History 104Europe from Napoleon to the PRESENT

5 March 2008

Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalinism

Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk OblastRussia

postage stamp depictingMarx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin

(Soviet Union, 1954)

Introduction

The Bolsheviks came to power in Russia in October 1917. Their success was facilitated by:• widespread popular dissatisfaction with the war

• the ideology of a “revolutionary vanguard”(which made it possible to imagine theCommunist Revolution happening even whenmost people were still peasants)

• the particular conditions produced by Russia’srapid industrialization in the period 1880-1914

What effects and consequences did these particularcircumstances have for the regime? To what extent did the Stalinismof the 1930s represent a break from the earlier years of the RussianRevolution? Was the Soviet Union a communist country in this era?

soldiers and workers on streets(November 1917)

1917: Russian Revolution (background)

Feb.-March 1917 massive protests in Petrograd;troops refuse to fire on protesters

1 March Nicholas II abdicates

Provisional Government(s)authority unofficially divided between Duma &Petrograd Workers’ Soviet (soviet = council);Soviet’s “Order Number One” calls on troops toorganize themselves, elect officers

Lenin’s April Theses call for: end to “imperialist” war;rejection of parliamentary government; national confiscation of landed estates

July Days street demonstrations in support of Soviet taking full control

August “Kornilov Affair”-threat of military coup

Sept. 5-9 Petrograd and Moscow soviets pass resolutions in support of Bolshevikprogram: “Peace, Land, Bread”

October Bolsheviks, claiming to defend soviets from military, take power

Russian Revolution: From February to October

“Only the close cooperation of worker and peasantwill save Russia from desperation and hunger”

Civil War poster

Russian Civil War, 1917-1923

Red Army: over 5,000,000 men (mainly peasant draftees)

50,000 officers from former Imperial Army

White Armies – distinct armies, each led by officers from Imperial Army

supported by British, American, and Japanese troops

War: Civil War“Great Siberian Ice March,” Jan-March 1920(retreat of White Army led by Vladimir Kappel)

farthest advance of Admiral Kolchak’s White Army, summer 1919

American, British,Canadian troops

Japanese and US troops

Denekin’s Armyfall 1919

Cossack, it’s us or them: who are you with?

Civil War and the Polarization of Society

War: Civil War

Dmitry Moor, 1920

…fundamental aims: abolition of all exploitationof man by man; the complete elimination of thedivision of society into classes; the ruthlesssuppression of exploiters; the establishment ofa socialist organisation of society and the victoryof socialism in all countries…

Constitution of the Russian Socialist FederalSoviet Republic, July 1918.

From a small group of partisans to a mighty Red Army!

Jacques Louis David, BonaparteCrossing the Alps (1800)

Trotsky = Lev Davidovich Bronstein(1879, Ukraine-1940, Mexico)

1898-1900 jailed for political opinions1900-1902 exiled to Siberia1902-1904 in London1905-1906 returns to Russia; jailed;

exiled to Siberia1907-1914 lived in Vienna1914-1917 in Switzerland

1917-1918 People’s Commisar for ForeignAffairs; negotiates peace with Germany

1918-1920 Commisar of War, in charge ofof organizing Red Army

1925 forced to resign as War Commisar1928-1933 exile in Kazakhstan, then Turkey1933-1935 exile in France1935-1940 exile in Mexico; lived for a time

with painters Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo;1940 assassinated by agent of NKVD

“Be on Guard!”—poster signed “Trotsky,” 1921

War: Civil War

Civil War and Militarization of the Bolsheviks : Rise of Trotsky

Gustav Klutsisphoto-montage poster,

“Long live world October”

Hindu and Korean, Englishman, Persian, Frenchman, Chinese, Turk, and allthe rest: they all spoke, and spoke of imperialism, which carried away by its greed has dug its own grave and now is drowning in the blood of nations. … In this unanimous funeral dirge for the past, the real meaning was the joyous announcingof the future,summoning the nations to aid resurgent revolutionary Russia…In every speech, there was confidence that Russia, who by the will of historiy is taking it on herself to be the vanguard of Socialism, will play her great and difficult part with honor and with success.

It was wonderful to listen to these many-tonguedspeeches full of a single feeling—and to know thatthe rationally directed will of the people is capableof working miracles.

The attention of the whole world is intent on the Russianworker-socialist. He appears before the peoples of theEarth as the creator of new forms of life. By the willof history he is teacher and example to millions of men.

Maxim Gorky, “Soviet Russia and the Nationsof the World” (1919).

Ideology of revolutionary vanguard

Revolutionary enthusiasm and making of a new world

Ideology of revolutionary vanguard

Women’s Rights and Gender Roles in the early Soviet Union

Worker and peasant women –all should go to the polls!

Gather under the Red Banner with men!Bring fear to the bourgeoisie!

N. Valerianov, 1925

1917 universal suffrage proclaimedby Bolsheviks, includes women

United Kingdom 1928Spain 1931France 1945Italy 1946Greece 1952Switzerland 1971 (federal)

1990 (all cantons)

Women’s strike on InternationalWomen’s Day begins Feb. Revolution

1918-1922 laws mandated: equal pay for equal workno stigma attached to unwed mothersdivorce on demand

You, there, don’t trifle with booze

You’d rather thrash it.

Culturally, roughly,Powerfully, wrathfully,

Smash daily, At your every step,

Give no rest to the enemy.(1930)

Ideology of revolutionary vanguard

Self-Righteousness and the Puritanical Aspects of Stalinism

I was very happy. The Bolsheviksplanned their economy and had movedfrom the fetishization of material goods(which, my parents had taught me, wasone of the chief ills of our American civilization). I saw that most Russiansate only black bread, wore one suituntil it disintegrated, and used oldnewspapers for writing letters and forvarious personal functions. I was going to be part of this society. I was going to be one of the many who did not care to owna second pair of shoes, but who built blast furnaces which were their own. It wasSeptember 1932 and I was twenty years old.

John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel (1942).

Come, comrades, join usin the collective farm!

Beautiful as Birds all in a row Songs fly above the Soviet Land The happy refrain of the cities and fields “Life’s getting better and happier too!”

The country is growing and singing as one, It forges everyone’s joy with its songs. Look at the sun – the sun’s brighter too!“Life’s getting better and happier too!”

Vasily Lebedev-Kemach, “Life is Getting Better” (1936)

Lenin and Trotsky, October 1919

Ideology of revolutionary vanguard

Ideology and the Falsification of History

Ideology of revolutionary vanguard

De-kulakization, Forced Resettlement, and the Gulag

kulak –high income farmers; literally meaning “tight fisted”

Identifying features of a kulak (USSR Council of Ministers, 1929)•using hired labor•owning a mill, a creamery, or other complex equipment•systematic renting out of equipment or facilities (barns, etc.)•involvement in commerce, money-lending, or other “non-labor” activity

kolkhoz (collective farmers) marching with bannerthat reads “we will liquidate the kulaks as a class”

Our husbands are separated from us. They are off lumbering somewhere, and we women, old people, and small children are left behind to languish in churches. As many as 2000 of us have been packed into each church where plank beds have been put up three stories high so there is always a steamy mist in the air. We have all become sick …In the course of six weeks, as many as 3000 children have been buried in the Vologda cemetery.... We brought a supply of food with us, but when they moved us, the local officials took it away....

petition from 50,000 women exiled during collectivization (from Siegelbaum, Stalinismas a Way of Life)

The October Revolution——bridge to a bright future

Industrialization

Revolution as Modernization

One feature of the history of the oldRussia was that she was constantlysuffering beatings because of herbackwardness… We are still 50 or 100years behind the advanced countries.We must catch up in ten years. Eitherwe catch up, or we go under.

Stalin, speech, February 1931.

Magnitogorsk

population of Magnitogorsk1928 less than 2,0001939 145,870

Metric tons

Actual 1926

Goal 1928

Newgoal

Lastgoal

Actual1932

coal 35.4 68 75 105 64

oil 11.7 19 22 55 21.4Iron ore 5.7 15 19 16 6.2

Industrialization

The First Five-Year Plan: Let’s do it in Four!

Alexei G. Stakhanov (1906-1977),cover of Time magazine 1935