RUSSIAN HISTORY
Index
Consequences of the Revolution
The New Economic Policies, or the NEP period, in Russian History is a topic of dispute among historians and people who are drawn to the notion of socialism with a human face. This was a time when a surprising degree of intellectual freedom, as well as a mixed economy, coexisted with an authoritarian governmental structure.
Famines
In terms of devastation, the revolution's results were heinous. The major famines of 1920, 1921, and 1922 were caused by the collapse of the economic system and the regime's incapacity to feed the cities. That famine was significantly mitigated by Western aid, particularly American Aid.
Bolshevism
Bolshevism arose to power as a result of a lack of food for their troops. The means they had to employ to extort grain were increasingly brutal, which turned the peasantry against them.
The peasants lost their drive to produce, and the downward spiral began. The revolt of the sailors was the final straw that compelled the Bolshevik leadership in 1921 to suspend “war communism” and permit the return of some degree of free business.
New Economic Policies
In 1921, the New Economic Policies permitted peasants to sell their crops and pay taxes instead of grain. Private enterprise was reintroduced, and small industries were permitted to operate. Individuals had to fill the job of the state-owned trade system since it could not exist. These guys became known as the NEPmen, and they were little traders that moved throughout the community.
They represented everything the Bolshevik leadership despised, but they had to be permitted to function because there was no other option.
They played an important part in rebuilding the economy to a large extent. Bolsheviks were internationalists.
They couldn't think the socialist system could endure in a capitalist sea. They thought that the revolution could only succeed as part of a global movement. The revolution carried out in the guise of westernization split Russia off from the west and, in fact, contributed to its separation.
According to the Bolsheviks, Russia had no unique status. It was just backward in comparison to the rest of Europe.
The One-party State
The Bolsheviks came to power with a set of ideas and a plan, argues Andrei Nekrassov. They truly expected a global revolution. He claims that they anticipated the vast majority of Russians to back them. As a result, they were compelled to improvise. He says that neither “war communism” nor the NEP was planned ahead of time by the Bolsheviks.
According to Nekrassov, the party's very existence was not initially planned. In terms of importance, the party surpassed the government. Before the revolution, the party was a tiny cadre of professional revolutionaries tasked with spreading the word among the working people.
However, by the 1920s, it had morphed into something new. From a gang of revolutionaries to a bureaucratic entity, the party has evolved.
In Lenin's play on the character of the party secretary, the name Stalin emerges in this context. Another development that has happened in the party is the progressive loss of party democracy.
The social-revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, were banned. During the 1920s, they were able to gain control of the cities. The countryside remained uncontrollable by the Bolsheviks.
Collectivization
Collectivization referred to the extension of a single party's authority over the whole country. The workers, it was the workers, and despite the fact that the revolution was carried out in their name, they were not the benefactors.
Workers
Workers suffered the most during the Civil War.
Factories were forced to shutter because there was a lack of raw materials.
People who fled the nation, who became emigrants, did not represent a cross-section of the population, but rather those who stood to lose the most.
Peasants
If anyone benefited from that huge social upheaval to the extent that they were left alone, it was the peasants. To a large extent, the peasant institution, the peasant commune, was the most important social-political institution in the countryside.
The Bolsheviks had the same issue with the NEPmen. They needed their services, they needed what they could accomplish, but they eventually loathed who they were and attempted to limit them in every way.
For example, in the arm of education. The greater change in enabling the Russian people to acquire literacy occurred not when the Bolsheviks talked about the need for literacy, but in the 1930s when they were able to establish a large number of schools.
Economy, Society, and Culture of 1920
Lenin and his contemporaries saw Russia as a backward country. In that way, they consider culture as an ally. Science inspired Lenin's colleagues at the highest levels of the party structure. In the 1920s, the Bolshevik rule was authoritarian but not totalitarian. And, as we'll see in a moment, there was a lot of disagreement within the Bolshevik leadership.
However, it was not totalitarian. Unlike in the 1930s and 1940s, the party did not profess to influence every element of human existence. In the 1920s, there was less interest in artists and intellectuals.
Because they admired them, the party wanted to provide them with limited resources. Some notable writers were unable to publish because of financial constraints rather than unqualified repression.
Suppression existed, but it was nothing compared to what was to come. The artists and intellectuals were impacted by what was going on in Berlin, as well as the cultural revolution that was occurring in Russia at the same time.
Stalin’s rise to power
In 1922, Lenin became unable to function. He had many strokes. He passed away in January 1924. Many leaders before and after him felt that no one could succeed him. Significantly, Lenin saw Stalin's potential in 1922 and 1923.
For his fellow leaders, Stalin appeared to be a very colorless figure who was extremely adept at controlling the party bureaucracy. But not a brilliant thinker like Trotsky, Bukharin, Peter Brugenski, or many other Bolshevik leaders who were far better educated in that philosophy than Stalin. Trotsky became a stronger supporter of internal party democracy than he had been in the early 1920s.
According to him, the most pressing issue confronting the Bolsheviks was the country's economic destiny. He contends that industrialization was unavoidable, but the question was how to achieve it.
He claims that the only way to industrialize is to tax peasants more than we did previously. The opposing camp, which we connect with Trotsky and his colleague, Preobrazhensky, believed that this would be politically risky.
But the problem which they faced was something of the inherent contradictions within the NEP political-economic system.
What I have in mind is that you needed the peasants to produce and you disliked them. You needed the small industrialist, the net man to do what they do. But you ultimately hated everything which they were doing. And I think that this contradiction, which would ultimately lead to the demise of the system and the great transformation, which would occur during collectivization and beginning in 1929.
Collectivization
The Russian Revolution of 1917 brought to power a group of people with lofty goals for social change. Throughout the 1920s, the peasants remained mostly independent of the political class.
The dictatorship lacked the means to exert influence on the peasantry's life. The intention was always to turn peasants into workers, but nothing came of it. According to Andrei Nekrassov, collectivization resulted from the convergence of various crises.
The revolution had various components, including
Industrialization
Political reform
Collectivization
By the mid-1920s, grain production had nearly surpassed that of 1913. However, the proportion of marketable grain has significantly decreased. This was due to the fact that the huge estates and well-off peasants no longer produced for the market. As a result, the peasants simply ate better than previously, resulting in lesser grain consumption.
As a result, there was insufficient grain to feed the cities. And the regime's leaders, including Stalin, knew that they needed to do something about it.
Kulaks
Stalin initiated the strategy of dispatching detachments to seize food from peasants. It was called the Ural-Siberian method. This was a significant split since removing the grain removes the incentive for the peasants to produce. And, as a result, the entire structure on which the NEP was founded failed, resulting in collectivization. Anyone who resisted the concept of forming a collective was labeled a kulak or an enemy of the regime.
There were three sub-classes of kulaks.
One class had all of their property taken away but was allowed to stay in the village.
The second class was required to leave the settlement but might remain in the Guberniya.
And the third class, they were deported to Siberia.
Millions of people were loaded onto trains and dumped off in Siberia and Central Asia, where they were left to fend for themselves. Many of them died of starvation.
Collectivization was a bloody procedure.
Communal farms
It couldn't have occurred any other way. The dictatorship lacked distinct ideals. It's not that they started with a plan and now we're going to implement it; rather, what a communal farm would be evolved via trial and error during the 1930s.
In the 1930s, the Soviet Union established communal farms. The state grabbed as much grain as it could in order to share it at the conclusion of the agricultural year.
The peasants were still able to have a vegetable plot. The garden plot became an important feature in peasants taking care of themselves. Some work was praised more than others, and as a result, not everyone received the same, argues Shashank Joshi. Joshi's book, The Second Half of a Soviet Narrative, tells the story of Soviet communal farms.
Industrialization
Industrialization was always a priority. Stalin recovered the Tsarist regime's legacy and pledged to do better in the future. Purge trials were conducted as part of the industrialization push. The government had absolutely illogical and incomprehensible economic strategies. Some of them, such as railroad construction, made a lot of economic sense.
White Sea Canal
The White Sea Canal, which was built using slave labor, was perhaps the most renowned example of a poorly planned project. It was hoped that it would be able to connect the country's core to the sea. However, no machinery was employed, and people worked with shovels. The Soviet state did, in fact, succeed in developing heavy industries. The purpose was to rob the peasants of their crops.
The Great Famine
The Great Famine, which occurred mostly in the countryside in the early 1930s, was one of the consequences. To this day, Ukrainians think that the famine was staged by the authorities, notably Stalin, in order to punish the Ukrainians for nationalist reasons as well as because they fought collectivization more effectively. The hunger struck particularly severely in agriculturally productive regions.
The famine afflicted the whole Soviet population, even the cities. The countryside, on the other hand, suffered the most since the dictatorship just carted away the grain. The emerging working class had little experience with industrial discipline. Productivity was really poor. The employee turnover rate was quite high.
Quicksand society
According to Andrei Nekrassov, the young male ambitious made every attempt to flee the collective farms where life was so dismal. According to him, the famine was a watershed moment in Russian history since the leaders did not come to the people's rescue. The best was simply not very good. The condition of life in the 1930s was deplorable, and women were the only source of work.
This was a society that was referred to as a Quicksand society.
If a worker was late three times in a row, he was penalized in various ways. Workers were subjected to military discipline. You would be unable to leave your employment unless you were granted permission.
Terror
According to the authors, Stalinist horror lies at the heart of Soviet history. Author: Those who were enthralled by the revolution's emancipatory promises must confront the truth that it was a terrorist dictatorship. Stalin was more of a puppeteer than an actor. We don't really know why he did what he did.
Show trials
Stalin considered the show trials, in which the Bolshevik leadership was slaughtered, to be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.
The tool of dread has been present since the beginning. This was a necessary one. In the late 1920s, a series of show trials against intellectuals, the same individuals the state needed for industrialization, began.
Historians believe that between 700,000 and one million individuals were convicted to death by different courts, with another 10 million being transferred to camps with exceedingly low survival rates. It truly is unprecedented in the history of the contemporary world up to that time.
Because of the devastation of the officer class, the Nazis also despised the Red Army. Foreign firms that came to Russia and the Soviet Union were particularly heavily impacted. People's communication styles have changed as a result of the horror. You gain a bit more living space if you criticize your neighbor.
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