soviet resourcefulness

Since the Soviet government banned or failed to procure numerous goods that were widely desired by the Soviet people, the latter had to take the matter into their own hands.

Virtually every Soviet family had technology and knowledge to make carbonated soda water at home, while the most advanced inventors transformed obsolete X-ray images into something akin to vinyl records to listen to pirated Western music on.

Click here for 10 things you can only understand if you lived in the USSR. 

The Soviet underworld

Although foreign-made goods were highly desired in the USSR and there was no direct law forbidding ownership of them, it was illegal to sell and/or buy them. As a result, some Soviet citizens turned into fartsovka or fartsa, a term for those using an illegal process to obtain and resell foreign-made goods in the USSR. 

Many young and ambitious daredevils chased foreign tourists and talked them into exchanging jeans, chewing gum, bags, cigarettes, and virtually anything else they had in exchange for some Soviet goods of questionable value. They later would resell those foreign-made goods to fellow Soviet citizens at a premium. While this was a criminally punishable activity in the USSR, the fartsa movement quickly grew into a larger cultural phenomenon. 

Click here to read about the secret world of Soviet the “fartsa”.

Did you like the article? Then click here to learn what was the best and the worst about the USSR.

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Annales. histoire, sciences sociales 2013/2 68 th year, everyday life under communism: practices and objects.

• By Larissa Zakharova ,
• This introduction was translated from the French by Michael C. Behrent

Pages 305 to 314

Journal article

• [*] I would like to thank Antonela Capelle-Pogăcean, Grégory Dufaud, and Nadège Ragaru for their comments and suggestions.
• [1] Frederic J. Fleron and Erik P. Hoffmann, eds., Post-Communist Studies and Political Science: Methodology and Empirical Theory in Sovietology (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993).
• [2] Dieter Cassel and Ulrich Cichy, “The Shadow Economy and Economic Policy in East and West,” in The Unofficial Economy: Consequences and Perspectives in Different Economic Systems , eds. Sergio Alessandrini and Bruno Dallago (Brookfield: Gower, 1987), 127-46; István R. Gábor, “The Second (Secondary) Economy,” Acta Oeconomica 22, nos. 3-4 (1979): 291-311; Gregory Grossman, “The ‘Second Economy’ of the USSR,” Problems of Communism 26, no. 5 (1977): 25-40; Grossman, “The Second Economy in the USSR,” in The Underground Economy in the United States and Abroad , ed. Vito Tanzi (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1982), 245-69; Christopher M. Hann, Tázlár: A Village in Hungary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Hann, A Village Without Solidarity: Polish Peasants in Years of Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Aron Katsenelinboigen, “Coloured Markets in the Soviet Union,” Soviet Studies 29, no. 1 (1977): 62-85; János Kenedi, Do It Yourself: Hungary’s Hidden Economy (London: Pluto Press, 1982); Gail Kligman, The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics, and Popular Culture in Transylvania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Maria Łoś, The Second Economy in Marxist States (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1990); Patrick Michel, La société retrouvée. Politique et religion dans l’Europe soviétisée (Paris: Fayard, 1988); Steven L. Sampson, “The Informal Sector in Eastern Europe,” Telos 66 (1985-1986): 44-66; Sampson, “The Second Economy of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,” The Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Sciences 493, no. 1 (1987): 120-36; David Stark, “Bending the Bars of the Iron Cage: Bureaucratization and Informalization in Capitalism and Socialism,” Sociological Forum 4, no. 4 (1989): 637-64; Katherine Verdery, Transylvanian Villagers: Three Centuries of Political, Economic, and Ethnic Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Janine R. Wedel, The Private Poland: An Anthropologist’s Look at Everyday Life (New York: Facts on File, 1986).
• [3] Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien , vol. 1, Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1990); Alf Lüdtke, ed., Histoire du quotidien (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1994); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Anne E. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000); Jukka Gronow, Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917-1953 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Juliane Fürst, ed., Late Stalinist Russia: Society Between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London: Routledge, 2006); and Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
• [4] Sandrine Kott, Le communisme au quotidien. Les entreprises d’État dans la société est-allemande (Paris: Belin, 2001);Michel Christian and Emmanuel Droit, “Écrire l’histoire du communisme. L’histoire sociale de la RDA et de la Pologne communiste en Allemagne, en Pologne et en France,” Genèses 61, no. 4 (2005): 118-33; Vincent Dubois et al., eds., “Jeux bureaucratiques en régime communiste,” special issue, Sociétés contemporaines 57, no. 1 (2005); and Jean-Paul Depretto, “Pour une histoire sociale de la dictature soviétique,” Le Mouvement social 196, no. 3 (2001): 3-19.
• [5] Nataliia L. Pushkareva, “Istoriia povsednevnosti: predmet i metody,” in Sotsial’naia istoriia. Ezhegodnik 2007 (Moscow: Rosspèn , 2008), 9-54.
• [6] For example, see Ivan Elenkov and Daniela Koleva, Detstvoto pri sotsializma: politicheski, institutsionalni i biografitchni perspektivi (Sofia: Riva, 2010).
• [7] Elena Osokina, Za fasadom “stalinskogo izobiliia.” Raspredelenie i rynok v snabzhenii naselelniia v gody industrializatsii, 1927-1941 (Moscow: Rosspèn , 1998); Elena Zubkova, Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo: politika i povsednevnost’, 1945-1953 gg. (Moscow: Rosspèn , 1999); Sergei Zhuravlev, “Malen’kie liudi” i “bol’shaia istoriia”: Inostrantsy moskovskogo Elektrozavoda v sovetskom obshchestve 1920-kh – 1930-kh gg . (Moscow: Rosspèn , 2000); and Igor Narsky, Zhizn’ v katastrofe: Budni naseleniia Urala v 1917-1922 gg. (Moscow: Rosspèn , 2001).
• [8] On the latter issue, see Gronow, Caviar with Champagne .
• [9] The most notable works representing the latter approach include: Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); and David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity (1917-1941) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). On this historiographical debate, see Michael David-Fox, “Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism: On Recent Debates in Russian and Soviet History,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 54, no. 4 (2006): 535-55.
• [10] David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, eds., Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Crowley and Reid, eds., Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (Oxford: Berg, 2002); Crowley and Reid, eds., Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010); Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Eleonory Gilburd and Larissa Zakharova, eds., “Repenser le Dégel: versions du socialisme, influences internationales et société soviétique,” special issue, Cahiers du monde russe 47, nos. 1-2 (2006); Polly Jones, ed., The Dilemmas of De-Stalinisation: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era (London: Routledge, 2006); Nadège Ragaru and Antonela Capelle-Pogăcean, eds., Vie quotidienne et pouvoir sous le communisme. Consommer à l’Est (Paris: Karthala, 2010); Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960-1985 (Baltimore and Washington: The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010); Larissa Zakharova, S’habiller à la soviétique. La mode et le Dégel en URSS (Paris: Cnrs Éditions, 2011); and Anne E. Gorsuch, All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
• [11] For an overview of new approaches, see Alain Blum et al., eds., “L’Union soviétique et la Seconde Guerre mondiale,” special issue, Cahiers du monde russe 52, nos. 2-3 (2011); Masha Cerovic et al., eds., “Sortie de guerre. L’URSS au lendemain de la Grande Guerre patriotique,” special issue, Cahiers du monde russe 49, nos. 2-3 (2008); and Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).
• [12] Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Siegelbaum, The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); and Olga Gurova, Sovetskoe nizhnee bel’e: mezhdu ideologiei i povsednevnost’iu (Moscow: Nlo , 2008).
• [13] For an overview of this approach, see Bernard Conein et al., eds., “Les objets dans l’action. De la maison au laboratoire,” special issue, Raisons pratiques 4 (1993), and particularly Michel de Fornel, “Faire parler les objets. Perception, manipulation et qualification des objets dans l’enquête policière,” ibid., 241-66. This article draws on James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). See also: Jean-Pierre Warnier, Construire la culture matérielle. L’homme qui pensait avec ses doigts (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999); Marie-Pierre Julien and Céline Rosselin, La culture matérielle (Paris: La Découverte, 2005).
• [14] Larissa Zakharova, “Le 26-28 Kamennoostrovski, les tribulations d’un immeuble en révolution,” in Saint-Pétersbourg. Histoire, promenades, anthologie et dictionnaire , ed. Lorraine de Meaux (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2003), 473-505; Zakharova, “Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev dlia diktatury proletariata,” Rodina 8 (2000): 57-61.
• [15] Mark Edele, “Strange Young Men in Stalin’s Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945-1953,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 50, no. 1 (2002): 37-61.
• [16] Véronique Garros et al., eds., Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New York: The New Press, 1995); Brigitte Studer et al., eds., Parler de soi sous Staline. La construction identitaire dans le communisme des années 1930 (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2002); Igal Halfin, ed., Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identity (London: Routledge, 2002); and Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
• [17] For example, see Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2007).
• [18] On this kind of “contract” between the Stalinist regime and the Soviet middle classes, see Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middle Class Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
• [19] Susan E. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (2002): 211-52; Reid, “Who Will Beat Whom? Soviet Popular Reception of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 9, no. 4 (2008): 855-904.

1 Why should we consider the everyday life of ordinary citizens in their countless struggles to obtain basic consumer goods if the priorities of their leaders lay elsewhere? For years, specialists of the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies neglected the history of everyday life and, like the so-called “totalitarian” school, focused on political history, seeking to grasp how power was wielded over a society that was considered immobile and subject to the state’s authority. Furthermore, studies on the eastern part of Europe were dominated by political scientists who were interested in the geopolitics of the Cold War. The way the field was structured meant that little attention was paid to sociological and anthropological perspectives that sought to understand social interaction.  [1]

2 In the 1970s, pioneering work on everyday life under Communism was undertaken in the field of social history, the rapid expansion of which was tied to a growing focus on revisionism. Moshe Lewin at the University of Pennsylvania and Sheila Fitzpatrick at the University of Chicago were among the first to initiate this shift in Soviet studies by examining history “from below.” Meanwhile, through studies of the informal economy and identity construction, anthropologists and sociologists working on Central and Eastern Europe demonstrated the importance of favor trading and resourcefulness to the way Communist regimes functioned.  [2] The opening of the Soviet archives in the early 1990s, along with easier access to Eastern Europe and thus to testimonials and memories, uncovered sources that confirmed earlier hypotheses: citizens of the Eastern Bloc were not the “blind puppets” or “helpless victims” of dictatorial regimes; rather, they developed a whole host of tactics and ruses in their daily lives that allowed them to either accommodate or resist the regime, to either help shape its norms or circumvent them altogether.

3 From a quantitative perspective, the historiography of the 1990s was largely dominated by work written in English and German on the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic. Historians of the everyday life of these countries used the work of Michel de Certeau and Alf Lüdtke as their theoretical and conceptual framework.  [3] The appeal of Lüdtke’s project lay primarily in its micro-approach, with its attention to the concerns of individuals and their relationship to power. It was important to study and understand how ordinary citizens participated in the implementation and preservation of dictatorial regimes. Individual experiences, grasped in their diversity, made it possible to understand the many possibilities determined by the available resources within particular social structures. As for the historiography in French, it was marked by the pioneering work of Sandrine Kott on everyday life in the GDR, which drew on Marcel Mauss’s notion of the gift and the counter-gift as a means of understanding the mechanisms that shaped East German society.  [4]

4 Meanwhile, in Russia, the first work done on everyday life during the Soviet period was influenced by Fernand Braudel’s notion of “material civilization,” as popularized by Aron Gurevich and Iurii Bessmertnyi, Russians specializing in Western countries.  [5] In their view, this notion made it possible to conceptualize the relationships between political, religious, social, and economic institutions in addition to lifestyles, “mentalities,” and daily practices. The structures of everyday life were thus understood as ordinary practices determined by people’s material environment and living conditions (housing, food, clothing, etc.) on the one hand and, on the other hand, by values, fears, hopes, and so on. What mattered was grasping the “spirit of the age,” which meant that the individual was lost in the crowd.

5 This dual appropriation of Braudel’s approach —first by Russian specialists of Western history, then by Russian historians of the Soviet Union who discovered Braudel through their colleagues’ work —resulted in a static, descriptive, and largely unproblematized history of ways of life that was unconnected to the major events of twentieth-century history. This history, which was similar to the ethnography of lifestyles that Russians call kraevedenie and tends to be anecdotal and limited to enumerating routine and repetitive acts, met with considerable popular success. It detailed what the Soviets ate and wore, where they lived, and what they did with their time. These books, which flooded the market, used the word “everyday” in their titles and discredited this field of research for many years. At the same time, in Eastern Europe and particularly Bulgaria, the new historiography of everyday life drew heavily on the collection and publication of autobiographies, memoirs, and private archives, making it possible to consider the past from a new perspective.  [6]

6 The gradual arrival in Russia and Eastern and Central Europe of works by Western specialists of the Soviet Union (including translations) and the training of Eastern Europeans in the West led these various approaches to converge. The work of Elena Osokina, Elena Zubkova, Igor Narsky, and Sergei Zhuravlev suggested an approach that viewed everyday life as directly related to the economic and political activity of the state and endorsed the study of the “production and reproduction of real life” in all its dynamism and upheaval.  [7] Within this perspective, which suggests the influence of Lüdtke’s project, individuals are simultaneously objects and subjects: as the targets of political decisions, they react to these measures by actively adapting to new situations, inventing tactics to avoid the political forces imposing themselves from above. This research endeavors to avoid presenting Soviets as the “unwitting” spectators of historical events. Historical change and continuity are examined in relation to individual practices. In other words, this approach to the history of everyday life is written from both the “top” and the “bottom,” for it is in the interaction between political decisions and the responses of ordinary citizens that daily life appears in all its complexity as a constantly evolving phenomenon. This kind of history seeks to emphasize the forms through which the Soviets sought to appropriate the socio-economic and political framework of their daily lives and, in so doing, constantly transformed it.

7 As the 1990s progressed, the Stalinist period and the first half of the twentieth century in general increasingly retained the attention of scholars interested in the Soviet Union. Everyday Soviet life was seen as a history of repression, rationing, privation, famine, “survival strategies,” control, and social stratification. It was intimately tied to the campaign for Soviet culturedness ( kul’turnost’ ), meaning the inculcation of proper manners and taste, which began in the second half of the 1930s. In these years, the regime recognized the legitimacy of consumption, notably through slogans proclaiming that life “became better and gayer” with the introduction of luxury consumer goods (Soviet champagne, caviar, chocolate, perfume, etc.), which were nonetheless accessible only to groups that the regime considered privileged.  [8]

8 A historiographical split then occurred within the American revisionist school, pitting “neo-traditionalists” against “modernists.” The former group, primarily inspired by the work of Fitzpatrick, emphasized the persistence of tsarist structures in Soviet society: petitions, denunciations, patron-client relationships, blat (supposedly “useful” personal connections, allowing for the exchange of goods and services), the assignation of social status, and the mystification of power. The “modernists” sought to show that Communist Bloc countries had experienced a form of modernity comparable to Western societies. Planning, social protection, expert participation in politics, surveillance, and both individual and collective discipline were presented as typical characteristics of the modernization process.  [9]

9 The 2000s were marked by an increase in studies devoted to Communist Europe and a shift in historical interest toward the post-Stalinist thaw and the Brezhnev era, both of which benefited from the contributions of transnational history. Transnational history brought an end to the debate between “neo-traditionalists” and “modernists,” since by studying the connections and intersections between different countries, it was easier to discern their similarities and differences. Soviet society’s timid opening to the external world in the wake of Nikita Khrushchev’s policy of “peaceful coexistence” encouraged scholars to consider the transfer and circulation of ideas, actors, goods, and practices within the Communist Bloc and between Eastern and Western countries. Reforms aimed at improving the Soviet people’s material conditions in addition to competition with the West initiated new forms of consumption and leisure, which made it necessary to continually redefine and find new descriptions for the meaning of “Socialist” as opposed to “Capitalist.”  [10] Recent research on World War II has also looked at the impact of the circulation of foreign goods on social dynamics, wartime experiences in occupied territories, and the home front, as well as individual experience.  [11] A twofold movement has thus been at work, one that seeks to go beyond both the East-West divide and the split between the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies. In this way, new historiographical trends have attempted to reconfigure the space in which the past is conceived. In the wake of the European Union’s enlargement, the Communist past of the people’s democracies is increasingly integrated into a common European past and considered as one phase in their shared history. These developments mean that it is no longer possible to think in terms of a “bloc,” encouraging rather a more nuanced analysis and increased attention to the variety of experiences of everyday life.

10 Yet the majority of works discussed above were primarily interested in practices that constituted social relations, power relations, and the daily lives of those who inhabited Communist countries. Only very rarely were objects considered to play a full-fledged role in everyday life.  [12] Thus, this special issue of the Annales is situated halfway between the study of practices, the relevance of which is well established for the history of daily life, and the more recent study of objects. It seeks to establish new perspectives by emphasizing the mediating role of objects in everyday social interactions. They can then be viewed, in their materiality, as the technical stakes of social life: they elicit actions, while consumer practices constantly reconfigure and modify their initial purposes in relation to new circumstances and occasions for interaction.  [13] Individuals appropriate objects, the value and social prestige of which are constantly redefined. Objects also establish hierarchies between individuals. They are like magnifying glasses that allow us to see moments, sensibilities, and changing social configurations on a daily basis.

11 Indeed, the distribution of objects as rewards was central to the social policies of Communist countries. Following the October Revolution, the distribution of noble and bourgeois property among workers and Bolshevik leaders at all levels, which was part of an urban campaign for housing redistribution, lent concrete meaning to the reversal of social hierarchies and confirmed the right of the neediest citizens to oppress those who were once the most privileged within the latter’s own apartments, which were now transformed into communal residences.  [14] The appropriation of objects originating from “capitalist” countries modified social relations and resulted in new forms of interaction. The authorities established a hierarchy of consumer goods in which objects produced abroad were considered more valuable than local goods. This hierarchy found concrete expression in the creation of depots for rare goods, which were reserved for the elite, called “special distributors.” In this way, objects participated in the stratification of society, playing the role of symbolic markers. Their accumulation, however, could also be used as the basis for an accusation of corruption or betrayal of Communism’s moral beliefs against bureaucrats who fell from grace. Though the regime promised material abundance, the limits and characteristics of luxury remained fluid and transient, which explains society’s contradictory attitudes toward consumption.

12 The articles by Elena Zubkova and Nathalie Moine examine practices and forms of destitution and enrichment in daily life. Soviet beggars found themselves in an ambivalent situation. The authorities wanted to exclude them from the future Communist society, but, incapable of solving the begging problem, they simply concealed it from the 1930s until the mid-1950s so as not to contradict the USSR’s image as a prosperous state —even as they made it impossible to devise any form of welfare policy towards them. The launch of a program aimed at solving the begging problem in the second half of the 1950s led to a debate in the press, which exposed the contradictions between the official discourse and social reality. Alongside expressions of indignation and compassion for war heroes, who were extolled in propaganda even as they were often reduced to poverty, there emerged the stereotype of the “professional” beggar who grows rich by living a parasitic life and refusing to contribute to building a “shining future” through conscientious labor. While, for some, World War II meant disability and therefore extreme poverty, others profited from it by acquiring Western goods. As Moine demonstrates, growing rich by pillaging the defeated enemy met with no moral condemnation. On the contrary, the authorities encouraged Soviets in occupied territories to seize consumer goods and send them to the USSR. Yet this opened a breach in the world of Soviet consumption, and the authorities found themselves confronted with the unforeseen economic, social, and cultural consequences of an influx of foreign goods: the black market, distribution of goods at the local level through patron-client relationships without central oversight, embezzlement, social tension, the exposure and intensification of social hierarchies, and, finally, youth fashion, which was quickly stigmatized as stiliagi (from the Russian word stil , or “style”).  [15]

13 How objects are used is inseparable from culture, insofar as it betrays consumers’ tastes and preferences, which are hierarchical —even if Communist states were officially very concerned with offering all citizens access to culture. Cultural heritage proved problematic to the extent that the regime felt compelled to distinguish progressive revolutionary culture from decadent bourgeois culture. In Bulgaria, the “Sovietization” of culture studied by Antonela Capelle-Pogăcean and Nadège Ragaru expressed a shift in repertory (Soviet and national works replaced “Nazi” or American art), as well as changes in audiences, viewing practices, and bodily postures in cinemas and theaters. Yet such entertainment venues lent themselves poorly to becoming places where codes of self-presentation and “good (Socialist) manners” for viewing plays or movies could be elaborated: bodies ultimately proved resistant to efforts to manage leisure time and cultural activities. Narsky’s essay presents a mirror image of Capelle-Pogăcean and Ragaru’s study. It shows how fragments of prerevolutionary cultural practices survived into the Soviet period and forcefully reemerged in post-Soviet Russia. He studies diary writing, which historiography has often associated with the “disciplining” of individuals by the Stalinist regime specifically encouraging the practice.  [16] Yet by granting particular attention to the objects of these practices —notebooks, photographs, and drawings, which were often slipped inside diaries and memoirs —Narsky demonstrates that, on the contrary, the graduates of tsarist women’s colleges who had become Soviet citizens kept diaries (as did their daughters) that still respected early twentiethcentury styles.

14 Narsky also emphasizes the importance of direct communication within families. This conclusion contradicts the image of the Soviet Union as a society that had been reduced to total silence, even within the most intimate of spaces, due to omnipresent surveillance.  [17] Larissa Zakharova, on the other hand, shows how long-distance communication was not self-evident for Soviets under Stalin, less because of mail censorship or wiretapping than because access was difficult and communication tools and services were unequal. If objects, simply because they are present in one’s surroundings, are capable of eliciting action, they are also resources that can trigger a social dynamic. Conversely, distance from “social” objects can make mobilizing for action more difficult. Thus, workers on the big Stalinist building projects or kolkhoz farmers, who knew that the nearest mailbox was located some ten kilometers from their homes, engaged in very little long-distance communication and tended to live in communities that were closed in upon themselves. The perception of objects —in this instance, communication tools —thus depended on the type of activity with which they were associated, such as communication services and networks. In places where services and networks were better developed, telephones and mailboxes afforded greater opportunities. Moreover, defective services and equipment also offered opportunities for action, notably in the form of complaints demanding that services function properly and that resources be fairly allocated.

15 Similarly, Małgorzata Mazurek addresses the everyday inequalities and the search for justice that were exacerbated by shortages of consumer goods in Socialist Poland. The struggle against the black market was waged in the name of Communist morality and the just distribution of food resources, but this discursive rationalization masked interethnic conflicts and even a degree of anti-Semitism. In practice, the authorities used the Stalinist supply system as their model: rather than allocating goods impartially, they followed a highly hierarchical method of distribution, in which privileges were traded for political loyalty.  [18] The corrupt civil servants who ran the state business —the new “profiteers” —have often been cited as the reason for this discrepancy between egalitarian discourse and actual stratification, as well as for the shortages and supply problems. Yet the imaginary association of salesmen with “thieves” allowed the leadership to deflect conflict and discontent and thus keep them under control —until the 1980s when individualism finally won the battle against the morality of the Socialist welfare state.

16 Consumption and, more generally, the material world thus constituted a true challenge for Communist regimes. The consumerist aspirations of East European citizens prevailed over the ascetic ideal, and the authorities felt compelled to respond to this, particularly during the Cold War, when the quality of everyday life became a stake in the competition between regimes.  [19] While cultivating the myth of material abundance and future equality, the authorities wielded power by distributing goods and resources on the basis of social status. This resulted in tensions and contradictions that undermined the legitimacy of the Communist project: in economies afflicted by chronic shortages, consumer goods assumed great symbolic importance, which differed considerably from their role in market economies.

Cite this article

• ZAKHAROVA Larissa ,
• This introduction was translated from the French by BEHRENT Michael C..
• ZAKHAROVA, Larissa ,
• ZAKHAROVA, L ,
• This introduction was translated from the French by & BEHRENT, M

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The Cold War

Communist russia.

As weeks passed and unrest in Russia worsened, the Bolshevik regime resorted to undemocratic methods to maintain control. Elections for a constituent assembly were held in December 1917 but when they failed to return a Bolshevik majority, Lenin sent in troops to dissolve the assembly after just one day. Facing the possibility of counter-revolution both from tsarists and other socialists, Lenin ordered the formation of a Red Army and a secret police force called the CHEKA . When civil war erupted in Russia in mid-1918, the regime imposed a brutal economic policy. Dubbed ‘war communism’, this policy saw peasants forced to hand over their food supplies at the point of a gun. For three years Russia endured a divisive and bitter civil war between the Bolshevik Red Army and the counter-revolutionary ‘Whites’, a loose confederation of tsarists, democrats and non-Bolshevik socialists. The Russian Civil War , Bolshevik economic policies and a series of severe droughts gave birth to a catastrophic famine that killed between five and ten million Russian peasants. Events in Russia terrified American capitalists, who feared similar outcomes if socialism was allowed to take root in the United States. The US government took a strong stand against the Bolshevik regime. Washington refused to formally recognise the Soviet Union and its government; it would not do so until 1933. The US and other Allied nations also provided military support for White counter-revolutionaries in the Russian Civil War. In July 1918, US president Woodrow Wilson approved the deployment of 13,000 American soldiers – known as the Polar Bear Expedition – to support the Whites. While American troops did not play a major role in the Civil War, they remained in Russia until 1920. This intervention by foreign forces only hardened Bolshevik attitudes to the West. Soviet propaganda, such as the image shown on this page, portrayed the western Allies as greedy capitalists who wanted to defeat socialism and re-enslave Russian workers. In 1921 the Bolsheviks secured victory in the Civil War and the Whites were dispersed or forced into exile. Now politically secure, the Soviet Union began to recover and rebuild after seven years of war.

“Despite the harrowing devastation of the struggle against Adolf Hitler, Soviet society, under Joseph Stalin’s relentless discipline, recovered from the war fairly quickly. But the Soviet system remained rigid, inefficient and unproductive, especially when compared to the surging economies of Western countries… In a February 1946 speech, Stalin announced his harsh and forbidding program for the post-war Soviet Union. He called for sacrifice, superhuman work and rigid conformity. He made clear that the Soviet government would rebuild the country by its own exertions, with minimal help from the West, whose capitalist system Stalin plainly distrusted. Stunned, Soviet citizens had no choice but to settle grimly to the task.” John M. Thompson, historian

While Stalin succeeded at industrialising the Soviet nation and hauling it into the 20th century, his reforms came at an enormous human cost. Stalin’s Russia was not the workers’ paradise once imagined by Soviet propagandists – in fact, for most workers it was an oppressive and authoritarian place, where the needs of the party and state took precedence over the rights of workers. Russia’s peasants fared no better. To improve agricultural productivity, millions of peasants were herded into giant collectivised farms to work for the state. Grain was seized and sold abroad to fund Stalin’s economic programs; this policy triggered another deadly famine in the mid-1930s. Those who refused to work or defied the Stalinist regime were whisked away by one of several secret police forces that operated under Stalin’s reign (the OGPU, NKVD and KGB). Some were liquidated and never seen again; thousands more ended up in remote Siberian labour prisons called gulags, where they were beaten, starved and worked to death.

Atop all this misery, state propaganda maintained a personality cult that hailed Stalin as the saviour of his country. In film, posters and the press, Stalin was depicted as a benevolent leader, the protector of Russian women and children, a defender of the ideological traditions of Marx, Engels and Lenin. The reality was that Stalin called himself a Marxist and a communist but was very little of either. The Soviet leader was a totalitarian despot who had more in common with Hitler, his fellow dictator and arch-rival, than with true Marxists. To capitalists in the West, particularly the United States, Stalinist Russia was a case study of how flawed ideologies like communism created more human suffering than successful reform. Yet while Western nations loathed Stalin’s policies, they feared the industrial, technical and military power these policies had delivered to the Soviet Union. By the late 1930s, the world was pondering the possibility of a war involving two fast-industrialising dictatorships: Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. It would not have to wait long for this war to become a reality.

1. Before 1917, Russia was ruled by an autocratic leader called the tsar. Marxist ideas became popular in Russia in the 1890s and manifested themselves in the Bolshevik movement.

2. In October 1917, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized control of the Russian government. They attempted to transform Russia into a socialist state through sweeping reforms.

3. The new Bolshevik regime was unable to fulfil its promises due to internal opposition, civil war and economic deprivation. It resorted to violent and oppressive methods to maintain control.

4. Stalin became Soviet leader in the mid-1920s and sought to protect the USSR from external aggressors by modernising and industrialising. This progress came at an enormous human cost.

5. The transformations in Russia worried Western capitalists. They despised and feared communism but were also concerned about the Soviet Union’s growing military strength, which paralleled that of Nazi Germany.

Content on this page is © Alpha History 2018. This content may not be republished or distributed without permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use . This page was written by Jennifer Llewellyn, Jim Southey and Steve Thompson. To reference this page, use the following citation: J. Llewellyn et al, “Communist Russia”, Alpha History, accessed [today’s date], https://alphahistory.com/coldwar/communist-russia/.

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• > The Cambridge History of Russia
• > The Soviet Union and the road to communism

Book contents

• Frontmatter
• Introduction
• 1 Reading Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century: how the ‘West’ wrote its history of the USSR
• Part I Russia and the Soviet Union: The Story through Time
• Part II Russia and the Soviet Union: Themes and Trends
• 14 Economic and demographic change: Russia’s age of economic extremes
• 15 Transforming peasants in the twentieth century: dilemmas of Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet development
• 16 Workers and industrialization
• 17 Women and the state
• 18 Non-Russians in the Soviet Union and after
• 19 The western republics: Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Baltics
• 20 Science, technology and modernity
• 21 Culture, 1900–1945
• 22 The politics of culture, 1945–2000
• 23 Comintern and Soviet foreign policy, 1919–1941
• 24 Moscow’s foreign policy, 1945–2000: identities, institutions and interests
• 25 The Soviet Union and the road to communism
• Bibliography

25 - The Soviet Union and the road to communism

from Part II - Russia and the Soviet Union: Themes and Trends

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

The heart of the governing ideology of the Soviet Union was an image of itself as a traveller on the road to communism. This image was embedded in the narrative of class struggle and class mission created by Karl Marx and first embodied in a mass political movement by European Social Democracy. When Russian Social Democrats took power in October 1917, they founded a regime that was unique in its day because of their profound sense that the country had embarked on a journey of radical self-transformation.

Throughout its history, the Soviet Union’s self-definition as a traveller on the road to socialism coloured its political institutions, its economy, its foreign policy and its culture. The inner history of Soviet ideology is thus the story of a metaphor – a history of the changing perceptions of the road to communism. In 1925, Nikolai Bukharin’s book Road to Socialism exuded the confidence of the first generation of Soviet leaders. Sixty years later, the catch-phrase ‘which path leads to the temple?’ reflected the doubts and searching of the perestroika era. Right to the end, Soviet society assumed that there was a path with a temple at the end of it and that society had the duty to travel down that path.

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• The Soviet Union and the road to communism
• By Lars Lih
• Edited by Ronald Grigor Suny
• Book: The Cambridge History of Russia
• Online publication: 28 March 2008
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521811446.027

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The Civil War and War Communism (1918–21)

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One side can start a war, but it takes two to end one. The Bolsheviks found that this principle applied to themselves after October, when they expected to disengage quickly from World War I . Of the three points of their effective slogan—“Peace, land, and bread”—the first proved to be the most difficult to realize. Trotsky, the silver-tongued Bolshevik negotiator, had lectured the Germans and Austrians on Georg Hegel ’s philosophy and other abstruse subjects at Brest-Litovsk. He thought that he had time on his side. He was waiting for news of revolution in Berlin and Vienna. It never came, and the Bolsheviks found themselves at the Germans’ mercy. The issue of peace or war tore the Bolsheviks apart. Lenin favoured peace at any price, believing that it was purely an interim settlement before inevitable revolution. Nikolay Bukharin , a left-wing Bolshevik in the early Soviet period, wanted revolutionary war, while Trotsky wanted neither war nor peace. Trotsky believed the Germans did not have the military muscle to advance, but they did, and eventually the very harsh peace of the Brest-Litovsk treaty was imposed on Russia. The Socialist Revolutionaries left the coalition, and some resorted to terrorism, the target being the Bolshevik leadership. Ukraine slipped under German influence, and the Mensheviks held sway in the Caucasus . Only part of Russia—Moscow, Petrograd , and much of the industrial heartland—was under Bolshevik control. The countryside belonged to the Socialist Revolutionaries. Given the Bolshevik desire to dominate the whole of Russia and the rest of the former tsarist empire, civil war was inevitable.

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The Red Army was formed in February 1918, and Trotsky became its leader. He was to reveal great leadership and military skill, fashioning a rabble into a formidable fighting force. The Reds were opposed by the “ Whites ,” anticommunists led by former imperial officers. There were also the “Greens” and the anarchists, who fought the Reds and were strongest in Ukraine; the anarchists’ most talented leader was Nestor Makhno. The Allies (Britain, the United States , Italy , and a host of other states) intervened on the White side and provided much matériel and finance. The Bolsheviks controlled the industrial heartland of Russia, and their lines of communication were short. Those of the Whites, who were dispersed all the way to the Pacific, were long. The Reds recruited many ex-tsarist officers but also produced many of their own. By mid-1920 the Reds had consolidated their hold on the country .

The feat of winning the Civil War and the organizational methods adopted to do so made a deep impact on Bolshevik thinking. Joseph Stalin, a party leader, talked about the party in terms of an army. There were political fronts, economic struggles, campaigns, and so on. The Bolsheviks were ruthless in their pursuit of victory. The Cheka (a forerunner of the notorious KGB ), or political police, was formed in December 1917 to protect communist power. By the end of the Civil War the Cheka had become a powerful force. Among the targets of the Cheka were Russian nationalists who objected strongly to the bolshevization of Russia. They regarded bolshevism as alien and based on western European and not Russian norms. Lenin was always mindful of “Great Russian” chauvinism , which was one reason he never permitted the formation of a separate Russian Communist Party apart from that of the Soviet Union. Russia, alone of the U.S.S.R.’s 15 republics, did not have its own communist party. It was belatedly founded in 1990.

Lenin did not favour moving toward a socialist economy after October, because the Bolsheviks lacked the necessary economic skills. He preferred state capitalism, with capitalist managers staying in place but supervised by the workforce. Others, like Bukharin, wanted a rapid transition to a socialist economy. The Civil War caused the Bolsheviks to adopt a more severe economic policy known as War Communism , characterized chiefly by the expropriation of private business and industry and the forced requisition of grain and other food products from the peasants. The Bolsheviks subsequently clashed with the labour force , which understood socialism as industrial self-management. Ever-present hunger exacerbated the poor labour relations , and strikes became endemic , especially in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks, however, pressed ahead, using coercion as necessary. The story was the same in the countryside. Food had to be requisitioned in order to feed the cities and the Red Army. The Reds informed the peasants that it was in their best interests to supply food, because if the landlords came back the peasants would lose everything.

Soviet Russia adopted its first constitution in July 1918 and fashioned treaties with other republics such as Ukraine. The latter was vital for the economic viability of Russia, and Bolshevik will was imposed. It was also imposed in the Caucasus, where Georgia , Armenia , and Azerbaijan were tied to Bolshevik Russia by 1921. Many communists regarded Russia as acquiring imperialist ambitions. Indeed, Moscow under the Georgian Joseph Stalin , the commissar for nationalities, regarded imperial Russia’s territory as its natural patrimony. Russia lost control of the Baltic states and Finland , however. Lenin’s nationality policy was based on the assumption that nations would choose to stay in a close relationship with Russia, but this proved not to be the case. Many republics wanted to be independent in order to develop their own brand of national communism. The comrade who imposed Russian dominance was, ironically, Stalin. As commissar for nationalities, he sought to ensure that Moscow rule prevailed.

Forced requisitioning led to peasant revolts, and the Tambov province revolt of 1920 in particular forced Lenin to change his War Communism policy. He and the Bolshevik leadership were willing to slaughter the mutinous sailors of the Kronstadt naval base in March 1921, but they could not survive if the countryside turned against them. They would simply starve to death. A tactical retreat from enforced socialism was deemed necessary, a move that was deeply unpopular with the Bolshevik rank and file. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was inaugurated at the 10th Party Congress in March 1921. A ban on factionalism in the party was also imposed. This ban was needed to prevent local party groups from overturning the decisions of the congress. The key sectors of the economy—heavy industry, communications, and transport—remained in state hands, but light and consumer-goods industries were open to the entrepreneur . The monetary reform of 1923 provided a money tax that brought an end to forced requisitioning. The economy was back to its 1913 level by the mid-1920s, and this permitted a vigorous debate on the future. All Communist Party members agreed that the goal was socialism, and this meant the dominance of the industrial economy. The working class, the natural constituency of the Communist Party, had to grow rapidly. There was also the question of the country’s security. Moscow lived in fear of an attack during the 1920s and concluded a number of peace treaties and nonaggression pacts with neighbouring and other countries.

Soviet Russia gave way to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) in 1922, but this did not mean that Russia gave up its hegemony within the new state. As before, Moscow was the capital, and it dominated the union. Lenin ’s death in January 1924 set off a succession struggle that lasted until the end of the decade. Stalin eventually outwitted Trotsky, Lenin’s natural successor, and various other contenders . Stalin, who had become general secretary of the party in 1922, used the party as a power base. The economic debate was won by those who favoured rapid industrialization and forced collectivization. The NEP engendered not only a flowering of Russian culture but also that of non-Russian and non-Slavic cultures . Russia itself had been an empire with many non-Russian citizens, and the emergence of numerous national elites was a trend of considerable concern to Stalin and his leadership.

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6 Russia and Revolution

• Published: April 2007
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In pursuing their ultimate goal, revolutionaries believed that the end justifies their violent means. However, great revolutions do not often begin deliberately; they result from a confluence of circumstances. A revolution is a process rather than an event, one that develops over a period of years in characteristic phases: the overthrow of the Old Regime, the rise of the moderates, the breakdown of the old institutional fabric, the emotional mobilization and polarization of the population, and the conflict between left-wing extremists and right-wing counterrevolutionaries in their struggle for power. This chapter examines the factors that account for the triumph of revolutionary extremism and the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia. It looks at how the Bolsheviks assimilated the anticapitalist principle, the role of capitalism and anticapitalism in the Russian Revolution, and the Russian Communists' rejection of social revolution. It argues that the Russian Revolution was a struggle not only of cultures but also of classes.

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Communism in Russian History

By george f. kennan.

Russia was for many centuries separated, geographically and politically, from the development of Western civilization and culture, and thus came late into what, for most of Europe, would be called the modern age.1 But the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, witnessing as they did an extensive overcoming of these earlier barriers, permitted a very considerable progress in the modernization of Russian society. By the time the country was overtaken by the First World War, its situation was not entirely discouraging. Industrialization was proceeding at a level only two or three decades behind that of the United States. There was under implementation a program of education reform which, if allowed to continue unimpeded, would have assured total literacy within another two decades. And the first really promising program for the modernization of Russian agriculture (the so-called Stolypin reforms), while by no means yet completed, was proceeding steadily and with good chances for ultimate success.

These achievements, of course, had not been reached without conflicts and setbacks. Nor were they, alone, all that was needed. Still to be overcome as the war interceded were many archaic features in the system of government, among them the absolutism of the crown, the absence of any proper parliamentary institutions and the inordinate powers of the secret police. Still to be overcome, too, was the problem of the non-Russian nationalities within the Russian Empire. This empire, like other multinational and multilingual political constellations, was rapidly becoming an anachronism; the maintenance of it was beginning to come under considerable pressure.

But none of these problems required a bloody revolution for their solution. The removal of the autocracy was, after all, destined to be achieved relatively bloodlessly, and the foundations of a proper parliamentary system laid, in the first months of 1917. And there was no reason to despair of the possibility that Russia, if allowed to develop without war or violent revolution, might still encompass a successful and reasonably peaceful advance into the modern age. It was, however, just this situation, and just these expectations, that were to be shattered by the events of the final months in that fateful year of 1917.

The Russian oppositional movement of the last half of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth had always included extreme radical factions that did not want reform to proceed gradually, peacefully and successfully. They wanted nothing less than the immediate and total destruction of tsarist power and of the social order in which it operated. The fact that their own ideas of what might follow upon that destruction were vague, unformed and largely utopian was not allowed to moderate the violence of their intentions. Participating, though in quite different ways, in both of the major revolutionary parties, the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats (out of whom the Communists emerged), these factions found themselves, in their bitter opposition to gradual reform, in a state of limited and involuntary alliance with the most radical reactionary circles at the conservative end of the political spectrum. After all, these latter also did not want to see change proceed gradually and peacefully, for they did not want it to occur at all. So it was not by accident that the ideas and aims of both extremist elements were to find a common expression, as Robert C. Tucker has so persuasively pointed out in his recent work, in the Stalin of the future.

Up to the outbreak of war, to 1917 in fact, the leftist extremists had met with very limited success. In the final prewar years they had actually been losing political position and support. What changed all this, and gave them opportunities few of them had ever expected, was Russia's involvement in the war, and particularly the ill-considered attempt by the provisional government to continue the war effort into the summer of 1917, in the face of the epochal internal political crisis already brought about by the recent fall of the monarchy.

It had been a folly, of course, for Russia to involve itself a decade earlier in 1904-05 in the war against Japan. This alone had brought the country to the very brink of revolution. It was a greater folly (and this might have been clear, one would think, to Russian statesmen at the time) to involve Russia in the far larger strains of participation in a great European war. The war was, of course, not the only cause of the breakdown of the tsarist system in 1917; it may be fairly said, however, that without Russia's involvement in the war that breakdown would not have come when it did or taken the forms that it did, and that anything like a seizure of power by the Bolshevist faction would have been improbable in the extreme. Seen in this way, the establishment of communist power in Russia in November 1917 has to be regarded as only one part of the immense tragedy that World War I spelled for most of European civilization. But the consequences of the Russian Revolution were destined long to outlive the other immediate effects of the war and to complicate the world situation over most of the remainder of the century.

By mid-1917 in any case, the die was cast for Russia. The stresses of the first two and a half years of war, together with those of the earlier months of that year-the exhaustion of army and society, the sudden collapse of the tsarist police force, and the program of land reform that lent itself so easily to demagogic exploitation-made possible the successful seizure of power, first in the major cities, then throughout the country, by Lenin and his associates. Thus the straitjacket of communist dictatorship-the restraint under which it was destined to writhe throughout the life span not only of the generation then alive but of its children and grandchildren as well-was fastened upon an unprepared and bewildered Russian society.

One hesitates to summarize what this development was to mean for Russia. No summary could be other than inadequate. But the effort must be made, for without it the communist epoch now coming to an end cannot be seen in historical perspective.

Let us start with what happened to most of the educated and culturally important elements of the Russian society of that time. The Leninist regime, in the initial years of Soviet power, succeeded in physically destroying or driving out of the country the greater part-most of an entire generation, in fact-of what would have been called, in the Marxist vocabulary of that day, the "bourgeois" intelligentsia. Stalin later completed the process by doing the same to most of the Marxist intelligentsia that remained. Thus Lenin and Stalin contrived, between the two of them, to eliminate a very large portion of the rather formidable cultural community that had come into being in the final decades of tsardom. And with this loss there went, more important still, the loss of much of the very cultural continuity of which this generation was an indispensable part. It would never thereafter be possible to reunite fully the two frayed ends of this great chain of national development, now so brutally severed.

Not content with these heavy blows to the country's intellectual and cultural substance, Stalin, as soon as his power was consolidated in 1928, turned to the peasantry and proceeded to inflict upon this great portion of the population (some 80 percent at that time) an even more terrible injury. In the Stolypin reforms, emphasis had wisely been placed on the support and encouragement of the most competent and successful segment of the farming population. Stalin, in his sweeping campaign of collectivization launched in 1929, did exactly the opposite. He set out to eliminate precisely this element (now referred to by the pejorative Russian term of "kulaks"), to eliminate it by ruthless confiscation of what little property most of its members possessed, by deportation of a high proportion of those and other peasant families, and by the punishment-in many cases the execution-of those who resisted.

The results were simply calamitous. They included a major famine in certain key agricultural regions of the country and the loss, within a short time, of some two-thirds of the country's livestock. Through these cruel and ill-considered measures, a blow was dealt to Russian agriculture that set it back by decades, and from which it has not fully recovered to the present day.

The collectivization campaign roughly coincided in time with the First Five Year Plan, the announcement of which in 1928-29 made so deep and so favorable an impression upon many well-meaning people in the West. Actually, the plan as announced, and later the claimed statistics on its completion, masked a ruthless and reckless program of military industrialization. This program did indeed provide certain basic components of a great military industry, but did so in an extremely hasty and wasteful manner, at vast expense in human deprivation and suffering, and with reckless abuse of the natural environment. Despite limited improvements in later years, these same features were destined to mark much of Soviet industrialization down through the ensuing decades.

It was on the heels of these early Stalinist efforts at revolutionizing the Soviet economy that there was then unleashed upon Soviet society that terrible and almost incomprehensible series of events known historically as "the purges." Beginning with an obvious effort on Stalin's part to remove from office and destroy all those remnants from the Lenin leadership in whom he suspected even the slightest traces of resistance to his personal rule, these initial efforts, savage enough in themselves, soon grew into a massive wave of reprisals against a great portion of those who at that time were taking any part in the governing of the country or who enjoyed any prominence as members of the cultural intelligentsia. So terrible were these measures, so arbitrary, indiscriminate and unpredictable was their application, that they culminated, in the years 1937 and 1938, in a deliberately induced mass frenzy of denunciation-a frenzy overcoming millions of innocent but frightened people who had been encouraged to see in the reckless denunciation of others, even others they knew to be as guiltless as themselves, the only possible assurance of their own immunity to arrest and punishment. In the course of this hysteria, friend was set against friend, neighbor against neighbor, colleague against colleague, brother against brother, and child against parent, until most of Soviet society was reduced to a quivering mass of terror and panic. In this way a very considerable proportion of the administrative and cultural elite of the Soviet Union-tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of them-were induced to destroy each other for the edification, perhaps even the enjoyment, of a single leader, and this, while lending themselves to the most extravagant demonstrations of admiration for and devotion to this same man. One searches the annals of modern civilization in vain for anything approaching, in cynicism if not in heartlessness, this appalling spectacle.

So preposterous, so bizarre, so monstrously destructive, and so lacking in any conceivable necessity or advantage to anyone at all were these measures that it is impossible to imagine any rational explanation for them, even from the standpoint of the most fearful, jealous and suspicious of tyrants. What, in these circumstances, explained Stalin's motives in launching and directing them? And how was it possible that an entire society could submit passively to so dreadful an abuse of its social intactness and moral integrity? These are crucial questions.2

Suffice it to say that when Stalin finally perceived that things had gone too far, when he realized that even his own interests were being endangered and finally began to take measures to dampen the terror and the slaughter, several million people were already either languishing or dying in the labor camps, and a further number, sometimes estimated in the neighborhood of a million, had been executed or had died of mistreatment. To which tragic count must be added those further millions who had themselves escaped persecution but who cared about the immediate victims-their parents, lovers, children or friends, and for whom much of the meaning of life went out with the knowledge, or the suspicion, of the sufferings of the latter. Bereavement, in short, had taken its toll on enthusiasm for life. Fear and uncertainty had shattered nerves, hopes and inner security.

It was, then, on a shaken, badly depleted, socially and spiritually weakened Russian people that there fell, in the first years of the 1940s, the even greater strains of the Second World War. Russia, to be sure, did not become formally involved in that war as such until June 1941. But the interval had been in part taken up with the war with Finland, which alone had caused some hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties. And what was then to follow, after the German attack, was horror on a scale that put into shade all the sufferings of the previous decades: the sweeping destruction of physical installations-dwellings, other buildings, railways, everything-in great parts of European Russia, and a loss of life the exact amount of which is not easy to determine but which must have run to close to thirty million souls. It is virtually impossible to envisage, behind these bare words and figures, the enormity of the suffering involved.

It will of course be observed that, if the tragedies of the 1920s and 1930s were brought to Russia by its own communist regime, the same cannot be said of those of the 1940s. These were the doing of Hitler; Stalin had actually gone to great lengths to appease Hitler with a view to diverting the attack; it was not his fault that he did not succeed.

There is much truth in this statement. Nothing can diminish Hitler's responsibility for bringing on what the Soviets have subsequently referred to (ignoring most of the other theaters of operation in World War II) as the Great Patriotic War. But it was not the whole truth. Stalin himself heightened in many ways the horrors of the struggle: by the cynicism of his deal with Hitler in 1939; by the subsequent treatment of Russians who had become prisoners of war in Germany; by his similar treatment of those civilians who had found themselves on territory that fell under German control; by the brutal deportation of entire subordinate nationalities suspected of harboring sympathies for the German invader; by the excesses of his own police in the occupied areas, of which even the appalling Katyn massacre of Polish officers was only a small part; and by the liberties allowed to his own soldiery as they made their entry into Europe. More important still, one will never know what might have been the collaboration in the prewar years between Russia and the Western powers in the confrontation with Hitler, had the regime with which those powers were faced on the Russian side been a normal, friendly and open one. Instead, to many in Europe, the Soviet state looked little if any more reliable and reassuring as a partner than did the Nazi regime. Let us, however, leave such speculations aside and proceed with our recitation of the miseries that overtook the Russian people in these seven decades of communist power.

It was an even more weary, even more decimated and ravaged Russian people that survived the trials and sacrifices of the war. And their miseries, as it turned out, were not yet at an end.

War against a hated enemy had aroused elementary nationalistic feelings among the Russian people. So long as hostilities were in progress, Stalin had wisely (if presumably cynically) associated himself with those feelings. The people and regime had thus, as it seemed, been brought together in the common effort of resistance to the Nazi invasion. And this had produced new expectations. Not unnaturally, there was hope in all quarters, as the war neared its end, that victory would be followed by a change in the habits and methods of the regime-a change that would make possible something resembling a normal relationship between ruler and ruled, and would open up new possibilities for self-expression, cultural and political, on the part of a people long deprived of any at all.

But Stalin soon made it clear that this was not to be. Government would continue as it had before. There would be no concessions to the Soviet consumer; there would only be more of the same ruthless effort of military industrialization, the same suppression of living standards, the same familiar yoke of secret police control. Seldom, surely, has a more bitter disillusionment been brought to an entire people than this callous indifference on Stalin's part to the needs of a sorely tried population just emerging from the sufferings of a great and terrible war.

This, however, was the way things were to be. And the final years of Stalin's life, from 1945 to 1953, wore their way much as the final prewar years had done: the same tired litanies of the propaganda machine; the same secrecy and mystification about the doings of the Kremlin; the same material discomforts; and the same exactions of a police regime the ferocity of which seemed, if anything, to be heightened as an aging Stalin became increasingly aware of his dependence upon it for his personal security and for the preservation of his own power.

Even Stalin's death, in 1953, brought about no sudden or drastic change in the situation. Stalinism, as a governing system, was by now far too deeply planted in Russian life to be removed or basically changed in any short space of time. There was no organized alternative to it, and no organized opposition. It took four more years before Khrushchev and his associates succeeded in removing from power even those in the leadership who had been most closely associated with Stalin in the worst excesses of his rule and who would have preferred to carry on in much the same manner.

But Khrushchev himself did not last very long thereafter, and in the ensuing years, down to the mid-1980s, the country was ruled by a number of mediocre men (Yuri Andropov, Mikhail Gorbachev's patron, was an exception). While they had no taste for the pathological excesses of Stalinist rule (which, as they correctly saw, had endangered everyone, themselves included), these men were heirs to the system that had made these excesses possible, and they saw no reason to change it. It represented, in their eyes, the only conceivable legitimation of their power and the only apparent assurance of its continuation. It was all they had and all they knew. The sort of systemic changes Gorbachev would eventually endeavor to bring about would have surpassed the reaches of their imaginations. And after all, from their standpoint, the system appeared to work.

But it did not, of course, work very well. The Soviet system involved the continuing necessity of suppressing a restless younger intelligentsia, increasingly open to the influences of the outside world in an age of electronic communication, and increasingly resentful of the remaining limitations on its ability to travel and to express itself. Beyond that, it rested upon an economy that, just at the time when the remainder of the industrialized world was recovering from the war and moving into the economic revolution of the computer age, was continuing to live in many respects in the conceptual and technological world of the nineteenth century, and was consequently becoming, on the international scene, increasingly uncompetitive.

Finally, the ideology as inherited from Lenin was no longer really there to support this system. It remained as a lifeless orthodoxy, and Soviet leaders would continue on all ceremonial occasions to take recourse to its rituals and vocabulary. But it had been killed in the hearts of the people: killed by the great abuses of earlier decades, killed by the circumstances of the great war for which Marxist doctrine offered no explanations, killed by the great disillusionment that followed that war.

It began to become evident, in short, in those years of the 1970s and early 1980s that time was running out on all that was left of the great structure of power Lenin and Stalin had created. Still able to command a feigned and reluctant obedience, it had lost all capacity to inspire and was no longer able to confront creatively the challenge of its own future. The first leader to perceive this, to read its implications and to give a dying system the coup de grace it deserved, was Gorbachev.

One cannot end this review of the blows suffered by Russian society at the hands of its own rulers over the decades of communist power without being aware of the danger of a certain Manichaean extremism in the judging of those rulers and of those who tried faithfully to follow them. Not all that went by the name of communism in Russia was bad; nor were all of those who believed in it. And to recognize the tragic consequences of its exercise of power is not to question the intellectual seriousness or the legitimacy or the idealism of the world socialist movement out of which, initially, communism arose. One's heart can go out, in fact, to those many well-meaning people in Russia and elsewhere who placed their faith and their enthusiasm in what they viewed as socialism and who saw in it a way of bringing Russia into the modern age without incurring what they had been taught to see as the dark side of Western capitalism. It is important to recognize that Russian communism was a tragedy not just in its relations to others, but also a tragedy within itself, on its own terms.

But it is impossible, in the view of this writer, to review the history of communism-in-power in Russia without recognizing that the left-extremist wing of the Russian revolutionary movement, as it seized power in 1917 and exercised it for so many years, was the captive of certain profound and dangerous misconceptions of a political-philosophical nature, revolving around the relationships between means and ends, between personal and collective morality, between moderation and unrestrained extremism in the exercise of political power-misconceptions that were destined to have the most dire effects on the nature of the authority it was assuming to itself. It was the Russian people who had to pay the price for these misconceptions, in the form of some of the most terrible passages in their nation's long and tortured history. Seen in this way, the October Revolution of 1917 cannot be viewed otherwise than as a calamity of epochal dimensions for the peoples upon whom it was imposed.

And what of the future?

It is not easy, in any discussion of Russia's future, to avoid preoccupation with the distressing and dangerous state of disarray that prevails in that country today, and to distinguish the short-term aspects of this situation from those causal features that may be expected to have determining significance in the longer future.

The postcommunist Russia we now have before us finds itself not only confronted with, but heavily involved in, the Herculean effort to carry out three fundamental changes in the national life of the country.

The first of these changes is the shift of the vital center of political power from the Communist Party, which has had a monopoly on power for so many years, to an elected and basically democratic governmental structure. The second is the shift of the economy from the highly centralized and authoritarian administrative basis that has governed it since the 1920s to a decentralized free-enterprise system. The third is the decentralization of the structure of interrelationships among the various national components, originally of the tsarist empire and more recently of the Soviet Union, that has generally prevailed over the last three centuries.

These three changes, if successfully implemented, would represent in many respects an alteration of the life of the Russian state more fundamental than that which the communists endeavored to introduce into Russian life in 1917-more fundamental, because whereas the communists' changes purported, rather vaingloriously, to deny, ignore and consign to oblivion the Russian past, the present efforts at change are linked, consciously or otherwise, to that past, and reflect an inclination not only to respect but in part to resume the struggles for modernization that marked the final decades of tsardom. If successfully carried through, these changes would constitute the greatest watershed in Russian life since the Petrine reforms of the early 18th century.

What are the chances for success in this momentous effort? Many factors would have to enter into any adequate answer to that question; they cannot all be treated here. But certain outstanding ones may well deserve attention in this context.

First, in estimating the chances for success of the first two of these efforts at change-the basic reforms of the political and economic systems-one has to take account of the enduring effects of seven decades of communist power. One is obliged to note that, when it comes to the bulk of the population, the state of preparedness to meet these challenges is smaller than it probably would have been in 1917. It is sad to reflect that among the many other disservices that the Soviet regime did to traditional Russia, not the least was the fact that it left, as it departed, a people so poorly qualified to displace it with anything better.

It would be easy to regard the communist decades as a tragic seventy-year interruption in the normal progress of a great country and to assume that, the interruption now being over, the country could pick up where things left off in 1917 and proceed as though the interruption had never occurred. The temptation to view things that way is heightened by the evidence that many of the problems the country now faces, as the heavy communist hand withdraws, represent the unfinished business of 1917, existing much as it then did because so little of it was, in the interval, sensibly and effectively addressed.

But things are not quite like that. The people we now have before us in Russia are not those who experienced the events of 1917; they are the children and grandchildren of the people of that time-of those of them, at least, who survived enough of the horrors of the ensuing years to leave progeny at all. And these children and grandchildren are divided from their parents and grandparents by something more than just the normal generational change. The intervening events, primarily Stalinism and the carnage of the wartime battlefields, were decisive, each in its own way, in their legacy for future generations. Certain people were more likely than others to survive them; it is to these latter that the next generation was born. We have already noted the decimation of much of the prerevolutionary Russian intelligentsia in the early years of communist power. This has had its effects; of those who saw something of Russia before that decimation was completed, this writer surely is not alone in noting a certain comparative brutalization in the faces one now encounters on the Moscow streets-a result, no doubt, of long exposure to not only the exactions of a pitiless dictatorship but also the ferocious petty frictions of daily life in a shortage economy.

Nor may we ignore the social effects of all these upheavals. Political persecution and war left tragic gaps in the male parental population, particularly in the villages. Family structure was deeply destabilized, and with its stability there were forfeited those sources of inner personal security that only the family can provide. As so often before in the more violent passages of Russian history, it has been the broad and long-suffering back of the Russian woman, capable of bearing a great deal but also not without its limits, on which an inordinate share of the burdens of the maintenance of civilization has come to rest. The effects are painfully visible in a whole series of phenomena of that woman's life: the weariness, the cynicism, the multitudinous abortions, the fatherless families.

Particularly distressing is the fact that so many of the present younger generation have very little idea of what has happened to Russia in these past decades, of why it happened, or of its effects. With the lives of the tens of millions who perished in the earlier vicissitudes went also their memories and the lessons learned from the events of those times. This younger generation has been thrust with little parental guidance and almost no historical memory into a world whose origins it does not know or comprehend.

It was inevitable that this state of affairs should have had its effects on intellectual outlooks. It is true that a larger part of the population than was the case at the time of the revolution has now received at least a grade school education and some technological training. But on the philosophical, intellectual and economic sides the picture is a disturbing one.

The governmental structure to which the center of gravity of political power is now being transferred from what was formerly the party's political monopoly may adequately serve as the outward framework for a new and democratic form of political life, but only that. It will have to be filled in at many points with an entirely new body of methods, habits and-eventually-traditions of self-rule. For this, the minds of the younger generation are poorly prepared. It is not too much to say that there was much more real understanding for the principles and necessities of democratic rule-for the compromises, the restraints, the patience and the tolerance it demands-in the Russia of 1910 than is the case today.

And the same applies when it comes to an understanding of economic realities. Seven decades of relentless suppression of every form of private initiative or spontaneity have left a people trained to regard themselves as the helpless and passive wards of the state. Seven decades of economic hardship and low living standards have largely destroyed good-neighborly relations, and have produced an atmosphere in which a great many people peer spitefully and jealously every day over the backyard fence to assure themselves that their neighbors have not contrived to get something they themselves do not possess, and, if the neighbors have done so, to denounce them. All this has encouraged the prevalence of a sweeping and exaggerated egalitarianism, under the influence of which it is sometimes held to be better that all should continue to live in a state of semi-poverty and abject dependence upon centralized power than that any should be permitted to take the lead, by their own effort and initiative, in elevating themselves even temporarily over the living standards of others.

Faced with such attitudes it will not be easy to make quick progress in the systemic changes Gorbachev and others are trying to bring about. These are not the only handicaps of this sort, but they will perhaps prove the most recalcitrant and long-lasting. For what will be required for their correction will be a long and persistent educational effort-an effort for which, in many instances, a new generation of teachers will have to be provided, and one that will presumably have to proceed in the face of much instability in Russian life.

If the full seriousness of the problem is recognized and taken into account, and if the requisite patience and persistence can be mustered, there is no reason to preclude the possibility of eventual success. But the effort cannot be other than a long one; until it is completed, the prejudices and the forms of ignorance just described will continue to lie heavily across the path of Gorbachev's efforts at reform.

We come now to the third of the great elements in the process of change in which Russia is now involved: the readjustment of the interrelationships among the various national and ethnic elements that have heretofore made up the tsarist/Soviet state.

This readjustment is inevitable. The complete maintenance in any of its former forms of the multinational and multilingual empire of past decades and centuries is incompatible with the powerful force of modern nationalism. Most of the other empires of this nature have already been compelled to yield to that force. Russia, too, had begun to yield to it in 1917; but here, too, the process was interrupted and long postponed by the establishment of communist power. Now the demand for it has reasserted itself with redoubled vigor, and not all of it, surely, is to be withstood. But this is a highly complex and even dangerous problem, which even the benevolently inclined outsider should approach only with greatest circumspection.

That the three Baltic states deserve their independence, and will eventually have it, seems beyond question. There are others that are demanding sovereign status but in whom the requisite experience and maturity of leadership, as well as other essential resources, have yet to be demonstrated. There are still other non-Russian entities where the demand for independence has not even been seriously raised and where the ability to bear the strains and responsibilities of an independent status is even more questionable. There is, in short, no uniformity in the needs and the qualifications that the respective Soviet peoples bring to any far-reaching alteration in their relationship to the Russian center. And no single model, not even one from the outside world, could possibly provide a useful response to all the problems such an alteration would present.

Very special, highly intricate, and full of dangerous pitfalls are those problems that present themselves in the case of the relationship between the Ukraine and Russia proper. Many Ukrainians can and do offer compelling reasons why their country should have at least a greatly changed if not fully independent status in the new era. But Ukrainians do not always speak with one voice. Some speak with a Polish voice, some with a Russian, and some with a more purely Ukrainian one. It will not be easy for them all to agree on how a future Ukraine is to be independently governed, or indeed, even on what its borders should be. To which must be added the fact that so extensive is the interweaving of the Russian and Ukrainian economies that any significant detachment of the two governments would have to be accompanied by the widest possible arrangements for freedom of commercial and financial exchanges between them, if confusion and even hardship were to be avoided.

Pregnant with problems of equal, if not greater, gravity are the demands for a virtual independence on the part of the Russian center that now embraces nearly half of the population, and an even larger proportion of the material resources, of the Soviet Union. These demands, too, are not lacking in serious foundation. Russian national feeling, while not without weaknesses and distortions (notably in the tendencies towards xenophobia and intolerance), is deeply rooted in the culture, the religion and the traditions of the Russian people. No less than the similar feelings of the other national parts of the Soviet Union do they deserve recognition and consideration. To which must be added the fact that the recent discussion within Russia proper of the separate future of that part of the country has been marked, notwithstanding all the handicaps noted above in this article, by an encouraging level of seriousness and responsibility.

But here, very serious complications present themselves. For were the process of designing an independent future for the Russian people alone to go too far, this would place in question the very raison d'être for any supranational center such as the Soviet government now presents. Were the Russians, in other words, to establish a separate sovereignty, or even a far-reaching degree of national independence, this, coming together with the similar detachment of other nationalities of the present Soviet Union, would raise the question as to whether enough would be left of the traditional tsarist/Soviet empire to justify any great coordinating center at all.

The relationships that have existed between the many non-Russian parts of this traditional multinational structure and the Russian center have deep historical roots. Few would be prepared for the situation that would develop if all these ties were to be abruptly severed. The economic confusion would be enormous. Worse still is the growing evidence that certain of these non-Russian entities, if left suddenly to themselves, would either make war against each other or become subject to highly destructive civil conflicts within their own confines. Finally, there is the very serious problem that would be created by the fragmentation of responsibility for the nuclear weaponry now in Soviet hands.

Beyond this, there is the need of this entire region for a single voice-a mature and experienced voice-in world affairs. The importance of this problem is apparent in the commanding figure and present position of Gorbachev, a statesman of world stature and competence, without whose service as a spokesman for peoples of this entire area all would be impoverished. It is hard to think of any of the aspirants for independence who, trying to "go it alone," could be as useful to world peace, or even to themselves, as this one common and enlightened voice in world affairs could be to all of them. The preservation of the Soviet government as a coordinating center will demand, most certainly, a far higher level of input on the part of these other entities into the development of a common foreign policy than they have enjoyed in the past, but to forfeit the advantages of this arrangement would be, for most if not all of them, to lose more than they would gain.

Of greatest importance in this connection would be the effect on international life of any complete breakup of the Russian/Soviet state. The abandonment of any general political center for the peoples of the region would mean the removal from the international scene of one of those great powers whose interrelationships, with all their ups and downs, have constituted a central feature of the structure of international life for most of this century. Experience has shown (not least in the sudden breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918-19) that any major change in the composition of the international community, although perhaps unavoidable or even desirable over the long term, is pregnant with possibilities for unpredictable complications and for grave dangers if it takes place too abruptly and without careful preparation.

It is clear, then, that no satisfactory solution to these problems will be found at either of the extremes of contemporary opinion in the Soviet Union-neither at that of total independence for everyone nor at that of a total preservation of the sort of subordination to a single central political authority that its component national entities have known in the past. Compromises will have to be found, restraint and patience will have to be observed on all sides.

All this would suggest the necessity for some sort of a federated interrelationship among those of the present components of the Soviet Union that are not to become entirely independent. This would have to be a highly flexible arrangement, and probably a looser one than that which Gorbachev now envisages. But the total absence of such ties would present dangers of great gravity for Russia itself, for the other Soviet nationalities and for the peace of surrounding regions.

Let the following stand, then, as a summary of the considerations set forth above.

What is now emerging on the territory traditionally known as Russia will not be-cannot be-the Russia of the tsars. Nor can it be the Russia of the communists. It can only be something essentially new, the contours of which are still, for us and for the Russians themselves, obscure.

The tasks to be encompassed are immense. A workable system of humane representative government-something of which Russian history provides only the most rudimentary experience-will have to be devised and rendered acceptable to a people among whom the principle of reasonable compromise, essential to its success, is largely foreign. A new economic system, compatible with Russian traditions but not limited by them, will have to be devised; and an essential feature of this new system will have to be a wholly new organization of the agricultural process for which, in the main, there will be no precedent in Russian experience. And, finally, the immensely complex and dangerous process of political and institutional decentralization of the traditional Russian state will have to be in some way managed.

For the meeting of these demands the Russian people are today poorly prepared. The events of this century have, as we have seen, taken a terrible toll on their social and spiritual resources. Their own history has pathetically little to tell them. A great deal will have to be started from scratch. The road will be long, rough and perilous.

How can we best relate to a people that finds itself in such straits, confronted with such tremendous and difficult tasks? The lingering tendencies in this country to see Russia as a great and dangerous enemy are simply silly, and should have no place in our thinking. We have never been at war with Russia, should never need to be, and must not be. As Gorbachev has often pointed out, we live in an age when other people's problems are essentially our own. This is the way we must come to view Russia's.

The Russians will need help from wherever they can get it. Some of that help, in our case, may from time to time take the form of economic assistance; but this will be of minor importance. The greatest help we can give will be of two kinds: understanding and example.

The example will of course depend upon the quality of our own civilization. It is our responsibility to assure that this quality is such as to be useful in this respect. We must ask ourselves what sort of example is going to be set for Russia by a country that finds itself unable to solve such problems as drugs, crime, decay of the inner cities, declining educational levels, a crumbling material substructure, and a deteriorating environment.

The understanding, on the other hand, will have to include the recognition that this is in many ways a hard and low moment in the historical development of the Russian people. They are just in process of recovery from all the heartrending reverses that this brutal century has brought to them. They are not, seen in the historical dimension, entirely themselves. We should bear this in mind. We, too, may someday have our low moments. And while we should beware of our American tendency to idealize those foreign peoples whom we consider to be particularly unfortunate, there is no reason why an understanding American attitude towards Russia at this juncture in its history should not include a reasonable measure of compassion.

Beyond this, while we speak of understanding, we can try to bear in mind that along with all the dark aspects of their development, the Russians have shown themselves historically to be a great people-a people of many talents, capable of rendering significant contributions, spiritual, intellectual and aesthetic, to the development of world civilization. They have made such contributions at times in the past. They have the potentiality for doing it again-in a better future.

The obligation to respect and cherish that potentiality is primarily their own. But in another sense it is ours as well. Let us accept that responsibility, and meet it thoughtfully, imaginatively and creatively wherever we can.

1 My reflections have been stimulated by Professor Robert C. Tucker's new study of the crucial and formative years of the Stalin dictatorship (Stalin in Power: The Revolution From Above, 1928-1941, W. W. Norton, 1990). For anyone who, like the writer, lived in Moscow through parts of the period he describes, Tucker's account was bound to stir many reflections about the place of those terrible years, and indeed of the entire communist epoch now coming to an end, in the historical development of the Russian state. Some of these reflections find expression in the present article.

2 Insofar as the historical evidences provide answers, Tucker has given them in his book, and they richly deserve reading. But they are extraneous to this bare listing of the misfortunes endured by the Soviet peoples under communist rule.

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• George F. Kennan is Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Copyright (c) 1990 by George F. Kennan.
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Introduction

Within one week’s time, in the summer of 1991, the 74-year-old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.)—or Soviet Union—became a finished part of history. The Soviet Union was the world’s largest country. At its greatest extent, it covered an area of 8.6 million square miles (22.3 million square kilometers), almost seven times the area of India and two and a half times that of the United States. It encompassed one sixth of Earth’s landmass, including half of Europe and about two fifths of Asia. The population of the country in 1991 was more than 290 million.

The country was made up of several parts called soviet socialist republics. Russia was the largest and most influential of these by far. Although the Soviet Union was formed in 1922, the first of the soviet socialist republics were created in 1917, after the Russian Revolution overthrew the rulers of the Russian Empire. From the 1950s there were 15 of these republics, each of which is now an independent country. Besides Russia, they were Armenia , Azerbaijan , Belorussia (now Belarus ), Estonia , Georgia , Kazakhstan , Kirghizia (now Kyrgyzstan ), Latvia , Lithuania , Moldavia (now Moldova ), Tajikistan , Turkmenistan , Ukraine , and Uzbekistan .

The Soviet Union not only loomed large on world maps but it also had Earth’s second (or third) largest economy and competed effectively for military superiority. From 1960 it took an increasingly major role in international commerce. It was also a powerful political force.

The Soviet Union was the first country in the world to adopt a Communist government based on Marxism, the theories of the German revolutionary Karl Marx . In a Communist society, the major means of economic production, such as farms, factories, and mines, are owned by the public or the government, not individuals. Wealth is divided among all people either equally or according to their needs. Vladimir Lenin , the principal architect of the Soviet Union and its first leader, adapted Marxism to Russian conditions. His version of Communism came to be called Marxism-Leninism. The Soviet government took control of nearly all the land and industries in the country, and the Soviet Communist party came to dominate all aspects of the country’s political, economic, social, and cultural life. As a collectivist society, it was based on the principle that the welfare of the collective—meaning all of society—is more important than individual liberties.

Beginning as an impoverished country, the Soviet Union made great strides in industrializing and improving its economy. Marxism-Leninism, as an alternative to capitalism , thus appealed to leaders of some developing countries—nations where there were many dispossessed and impoverished people and where a few people had most of the wealth. The Soviet constitution openly supported “wars of liberation” wherever and whenever they occurred. After World War II the country helped to install Communist governments in most of Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union and United States (and their respective allies) opposed each other in a long, hostile rivalry called the Cold War . Whether Western countries viewed the Soviet Union as a powerful rival or a threat, it could not be ignored.

In the 1980s the Soviet Union began to change. Following decades of political and cultural repression and bureaucratic and economic stagnation, the Soviet government after 1984 was given an injection of fresh, new leadership. General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev introduced a vast array of perestroika (restructuring), or reform of political and economic policy. He also instituted the liberal policy of glasnost (openness), which allowed political and social issues to be discussed openly. A host of peace proposals was proffered, resulting in a major nuclear arms reduction agreement with the United States. In less than a decade, however, these policies led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Immensity and Diversity

The Soviet Union ultimately stretched across 172 degrees of longitude. From east to west, it spanned 5,700 miles (9,180 kilometers) and 11 of the world’s 24 time zones. From its southernmost point to the tip of its northernmost islands, the Soviet Union extended nearly 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers). To the north the country was bounded by the seas of the Arctic Ocean, and to the east were the seas of the Pacific. The vast majority of the coastal boundary, however, was frozen for up to 10 months each year. Access to the world’s oceans was both difficult and expensive.

Because it was so large, the Soviet Union in its totality displayed great beauty and diversity of landforms, climate, vegetation, and soils. The country had some of the world’s highest mountains and lowest basins, largest plains and broadest tablelands, driest deserts and wettest swamps, purest waters and saltiest seas, longest rivers and deepest lakes, greatest grasslands and most extensive forests.

In any one place, though, the landscape could seem very monotonous because of the great distances between geographic phenomena. Three quarters of the country, for example, was a vast plain at less than 1,500 feet (460 meters) in elevation. The typical Soviet landscape was a flat-to-rolling countryside, with mountains only along the borders and in the area east of the Yenisey River . The Ural Mountains , which divide Europe from Asia, are no higher than 6,200 feet (1,890 meters) and form only a modest barrier to passing air masses and human interaction. The average elevation for the country as a whole was 1,406 feet (429 meters).

People and Culture

In 1991 the population of the Soviet Union was more than 291 million, the third largest in the world after China’s and India’s. More than half of the people were East Slavs, mainly ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians (now spelled Belarusians). However, this enormous country was ethnically very diverse and was home to numerous ethnic groups native to the Baltic region, the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, as well as many others.

Initially, the majority of country’s people lived in rural areas. After undergoing rapid industrial expansion in the 1920s and ’30s, the Soviet Union became a more urban society. In the 1960s it was about equally urban and rural, and in its later years two out of three of its people lived in cities. This was the result of migration from farms to the cities. Urbanization was accompanied by modernization.

Ethnic and Language Groups

Although the Soviet Union contained more than 100 different ethnic groups, most were very small. According to the 1989 census, only 52 ethnic groups numbered 100,000 or more. Of these, 23 exceeded 1 million. Among the seven largest groups, ethnic (and Russified) Russians led all others with 148 million, followed by Ukrainians (45 million), Uzbeks (17 million), Belorussians (10 million), Kazakhs (8.3 million), and Azerbaijanis and Tatars (6.9 million each).

Four language families were significantly represented in the Soviet Union. About three quarters of the population spoke languages belonging to the Indo-European language family, including Slavic, Baltic, Germanic, Romance, Greek, Armenian, Iranian, and Indic languages. The fastest-growing family was Altaic, containing the Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus groups. The country also had many speakers of languages in the Uralic family, which comprises the Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic groups, and in the Caucasian family, such as Georgian and Chechen.

Although an estimated 200 languages and dialects were spoken, Russian, a Slavic language , was the official, and most commonly spoken, language of the country. It was taught in all schools. Four-fifths of the Soviet population had command of the Russian language.

In an age of nationalism every nationality aspires to independent statehood. The non-Russian peoples were appeased with a hierarchy of administrative units. Fifteen were granted a soviet socialist republic status that, according to the constitution, most resembled that of a sovereign nation-state. Twenty others possessed the status of an autonomous soviet socialist republic, which provided some cultural autonomy. Still others were recognized as autonomous oblasts or autonomous okrugs, designations that meant little beyond an official acknowledgment of ethnic identity. Many groups—such as the ethnic Germans, Poles, Koreans, Bulgarians, Greeks, Hungarians, and Romanians—did not have homelands within the Soviet Union. Other officially designated homelands were so in name only. The Tatar autonomous republic, for example, included only a quarter of the Soviet Tatars, and the Jewish oblast in the Soviet Far East was only 5 percent Jewish.

The majority of the most powerful government and party leaders in the Soviet Union were Slavs, mostly ethnic Russians. Although ethnic Russians represented about half of the total population, they made up at least three fifths of the leadership of the Communist party.

The history of religion in the Soviet Union is long and complex. By the 10th century the Eastern Orthodox church was highly influential among the Slavs. In 988 the ruler of Kyivan (Kievan) Rus, the first East Slavic state, ordered the state’s people to receive baptism in the Orthodox Christian rite.

Centuries later a more secular culture took hold in Russia as Peter the Great introduced far-reaching changes. He reformed the church, depriving the priests of their influence in secular matters. By the 19th century Russia was a multireligious society. The 1917 Revolution led to the official policy of eradication of religion in the country. Churches had no legal status, and their property was confiscated. Private religious education of any kind was strictly forbidden.

In the late 1980s, under the reforms established by Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union pledged to increase religious freedom for all believers. In 1991 as much as half of the people of the Soviet Union identified themselves as believers. They included 50–60 million Russian Orthodox Christians, 40–50 million Muslims, 10 million Roman Catholics, 4 million Armenian Apostolics (Gregorians), 3 million Georgian Orthodox Christians, 1.4 million Jews, and more than 1 million Protestants of all sects.

Arts and Literature

Many great artists, dancers, musicians, composers, actors, and writers were from the Soviet Union. It had more permanent opera and ballet companies than any other country. The Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow and the Kirov (now Mariinsky) in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) were famous throughout the world. The country’s people were great lovers of music. Chief among the Soviet Union’s great classical music composers were Sergei Prokofiev and Dimitri Shostakovich . The outstanding Moscow Art Theater, which had been founded in the late 19th century, continued to stage Russian classics and new Soviet plays, emphasizing theatrical naturalism and the “method” style of acting .

Four of the country’s many acclaimed novelists, playwrights, and poets won the Nobel prize for literature: Boris Pasternak (1958), Mikhail Sholokhov (1965), Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1970), and Joseph Brodsky (1987). However, the Soviet government did not allow Pasternak to accept his prize; Solzhenitsyn did not accept the honor until after he was exiled from the country; and Brodsky won his prize while in exile. ( See also Russian literature .)

In the Soviet Union writers, composers, and artists of all kinds were subjected to varying degrees of censorship , repression, or persecution, unless they produced works that were compatible with the political aims of the state. The officially sanctioned theory of writing and the other arts was called Socialist Realism . Under this concept, writers and artists were expected to participate fully and prominently in building socialism and a classless society. The oppression was by far the worst under the dictator Joseph Stalin , who ruled the country from 1924 to 1953.

Before the Revolution, education was generally available to only a privileged few. In 1913 only 6 percent of the total population of tsarist Russia attended schools of all types. Education in the Soviet Union, however, was provided to all for free or at a minimal cost, and several years of schooling were compulsory. Pupils were taught the principles of Marxism-Leninism along with their formal courses. As late as 1920 only 44 percent of the population in the age group 9 to 49 were literate. By 1991 the literacy rate had grown to more than 99 percent.

By 1991 there were 69 Soviet universities with 587,000 students enrolled. Only students who ranked in the top 20 percent of their graduating class could take the difficult college entrance examinations. Students ranking lower could become eligible later if they took additional secondary school courses. Other students could go to technicums, which trained technicians for industrial work, nursing, dentistry, agronomy, and primary school teaching.

In its later years, the Soviet Union was a highly urbanized country. In 1990 the country included 59 cities with populations of more than 500,000 and 24 with more than 1 million residents. The largest was Moscow , the Soviet and Russian capital, with an estimated 1991 population of 8.8 million. Leningrad (now St. Petersburg ) had about 4.5 million. Kyiv (Kiev), the capital of Ukraine, contained more than 2.6 million. The fourth largest Soviet city was Tashkent , the capital of Uzbekistan in Central Asia.

Urbanization varied according to region and republic. Remote areas with severe climates, such as Siberia , generally had large proportions of urban dwellers (75 percent or more). The economically developed Baltic and Slavic republics also exhibited urban ratios of 75 percent or more. Moldavia, Transcaucasia (except for Armenia), and the Central Asian republics had urban shares of 55 percent or less. The most rural republic was Tajikistan, where only one in three persons lived in a city.

The economic system of the Soviet Union was highly centralized. For most of the country’s history, the government controlled the entire economy through a series of five-year plans, which set production targets for all sectors. For example, government agencies decided what products various enterprises in the different industrial branches would manufacture, and they set weekly, monthly, and annual production targets, which plant managers had to meet or surpass. During the country’s later years, Gorbachev introduced many changes to this system.

The Soviet Union was in many ways an economic paradox. Having undergone rapid industrialization after 1922, it had a heavy industrial and armed forces sector commensurate with that of a highly developed country. However, its consumer sector remained comparable to that of a developing country. The agricultural base at best muddled through.

Richly endowed with natural resources, especially in Siberia, the country ranked first or second in the output of most of the world’s strategic minerals and mineral products, including petroleum, natural gas, iron, steel, cement, and mineral fertilizers. The country also took the lead in the output of some manufactures, such as tractors, woolen cloth, and butter. Its machine construction was numerically second only to the United States, and its chemical industry made spectacular advances from the early 1960s. All of these industrial resources and manufactured products laid the foundation for a mighty military complex that was one of the strongest in the world. Except for agriculture, however, Soviet planners traditionally neglected the consumer sector, emphasizing heavy industry instead. Many of the consumer goods that were produced were of such poor quality that few people wanted to buy them.

Soviet agriculture was a huge sector, but it always performed poorly. The problem was not one of investment: agriculture was estimated to account for nearly a third of all Soviet investment. When a crop failure occurred in the Soviet Union, it rippled through the economy like an earthquake—and there were more than six crop failures between 1970 and 1991.

The reasons for the country’s low farm productivity are varied, but a major factor was weather. The Soviet Union had short growing seasons, low average annual temperatures, and lack of balance in the distribution of precipitation. Such constraints restricted the availability of good farmland and created variations in food supply. Other major factors were inefficiency; poor wages and low quality of life for farmers; a bureaucracy that meddled in the affairs of farm managers; a poor infrastructure, including inadequate roads, storage facilities, and housing; and the emphasis on socialized farming.

The Soviet socialized farming system was based in part on the idea that large farms, like large factories, can produce goods more cheaply than small ones. They were also easier for the state to control. By the end of the 1930s, nearly all of the country’s peasants had been forced to become part of the socialized farming sector, which included collectivized and state-run farms. The kolkhoz, or collective farm, consisted of a number of member families who were granted perpetual rights to rent-free state land. Workers received wages based on the number of hours contributed along with bonuses and production incentives. The sovkhoz, or state farm, was a state-operated “factory in the fields.” Sovkhoz workers were state employees and were paid wages from state funds. They too received year-end bonuses if annual production exceeded targets. A small percentage—about 8 percent by the late 1980s—of the country’s farmland remained in private plots.

The principal food crops were grains (mainly wheat, barley, oats, rye, rice, buckwheat, and millet), potatoes, sugar beets, and vegetables. The Soviet Union was the world’s largest producer of wheat. After 1955 Soviet leaders placed heavy emphasis on increased production of meat and dairy products.

The Soviet Union usually achieved a favorable foreign trade balance except in years of crop failure. However, foreign trade was only a small share—less than 10 percent—of the gross national product. More than half of its trade was with other socialist countries.

The capital city of the Soviet Union was Moscow , in the Russian republic. The country’s government was headquartered in Moscow’s Kremlin , a former medieval fortress complex.

The Soviet state had a dual structure: one part was the Communist party, and the other was the official government organization. Each side had a parallel hierarchy in the shape of a pyramid. In theory power flowed upward from the broad base, but in reality only high-level party officials made the major decisions.

Communist Party

The Communist party was an elite organization. Its membership rarely exceeded 6 to 12 percent of the population. Membership was regarded as a great privilege and a reflection of high moral character and leadership qualities. In order to join the party, one needed recommendations by three party members in good standing and approval by the regional party organization.

Although the Communist party was relatively small, it affected all aspects of Soviet life through the primary party organization (PPO). Composed of three or more members, PPOs were found in factories, offices, military platoons, and on farms. The members of each PPO elected one member to be their secretary, who represented them at the next higher level. At each ensuing level a secretary was chosen until the top of the party pyramid was reached.

Each level of the hierarchy ( rayon or city, kray or oblast, republic or region) held a congress. Republic or regional congresses elected deputies to the all-union congress. At the top of the hierarchy was the party’s Central Committee and the two most powerful political units in the country: the Politburo, which was the supreme policy-making body, and the Secretariat, which was the major administrative body. The Politburo made all major state decisions, and its decrees were automatically ratified by the parallel government structures. The Secretariat handled the day-to-day implementation of the Politburo’s decisions. The first secretary of the Secretariat was also the general secretary of the Politburo. Officially, the all-union congress elected the members of the Central Committee, which in turn selected the members of the Politburo and Secretariat, but the Politburo and Secretariat actually directed these decisions.

Government Organization

The government bureaucracy consisted of both elective and appointive bodies.

Elective bodies

Among the elective bodies was the two-chamber legislative body called the Supreme Soviet (Council), which had 1,500 members. One of its chambers, the Soviet of the Union, had 750 deputies who were elected on the basis of one representative for every certain number of people in the population. The other chamber was the Soviet of Nationalities, whose 750 deputies each represented a given national administrative unit—Russians, Tatars, Uzbeks, and so on.

The two houses were elected popularly once every five years. Voting was done in secret, and at least 97 percent of the electorate turned out to vote. However, the candidates—both party and nonparty members—were carefully screened by the local heads of the Communist party. Each office on the ballot listed only the name of the single party-approved nominee (though there was room for write-ins). Of those elected to the Supreme Soviet, 80 percent were party members. The president of the Supreme Soviet was more often than not also the party’s general secretary.

The Supreme Soviet was nominally the highest legislative body. Although the Supreme Soviet debated issues, it never vetoed legislation proposed by the Council of Ministers, an appointed body. Such legislation had already been approved by the Presidium. No legislation ever originated with the Supreme Soviet, though technically it could.

Under a nominally federal system, each of the 15 republics also had a Supreme Soviet. There was also a system of regional and local soviets.

A new two-house legislature was created in 1988. Unlike the previous Supreme Soviet, this body actually had substantial lawmaking powers. The new upper house, called the Congress of People’s Deputies, had 2,250 members, 1,500 of whom were popularly elected from regional and national districts and 750 of whom were selected by party organizations, social and professional organizations, trade unions, and other groups. Citizens were given a choice of candidates on the ballots for the elected members. The upper house was responsible for selecting the lower house from among its members. The Supreme Soviet, the new lower house, was a parliament made up of 400 to 450 members. The first law it passed granted workers the right to strike.

Appointive bodies

The Council of Ministers was the chief executive body of the Soviet government. Its members headed the various ministries, commissions, and committees of government that ran day-to-day activities. Each minister dealt with the affairs of a specific branch of the economy or a given region. Alone, or jointly with the Central Committee of the Communist party, the Council of Ministers formally issued all major legislative and administrative orders. These were automatically ratified by the Supreme Soviet.

The Council of Ministers had a body called the Presidium that was comparable in size and function to the Politburo on the party side. The chief executive of this Presidium was called the chairman, or premier. The premier inevitably was a ranking member of the Politburo.

Most of the members of the Council of Ministers were also high-ranking officials in the Communist party. The ministers were chosen by the party and automatically approved by the Supreme Soviet. Other key appointive administrative posts were also filled only with the approval of the Communist party. Holders of these positions were among the most powerful members of Soviet society.

Mikhail Gorbachev restructured the ministries to make them more efficient. Moreover, in February 1990 the Supreme Soviet created the elective office of president of the Soviet Union, a new executive presidency with widely expanded powers. However, the attempted coup in August 1991 led to the collapse of central controls.

Judicial bodies

Justice was administered by the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union, the Supreme Court of each of the union republics, regional courts, and local peoples’ courts. Special officials called procurators supervised the courts to make sure that state law was strictly observed. Judges were elected by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union for a period of five years. The procurator general served for seven years.

International Relations

Soviet leaders believed that capitalist countries were inherently expansionist and that they were a threat to Soviet security. Relations with the West typically were undermined by an air of suspicion and hostility—the Cold War . The Cold War did not become a “hot war” because the Soviets believed in the inevitable collapse of capitalism and because both sides had huge nuclear capabilities. Marxist-Leninist doctrine provided a theoretical basis for the special relationship of the Soviet state with the socialist countries of Eastern Europe and with Communist parties elsewhere. It also helped to explain the intense Soviet interest in the less developed countries, already predisposed against capitalism because of its association with their colonial pasts, as they sought ways to modernize.

Nonideological considerations also played a role in influencing Soviet international policy. Such considerations included the protection of Soviet security through a defensive buffer, the need for extensive foreign trade to obtain exchangeable currency, and the desire for prestige and recognition as a global superpower.

The Gorbachev administration showed a willingness to rethink its interpretation of relations with capitalist countries. Historically, relations with the West improved whenever the Russian or Soviet economy needed help: in the early 1700s under Peter the Great , in the late 1700s under Catherine the Great , between 1890 and 1917 under Nicholas II , in the 1930s under Joseph Stalin , and in the 1970s under Leonid Brezhnev . The difference between the earlier improvements and those made under Gorbachev was that Gorbachev realized that the Soviet economy was in a state of crisis and needed drastic reforms to survive.

The last tsar of all the Russias, Nicholas II , led his country into a disastrous war against Germany and Austria in August 1914. His own incompetent leadership in the field and the government’s inability to supply and equip its armies led to enormous military failures with millions of lives lost. By March 1917 there were severe food shortages, resulting in mass rioting in the capital, Petrograd (St. Petersburg). As casualties mounted, soldiers deserted the military and joined the peasants in revolt in St. Petersburg. The newly elected Duma, or parliament, demanded the abdication of the tsar. Nicholas stepped down on March 15, and he and his family were exiled. This was the first phase of the Russian Revolution.

Revolution and the Soviet Union

The March 1917 revolution was over within a week with little bloodshed. For a time the government was in the hands of the nonsocialist Constitutional Democrats. In July, however, power passed to Aleksandr Kerensky . Kerensky wanted to continue the war against Germany, but the Russian people did not.

Bolsheviks take power

At this point a group of socialists schooled in the doctrines of Karl Marx filtered into Petrograd. Many had been in exile in Russia and abroad. They were few in number, though the name Bolsheviks means “majority men.” They were extremely well organized and dedicated, and they had a program. Vladimir Lenin was the Bolsheviks’ undisputed leader. Lenin aimed to overthrow Russia’s infant capitalist system, which he would then replace with a dictatorship of the proletariat (workers) based on the principles that had been espoused by Marx.

October Revolution

Thousands of revolutionary soviets (councils) had sprung up all over Russia. The Bolsheviks carried on propaganda campaigns among them. By October 1917 the party controlled the majority of the soviets of Petrograd and Moscow.

On October 25 the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets was scheduled to meet in Petrograd. Early that morning Red Guards poured into the city, surrounded the Winter Palace, and occupied the railroad stations, the ministries, and the state bank. When the Congress of Soviets met that night, Lenin was proclaimed premier. The event is called the October Revolution because Russia still used the old calendar, but according to the calendar now in use, the event took place on November 7. The October Revolution itself was over in a week, and fighting was limited to the major cities. Eight months later the former tsar and his entire family were executed near the city of Yekaterinburg. ( See also Russian Revolution .)

The new government assumed ownership of all land and took control of industry. In March 1918 a treaty of peace was signed with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk. By the terms of the treaty Russia recognized Germany’s claims to the Caucasus and Ukraine. In addition, Russia agreed to give up Poland and the Baltic states and pay huge indemnities.

Civil war and famine

Between 1918 and 1922 the Bolsheviks were confronted with civil war, intervention by foreign troops, and terrible famine. “White” armies of soldiers loyal to the tsar challenged the Bolshevik “Red” armies. The White armies were supplied by foreign interventionists—including British, American, and Japanese—and were quite successful at first. Having finished with Germany, the victorious Western Allies wanted to use troops to try to defeat the Soviet revolution. Most of these troops arrived in the far north at Archangel. After the surrender of Germany in 1918, Poland invaded Belorussia, Ukraine was recovered in 1919, and the Caucasus in 1922. In Russia the Reds finally defeated the Whites, the interventionists withdrew, and Lenin made peace with Poland. On December 30, 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was officially established.

In 1921 Russia had suffered a drought, which caused widespread famine and disease as well as economic chaos. The American Relief Administration, under the direction of Herbert Hoover, fed millions, but many people died. In 1921 Lenin inaugurated the New Economic Policy (NEP), encouraging individual initiative in the farm sector. The NEP temporarily reinvigorated the Soviet economy by providing sufficient food for everyone.

Stalin Years

Lenin died in 1924, and a struggle for leadership began between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky . As secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party, Stalin stripped Trotsky of power and exiled him in 1928.

Stalin continued Lenin’s NEP until 1928. Fearing the entrenchment of a capitalist class in agriculture, however, he initiated the First Five-Year Plan. The plan called for rapid growth in heavy industry and collectivization of agriculture.

Rapid and forced collectivization of agriculture resulted in great inefficiencies, the deportation of millions of the wealthier peasants, and confiscation of grain. Rather than yield their livestock to the new collectives, many farmers slaughtered them. A man-made famine resulted. In 1932 about 3 million people died of starvation in Ukraine alone. Nevertheless, when the First Five-Year Plan ended in 1932, the government announced that great progress had been made. Peasant resistance had been smashed, and the country was on the road to industrialization.

Stalin meanwhile tightened his grip on the government and the Red Army by means of a series of purges. In 1935 and 1936 nearly 500,000 people were executed, imprisoned, or forced into labor camps. He further consolidated his position through the Great Purge trials of 1936–39. Through this system Stalin eliminated his rivals. He systematically employed the services of the secret police (later known as the KGB) to root out “political criminals.”

Stalin’s foreign policy was equally ruthless. Like Lenin, he believed that the Soviet state would never be totally secure until the entire world was Communist. Many nations were disturbed by the Third, or Communist, International, known as the Comintern. The Comintern directed the activities of Communist parties outside the Soviet Union. It gathered information by espionage, caused labor troubles and other civil discord, and undermined governments.

In Germany the Communist party played a major part in helping destroy the Weimar Republic . Its destruction, however, brought Adolf Hitler , an outspoken anti-Communist, to power. Stalin then began to advocate “collective security” and ordered the Comintern to tone down its propaganda. With the apparent change in the Communist program, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt granted recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933, and in 1934 it joined the League of Nations .

Stalin-Hitler pact

On August 23, 1939, Stalin and Hitler signed a Soviet-German nonaggression pact. This assured Hitler that he would not have to fight a war on two fronts. On September 1 the Nazis attacked Poland, and World War II began. Shortly thereafter Soviet troops occupied eastern Poland.

In November the Soviets attacked Finland and defeated the Finns in three months of bitter fighting. In 1940 Soviet authorities annexed the Baltic states— Latvia , Lithuania , and Estonia —and Moldavia , which had been a part of Romania.

Germany invades the Soviet Union

Much against the advice of his generals, Hitler ordered the Nazi armies to invade the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in pursuit of the rich granaries of Ukraine and the petroleum fields of the Caucasus . By November the Germans had reached the suburbs of Moscow . In the north, aided by the Finns, they had surrounded Leningrad (now St. Petersburg ). In the south, aided by the Romanians, they reached Stalingrad (now Volgograd ) in 1942.

That spring supplies from the United States and Great Britain poured into the Soviet Union. Soviet fighters were soon fed and outfitted by the very capitalists who were so much despised by Stalin. By the end of the war, the United States had given more than 11 billion dollars in aid to the Soviet Union. Ultimately, the Germans were defeated by reequipped Soviet soldiers, severe winter weather, and a scorched-earth policy. Early in 1943 the Red Army forced the surrender of 22 enfeebled German divisions at Stalingrad. Counterattacking on all fronts, Soviet forces advanced into Poland , Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia ), Hungary , Romania , and Bulgaria . They reached Berlin, the capital of Germany, victoriously, in 1945. No one knows exactly what the Soviet war losses were, but it has been estimated that well over 20 million soldiers and civilians died because of the war.

Yalta and Potsdam

In February 1945 Stalin met with Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula . Stalin promised to enter the war against Japan three months after the end of hostilities in Europe. The Soviets turned against Japan on August 8, 1945. They fought no battles, but when Japan surrendered on September 2 the Red Army had moved into northern Korea and into much of Manchuria.

After Germany’s unconditional surrender, representatives of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain met again—in Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin. At this conference Germany and Austria were both divided into four zones—with each zone to be occupied by one of the Big Three nations (the Soviet Union, the United States, and Britain) or France. Although entirely within the Soviet German sector (East Germany), the city of Berlin was also carved into four parts.

Eastern Europe

At Yalta and Potsdam Stalin promised that in Soviet-occupied Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria) there would be civil liberties, free elections, and representative governments. In all those countries, however, Moscow-trained political leaders supported by the military succeeded in gaining power. Anti-Communists were soon dead, in jail, or in exile.

As a concession to foreign opinion, the Comintern was dissolved in 1943. In 1947 it was revived as the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau). It controlled the Soviet satellite nations of Eastern Europe.

The Soviet Union was a charter member of the United Nations and one of the Big Five on the Security Council. In the council Soviet representatives used their veto power to halt disarmament plans and to prevent action against Soviet aggression.

In 1948 Stalin tried to drive the Western powers out of Berlin by blockading the city and starving the people. Great Britain and the United States broke the blockade, bringing in food by air. ( See also Cold War .)

On April 4, 1949, the United States, Canada, and most of the countries of western Europe signed a pact creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) , which provided that an armed attack against any one of them should be considered an attack against them all. When West Germany was admitted into NATO in 1955, the Soviet Union reacted by forming the Warsaw Pact defense alliance with the countries of Eastern Europe.

Marxism-Leninism in Asia

In 1924 Outer Mongolia had become a Communist people’s republic. A Communist government was established in North Korea in 1948. Soviet forces partially withdrew from Manchuria to allow the Chinese Communists to take over much of the industrial area as a base for operations against the Nationalists in the Chinese civil war. In 1949 Chinese Communists finally drove the Nationalist government off the mainland and set up a government modeled on that of the Soviet Union. In February 1950 Communist China and the Soviet Union signed a treaty of friendship, alliance, and mutual assistance. The United Nations created the republic of South Korea when the Soviets refused to allow free elections in a unified Korea. On June 25, 1950, Soviet-trained North Koreans, using Soviet tanks and equipment, invaded South Korea. The United Nations was able to take action against the aggression because the Soviets boycotted the Security Council. ( See also Korean War .)

Khrushchev Era

Stalin died on March 5, 1953. Party leaders announced that the country would be ruled by a committee, headed by Georgi M. Malenkov. Nikita S. Khrushchev seemed to be the least important member of the ruling group. In a few days, however, Malenkov “voluntarily” resigned the key post of first secretary of the party, and Khrushchev took over. Malenkov kept his title of premier, but two years later Khrushchev forced Malenkov to resign that position. Nikolai Bulganin took Malenkov’s place.

In 1956 Khrushchev, in what was considered a very bold move, denounced Stalin in a secret speech before the Communist party congress. He also dissolved the Cominform. Several satellite countries were at once encouraged to strike out for more independence. The Poles rioted, and the Hungarians launched a full-scale revolt that the Soviet army quickly suppressed.

Khrushchev next moved against his enemies in the government. In July 1957 Malenkov was again demoted along with the foreign minister, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, and other prominent leaders. In March 1958 Khrushchev ousted Bulganin and took the title of premier himself.

Soviet strides in science and technology scored propaganda victories and aroused concern in the West. The country had had nuclear weapons since 1949. The successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile was announced in August 1957, and in October, Sputnik I , the first artificial Earth satellite, rocketed into orbit. In April 1961 Soviet scientists sent the first human, Yuri Gagarin , into orbit around Earth.

In 1958 and 1959 Soviet leaders demanded that Western troops be removed from Berlin . Later, Khrushchev made friendship visits to the United States and Asia. Hoping to promote a summit meeting of heads of state, he did not press the Berlin demands. But the four-power conference collapsed in May 1960.

In 1961 Soviet officials ordered a wall built between East and West Berlin. Ignoring a no-testing agreement with the West, the country also resumed nuclear weapons tests. In 1962 United States President John F. Kennedy demanded that Soviet offensive missiles be withdrawn from Cuba . Facing a United States naval blockade of Cuba and the threat of nuclear war, Khrushchev yielded.

In 1960 the Communist party congress narrowly endorsed Khrushchev’s doctrine of peaceful coexistence with the West. Soviet representatives signed a limited nuclear test-ban treaty with the Western nations in 1963. The following year Khrushchev was ousted.

Brezhnev to Gorbachev

Leonid I. Brezhnev succeeded Khrushchev as first secretary (later called general secretary) with Aleksei N. Kosygin as premier. In 1966 the Soviets landed an unmanned vehicle on the Moon and sent a satellite into Moon orbit. In 1968 they led a Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia to halt that country’s liberalization movement. Relations with China deteriorated during the 1960s.

During the Brezhnev years, Soviet policy emphasized détente with the West along with a massive arms buildup. In the 1970s and early 1980s the Soviet government came under international pressure for suppressing dissent within the country and restricting the emigration of Jews. In 1979 the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to preserve a newly established Marxist regime. Although Brezhnev had singled out Konstantin Chernenko as his successor, Yuri Andropov became general secretary after Brezhnev’s death in 1982. Chernenko, who had replaced Andropov as second secretary, succeeded Andropov, who died in 1984. When Chernenko died in 1985, the second secretary was Mikhail S. Gorbachev .

In March 1988 Gorbachev signed a bilateral arms reduction agreement known as the intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) treaty with the United States. He called for the elimination of all nuclear arms by the year 2000 and withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. Also in 1989 Gorbachev visited Cuba. He and Cuban President Fidel Castro signed a friendship treaty in which they pledged to work toward relieving Third World debt.

Gorbachev also met that year with Deng Xiaoping , China’s senior statesman, in the first summit between the two countries since 1959. The meeting formally normalized relations between China and the Soviet Union, which had been broken in 1960. But the meeting did not put to rest the suspicions between the Chinese and Soviets. A student demonstration for democracy was gathering steam in Beijing just as Gorbachev arrived, and the Chinese authorities blamed much of this unrest on the new Soviet policies.

Gorbachev radically changed the structure of the government and was determined to reform the domestic economy. His policies of glasnost and perestroika had wide-ranging effects, both abroad and within his own country, though in later years his commitment to reform seemed to waver.

There were nationalist protests in various republics beginning in 1987, with demonstrators demanding independence or greater autonomy for their republics. Political perestroika involved taking the power out of the hands of the Communist party leaders and setting up parliament, the presidency, and the justice system under the rule of law. The Soviet parliament made numerous fundamental changes in the constitution and the laws, including approval of a private property law. On March 15, 1990, Gorbachev assumed the Soviet Union’s new executive presidency and pledged to use his broadened powers to speed economic reform, but shortages of food, housing, and medical supplies continued. In August 1991 Gorbachev and leaders of seven of the Soviet Union’s constituent republics were scheduled to sign a treaty to decentralize power and change the country’s name to the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics, but an attempted political coup prevented adoption of the treaty and led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Revolution of 1991

On August 18 Gorbachev and his family were detained by military authorities at their home in Crimea . In Moscow the next morning, an eight-man junta calling itself the State Committee for the State of Emergency announced that it had seized power. The committee was headed by Gorbachev’s vice-president, Gennadi Yanayev. Soviet troops in tanks quickly moved into Moscow. The coup was badly planned, however, and it was immediately opposed by Boris Yeltsin , president of the Russian republic. Standing atop a tank (just as Lenin had done in 1917), he called for a general strike and resistance to the takeover, and he demanded that Gorbachev be returned to power. Leaders of Western nations and Japan immediately suspended aid to the Soviet Union. As parts of the army turned against the coup, it collapsed within 72 hours, and its leaders fled the city.

Upon Gorbachev’s return, on August 22, events moved quickly. The coup leaders were soon arrested. Others who had supported them were driven from power. On August 24 Gorbachev resigned as head of the Communist party and disbanded the party itself. The party was forbidden any role in governing the country, and its assets were seized by the Soviet parliament. Statues and pictures of Lenin and other Soviet founders were removed from public places. But perhaps most significant of all was the shift in power from Gorbachev to Yeltsin, hero of the resistance during the coup.

On September 5 the Congress of People’s Deputies dissolved itself. A transitional state council was set up, with Gorbachev as its head, to decide on the future of the country. The Baltic republics— Lithuania , Latvia , and Estonia —were granted independence the next day. Among the remaining 12 republics, Belorussia (renamed Belarus ) rushed to independence two days later. Kazakhstan and Kirghizia (renamed Kyrgyzstan ) took control of their republics’ resources and began economic reform and privatization. In November seven of the republics agreed to form a new Union of Sovereign States, but it remained a shell. Desires for independence proved too powerful.

Ukraine voted overwhelmingly on December 1 for independence, and a week later the leaders of the three Slavic republics— Russia , Ukraine, and Belarus—proclaimed a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The presidents of 11 of the 12 remaining republics (all but Georgia) signed agreements to join the CIS on December 21. Four days later, on December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president. The 74-year-old Soviet Union was no more.

Victor L. Mote

Additional Reading

Andrews, William. The Land and the People of the Soviet Union (Harper, 1991). Brown, Archie, and others, eds. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Former Soviet Union, 2nd ed. (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994). Cunningham, Kevin. Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union (M. Reynolds, 2006). Edwards, Judith. Lenin and the Russian Revolution in World History (Enslow, 2001). Gottfried, Ted. The Road to Communism; The Stalinist Empire; The Great Fatherland War; The Cold War (Twenty-first Century, 2002–03). Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, rev. and expanded ed. (Columbia Univ. Press, 1989). Read, Christopher. Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (Routledge, 2005). Stoff, Laurie, ed. The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union (Greenhaven, 2006). Streissguth, Thomas. Life in Communist Russia (Lucent, 2001). Suny, R.G. The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (Oxford Univ. Press, 1998). Ulam, A.B. The Communists: The Story of Power and Lost Illusions 1948–91 (Scribner, 1992).

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Russian Revolution

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 27, 2024 | Original: March 12, 2024

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was one of the most explosive political events of the 20th century. The violent revolution marked the end of the Romanov dynasty and centuries of Russian Imperial rule. Economic hardship, food shortages and government corruption all contributed to disillusionment with Czar Nicholas II. During the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks, led by leftist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, seized power and destroyed the tradition of czarist rule. The Bolsheviks would later become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

When Was the Russian Revolution?

In 1917, two revolutions swept through Russia, ending centuries of imperial rule and setting into motion political and social changes that would lead to the eventual formation of the Soviet Union .

However, while the two revolutionary events took place within a few short months of 1917, social unrest in Russia had been brewing for many years prior to the events of that year.

In the early 1900s, Russia was one of the most impoverished countries in Europe with an enormous peasantry and a growing minority of poor industrial workers. Much of Western Europe viewed Russia as an undeveloped, backwards society.

The Russian Empire practiced serfdom—a form of feudalism in which landless peasants were forced to serve the land-owning nobility—well into the nineteenth century. In contrast, the practice had disappeared in most of Western Europe by the end of the Middle Ages .

In 1861, the Russian Empire finally abolished serfdom. The emancipation of serfs would influence the events leading up to the Russian Revolution by giving peasants more freedom to organize.

What Caused the Russian Revolution?

The Industrial Revolution gained a foothold in Russia much later than in Western Europe and the United States. When it finally did, around the turn of the 20th century, it brought with it immense social and political changes.

Between 1890 and 1910, for example, the population of major Russian cities such as St. Petersburg and Moscow nearly doubled, resulting in overcrowding and destitute living conditions for a new class of Russian industrial workers.

A population boom at the end of the 19th century, a harsh growing season due to Russia’s northern climate, and a series of costly wars—starting with the Crimean War —created frequent food shortages across the vast empire. Moreover, a famine in 1891-1892 is estimated to have killed up to 400,000 Russians.

The devastating Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 further weakened Russia and the position of ruler Czar Nicholas II . Russia suffered heavy losses of soldiers, ships, money and international prestige in the war, which it ultimately lost.

Many educated Russians, looking at social progress and scientific advancement in Western Europe and North America, saw how growth in Russia was being hampered by the monarchical rule of the czars and the czar’s supporters in the aristocratic class.

Russian Revolution of 1905

Soon, large protests by Russian workers against the monarchy led to the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1905 . Hundreds of unarmed protesters were killed or wounded by the czar’s troops.

The Bloody Sunday massacre sparked the Russian Revolution of 1905, during which angry workers responded with a series of crippling strikes throughout the country. Farm laborers and soldiers joined the cause, leading to the creation of worker-dominated councils called “soviets.”

In one famous incident, the crew of the battleship Potemkin staged a successful mutiny against their overbearing officers. Historians would later refer to the 1905 Russian Revolution as ‘the Great Dress Rehearsal,” as it set the stage for the upheavals to come.

Nicholas II and World War I

After the bloodshed of 1905 and Russia’s humiliating loss in the Russo-Japanese War, Nicholas II promised greater freedom of speech and the formation of a representative assembly, or Duma, to work toward reform.

Russia entered into World War I in August 1914 in support of the Serbs and their French and British allies. Their involvement in the war would soon prove disastrous for the Russian Empire.

Militarily, imperial Russia was no match for industrialized Germany, and Russian casualties were greater than those sustained by any nation in any previous war. Food and fuel shortages plagued Russia as inflation mounted. The already weak economy was hopelessly disrupted by the costly war effort.

Czar Nicholas left the Russian capital of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1915 to take command of the Russian Army front. (The Russians had renamed the imperial city in 1914, because “St. Petersburg” sounded too German.)

Soviet Union Leaders: A Timeline

From Stalin's reign of terror to Gorbachev and glasnost, meet the eight leaders who presided over the USSR.

How World War I Fueled the Russian Revolution

Ineffective leadership and a weak infrastructure during the war led to the demise of the Romanov dynasty.

Rasputin and the Czarina

In her husband’s absence, Czarina Alexandra—an unpopular woman of German ancestry—began firing elected officials. During this time, her controversial advisor, Grigory Rasputin , increased his influence over Russian politics and the royal Romanov family .

Russian nobles eager to end Rasputin’s influence murdered him on December 30, 1916. By then, most Russians had lost faith in the failed leadership of the czar. Government corruption was rampant, the Russian economy remained backward and Nicholas repeatedly dissolved the Duma , the toothless Russian parliament established after the 1905 revolution, when it opposed his will.

Moderates soon joined Russian radical elements in calling for an overthrow of the hapless czar.

February Revolution

The February Revolution (known as such because of Russia’s use of the Julian calendar until February 1918) began on March 8, 1917 (February 23 on the Julian calendar).

Demonstrators clamoring for bread took to the streets of Petrograd. Supported by huge crowds of striking industrial workers, the protesters clashed with police but refused to leave the streets.

On March 11, the troops of the Petrograd army garrison were called out to quell the uprising. In some encounters, the regiments opened fire, killing demonstrators, but the protesters kept to the streets and the troops began to waver.

The Duma formed a provisional government on March 12. A few days later, Czar Nicholas abdicated the throne, ending centuries of Russian Romanov rule.

Alexander Kerensky

The leaders of the provisional government, including young Russian lawyer Alexander Kerensky, established a liberal program of rights such as freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the right of unions to organize and strike. They opposed violent social revolution.

As minister of war, Kerensky continued the Russian war effort, even though Russian involvement in World War I was enormously unpopular. This further exacerbated Russia’s food supply problems. Unrest continued to grow as peasants looted farms and food riots erupted in the cities.

Bolshevik Revolution

On November 6 and 7, 1917 (or October 24 and 25 on the Julian calendar, which is why the event is often referred to as the October Revolution ), leftist revolutionaries led by Bolshevik Party leader Vladimir Lenin launched a nearly bloodless coup d’état against the Duma’s provisional government.

The provisional government had been assembled by a group of leaders from Russia’s bourgeois capitalist class. Lenin instead called for a Soviet government that would be ruled directly by councils of soldiers, peasants and workers.

The Bolsheviks and their allies occupied government buildings and other strategic locations in Petrograd, and soon formed a new government with Lenin as its head. Lenin became the dictator of the world’s first communist state.

Russian Civil War

Civil War broke out in Russia in late 1917 after the Bolshevik Revolution. The warring factions included the Red and White Armies.

The Red Army fought for the Lenin’s Bolshevik government. The White Army represented a large group of loosely allied forces, including monarchists, capitalists and supporters of democratic socialism.

On July 16, 1918, the Romanovs were executed by the Bolsheviks. The Russian Civil War ended in 1923 with Lenin’s Red Army claiming victory and establishing the Soviet Union.

After many years of violence and political unrest, the Russian Revolution paved the way for the rise of communism as an influential political belief system around the world. It set the stage for the rise of the Soviet Union as a world power that would go head-to-head with the United States during the Cold War .

The Russian Revolutions of 1917. Anna M. Cienciala, University of Kansas . The Russian Revolution of 1917. Daniel J. Meissner, Marquette University . Russian Revolution of 1917. McGill University . Russian Revolution of 1905. Marxists.org . The Russian Revolution of 1905: What Were the Major Causes? Northeastern University . Timeline of the Russian Revolution. British Library .

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Called treacherous, deluded and insane, Lenin might have been a historical footnote but for the Russian Revolution, which launched him into the headlines of the 20th century.

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It championed an idea at grave risk today: that those of us lucky enough to live in open societies should fight for the freedom of those born into closed ones.

By Natan Sharansky

Mr. Sharansky, the author of “The Case for Democracy,” is a former spokesman for Andrei Sakharov. He spent nine years in Soviet prisons and the gulag.

Fifty years ago this Sunday, this paper devoted three broadsheet pages to an essay that had been circulating secretly in the Soviet Union for weeks. The manifesto, written by Andrei Sakharov, championed an essential idea at grave risk today: that those of us lucky enough to live in open societies should fight for the freedom of those born into closed ones. This radical argument changed the course of history.

Sakharov’s essay carried a mild title — “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom” — but it was explosive. “Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of mankind by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships ,” he wrote. Suddenly the Soviet Union’s most decorated physicist became its most prominent dissident.

Read Sakharov’s Original Essay

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On the way to Krasnoyarsk, I kept wondering how to present you with a bouquet of flowers on the 14th or 15th [his wife’s birthday], and I also reflected sadly that there is no one in Moscow I can ask to do this favor. . . . I’ve sent you four letters, three en route and one from here, Krasnoyarsk Deportation Jail. My situation is still the same and I know nothing about my future. Why are there no letters from you?

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Revelations from the Russian Archives Internal Workings of the Soviet Union

Having come to power in October 1917 by means of a coup d'état, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks spent the next few years struggling to maintain their rule against widespread popular opposition. They had overthrown the provisional democratic government and were inherently hostile to any form of popular participation in politics. In the name of the revolutionary cause, they employed ruthless methods to suppress real or perceived political enemies. The small, elite group of Bolshevik revolutionaries which formed the core of the newly established Communist Party dictatorship ruled by decree, enforced with terror.

This tradition of tight centralization, with decision-making concentrated at the highest party levels, reached new dimensions under Joseph Stalin. As many of these archival documents show, there was little input from below. The party elite determined the goals of the state and the means of achieving them in almost complete isolation from the people. They believed that the interests of the individual were to be sacrificed to those of the state, which was advancing a sacred social task. Stalin's “revolution from above” sought to build socialism by means of forced collectivization and industrialization, programs that entailed tremendous human suffering and loss of life.

Although this tragic episode in Soviet history at least had some economic purpose, the police terror inflicted upon the party and the population in the 1930s, in which millions of innocent people perished, had no rationale beyond assuring Stalin's absolute dominance. By the time the Great Terror ended, Stalin had subjected all aspects of Soviet society to strict party-state control, not tolerating even the slightest expression of local initiative, let alone political unorthodoxy. The Stalinist leadership felt especially threatened by the intelligentsia, whose creative efforts were thwarted through the strictest censorship; by religious groups, who were persecuted and driven underground; and by non-Russian nationalities, many of whom were deported en masse to Siberia during World War II because Stalin questioned their loyalty.

Although Stalin's successors also persecuted writers and dissidents, they used police terror more sparingly to coerce the population, and they sought to gain some popular support by relaxing political controls and introducing economic incentives. Nonetheless, strict centralization continued and eventually led to the economic decline, inefficiency, and apathy that characterized the 1970s and 1980s, and contributed to the Chernobyl' nuclear disaster. Mikhail Gorbachev's program of perestroika was a reaction to this situation, but its success was limited by his reluctance to abolish the bastions of Soviet power—the party, the police, and the centralized economic system—until he was forced to do so after the attempted coup in August 1991. By that time, however, it was too late to hold either the Communist leadership or the Soviet Union together. After seventy-four years of existence, the Soviet system crumbled.

Repression and Terror: Stalin in Control

Repression and terror: kirov murder and purges, secret police, collectivization and industrialization, anti-religious campaigns, attacks on intelligentsia: early attacks, attacks on intelligentsia: renewed attacks, attacks on intelligentsia: censorship, attacks on intelligentsia: suppressing dissidents, ukrainian famine, deportations, the jewish antifascist committee, perestroika.

During the second half of the 1920s, Joseph Stalin set the stage for gaining absolute power by employing police repression against opposition elements within the Communist Party. The machinery of coercion had previously been used only against opponents of Bolshevism, not against party members themselves. The first victims were Politburo members Leon Trotskii, Grigorii Zinov'ev, and Lev Kamenev, who were defeated and expelled from the party in late 1927. Stalin then turned against Nikolai Bukharin, who was denounced as a “right opposition,” for opposing his policy of forced collectivization and rapid industrialization at the expense of the peasantry.

Stalin and colleagues, 1929

A celebration of Joseph Stalin's 50th birthday in the Kremlin, December 21, 1929, with party members Ordzhonikidze, Voroshilov, Kuibyshev, Stalin, Kalinin, Kaganovich, and Kirov, as a statue of Lenin looks on.

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Stalin had eliminated all likely potential opposition to his leadership by late 1934 and was the unchallenged leader of both party and state. Nevertheless, he proceeded to purge the party rank and file and to terrorize the entire country with widespread arrests and executions. During the ensuing Great Terror, which included the notorious show trials of Stalin's former Bolshevik opponents in 1936–1938 and reached its peak in 1937 and 1938, millions of innocent Soviet citizens were sent off to labor camps or killed in prison.

By the time the terror subsided in 1939, Stalin had managed to bring both the party and the public to a state of complete submission to his rule. Soviet society was so atomized and the people so fearful of reprisals that mass arrests were no longer necessary. Stalin ruled as absolute dictator of the Soviet Union throughout World War II and until his death in March 1953.

Translation of letter from Rykov

The murder of Sergei Kirov on December 1, 1934, set off a chain of events that culminated in the Great Terror of the 1930s. Kirov was a full member of the ruling Politburo, leader of the Leningrad party apparatus, and an influential member of the ruling elite. His concern for the welfare of the workers in Leningrad and his skill as an orator had earned him considerable popularity. Some party members had even approached him secretly with the proposal that he take over as general secretary.

It is doubtful that Kirov represented an immediate threat to Stalin's predominance, but he did disagree with some of Stalin's policies, and Stalin had begun to doubt the loyalty of members of the Leningrad apparatus. In need of a pretext for launching a broad purge, Stalin evidently decided that murdering Kirov would be expedient. The murder was carried out by a young assassin named Leonid Nikolaev. Recent evidence has indicated that Stalin and the NKVD planned the crime.

Stalin then used the murder as an excuse for introducing draconian laws against political crime and for conducting a witch-hunt for alleged conspirators against Kirov. Over the next four-and-a-half years, millions of innocent party members and others were arrested—many of them for complicity in the vast plot that supposedly lay behind the killing of Kirov. From the Soviet point of view, his murder was probably the crime of the century because it paved the way for the Great Terror. Stalin never visited Leningrad again and directed one of his most vicious post-War purges against the city—Russia's historic window to the West.

Translation of speech of Bukharin

Study of Kirov's murder

Read the translation

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From the beginning of their regime, the Bolsheviks relied on a strong secret, or political, police to buttress their rule. The first secret police, called the Cheka, was established in December 1917 as a temporary institution to be abolished once Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks had consolidated their power. The original Cheka, headed by Feliks Dzerzhinskii, was empowered only to investigate “counterrevolutionary” crimes. But it soon acquired powers of summary justice and began a campaign of terror against the propertied classes and enemies of Bolshevism. Although many Bolsheviks viewed the Cheka with repugnance and spoke out against its excesses, its continued existence was seen as crucial to the survival of the new regime.

Once the Civil War (1918–21) ended and the threat of domestic and foreign opposition had receded, the Cheka was disbanded. Its functions were transferred in 1922 to the State Political Directorate, or GPU, which was initially less powerful than its predecessor. Repression against the population lessened. But under party leader Joseph Stalin, the secret police again acquired vast punitive powers and in 1934 was renamed the People's Comissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD. No longer subject to party control or restricted by law, the NKVD became a direct instrument of Stalin for use against the party and the country during the Great Terror of the 1930s.

Lavrenti Beria

After Stalin's death in 1953 the loyal Beria was purged from the Communist Party and power and later executed. (The young girl in Beria's lap is Stalin's daughter Svetlana; the man at right, rear, is unidentified.)

Joseph Stalin and Lavrenti Beria, a Soviet political leader and official in the secret police during the Stalin era of leadership, enjoying a rest at a dacha (a Russian country cottage).

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The secret police remained the most powerful and feared Soviet institution throughout the Stalinist period. Although the post-Stalin secret police, the KGB, no longer inflicted such large-scale purges, terror, and forced depopulation on the peoples of the Soviet Union, it continued to be used by the Kremlin leadership to suppress political and religious dissent. The head of the KGB was a key figure in resisting the democratization of the late 1980s and in organizing the attempted putsch of August 1991.

United Press

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The Soviet system of forced labor camps was first established in 1919 under the Cheka, but it was not until the early 1930s that the camp population reached significant numbers. By 1934 the Gulag, or Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps, then under the Cheka's successor organization the NKVD, had several million inmates. Prisoners included murderers, thieves, and other common criminals—along with political and religious dissenters. The Gulag, whose camps were located mainly in remote regions of Siberia and the Far North, made significant contributions to the Soviet economy in the period of Joseph Stalin. Gulag prisoners constructed the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Baikal-Amur main railroad line, numerous hydroelectric stations, and strategic roads and industrial enterprises in remote regions. GULAG manpower was also used for much of the country's lumbering and for the mining of coal, copper, and gold.

Stalin constantly increased the number of projects assigned to the NKVD, which led to an increasing reliance on its labor. The Gulag also served as a source of workers for economic projects independent of the NKVD, which contracted its prisoners out to various economic enterprises.

Conditions in the camps were extremely harsh. Prisoners received inadequate food rations and insufficient clothing, which made it difficult to endure the severe weather and the long working hours; sometimes the inmates were physically abused by camp guards. As a result, the death rate from exhaustion and disease in the camps was high. After Stalin died in 1953, the Gulag population was reduced significantly, and conditions for inmates somewhat improved. Forced labor camps continued to exist, although on a small scale, into the Gorbachev period, and the government even opened some camps to scrutiny by journalists and human rights activists. With the advance of democratization, political prisoners and prisoners of conscience all but disappeared from the camps.

Letter to Bolshevik

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In November 1927, Joseph Stalin launched his “revolution from above” by setting two extraordinary goals for Soviet domestic policy: rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. His aims were to erase all traces of the capitalism that had entered under the New Economic Policy and to transform the Soviet Union as quickly as possible, without regard to cost, into an industrialized and completely socialist state.

Stalin's First Five-Year Plan, adopted by the party in 1928, called for rapid industrialization of the economy, with an emphasis on heavy industry. It set goals that were unrealistic—a 250 percent increase in overall industrial development and a 330 percent expansion in heavy industry alone. All industry and services were nationalized, managers were given predetermined output quotas by central planners, and trade unions were converted into mechanisms for increasing worker productivity. Many new industrial centers were developed, particularly in the Ural Mountains, and thousands of new plants were built throughout the country. But because Stalin insisted on unrealistic production targets, serious problems soon arose. With the greatest share of investment put into heavy industry, widespread shortages of consumer goods occurred.

The First Five-Year Plan also called for transforming Soviet agriculture from predominantly individual farms into a system of large state collective farms. The Communist regime believed that collectivization would improve agricultural productivity and would produce grain reserves sufficiently large to feed the growing urban labor force. The anticipated surplus was to pay for industrialization. Collectivization was further expected to free many peasants for industrial work in the cities and to enable the party to extend its political dominance over the remaining peasantry.

Stalin focused particular hostility on the wealthier peasants, or kulaks. About one million kulak households (some five million people) were deported and never heard from again. Forced collectivization of the remaining peasants, which was often fiercely resisted, resulted in a disastrous disruption of agricultural productivity and a catastrophic famine in 1932–33. Although the First Five-Year Plan called for the collectivization of only twenty percent of peasant households, by 1940 approximately ninety-seven percent of all peasant households had been collectivized and private ownership of property almost entirely eliminated. Forced collectivization helped achieve Stalin's goal of rapid industrialization, but the human costs were incalculable.

Memorandum on Forced Collectivization of Livestock

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The next 1932 letter documents in great detail the devastating effects of collectivization in the Novosibirsk area of Siberia. An accompanying physician's report describes the deleterious medical conditions the famine has produced. This document is among the first detailed descriptions of the collectivization and its results in Siberia.

Letter of April 9, 1932, from Feigin to Ordzhonikidze (a close friend of Stalin's), about conditions on the Kolkhozes (collective farms)

Dr. Kiselev's memorandum of March 25, 1932, about those conditions.

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The next document is an order from Lenin to communists in Penza, August 11, 1918, demanding that they publicly hang at least 100 kulaks and confiscate their grain, to set an example.

Hanging order. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/images/ad3kula2.gif ">Page 2 .

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The Soviet Union was the first state to have as an ideological objective the elimination of religion. Toward that end, the Communist regime confiscated church property, ridiculed religion, harassed believers, and propagated atheism in the schools. Actions toward particular religions, however, were determined by State interests, and most organized religions were never outlawed.

The main target of the anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and 1930s was the Russian Orthodox Church, which had the largest number of faithful. Nearly all of its clergy, and many of its believers, were shot or sent to labor camps. Theological schools were closed, and church publications were prohibited. By 1939 only about 500 of over 50,000 churches remained open.

After Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, Joseph Stalin revived the Russian Orthodox Church to intensify patriotic support for the war effort. By 1957 about 22,000 Russian Orthodox churches had become active. But in 1959 Nikita Khrushchev initiated his own campaign against the Russian Orthodox Church and forced the closure of about 12,000 churches. By 1985 fewer than 7,000 churches remained active. Members of the church hierarchy were jailed or forced out, their places taken by docile clergy, many of whom had ties with the KGB.

Campaigns against other religions were closely associated with particular nationalities, especially if they recognized a foreign religious authority such as the Pope. By 1926, the Roman Catholic Church had no bishops left in the Soviet Union, and by 1941 only two of the almost 1,200 churches that had existed in 1917, mostly in Lithuania, were still active. The Ukrainian Catholic Church (Uniate), linked with Ukrainian nationalism, was forcibly subordinated in 1946 to the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Autocephalous Orthodox Churches of Belorussia and Ukraine were suppressed twice, in the late 1920s and again in 1944.

Attacks on Judaism were endemic throughout the Soviet period, and the organized practice of Judaism became almost impossible. Protestant denominations and other sects were also persecuted. The All-Union Council of Evangelical Christian Baptists, established by the government in 1944, typically was forced to confine its activities to the narrow act of worship and denied most opportunities for religious teaching and publication. Fearful of a pan-Islamic movement, the Soviet regime systematically suppressed Islam by force, until 1941. The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union that year led the government to adopt a policy of official toleration of Islam while actively encouraging atheism among Muslims.

Letter from Gorky to Stalin

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Here is a letter of March 19, 1922, from Lenin via Molotov to members of the Politburo, outlining a brutal plan of action against the “Black Hundreds” clergy and their followers, who were defying the government decree to remove church valuables (purported by the government to be used to fund famine relief). Lenin proposed the arrest and quick trial of the insurrectionists in Shuia, followed by a ruthless campaign to shoot a large number of the reactionary clergy and bourgeoisie and urged that removal of valuables from the richest churches and monasteries be finished quickly.

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In the years immediately following their accession to power in 1917, the Bolsheviks took measures to prevent challenges to their new regime, beginning with eliminating political opposition. When the freely-elected Constituent Assembly did not acknowledge the primacy of the Bolshevik government, Vladimir Lenin dissolved it in January 1918. The Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, which protested the action, withdrew from the Bolshevik coalition in March, and its members were automatically branded enemies of the people. Numerous opposition groups posed military threats from various parts of the country, placing the survival of the revolution in jeopardy. Between 1918 and 1921, a state of civil war existed.

Bolshevik policy toward its detractors, and particularly toward articulate, intellectual criticism, hardened considerably. Suppression of newspapers, initially described as a temporary measure, became a permanent policy. Lenin considered the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) the center of a conspiracy against Bolshevik rule. In 1919, he began mass arrests of professors and scientists who had been Kadets, and deported Kadets, Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Nationalists. The Bolshevik leadership sought rapidly to purge Russia of past leaders in order to build the future on a clean slate.

These harsh measures alienated a large number of the intellectuals who had supported the overthrow of the tsarist order. The suppression of democratic institutions evoked strong protests from academics and artists, who felt betrayed in their idealistic belief that revolution would bring a free society. Writers who had emigrated shortly after the revolution published stinging attacks on the new government from abroad. As a result, further exit permits for artists were generally denied.

The disenchantment of the majority of intellectuals did not surprise Lenin, who saw the old Russian intelligentsia as a kind of rival to his “party of a new type,” which alone could bring revolutionary consciousness to the working class. In his view, artists generally served bourgeois interests, a notion that fueled the persecution of intellectuals throughout the Soviet period.

Letter from Lenin to Gorky

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The pattern of suppressing intellectual activity, with intermittent periods of relaxation, helped the party leadership reinforce its authority. After 1923, when threats to the revolution's survival had disappeared, intellectuals enjoyed relative creative freedom while the regime concentrated on improving the country's economic plight by allowing limited free enterprise under the Lenin's New Economic Policy.

But in 1928, the Central Committee established the right of the party to exercise guidance over literature; and in 1932 literary and artistic organizations were restructured to promote a specified style called socialist realism. Works that did not contribute to the building of socialism were banned. Lenin had seen the need for increasing revolutionary consciousness in workers. Stalin now asserted that art should not merely serve society, but do so in a way determined by the party and its megalomaniacal plans for transforming society. As a result, artists and intellectuals as well as political figures became victims of the Great Terror of the 1930s.

During the war against Nazi Germany, artists were permitted to infuse their works with patriotism and to direct them against the enemy. The victory in 1945, however, brought a return to repression against deviation from party policy. Andrei Zhdanov, who had been Stalin's spokesman on cultural affairs since 1934, led the attack. He viciously denounced such writers as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Mikhail Zoshchenko, who were labeled “anti-Soviet, underminers of socialist realism, and unduly pessimistic.” Individuals were expelled from the Union of Writers, and offending periodicals were either abolished or brought under direct party control.

Zhdanov died in 1948, but the cultural purge known as the Zhdanovshchina continued for several more years. The noted filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and great composers such as Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitrii Shostakovich were denounced for “neglect of ideology and subservience to Western influence.” The attacks extended to scientists and philosophers and continued until after Stalin's death in 1953.

Memoradum on Marietta Shaginian's novel

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Creative writers enjoyed great prestige in both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union because of literature's unique role as a sounding board for deeper political and social issues. Vladimir Lenin believed that literature and art could be exploited for ideological and political as well as educational purposes. As a result, the party rapidly established control over print and electronic media, book publishing and distribution, bookstores and libraries, and it created or abolished newspapers and periodicals at will.

Communist Party ideology influenced the creative process from the moment of artistic inspiration. The party, in effect, served as the artist's Muse. In 1932 the party established socialist realism as the only acceptable aesthetic—measuring merit by the degree to which a work contributed to building socialism among the masses. The Union of Writers was created the same year to harness writers to the Marxist-Leninist cause. Goskomizdat (State Committee for Publishing Houses, Printing Plants, and the Book Trade), in conjunction with the Union's secretariat, made all publishing decisions; the very allocation of paper became a hidden censorship mechanism. Glavlit (Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs), created in 1922, was responsible for censorship, which came later in the creative process. The party's guidance had already affected the process long before the manuscript reached the censor's pen. The Soviet censorship system was thus more pervasive than that of the tsars or of most other recent dictatorships.

Mikhail Gorbachev needed to enlist the support of writers and journalists to promote his reforms. He did so by launching his policy of glasnost' in 1986, challenging the foundations of censorship by undermining the authority of the Union of Writers to determine which works were appropriate for publication. Officials from the Union were required to place works directly in the open market and to allow these works to be judged according to reader preferences, thereby removing the barrier between writer and reader and marking the beginning of the end of Communist party censorship.

List of Persons

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Statistical report of March 21, 1988, from V. Chebrikov, chairman of the KGB, detailing 1987 investigations of the distribution of anonymous publications hostile to the Soviet government and the Communist Party.

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The Communist regime considered dissent in the Soviet Union a repudiation of the proletarian struggle and a violation of Marxism-Leninism, and thus a threat to its authority. The proletariat was seen as selflessly striving for progress in the building of socialism, whereas the bourgeoisie was seen as selfishly fighting to maintain the status quo. According to Marxist ideology, class struggle was the engine of change in all social development. Vladimir Lenin's ideological contribution was to make the party itself the exclusive “vanguard of the proletariat” and thus the final arbiter of what was proletarian or bourgeois. The secret police was enlisted to enforce the party's ideology and to suppress dissent.

Because the party's legitimacy rested on the basic correctness of its ideology, failures in practical policy were never attributed to ideology itself. To maintain the party's ideological authority, religion had to be condemned outright, and history periodically revised to match the current party line. Books and magazines viewed as no longer politically correct were removed from libraries. Scientists, artists, poets, and others, including many who did not think of themselves as dissidents but whose work appeared critical of Soviet life, were systematically persecuted and even prosecuted. Often they were declared either enemies of the state and imprisoned, or insane and committed to punitive mental hospitals.

A prime mover of change was Mikhail Gorbachev, whose policy of glasnost' allowed freedom of expression and resulted in the abandonment of Marxist-Leninist ideology and a loss of legitimacy for the party.

Letter about Pasternak

Letter about Pasternak.

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In a telegram from 1971, noted Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov supports the protests of two dissidents, V. Fainberg and V. Borisov, who have been hospitalized in a Leningrad psychiatric institution for “asocial behavior.” An accompanying memorandum from the USSR Minister of Health affirms the legitimacy and advisability of hospitalizing the two dissidents in the institution, run by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and denies the use of mind-altering medications in their treatment.

Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov's telegram supporting the protests of two dissidents, V. Fainberg and V. Borisov. [image not available at this time]

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The dreadful famine that engulfed Ukraine, the northern Caucasus, and the lower Volga River area in 1932-1933 was the result of Joseph Stalin's policy of forced collectivization. The heaviest losses occurred in Ukraine, which had been the most productive agricultural area of the Soviet Union. Stalin was determined to crush all vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism. Thus, the famine was accompanied by a devastating purge of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the Ukrainian Communist party itself. The famine broke the peasants' will to resist collectivization and left Ukraine politically, socially, and psychologically traumatized.

The policy of all-out collectivization instituted by Stalin in 1929 to finance industrialization had a disastrous effect on agricultural productivity. Nevertheless, in 1932 Stalin raised Ukraine's grain procurement quotas by forty-four percent. This meant that there would not be enough grain to feed the peasants, since Soviet law required that no grain from a collective farm could be given to the members of the farm until the government's quota was met. Stalin's decision and the methods used to implement it condemned millions of peasants to death by starvation. Party officials, with the aid of regular troops and secret police units, waged a merciless war of attrition against peasants who refused to give up their grain. Even indispensable seed grain was forcibly confiscated from peasant households. Any man, woman, or child caught taking even a handful of grain from a collective farm could be, and often was, executed or deported. Those who did not appear to be starving were often suspected of hoarding grain. Peasants were prevented from leaving their villages by the NKVD and a system of internal passports.

The death toll from the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine has been estimated between six million and seven million. According to a Soviet author, “Before they died, people often lost their senses and ceased to be human beings.” Yet one of Stalin's lieutenants in Ukraine stated in 1933 that the famine was a great success. It showed the peasants “who is the master here. It cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay.”

Memorandum on Grain Problem

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Joseph Stalin's forcible resettlement of over 1.5 million people, mostly Muslims, during and after World War II is now viewed by many human rights experts in Russia as one of his most drastic genocidal acts. Volga Germans and seven nationalities of Crimea and the northern Caucasus were deported: the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachai, and Meskhetians. Other minorities evicted from the Black Sea coastal region included Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians.

Resistance to Soviet rule, separatism, and widespread collaboration with the German occupation forces were among the official reasons for the deportation of these non-Russian peoples. The possibility of a German attack was used to justify the resettlement of the ethnically mixed population of Mtskheta, in southwestern Georgia. The Balkars were punished for allegedly having sent a white horse as a gift to Adolf Hitler.

The deportees were rounded up and transported, usually in railroad cattle cars, to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kirgizia, and Siberia—areas called “human dumping grounds” by historian Robert Conquest. Most estimates indicate that close to two-fifths of the affected populations perished. The plight of the Crimean Tatars was exceptionally harsh; nearly half died of hunger in the first eighteen months after being banished from their homeland.

In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninist principles. In his “secret speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress, he stated that the Ukrainians avoided such a fate “only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them.” That year, the Soviet government issued decrees on the restoration of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic and the Kabardino-Balkar Autonomous Republic, the formation of the Kalmyk Autonomous Oblast', and the reorganization of the Cherkess Autonomous Oblast' into the Karachai-Cherkess Autonomous Oblast'. The Crimean Tatars, Meskhetians, and Volga Germans, however, were only partially rehabilitated and were not, for the most part, permitted to return to their homelands until after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Memorandum on Crimean Tatars

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The Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAC) was formed in Kuibyshev in April 1942. Two Polish Jewish socialists, Henryk Erlich and Viktor Alter (both of whom were later secretly executed), may have proposed the idea to Lavrenti Beria, the head of the NKVD. The organization was meant to serve the interests of Soviet foreign policy and the Soviet military through media propaganda—as well as through personal contacts with Jews abroad, especially in Britain and the United States, designed to influence public opinion and enlist foreign support for the Soviet war effort.

The chairman of the JAC was Solomon Mikhoels, a famous actor and director of the Moscow Yiddish State Theater. Shakne Epshtein, a Yiddish journalist, was the secretary and editor of the JAC's newspaper, Einikait (Unity). Other prominent JAC members were the poet Itsik Feffer, a former member of the Bund (a Jewish socialist movement that existed from 1897 to 1921 and supported the Mensheviks), the writer Il'ia Ehrenburg, General Aaron Katz of the Stalin Military Academy, and Boris Shimelovich, the chief surgeon of the Red Army, as well as some non-Jews from the arts, sciences, and the military.

A year after its establishment, the JAC was moved to Moscow and became one of the most important centers of Jewish culture and Yiddish literature until the German invasion. The JAC broadcast pro-Soviet propaganda to foreign audiences several times a week, telling them of the absence of anti-Semitism and of the great anti-Nazi efforts being made by the Soviet military.

In 1948, Mikhoels was assassinated by secret agents of Stalin, and, as part of a newly launched official anti-Semitic campaign, the JAC was disbanded in November and most of its members arrested.

Memorandum concerning the Jewish Antifascist Committee

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In April 1986, Chernobyl' (Chornobyl' in Ukrainian) was an obscure city on the Pripiat' River in north-central Ukraine. Almost incidentally, its name was attached to the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant located about twenty-five kilometers upstream.

On April 26, the city's anonymity vanished forever when, during a test at 1:21 A.M., the No. 4 reactor exploded and released thirty to forty times the radioactivity of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world first learned of history's worst nuclear accident from Sweden, where abnormal radiation levels were registered at one of its nuclear facilities.

Ranking as one of the greatest industrial accidents of all time, the Chernobyl' disaster and its impact on the course of Soviet events can scarcely be exaggerated. No one can predict what will finally be the exact number of human victims. Thirty- one lives were lost immediately. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Russians, and Belorussians had to abandon entire cities and settlements within the thirty-kilometer zone of extreme contamination. Estimates vary, but it is likely that some 3 million people, more than 2 million in Belarus' alone, are still living in contaminated areas. The city of Chernobyl' is still inhabited by almost 10,000 people. Billions of rubles have been spent, and billions more will be needed to relocate communities and decontaminate the rich farmland.

Chernobyl' has become a metaphor not only for the horror of uncontrolled nuclear power but also for the collapsing Soviet system and its reflexive secrecy and deception, disregard for the safety and welfare of workers and their families, and inability to deliver basic services such as health care and transportation, especially in crisis situations. The Chernobyl' catastrophe derailed what had been an ambitious nuclear power program and formed a fledgling environmental movement into a potent political force in Russia as well as a rallying point for achieving Ukrainian and Belorussian independence in 1991. Although still in operation, the Chernobyl' plant is scheduled for total shutdown in 1993.

Document on Construction Flaws

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From modest beginnings at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in 1986, perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev's program of economic, political, and social restructuring, became the unintended catalyst for dismantling what had taken nearly three-quarters of a century to erect: the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist totalitarian state.

The world watched in disbelief but with growing admiration as Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan, democratic governments overturned Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, Germany was reunited, the Warsaw Pact withered away, and the Cold War came to an abrupt end.

In the Soviet Union itself, however, reactions to the new policies were mixed. Reform policies rocked the foundation of entrenched traditional power bases in the party, economy, and society but did not replace them entirely. Newfound freedoms of assembly, speech, and religion, the right to strike, and multicandidate elections undermined not only the Soviet Union's authoritarian structures, but also the familiar sense of order and predictability. Long-suppressed, bitter inter-ethnic, economic, and social grievances led to clashes, strikes, and growing crime rates.

Gorbachev introduced policies designed to begin establishing a market economy by encouraging limited private ownership and profitability in Soviet industry and agriculture. But the Communist control system and over-centralization of power and privilege were maintained and new policies produced no economic miracles. Instead, lines got longer for scarce goods in the stores, civic unrest mounted, and bloody crackdowns claimed lives, particularly in the restive nationalist populations of the outlying Caucasus and Baltic states.

On August 19, 1991, conservative elements in Gorbachev's own administration launched an abortive coup d'état to prevent the signing of a new union treaty the following day and to restore the party's power and authority. Boris Yeltsin, who had become Russia's first popularly elected president in June 1991, made the seat of government of his Russian republic, known as the White House, the rallying point for resistance to the organizers of the coup. Under his leadership, Russia embarked on even more far- reaching reforms as the Soviet Union broke up into its constituent republics and formed the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Document on Conversion to Market Economy

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A conference convened in Leningrad in October, 1990, by the conservative communist organization “Unity—for Leninism and Communist Ideals” demanded radical changes in Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of perestroika and its implementation. Participants in the conference accused Gorbachev of following a course that would restore capitalism in the Soviet Union, and they appealed to party organizations and members to demand convocation of an extraordinary Party Congress to remove Gorbachev from power. This resolution was given to the Central Committee on November 29, 1990, and assigned for action to two Politburo members by V. Ivashko, who notes on the document, “Please think about this, and let's talk.”

Resolution by the Society “Unity, for Leninism and Communist Ideals,” October 28, 1990, expressing lack of confidence in the policies of Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Central Committee. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/images/ab3unit2.gif ">Page 2 . //www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/images/ab3unit3.gif ">Page 3 .

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