PRIVILEGE

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Challenge of Modernity
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The Russian Empire,
The Soviet Union and the
Challenge of Modernity

DAVID CHRISTIAN

Ey LONGMAN
Pearson Education Australia Pty Limited
95 Coventry Street
South Melbourne 3205 Australia

Offices in Sydney, Brisbane and Perth, and associated companies throughout the world.

Copyright © David Christian 1986, 1994

First published 1986
Reprinted 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992
Second edition 1994
Reprinted 1997, 2001, 2002 (twice)

All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Copyright Act 1968 of
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Cataloguing-in-Publication data
Christian, David.
Power and privilege: the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the challenge of
modernity.
2nd ed.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 0 582 80114 1.

1. Russia — History 2. Soviet Union — History. I. Title

947

Front cover. Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Soviet-Union 1878-1939: A Fantasy. 1925. Oil on canvas. 50
x 64.5 cm. Collection: The Russian Museum, Leningrad.

Painted during the transitional era of the 1920s by a non-Communist artist who remained in
the Soviet Union, A Fantasy is profoundly ambiguous. The red horse leaps into the future,
leaving behind the traditional world of the village and its church. But the rider is looking
nervously backwards, and the horse threatens to trample and destroy the village from which it
has come. Whose is the fantasy?

The
publisher's
policy is to use
paper manufactured
from sustainable forests
PREFACE TO THE
SECOND EDITION

This is a revised edition of a book first published in 1986. The first edition of Power and
Privilege appeared at the start of the changes that led to the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991. The second edition reflects those changes in many ways.
First, it is larger. It includes two new chapters on Soviet history since Stalin. These
bring the story up to December 1991, when the Soviet flag last flew over the Kremlin.
The last chapter tries to make sense of the astonishing revolution that occurred after I
had finished writing the first edition. I do not discuss the post-Soviet period.
Second, the collapse of the Soviet experiment has changed the questions we must
ask. Instead of asking whether the Soviet attempt to build a better and fairer society
could still succeed, we must now ask why it failed. Was Socialism always an impossible
dream? Or are there particular reasons for the failure to build Socialism in this
particular society in the twentieth century?
Third, the opening of Soviet libraries and archives has shed new light on many
aspects of Soviet history. The new materials have not yet transformed our knowledge
of Soviet history; that may happen over the next decade or two. But they have provided
new information on some important issues such as the number of people in labour
camps in the 1930s and 1940s.
Finally, I must admit that perestroczka proved many of my own judgements on the
Soviet system wrong. The Soviet system turned out to be weaker than I believed it to be
in 1985. My only consolation for this blunder is that I was in good company. Very few
writers in the Soviet Union or elsewhere predicted the speed and extent of the collapse
that occurred in the late 1980s. One of the few who did was the dissident historian and
dramatist, Andrei Amalrik (1938-80), though even he got the mechanism wrong. In
1969, he wrote a famous essay which asked: ‘Will the Soviet Union survive until 1984?’
His answer was: ‘No. It will collapse after a prolonged war with China.’ Amalrik died in
a car accident in Europe before he could see how close he came to the truth.
The basic structure of Power and Privilege remains the same. So does its approach.
This is not an encyclopedic coverage of modern Russian and Soviet history, but an
interpretation—one historian’s attempt to make sense of an extremely complex
period. It still concentrates on the interrelated themes of politics and economics, and
their impact on society and government. This means that it deliberately neglects some
POWER AND PRIVILEGE

important topics such as international relations or religious and intellectual history,

except where these have a bearing on our central questions. However, I have tried to
be more sensitive to issues of Nationalism, whose great importance appeared clearly in
the 1980s. The book’s new sub-title emphasises this change. This is a history not of a
single nation, but of two successive empires, each ruling over many distinct regions,
some of which are now independent nations. The change in emphasis causes some
awkwardness: it is easier to say ‘Russia’ than ‘the Tsarist Empire’. Nevertheless, it
should help correct the excessively Russo-centred outlook of the first edition. I must
confess, though, that Power and Privilege is still a history of two imperial states. It still
describes the past mainly from the viewpoint of St Petersburg and Moscow.
I remain convinced that a long view of history is necessary to make sense of the
present. The profound changes of the 1980s have confirmed that belief for, as I will
argue, perestroika, like Stalinism, had very deep roots in the history of this region of the
world.
This edition retains the emphasis on modernisation. The theme is stressed even in
the book’s new sub-title. To help explore this theme more systematically, the
introduction now includes a theoretical section on economic growth, along with the
section on power that appeared in the first edition. The new section explains how the
book handles the theme of economic growth, and the challenges this posed to
traditional governments and societies. The section on power has been rewritten to
make more of the role of consent in power relations and to avoid the exaggerated stress
on coercion of the first edition. This change in emphasis reflects the influence of
Ernest Gellner’s superb, Nations and Nationalism.
Readers may choose to skip these theoretical discussions at a first reading, but they
should come back to them if they run into difficulties with the argument of later
chapters.
Some changes reflect the evolution of my own ideas, and the appearance of new
research on Russian and Soviet history. Since 1986 there have appeared many fine
studies on the social history of both nineteenth century Russia and the Soviet Union.
These reflect the interests of a new generation of western historians in Russia and the
Soviet Union. Like myself, most were students during the 1960s, and they viewed
Russian and Soviet history differently from their teachers, whose outlook was shaped
by World War II and the Cold War. Many amongst the newer generation of scholars
had a more sympathetic approach than their teachers to the Soviet experiment, and
to its intellectual forerunners, Marx and Lenin. Indeed, in our attempts to avoid the
cruder Cold War stereotypes we sometimes underestimated the failings of Soviet
society and exaggerated its successes. Under the influence of the new social history,
historians of my generation also took great interest in the world of ordinary men and
women, of nineteenth century peasants, or twentieth century factory workers. Their
work explains the increased emphasis this edition gives to the lives of women and men
who did not belong to the elite world of St Petersburg or Moscow.
Recent research has led me to downplay the role of the state in the profound
economic and social changes of the late nineteenth century. I have also modified my
account of Stalinism. However, recent work has confirmed my account of Stalinism as
the product of an entire ruling group rather than of a single, ruthless politician. It has
also stressed the limits to Stalin’s control over Soviet society, depicting a less efficient
and more ramshackle Stalinism, very unlike the smooth running, all-powerful
dictatorship of totalitarian theory.
PREFACE Vil

Finally, there are minor changes throughout the text. I have made numerous
stylistic changes. Hardly a sentence of the old edition remains intact. Most changes try
to clarify or simplify a complex argument. I have included new documents and new
material at many points in the text. The bibliography includes many recent
publications, as well as revised editions of older publications. There is an expanded
Table of contents, which should help readers navigate more easily through the book.
The introduction ends with a summary of the overall argument.
I hope these changes will not merely bring Power and Privilege up to date, but will
also make it more useful.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface to the Second CqitiON) <....005-5s5.c2.se0seeneeseessecsesentcnnscecenaesongnenoetgsame@teenorsmaacsseseazmae Vv

INTRODUCTION ...........csccccsssoscooscsssssesesscesaccocssessonecsssstscssssesscoosssscsscscsecossccseoees 1
IW EVNWe(dso) she oreay Smyre Fes tener ey cree enn mem CoB PPC earns hon meena eres eRC one sacar 1
Theory: A) Mobilising resources ...,:5<.ecs..csspese<soarescennensecteoeseninpte+enceotensencsnensaevensasearaun’ 4
Theory: B) Direct mobilisation and state POWET ...........ssssesserscererecseseeeneesseosescssoees5
Theory: C) Indirect mobilisation, economic growth and the ‘modern’ revolution . 9
PASS TOTMMATVATIV IO LUI cA WICINU spo eas eye ae anette anes eneens osee sete neal eect arcree rere eee 15

CHAPTER ONE: MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TIMES ............cceeeesseseeeees 18

‘he Setting Of Russian. NistOLry c-.:.c.00<se=sssesescaosesest-cst dhsssezevezesatctecesesssesuccuctopseotenarwaeeeane 18
RIC VATA RUS oocnsss nas doespaonsd Dacceneswasaceuecsnovaessasspagssanvasekadisnas auncose¥ensiau\ieananddieaeseyadassseecusearoaeee 21
Ros unter the Mongols, [240% 1480 5ois ccc nsec casters tsuneo cesseo stem entoseses enters eames 26
Muscovite Russia: the sixteenth and seventeenth Centuries ..............::csecceeeeeeseeee 32
Imperial Russia: the eighteeinthy CEMtury oc cscsccssscsvocestea-seacssuass cecsgesseces cesmeesconeseucoseee 39.

CHAPTER TWO: THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH

CEN TRY ccscaccsccsvarcessvocacctssatescresseauaeneer Cesceseeseetsorscvevest ster cestcee tees seaeecte ceeeaate 47
AC pie mOderiy SOcial StruCtire’.c...cc.sescsaracqenecso<tesot ceete eers uote ort eee eee 47
Thte- productive ‘classes: agriculture and the peasaniry «os. xceeece eee eee 50
Paxationsand the rédistibution Of wealthy cyrgscccccteescresctere ere eee eee 63
PRE OTE PLOGUClIVe CLASSES cee.-cssaconcsseue-ns tenth eneee eters ceceeenest tr Wiican ere ee 67
Towards the modern world

CHAPTER THREE: THE ‘GREAT REFORMS’ AND THE RISE OF A

REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT iic..ticctescseaessecertetesutsesecceenscereneteteecceeeenceee
teeta 75
CAUSES OF THE TELOTIMS ecseestsarersensanesecdsinses soocecosssner eecteneeere eeenema mene nee etee 75
TIETPELOTIN "PLOCOSS irestscoceeecstencetis dese cues tsesmc anscusuate nse eneteete tee canta es aetna eee eee eee ee 83
THE VETOTINS Tir.scocs-nateccecesescteraacs rscssoecsottestsassusacssttageceeeceenteretaeemtGn Gamer mt aettet mee ee eran 85
Assessing the "Great RETOTINS i tacscsecssevceoesec+.c00csre1 a=seo tene eRe ee ee 89
The emergence’of the revoluuionary movemient..............ceisee ee eee u2

CHAPTER FOUR: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE BEFORE 1914 ......... 100
The challenge of the ‘modern’ revolution in the Russian Empire ..............:00008 100
Before 1850: government strategies and spontaneous modernisation ..............0.+- 101
TABLE OF CONTENTS ix

1850 to 1914: economic change and government POicy ....c.cccscsssesessessesestsseeseeseess 103

PRSSCSSINIELT CON OM IONSHO WIN Grnik etd: Sncees Ares Me MRR a NO GUNTE AIN as cn ssssesenvone 109
Economic growth and social change, 1861 to 1914.......cccscsessseescssseseststessecseeseenes 15
Conclusion: was there a viable strategy of grOWtH? .......ccscssssesesesssseseseseseseeseseseecevens 122

CHAPTER FIVES THE 1905 REVOLUTION .cscscesscsossescsevcstscecssesssesssnsscersenessesss 125

WNocking class discontent 21th LR EN. Se ae Me hee AO, csocvesnsienises 125
DESION SWALI NLLLe UMN G,TOU sc.n.cccovaietttee aie tte oe eee AU RNREN <5 tte e cere 129
Militaryidisaster: the Russo—Japanese.wall.....4 0414. %h Obese iat Ree he deasansndezecaesee 136
ISVs TAIENG age eeRokk cinetics patos ete eoneev nceev nee ak secieades See eeeae aN aie ee aoe ee 137
Suriving the revolution, 1905, (0 L906 & csccvcrccmccnnnacostlene
Poneeeetata ctat tor aseesnensacees
ee 140

CHAPTER SIX: THE FINAL DECADE OF TSARIST RULE AND THE

FEBRUARY REVOLUTION 2. c2KtEs ii ncksicdicncdodetostctton dooateokcncnshenauetececetsnsessens 147
pee stolypusetas |G06 tO: 1A cans sesctmelsns copsnasccneguasenennsc
tate Aedee eeme ceases sacceaces148
Uivem sarist SOverMMeENnt 1101 9A o...seontwonacon, Seen teeeCee eae Reaetna onsneeeneaces152
PPE RMP ACL OL WAL -mnconnasdennie MER ORERCE -RECELES. ON Rae SEET RE LEA RDM canon ooh 155
ADEM ebrUuary REVOIMlOmerw rise Ie. A TALE IL REAR MITT ER os ass onstler seers 163
Could the, [sarist goyernmentilhavessurviyed ens: %, 1n0vis.dsttsshddedes. qeuaesdlgeecsassvassnessese 166

CHAPTER SEVEN? 1917 <1 :5:.0222-c0s<sr--sesotecshsd

ssgpperctadchs stchoureeosesueegcusteducssoseesececers 170
Thetornation ot the Provisional Government (2,.i..ct-cjatetesnacceyensontiee-ssedezsvesencedete 170
DecimerorhePromsionaliGovermnlen tei aiwa mne-ctce haecachaage se onsen tvmeeesnadeduwrsaes 173
Boliticalaltermatives diel OU 71s dua aonieebndic Ok Na Reece. eae hn near neaeeenead 179
hewise ote letiwin alternatives: sient testavestenncse2ees
frateeea eateseen ester catene ear 180
Thei© ctoberinsurrecticracgen, osetia SRR ae es ea ae eee ec ear os eaeees 187

CHAPTER EIGHT: CIVIL WAR AND THE ORIGINS OF A NEW SOCIAL

CPR ier os oc ca.cstaco ss sc cnnleosoqeanlo were ol se chases vopsons Mean henecsmenomimaabteasancs tant oshecennane’ 193
INScevaENGINO) Chis tite Reto k con cade okob de ovwcnns oho unaastepag Bexp dunsantevalunsdeaeeapon maaan ceuchas eeeademtraueceesat- use 193
The new Soviet government: the first six MONHS.......... seen eeteeetseeeeeeseeeeeenees 194
THe Agi tO WATS ICIVAIL WATE: « <dncocusansssansece theo ettoonat on comentee nusece stan dumtncmeen seeetane de tecsssinaaoars 198
BVA eaeMCD UETALULA ESPON Geeateries rsscid seb commie aso dniaaicoprpnaninn einacht REAM Mae Reha Oeemaaea eee wscesieleatves 200
Military ViCtOLY ......00.ssccsssssesssesssnsnenesecssncesneneaccensssesesessnseasssvesonsavessnoneasseneseneseaneaesenenses 209
Why did the Communists Win? ........sssesesesesesseeseesssestenesesesesesseneneeseneneneneasenenenensens 212
Direct mobilisation and the Communist CXPeriMENt .........ccceseeseeeeeeteeereeeseeeeeeenes 214

CHAPTER NINE: THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY .......cccccssssecrsssseeeresscceeeescees 217

Defeat in VICtOTY ......sscssssesesssseneseseseceeseneneneneessnssnessssessssnssesseessesessnersnnaneneneseenenenensans 217
The introduction of the New Economic Policy .......:ccsccsceeneeereeereenseeeneeeneeenseenssenas nae
Nep and modernisation: the great debate... sees eeseases 224
ASTyee TACs LAN Eo a ee eae ea sera cee ttt tae Poe soe Se adehebsanwe rnataddoomecmicchedsrsschnsdaaeesees 230
NEP and the changing political Structure «0.0... ccceeeseseeeeeeeeetenerereeseseneetereesesens 233
The crisis of modernisation: from indirect to direct mobilisation ............ esses 240

CHAPTER TEN: COLLECTIVISATION AND INDUSTRIALISATION ............. 243

(Miso eiall TEVOlITL@ ie. sari fecetesacaereontdentsee Spicni= cotcaha on ssanda tb tceb ora GasaSaeee aan tvckanmrsadduees 243
Go llechiviSat iOnna ater ees.ce ans seasMacgobe dase cov arer te apseevap dae asecncebndonnene somnshynuseauvedaquens oseteeatysaelsne 244
TCs teased OM orespescacones sneadeSetaeeps teen eacon: voncenasoensstenndubs fete diaera vemos saaereaaecessannndebaaees 252
POWER AND PRIVILEGE

CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE STALINIST POLITICAL ORDER ..........sscceeeseseeseees 265

The impact of collectivisation and the first Five-Year Plan: 1928 to 1934...........+. 265
Terror and Stalin’s rise to domination: 1934 to 1939.0... cescesseeeneesseeeeeeeeeneeeees Zike
Mobilising suppotrt............ miavtg cca vekseses sctvastctdecea tdci guess staeeeh snbtdaueMinens <teieees sien cocancee 281
Was Stalin really NeCessary? o..:cmncestectat orsscsssucsus youtoo 285
ontts)poburstaedere netssanssarerenctesucnestennrs

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR ........cccscssesseeceeeeeeeeeneeenees 291

Foreign. policy, L917 tol G41 ri... ssaceentedee se certe hes ated ase n Ia Ment See aee eRe nace sons canter 291
TheSoviet, Unionin 1941 ......2eitceesntt cesses eee ee, Sete. cd od meee tay ees eens on eeneanacean: 295
DETAGAWAL scuscstsceceele deans seins ochalseapncnenbasseeen eh cetet eps to haan tates unease aac ame eRe Scceoe Seances 207
LE) TPAC OL WAP, ......2-cisessnenasindeestnons doetinereeeasusteOnemmeabes wactontabae dupredteneteeasssaacdaaseveers 306
Reconstruction and. Cold War vcsssassessteattessssotsstssessea-cs esssaaee
penensecrecee qeencee eee 309

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: REFORMING THE STALINIST SYSTEM,

1953 TO 1964 0.0... scsccscsssessssrocsocssssssscsnivesscssssissstucorssosscecectsssssbsatussasessaasenassescecsss 316
Soviet. history after Stalin: 25..5..3s.scssesessus deonceosecebvapAdaedecett
dadtteceds tase teceradsta:cazsscaesroencs 316
Early: manoeuvres ald, PaNiC CONCESSIONS ..s5.225.52-ccasnones 44-eoaosetOer, 4020s040e foane-oaesoeaeeera 318
Politicalichanges.and. the struggle for. successvOm Sicicrrcsect
aesses snare saee-tesesnaesassaneose 320
Social, economic and ideological retOrmie atte ncatn. cess contecsacoet se oetaeneteed anaascemaanceac 328
Poreignsalrairs: the: Soviet, Union as a SUPel DOWER ersccccconcescce
stotsste-oeteee eee 333
mbalance sheet: 1953: towlOO4 wre senctenasit tem oes escent
ae cca acencanne525

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: CONSOLIDATION, STAGNATION AND

CHANGE, 1964.1 O 1982) ..<.sccsssecnscconeaneanschtsauanetsee soteecesstantunetatttstedctansacsiseasunes 338
A rresralinng gro up, cwcsysseshindadescdaecses
dann Abelese seoeeeenegee RE Me ET: NE REE Bao concerns 338
Social_change, dissidence and the loss.of legitimacy (222.2081 tSeoeteeensccececsesees S45
ECOMOMINASEARTI ALON ss ctianccssstecndwautbavtadect
evecutaesuseeteote acently: eect tee ets ees 350
ASPEN DOWEL WU CECIIMNC ric caetiascs ck docee ted colnet cone teehee PD stato ean 357
Conclusion stagnation and change sacevrticsszee eos ev ense seston 358

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: PERESTROIKA AND THE END OF THE SOVIET

EXPERIMENT) 1982) TO: 199 1n.,.c.voassccnsss contedentosseseronsee
ices cleesateisemeanene eeaesseanee 361
Me mn Cer O11L015 a acnsiewsnoesrorsinswanbnnenndnnione
anne teresooeeee sSee aaRe a een ot eee 361
The beginnings of reformsl985: to 1 987........co-seconensosceaalte
eon mente ee 72 ee 365
Reforming, the:command é€conomy:,1987iMo1989 unawen nee ePee.... 368
Crisis:,1989 £01990 Gas cersie eects sects tet...) casks. Dn ces ee, ee 374
Collapse 990) COs 99 Beseers. sc. .taterisvacnsasandune ond: acesssacdsessar eee ema on 380
CONCLUSION: WHY DID THE SOCIALIST EXPERIMENT FAIL? .............0002 385
Avprematuremevolution 2xaye eee ee west eee Tce 385
The Staliniststrategy.of growth: wat, 20). cee ee. 386
Missed opportunities? Alternative ‘engines of growth’? .......c.cccsccssccsscscssescssescseeees 386
The future of theisocialist; proj eethiie ten seet Brians an 387

Statisticaliap Perix ipacstseactuahsaaereeane.

oucheee ee oS 05) onan cece ee 389
Aninotated bibliography =..cu Sime anne ee, eee Ae ee 392
Glossary wscccicinscaiides esti AE ITLL 396
Chronology ieiiie ihe ROP ee ee 400
Acknowledgments 2. seweohiitea.oltttli ee ee 407
Landen 6.5.28. dace cit SERRE Ro 410
 INTRODUCTION

MAIN ‘THEMES
This book is a history of the Russian and Soviet Empires since the middle of the
nineteenth century. It is not a textbook in the conventional sense. Instead, it offers an
interpretation of the history of Russia and the Soviet Union in the modern period. It
tries to rethink the history of two great empires during a period of violent change.
Though it tells a story, it is more concerned to make sense of that story than to tell it in
encyclopedic detail, forIstart from the assumption that history consists of more than
facts and dates. Like any scientific enquiry it also tries to answer questions, to solve
problems. This means that the historian’s first duty to the reader is to explain the
questions being asked, and the way in which they are being tackled. That is the task of
this chapter.

Sov mpires. To understand the importance of this problem, we need some clear
ideas about the revolutionary changes that have created today’s world.

World history: the two great transitions

The agrarian transition
There have been two main changes in human society since modern human beings
evolved as a distinct species during the last one hundred thousand years. The
appearance of agricultural societies in a world dominated by hunters and gatherers
was the first such change. The second has occurred during the last two centuries and
continues today. It has created the world we inhabit and has made us what we are.
n the Australian
The first change was labelled the ‘neolithic’ revolutioby
archaeologist, V. Gordon Childe. It began with the emergence of farming in several
different parts of the world from about 10 000 years ago. For several thousand years
after that, small farming communities co-existed with nomadic communities of hunters
and gatherers. However, the two types of society were very different. Most nomadic
surplus
societies have little need to store up surplus goods, for travelling people find
2 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

goods a nuisance. This meant there could be no real division between rich and poor,
so hunter-gatherer societies were relatively egalitarian. Settled communities of farmers
are very different. Farmers have to create and store surpluses, if only to tide them over
to the next harvest. Besides, their farming technologies enabled them to produce more
resources from a given area than most hunting and gathering technologies, so they
could store very large surpluses. Where there
existed surpluses, it was possible for some
members of society to become rich by
controlling them.
Large-scale transfers of surplus resources first
appear in the historical record from about 5000
years ago, when the ‘neolithic’ revolution
entered a new phase with the emergence of the
first agricultural civilisations. These had large
cities, dependent on the supply of food from
farming villages. They engaged in large-scale
trade, while artisans and traders learned how to
Mysto
work metals and to write. There emerged the
first states and the first large-scale armies. These
coordinated the activities of scattered farming
communities, and controlled the surpluses they
produced. For the first time, small groups began
to control enough material wealth to free
themselves from the need to work. There
emerged a clear division between rich and poor.
In this way, power and privilege entered
human history. They did so hand in hand, for
they were different aspects of state power. Power
enabled elites to mobilise and dispose of surplus
resources; their control of these resources made
elites wealthy and privileged; and their shared
wealth bound them together and sustained their
Power and rite — a social democratic cartoon of 1900. power.
From the top, captions read: ‘We reign over you’; ‘We govern Particularly in its second phase, the
you’; ‘We mystify you’; ‘We shoot you’; ‘We eat for you’. The
banner reads: “To live in freedom, to die in struggle’. ‘neolithic’ revolution destroyed as much as it
created. Elites used their control over surpluses
to build up huge armies that gave them a
decisive military advantage over acne
societies. So whenever the two came into AGU hunter-gatherer societies eventuall
succumbed. The fate of the es of the Americas, Australia an
are recent examples of this old conflict, forin some parts of the world the ‘neolithic’
revolution has continued to the present.

The ‘modern’ revolution

There is no single label which describes the second transition adequately. Here I refer
to it as the ‘modern’ revolution. At its heart was a
Societies learnt how to manipulate the natural environment in order to produce more
and more resources that humans could use. This allowed a huge increase in human
INTRODUCTION 3

populations, and in the surplus resources available to states and to society as a whole.
The roots of the ‘modern’ revolution lie many centuries in the past, but it first
flowered in Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. T
re pea m as tl HT BL ductive en ise. The development
of new technologies and modern science led to colossal increases in productivity.
Populations soared; literacy and schooling spread to most sections of society.
Like the ‘neolithic’ revolution, the ‘modern’ revolution has also destroyed
traditional societies, lifeways and environments. In particular, it destroyed peasant
societies and the states that protected and taxed them. Simultaneously, it created the
urban, industrial world that shapes our lives today. Because it has been so destructive,
revolutions and wars have accompanied every stage of the ‘modern’ revolution, and
they still do so today. To understand the modern world, we must understand these
conflicts between the old and the new. Nowhere have they been fought out with more
savagery than in the lands dominated by Tsarist Russia and then by the Soviet Union.
To understand modern Russian and Soviet history, therefore, we must understand the
impact of the ‘modern’ revolution.

Central questions
The central questions posed in this book are about the nature of the ‘modern’
revolution in the Russian and Soviet Empires.

Question 1: What form did the ‘modern’ revolution take in the Russian
and Soviet Empires ?
Like any important question, this raises others. What triggered modernisation in this
region? What role did the state play? Who benefited? Who suffered? In what ways was
modernisation in this region typical of modernisation elsewhere in the world? How
was it atypical? Above all, why did the modernisation of the Tsarist Empire lead to the
emergence of a Communist society? And why did that Utopian experiment fail?
The second question is about continuities rather than change.

Question 2: Why was the political culture of the Tsarist and Soviet
Empires so much more authoritarian than the political cultures of most of
Western Europe?
This question also raises other questions. What features of the traditional political
culture of Tsarist Russia survived into the Soviet era? Why did these features survive
both the ‘modern’ revolution and the attempt to build the first socialist society in the
world? What was the relationship between the democratic ideals of Socialism and the
authoritarian realities of Soviet society? Finally, why did the authoritarian structures
built up in the 1930s collapse in the 1980s?
Concentrating on these questions means neglecting others. I will say little about the
many non-Russian nationalities. Foreign policy, cultural history and religious history
also receive less attention than is usual, except where they are relevant to our two main
questions. : bas
Our two questions raise some difficult theoretical issues. What is power? A dwhat |
a s the economic growth so characte stic of the ‘modern’ re\ tion? Before

going any further, we need some clear ideas about the nature of power and of
4 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

economic growth. Unfortunately, there is no general agreement about either notion.

Yet if we are to make sense of modern history, we need some working definitions. The
following sections explain the definitions used in this book.
It is not essential to read these sections now. However, it will be necessary to read
them at some stage to understand fully the argument this book presents about the
history of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. They are intended as a theoretical tool-
kit. Used carefully, they will help us solve some important historical problems.

THEORY: A) MOBILISING RESOURCES

Though it is helpful to think of political and economic issues separately, in reality they
are closely linked. What links them is the task of ‘mobilising resources’. By this I mean
the techniques by which, ever since the ‘neolithic’ revolution, rulers have controlled
surplus resources. The powers and privileges of ruling groups depended on their
ability to control surplus resources, and their different histories reflected the different
methods they used to control resources. That is why the issue of mobilisation is central
to so many aspects of world history.

Direct and indirect mobilisation

It will help to distinguish between direct and indirect ways of mobilising resources.
Direct mobilisation is the use of force to control resources, both material and
human. Warfare, slavery and forced labour are all forms of direct mobilisation. So are
taxes and compulsory military recruitment.
Indirect mobilisation works through market forces. Though states continue to
mobilise resources directly, their main role now is to maintain the structures of law and
order, within which markets can operate successfully. Market forces now do most of
the work of mobilising resources. Where people have no land, they have to pay for food
and other essential goods. To do that they have to earn cash. To earn cash, they have
to sell either what they produce or their power to work. Through mechanisms of this
kind, market forces can mobilise labour and resources even more successfully than
naked force.
In the real world, direct and indirect forms of mobilisation are intertwined.
However, the relative importance of the two types of mobilisation can shape a society
in profound ways. In societies dominated by direct mobilisation, social relations
depend largely on the direct use of power. Naked force is present in relations between
men and women, children and parents, servants and masters, state and society. In such
a world, slavery and caste seem natural. Relations based on force appear so normal that
people easily project them onto the universe, creating religions in which gods and
goddesses control the world through the direct use of supernatural force, Just as states
and overlords control it through the direct use of earthly force.
In societies where indirect mobilisation is more important, force moves into the
background. The use of physical violence in personal relations or commercial dealings
is frowned upon. Instead, people find their lives shaped by impersonal market forces.
Not surprisingly, ideologies change as well. Instead of a cosmos peopled by gods and
 INTRODUCTION
5

goddesses who intervene directly in everyday life, the universe appears to be shaped by
abstract, universal and impersonal forces affecting everyone equally. Science takes the
place of religion. Adam Smith’s ‘unseen hand’ rules in the place of God.
Direct mobilisation dominated most societies in the pre-modern world. But indirect
mobilisation dominates our world. Understanding the differences between these two
types of mobilisation will help us understand the transition from a pre-modern to a
modern world.

THEORY: B) DIRECT MOBILISATION AND STATE

POWER
Direct mobilisation depends on the direct exercise of power. So what is power? How
do some groups of people dominate others? Explaining power is extremely difficult,
and there is little agreement among the experts. What follows is the definition of power
that shapes the argument of this book.
In some form, power has existed in all societies. Even in small-scale societies of
hunter-gatherers, which rarely had more than 50 to 100 members, some individuals
dominated others. Often, whole groups enjoyed greater influence because of their sex,
their age, or their ancestry.
With the emergence of larger social groups after the ‘neolithic’ revolution, there
appeared more extensive forms of domination. At the local level, these power
structures meshed with and reinforced traditional forms of power exercised by
powerful local families and chiefs. On larger scales, power came to depend on new
types of links between communities. From these links were woven the networks and
alliances that bound together the earliest states. I will refer to this type of power as ‘state
power’.
What is ‘state power’? At first sight, its nature may appear obvious. There are those
with authority, and there are those who submit to that authority. However, in periods
of revolutionary change (such as the period covered by this book), we must ask not
just what power is, but also how different groups win and lose power. How is it that
small groups of people end up dominating larger groups, sometimes in violent and
brutal ways? Attempts to answer these questions soon show that state power is a difficult
notion to pin down.

A general definition of state power

A distinguishing feature of state power is that it has always been closely linked with
privilege. Since the ‘neolithic’ revolution, states have mobilised resources directly to
support privileged elites and to defend their privileges. State power, in other words, is
the ability to mobilise resources directly and transfer them from producers to elites.
Doing this has always required effort and has always provoked resistance. These
generalisations suggest a general definition of state power. State power is what enables a
privileged ruling group to maintain the steady transfer of wealth on which tts privileges depend,
in spite of resistance from below. To use an electrical simile, state power is the social
equivalent of the voltage that drives an electric current through resistance.
POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Building power relations

How do rulers generate the power to mobilise resources despite resistance?

Power based on consent

In normal times, resistance is sporadic and ineffective. Most people accept relations of
power as normal, unchangeable and even rightful. They see the authority of rulers as
‘legitimate’. They accept that existing social arrangements are ordained by God, or by
natural law, or that everyone benefits in some way from the existence of government.
The first states probably ruled mainly through consent, relying on the spiritual
authority of priests who mediated with the gods. Even in modern times, the task of
maintaining power is normally educational as well as political. Governments try to
persuade their citizens that it is their duty to obey, and that it makes sense to surrender
the resources that support the power of governments and the privileges of elites.
Churches, schools and the press play a crucial role in mobilising consent. To maintain
consent, governments must try to control these various institutions of persuasion. They
need a ‘machinery of persuasion’.
In return for obedience and the payment of taxes, governing elites offer protection
and other services. In this way, an unspoken ‘social contract’ emerges. This limits the
fiscal demands made by the ruling group, and specifies the services they must offer in
return. As long as it abides by this contract, the authority of the ruling group will be
accepted without much resistance. Such ‘social contracts’ are an important part of the
machinery of persuasion of most ruling groups.

Power based on coercion

To protect its citizens from rival rulers, both internal and external, ruling groups also
need a ‘machinery of coercion’. During wars or revolutions, when resistance to their
power is widespread, force may be the only way of maintaining the power of a ruling
group. To create a machinery of coercion, ruling groups must concentrate the use of
violence in their own hands.
How do ruling groups impose their will by force? In very small-scale societies, the
strength of individual leaders may be enough. But in groups of thousands or millions,
individuals cannot impose their will on their own. They have to act with and through
other wielders of power. So in large-scale societies power is never really ‘in’ any one
person, though it often appears to be.
This means that to understand how states impose their will on others we must
understand how ruling groups work. We must study why and how the members of
ruling groups concentrate their collective power and cooperate in the project of
maintaining their collective privileges. To do this we must study the internal
organisation of ruling groups.

The structure of ruling groups—maintaining cohesion

The key to ruling group power is unity. Neither the machinery of persuasion nor the
machinery of coercion can work effectively if their different parts pull in different
directions. This means that the members of a ruling group must act with cohesion and
discipline. They must act as if they had a single will anda single purpose. If they succeed
in doing this, they can, in effect, create a superhuman being, with thousands
of arms
INTRODUCTION 7

and legs and eyes. This is what the state is, and this is why the English philosopher,
mas Hobbes, called the state a monster, a ‘Leviathan’.
Such a group will always be stronger than the isolated individuals it deals with. As an
Italian social theorist, Gaetano Mosca, wrote: ‘The power of any minority is irresistible
as against each single individual in the majority, who stands alone before the totality of
the organised minority’.' If others wish to oppose such a group, they must also learn to
act with a common purpose. To prevent this, ruling groups must restrict the ability of
their subjects to organise themselves into disciplined groups. Rulers must divide in
order to rule.
To understand how power is generated and maintained, we must understand what
forces link the members of ruling groups together in disciplined, unified teams.
Many different social adhesives hold ruling groups together. For much of history,
kinship and marriage ties have created leadership structures automatically. Senior
members of senior clans wielded authority because of their position within a tribe.
However, as states expanded, ruling elites had to find ways of linking people into the
large, non-tribal structures that dominate the modern world. Though ties of kinship
and village solidarity can be important even in the twentieth century, it is ties of shared
interests that dominate the large structures. These are the ties that Marx stressed in his
class interpretation of history. Within ruling groups, the most important tie of this kind
is privilege—the recognition that membership of a ruling group gives you material,
social and psychological privileges.
It is not enough for members of a ruling group to recognise that they have a
common interest. They also need structures that can coordinate the actions of
different groups within the ruling group. There must be leaders, clear lines of
command and a general recognition of the need to obey. As in the army, there must
also be ways of disciplining those who refuse to obey. Paradoxically, this means that
relations of domination must exist within the ruling group, as well as in its relations to
those it rules. To a large extent, the power a ruling group can exert in a crisis depends
on the efficiency of its leadership structures, for leadership is the key to unity and unity
means power. Strong leadership and clear lines of command provide a good index of
the collective power of a whole group, for strong leaders can focus the power of a
group’s members. Weak leadership and internal divisions are signs that a ruling group
is in trouble.
Finally, a group must not only be united; it must also advertise the fact so as to
encourage its own members and intimidate those it rules. This requires public displays
of unity. It also means that members must try to hide internal conflicts from public
view.

Borderline groups
It is difficult to draw a neat line between a ruling group and its subjects. There always
exist borderline groups. These are usually people who serve the ruling group without
enjoying the privileges of full membership. Often they occupy subordinate positions
in the machineries of coercion or persuasion. In Russian and Soviet history, examples
of such borderline groups include the dissident army officers of the 1820s, the radical
priests of the mid-nineteenth century intelligentsia, the revolutionaries of the late
nineteenth century, and the Soviet dissidents of the 1970s.
Where the line is drawn between members and non-members of a ruling group 1s
not that important. But it is important to note that these ‘semi-members’ have a special
POWER AND PRIVILEGE

position. They have different interests from other members of the ruling group, so they
are notas tightly bound to it as its full members. As a result, they may hesitate, or even
desert in a crisis. Such ‘borderline’ groups have played an important historical role,
particularly in periods of crisis, for if they leave the ruling group they can provide
valuable leadership skills to rival groups.

Five general features of a ruling group

It is now possible to summarise the implications of this discussion of power. Five
general features of a ruling group stand out.

1 It has a fiscal or mobilisational system. The ruling group’s members make a living
by collecting money and resources from other people. Their business is taxing
people, and this is why they are more privileged than those they rule. However,
resources are never surrendered willingly, so,
no a ruling group faces resistance from below. To cope with resistance,
3 aruling group needs a machinery of persuasion to encourage those it rules to accept
its power. But this is rarely sufficient. To defend itself against those, both at home
and abroad, who do not accept its authority,
4 aruling group also needs a machinery of coercion. It must be able to defend its
authority with organised armed force. However, it can also use its machinery of
coercion to gain support by defending its subjects against bandits or against
invading armies. Finally, if the machineries of persuasion and coercion are to work
effectively,
5 a ruling group needs internal unity and discipline. Strong leaders and common
traditions must transform the members of a ruling group into a single political
animal.

Degrees of unity and discipline

The degree of internal discipline needed by a given ruling group will depend in part
on the nature of the territory it controls. Each territory presents different problems,
and requires different solutions. Two issues are particularly important: the ease with
which a territory can be defended against outsiders; and its natural wealth.
1 Defence. If the boundaries of a territory are difficult to defend, and there are
dangerous neighbours, then the ruling group will have to devote much of its
resources to defence, and that means constructing a very powerful machinery of
coercion.
2 Productivity and wealth. If the territory and its inhabitants are poor, available
surpluses will be small. Taxpayers will surrender resources less willingly, and may
rebel. To survive, the ruling group will have to be that much more coercive. This
means maintaining a larger army, collecting more taxes and maintaining a higher
level of internal discipline. However, if the territory and the people living there are
rich, then the job of the ruling group is easier, for it will enjoy a large surplus. Its
members can live well without taking so much off the people that they force them
into rebellion. They can rely more on consent than on coercion.
These two problems can reinforce each other. If the territory is poor and lacks
natural defensive boundaries, the ruling group has to have a large army. However,
supporting a large army where there are limited resources may provoke fierce
resistance. So the members of the ruling group will have to use the army to deal with
 INTRODUCTION 9

both internal and external enemies. That will demand an even larger and more
expensive army. Like it or not, the members of such a group will have to rely more on
coercion than on consent to maintain their domination. In the last resort, they will
have to organise themselves rather like an occupying army. They will need ranks,
ferocious internal discipline, and a single chain of command.
They will also need to advertise their unity clearly to encourage their supporters and
intimidate their subjects. This means avoiding public displays of conflict, driving
internal conflicts underground, and making public displays of unity at coronations,
parades and official ceremonies. For such a group, the facade of unity is as important
as the reality.
At the other extreme, a ruling group whose territory is wealthy and well-defended
will not need to levy heavy taxes. It will provoke less resistance, so it can rely more on
persuasion than on coercion to maintain its power. Such an environment will greatly
affect the internal nature of the ruling group. Its members will not need to be so
unified. They need not submit so unquestioningly to central authority and can enjoy
greater independence. Individual members can be permitted to discuss policy and
even air differences publicly. Life for such people is sweeter, because it is never pleasant
to have to submit without question to orders from elsewhere, even when doing so is
necessary to the survival of the group.
These extreme types arise naturally out of the preceding discussion of power. They
correspond to quite different types of political organisation, the one being militaristic,
centralised and intolerant of internal dissent, while the other is more loosely organised
and more tolerant of internal dissent. Both structures serve the interests of ruling
groups but they flourish in different environments. Neither ever appears in a pure
form. These are simply models or ‘ideal types’. However, they can help us to analyse
the historical development of real political systems and the ruling groups which
dominate them.
To think of these structures less abstractly, it will help to contrast the evolution of
the looser political structures of early modern England, where parliamentary
assemblies allowed for considerable disagreement within the elite, with the highly
centralised political structures that arose in Muscovy and the Russian Empire.

THEORY: C) INDIRECT MOBILISATION, ECONOMIC

GROWTH AND THE ‘MODERN’ REVOLUTION
From power, we must now turn to economics. More than anything else, it is the colossal
productivity of modern societies that distinguishes them from all previous societies.
To understand the nature of the modern world, we must explain the origins of this
great increase in productivity. We need to explain “economic growth’.

Extensive and intensive growth

It will be helpful to think of two types of economic growth: ‘extensive’ and ‘intensive’
growth. In the real world, the two are intertwined. However, we must discuss them
separately, for they have played very different roles in world history.
10 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Extensive growth occurs when a society produces more because it consumes more.
‘Outputs’ increase because ‘inputs’ increase. For example, agricultural output may
double because twice as much land is farmed. Extensive growth does not require
technological innovation. It depends mainly on the use of increased inputs. As a recent
study of the Soviet economy put it, the Soviet strategy of extensive growth ‘sought high
rates of growth through massive diversion of resources to investment rather than
through innovation’.*? This comment suggests, already, why the notion of extensive
growth will be so useful in making sense of Soviet history.
In the agrarian empires that dominated world history for several thousand years,
technological change occurred, but very slowly. This meant that economic growth
depended mainly on increased inputs. It was extensive. Empires grew because their
populations grew, or they conquered more land or they took the wealth of others.
Extensive growth was the normal form of growth in the pre-industrial world. It is
normal where resources are mobilised mainly through direct, rather than indirect
means. For pre-industrial states, this meant that the key to economic and military
success was direct mobilisation. All the great agrarian empires survived because of their
ability to mobilise resources directly, above all for war.
In the modern world, there has emerged a very different type of growth: intensive
growth. In the modern world, growth depends increasingly on changes in technique
which allow more efficient use of existing resources. Today, the most successful states
are those best able to encourage innovation.
Extensive growth is very different from intensive growth. Because it depends so
much on increased ‘inputs’, extensive growth is limited by available resources. As a
result, in the pre-industrial world, growth always reached a peak, after which there was
a decline. Governments found they could not mobilise the extra output needed to
support growing populations. Eventually disease, famine and military defeat led to the
decline and fall of even the greatest of empires.
Intensive growth breaks these limits as it uses existing resources more and more
productively. In the modern world, economic growth has continued to levels
inconceivable in earlier societies. Rapid economic growth and new technologies have
given modern societies a decisive military edge over larger but less efficient rivals. How
else could Britain, one of the smallest nations in the world, have created the largest
empire in world history in just two centuries? And why did the Russian government,
one of the most powerful resource mobilisers that ever existed, eventually collapse?
For states, the key to survival was no longer simply the capacity to mobilise resources
directly. Governments also had to encourage innovation if they were to survive. This
meant encouraging indirect mobilisation.
The change from extensive to intensive growth lies at the heart of the ‘modern’
revolution. It is the key to the military success of modern states. It also explains the
decline of the great agrarian empires of the past. How are we to explain these
momentous changes?
What had to be done if traditional societies such as the Russian Empire were to equal
the economic productivity and military power of the West? These questions haunted
Russian and Soviet governments, and they haunt their successors today. The same
questions also haunt historians, for without answering them, we cannot hope to
understand the history of the modern world. Unfortunately, answering them is
extremely difficult, for there exists no generally agreed explanation for the rise of
intensive economic growth. In what follows, I will sketch the ideas about economic
growth that shape the argument of this book.
INTRODUCTION i

Explaining intensive growth

Intensive growth depends mainly on changed methods of production. So the crucial
question is: why did technological innovation become so common in recent history
when it was so rare before?
There have been many different theories to account for the rise of intensive growth.
Some stress changes in people’s ideas, as rational and scientific ideologies replaced
the religious ideologies of the past and encouraged greater technological innovation.
The German sociologist, Max Weber, offered a theory of this type in a famous essay on
‘Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism’. Others, following in the tradition of Adam
Smith, stress the role of trade as a stimulus to innovation. The argument of this book
stresses the role of changing social structures. It owes much to the theories of Karl
Marx. However, his theories overlap at many points with other theories of growth.
In some form, the ingredients that Marx stressed appear in most explanations of
intensive growth. Most writers would agree that intensive growth is more likely in
societies in which entrepreneurs,
wage earners and markets play important roles.
These three ingredients make up the package of changes that created what Marx called
‘Capitalism’
How can these three factors explain intensive growth? They do so because, in
combination, they force members of capitalist societies to innovate, by forcing them
to raise the productivity of their own labour. This is true of both major classes of
capitalist society: entrepreneurs and wage-earners. Why?
Like merchants of all kinds, entrepreneurs (or ‘capitalists’ as Marx called them)
make money by buying and selling. They do not mobilise resources through the direct
use of force. Instead, they mobilise resources through the market. They are specialists
in indirect mobilisation. Their incomes come from profits, and these depend on
buying cheap and selling dear. If entrepreneurs raise prices too much, customers will
go elsewhere, so the best way to make reliable profits is normally to cut prices. This
means they must keep their costs down. They must economise on ‘inputs’.
These rules apply to all merchants, that is to say, to all entrepreneurs who buy and
sell. They also apply to industrialists—to entrepreneurs who produce the goods they
sell. To make profits, they must cut costs. To do this they must look for and make use
of the most efficient methods of production. Their survival depends on constant
innovation, and innovation, as we have seen, is the key to intensive growth.
The situation of entrepreneurs is very different from that of the landed aristocrats
who dominated traditional agrarian civilisations. Traditional landed aristocrats were
specialists in direct mobilisation. They specialised in the use of force, using their
military and political skills to make peasants or slaves work for them. Not being
concerned directly in the production of resources, they had no need to count the cost.
As a result, the rulers of traditional agrarian civilisations often used inputs
extravagantly. Many even took pride in their extravagant lifestyles. As long as they got
the resources they needed to support their aristocratic lifestyles, they had little reason
to worry about costs. This meant they were usually uninterested in technological
innovation.
The different situation of entrepreneurs and landed nobles affected more than
economics. It also affected their outlook on the world. Capitalists had to treat resources
economically; feudal aristocrats did not. The following passage, from the writings of a
nineteenth century Russian official, illustrates these differences.
12 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Document 0.1: aristocrats, merchants and economic growth

The experience of centuries proves that manufactures prosper only where those undertaking
them, and enjoying the profits from them, are themselves directly involved, in person, in the
management of the enterprise’s capital. Such people are far more capable of moderation and
rational accounting and saving, for they know from their daily experience how difficult it is to
acquire money, and what use can be made of even the most insignificant savings, and they
avoid and fear unproductive expenditure. The more people of this kind there are in a nation,
the more capital is accumulated, and the more productive is the same capital.
This is not the situation of a large landowner or landlord. He can receive an income
without any direct participation in production. He can use the services and labour of others
without paying them anything. Hence the lack of careful accounting, and a tendency to view
money only as a means of expenditure, and not as a source of new production. It is sufficient
in this respect to glance at the domestic life of a landlord and a merchant living in the same
town and enjoying the same income. In the first case you will see luxury and disorder, in the
second case simplicity and economy.’

Because entrepreneurs have to cut costs, they have to innovate. So, while societies
dominated by entrepreneurs have usually encouraged innovation, those dominated
by landed aristocrats have not. This is why societies dominated by entrepreneurs
encourage intensive forms of growth; while societies dominated by traditional elites
encourage extensive forms of growth.
The second essential ingredient of capitalist economies is wage labour. Wage
labourers, by definition, have no property from which to make a living. If they had,
they would not need to look for wage work. This is what distinguishes them from
peasants, who have access to land. The only resource wage-earners have is their own
labour power. To survive, they must market that one resource by finding entrepreneurs
willing to hire them. Entrepreneurs, unlike feudal landlords, have to pay for labour,
yet they also have to economise on their ‘inputs’. Naturally, they look for the cheapest
and most productive workers, those who work hardest, and whose work is of the highest
quality. This means that, if they are to be hired, workers have to be concerned about
their productivity. In the last resort, wage-workers have to work efficiently because the
alternative may be unemployment and penury.
The situation of traditional peasants was very different. Unlike wage-earners, they
had access to land, and did not have to compete for survival on a market. Lack of
competition meant they were not forced to innovate. They had little incentive to
innovate because they knew that landlords or governments would tax away any increase
in production. Heavy taxation also kept them close to subsistence, so they dared not
risk using new techniques which might not work for a year or two. Peasants had to
produce enough to avoid starvation; how efficiently they produced it was less
important. Besides, traditional peasants rarely had access to knowledge about new
farming techniques, or the freedom needed to introduce them, or the capital needed
to pay for them. Not surprisingly, in the pre-modern world, peasants were usually
technological conservatives, preferring traditional techniques that were tried and true.
To sum up: In pre-modern societies, the major social groups do not have to
innovate, while in capitalist societies, they do. In capitalist societies entrepreneurs and
wage-earners compete on the market for survival. If they are less efficient or less
productive than others, they will fail. To. survive, entrepreneurs must constantly
innovate, and workers must work cheaply and efficiently. This is how the three
INTRODUCTION 13

components of Capitalism—markets, entrepreneurs and wage-labour—combine to

form such a powerful engine of growth.
This argument suggests that the difference between the modern world of intensive
growth, and the traditional world of extensive growth, lies not just in new technologies
or scientific ways of thinking or in the expansion of trade. It lies, above all, in social
change. Intensive growth requires a specific type of social structure. This is why the
history of the modern world is as much a matter of social history, as of political and
economic history. Explaining the rise of intensive growth means explaining how some
members of traditional societies accumulated capital and productive resources and
became entrepreneurs and capitalists, while others lost all access to productive
resources, and became mere wage-earners.
Marx and Engels used an electrical analogy to describe the capitalist engine of
growth. They compared the way it accumulates wealth to the way an accumulator
battery stores up electricity by electrolysis. In Capital, Marx wrote: ‘Accumulation of
wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment
of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalisation and moral degradation at the opposite
pole’.* In a speech at Marx’s graveside in 1883, Engels expanded Marx’s metaphor:

And to expect any other division of the products from the capitalistic mode of
production is the same as expecting the electrodes of a battery not to decompose
acidulated water, not to liberate oxygen at the positive, hydrogen at the negative
pole, so long as they are connected with the battery.®

The capitalist engine of growth needs a particular arrangement of social classes just
as an electric battery depends on a particular arrangement of chemicals. Capitalism
works because some classes have productive resources and others do not, just as a
battery works because one terminal has an excess of electrons and the other has a
deficit. Today, we can see the poles of the capitalist battery most clearly when we
compare affluent nations with the Third World.
This argument highlights a sad paradox of the ‘modern’ revolution. For the first
time in human history, there appeared the productive capacity to ensure that no one
needed to live in poverty. This was the work of the capitalist engine of growth. Yet that
engine depends on material inequality. It works because most people do not control
productive resources while a few do. This is why the ‘modern’ revolution has been so
destructive for most members of traditional societies. This also explains why socialist
ideas have proved so popular during the ‘modern’ revolution. Of all modern
ideologies, it was Socialism that tried hardest to overcome this basic conflict between
growth and equality.

The impact of Capitalism on traditional agrarian empires

This discussion will help explain the agonies Russian society underwent in the
transition to modernity. As capitalist societies increased their economic productivity
and their military power, the governments of traditional agrarian empires realised they
would have to match them to survive. They, too, would have to increase productivity by
encouraging intensive growth. But how? Our argument suggests that encouraging
intensive growth required changes in social structure. Yet this was extremely dangerous
for traditional governments. Modernisation increased the importance of markets, of
entrepreneurs, and of wage-earning activities. It increased the importance of indirect
14 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

methods of mobilisation, over which traditional governments had little control. In

doing so, it weakened the economic and political power of landed aristocracies, and
undermined traditional peasantries. In short, modernisation meant the destruction of
the traditional social structures on which
traditional ruling groups based their power.
This is why modernisation has been such a
brutal and traumatic process for traditional
governments and the societies they ruled. This
is why it has led to revolution in country after
country. To compete successfully with capitalist
societies, traditional governments had to
destroy the social structures on which they were
based.
Not surprisingly, most traditional govern-
ments found this conclusion unacceptable.
They tried to evade it by finding other ways of
increasing their economic productivity and
their military power. They looked for non-
capitalist ‘engines of growth’, or they borrowed
bits and pieces of the capitalist engine of
growth. They borrowed some technology, they
favoured some entrepreneurs, they introduced
some modern education. Simultaneously, they
tried to prop up the traditional structures on
which their power depended. The trouble was
that half-hearted reforms often made the
situation even worse. They rarely generated
enough growth to keep up with capitalist rivals,
yet they undermined traditional social
structures. There was, indeed, no escape from
the dilemma. Traditional societies were now
part of a larger world system. They could no
longer avoid the ideas, the commodities and
the military power. of modern capitalist
societies.
A pre-modern view of modernity. From a story of a saint’s life
In the modern era, traditional governments
published in the mid-nineteenth century, in the Urals town of
Nevyansk. The Old Believers saw the reformed Orthodox in Russia, China, India, Japan and elsewhere
church and many other features of the modern world as works have twisted and turned in the search for ways
of the Devil. In mining towns such as Nevyansk, modern out of this trap. What interests us is the path
metal factories, worked by compulsory labour, provided a pursued by Russian governments in trying to
fitting symbol of the worst aspects of the ‘modern’ revolution.
Modern technologies appear here as instruments of torture solve the agonising dilemmas posed by the
rather than as means for liberation. ‘modern’ revolution.
 INTRODUCTION 15

A SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT

The ideas explained in this Introduction provide the framework for the rest of this
book. We will see that the traditional pre-modern governments of the Russian Empire
had to be exceptionally good at the direct mobilisation of resources. To do this, they
concentrated state power to an unusual degree. There emerged a political culture
characterised by a large and powerful coercive machinery and a highly unified ruling
group. The power of the Russian autocracy made it possible to mobilise directly the
resources needed to support the large armies that made Russia a great power.
However, in the nineteenth century, the Tsarist government began to face a new
challenge: the challenge of intensive growth and indirect mobilisation. Its officials
began to understand that the emerging capitalist societies of Europe posed a severe
economic and military challenge to traditional empires such as Tsarist Russia.
How could traditional governments react to the challenge of Capitalism? To
compete, they, too, would have to encourage intensive growth. They would have to
encourage indirect ways of mobilising resources. Yet our argument suggests that doing
that was bound to undermine their own power. Intensive growth was not just a matter
of new ideas or different economic policies. It reflected a particular type of social
structure, one very different from the structures of traditional agrarian empires.
At a very general level of analysis, there were two options open to traditional states.
First, they could try to transform their own social structures. However, this would
inevitably undermine existing political structures. For traditional rulers, this was a form
of slow suicide. The second option was to return to extensive growth. They could
continue doing what traditional empires did best—mobilising resources directly, but
on an ever greater scale to keep up with the rising productivity of the capitalist world.
The advantage of this approach was that it meant preserving many existing political
structures. However, we have seen that the scope for extensive growth is always limited.
If resources are used as inefficiently as in the past, but in increasing amounts,
eventually they will run out.
I will argue that the Tsarist government experimented nervously and half-heartedly
with the first option. The Soviet government, because of its hostility to Capitalism,
preferred the second option. It tried to meet the challenge of the capitalist West by
using the direct mobilisational skills of Russia’s traditional political culture. It pitted
direct against indirect forms of mobilisation. It pitted extensive growth against the
intensive growth of the capitalist world.
Here, already, is a partial answer to our second main question. The Soviet
government preserved much of Russia’s traditional autocratic political culture in order
to mobilise directly the resources it needed to match the growing power of Capitalism.
This argument also suggests an answer to our first question. In what had been the
Russian Empire, the ‘modern’ revolution took the peculiar form of ‘Communism’
because, beneath its socialist ideals, Soviet Marxism appeared to offer a non-capitalist
route to modernity.
Finally, this approach will also help us explain the failure of the Soviet experiment.
In choosing direct over indirect forms of mobilisation, the government of Stalin chose
a strategy that was bound to fail. Direct mobilisation implied extensive growth.
However, in the long run, extensive growth could not match intensive growth, for
up
extensive growth discourages the economical use of resources. It therefore uses
16 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

resources far more extravagantly than intensive growth. What is remarkable about the
Soviet experiment is not that it failed, but that it worked for so long.
Having sketched these general answers to our main questions, we must now begin
at the beginning. The next chapter will discuss the evolution of a distinctively Russian
political culture since the Middle Ages. What distinguished the traditional Russian state
was its exceptional ability to mobilise resources directly.

Questions for discussion

1 What are the main changes brought about by a) the ‘neolithic’ revolution? and b)
the ‘modern’ revolution?
2 What is meant by ‘the mobilisation of resources’? Why is this notion so important
for historians? What is the difference between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ methods of
mobilisation?
3 What is the difference between power based on consent and power based on
coercion? How are they linked?

4 What must ruling groups do to maintain their power? What changes are most likely
to undermine their power? Why is it so difficult for subordinate groups to overthrow
established rulers?
5 How can different territories generate different types of power?
6 What are the five main aspects of the power of a ruling group?
7 What are the three main components of the capitalist ‘engine of growth’? How do
they combine to drive the capitalist ‘engine of growth’?
8 Why does Capitalism pose so severe a challenge for traditional ruling groups?
9 Can you use the definitions of ‘power’ and of ‘economic growth’ offered in this
chapter to help explain the history of other countries and other periods of history?

Further reading
There is a good short discussion of power in: S Lukes, Power, Macmillan, London & Basingstoke,
1974. See also the elegant and subtle discussion of power in agrarian and industrial societies in
E Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Blackwell, Oxford, 1983.

A note on dates and place names

Until 1 February 1918, Russia used the Julian calendar, which lagged behind the Gregorian
calendar used in western Europe by almost two weeks. This can sometimes create confusion,
particularly in dealing with 1917. According to the Gregorian calendar, the October Revolution
INTRODUCTION 17

took place in November 1917, and some sources use this dating. In this book, all dates are those
used by contemporaries. I use the Julian calendar (the Old Style, or OS) up to 1 February 1918,
and the Gregorian calendar (the New Style, or NS) after that date. The day after 1 February 1918
was 15 February 1918.
In the Soviet period, and again during perestroika, governments freely changed the names of
major cities. St Petersburg, founded by Peter I in 1703, became Petrograd in 1914 at the start of
World War I. After Lenin’s death in 1924, it became Leningrad. Then, in September 1991 it
became St Petersburg once more. I have tried to use the names in use during the period under
discussion. So in discussing 1917 I refer to Petrograd, while the chapter on World War II uses
the name Leningrad.

Endnotes
1 GMosca, The Ruling Class, New York, 1939, p 53, cited in M Mann, The Sources of Social Power,
vol 1, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1986, p7
2 RW Campbell, The Failure ofSoviet Economic Planning, Indiana University Press, Bloomington,
1992, p vii
3 A P Zablotskii-Desiatovskii, ‘On Feudalism in Russia’, cited from A P Zablotskii-Desiatovskii,
Graf P D Kiselev i ego vremia, 4 vols, Tipografiya M M Stasulevicha, St Petersburg, 1882, vol 4, p
330
4 Marx, Capital, vol 1, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p 799. On Marx’s use of the word
‘accumulation’, see David Christian, ‘Accumulation and Accumulators: The Metaphor Marx
Muffed’, Science and Society, 54 (Summer, 1990), vol 2, pp 219-24
5 RC Tucker (ed), Marx-Engels Reader, W W Norton, New York, 1972, p 630
 CHAPTER ONE

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY

MODERN TIMES

THE SETTING OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

The continent of Eurasia is the largest landmass on earth. It consists of two distinct
regions. Around the eastern, southern and western edges of Eurasia there are several
coastal sub-continents: China, South-East Asia, India, the Middle East and Europe.
These regions I will call ‘Outer Eurasia’. At the heart of Eurasia there lies a vast flatland,
the largest in the world. This stretches from the Arctic Sea to the mountains!
arc of
which extends from the Balkans, through the Caucasus and Tien Shan ranges, to?
north-eastern China. I will call this region ‘Inner Eurasia’. This was the stage on which
the history of Russia and the Soviet Union was enacted.
The differences between Inner and Outer Eurasia have shaped the entire history of
Eurasia.’ Because it lies further south, most of Outer Eurasia enjoys warmer climates
than Inner Eurasia. More sunlight means more photosynthesis and more plant growth.
Most of Outer Eurasia is also coastal, so it is well-watered. High rainfall and plenty of
sunlight make for productive agriculture. These factors help explain why Outer
Eurasia has been for several thousand years a region of densely populated agrarian
civilisations. Most of the population of Eurasia has always lived in Outer Eurasia. As a
result, the coastal civilisations of China, India, the Middle East and the Mediterranean,
dominated the history of the entire continent.
Settled agriculture was harder in the cold, dry heartland of Inner Eurasia. For this
reason, the societies of Inner Eurasia remained nomadic for longer than in Outer
Eurasia. Their populations also remained smaller. Until the middle of the first
millennium of the modern era, most people in Inner Eurasia lived in small societies of
nomadic gatherers and hunters or pastoralists, though some also engaged in small-
scale farming.
From about 1000 Bc, armies of pastoral nomads dominated the steppelands and
semi-deserts that stretch across the southern parts of Inner Eurasia. These were
nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples, whose wealth consisted mainly of large herds of
livestock. Scythians, Hsiung-Nu, Sarmatians, Huns and Turks, all created empires that
MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TIMES 19

Table 1.1 Regional populations of Inner Eurasia |000ap-2000apd

Date West of Caucasus Central Asia/ Mongolia Siberia TOTAL
Urals Kazakhstan
POPULATIONS (millions)

1000 4.00 0.50 2.50 0.50 0.10 7.60

1100 6.00 0.70 2.60 0.65 0.12 10.07
1200 9.00 1.00 2.80 0.80 0.14 13.74
1300 9.00 1.25 3.00 0.85 0.16 14.26
1400 9.00 1.00 3.20 0.70 0.18 14.08
1500 12.00 1.25 3.50 0.60 0.20 17.55
1600 15.00 1.50 4.00 0.60 0.22 21.32
1700 20.00 1.75 4.50 0.60 0.30 27.15
1800 36.00 2.00 6.00 0.60 1.00 45.60
1900 100.00 7.50 11.00 0.70 6.00 125.20
2000 190.00 32.00 60.00 3.00 40.00 325.00
Source: McEvedy & Jones, Atlas of World Population History, pp 78-82, 158-165

1000 Siberia
1100
1200 Mongolia

g 1300 Central Asia/Kazakhstan

S 1400
oS
a 1500 en Caucasus

8 1700 West of Urals

a
ey
ce Note: Based on information in Table |.1
1900
2000

0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350

Population (millions)
Figure 1.1 Regional populations of Inner Eurasia.

squeezed tributes from local populations of farmers, traders or other pastoralists.

Occasionally, armies of pastoral nomads even invaded parts of Outer Eurasia. Some,
such as the Huns, helped destroy the Roman Empire.
While pastoral nomads ruled the steppelands, agriculture spread along the
southern rim of the steppe and in the northern forests. Agriculture spread most rapidly
in the north and west, in the regions dominated today by European Russia, Belarus
and Ukraine. Here the local populations included Finnic speaking natives and growing
numbers of Slavonic speaking immigrants from the south and west. During the first
millennium the region to the west of the Urals became the largest consolidated
farming area in the whole of Inner Eurasia. This was where the ‘neolithic’ revolution
made its first large-scale conquests in the harsh lands of Inner Eurasia. With the spread
of farming, this became the most populous region of Inner Eurasia. Eventually, though
with great difficulty, the governments of the region turned their demographic
POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Trade route from

the Vikings to
the Greeks

Vladimir-in-Vol BOG Khazars

oe Mongols
(13th century)

800 km
500 miles

Kievan Russia
223 Mountains
[=] Principalities important
in the 12th century

Figure 1.2 Kievan Rus’, eleventh to thirteenth centuries.

a as a a
 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TIMES 21

superiority into military and political superiority to create the Russian and Soviet
Empires. The spread of agriculture in the forest lands of western Inner Eurasia was,
therefore, of great importance for the future history of Eurasia as a whole. The graph
above illustrates the demographic superiority enjoyed by the lands west of the Urals
from as early as 1000 ap.
By the ninth century of the modern era, the forest lands west of the Urals were a
region of many small chiefdoms. Their people lived in vil and fortified townshi4
or grady}so that visiting Scandinavian merchants called thearea Ga d of
forts’! Its people lived off farming, and from fishing, hunting and foresta ee
as furs and honey. Occasionally, they raided neighbouring tribes for goods or slaves.
Many paid tributes to pastoral nomadic peoples to the south and east, such as the
Khazars. Much about this region is reminiscentofseventeenth and eighteenth century
Africa, or seventeenth century Canada.

KIEVAN RUS’
Origins
The first ruling group to combine these small agrarian societies into a larger political
system epee oreshiin the ninth centuryAD. Its influence extended along the river system
ands of the Baltic to the Byzantine Empire in the eastern
erranean, ‘from the Varangians to the Greeks’ as the medieval chroniclers put
it. Italso controlled the northern reaches of another major trading system, along the
river Volga (see Figure 1.2). After Aap 882, when its capital became Kiev, this group
survived for almost four hundred years. Its first rulers were probably Viking warriors
and merchants keen to exploit the region’s abundant human and material riches.
However, the ruling groups they led included native chiefs, and many of their followers
came from the Slavic, Finnic and Turkic populations of the vast region they controlled.
The first rulers of Rus’ mobilised resources crudely and violently. They lived partly
off tributes collected from the various peoples they ruled or conquered. Such payments
were little more than protection money. As a Soviet historian has written, they were ‘a
payment for peace and security, a way of avoiding the threat of plunder and devastation
by their enemies’. The Russian Primary Chronicle, the basic documentary source on
early Kievan history, shows vividly the brutal methods the earliest princes of Rus’ used
to collect tributes from conquered tribes. The following document is from the reign of
Prince Igor (913-945), the first ruler of Kievan Rus’ for whose existence there is solid
historical documentation.

Document 1.1: Prince Igor gathering tribute, ap 945

In this year, Igor’s retinue said to him, ‘The servants of Sveinald are adorned with weapons
and fine raiment, but we are naked. Go forth with us, oh Prince, after tribute, that both you
and we may profit thereby.’ Igor heeded their words, and he attacked Dereva in search of
tribute. He sought to increase the previous tribute and collected it by violence from the
people with the assistance of his followers. After thus gathering the tribute, he returned to
his city. On his homeward way, he said to his followers, after some reflection, ‘Go forward
22 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

with the tribute. | shall turn back, and rejoin you later.’ He dismissed his retainers on their
journey homeward, but being desirous of still greater booty he returned on his tracks with
a few of his followers.
The Derevlians heard that he was again approaching, and consulted with Mal, their prince,
saying, ‘Ifa wolf come among the sheep, he will take away the whole flock one by one, unless
he be killed. If we do not thus kill him now, he will destroy us all.’ They then sent forward to
Igor inquiring why he had returned, since he had collected all the tribute. But Igor did not
heed them, and the Derevlians came forth from the city of Iskorosten and slew Igor and his
company, for the number of the latter was few.’

This document shows what the direct mobilisation of resources meant in practice.
It shows the role of force in collecting tribute, and the ways in which tribute collecting
could provoke resistance. The Chronicle goes on to show how Igor’s wife, Olga, dealt
with this resistance by taking a terrible revenge on those who had killed her husband.
This famous story conveys well the role of naked force in the pre-modern world.
Document 1.2 describes how Olga tricked a delegation sent to Kiev from Dereva soon
after Igor’s death.

Document 1.2: Olga’s revenge

The Derevlians announced that their tribe had sent them to report that they had slain her
husband, because he was like a wolf, crafty and ravening, but that their princes, who had thus
preserved the land of Dereva, were good, and that Olga should come and marry their Prince
Malsran
Olga made this reply: ‘Your proposal is pleasing to me; indeed, my husband cannot rise
again from the dead. But | desire to honour you tomorrow in the presence of my people.
Return now to your boat, and remain there with an aspect of arrogance. | shall send for you
on the morrow, and you shall say: “We will not ride on horses nor go on foot; carry us in
our boat.” And you shall be carried in your boat.’ Thus she dismissed them to their vessel.
Now Olga gave command that a large deep ditch should be dug in the castle within the
hall, outside the city. Thus, on the morrow, Oljga, as she sat in the hall, sent for the strangers,
and her messengers approached them and said: ‘Olga summons you to great honor.’ But they
replied: ‘We will not ride on horseback nor in wagons, nor go on foot; carry us in our boat.’
The people of Kiev then lamented: ‘Slavery is our lot. Our prince is killed, and our princess
intends to marry their prince.’ So they carried the Derevlians in their boat. The latter sat on
the cross-benches in great robes, puffed up with pride. They thus were borne into the court
before Olga, and when the men had brought the Derevlians in, they dropped them into the
trench along with the boat. Olga bent over and inquired whether they found the honor to
their taste. They answered that it was worse than the death of Igor. She then commanded
that they should be buried alive, and they were thus buried.*

The Chronicle account tells how Olga burnt to death the members of a second
delegation, then massacred a third group of Derevlians, before besieging and sacking
their capital, Iskorosten. The monks who wrote The Chronicle account came from the
‘Caves Monastery’ in Kiev, which survives to the present day. They admired Olga, partly
because she was the first ruler of Rus’ to become a Christian. The church responded
by making her a saint.
MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TIMES 23

The Caves Monastery (Pecherskaya lavra) in Kiev was the first great Christian monastery in Kievan
Rus’. It was founded in the mid-eleventh century, just south of the fortress of Kiev, near catacombs
inhabited by religious hermits. Modern tourists can still visit the catacombs in which some monks lived
out their lives and were buried. The Caves Monastery was largely destroyed during the Mongol invasions.
It was rebuilt many times, and its modern facade owes much to rebuilding in the eighteenth century. In
the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Caves Monastery became the centre of Kievan intellectual and
literary culture. The earliest editions of the Russian Primary Chronicle were written here.

A prince of Kievan Rus’ rides to war with his druzhina. From a fifteenth century manuscript.
24 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

The rulers of Kievan Rus’ also used indirect methods of mobilising resources, for
they traded with some of the goods they received as tribute. A famous account of this
trade exists, written by the Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the
mid-tenth century. This describes how, in winter, the princes of Rus’ went off on their
‘rounds’, touring the villages and townships of nearby tribes. From these, they collected
furs, honey, wax and sometimes slaves. In April, when the ice melted, they returned to
the capital, Kiev. In May, they fitted out a fleet of large canoes, which they loaded with
the booty they had collected in the winter. Then, heavily armed against marauding
nomadic tribes, they began the dangerous trip down the river Dnieper with its many
rapids. On arrival in Constantinople, they exchanged the produce they had collected
for the luxury goods of the Mediterranean world.° In the early years of Kievan Rus’,
this trade was probably the main source of income for the princely elite and their
retainers.

The Kievan federation at its height

In the eleventh century, when the Kievan princes began to engage in husbandry and
agriculture as well as trade, they found more sophisticated ways of mobilising
resources. The tributes once levied on conquered tribes became regular taxes imposed
on the rural population, or revenues from estates worked by slaves or bonded servants.
In about 988, the greatest of the early princes of Kiev, Vladimir I (ruled 980-1015),
adopted the Orthodox or Byzantine form of Christianity, and Kievan Rus’ became a
part of Christian Europe. Christianity legitimised the exaction of taxes, for the
Orthodox church taught obedience to the will of Christian princes, and received their
protection in turn. Ecclesiastical support enabled the princes of Rus’ to base their
power on consent as well as on coercion.
Under Iaroslav the Wise (1019-54), Kievan Rus’ was a civilised agrarian empire. Kiev
itself was as wealthy, its architecture as beautiful, and its rulers as well-connected as any
in Europe. At its height, Kievan Rus’ had a single ruler, the Grand Prince of Kiev, and
a single ruling clan, whose members moved from city to city according to complex rules
of succession. Nevertheless, Rus’ was never really a single state. It was a federation of
small city-states, similar to classical Greece. Each had its own elites who lived in the
capital city and collected tribute from surrounding villages. The armed might of the
princes consisted of little more than a small band of personal retainers, the druzhina.
Sometimes local militias would support the druzhina, though, as the fate of Prince Igor
shows, local militias sometimes opposed the princes who tried to collect tributes from
them.
What held the druzhina together? Ties of kinship counted for something. However,
privilege was the primary bond, for members of the druzhina shared the tributes
exacted with their help. Grand Prince Vladimir I understood as well as anyone that his
own power depended on his ability to enrich his followers.

On one occasion . . . after the guests were drunk, they began to grumble against the
prince, complaining that they were mistreated because he allowed them to eat with
wooden spoons, instead of silver ones. When Vladimir heard of this complaint, he
ordered that silver spoons should be moulded for his retinue to eat with, remarking
that with silver and gold he could not secure a retinue, but that with a retinue he
was in a position to win these treasures, even as his grandfather and his father had
sought riches with their followers.®
 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TIMES 25

The world of Kievan Rus’ seems remote to us now. However, we can glimpse the life
of its rulers through the testament that Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh (1113-
1125) left his sons. This shows a life dominated by warfare and by hunting, itself a form
of military training. The virtues Vladimir admires are bravery, endurance and physical
toughness. His testament also reveals Prince Vladimir’s profoundly religious outlook.
His God is a powerful and fearsome overlord, who demands of his subjects obedience,
worship, a sense of justice and charity towards the poor.

Document 1.3: from the ‘Testament’ of Viadimir Monomakh

l, wretched man that | am ... sitting upon my sledge [i.e. ‘as | approach death’], have
meditated in my heart and praised God, who has guided me, a sinner, even to this day. Let
not my sons or anyone else who happens to hear this document laugh at its contents. But
rather let any one of my sons who likes it take my words to heart and not be lazy, but work
hard.
First, for the sake of God and your own souls, retain the fear of God in your hearts and
give alms generously, for such liberality is the root of all good. .. . Above all things, do not
forget the poor but feed them to the extent of your means. Give alms to the orphan, protect
the widow, and do not permit the mighty to destroy anyone. Do not kill the just or the unjust
person or permit him to be killed. Do not destroy any soul even if he deserves death. ...
Receive with affection the blessings of bishops, priests, and priors, and do not shun them, but
rather, according to your means, love and help them, so that you may receive from them
their prayers ... [for help] from God. ...
Do not be lazy in your own households, but keep watch over everything. Do not depend
upon your steward or your servant lest they who visit you ridicule your house or your table.
When you set out to war, do not be lazy, do not depend upon your voevody [commanders],
do not indulge yourself in drinking, eating, or sleeping. Set the sentries yourselves, and at
night go to sleep only after you have posted them on all sides of your troops, and get up
early. Do not put down your weapons without a quick glance about you, for a man may thus
perish suddenly through his own carelessness. Guard against lying, drunkenness, and lechery,
for thus perish soul and body. ...
| now narrate to you, my sons, the fatigue | have endured on journeys and hunts ever
since the age of thirteen. . . Among all my campaigns there are 83 long ones, and | do not
count the minor adventures. | concluded 19 peace treaties with the Polovtsians [steppe
nomads] both while my father was living and since then. .. .
| devoted much energy to hunting as long as | reigned in Chernigov . . . At Chernigov, |
even bound wild horses with my bare hands. .. . Two aurochs tossed me and my horse on
their horns, a stag once butted me, an elk stamped upon me and another butted me with his
horns, a boar once tore my sword from my thigh, a bear on one occasion bit the saddle-
cloth beside my knee, and another wild beast jumped on my thigh and knocked over my horse
with me. ...
In war and at the hunt, by night and by day, in heat and in cold, | did whatever my servant
had to do, and gave myself no rest. .. . | looked after things myself and did the same in my
own household. At the hunt | posted the hunters, and I looked after the stables, the falcons,
and the hawks. | did not allow the mighty to distress the common peasant or the poverty-
stricken widow, and | interested myself in the church administration and service.’
26 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

The decline of the Kievan ruling group

Christianity united the princes of Kievan Rus’. So did kinship, for most princes claimed
descent from Rurik, the legendary first ruler of Novgorod. But these ties were fragile,
and there were long periods of warfare between rival princes. In the eleventh and
twelfth centuries new difficulties appeared. The trade with Byzantium declined and
attacks from nomadic tribes to the east increased. Finally, in the early thirteenth
century, Kievan Rus’ succumbed to a new and more formidable rival: the Mongols.
Why did the Kievan ruling group lose its grip on the territory it had lived off for so
long? All ruling groups in this region faced the same basic problems, posed by
geography. First, the territory of Kievan Rus’ was difficult to defend, as it lacked natural
defensive boundaries. Set in the world’s largest lowland plain, Kievan Rus’ was not
protected by large mountain ranges or seas either from Europe in the west, or from
steppe nomads to the south-east. So the whole burden of defence fell on the army. To
survive external challenges, the rulers of this region needed an exceptionally large and
expensive army.
Second, the land was difficult to farm. North of a line running from Kiev to Riazan
(see Figure 2.4), the soils are poor, sandy podzols. In the northern parts of Rus’, the
short growing season meant that farmers had to complete all agricultural work in four
to six months, in contrast to the eight or nine months available in western Europe. The
winters were also extremely cold. This forced farmers to keep cattle indoors and feed
them for long periods. The combination of poor soils and a short growing season kept
grain yields low. This meant that the taxable surplus was meagre.
The difficulties of farming in this region meant that any ruling group was bound to
weigh heavily on the population it ruled. This, of course, was likely to provoke
resistance from below, which meant that rulers in this region faced serious threats both
from abroad and from below. So, ruling this territory required exceptional
organisation, discipline and unity. Not only would ruling elites have to extract a heavy
tribute from the population they ruled, but they would also have to pay a heavy price
in discipline themselves. All in all, mobilising the demographic superiority of the lands
west of the Urals would not be easy.
None of these problems was critical while there existed no serious rivals to the
princes of Kievan Rus’. While their rivals were as weak as they were, they could survive
in spite of their small armies and the constant feuding that deprived them of unity,
cohesion and group discipline. Once the Mongols appeared, with their much greater
discipline and unity, the weaknesses of the Kievan ruling group proved fatal.

RUS’ UNDER THE MONGOLS, 1240 TO 1480

The Mongol invasion
In 1206 in Mongolia, a Khuriltai, or gathering of Mongol tribes, elected as their leader
a chieftain called Temuchin. They gave him the title of Genghis Khan (‘Universal
Ruler’). Genghis Khan had earned his position by the skill he displayed as a military
leader during the vicious tribal wars of his youth. As leader of a large confederation of
pastoral nomadic tribes, he now directed their energies towards further conquest. By
his death in 1227, Genghis Khan had conquered Siberia, central Asia and northern
 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TIMES
27

China. In 1223, Mongol armies led by Genghis Khan’s general, Subodei, also made a
first, brief foray into Kievan Rus’. Here they encountered and defeated an alliance of
Rus’ and Polovtsians (Kuman) on the river Kalka. As a sign of respect for the rank of
the princes they captured in this battle, the Mongols executed them without spilling
their blood. According to the Novgorod Chronicle, ‘The princes were taken by the Tatars
and crushed beneath platforms placed over their bodies on the top of which the Tatars
celebrated their victory banquet’.’ The arrival of the Mongols marked a new stage in
the struggle for control of Rus’.
In 1237, Genghis Khan’s grandson, Batu, renewed the attacks on Rus’ in a terrible
war of conquest through its northern cities. The failure of local princes to unite made
Batu’s task that much easier. In 1240 Batu’s armies sacked Kiev itself. In 1241 Batu
established a capital at Sarai on the River Volga (south of modern Stalingrad/
Volgograd). The Mongol Empire broke up within a generation of these conquests.
Nevertheless, for more than two centuries, much of Kievan Rus’ came under the
control of Mongol khanates or ‘Hordes’ based on the lower reaches of the river Volga.
As usual in this era, the aim of conquest was to collect tribute. Document 1.4 is an
account from a Rus’ chronicle of the attacks of 1237 on the town of Riazan’, south-east
of Moscow.

Document 1.4: Khan Batu attacks Riazan’, 1237

That same winter the godless Tatars [Mongols], with their tsar Batu, came from the east to
the land of Riazan’, by forest ... and... sent their emissaries . . . to the Princes of Riazan’,
asking from them one-tenth of everything: of princes, of people, of horses. . . And the princes
replied: ‘When we are gone, then all will be yours.’ . .. The princes of Riazan’ sent to Prince
lurii of Vladimir, asking him to send help or to come himself; but Prince lurii did not come
himself nor did he heed the entreaty of the princes of Riazan’, but rather he wished to defend
himself separately. But there was no opposing the wrath of God; He brought bewilderment,
and terror, and fear and trepidation upon us, for our sins. Then the foreigners besieged the
town of Riazan’, on December 16, and surrounded it with a palisade; the prince of Riazan’
shut himself up in the town with his people. The Tatars took the town of Riazan’ on the
twenty-first of the same month, and burned it all, and killed its prince, lurii, and his princess,
and seized the men, women, and children, and monks, nuns, and priests; some they struck
down with swords, while others they shot with arrows and flung into the flames; still others
they seized and bound ... They delivered many holy churches to the flames, and burned
monasteries and villages, and seized property, and then went on to Kolomna.’

The Mongol system

After the first invasions the Mongols established a more regular system of
administration and taxation over the lands they had conquered. Usually, they let local
princes act as their agents. To these princes they granted a zarlyk, or charter,
confirming their authority. During two centuries, more than two hundred princes
received the Mongol iarlyk. They collected taxes levied by the Mongols and helped
suppress any opposition. To help them (and to keep an eye on them), the Mongols
stationed their own officials and soldiers in the major cities. In return for helping the
Mongols, those princes who received the tarlyk enjoyed other privileges. If they needed
it, they could also call on military support from Mongol armies. In effect, they became
‘semi-members’ of the Mongol ruling group.
28 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

In their early years, the Mongol rulers were more powerful than the Kievan princes
they replaced. The differences between the two groups reflect one of the basic
principles governing the success of a ruling group: the more united and disciplined a
ruling group, the more resources it can mobilise, and the larger the armies it can field.
The Mongols were more unified, more disciplined, taxed more heavily than the Kievan
princes, and had a larger and stronger army.

A coercive machinery
The Mongols invaded with a disciplined cavalry army much larger than the traditional
Kievan druzhina. Batu’s invasion army of 1237 had 50 000 Mongols and 150 000
auxiliaries. It relied on ferocious internal discipline. A papal envoy, Plano Carpini,
described the army as follows after visiting the Mongol Horde in 1246.

Document 1.5: Plano Carpini on the Mongol army, 1246

On the subdivisions of the army | will say the following: Genghis Khan ordered that there
should be one man in charge of every ten. . .and one in charge of every ten groups of ten...
and one in charge of every ten groups of 100 [and so on]. . . At the head of the whole army
there were to be two or three generals, but they in turn were subordinate to a single leader.
In battle, if one, or two, or three members of a group of ten run away, then all other members
of the ten are executed even if they have not run; and if all ten run away, then all the other
members of their hundred are executed . . . in the same way, if one or two from a group of
ten enter into battle bravely, and if one member is captured and his comrades do not free
him, then they are all executed."

A united and disciplined elite

Members of the Mongol elite obeyed a single, autocratic leader, who expected total
obedience from his commanders. During the treacherous tribal wars of his youth,
Genghis Khan learnt that ties of kinship could be fragile. So he often preferred to
appoint as commanders men of low birth who depended entirely on his favour. In their
turn, members of the Mongol ruling elite knew that their wealth and status depended
on strong leadership. When offered the imperial throne in 1246, Khan Guyuk asked
the Mongol tribal leaders: ‘If you want me to reign over you are you ready each one of
you to do what I shall command, to come whenever I call, to go wherever I may choose
to send you, to put to death whomsoever I shall command you?’.!! They said they were.

A powerful fiscal apparatus

Discipline and autocratic leadership enabled the Mongols to impose a much higher
level of taxation than their predecessors. Soon after their first invasion, they demanded
a tenth of everything in the lands they conquered—crops, animals and people. (They
used the people either as soldiers or as slaves.) The terror the Mongols inflicted during
the first invasion encouraged prompt payment of the tributes they demanded. Soon,
however, the Mongol rulers regularised the system of tribute. In 1257, with the help of
Chinese advisers, officials conducted the first census of Rus’, and this became the basis
for assessing future taxes.
 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TIMES 29

Resistance from below

The imposition of this huge fiscal burden provoked resistance, and resistance
provoked reprisals. Here is an account from the Russian Primary Chronicle of an uprising
in Tver in 1327, ninety years after Batu’s invasion.

Document 1.6: the Tver uprising, 1327

The people, constantly hurt in their pride by the pagans [Tatars/Mongols], complained many
times to the grand prince [of Tver] that he should defend them; but he, although he saw the
injuries done to his people, could not defend them and ordered them to be patient; but the
people of Tver could not endure this and waited for a suitable moment. And it happened
that on the fifteenth day of August, in mid-morning, during the market hours, a certain
deacon, Tveritin, surnamed Diudko, was leading a small and very fat mare to drink the water
of the Volga; the Tatars saw her and carried her away. The deacon was grieved and began to
cry out loudly, saying: ‘Oh men of Tver, do not let me down!’ And a fight took place between
them; the Tatars, relying on their unlimited authority, began to use weapons, and straightway
men gathered, and the people arose in tumult, and sounded the bells, and assembled in a
veche [town meeting]; and the entire city turned [against the Tatars], and the people all
gathered right away, and there was agitation among them, and the men of Tver gave a shout
and began to kill the Tatars, wherever they found them, until they had killed Shevkal himself
[the Tatar representative] and all of them in turn... And after they had heard this, the lawless
tsar [Mongol Khan] sent an army in winter into the Russian land, with the voevoda
[commander-in-chief] Fedorchiuk, and five temniki [commanders of units of 10 000 soldiers
each); and they killed many people, and took others captive, and put Tver and all the towns
to flame.'”

A machinery ofpersuasion?
The Mongols’ weak spot was their lack of an effective machinery of persuasion. In the
thirteenth century, the Mongols worshipped many gods and expressed interest in
many different religions, including Nestorian Christianity. They had no missionary zeal
and made no serious attempt to convert the Christian population of Rus’. As a result,
they never persuaded them of the legitimacy of Mongol power. The conversion of the
Golden Horde to Islam in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries created a
permanent ideological gulf between its rulers and the Christian populations of what
had been Kievan Rus’. Tatar power over Rus’ rested almost entirely on force. When
disunity began to undermine their power, the Golden Horde could count on no
support from the population of Rus’.

Non-Mongol territories
The Mongols did not absorb all the lands of Kievan Rus’. By the fourteenth century,
the western parts, including Kiev itself and the Dnieper basin, had fallen into the hands
of the hose dynasty merged with that of Poland in 1386.
These regions later became the core of modern Ukraine. The contrast between the
had
Mongol and Lithuanian political systems is instructive, for the Lithuanian princes
nothing like the power of the early Mongol Khans. The Lithuanian princes had limited
wealth, and a council (rada) of leading nobles restricted their power.
30 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Further north, the forests of the taiga restricted the mobility and power of the
Mongol cavalry. Here the commercial city-state of Novgorod escaped direct Mongol
control, though it also paid tribute. Like Lithuania, its political system was far from
autocratic. Leading landed families of boyars (nobles), together with the city’s
merchants, ruled through a veche, or town council. This imposed severe limits on the
financial and political powers of the princes and expelled those who overstepped these
limits.
Eventually, the loose oligarchicstructures of Novgorod and Lithuania, like those of
Kievan Rus’, proved fatally weak. By 1500 both regions had been absorbed by a
Muscovite ruling group that had acquired a harsher political culture under the
supervision of the Mongols.

The rise of Moscow

Those princes who acted as agents for the Mongols also learned their methods of rule.
None learnt them better than the princes of Moscow. Eventually, they would use them
to form a new ruling group.
The first mention of Moscow dates from 1147. At that time Moscow was a border
fortress belonging to Yurii Dolgorukii, grand prince of the principality of Suzdal. A
century later Moscow was already a major principality, and Khan Batu’s armies sacked
itin 1238. In 1327 its prince, Ivan I (1325-40), became chief agent for the Mongols in
the north-east of Rus’. So successfully did Ivan collect taxes for his Mongol overlords
and himself, that contemporaries called him Ivan Kalita, or ‘Moneybags’. Ivan’s success
had much to do with the loyalty with which he served his Mongol masters. He spent
two years early in his life at the capital of the Golden Horde, where he befriended Khan
Uzbeq. In 1327 he led a Tatar army that punished the principality of Tver for rebellion
(see Document 1.6). In return, the Mongols appointed Ivan grand prince of all the
lands of Rus’.
As agents of the Mongol Empire, the prince and his followers shared some of its
privileges. They did not suffer from the raids that devastated less submissive areas of
Rus’, and Muscovy paid only one-seventh of the normal tribute. By the late fourteenth
century, the prince himself and the town of Moscow paid no tribute at all. Under these
conditions, Moscow’s prestige, power and wealth increased, while that of other
principalities declined. This made Moscow an attractive place to settle, and many
wealthy families migrated there with their followers and settled down as boyars of the
prince of Muscovy. These favourable conditions also persuaded the Orthodox Church
to make Moscow its metropolitan centre in 1326. In return the Church gave the Prince
of Moscow its support and its blessing. In the eyes of most Christians this gave the rulers
of Moscow a legitimacy that the rulers of the Golden Horde lacked.
The growing power of Moscow’s leaders depended not just on their own skills, but
also on changes in the nature of the entire ruling group. Indeed, the building of a
powerful government was never just the work of rulers. Throughout Russian history, it
depended on the outcome of a tense and difficult collaboration between rulers and
other members of the ruling group. Where leaders have no bureaucracies to carry out
their will, their power depends entirely on gaining the support of clan leaders. In
Muscovy, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there emerged a close-knit group
of leading boyar clans, each with their own territories and their own followers. The
distinctive feature of the Muscovite boyar elite was that its leaders were unusually
successful in preventing any public display of disunity or conflict. This enabled them
 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TIMES 31

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32 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

to give their united support to the princes of Moscow. The growing power-of Moscow’s
rulers depended largely on the solidarity of a small number of great boyar families,
bound to each other and to the royal family through networks of intermarriage.
Autocracy was the price that leading families willingly paid to ensure stability in a
dangerous world. Carefully arranged marriages between leading families provided the
adhesive that held the ruling group together.”

The decline of the Mongol Horde

As the power of Moscow grew, that of the Tatars declined. As with the Kievan princes
before them, their main problem was disunity. From the mid-fourteenth century, the
Golden Horde split into rival groups which formed distinct Tatar kingdoms. In 1380,
at the battle of Kulikovo, a Muscovite army soundly defeated the army of Khan Mamai
of Kazan. Two years later the Tatars retaliated, but they were never as strong again. In
1480 the retreat of a Tatar army before another Muscovite army, led this time by Tsar
Ivan III, marked the symbolic end of what Russian historians call the “Tatar yoke’. In
fiscal terms, the change meant that the princes of Moscow ceased to pay tribute. It did
not mean that they ceased to collect taxes from those they ruled.

MUSCOVITE RUSSIA: THE SIXTEENTH AND

SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
A new ruling group
Patriotic Russian historians have portrayed the end of Tatar domination as a moment
of national liberation. Unlike the Tatars, the Muscovite ruling group was ethnically and
linguistically similar to most of their subjects. As Christians, they could also appear as
defenders of the true faith against the infidels. Moscow, they began to claim, was the
third Rome, the capital of true Christianity. In the eyes of the Christian population,
this gave them a legitimacy the Tatars had always lacked.
Nevertheless, they were as much rulers as the Tatars had been. They could be as
savage towards their fellow Russians, and they taxed as hard. Liberation had merely
substituted a Christian and Russian ruling group for a Tatar and Islamic ruling group.
As early as 1389, the will of Prince Dmitrii Donskoi, the victor of Kulikovo, declared
that: ‘If God should change the Horde [i.e. should liberate Russia from the Horde]
and my children do not have to give tribute to the Horde, then whatever [tribute] each
of my sons collects in his appanage, that shall be his’."
The taxes the Muscovite princes collected even looked like tributes. Kormlenie, or
‘feeding’, was a traditional form of taxation that survived to the sixteenth century. A
prince would assign a certain area to one of his nobles. The kormlenshchik, or grantee,
would then administer this territory, try court cases and collect taxes. In return, he
collected whatever he needed to live on from the local population.

Document 1.7: a Kormlenie charter of Ivan III, late fifteenth century

|, Grand Prince lvan Vasil’evich of all Russia, have granted to Ivan, son of Andrei Plemiannikov
[the villages of] Pushka and Osintsovo as a kormlenie with the right to administer justice
MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TIMES 33

[pravda] [and collect fees for this service] and to collect taxes on the purchase, sale, and
branding of horses [piatno]. And you, all the people of this volost’ [district], honor him and
obey him, and he will govern you and judge you and will conduct your affairs in every way as
they were conducted heretofore.'®

Such a grant made sense only because everyone understood that the Grand Prince
would punish the villages if they did not provide an adequate living for his
kormlenshchik. In this way, the ruling group as a whole upheld the authority of its
individual agents.
The reign of Ivan III (1462-1505) marks the emergence of Muscovy as a powerful
and independent state. Muscovy formally rejected the overlordship of the Mongols in
1480. During Ivan’s reign Muscovy also absorbed the principalities of Novgorod, Tver
and Pskov. The conquest of these weaker states by the autocratic principality of Moscow
showed the advantages of strong leadership in a region that lacked natural defensive
borders. It also justified Ivan’s assumption of the title of Grand Prince of all Russia.
Finally, his conquests made available plenty of spare land that Ivan used to support his
own nobles in return for service.

The rise of autocracy

Over the next two centuries, the political history of Muscovy consists of attempts to
tighten the discipline and unity of the ruling group even further by increasing the
power of the Grand Prince of Moscow. The result was the emergence of a peculiarly
autocratic political culture in Muscovy. This enabled the ruling group of Muscovite
Russia to mobilise the resources needed to defend and enlarge Muscovy’s vulnerable
borders.
How was Russia’s autocratic political culture forged? The process was complex,
prolonged and painful, and there was never any certainty that it would succeed. To
enhance their authority, rulers had to persuade, cajole and, if possible, compel
members of the ruling group to accept that strong leadership was necessary for their
own survival. The rulers of Muscovy could not have done this if many members of the
group had not understood that this was, indeed, true. Leaders and members of the
ruling group cooperated in the building of an autocratic political system.
Because of their strategic position, leaders were in the best position to enhance the
unity of the ruling group by increasing their own power. Like Genghis Khan, Muscovy’s
more able rulers understood that the best way to increase their power was to favour
individuals whose position in the ruling group was insecure, against those whose
membership rested on birth and kinship. To understand how this process worked, we
must distinguish between two sections of Muscovy’s ruling elite. At the top of the system
was the boyar elite. The boyars claimed to owe their position to birth, for most were
descended from old princely families or their military retinues. They viewed their land
as their own property, not as a grant from the prince of Moscow. They also claimed the
freedom to transfer their allegiance from one prince to another whenever they wished.
So, though the great boyar families had laid the foundations for Muscovite autocracy,
their obedience was by no means total.
Below the boyars, there existed a group of less privileged nobles, who came to be
known as ‘courtiers’, or dvoriane. The dvoriane were of lower birth than the boyars. Most
had entered the nobility through service as officers in the army or officials of the state.
In return, they received conditional grants of land, or pomest ’ya, which they keptas long
34 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

as they served their prince. This meant that they owed their membership in the ruling
class and the privileges it brought to the favour of the prince. That favour was
conditional. It could be withdrawn as easily as it had been given. This ensured that the
dvoriane could usually be counted on to obey their ruler without question.
If the dvoriane needed a strong ruler to protect their precarious privileges, boyars
sometimes felt threatened by their ruler’s increasing power. So, the best way for rulers
to tighten the discipline of the ruling group even further was to favour the dvoriane at
the expense of the boyars. A series of rulers favoured the dvoriane, and used the power
this gave them to break the independence of the great boyar clans.
By the reign of Ivan III this policy was already well established. Ivan III’s will differs
significantly from those of earlier Kievan and Muscovite princes. First, it limited the
right of boyars to leave the service of Ivan’s son and heir, Vasilii, and take their land
with them. Second, it gave most of the land ruled by Ivan III to Vasilii, the oldest son,
instead of dividing it up equally among several sons. These large landholdings,
together with the lands conquered from Novgorod and Pskov, gave the rulers of
Muscovy the resources needed to buy the loyalty of lesser nobles by granting them
pomest’ya.
By the reign of Vasilii III (1505-33), the process of disciplining the ruling elite and
increasing the authority of the grand prince had already created an unusually
autocratic political world. A German traveller, Sigismund von Herberstein, who visited
Muscovy in the early sixteenth century, described how its autocratic political culture
shaped the world of upper class men and women.

Document 1.8: Herberstein on the Muscovite nobility under Vasilii III

In the control which he [Grand Duke Vasilii lvanovich, the eldest son of Ivan III] exercises
over his people, he easily surpasses all the rulers of the entire world . . . He obliges all people
to do hard service, to such an extent that whomever he orders to be with him in court, or
to go to war, or to go on any mission is forced to undertake whatever it may be at his own
expense. The younger sons of the boyars are excepted, that is, of the nobles of lesser fortune.
It is customary to send for them every year, and because they are oppressed by poverty, to
support them with a fixed but inadequate salary . . . He uses his authority as much in spiritual
as lay affairs and freely decrees according to his own will concerning the life and properties
of all people.
Of the counsellors whom he had, there is no one of such authority that he would dare to
disagree or to resist him in anything. They publicly declare that the will of the Prince is the
will of God, and that whatever the Prince does is done by the will of God...
[While the men in noble families served their tsar, their women lived a life of segregation
and isolation, dominated by the demands of family and clan honour.]
Love is lukewarm among most married people, especially among the nobility and the
princes because they marry a girl not seen before, and, occupied by services of the prince,
they are forced to desert them, contaminating themselves in the meantime with base lust for
another.
The condition of women is very miserable, for no woman is thought to be modest unless
she lives locked in her home, and unless she is so guarded that she never goes out. They
believe, as | have said, a woman is almost totally immodest if she is seen by foreigners or
people outdoors. Locked in the house, women spin and sew. Legal and business matters are
absolutely never discussed in the home. All household duties are performed by serfs... But
the wives of the poor perform the household tasks and cook,'¢
 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TIMES 35

Ivan IV, “The Terrible’

The main achievement of Ivan IV, ‘The Terrible’ (1533-84), was to tighten the
discipline of the ruling group even further by a violent assault on the boyar class. During
his own early life he saw the divisive struggles of the great boyar clans. Once he became
ruler in his own right, Ivan tried to free himself from the power of the major boyar
families, and increase his own power. He did this in the firm belief that the autocrat
should be subject to no one but God, for disobedience and ‘internecine strife . . . cause
kingdoms to crumble’.!”
Members of the service nobility, such as the writer Ivan Peresvetoy, encouraged
Ivan’s suspicions of the boyar class and his preference for warriors from the service
nobility.

Document 1.9: Peresvetov’s ‘Tale of the Sultan Mohammed’, circa 1547

From earliest times the wise philosophers have disapproved of those men of high rank who
find favour with the tsar neither for their services in war nor by virtue of their wisdom. The
wise philosophers speak about them thus: ‘These are sorcerers and heretics, who take away
the tsar’s happiness and wisdom, and cast a spell upon the tsar’s heart by means of sorcery
and heresy, and enfeeble the warriors.’ And the voivode [ruler] of Moldavia [the fictional
mouthpiece for Peresvetov’s own views] speaks thus: ‘Such as these should be burned by
fire or consigned to some other cruel death, so that the evil may not multiply . . . for the tsar
cannot exist without his warriors ... In his warriors lies the tsar’s strength and glory. The
tsar should rule his realm by the grace of God and with great wisdom; and he should be
generous to his warriors, as a father to his children. In the tsar’s generosity towards his
warriors lies his wisdom; a generous hand will never be empty and it gathers great glory for
itself.’!®

Though there was some logic to Ivan’s treatment of the boyar elite, there was also an
element of sheer madness. Yet Ivan’s madness was itself a symptom of Russia’s
autocratic culture. The intense pressure on the entire ruling group to display unity and
discipline did not suppress all conflict; it just drove conflict underground. In public,
the elaborate rituals of autocracy required nobles to display total subservience to their
monarch. Privately, there were always hidden conflicts between individuals and
families within the nobility. These were fought out in a twilight world of intrigue and
plots. In this way, the banning of open conflict, which became a basic rule of Russia’s
autocratic political culture, made political conflicts all the more vicious. Hidden
conflicts created a pervasive atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion that led to
outbreaks of savage internal conflict. These aspects of Russia’s autocratic political
culture help explain the violent conflicts of Ivan’s reign, and those of later periods of
Russia’s history.
Childhood memories of insults and threats from leading boyars intensified Ivan’s
paranoia. During the period of the oprichnina (1564-72), he divided the country into
two parts. One, the oprichnina, he ruled through a group of newly ennobled dvonane
and foreign mercenaries. These took oaths of absolute obedience to Tsar Ivan and
depended totally on his favour. They even wore a special black uniform, and carried a
broom with which they could symbolically sweep away treason. Ivan used the oprichniki,
as his followers were called, to destroy many boyar families. Altogether, six to seven
36 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

hundred boyars perished together with their families, while many others lost their land.
In this gruesome way Ivan proved that the boyars, too, depended on his favour. In name,
the boyar families survived the oprichnina, but from then on their dependence on the
Tsar was clear. Ivan had almost managed to reduce the boyars to the position of dvonane.
In doing so, he greatly enhanced his own power as tsar.

The “Time of Troubles’

However, Ivan IV overdid it. His reign caused such destruction, both internally and
through the long series of wars he fought, that it nearly ruined the entire system. In
1598, the death of his son and successor, Fedor I, without an heir, ended the Rurkid
dynasty that had ruled since the ninth century. Between 1598 and 1613 Muscovy
endured the ‘Time of Troubles’. This was a'confused period of anarchy, foreign
intervention and civil war, during which there were several unsuccessful attempts to
found new dynasties. As much as one-third of the population of Muscovy may have
perished during these terrible years. Polish and Swedish armies invaded the country
and, often with the help of leading Muscovite boyars, tried to place their own nominees
on the Muscovite throne. Finally, in 1613, an assembly of Russian nobles, merchants
and officials, the so-called Zemskii Sobor or Land Council, elected one of their number,
Michael Romanoy, as the new tsar. The Romanov dynasty was to survive until 1917.
The experiences of this period were terrible for both ordinary people and nobles.
This explains the enthusiasm with which all classes welcomed the new dynasty. There
was now a widespread acceptance of the need for internal discipline under an
autocratic tsar if there was to be any stability in Muscovy. These attitudes show up in
many documents of the period. The following is a message sent to all major towns by
leaders of the army that expelled the foreign armies in 1612.

Document 1.10: invitation to help elect a new sovereign, 1612

And you, sirs, should take counsel together with all the people, mindful of God and of our
faith, lest we remain without a sovereign in these times of utter ruin, so that by counsel of
the entire state we may choose a sovereign by common agreement, whomever God may
grant us in his righteous love of mankind, lest the Muscovite state be utterly destroyed by
such calamities. You know yourselves, sirs: how can we defend ourselves now, without a
sovereign, against our common enemies, the Poles and Lithuanians, and Germans [Swedes],
and the Russian rogues who are renewing bloody strife in the state? How can we, without a
sovereign, negotiate with neighbouring sovereigns about great matters of the state and of
the land? And how can our realm stand firm and unshakeable henceforth?!?

Rebuilding autocracy
During the seventeenth century, the new dynasty began rebuilding Muscovy’s
autocratic political system. An important sign of this was the decline of the Zemskii Sobor,
a council of nobles and officials which, under other circumstances, might have evolved
into a parliament. It had first met in 1550. Thereafter it met periodically for over a
century, but it never placed serious limits on royal authority. Indeed, in 1613 it had
met specifically to re-establish autocracy. In practice, it became an instrument of royal
power, for it provided a way of sounding out opinion and mobilising support from
those lesser members of the ruling class who rarely met the tsar directly.
 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TIMES 37

The army
The revival of autocracy made it easier to mobilise the men, money and equipment
needed to supply Muscovy’s huge armies. The modernisation of Muscovy’s army had
begun under Ivan IV, who introduced professional units of streltsy or musketeers. He
also tried to make army service compulsory for all landowners. The size of Ivan’s armies
and the hardiness of Muscovite soldiers amazed the Englishman, Richard Chancellor,
in the 1550s.

Document 1.11: Chancellor on the Muscovite army, 1550s

He [Tsar lvan IV] never goes to the field himself with under two hundred thousand men, yet
does he never take to his wars either husbandman or merchant. All his men are horsemen,
all archers. Their armour is a coat of mail with a skull on their heads. Some of their coats are
covered with velvet or cloth of gold: their desire is to be sumptuous in the field. Partly | have
seen it or else | would scarcely have believed it... They are a kind of people most sparing in
diet and most patient in extremity of cold; above all others. For when the ground is covered
with snow and is grown terrible and hard with frost, this Russ hangs up his mantle or soldier’s
coat against that part whence the wind and snow drives and so, making a little fire, lies down
with his back towards the weather; his drink is cold water from the river, mingled with
, - op SEA
Ae ee Ui LRG HO
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OVGAe Fra 32070 TURES DRT
oatmeal, and this is all his good cheer, and he thinketh
Fy aCate _Aerfoaussoyternusa
Spmannife
7
Auo Oeuec
Y
Upre
dee Pevih ame cendach himself well and daintily fed therewith; the hard ground
oe
OFse ae Xi is his feather bed and some block or stone his pillow;
and as for his horse, he is, as it were, a chamberfellow
with his master, faring both alike. How justly may this
barbarous and rude Russ condemn the daintiness and
niceness of our Captains who, living in a soil and air
Cre I much more temperate, yet commonly use furred boots
eis
AY and cloaks?”

In the seventeenth century, the use of foreign

technology and foreign-trained soldiers and
commanders enabled Muscovite armies to
challenge the major powers of central Europe, such
as Poland and Sweden. Muscovy’s military power
also underpinned a burst of territorial expansion.
By the treaty of Pereiaslavl in 1654, Muscovy
absorbed Ukraine, the heartland of Kievan Rus’.
Even more spectacular was Muscovite expansion to
the east. Ivan IV had conquered the Khanates of
Kazan and Astrakhan in 1552 and 1556. These
Yermak defeats Kuchum, Khan of Sibir’, in 1581, on
conquests gave Moscow control of the Volga river
the banks of the river Tobol. This early eighteenth
century illustration suggests that Yermak’s army enjoyed to the Caspian sea. Cossack troops launched the
both a military superiority (they use muskets against conquest of Siberia in 1582, and by the end of the
spears, swords and bows) and a religious superiority seventeenth century Muscovy claimed the whole of
(the Archangel Michael fights on their side). The defeat this vast new territory. With the conquest of Siberia,
of Sibir’ was the first step towards the conquest of Muscovy created a land empire to match the
Siberia. By 1639 Russian troops had already reached
the Pacific. overseas empires of Western Europe. It also
became the dominant power of Inner Eurasia. The
38 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

seventeenth century, therefore, marks a crucial turning point in the history of Inner
Eurasia. This is when the governments of Moscovy finally turned their demographic
superiority over the steppelands into a clear military superiority. This was the most
important single achievement of Muscovy’s autocratic governments, and it laid the
foundations for the military successes of the Russian and Soviet Empires.

The rise of serfdom

The growth of the army demanded huge resources in cash and in men. Of all the
methods used by Muscovite governments to mobilise these resources, serfdom was the
most important.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dvoriane were the core of the Muscovite
army. Most received temporary land grants to enable them to support themselves and
pay for their armour and their mounts. However, land was useless without labour to
work it. Peasants settled on the estates of nobles or boyars had always paid for their
land by supplying produce, or labour or cash. But as the burden of warfare grew
during the reign of Ivan IV, so did the burdens of service, and so did the demands
nobles made on their peasants. Many peasants responded by fleeing to unoccupied
lands or to landlords who demanded less of them. By the end of the reign of Ivan IV
whole provinces had been depopulated in this way. This posed severe problems for
the government, as dvoriane without serfs could not serve the army properly. The
government responded with charters banning the movement of peasants except at
certain times of the year, such as St George’s day, just after the harvest. In 1581, it
went further, banning all movement for a year. This limited the traditional freedoms
of Russian peasants settled on noble lands, and began the process of transforming
them into serfs. The government renewed these bans many times over the next
decades, though its efforts had little effect during the Time of Troubles. Then, in
1649, the government declared that the ban on peasant movement was to be
permanent.
The law code or Ulozhenie of 1649 decreed that peasants were to remain permanently
on the lands they occupied in that year. It gave each serf-owning family the right to
exploit the labour and produce of the peasants settled on their land, theoretically
forever. Article 9 of Chapter XI of the Ulozhenie declared:

And whatever peasants and bobyli [poor peasants] are listed with any [landowner] in
the census books of the previous years of [1646 and 1647], and who subsequent to
these census books have fled, or shall henceforth flee, from those men with whom
they are listed in the census books: those fugitive peasants and bobyli, and their
brothers, children, nephews, and grandchildren with their wives and with their
children and with all their possessions, and with their harvested and unharvested
grain, shall be returned from flight to those men from whom they fled, in accordance
with the census books, without time limit; and henceforth under no circumstances
should anyone receive peasants who are not his and keep them with him.?!

To enforce the new laws, the government had to deal with the problem of runaways.
In a country as large as Muscovy, it was extremely difficult to stop peasants from fleeing
oppressive masters. This was particularly true of the borderlands to the south and
south-east, where the Cossacks lived. Here is how the great nineteenth century
historian S. M. Soloviev described the task the government had undertaken.
 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TIMES 39

The chase after human beings, after working hands, was carried out throughout the
Muscovite state on a vast scale. Hunted were city people who ran away from tiaglo
[tax obligations] wherever they only could, by concealing themselves, bonding
themselves [as slaves], enrolling in the ranks of lower grade clerks. Hunted were
peasants who, burdened with heavy taxes, roamed individually and in droves
migrated beyond ‘the Rock’ (the Urals). Landlords hunted for their peasants who
scattered, sought concealment among other landlords, ran away to the Ukraine, to
the Cossacks.**

The government also raised resources in other ways. To pay for foreign soldiers and
foreign military and industrial technology it had to find cash. But this was not easy in
a society in which most people were still self-sufficient. Fortunately for the government,
there were some goods that even peasants had to purchase, and Muscovite
governments discovered as early as the sixteenth century that they could raise large
revenues by controlling the sale and production of these rare commodities. In the
seventeenth century, the most important goods of this kind were salt and vodka. Both
were vital in daily life. Salt was used to pickle vegetables and meat over the winter, while
vodka was a vital ingredient in all social and church ceremonials. Because of their
importance, people had to buy vodka and salt even if the government taxed them
heavily. By 1700, state controlled taverns or kabaks may have generated more than ten
per cent of the government’s income. The Muscovite government was already in
danger of turning its citizens into alcoholics to pay for its army.”

The great peasant wars

The Church taught the peasantry that it was their religious duty to obey a government
established by God. However, as the burden of taxes and serfdom rose, the power of
moral and religious exhortations declined. From early in the seventeenth century,
peasants began to resist the growing burdens imposed by Muscovwy’s autocratic state.
Resistance took many forms: flight, the murder of landlords or their bailiffs, and
occasionally, large-scale peasant rebellions. After the Bolotnikov uprising of 1606-07,
such peasant wars were to become periodic features of Russian political life until the
twentieth century. The greatest of these rebellions in the late seventeenth century was
led by a Don Cossack leader, Stenka Razin, in 1670-71. Often the moral inspiration
for rebellion came from religious dissenters, the so-called ‘Old Believers’, who had left
the official Church after the Raskol, the religious schism of the mid-seventeenth
century. The political inspiration usually came from non-Russian peoples of the
borderlands, determined to resist the Muscovite juggernaut.

IMPERIAL RUSSIA: THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Peter the Great, 1682 to 1725
By the late seventeenth century, serfdom and autocracy were the twin pillars of the
Russian
Russian political and social system. However, it was under Peter I that the
ruling group assumed its most united and disciplined form. Peter’s reign began with
internal squabbles over succession to the throne. Divisions within the government
40 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

weakened the state and led to military defeats at the hands of the Swedes and Turks.
Peter became sole ruler in 1696, but the huge reforms that characterised his reign
did not begin for several years. The trigger for reform was a humiliating defeat at the
hands of the Swedes at Narva in 1700. This made Peter face the basic problem of all
Russian ruling groups—the task of ruling a poor country with inadequately defended
borders.
His reforms clearly show the relationship between these factors and the
authoritarian political culture of the Russian ruling group.

The army
Peter began his reforms with the army. In 1698-99 he suppressed a mutiny among the
streltsy units. He did so with a violence that showed that he would tolerate no
indiscipline in his armies. As many as 1200
streltsy were executed or tortured to death.
Typically, Peter set his nobles an example by
personally torturing and executing some of the
rebels. After 1700 Peter increased the army’s
size, tightened its discipline, and hired foreign
military experts to train and lead its troops. By
1709 he was able to inflict a serious defeat on
the Swedes at the battle of Poltava. His control
of the Baltic shoreline was by then so secure that
in 1712 he made the port of St Petersburg
(which he had founded in 1703) his capital city.
It remained the capital until March 1918. By
1721, with the signing of the Treaty of Nystadt,
Russia had become the dominant power in
northern Europe. Its old rivals, Poland, Sweden
and Turkey, entered long periods of decline. In
The execution of the streltsy (musketeers) after their mutiny
against PeterI,Moscow, 1698. From an eighteenth century the same
; year, Peter declared Russia to be an
engraving. Empire, and assumed for himself the title of
‘Emperor’.

The fiscal system

Peter’s military reforms demanded a huge mobilisation of human and material
resources, and caused great suffering. The government drafted hundreds of thousands
of men to fight in its armies and to carry out immense public works programs, such as
the building of St Petersburg. Thousands died during the building of the new capital
because of the appalling conditions under which they had to work. A new system of
military recruitment required that every twenty peasant households produce one
recruit each year. The recruits served for life, and their families mourned them as if
they had died. Money taxes also increased, probably by 200 or 300 per cent during his
reign. In 1724, Peter consolidated many new taxes into a single tax on all males, the
‘poll tax’. Introduction of the new tax tidied up the system of serfdom, for it tied down
even those peasants who had no landlords and had remained outside the net of
serfdom. Like the Mongols in the thirteenth century, Peter prepared for the new
system of taxation by taking a census of the population.
 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TIMES 41

HonKOTTLAKKTINE WOREporAaHarh KAAEHENR Resistance from below

spinon wien os ese

The population reacted to these burdens with

mass flight and many petty acts of desperate
violence. There were also larger rebellions in
Astrakhan, and in the lands of the Bashkirs south
of the Urals. In 1707-08, a Don Cossack hetman,
Bulavin, led a huge popular rebellion against the
government. Like earlier rebel leaders such as
Bolotnikov or Stenka Razin, Bulavin promised
freedom from serfdom and poverty, and a return
to the true faith of the ‘Old Believers’. His
Utopian promises attracted a motley army of
more than 100 000 serfs, slaves, cossacks, steppe
nomads, ex-soldiers and religious dissidents. But
his army was too indisciplined to challenge
Peter’s reformed armies. After savage fighting, it
was crushed in 1708.

Internal unity and discipline of the

ruling group
External and internal crises such as those of the
early years of Peter’s reign demanded excep-
tional unity and discipline if the system was
to survive. Peter showed that he had the
ruthlessness and the political skills necessary to
forge a more disciplined ruling group and to
Peter the Antichrist building St Petersburg. He wears the increase his own power as its leader. Peter made
dress of a westerner. Apart from his demon helpers, most it compulsory for all members of the nobility to
other figures wear the traditional clothing of Muscovy. Old serve their whole life long, either in the army or
Believers in particular saw Peter and all his reforms as in the government service. In 1721, he
works of the Devil. Those forced to work under ternble ’ Fat Fs Ores GE Ranke This Oreanised
conditions on the building of St Petersburg had good reason ATO hae Z 2 © MS oy im : OTs:
to agree. From an illuminated Apocalypse of the early the entire ruling elite into a strict hierarchy, as
eighteenth century. if they were a sort of occupying army. Each
noble, in theory, was to start at the bottom and
work upwards, and each rank carried its own
rights and privileges. Combined with Peter’s own policy of favouring ability and service
over birth, the Table of Ranks made it much easier for non-nobles to join the ruling
group through dedicated service in the army of bureaucracy. This was the opposite of
the boyarideal of nobility based on birth. Under the Table of Ranks nobles earned their
privileges through service to the tsar.

Document |.12: Table of Ranks, January 1722

The Act decreed:
All state officials, Russian or foreign, who now belong, or have formerly belonged, to the first
eight classes, and their legitimate children and descendants in perpetuity, must be considered
equal in all dignities and advantages to the best and oldest nobility, even if they are of humble
42 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

origin... Any military man who is not [himself a hereditary] noble and who attains the rank
of a company-grade officer becomes a nobleman; all his children born after the promotion
are also nobles.”

A machinery ofpersuasion?
Peter paid less attention to the persuasive than to the coercive aspects of power. He
incorporated the Orthodox Church within the government bureaucracy when, in
1722, he replaced the Patriarch with a civilian official, the Procurator of the Holy
Synod. This increased the State’s control over the Church, but deprived the church of
the prestige it had enjoyed in the past. Peter’s own irreligious behaviour, in particular
the drunken mock services he held with many of his close followers, also undermined
the church’s authority. The great church schism of the seventeenth century had
further weakened the church’s power to support the state. Indeed, most of the so-
called ‘Old Believers’ were convinced that Peter and his government represented the
anti-Christ. The declining prestige of the church made it a less effective instrument of
persuasion than it had been in the Muscovite era.
Finally, Peter’s policies of westernisation exposed members of the Russian ruling
elite to the corrosive rationalism of European thought. Peter had forced the nobility
to familiarise themselves with the technical knowledge of Western Europe and to adopt
European styles of dress and manners. Soon, Russian nobles were familiar with the
languages of Western Europe (particularly French and German), and also with the
philosophies and theories of the Enlightenment. Not only did this threaten their
traditional faith in autocracy; it also created an ideological gulf between the elite of
Russian society and the mass of the population. The cohesive Christian faith of the
Muscovite period, which had provided such powerful ideological support for Tsarism,
began to disintegrate during the eighteenth century.

The results of the Petrine Reforms

Peter’s reforms created immense strains and caused much suffering. However, for the
ruling group they were a success. The proof of success was the emergence of Russia as
the dominant power in Eastern Europe.
The long-term results of Peter’s reforms were more paradoxical. By tightening the
discipline of the ruling class to an extreme degree, Peter’s reforms prepared for an
eventual reaction against the centre. Most nobles resented the heavy demands Peter’s
reforms placed on them, particularly for life-long military service. As soon as he died,
they began to chip away at the principle of life-long service for the nobility. Peter had
unwittingly helped them by encouraging the westernisation of upper class Russian
society. Western political theories encouraged Russian nobles to see their own:
privileges as rights to be defended, even against the autocracy. Eventually, European
political ideas provided the basis for a distinctively Russian form of Liberalism.
The westernisation of the Russian ruling group also altered the situation of upper-
class women. In Muscovite Russia, women of noble families were kept segregated in
the women’s quarters of each house (the terem). However, from 1718, Peter began to
hold social gatherings called ‘assemblies’. At these the dress was European and, asina
French salon, women played a major role. From then on, women were much more
visible in Russian upper class society, though their political role remained inferior to
that of men.
 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TIMES
43

The later eighteenth century

Miltary successes
Building on the achievements of Peter the Great, Russia remained the dominant power
in Eastern Europe. During the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-96), Russia
absorbed much of Poland and conquered the northern shores of the Black Sea. In
1812-15 it was the Russian armies of Alexander I that did most to crush the once
invincible armies of Napoleon.

Declining discipline
The autocratic traditions of the past also survived. As long as the dangers from both
outside and inside were clear to all (as in 1613 or 1700), it was easy to convince
members of the Russian ruling class to unite around an autocratic monarch. In the
eighteenth century, occasional reminders of these dangers, such as the odd military
reversal, or the huge peasant rebellion led by Emelyan Pugachev in 1773-74, helped
sustain upper class faith in autocracy. However paradoxical it may seem to those
brought up in a liberal democracy, most nobles saw autocratic government as necessary
to the preservation of their own privileges. This political outlook is expressed well in a
memorandum written in 1799 by a prominent official, Prince Bezborodko.

Document 1.13: Prince Bezborodko on the importance of autocracy in Russia

Russia is an autocratic state. Its size, the variety of its inhabitants and customs, and many
other considerations make this the only natural form of government for Russia. All arguments
to the contrary are futile, and the least weakening of autocratic power would result in the
loss of many provinces, the weakening of the state, and countless misfortunes for the people.
An autocratic sovereign, if he possesses the qualities befitting his rank, must feel that he has
been given unlimited power not to rule according to his whim, but to respect and implement
the laws established by his ancestors and by himself; in short, having spoken his law, he is
himself the first to.respect and obey it, so that others may not even dare to think of evading
or escaping it.”

Nevertheless, the successes of the Petrine system reduced the willingness of the
ruling group to put up with the ferocious discipline Peter had imposed on them. This
relaxation of tension explains why, during the eighteenth century, the Russian ruling
group managed to reduce the burden of compulsory service. In practice, it had always
been hard to enforce their service obligations. Many nobles simply hid on their rural
estates, far from the capital. Besides, during the eighteenth century, conflicts over the
succession weakened the monarchy. This was true even of Catherine the Great, for,
though she was as able as Peter the Great, she had a weaker claim to the throne. By
birth an obscure German princess, she secured the throne through a coup d’état
against her husband, Peter III. As a result, she had to spend many years consolidating
her position by granting favours to her supporters.
Under these pressures, the government freed the nobility from compulsory service
by two statutes of 1762 and 1785. From then on the nobility was free to serve or not to
serve. Many continued to serve because they needed the salary, while others served out
of a sense of moral obligation. But service was no longer a legal obligation. Nobles also
44 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

received full property rights over their land. They now owned their estates outright,
rather then enjoying them in return for service. Meanwhile, the privileges of the upper
nobility increased as Catherine extended serfdom to regions previously untouched by
it, including Ukraine.
There were slight but significant changes in the political mood of some nobles.
Catherine herself helped spread the progressive ideas of Enlightenment philosophers
such as Voltaire and Montesquieu. By the end of her reign there existed a minority of
dissident nobles committed to ideas such as freedom and democracy, which conflicted
with the very foundations of Russian autocracy. One of the first to express these ideas
publicly was Alexander Radishchev, whose Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, published
in 1790, attacked both serfdom and autocracy. For the Russian nobility the idea of
freedom meant primarily an end to the extreme dependence of nobles on the
autocratic monarch. The result of these changes was that the nobility, which Peter had
organised like the old dvoriane, now began to behave like the old boyar class, though
the term dvoriane was now used for nobles of all kinds.

The emergence of the bureaucracy: an inner elite

The growth of the bureaucracy partially counterbalanced the growing independence
of some sections of the nobility. Most government officials came from non-noble
families. Like sixteenth century dvoriane, therefore, their status depended on loyal
service to the crown. As the bureaucracy expanded it took over the governmental
functions of the nobles, just as professional soldiers had taken over the military
functions of the nobility in the seventeenth century.
The bureaucracy originated from the private officials of medieval princely estates,
and the government chancelleries or prikazy of the sixteenth century. Catherine the
Great expanded its influence greatly in 1775, when she created for the first time a
provincial bureaucracy. Civil, judicial, military and police officials now appeared not
just in the capitals, but also in the major provincial (guberniya) and district (wezd) towns
of the empire. Here, in the salaried officials of state, the government found a new class
as susceptible to discipline as the old dvoriane. In the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries the government relied more and more on its officials as the nobility’s
willingness to serve declined. In the nineteenth century these changes eventually
transformed the Russian government into a bureaucratic dictatorship without deep
roots in Russian society at large.

Questions for discussion

1 What is ‘Inner Eurasia’? What are the most important features of the geography and
climate of this region? How did these factors affect the history of Rus’ and Russia?
2 What examples are there of ‘direct’ mobilisation of resources in Kievan Rus’,
Muscovy and Imperial Russia?

3 What was the impact of the Mongol invasions? kus Diinces Jeane fo de otless
4 What were the main tasks facing rulers in Rus’, Muscovy and Imperial Russia? Did
the nature of those tasks change much over Ger \a\ence. 4 oy \ eo Form,
MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TIMES 45

What is the difference between ‘boyars’ and ‘dvoriane’? What were the different
problems faced by members of each group? How could tsars exploit these
\o))\e bybik us. Tsacs hand. Not eacned vs: eamed
differences? )
What is meant by an ‘autocratic political culture’? Why did such a political culture
emerge in Muscovy and Russia?
What is the importance of a) Vladimir I, b) Ivan IV and c) Peter I? ,
; Temible The jen’
How did the nature and mood of the Russian ruling group change in the eighteenth
century? \Wostorni zed

Further reading
See bibliography:
Auty and Obolensky, An Introduction to Russian History
Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia
Kochan and Abrahams, The Making of Modern Russia
Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime
Riasanovsky, A History of Russia
Subtelny, Ukraine: A History

In addition:
MS Anderson, Peter the Great, Thames & Hudson, London, 1978
J Cracraft (ed), Peter the Great Transforms Russia, D C Heath & Co, Lexington, Mass, 1991
R Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy 1304-1613, Longman, London & New York, 1987

Endnotes
1 See D Christian, ‘“Inner Eurasia” as a Unit of World History’, Journal of World History, vol 5,
no 2 (Sept 1994)
I Ya Froyanov, Kievskaya Rus’: Ocherki sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi istorii, Leningrad, 1974, pp 113—
14
G Vernadsky, et al (eds), A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917, 3 vols, Yale
University Press, New Haven, Conn, 1972, vol 1, pp 22-3
New
S A Zenkovsky (ed), Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles and Tales, rev edn, Meridian,
York, 1974, pp 55-6
Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 1, p 24
Mediaeval
S H Cross and O P Sherbovitz-Wetzor (tr and ed), The Russian Primary Chronicle,
Academy of America, Cambridge, Mass, 1953, p 122 (years 994-96)
Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 1, pp 32-33
Zenkovsky, Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles and Tales, p 195
Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 1, p 45
cheskoe izd-
— oo
nr
OnS S Dmitriev, et al (eds), Khrestomatiya po istortt SSSR, gos-oe uchebno-pedagogi
D Christian)
vo min-va prosveshcheniya RSFSR, Moscow, 1948, vol 1, p 49 (tr
1953, vol 3, p 121
G Vernadsky, A History ofRussia, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn,
i2 Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 1, p 53
,
13 NS Kollmann, Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System 1345-1547
Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1987
46 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

14 Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 1, pp 57-8

15 ibid, p 120
16 ibid, pp 156-7
17 ibid, p 173, from Ivan’s letter to Prince Kurbskii of 1564
18 ibid, p 163
19 ibid, pp 206-7, from Pozharskii’s appeal to Sol’vychegodsk
20 F Wilson, Muscovy through Foreign Eyes, 1553-1900, Praeger, London, 1970, pp 28-9
21 Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 1, pp 225-6
22 Cited in R Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1974, p 108
23 On the role of vodka in Russian life, see David Christian, ‘Living Water’: Vodka and Russian
Society on the Eve ofEmancipation, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990
24 Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 2, p 344
25 Cited from Raeff (ed), Plans for Political Reform, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1966, p 70
 CHAPTER TWO

THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE

EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

This chapter discusses the main features of Russian life and society on the eve of the
modern revolution.

A PRE-MODERN SOCIAL STRUCTURE

Just after the Napoleonic war, one of Russia’s first statisticians, K. I. Arsenev, used the
tax censuses of 1812 and 1816 to draw up the following description of Russia’s social
structure.

Document 2.1: Arsenev on Russia’s population, 1812 to 1816

All inhabitants of Russia can be divided into two main classes—the productive and the
non-productive classes. To the first belong those who either directly or indirectly expand
the wealth of the nation, such as agriculturalists, manufacturers, artisans and merchants. To
the second class belong all those who live at the expense of the first class: such as the clergy,
the nobility, civil and military officials [chiny, rank-holders in the Table of Ranks], the army and
navy, servants, etc.

groups
Here are Arsenev’s calculations of the size and main subdivisions of these
between the censuses of 1812 and 1816.

Non-productive classes 1000s %

| Nobility 450 Lal

2 Clergy 430 Bl
3. Military 2 000 5.0
4 Officials of various kinds & | 500 oye
Raznochintsy (people of
mixed ranks)
Total 4 380 10.9
48 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Productive classes

5 Merchants 204 0.5

6 Meshchane (town-dwellers) | 490 3.7
7 State peasants 13 100 327
8 Landlords’ serfs 20 300 50.7
9 ‘Free people’ (mainly Cossacks) 234 0.6
10 Other categories of peasants 360 0.9

Total 35 688 89.1

Total population 40 068 100.0

Arsenev concluded:

The non-productive class is to the productive class in the proportion 1:9, so that 9
producers support a single consumer-.'

Figure 2.1 uses these figures. However, it changes Arsenev’s classification in two
main ways. First, it places the merchants with the ‘non-productive’ classes. Second, it
adds a vague but important category of ‘borderline’ groups. This is to show that the
border between the productive and non-productive groups was blurred. For example,
most of the ‘military’ were common soldiers recruited from the peasantry. Many
officials, raznochintsy and clergy, and even some nobles, also lived in conditions of
extreme poverty and squalor.

‘Classes’ or ‘estates’
Arseney was an intelligent and informed observer. However, some of his classifications
are confusing. This is because class was a legal, rather than a socio-economic category

Non-productive classes (| 1.4%)

Ruling elite (0.25-0.5%
(Educated Classes) voliHae dwg!
Nobility (1.1%) p
Borderline
Officials and Raznochintsy (3.7%) Military (5%) groups

Clergy (1.1%)
Merchants (0.5%)

Productive classes (88.6%)

(Peasants and urban working Meshchane (3.7%)
(Urban working classes
classes and small traders) and small traders)

Cossacks and other

peasants (1.5%)

Landlords’ serfs (50.7%) State peasants (32.7%)

}Bmw we eee we oe oe en ee ee eee eee Peasants (84.9%) f

(Rural working classes)

La Predominantly urban

Figure 2.1 Social structure of Russia after the Napoleonic Wars.

 THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 49

in nineteenth century Russia, as in most pre-modern societies. Like most traditional

governments, the Russian government used class labels to fix people’s place within a
rigid hierarchy of power and privilege. This made sense in a pre-modern society in
which social position depended more on political than on economic forces.
However, particularly in the towns, these traditional labels could not grasp a
complex and changing reality. Raznochintsy, for example, was a catch-all term for an
important but motley group of educated people who were not nobles. They did not
hold high rank (chin) in the Table of Ranks. So they did not fully belong to the ruling
group. Yet they were clearly not peasants or merchants. This made it hard to classify
them in law. The term raznochinets reflects this vagueness, for it means ‘of various
ranks’. For the historian, the raznochintsy are important as the precursors of the Russian
intelligentsia, the group that provided most of the leaders for the Russian revolutionary
movement.
Meshchanin was a legal classification that referred to a variety of poorer town-
dwellers. It could include labourers and street pedlars as well as artisans, small
entrepreneurs and shopkeepers. Yet it did not cover all poorer town-dwellers, for many
belonged, in law, to the peasantry. The curious category of ‘free people’ referred
mainly to the Cossacks, the free soldier-peasants of Ukraine, the south-east and western
Siberia.
Each person had a precise legal status carrying particular rights and duties. For
example, a meshchanin could carry on commercial operations only within strictly
defined limits. If a business was successful, a meshchanin might eventually try to join
one of the merchant guilds. This required paying a large entry fee. In return the
merchant received new commercial privileges and a new legal status.
The legal barriers between classes limited social mobility. For serfs, bound by law to
their master’s land, escape was extremely difficult. This is clearest in the rare cases
when a serf did succeed in entering another class. Occasionally serf-owners allowed
their serfs to undertake small business operations, and sometimes enterprising serfs
earned enough to buy their freedom. The following passage shows the complex
negotiations this required. It comes from an essay on serfdom written by a liberal-
minded official in the 1840s.

Document 2.2: Zablotskii on the difficulties of purchasing freedom from serfdom

The peasant desiring to buy his freedom starts negotiations with his landlord, and these
continue for some time and employ various diplomatic niceties. The peasant, for example,
when
finds out when his landlord is short of cash; or the landlord increases his demands just
the peasant is most in need of cash for his business. This leads to many different forms of
on
cunning. The result, usually, is that the peasant buys his freedom, but at a price dependent
the scale of his turnover. No landlord finds it shameful to acquire gratis, in this way, the
of
savings others have accumulated through much blood and sweat and merely as the result
they often boast,
an absurd set of laws. Such are their notions ofjustice and equity. Indeed,
from a peasant, just as a horse-dealer
when they succeed in tearing huge sums of money
boasts when he has sold a horse for a high price.
| once had a rich peasant,’ said Mr M . . ., ‘who wanted to buy his freedom. We haggled
later that he
and settled on 16 000 rubles. But the son of a bitch tricked me. It turned out
was smarter. She
had 200 000 rubles, so | could have asked for up to 150 000! My sister
and she was right, as it turned out
would not let one of her peasants free for less than 30 000
held by the landowners!
that his total capital was only 45 000.’ Such are the notions ofjustice
50 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

And yet M.. . is no fool, is not lacking in goodness, and is no savage. “What does it matter to
the peasant,’ a landlord told us, ‘if he pays a third or half of his accumulated capital, when in
return he gets his freedom, and in one or two years of good fortune, he can regain his whole
fortune?”

Many historians prefer to talk of ‘estates’ rather than ‘classes’ when describing pre-
modern societies, because of the existence of such barriers to social movement. They
use the word ‘class’ only for modern societies, where social hierarchies are shaped by
market forces rather than by legal regulations. The distinction between ‘class’ and
‘estate’ is important and useful. However, in a modernising society such as nineteenth
century Russia, the two overlapped. Indeed Arsenev himself preferred the foreign term
klass to the traditional Russian term for ‘estate’. For this reason, I will use the term
‘class’ more broadly than most historians. I will use it to include both the legally
defined ‘estates’ of the pre-modern world, and the less defined social and economic
groups typical in modern societies.
The social structure that Arsenev described was typical of the agrarian empires of
the pre-modern world. Its most important classes were peasants and landed aristocrats.
Neither class depended primarily on market forces. Unlike entrepreneurs, nobles had
little need to compete on a market. They took most of what they needed to survive from
their peasants in the form of feudal dues. As long as their bailiffs squeezed enough
from their serfs, most nobles were uninterested in how efficiently their estates
operated. Peasants were also protected to some extent from market forces. Many had
to earn cash for taxes or special purchases, but they produced most of what they
needed from the land made available to them by their landlords. Markets existed, of
course. So did entrepreneurs and wage-earners. But as yet these three crucial
ingredients of the capitalist “engine of growth’ played only a minor role in Russian
society. The ‘modern’ revolution, which was already transforming the societies and
economies of Western Europe, had barely touched the Russia of Pushkin and Gogol.
We must now look at this pre-modern world in more detail.

THE ‘PRODUCTIVE’ CLASSES: AGRICULTURE AND THE

PEASANTRY
How did the ‘productive’ classes generate the resources that supported Russian
society? And how did they live?
Most surplus resources were generated in the countryside, for Russia, like most pre-
industrial societies, was overwhelmingly rural. In 1858, ninety-four per cent of Russians
lived in small village communities. Indeed, the best measure of the huge changes that
took place over the next hundred years is the relative decline of the rural population
and the growth of towns. (See Figure 2.2 and column B of the Statistical appendix.)
As most Russians still lived in the countryside, we will ignore the urban working
classes in this section. (Many were, in any case, temporary migrants from the villages.)
We will concentrate instead on the main productive class, the peasantry.
THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 51

100

80

=
=
8
= 60
Cc
x)
8
aQo 40
a

xo
ae

20 |

Note: Based on information in the Statistical appendix

0
1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980
Years

Figure 2.2 Urbanisation in Russia and the USSR, 1860-1990.

Se eS ee hide

The village of Slobodna, Tula, south of Moscow, August 1 879.

The village community

Physically, the village was a group of houses strung along the dirt track that passed for
a main road. It was usually close to a river. Most villages had fewer than five hundred
of water
inhabitants. However, they were larger in the steppe lands, where supplies
were scarce. As a social unit, the village was similar in size toa modern suburban street.
In the steppes
In well-wooded regions peasants built their houses, or zby, of wood.
of Ukraine the scarcity of wood made stone the preferred material. Elsewhere, stone
Each
was a luxury material used for the houses of the nobility or the occasional church.
families) two large living rooms. This was where people
house had one or (in richer
52 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

A second village scene. During the rasputitsa’, the spring thaws, most roads were impassable for several weeks. Winter was
the best time for long-distance travel.

slept, ate and spent their leisure time. Dominating the living room was a large brick
stove, the pech’, which heated the entire building. Other sections of the household
included cattle sheds, storage areas for grain, and the banya, or bathhouse. In colder
regions, these adjoined the living quarters and shared the heat from the pech’.
Elsewhere, they were separate from the main dwelling.
The land immediately around the house was called the usad’ba. Here peasant
women grew vegetables and raised cattle, pigs and poultry. They also grew flax and
hemp for cloth-making. In southern regions, they tended fruit trees or gardens of
melons and gourds.
Villages needed grazing land for cattle and hay-land for winter fodder. Where
possible, villagers also made use of local forests. They used wood from the forests for
heating, for building and for making farm implements, as well as for village crafts such
as boat-building. The forests also provided berries, mushrooms, fish and game, for
food; bark for bast shoes (lapti); and much more, including the tapers (luchiny) that lit
the house at night.
Life in such dwellings appears squalid to the modern observer. Here is an account
by a modern historian, who made a detailed study of life ina single village in the early
nineteenth century. His account avoids the idealisation of peasant life common in
much writing about rural Russia.

Document 2.3: a historian’s description of the interior of peasant huts—Petrovskoe

village, early nineteenth century
Inside the huts, the air was fetid from animal and fowl excreta. The walls and ceiling were
covered with soot and ash. Smoke, especially in the morning when the stove was lit, filled the
top half of the izba. In the evening, soot from the luchinas stung the eyes. The dirt floor
was
always damp, and in the spring and autumn it was muddy. It was impossible to keep
cockroaches out of the food; they even became a symbol of abundance and material wealth
THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 53

; S eo a Five areas of work

G | Usad’ba
3 Pasture (grazing) 2 Arable
| Village (houses, S) 3 Livestock
vegetable plots, 4 Forest 4 Forests
outhouses) Witeee ere asi 5 Off-farm earnings, Otkhod

LI]
Bridge
Aa q Church °

earnings 2 Winter

Fallow
2 Spring
(barley, oats, peas, y
flax, hemp, etc) ~ 3 Hayfields
2 Fallow 3 Hayfields 5 Off-farm earnings =».

Figure 2.3 Typical layout of a nineteenth-century Russian village.

and a sign of good luck. In fact, when moving to a new home, the head of the household
would bring a few roaches with him and let them loose. These were the conditions under
which all the serfs lived for at least a third of the year.
In contrast, the warm months brought considerable relief from the squalor of the hut,
and the psychological effect must have been substantial. Livestock, of course, was moved
outside. The stove was heated less often and in summer was used only for cooking. More
hours of sunlight reduced the need for luchinas. Animal feces were removed from the hut,
though with warm weather came the stench of decomposing manure piled in the yard.’

The household and family

The basic unit of village life was the three-generation family or household. On average,
the family included five to eight people living under the same roof. The household
was much more important than it is in industrial societies today. No institution in
modern society (except perhaps the state itself) has the influence the nineteenth
coped
century Russian household had over the life of those within it. The household
with many tasks that modern society assigns to different institutions. It handled child-
rearing, education, food production and money making, care of the aged, medical
an
treatment, even relaxation. This wide range of functions gave the household
Through its
absolute authority over its members that 1s difficult for us to appreciate.
the household took the most important decision of all in
head (usually the father),
when. The household also
the life of its members, by deciding who married whom and
authority of
decided who stayed at home and who went away for work. The immense
saw themselves more as members of a group than as
the household meant that people
separate individuals.
child-rearing
The need of the household for children meant that childbearing and
Besides, everyone
dominated women’s lives. Parents needed children for their labour.
54 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

knew that large families were usually wealthy, while small families were poor. In part,
this was because land was allotted to households in accordance with the number of
sons they had. In part, it was because spare labour was a resource that households could
use to generate more income. Indeed, labour was the only productive resource
peasants controlled, for they had little hope of buying land or borrowing capital.
Children were also the only source of security for the old.
For these reasons, the pressure to marry and rear children was overwhelming. In
Petrovskoe village in Tamboy province, ninety per cent of all women were married by
the age of twenty-four in the early nineteenth century.’ Marriage rates had been high
in Russia since at least the sixteenth century. In earlier centuries, the need to settle
new lands had encouraged widespread and early marriage, and large families. With
the rise of serfdom, landlords encouraged early marriage to increase the numbers of
their serfs.” As almost half of all children died by the age of five, women had to marry
young and keep bearing children as long as possible, to make sure some survived to
adulthood. So married women spent most of their mature years pregnant and looking
after children. In a world without day-care centres or schools, in which few questioned
traditional gender roles, the task of child-rearing tied most women to the household.
What sort of life did ordinary men and women expect to live? Most expected to
spend most of their life in the village they were born into. However, men in particular
travelled extensively outside their village in search of temporary work. People did not
expect life to change much during their lifetimes. They lived much as their ancestors
had done hundreds of years before them, and expected the future to be much the
same.
For most people, life was short. Average life expectancy on the estate of Petrovskoe,
in Tambov province, was about twenty-seven years in the first half of the nineteenth
century. This compares with over seventy years in Australia today. The Russian figure
is low because almost forty-five per cent of children died before their fifth birthday.
On the other hand, those who reached their fifth birthday had a life expectancy of forty
years, while those who survived to twenty, could hope to live well into their fifties.®

The land
For the peasantry the basic productive resource besides their own labour was the land.
The heartland of Kievan Rus’ and of Muscovy is a huge plain. For travellers the main
variations were in soils, rainfall and vegetation rather than in the shape of the land.
These variations created distinct zones running east and west (see Figure 2.4). We can
ignore the sparsely populated tundra of the far north and the deserts of the south-east.
Apart from these, there were two main inhabited areas—the forested northern zones
and the almost treeless steppes of the south, with a transitional area of wooded steppes
in between. In the early 1840s the German traveller Baron Haxthausen wrote:

In the north of Russia the vegetation springs up into a forest; every fallow field, every
uncultivated spot is covered with wood in a few years ... In the Steppes, nature
shoots up into grass and flowers; and what a luxuriant growth! Plants which with us
are at the utmost two feet tall, here rise higher than the head. Nowhere did we see
any forest, only occasionally a few bushes and stunted oaks.”

Here is Haxthausen’s description of the change from forest to steppe:

 THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 55

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56 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

To the traveller coming from the north the Steppe becomes gradually perceptible
by the forests appearing more and more in isolated patches, and the grass plains
growing larger in extent. All at once the wood ceases, not a bush is anywhere to be
seen, and the Steppe stretches out in its immensity before us.*

The forest zone had been the heartland of Muscovy. It was therefore the forests that
shaped the traditional life of old Russia. Here is how Russia’s greatest historian, V. O.
Klyuchevskii, described the role of the forests in Russian history:

Even in the seventeenth century, for a Western European travelling from Smolensk
to Moscow, Muscovy appeared an endless forest, in which towns and hamlets were
simply larger or smaller clearings. Even today [the late nineteenth century] a broad
horizon fringed by a bluish band of forest, is the most familiar landscape of central
Russia. The woods offered much to the Russian people, economically, politically and
even morally. They built their houses of pine and oak; they heated them with birch
and aspen wood, and lit them with birch tapers; they wore boots (lapti) made from
the bark of lime trees; and they made their domestic utensils of wood or bark. The
forests provided a safe refuge from external enemies, taking the place of mountains
and fortresses. The state itself, whose predecessor had failed because it was too close
to the steppes, could flourish only . . . under the protection of the forests.’

Changes in soils and rainfall were equally important. In the north, the soils were
sandy podzols, but rainfall was plentiful. The steppelands of the south had richer black
soils, formed from the composting of steppeland grasses over thousands of years.
However, until the late eighteenth century, pastoral nomads prevented farmers from
settling the steppes. When they did begin to colonise the steppes, farmers had to cope
with droughts that could destroy an entire crop. Poor soils in the north, and droughts
and pastoral nomads in the south made agriculture a hard and precarious activity in
Russia and Ukraine. However, migration into the black soil regions during the
nineteenth century permitted a rapid expansion in grain production, though it also
increased the risk of drought and famine.
High latitudes were the other main influence on Russian agriculture. Huge areas in
the far north were too cold to farm. Elsewhere, the long winters made farmers
concentrate their work into a shorter period than in Western Europe. Farmers also had
to keep livestock indoors for much longer. These problems still bedevil agriculture in
the region today.

Agriculture, food and the commune

The main productive activity of villagers was agriculture, often combined with rural
crafts. Agriculture provided the food that sustained most Russians, as well as the surplus
products used to pay taxes and feudal dues. Most important of all was the grain (usually
rye) that provided most of the food energy in peasant diets. Like peasants in other
grain-growing regions of the world, Russian and Ukrainian peasants spent much of
their life eating grain. They ate it in bread, in gruel (or kasha), in lightly fermented
drinks such as kvas, or, on festive occasions, in pies or pirogi. In the late nineteenth
century, potatoes emerged as an important supplement. Vegetables, pickled for winter,
provided variety and an essential source of vitamin C. Livestock produce was less
important, for large animals were more valuable alive than dead. Meat, meat fat and
THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 57

milk were merely supplements to a largely vegetarian diet. Gathered foods, such as
berries, mushrooms, fish and game, occasionally relieved the tedium.
Recent research suggests that Russian peasant diets, though boring, were well
balanced nutritionally. Russian peasants probably ate at least as well as their
contemporaries in Western Europe, and better than many in the third world today.
However, diets were unreliable. Most peasants suffered occasional periods of shortage,
and sometimes they endured terrible famines. Poorer families often expected
shortages in the spring, as the previous year’s stocks began to run out. The following
description suggests how families coped with spring shortages. It comes from Smolensk
province in the 1870s:

In the autumn, when there is a stock of rye, they eat pure bread, as much as they
like, and only a very conscientious peasant eats adulterated bread . . . But then the
peasants notice that bread is short. They eat less, not three times a day, but twice
and then only once. Then they start adding chaff to the pure flour. If there’s money
left from selling hemp, they use it to buy bread instead of for taxes. If there’s no
money, they get by. The head of the household finds work, or borrows ... When
there’s no more bread the children and old folk take their knapsacks and go out
‘collecting crusts’ [begging] in the neighbourhood."

Agricultural methods were primitive by twentieth century standards. The main

problem was to maintain soil fertility. Without artificial fertilisers, Russian and
Ukrainian peasants solved this problem in two main ways. First, cattle and horse
manure provided a natural fertiliser. This made livestock a vital element in peasant
agriculture. Second, farmers rested their arable/land, usually every three years, by
leaving it fallow) This meant that a third of arable land was unsown at any time.
The black soil areas of the southern steppes were different. While populations
remained small, farmers could cultivate the land more wastefully. They planted crops
year in and year out, and simply moved on when output declined. The scattered

Pract p ee a set nS Cue ms

bu
Apart from the ploughshare, the Russian plough (sokha) was wooden. It was easy to repair and haul
less efficient than European iron ploughs. Photograph dated 1880.
58 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

populations of the northern forests sometimes practised an even more ancient

technique, known as slash-and-burn, or swidden agriculture. They burnt down patches
of forest, and farmed the ashy soils until they had exhausted their fertility. Then they
moved on, returning to the same patch several decades later.
The central regions, which had been the heartland of Muscovy, were more typical.
Populations were dense here by the nineteenth century, so there was no room for such
wasteful methods. Here, three-field crop rotations were universal. Though farming was
never easy in this region, recent research suggests that crop yields were not necessarily
lower than in most of Western Europe in the same period."’ However, harvests were
less reliable than in Western Europe. Every decade, some regions suffered acute
famine.
The most distinctive feature of agriculture in this region was the way in which
peasants divided the arable land they farmed. Though the land belonged, in law, to
landlords or the state, peasants usually controlled how it was farmed. This encouraged
the peasants’ traditional belief that the land should belong to those who farmed it.
Usually, they divided the land into many strips, scattered throughout the village’s
arable land, and each household received strips from different parts of the arable land.
In this way, each household received a fair share of good and bad land.
Methods of farming shaped the lives of peasant families in many ways. The following
account, by a modern historian, explains how they shaped the division of labour
between men and women in Tamboy province.

Document 2.4: agriculture and the division of labour between men and women
As a consequence of the extremely short growing season—five and a half to six months
instead of the eight to nine months in Western Europe—under the three-field system the
harvesting of winter and spring cereals and the plowing and sowing of the winter field all
came in quick succession within the span of six weeks. From mid-July to the end of August
was the harvest season, the stradnaia pora as the Russians called it, literally the time of
suffering. It was an agonizing period of exertion demanding that numerous tasks be
accomplished simultaneously. A work team, or tiaglo, of husband and wife together proved
the best allocation of labor resources. A single male simply could not complete all the
necessary field work if he were to allow the cereals to mature fully yet avoid the danger of
an early frost.
There thus emerged in Russia a clear differentiation of field labor by sex. During the
harvest season, women used sickles to cut rye, winter wheat, if any, and sometimes oats,
while the men reaped the other spring cereals with scythes. Winter crops could not be cut
with a scythe because it knocked too many seeds off the stock, but this was not a problem
with less ripe spring cereals. The women then tied the grain into sheaves for drying, and the
men began plowing the winter field. While they sowed the next year’s rye crop, the women
started to cart the sheaves from the fields, assisted by their husbands if time permitted. In
general, plowing, harrowing, cutting hay, and harvesting with a scythe were men’s field work:
tending the kitchen garden and hemp field, raking hay, cutting stalks with a sickle, tying them,
and transporting them to the threshing floor were women’s field work.
A partnership was essential.'?

The institution that controlled the reallocation of land was the commune. This was
an informal meeting of the mainly male heads of households that took basic decisions
 THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 59

— : : ee oO be ae

A meeting of the village mir’, or ‘commune’. This was a gathering of the mainly male heads of
households.

about the allocation of land and taxes, and the timing of agricultural activities. Dividing
the arable land was necessary to make sure each household had enough land to
support itself and pay its taxes. All males had to pay the poll tax so, as the number of
males changed within a household, the commune could adjust its allocation of strips.
Regular re-partition of the land by males, and according to the number of males,
meant that men controlled the land. This control underpinned the patriarchal
authority of males in the life of the village. The commune also acted to maintain male
dominance within the household by supporting the authority of husbands and
punishing wives accused of adultery. In the 1880s, a woman named Ferapontova from
Russia’s northern provinces, made the following complaint to a district constable.

Document 2.5: defending family values in rural Russia, 1880

| complained to the township court that my husband beat me, but the court did not resolve
the case according to the law; instead, the village elder gathered some people together, came
to the home. . . where |was staying, and amidst a din and shouts they seized me, and ordered
my husband to tie my hands with a saddle strap, which is just what he did. Then | was pushed
out of the house and, while | was tied up, he thrashed me down the entire street and up to
our house, and. . . he dragged me inside and there, where people had already gathered, threw
me on the floor. . .and, though he didn’t beat me further, he mocked me in all kinds of ways,
cursing with every possible word. | implore you to carry out an investigation quickly,
otherwise | will have to endure still more torture from my husband. Is it possible that they
can order people to be tortured and mocked? Save me, for the sake of God, | haven’t the
strength to bear this torture.'°
60 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

a may have symbolised oppression, many

the commune
Though to Ferapontov

‘democracy.They saw in the survival of the commune a basic difference between Russia
and Western Europe, for they believed that the Russian commune had preserved the
, which had vanished in Europe. In the 1860s this
idea provided thebasis'for the fevolutionagl ideology known as Populisny (see Chapter
three). Most Russian intellectuals took their ideas on the commune partly from the
classic account of the German traveller Haxthausen.

Document 2.6: Haxthausen on the Russian commune, | 843 to 1844

The following information was given to us concerning the division of land in the village
communes. The principle is that the whole of the land (tillage, meadows, pasture, woods,
streams, and so on) belongs to the population of a village community regarded as a whole,
and in using these communal possessions every male inhabitant has a right to an equal share.
This share is therefore constantly changing; for the birth of every boy creates a new claim,
and the shares of those who die revert to the commune. The woods, pastures, hunting
grounds, and fisheries remain undivided and free to all the inhabitants; but the arable land
and meadows are divided equally, according to their value, among the males. This equal
division is of course very difficult, as the soil differs in quality, and portions of it may be distant
or inconveniently situated. The difficulties are great; nevertheless the Russians overcome
them easily. There are in each commune skilful land surveyors, who, competently, with insight
acquired from the traditional habits of the place, execute the work to the satisfaction of all.
The land is first divided, according to its quality, position, or general value, into sections, each
possessing on the whole equal advantages. The sections are then divided into as many
portions, in long strips, as there are shares required, and these are taken by lot. This is the
usual plan, but each region, and frequently each commune, has its local customs.

The facts here described constitute the basis of the Russian communal system, one of the
most remarkable and interesting political institutions in existence, and one that undeniably
een great advantages for the social condition of the country. The Russian communes
rg ce and compact social strength that can be found nowhere else
) the culable advantage that no proletariat can be formed so ‘long as they exist
with their present structure. A man may lose or squanderall hepossesses, but hischildren
do not inherit hisispoverty.
| They still retain their claim upon the land, by a right derived, not
from him, but from their birth as members of the commune. On the other hand, it must be
admitted that this fundamental basis of the communal system, the equal division of the land,
is not favorable to the progress of agriculture, which . . . under this system could for a long
time remain at a low level.'4

This extract shows why Russian socialists came to believe that Russia had preserved
in the commune a unique basis for Socialism. The extract also shows how the
commune could hindertec chnical pro press. It was hard to use modern machinery
where the land was divided into many small strips. Besides, re-partitions deprived’

Although primitive, Russian agriculture made Modern

agriculture has reduced the labour demanded of both people and animals in food
production. However, it makes up for this by using energy in other forms. It uses fuel
 THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 61

for farm machinery, in transport and distribution and to make fertilisers. Indeed, for
each unit of energy put into agriculture, modern agriculture produces less food energy
than did traditional peasant agriculture. Judged by its energy cost, it is modern
agriculture that is inefficient!"°

Other productive activities: the role of cash incomes

In the early nineteenth century, peasants were still largely self-sufficient. They
produced much of their own cloth and most of their own clothes. Horses and home:
) : Peasants built their own houses, paying others only for
special tasks such as the building of the brick stove. Their parents and relations taught
the many skills needed in daily life, such as building, carpentry (with an axe), hunting,
fishing and baking. For such tasks, schools were not necessary. As for medicine, each
family had its own favourite treatments, many of which relied on the healing power of
vodka. For more serious treatments, villagers went to the local znakharka, or wise
woman, who treated the sick, using a combination of herbal lore and charms. The
following interview, from the 1890s, gives some insight into the world of a village healer
called Marfa.

Document 2.7: the world of a village healer

‘| remained a widow with six small children, so | had to feed myself somehow.’
‘Did you learn to cure from someone?’
‘It’s from God.’
‘Did you begin to cure immediately?’
‘How can you do it immediately? No, little by little. It happened that | was treated myself
and saw how others cure. So, | watched closely and began to cure myself: | learned from
others.’
‘Do you treat with herbs?’
‘With herbs, with sayings, and | wash with magical water.’
‘Would you tell anyone these sayings?’
‘Why not? It’s not sinful. | get this from God. So, | went among the holy and asked, is it a
sin to heal? The old men said, not at all, it’s not a sin. You see, | had a dream . . . | was ina
room and a girl came into the room with a book in one hand and a jug in the other. She
|
looked into the jug and then into the book. Then she says three times, “no, it’s not a sin”.
about the dream. He said, “It’s alright, it’s given from God”. The
asked Father Ambrosia
monks, the most holy of them, also said it was alright.’'®

most
This extract also hints at the religious world of Russian peasants. Formally,
Christian ity was less importan t than the many
were orthodox Christians. In reality,
peasants
spirits that lived in the houses, streams and fields of every village. Most
crses

so
Self-sufficiency meant that few goods and services passed through the market,
l societies . Healers, for example,
money was less necessary than in modern industria
usually payment
were paid in kind. ‘The znakharka took what the family could afford,
, there were
in kind—a loaf of bread, five eggs, a length of cotton or wool.’!” However
bought in the nearest town, or at
some items that peasants did have to buy. These they
and family celebrat ions, and they
a fair or market. They needed vodka for all village
62 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

bought metal goods such as ploughshares.

They also bought salt, the major preservative in
a world without refrigerators.
During the nineteenth century, the im-
portance of cash steadily increased. Purchases,
money taxes and land shortages forced
peasants to seek cash incomes. Wage-earning
was possible because the rhythms of agri-
cultural life meant there were slack seasons
when peasants had spare time. Agriculture was
an erratic activity in comparison with the nine-
ae catherine.
to-five routine of modern city-dwellers. Work
Aquatint from Robert Lyall, Character of the Russians,
1823. The Russian village had a rich ceremonial life, for was hard.at certain times of the year, such as
which most villagers kept special clothes. Dancing, singing harvest-time. At other times, particularly during
and drinking dominated festivities at the great church the winter, there was less to do. As a result,
festivals, and the baptisms, weddings and funerals that were Russian peasants (particularly males) were used
the major events in the history of each household.
to periods of intense labour, followed by
periods of prolonged idleness or intense
festivity. In the early twentieth century, Russian rural sociologists tried to graph these
erratic work rhythms (Figures 2.5 and 2.6).
Free labour time and increasing need for cash encouraged peasants to find new ways
of turning their many skills into cash. The search for cash incomes was the beginning
of the profound changes that would eventually turn traditional peasants into modern
urban wage-earners.
There were three main ways of earning cash. First, peasants could earn money while
remaining in the village. Many earned money by weaving, spinning, carving wooden
utensils, making bast shoes from tree bark, or in many other rural trades. Occasionally,
whole villages specialised in a trade, such as the making of samovars, the beautiful water
heaters used for preparing tea. Some villages even specialised in begging.
16
MB Agriculture
15
14 ee Mowing
13
12 Flax growing and preparation
Il
10 | Work in the house
.o
(oa Off-farm earnings

Hours
day
per

Oo-
UI
DBP
C
DN
NW

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
Figure 2.5 Distribution offamily labour by season and type of work.

Source: Adapted from D Thorner, R E F Smith and B Kerblay (eds), A V Chayanov on the Theory
of Peasant Economy, Richard D Irwin Inc, Homewood, Ill, 1966, p 151.
 THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 63

Men Women
% of working time 100

40.2

32.5

13.7 25.0

Us
[__] Unused time 13.4
[] Domestic work 14.0
erseana 27.5
rafts and trades 20.4 28

E23 Livestock 8.8

: 0
es Agriculture Adults Youths Adults Youths

Figure 2.6 Distribution offamily labour by age and gender.

Source: Adapted from D Thorner, R E F Smith and B Kerblay (eds), A V Chayanov on the Theory
of Peasant Economy, Richard D Irwin Inc, Homewood, Ill, 1966, p 180.

The second choice was open mainly to the men. This was to seek work outside the
village, using the many skills learned in the village. Migratory workers brought in the
harvest, carted goods to markets, or hauled barges on the river Volga. In the grain belt
of the south, there appeared in the late nineteenth century special markets for the hire
of farm labourers.
Third, peasants could go to the towns and find work in building, transport, mining,
or in factories. Work in the towns usually required new skills, and often it required a
degree of literacy. So urban work was, in this sense, the hardest of the three options.
Whatever they did, most migratory workers, even those who worked in the towns,
returned to their villages for the spring sowing or for the harvest in late summer.

TAXATION AND THE REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH

The easiest way to understand relations between the productive and non-productive
classes of nineteenth century Russia is to examine the system of taxation. By taxation I
mean both the direct and indirect methods used by the ruling group to mobilise
resources.
Before 1861, there existed two distinct types of taxation. These were feudal dues and
state taxes.

Feudal dues and serfdom

Feudal dues were payments that all serfs had to make to their landlords. Serf-owners
own
could choose to levy them in cash, in kind, or in labour (usually on the landlord’s
64 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

lands). Serf-owners received these dues by right, just as modern governments receive
taxes by right.
There were two main groups of serfs—landlords’ serfs and state peasants. State
peasants belonged to the government. Landlords’ serfs belonged to individual
members of the nobility, for the right to own serfs was a privilege of the noble estate.
From the serf’s point of view, the main difference was that the government was more
remote, and meddled less in their lives than did individual landlords.
Landlords’ serfs had to pay whatever their masters demanded of them. Still, most
serf-owners had good reason not to ruin the serfs who were the basis of their own
wealth. Where soils were fertile and farming was profitable, many landlords required
their serfs to labour on the demesne lands set aside for the landlord’s own use. Labour
dues of this kind were called barshchina. Elsewhere landlords demanded payment in
cash, or obrok. In practice, landlords could demand any combination of labour and cash
dues, as well as payments in kind. Here is a list of the annual payments in kind that
serfs paid on an estate in Tambov province in the 1840s, in addition to their normal
feudal dues. Each tiaglo (an adult male and female couple) paid: twenty metres of
linen; two skeins of silken thread; one skein of ordinary thread; fifteen to twenty-five
kilograms of ham; 800 grams of butter; as well as one sheep, one duck, one goose, and
one chicken."* Serfs on obrok suffered less direct interference in their lives than those
on barshchina. Their landlords often allowed them to work in the towns, and some serfs
even became wealthy entrepreneurs.
‘Household serfs’ had no land and worked for their landlords as maids, butlers,
cooks, coach-drivers, or gardeners. They rarely received cash wages but usually received
free board and lodging. Of all serfs, household serfs were most vulnerable to the
arbitrary power of their owners, and closest in their status to slaves.
State peasants paid feudal dues to state officials, mainly in the form of cash (obrok).
This usually meant that they suffered less petty tyranny than did landlords’ serfs. On
the other hand, officials who chose to harass state peasants lacked the landlords’ self-
interested concern for the well-being of the serfs.
To enforce their fiscal rights, nobles
and gov
powers over their serfs. These - 's were t
forbade landlords to kill, ruin or injure their serfs, and d good reason
to obey. Otherwise, there were few legal limits on the power of landlords. The only
restraints were practical. Landlords could decide how much labour, money and goods
to exact from their serfs. They decided how much land to assign to the peasants and
how much to set aside for their own use. They could force their serfs to marry. They
could dispossess serfs of their land at any time, turning ordinary serfs into household
serfs. Serf-owners judged petty offences and could flog their serfs or even exile them
to Siberia. They could send male serfs to the army as recruits. They could even sell their
serfs, though the law frowned on this practice. Finally, as serfs could not legally own
property, unscrupulous landlords extorted large payments from entrepreneurial serfs
who made money. In short, the right to tax their serfs gave landlords arbitrary authority
over most aspects of a serf’s life. Though self-interest forced most landlords to protect
their serfs, there were always some who used their powers in brutal and sadistic ways.
Most to
determine how they farmed the land set aside for their own use and how they managed
their village affairs. It is also probable that Russian serfs
than many wage-e inWestern
ame Europe?rsHowever, serfs had nocivilorpolitical
rights/In this sense they were similar to American slaves.)
THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 65

in the R in peasants’ tradit ie espect for [

tk

tsar.)They had no legal protection against landlords or government officials. Indeed,

Catherine the Great had made it illegal for serfs to complain about their masters. The
only source of protection for serfs, therefore, was someone more powerful than the
landlords or officials who stood over them. This could only be God—or the tsar. So
most peasants retained a touching faith that the tsar would try to help them, if only
they could tell him of their real plight. This also explains why most peasant
disturbances broke out not because of the intensity of peasant grievances but because,
momentarily, peasants came to believe that the tsar would support their protests. The
belief that they could get away with protest was usually more important than the
intensity of their grievances. They also knew that landlords and officials would try to
hide the truth from the tsar and sabotage his efforts at reform. Peasants saw moré

1p

How burdensome were feudal dues? There are no precise calculations. However, we
have some indirect evidence. Soviet scholars claimed that the obrok payments in four
central provinces of Russia amounted to about twenty per cent of average peasant
income in the late eighteenth century, and as much as thirty to forty per cent by the
nineteenth century.’? Where labour dues were the norm, we can estimate the size of
the tribute by comparing the number of days worked on the landlords’ land with the
time peasants spent on the land set aside for their own use.

If the landlord demands only three days of barshchina a week, it is obvious that the
peasant cannot work more land for the landlord than he has been given for his own
allotment, assuming, of course, that he works as hard as is humanly possible. But
peasants often work more land for the landlord than they receive for their own use.”

Andrei Zablotskii, the author of this passage, noted cases where the peasants had to
work twice as hard for the landlord as for themselves. However, he added that such
cases were unusual. These calculations are extremely rough. However, they suggest
could account for as much asone-third, and sometimes two-thirds of
ur anc ealth generated by peasant households. This is much more than
saigin vein
he ter it bythe Mongolsin the thirteenth century. Such figures
show the power of serfdom as a lever for the direct mobilisation of resources.

State taxes
direct
In addition to the feudal dues it levied as a serfowner, the government also levied
was
and indirect taxes on the entire non-noble population. The most direct of all taxes
army recruitment, which was levied not on property but on human beings. Until 1834,
to
those recruited had to serve for twenty-five years. In 1834, the term was reduced
term, recruits received their freedom. However, this
fifteen years. At the end of their
meant
was small consolation. The high death rate in the army (mainly from disease),
no longer had roots
that few returned to civilian life, and those who did found they
Indeed the law
there. Recruitment meant severing all ties with one’s home village.
to remarry. In the 1850s
treated the wives of recruits as widows, and allowed them
-ecruitment was the lot of one intwenty-five Russian males. from the
The nobility and clergy were free from compulsory recruitment and
all other classes (except
payment of direct monetary taxes. The main direct tax, paid by
66 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Income Expenditure

Other (14%)
Other (22%)
Ministries of justice
and education (4%)
Ministry of finance (13%)
Customs (18%
Mod Imperial court (7%)
Tax on salt (5%)

Tax on vodka (30%) Army and fleet (45%)

Direct taxes (25%)

remy poll tax and
obrok of state peasants) Loans (17%)

Based on ordinary revenue and expenditure (ie excludes extraordinary loans and expenditure)

Figure 2.7 Budget of the Russian government in 1846.

Source: Based on S S Dmitriev, et al (eds), Khrestomatiya po istorii SSSR, gos-oe uchebno-

pedagogicheskoe izd-vo min-va prosveshcheniya RSFSR, Moscow, vol 2, pp 607-10.

merchants), was the poll tax. Introduced by Peter the Great, it was levied on all males
from the ‘tax-paying’ classes. The other main direct tax was the obrok, paid by state
peasants. This was the governmental equivalent of the feudal dues received by private
landlords. Together, poll taxes and the obrok from state peasants accounted for about
twenty-five per cent of ordinary government revenue in the 1846 budget (see Figure
af):
. This yielded an astonishing
To collect the liquor tax, the government used the
archaic method of tax farming. In each province, liquor traders bid for the right to
become ‘tax farmers’. This gave them a monopoly on liquor sales for a period of four
years, in return for which they paid the government a fixed amount each month.
Inevitably, this generated great corruption as the tax farmers looked for ways of raising
as much cash as they could within the four years available to them. Like the direct taxes,
the vodka tax mainly affected working class households in the villages and towns.”!
Working-class families also contributed to customs revenues by paying inflated prices
for imported goods. Customs revenues accounted for eighteen per cent of ordinary
revenue in 1846. Altogether, it is likely that peasants and urban workers contributed at
least eighty per cent of the government’s ordinary revenue.
What did they get in return? Not much. In the same year, 1846, seventeen per
cent
of ordinary expenditure serviced loans, forty-five per cent went to the army and fleet,
thirteen per cent to the ministry of finance, and seven per cent to the upkeep of the
imperial court. Of the remaining eighteen per cent, most went to various other
ministries. Even the two per cent assigned to the ministry of education went to elite
schools. The similar amounts assigned to the ministry of justice had no effect on
peasants, who came under the jurisdiction of separate manorial or communal
courts.22
 THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 67

Redistributing resources
The huge fiscal machinery of the Russian state pumped resources upwards from the
peasantry to support Russia’s huge armies, and to support the privileged and leisured
life-style of Russia’s non-productive classes.

THE NON-PRODUCTIVE CLASSES

The non-productive classes were a diverse group. The dominant section was the serf-
owning nobility, headed by the tsar, the largest of all landowners. I will also examine
three other groups within the ruling group, for their importance was to grow steadily
as Russia modernised. These were the officials, the intelligentsia and the merchantry.
The military never formed a distinct political group, and at the upper levels they
merged with the nobility. The clergy, and the Russian Orthodox Church in general,
also played a limited role in Russian political life. The church had been firmly
subordinated to the government by Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great
completed the process by secularising Church lands. Besides, most parish clergy lived
a life little different from that of the peasantry. For these reasons, I will not discuss the
military and the clergy separately.

The nobility
In 1858 there were about one million nobles in the Russian Empire. However, only
610 000 were hereditary nobles, and only 247 000 belonged to the Russian hereditary
nobility. (Many of the rest were from the numerous Polish nobility.) Of these, only
about 90 000 owned serfs. Even within this smaller group, there were large variations
in wealth and privilege. Only about 18 500 serf-owners owned more than a hundred
serfs. These were the real nobility. Only they could vote in the provincial assemblies of
nobility established under Catherine the Great. Some of the remaining serf-owners
were so poor they lived like peasants alongside their own serfs. So it is really these
18 500 (about 0.02 per cent of the total population) who made up the upper crust of
Russian society. As this group also dominated the bureaucracy and the army, it is
reasonable to describe its members as the ‘ruling elite’. Together with their families,
they accounted for no more than 0.25-0.5 per cent of the total population.
Even within this elite, there were differences. There was a tiny inner group, close to
the royal court. This is the world of Leo Tolstoy, and the Rostov family in War and Peace.
There was also a larger outer group of rural nobles, often referred to by historians as
the ‘gentry’. These were the heroe s
and heroines of Gogol’s novel, Dead Souls.
What is striking about the upper nobility is not just its fabulous wealth, based on
serf labour, but also its Europeanness. Ever since the reign of Peter the Great, the
upper nobility had been educated in European traditions. By the nineteenth century,
their world was European in clothing, food, education, culture, even language. Many
could barely speak the language of their own peasants. Instead, they spoke French or
German. They lived on large country estates, or in town houses in Moscow or
home
St Petersburg, or in the spas and resort towns of Western Europe. Their spiritual
was Europe even if their economic home (the source of their wealth) was the Russian
countryside.
68 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

In the early nineteenth century, the landed nobility still dominated the Russian
ruling group. Its upper levels set the tone for the upper classes in manners, dress and
attitudes. As serf-owners, they directly ruled half the peasant population. They
dominated the upper levels of the bureaucracy and advised the tsar on policy. The
autocracy itself was still the representative of noble interests, and tsars saw themselves
as leaders of the class of nobles. Tsars also knew that if they neglected the nobility’s
interests too obviously, disgruntled nobles might simply murder them. This had been
the fate of Paul I (1796-1801), the father of Alexander I and Nicholas I who, between
them, ruled from 1801-1855. The French traveller, de Custine, was thinking of this
unspoken threat when he described Russia as an ‘autocracy tempered by assassination’.

Subordinate members of the ruling group

Officials and the structure of government
Under the original Table of Ranks all nobles were also either civil-or military officials
of the government. After the emancipation of the nobility from compulsory service in
1785, this ceased to be true. From that time, it was possible to distinguish between those
nobles who worked as government officials, and those who did not. By the mid-
nineteenth century, the number and importance of government officials was growing
rapidly. Officials began to form an inner, disciplined core of the ruling group. Whether
or not they were of noble rank, most officials were dependent on government salaries
for a livelihood. Like the old dvorane, their privileges derived from service. Meanwhile,
those nobles who did not serve considered themselves more independent of the
government, like the old boyar class. During the nineteenth century the gap between
the two groups grew wider, as the autocracy relied increasingly on paid officials for the
routine execution of government decisions.
At the top of the pyramid the two groups merged. Government ministers and
provincial governors usually came from the upper levels of the landed nobility. Below
them, serving in the ministries or in the various organs of local government and police,
was a larger group of professional bureaucrats. At the lower end of the scale, these
exercised purely clerical functions in return for pitifully small salaries. In 1850 there
were about 114 000 officials on the government’s payroll, but 32 000 were purely
clerical. The remaining 86 000 were in the Table of Ranks, but only the upper eight
ranks (about 14 000) had noble status.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the Russian government consisted of a disciplined
bureaucracy, which gave the tsar advice and carried out the tsar’s decisions. There were
no elected institutions of any significance. Nor could any group, institution, or
individual legally resist the will of the tsar. The main instruments of government were
the ministries, which had been founded in 1802. In each province (guberniya), the main
government official was the governor. The governors represented the tsar, and ruled
their provinces as autocratically as the tsar ruled Russia. They, in turn, headed an
administration based in the provincial capital, but with branches in the main towns of
each district (wezd).

The merchants
About 246 000 merchants belonged to the so-called merchant guilds in 1867.
Merchants could not own serfs, nor could they vote in the assemblies of the nobility.
Although many were extremely wealthy, they had nothing like the prestige or influence
THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 69

of the bourgeoisie of nineteenth century France or England. In dress, mental outlook

and customs, they, along with the clergy, were the least Europeanised section of the
upper classes. Nevertheless, in economic and fiscal matters the government often
turned to merchants for advice. As Russia began to modernise later in the century,
merchants gained increased influence as industrialists and financiers.

The intelligentsia
The Russian term ‘intelligentsia’ has given rise to much dispute among historians. It is
simplest to think of the intelligentsia as those members of the upper classes who,
though educated, enjoyed neither the material privileges of the nobility nor the
political influence of the bureaucracy. It was their half-and-half status, as semi-members
of the ruling group, that explains why so many became dissidents.
Members of the intelligentsia were the forerunners of the modern ‘white-collar’
workers. They were brain workers, living from their education and intellect.
This is an
extremely
large and important group in modern industrialised societies, but it was a
small and underprivileged group in most pre-modern societies, including nineteenth
century Russia.
In the mid-nineteenth century, most members of the intelligentsia came from
raznochintsy groups, such as the children of priests. However, as the century wore on,
increasing numbers trained in the universities. By the second half of the century, many
worked for the government as statisticians, teachers, doctors, agricultural experts.
Others worked as journalists or writers. A minority felt so alienated from the system
that they became revolutionaries. Dissident members of the intelligentsia provided
most of the leaders of the Russian revolutionary movement, and they made good
revolutionary leaders, for they were better educated than their working class followers,
and knew from inside how the system worked.

Divisive and cohesive factors within the ruling group

Divisive factors
By comparison with the productive classes, most of these groups enjoyed considerable
material, political and psychological privileges. However, their privileges took various
forms. Nobles owed their wealth mainly to serf labour. Officials, and most members of
government salaries, though some enjoyed
the intelligentsia lived off ungenerous
influence as servants of a powerful state. Merchants made their money in business and
industry. Within each group there were wide variations in wealth, status and power. At
the lower levels, each group merged imperceptibly into the ‘productive’ classes.
The diverse interests of the various sections of the ruling elite always threatened
their solidarity as a group. Even in the eighteenth century, some nobles had resented
the immense power of the autocracy and its officials. Merchants resented the exclusive
the constant
economic privileges of the nobility. Members of the intelligentsia resented
more than
petty harassment of a government that respected birth and wealth
promotion were the main
education and expertise. Poor wages, censorship, and bars to
grievances of the nineteenth century intelligentsia.
ly,
These divisions within the ruling group multiplied during the century. Eventual
group began to lose the unity and cohesion
they created rifts so wide that the ruling
necessary for its survival.
70 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Cohesive factors
In the early nineteenth century, these divisions were balanced by powerful unifying
pressures.
In the first place, all members of the non-productive classes benefited from the
massive redistribution of wealth described in the previous sections. They also shared
in different ways in the task of government. This was obviously true of the nobility,
government officials and the military. But even the intelligentsia, the clergy and the
merchantry played important leadership roles in the more specialised areas of culture,
religion and the economy. This is the first reason for treating all these groups as
members of a single ‘ruling group’.
Second, formal institutions bound the group together. The most important were
the autocracy and the Table of Ranks. Together, they created structures of leadership,
subordination and hierarchy, that incorporated everyone of importance in Russian
society. As the literature of the period shows, most upper-class Russians accepted the
autocratic political culture that had evolved in Russia since the Middle Ages. They were
also intensely conscious of rank. There were even special forms of address for each
rank. Members of the first two ranks were addressed as ‘Your Supreme Excellency’;
those of ranks 3 to 5, as ‘Your Excellency’; those of ranks 6 to 8, as ‘Your Supreme
Honour’; and the rest, as ‘Your Honour’.
The third cohesive factor was cultural. In 1850, ninety to ninety-five per cent of the
population was illiterate.** In contrast, most members of Arsenev’s ‘non-productive’
classes were literate, and many were well-educated. Their learning was European in
content, and taught either by private tutors or in the country’s few secondary schools.
As a result, the ‘non-productive’ classes were also the ‘educated’ classes. They shared a
western culture that separated them from the religious, superstitious and pre-literate
peasantry. Intellectually, the productive and non-productive classes lived in quite
different worlds. In the long-term, the cultural gulf between the upper and lower
classes did much to preserve upper class solidarity against the ‘dark masses’ they ruled,
despite the many potential divisions within the elite.

Society and culture

In the early nineteenth century Russia’s educated classes produced a rich literary,
philosophical and scientific culture that reflected many of the tensions of a pre-
modern society first glimpsing the dangers and opportunities of the ‘modern’
revolution. Three main issues haunted Russian intellectuals in the early nineteenth
century.

1 The relationship between individuals and the autocracy.

This issue emerged naturally out of the growing discontent of some educated Russians
with autocratic government. Their discontent drew inspiration from the slogans and
ideals of the American and French revolutions, and the tumult of the revolutionary
epoch that ended with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. It was this combination of
resistance to extreme forms of autocracy, and attraction to the liberal ideas
of
revolutionary Europe that laid the foundations of the Russian revolutionary
movement.
THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 71

2 The relationship of Russia to Europe.

Ever since the reign of Peter the Great, educated Russians had borrowed extensively
from the culture of Europe. Yet ordinary Russians knew nothing of the culture of
Europe. What, then, was Russian culture? What did it mean to be Russian? Did Russia’s
future lie with Europe or with its own past? This issue merged imperceptibly with a
third.

3. The gulf between the upper and lower classes.

Did Russia’s future lie with the educated elite or with the peasantry? Which group was
truest to Russia’s essential nature? Or could educated and non-educated Russians
combine to produce a distinctive Russian culture in spite of the gulf between them?
These questions fired the revolutionary movement, whose origins lie in this period.
Their importance can be seen clearly in the Decembrist revolt of 1825. This was an
unsuccessful coup d’etat led by a small group of young army officers. Most of the
Decembrists had participated in the campaigns of 1812-14 against Napoleonic France.
On returning to Russia, they were shocked by the contrasts between post-revolutionary
Europe and their Russian homeland, with its lack of civil and political freedoms. One
of them, A. Bestuzhev, wrote in a letter:

The war was still on when the soldiers, upon their return home, for the first time
disseminated grumbling among the masses. ‘We shed blood’, they would say, ‘and
then we are again forced to sweat under feudal obligations. We freed the fatherland
from the tyrant and now we ourselves are tyrannised over by the ruling class.’**

Another Decembrist, Yakushkin, described his personal experience of the home-

coming from France:

From France we returned to Russia by sea. The first division of the Guard landed at
Oranienbaum [a royal palace near St Petersburg] and listened to the Te Deum
performed by the Archpriest Derzhavin. During the prayer, the police were
mercilessly beating the people who attempted to draw near to the line-up of troops.
This made upon us the first unfavourable impression when we returned to our
homeland. . . Finally the Emperor appeared, accompanied by the Guard, on a fine
sorrel horse, with an unsheathed sword, which he was ready to lower before the
Empress. We looked with delight at him. But at that very moment, almost under his
horse, a peasant crossed the street. The Emperor spurred his horse and rushed with
the unsheathed sword toward the running peasant. The police attacked him with
their clubs. We did not believe our own eyes and turned away, ashamed for our
beloved tsar.”°

From 1816, groups of young officers formed conspiratorial organisations intending

to overthrow autocracy and serfdom. In December 1825, in the confusion that followed
the death of Alexander I, they attempted a coup in St Petersburg. However, their
mutiny was ill-prepared, and the new Tsar, Nicholas I, crushed it within a few days.
During the oppressive reign of Nicholas I, strict censorship restricted public
discusof issues such as serfdom or autocracy. Censorship expressed one of the
sion
basic rules of the autocratic political culture of Russia’s ruling group. There must be
did not
no public display of division in deeds or words. As in the past, this principle
 72 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

suppress conflict. It merely dre nd. Educated Russians reacted to

censorship by debating politics indirectly, through discussions of topics such as Russia’s
relationship with the West. This issue was debated with particular intensity during the
1840s by small groups of Moscow intellectuals who later became known as the
Westernisers and Slavophiles. Broadly speaking, the Westernisers admired the modern
world of Western Europe, with its civil and political rights, its rational, scientific and
urban culture, and its economic productivity. On the other hand, the Slavophiles
admired old Russian culture and saw the West as a corrosive force destroying the
communal, rural and religious world of old Russia.
Many of their discussions centred on the role of Peter the Great, for it was during
his reign that Russia’s elite had first begun to absorb western culture and to separate
itself from the mass of the Russian population. For the Westernisers Peter was a hero,
the ruler who at last had turned Muscovy towards the higher civilisation of Europe.
Here is how a Westerniser, the literary critic V. G. Belinsky (1811-48), described Peter’s
role in Russian history.

Document 2.8: Russia and the West—a pro-western view

Peter the Great was the greatest phenomenon not only in our history, but in the history of
all mankind. He was a god who called us back to life, who blew a living soul into the body of
ancient Russia, colossal, but sunk in a deadly torpor...
Everything great, noble, human, and spiritual came up, grew, burst into splendid bloom,
and brought forth sumptuous fruit on European soil. The diversity of life, the noble relations
between the sexes, the refinement of customs, art, science, the subjugation of the
unconscious forces of nature, the victory over matter, the triumph of the spirit, the respect
for the human personality, the sacredness of human right—in short, everything that makes
one proud of being a man... all this is the result of the development of European life.”

When Slavophiles such as Ivan Kireevskii compared Russia and Europe, they saw
something very different.

4xpocument 2.9: Russia and the West—a Slavophile view

Theology in the West assumed the character of rational abstractness; in the Orthodox world
it retained an inner wholeness of spirit ... In the West, there were universities for
scholasticism and law; in ancient Russia—monasteries for prayer .. . There, the rational and
scholastic study of higher truths; here, the striving toward an active and complete
understanding of them . . . There a state organisation based on violent conquest; here, one
based on the natural development of the people’s way of life, permeated with the unity of a
fundamental belief. There, a hostile division of classes; in ancient Russia, their harmonious
association in all their natural variety ... There, a propensity in the law toward the
appearance of justice; here, a preference for the essence of justice. There, jurisprudence
strives for a logical code; here, instead of formal connections, it seeks the intrinsic bond
between legal principles and the principles of faith and custom . . . There, improvements were
always accomplished by forcible changes; here, by harmonious natural growth . . . There, the
precariousness of each individual regulating himself; here, the firmness of family and social
bonds... There, the foppery of luxury and the artificiality of life; here, the simplicity of basic
needs and the courage of moral fortitude.”
 THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 73

TOWARDS THE MODERN WORLD

In retrospect, we can see that in debates such as these, educated Russians were
beginning to grapple with the issue of modernity. Europe represented a new world of
industry, urbanisation and science. Russia represented a traditional world of peasants,
religion and autocracy. In discussing the relationship of Europe and Russia, or the
Europeanised upper classes to the peasantry, intellectuals were trying to make a choice,
for it still seemed there was a choice to be made. Should Russia keep what was best in
the traditional world? Or should it welcome the changes that were already
transforming Europe? We can see now that the choice was unreal. Sooner or later,
willingly or not, Russian society would be transformed. However, debates such as those
between the Slavophiles and Westernisers shaped Russia’s response to modernity and
affected the way in which Russian society entered the modern world. They could not
prevent modernisation, but they could and did affect its course.

Questions for discussion

1 How useful is Arsenev’s distinction between ‘productive’ and ‘non-productive’
classes? Does it apply in the modern world?
(@ \How did the Tsarist government mobilise resources in the early nineteenth century?
WA Were direct or indirect forms of mobilisation most important?
3 What were the most important factors shaping the lives of peasant women and men
in the Russian Empire early in the nineteenth century?
4 How did geographical factors affect a) the life of peasant men and women; and b)
the Russian ruling group?

5 Had the ‘modern’ revolution begun to affect Russian society in the early nineteenth
century? In what ways? Yes
6 What was ‘serfdom’? How did it shape Russian lifeways in the early nineteenth
century?

7 What were the most important factors dividing the Russian ruling group from
ordinary Russians?
8 How united was the Russian ruling group?

Further reading
See bibliography:
Atkinson, Women in Russia
Blum, Lord and Peasant
Kochan and Abrahams, The Making of Modern Russia
Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime
Saunders, Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform
Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire
74 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

In addition: :
B Eklof& S Frank (eds), The World of the Russian Peasant, Unwin Hyman, Boston, 1990
S L Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrouskoe, a Village in Tambov, Chicago, 1986
E Kingston-Mann and T Mixter (eds), Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia,
1800-1921, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1991

Endnotes
1 Adapted from S S Dmitriev, et al (eds), Khrestomatiya po istorit SSSR, gos-oe uchebno-
pedagogicheskoe izd-vo min-va prosveshcheniya RSFSR, Moscow, 1948, vol 2, pp 402-3 (tr
D Christian). Arsenev’s figures are very rough, and I have corrected totals. Itis characteristic
of the attitudes of the time that government censuses counted only males, as it was males
who paid the poll tax. So the above figures have been doubled to estimate the total
population.
A P Zablotskii-Desiatovskii, “O krepostnom sostoianii’, in Graf P.D. Kiselev i ego vremya.. .,
Tipografiya M M Stasulevicha, St Petersburg, 1882, vol 4, pp 289-90 (tr D Christian)
From S L Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov, Chicago,
1986, p 62
Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control, p 76
P Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy 1850-1917, Batsford, London, 1986, p 52
Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control, p 68
fh
Or
SID A von Haxthausen, The Russian Empire: Its People, Institutions, & Resources, London, 1856,
vol 1, p 344, reprinted F Cass, London, 1968
[e.0) ibid, vol 2, p 70
V O Klyuchevskii, Kurs russkot istorii, in Sochineniya, Mysl’, Moscow, 1987-90, vol 1, p 83 (tr D
Christian)
10 AN Engel gardt, Jz Derevni, 41-3, cited from R E F Smith and David Christian, Bread & Salt:
A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1984, p 337
il Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control, pp 30, 56
12 ibid, pp 91-2
13 cited in S P Frank, ‘Popular Justice, Community, and Culture: 1870-1900’, in B Eklof and
S P Frank (eds), The World of the Russian Peasant, Unwin Hyman, Boston, 1990, p 143
14 G Vernadsky, et al (eds), A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917, 3 vols, Yale
University Press, New Haven, Conn, 1972, vol 2, pp 554-5
15 See C Tudge, The Famine Business, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1979, pp 11-13
16 Cited in R L Glickman, ‘The Peasant Woman as Healer’, in B E Clements, B AEngel, &C D
Worobec (eds), Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, University of
California Press, Berkeley, 1991, p 154
IW ibid, p 157
18 Zablotskii, ‘O krepostnom sostoianii’, p 280
19 P G Ryndziunskii, Utverzhdenie kapitalizma v Rossii, Nauka, Moscow, 1978, p 56
20 Zablotskii, ‘O krepostnom sostoianii’, p 277
21 See D Christian, ‘Living Water’: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1990, chs 5-7
22 Dmitriev, Khrestomatiya, vol 2, pp 607-10 for the 1846 budget
23 The Fontana Economic History of Europe, William Collins, Glasgow, 1973, vol 2, p 801
24 T Riha (ed), Readings in Russian Civilization, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1964,
vol 2, p 299
25 A Mazour, The First Russian Revolution: The Decembrist Movement, Stanford University Press,
Stanford, 1937, p 55
26 Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 2, p 568
27 ibid, p 576
 CHAPTER THREE

THE ‘GREAT REFORMS’ AND

THE RISE OF A
REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT

In the early nineteenth century the Russian Empire was a major world power. It owed
its strength to the formidable armies that had helped defeat Napoleon, and to the
autocratic governments that mobilised the resources needed to support these armies.
Yet in the 1850s Alexander II launched a ‘revolution from above’ which transformed
Russian society. His government began by abolishing serfdom. Then it introduced
reforms in local government, the law, censorship, banking, taxation and the army.
Most historians regard the ‘Great Reforms’ as a watershed in Russian history. In the
view of Soviet historians, they marked the end of almost 1000 years of feudalism. Most
western historians have seen the reforms as a large, if hesitant, step towards
modernisation. One western historian, Terence Emmons, has described them as
‘probably the greatest single piece of state-directed engineering in modern European
history before the twentieth century’.'
Why did the Russian government introduce such dangerous and far-reaching
changes? Were the reforms a first attempt to bring Russia into the modern world? If
so, how successful were they?
In discussing these questions, we will bear in mind the striking parallels between
the era of the ‘Great Reforms’, and the era of perestroika in the late 1980s. In both
periods, anew generation of young, reforming politicians launched sweeping changes
from above, after a prolonged era of political oppression and economic stagnation.

CAUSES OF THE REFORMS

To explain the ‘Great Reforms’, we must begin by distinguishing between the real
problems of the government (as far as we can assess those problems now), and the
government’s own assessment of its problems. Soviet historians wrote within a Marxist
theory of history that stressed the role of objective historical laws. As a result, they
usually emphasised the long-term changes that made reform inevitable. Western
historians have mainly stressed the government’s subjective assessment of its problems.
Both approaches are necessary. No one doubts that the Russian government faced
and
serious problems that would eventually undermine its stability. Yet the timing
nature of reform depended on how particular politicians assessed the nature and
urgency of these problems.
76 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Long-term problems
In retrospect, we can see that serfdom posed economic, political, military and moral
problems, that had to be tackled sooner or later if Russia was to survive as a great power
in a modernising world.

Serfdom and the economy

A minority of educated Russians had argued since the eighteenth century that serfdom
was an inefficient way of using labour. In 1766 Catherine the Great organised an essay
competition on the question: ‘Whether it is more beneficial to society for the peasant
to own land, or only movable property, and the degree to which his rights should
extend over either type of property’. The winner, a Frenchman, put the case for free
labour clearly.

Document 3.1: the advantages of free labour in theory, 1766

Beyond all doubt, the best way to attract, arouse, and encourage the tillers of the soil is to
give them ownership of the land they cultivate. Then each one will toil for himself, for his
children, for his descendants; in a word, he will enrich the state while increasing property.
But what limits should be assigned to this property? If he owns only movable goods, this
can hardly be called property; it holds no attraction for the peasant; he should be given land.
But he must be free; freedom and property rights are united in an indissoluble bond. Two
thousand peasants doing forced labor will be of less benefit to the state than one hundred
husbandmen who see a sure path open to their own enrichment; for the former labor under
duress and always seek ways of avoiding hard work.”

In other words, the government should encourage peasants to become petty

entrepreneurs. This was a way of saying that the direct mobilisation of resources
through force was less efficient than indirect mobilisation operating through market
forces and people’s real interests.
In the early nineteenth century, educated Russians read the works of the Scottish
economist Adam Smith, who also argued that free wage labour was more productive
than forced serf labour. Practical experience confirmed these conclusions. Andrei
Zablotskii, a progressive government official, described what he was told by a provincial
noble in 1840.

Document 3.2: the advantages of free labour

in practice, 1840s
There is no doubt that free labour is better. It is wrong to suppose that once our peasants
are free they will become even lazier. This is untrue! A free man knows that if he does not
work he is not going to be fed for nothing, and as a result, he works hard. Here is my own
experience: twenty versts from my estate of Zemenki, | have some unsettled land which |
have worked using my own peasants, not under barshchina, but by hiring them under a free
contract. The same peasants who idle about on barshchina work extremely hard there and
are even willing to work on holidays, as long as no one stops them. And they so value this
work that they are reluctant even to annoy the overseer.
THE ‘GREAT REFORMS’ AND THE RISE OF A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT 77

The low productivity of serf labour threatened both the state and the nobility.
Nobles found it increasingly difficult to extract from their serfs the resources needed
to support their westernised life styles. As a result, they borrowed from the State Loan
Bank. By 1859, landlords had mortgaged sixty per cent of their serfs. Serfdom was also
failing the Treasury. In the 1840s and 1850s the taxes that rose most rapidly were not
the taxes based on serfdom—poll taxes, and the obrok from state peasants—but those
on vodka. By 1855 the government was fifty-four million roubles in debt. During the
Crimean War, it was the rising revenues from vodka sales that saved it from bankruptcy.
It was certainly in no position to pay for the military modernisation needed if Russia
was to remain a military superpower.
Serfdom also restricted growth indirectly. In regions with good soils, some
serf-owners exploited serf labour to produce cheap grain for the market. This was a
commercial form of serfdom, similar to the commercial uses of slavery in the southern
states of the USA. However, because transportation was so primitive, serf-owners who
produced for the market had to sell their grain on local markets where prices were
low. To survive, they needed the access to wider markets which an extensive railway
network could provide. Yet many believed that railways were incompatible with the
survival of serfdom for, while serfdom meant tying peasants to the village, railways
encouraged migration.* Like Nicholas I’s minister of finance, Kankrin, they saw
railways as ‘a malady of our age’.”
To more thoughtful Russians, the conclusion was clear. While serfdom remained,
Russian agriculture would stagnate and so would the entire Russian economy. A
stagnant economy would limit the revenues of both nobles and government, while a
fixed tax base left no resources for military reform. Meanwhile, the economies of
Russia’s European rivals were growing at unprecedented rates. If nothing was done to
stimulate the Russian economy, Russia would fall behind the other great powers in
economic and military strength.

towards the Moscow

Volga boatwomen, 1910. For centuries boats were towed upstream along the Volga
region by teams of men or, more rarely, women.
78 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

There can be no doubt that these arguments were correct. Eventually, forced labour
would have to give way to wage labour for, as we have seen, wage labour is one of the
defining features of a successful modern society.
Nevertheless, these conclusions were harder to see in mid-nineteenth century
Russia. Indeed, even amongst educated Russians, only a minority accepted them, and
most of these assumed that Russia would remain an agrarian society even after the
abolition of serfdom. Supporting the abolition of serfdom did not necessarily mean
supporting industrialisation. Most provincial nobles found the arguments of
economists irrelevant. Serfdom was simply a way of life. Few provincial nobles had read
Adam Smith, and they saw no reason to pay for labour when serf labour was free.
Besides, Russia’s serf economy still had plenty of room for growth, as Lenin’s one-
time ally, Peter Struve, argued later in the century.® In the early nineteenth century
many serfs engaged in wage-work or in rural crafts in order to pay taxes and cash dues.
Meanwhile, serf-owners set up enterprises such as distilleries or sugar-beet processing
plants on their lands. Serfdom was by no means so rigid that it prevented the
emergence of some entrepreneurs and wage-labourers, or an extension of market
relations.
In the middle of the century, only a minority of progressive nobles and officials
really thought that the advantages of free labour justified overthrowing a system that
had worked well since the sixteenth century. Though the problem of economic
stagnation would eventually have to be faced, it was not yet so serious that it demanded
immediate action.

Serfdom and the problem ofpeasant rebellion

Contemporaries were more impressed with the social and political dangers of
maintaining serfdom. Because it depended on forced labour, serfdom generated a
high level of class tension. We have already seen that the first large peasant rebellions
in Russian history occurred as serfdom was being created. Between 1773 and 1774, the
greatest of these rebellions, led by Emelyan Pugachev, had caused the death of 1500
nobles and threatened to destroy the government of Catherine the Great. Ever since,
Russian governments had feared the appearance of a new Pugachev. Yet the low
productivity of the Russian economy meant that governments and nobles had to tax
their serfs hard, even though they knew this might provoke unrest.
In the early nineteenth century, there were ominous signs that the peasantry might
hit back. Between 1835 and 1854, the army suppressed 228 peasant disturbances of
various kinds. Between 1836 and 1851, serfs killed 139 nobles or their bailiffs and tried
to kill seventy more.’ The government of Nicholas I took these signs very seriously. In
the 1840s, Count Benkendorff, the head of the secret police, reported to Nicholas I
that:

The whole mood of the people is concerned with one aim—emancipation . .

Serfdom is a powder keg under the state, and is the more dangerous because of the
fact that the army itself consists of peasants . . . It is better to begin gradually,
cautiously, than to wait until the process is started from below by the people
themselves.*®

Benkendorff’s nightmare vision, of 100 000 serf-owners holding down thirty million
serfs with a serf-based army, troubled the sleep of many nobles and officials.
During mobilisation for the Crimean War in 1854, peasant disturbances broke out
 THE ‘GREAT REFORMS’ AND THE RISE OF A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT 79

in many parts of the Empire. Many peasants responded to rumours that the tsar could
be found wearing a golden cap and sitting on top of a mountain in the Crimea,
dispensing freedom to all who came to him. To deal with internal disturbances, the
government diverted army units that should have been used against the external
enemy. In the late 1850s, the number of disturbances rose. Indeed, the Soviet historian,
M. V. Nechkina, claimed that by 1859 the country faced a ‘revolutionary situation’. The
thought of a new peasant war was particularly terrifying for rural nobles living on
remote country estates.
But we must not exaggerate. Most peasant disturbances were small scale affairs.
While they posed real threats to individual nobles and their families, none really
threatened the government. The so-called ‘potato riots’ of the 1840s illustrate the
limited scale of these disturbances. The potato riots erupted in response to a
government decision of 1840 to force state peasants to grow potatoes. Many peasants
believed the potato was a fruit of the devil. Others resented government interference
in the way they farmed their land. Police reports show vividly the sort of small-scale but
desperate resistance peasants could display when faced with changes in the already
precarious conditions of their life. The following description, by a Soviet historian, also
shows the pathetic lack of organisation characteristic of most peasant insurrections.

Document 3.3: potato riots in Vyatka province, 1842

In order to put an end to these disorders, the governor of Vyatka province, Mordvinov . . .
arrived in Bykovskoe village on June |2 [with about 300 soldiers]. Finding a gathering of about
600 unarmed peasants, he tried to calm them with the aid of a priest, but the peasants
unanimously declared that potatoes were no good for them, and that they would not
disperse. After this, the governor announced that he intended to fire on the crowd, but the
peasants shouted unanimously: ‘Shoot! We still won't surrender.’ Finally, the governor,
noticing that the peasants had begun to pull down fencing posts in order to arm themselves,
ordered a volley of forty-eight shots. This inspired considerable fear amongst the peasants,
and they ceased arming themselves. But they still remained on the spot, and when ordered
to disperse once more they declared again that they were willing to die.
Seeing neither resistance nor submission from the peasants, the governor, with his troops,
went around the village and, arriving at the plot of land set aside for potatoes, ordered some
of the other, more obedient villagers to plough the land and sow potatoes, which they did.
However, the other peasants remained as before and, when told that the potatoes had been
sown, replied: ‘Let them sow. We will just throw them out.’ Finally, seeing that nothing he
had done yet would solve the problem, he ordered his soldiers to charge the crowd in order
butts
to bind them. He ordered his soldiers not to use their bayonets, but to use their rifle
carried out
in case of resistance. This action, which the peasants had not anticipated, was
quickly, and with complete success. After an extremely brief conflict all those who had put
were
up resistance were thrown to the ground and, with the help of some other peasants,
of Kurchum, where, after the
bound with their own sashes. All 600 were led to the village
main instigators had been separated out to face a military court, eight others were whipped,
and the rest, after repenting in full, were allowed to return to their homes.’

were the
Disturbances in the late 1850s were also small-scale. The most organised
almost half the province s of Great Russia in 1859.
boycotts of vodka sales that spread to
and the high
However, these were aimed at the corrupt practices of the ‘tax farmers’
80 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

i prices they charged for vodka. They were not

i ee
Sig ahs cap
attacks on the government or on serfdom and
i
'
A
do not prove the existence of a serious
‘revolutionary crisis’.'
As with the issue of economic productivity,
there was a real problem, though some
exaggerated its seriousness. Unlike the issue of
economic productivity, this problem scared
both nobles and government, and therefore
encouraged the government to act.

Serfdom and the army

The army was the linchpin of the system. As
Alexander II’s Minister of War, Dmitrii Miliutin,
told him in 1867: “Thanks to the army, Russia
became a first class European power [and] only
by maintaining the army can Russia uphold the
position it has acquired’."!
The army had many strengths. It was huge,
with one million regular soldiers and many
units of Cossacks. The bravery and discipline of
its common soldiers remained one of its
strengths. Officers maintained discipline with
ferocious methods. The punishment for
disobedience, for instance, was running the
gauntlet. The victim had to run several times
between two rows of soldiers who beat him with
For peasants, it was all too easy to see the police and army as birch branches as he ran past. In 1831, 2600
the representatives of anti-Christ. This late nineteenth mutinous military colonists were punished in
century or early twentieth century manuscript shows the two this way, and 129 died.”
churches, of Christ and anti-Christ. The soldiers of the anti-
Christ wear the uniforms of nineteenth century gendarmes
The army looked particularly impressive on
and one carries the gendarme sword, the palash. the parade ground. >

were all con-

noisseurs of good drill. As a result the army performed splendidly on the parade
ground, where it could manoeuvre free from enemy harassment.
The army won most of its victories in the early nineteenth century against inferior
opponents such as the declining Ottoman Empire. This disguised its weaknesses. The
Crimean War exposed these weaknesses by pitting it against two of the most advanced
armies in Europe. Though the French and British armies also displayed spectacular
incompetence, the Russian army suffered from specific difficulties of its own. Russian
army drill still concentrated on the bayonet, and soldiers lacked training in the use of
firearms. Most officers were nobles, who despised formal military training. Many found
to their cost that panache was no substitute for expertise in modern warfare. The lack
of railways meant that, though Russian armies fought on Russian soil, they found it
harder to get supplies to the front than the French and English, who supplied their
armies by sea.
The army was also costly. Being a standing army, it remained at full strength even in
 THE ‘GREAT REFORMS’ AND THE RISE OF A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT 81

peacetime. As a result, it gobbled up forty to fifty per cent of government revenue. The
Crimean War drove the government to the verge of bankruptcy.
Military officials realised that serfdom made it difficult to reform the army. They
knew that to create a more efficient and less costly army, Russia would have to follow
the example of its opponents. It would have to form a small peacetime army with a
trained reserve that could be called up in time of war. This meant recruiting soldiers
for only five or six years, and allowing them to return to civilian life. However, a reform
of this kind was unthinkable under serfdom, for traditionally recruits were freed at the
end of their term of service. Such a reform would have led to a gradual, yet automatic
emancipation of all male serfs. Besides, the idea of giving millions of serfs military
training before returning them to their villages was unappealing to nobles afraid of a
peasant rebellion. The conclusion was clear: reform of the army required the abolition
of serfdom. These arguments were put to Alexander II in 1855, in a memorandum
written by Dmitrii Miliutin, a future minister of war.’*
Serfdom also inhibited railway building, yet as long as serfdom existed, the
government was reluctant to support a large-scale program of railway construction.
These arguments suggested that the abolition of serfdom was necessary if Russia was
to remain a major military power. Yet while Russia’s armies appeared successful, these
arguments lacked force. It took defeat in the Crimea to persuade the government that
the survival of serfdom was undermining the army as well as the economy of the
Russian Empire.

Moral issues
Serfdom also raised difficult moral problems. It arose in a world of direct mobilisation,
where forced labour seemed normal and legitimate. Though forced labour had
declined in Western Europe, it had expanded in Eastern Europe since the late middle
ages. In the seventeenth century, few doubted that serfdom, like slavery, was a natural
relationship, sanctioned by God. During the eighteenth century, Western European
attitudes to slavery began to undermine this confidence. Catherine the Great, who was
herself of German origin, had written in her diary that it was ‘contrary to the Christian
religion and to justice to make slaves of men (who are all free by birth) ’.”* Later, a series
of liberal-minded writers put the moral case against serfdom. These included Nicholas
§ Novikov} (1744-1818) and Alexander Radishchev (1749-1802), as well as the
Decembrists and both Westernisers and Slavophiles.
By 1850 educated members of the nobility accepted that serfdom was morally
indefensible. Unlike American slave-owners, Russian serf-owners made no serious
attempt to defend serfdom on moral grounds. When serfdom came under attack, its
defenders could fall back only on pragmatic arguments for inaction.

A general commitment to reform

By the early nineteenth century Russian governments understood that eventually
of the economy
serfdom would have to go. While it survived, it would hinder reform
to progressiv ely minded
and the army, and Russia would remain a moral pariah
Russians and Europeans.
Yet the government hesitated to act. After all, the system seemed to work; and
first-
abolition would be risky. ‘Why change that political system that made [Russia].a
ns, everything
class power in the world?’ asked a Russian. ‘To undermine its foundatio
dangerous .’”” Even Count
that constitutes its strength and essence, is ill-advised and
82 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Benkendorff’s metaphor cut two ways: It was dangerous sitting on top of a powder keg;
but it might be even more dangerous to shift the keg. So, throughout his reign (1825-
55) Nicholas I dithered. He discussed reform endlessly and set up numerous secret
committees on the subject. In the end, though, he chose inaction, arguing: “There is
no doubt that serfdom, as it exists at present in our land, is an evil, palpable and
obvious to all. But to touch it now would be a still more disastrous evil . . . The Pugachev
rebellion proved how far popular rage can go’.’®
Nicholas’s government was equally afraid of the opposition reform might provoke
among the nobility. It would inevitably cause them hardship, and Nicholas had no wish
to annoy the nobility. The Decembrist revolt, and the murder of his father (Paul I)
and grandfather (Peter III) by disgruntled nobles were reminders of how dangerous
that could be.
Like Brezhnev’s government in the 1970s, the government of Nicholas I preferred
the abstract dangers of stagnation to the immediate risks of reform.

Experiments with reform

Meanwhile, for more than fifty years, Russian governments tinkered with the problem
as if defusing a mine. Their experiments were, in part, a way of avoiding decisive action.
However, they suggested some important principles, which guided the government
when it finally took action in the 1850s.
In 1803, Alexander I issued the so-called ‘law of free cultivators’. This created a legal
way for nobles voluntarily to free their serfs. However, very few landlords took up the
government's offer. The experiment showed that a voluntary emancipation would not
work.
the government tried to regulate serfdom
by introducing inventories that fixed the level of feudal dues and the size of peasant
landholdings. In principle, this should have changed serfdom into a rental agreement
binding on peasants and their owners. However, the reform satisfied neither the
peasants, who wanted full freedom, nor the landlords, who feared losing control of
their land. In the 1840s, the government tried a similar reform on an even larger scale
amongst the state peasantry of the Russian provinces. Once again, the half-heartedness
of the reform generated more problems than it had resolved.
, the government
experimented with a reform that freed the peasants without any land at all. This
protected the landlords’ property rights. However, it created a large and discontented
group of landless workers, who proved unsatisfactory as wage-labourers and caused
much rural unrest. This experiment persuaded the government that it would have to
free the peasantry with land. Otherwise, it feared, landless peasants would drift to the
towns and create the sort of proletarian class that had fuelled revolutionary upheavals
in Western Europe in the early nineteenth century. The proletariat had played a
particularly important role in the revolutions of 1848. In seeing dispossessed peasants
or ‘proletarians’ as a dangerous revolutionary class, the Russian government was not
alone. In the Communist Manifesto, which they wrote in response to the 1848
revolutions, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued that the proletariat would become
the main revolutionary class of the modern era.
These experiments convinced the government that reform, when it came,
had to
be compulsory, that it had to give the peasants real property rights, and that it had to
give them enough land to support themselves. They also showed that half-hearted
 THE ‘GREAT REFORMS’ AND THE RISE OF A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT 83

measures would achieve nothing. When it finally decided to act, the government would
have to act decisively.

THE REFORM PROCESS

The commitment to reform
Two events explain why the government chose to act in the 1850s. These were defeat
in the Crimea, and a change of political leadership. The second factor was critical
because Russia’s government was autocratic. Unlike a democratic ruler, an autocrat
can take basic decisions without waiting for a broad consensus to emerge. This is why
authoritarian governments often make sudden sharp changes in policy.

foldova. Lacking any obvious target, the Western allies

attacked the Russian naval base of Sebastopol in the Crimea. Its fall in 1855 marked
the most humiliating defeat for a Russian army in one and a half centuries. For a
government whose power depended on its armies, this was a sign that reform could
not be postponed—and most people now understood that reform meant tackling the
issue of serfdom.
The death of Nicholas I in February 1855 ended thirty years of economic, political
and intellectual stagnation. It also allowed the rise to positions of influence of a new
generation of officials. Nicholas’ son and successor, Alexander II, probably held views
similar to those of his father. However, Alexander’s friends and advisers came from a
small network of liberal-minded nobles and officials whose views had been neglected
in the previous reign. Now, this younger generation of politicians (which included
Alexander’s brother, Constantine) gained real influence.'’ They had all been
committed for some time to the abolition of serfdom, and now they carried the tsar
with them. In an autocracy, that counted for everything. With the tsar on their side,
progressive officials could push through reform despite widespread opposition.
The new reign began in an atmosphere of greater frankness or glasnost’ in public
debate. The government permitted public discussion of many issues that had once
been taboo, including serfdom. The most important single act of glasnost in this period
was the speech Alexander II made to a meeting of Moscow nobles in 1856. Alexander
to begin
said: ‘the existing system of serf-owning cannot remain unchanged. It is better
abolishing serfdom from above than to wait for it to begin to abolish itself from below.
for
I ask you, gentlemen, to think of ways of doing this. Pass on my words to the nobles
committed itself publicly
consideration’.!® This was the first time the government had
threat
to the reform of serfdom. The speech also showed that the government saw the
or as the best way of
of a peasant rebellion either as the strongest motive for reform,
persuading the nobility to cooperate.

Cooperation with the nobility

Like Gorbachev’s government
Now the government had to decide what to do and how.
society without
in the 1980s, Alexander’s government had to figure out how to rebuild
an extremely delicate and
bringing the entire edifice down. Alexander had started
complex piece of social engineering.
84 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

As Alexander’s 1856 speech showed, the government’s first impulse was to work as
closely as possible with the nobility. However, the nobility remained silent, hoping, like
Soviet officials in the late 1980s, that the issue of reform would go away. The
government set up a new committee to consider reform but, as one member put it: ‘In
general the composition of the committee was extremely unfortunate, and thus it was
not surprising that for the first half year it only gazed at the beast that was shown it and
walked around it, not knowing from which side to approach it’.’® Finally, in November
1857, in response to a tentative enquiry from the nobility of Lithuania, the government
issued the so-called Nazimov rescript. This committed the government to reform, and
laid down certain general principles. The reform must grant landlords legal title to all
the land they held. However, peasants must receive their houses and the surrounding
usad’ba. Further, a portion of the landlords’ land must be made available for the
peasants’ use. Finally, peasants were to be placed under the jurisdiction of the peasant
commune, though landlords were to keep police powers.
In 1858, provincial assemblies of nobles met to prepare proposals for reform.
Broadly speaking, conservative nobles tried to limit the impact of the reform by
keeping the nobility’s economic and judicial powers over their peasants. Liberal nobles
argued for a reform which would grant the peasants genuine liberty as well as full
property rights in the land. However, even some liberals argued that peasants must not
get too much land. Otherwise, they feared, peasants would have no need to seek wage-
labour on the estates of their former masters, and nobles would be deprived of cheap
labour.”°
The fears of the nobility were real, and widely held.

Document 3.4: gentry fears about emancipation

A significant majority of estate owners either did not sympathize at all with the enterprise
that had begun or at least objected to giving the serfs land along with their freedom. The
provincial opposition movement fed the Petersburg movement, which in turn supported the
provincial movement. In Petersburg drawing rooms, at court functions, at parades and
inspections of the troops, behind the walls of the State Council and the Senate, and in the
offices of the ministers and members of the State Council were heard more or less energetic
protests against the intentions of the government. These protests expressed in vigorous
terms more or less the same idea—that the emancipation of the serfs was premature; the
result of the change, said the numerous enemies of the proposed reform, would be that the
estate owners would remain without working hands, the peasants because of their natural
indolence would not work even for themselves, the productivity of the state would decrease,
causing general inflation, famine, disease, and nationwide misery. At the same time would
come insubordination on the part of the peasants, local disorders followed by widespread
rioting—in a word, they predicted another Pugachev rebellion with all its horrors and
with
the addition of a ‘deeply plotted’ democratic revolution!

Going it alone
Like Gorbachev in the late 1980s, Alexander found that the
momentum of reform
would carry him further and faster than he had originally intended. Two events
forced
the government’s hand: renewed peasant disturbances in the Baltic provinces
; and a
financial crisis that threatened the government with bankruptcy.
 THE ‘GREAT REFORMS’ AND THE RISE OF A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT 85

During 1858, new peasant disturbances broke out in Estonia. These persuaded
Alexander that he had to offer peasants more than most nobles were willing to
concede. The government had to free peasants entirely from the authority of their
former masters, and it had to give them substantial amounts of land. By the autumn,
General Rostovtsev, the official in charge of the reform process, began to argue that:
‘If we deprive the peasants of the land we will set Russia alight’.”” However, if the
government was to be more generous to the peasantry than most nobles wished, it
could not expect gentry cooperation. So, from late in 1858, the government took the
reins firmly into its own hands. Early in 1859 it closed the gentry committees and set
up its own Editing Commission to supervise the final preparation of the reform. The
Editing Commission, headed by the liberal official, Nicholas Miliutin, used the material
provided by the gentry committees, but it was the government that took the crucial
decisions.
Meanwhile, a financial crisis made it impossible for the government to protect either
peasants or landlords from the real costs of reform.” After the Crimean War, the
government knew it had to encourage railway building. Yet the archaic state of
government finances attracted investment funds into unproductive and archaic areas
such as the infamous liquor tax farms, or the government’s own credit institutions, of
which the most important were the State Loan Bank, set up in 1786, and the State
Commercial Bank, set up in 1817. In 1857, to divert private funds into more productive
areas such as railway-building, and to reduce its own interest payments, the government
lowered the interest rates it paid on deposits in government banks. Unfortunately, this
manoeuvre proved too successful. Investors withdrew money from government credit
institutions and by 1859 the government was close to bankruptcy. In that year, on the
recommendation of a committee dominated by young officials such as Nicholas
Miliutin and two future ministers of finance, M. Kh. Reutern and N. Bunge, the
government issued the first long-term government loans. This created a modern
national debt for the first time in Russia. In 1860, the government established a new
State Bank to manage the national debt. By making the new government bonds
extremely attractive, the government avoided bankruptcy, just. But the crisis left it
without enough money to help finance the redemption operation. It could not offer
former serf-owners the loans they needed to reorganise their estates, or help ease the
burden of redemption for peasants. The redemption operation would have to pay for
itself. This burdened both peasants and landlords for many decades. Its financial
difficulties had forced the government to throw both peasants and landlords on to the
market without the safety nets that might have softened their fall.
These pressures moulded the final details of the emancipation act and explain some
of its contradictions. Peasant disturbances had forced the government to offer the
it
peasantry more land than it had once intended. But financial pressures had forced
to offer less cash.

THE REFORMS
The Emancipation Act, 1861
first article
The emancipation decrees were published on 19 February 1861. Their
landed properti es, and of
declared: ‘The serfdom of peasants settled on estate owners’
86 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

household serfs, is abolished forever’. This appeared to mark a decisive break with the
past. The reality was more complicated.
What did the 1861 act do? It is a complex document, composed of twenty-two
separate enactments. These changed the legal and economic relationship between
serfs, nobles and government. They did so in three stages. (Later acts dealt with the
state peasants and other, smaller groups. Household serfs were freed without land and
formed a small group of landless wage-workers. )
Stage one was to last two years, from 1861 to 1863. The twenty-three million
landlords’ serfs were declared legally free. This meant they could own land; they could
marry without outside interference; and they could sue and be sued in the courts.
However, their economic situation remained much as before for the first two years.
The act declared that all the land on landlords’ estates belonged to the nobility. This
meant that the peasants would have to buy the land they had used in the past. The only
exception was the land on which their houses stood, and the usad’ba surrounding it
(see Figure 2.3). This land immediately became the property of the peasants.
Temporarily, peasants had to keep paying all the feudal dues they had paid before the
reform. However, the landlord could no longer change their nature or extent. In
return, the peasants were to continue farming the land they had used before.
Meanwhile peasants and landlords were to draw up inventories of the land used by
peasants and the feudal dues they paid. The inventories would then become legally
binding agreements.
Stage two was to start in 1863. During this phase, the ex-serfs remained in a state of
‘temporary obligation’. Legally, all ties with their former landlords were severed. The
landlord could no longer punish serfs for minor offences or failure to pay taxes. These
judicial functions were taken over by a communal court. This was to be run by the ex-
serfs but supervised by government officials and by a new official, the peace arbitrator,
elected from the nobility. However, peasants were to continue paying the old feudal dues
to their ex-landlords, on the basis of the inventories drawn up in stage one.
During stage two, the government required landlords and peasants to negotiate the
terms on which the peasants would buy land from their ex-landlords. The statutes
placed severe limits on these negotiations. The landlords had to sell, and the peasants
had to buy. The government specified different maximum and minimum amounts for
different regions. It also specified limits within which the price could be negotiated. At
first, the government allowed an indefinite period for these complex negotiations on
the sale of land, but in the 1870s and 1880s it began hurrying the process of
redemption along.
Stage three began once these negotiations had been completed. The government
paid the landlords most of the purchase price of the peasants’ land. The peasants were
then to pay off their mortgages over a period of forty-nine years in the form of
‘redemption payments’. These became, in effect, a new form of direct taxation. The
government tried to make them roughly equivalent to the old feudal dues. In effect,
this meant that peasants now paid the government what they had once paid to their
landlords. These arrangements for the purchase of land should have made peasants
full owners of their land forty-nine years after they began paying for it. But even then,
it was the commune as a whole that would collectively own the land and allot each
household a share.
Once stage three began, even the economic ties with the old landowners were
severed. Only then could it be said that serfdom had really ended. At this stage, the
legal situation of the twenty-three million ex-serfs became similar to that of the twenty-
 THE ‘GREAT REFORMS’ AND THE RISE OF A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT 87

five million state peasants. Their legal and economic ties were now with the peasant
commune and the government, not with a private landlord. However, though legally
free, they remained, in effect, tied to the land. They were tied now, not by the legal
bonds of serfdom, but by the obligation to purchase land. The emancipation statute
made it almost impossible for peasants to sell their share of allotment land to others.
There were several difficulties to be overcome, but the greatest was the obligation
(according to article 173 of the statute) to pay half of the total value of the peasant’s
allotment land, and to find guarantees for the remaining payments, before leaving the
commune.**

Other reforms
Serfdom was so central to Russian social, political, legal and military structures, that its
abolition made further reforms necessary in all these areas. The government also
undertook reform as a concession to the growing liberalism of sections of the Russian
nobility. As a result, many of the reforms appeared to retreat from the autocratic
principle that had governed Russian political life for so long. That is also how many
liberally-minded contemporaries saw them. In reality, the government conceded less
than liberals had hoped. Indeed, the overall effect of the reforms was to increase,
rather than to reduce, the power of the government.
The arbitrary way in which the government handled the 1861 reform persuaded
many nobles that they had to find new ways of influencing the government. In the late
1850s, A. A. Golovachevy, a liberal noble from the relatively liberal nobility of Tver
* province wrote:

If we do not propose measures for the reform of our bureaucratic system, if we leave
it with the same rights and responsibilities, what will happen . . .? Will not [the
peasants] escape the control of one person, whose own interests forced him to
consider their welfare, only to fall under the control of another, indifferent to that.
If the character of our bureaucracy remains the same as before, then it is clear that
this change will not abolish serfdom, but only transfer it and widen its limits,
transforming not only the free classes, but even the gentry into serfs [of the
bureaucracy].”°

By 1860, the fear of losing all influence over government decision-making had
encouraged many liberal-minded nobles to support a broad but cautious program of
liberal reforms first put forward by nobles from Tver province. This program asked for
full emancipation of the peasantry, the creation of elected local government
assemblies, an independent judiciary with the power to prosecute government officials,
and freedom of the press. These proposals set the agenda for the reforms the
government introduced in the wake of the emancipation act.
The most important of these reforms were the judicial reform of 1864, and the
zemstvo reform of the same year, which created elected local government bodies.

The zemstvo reform, 1864

The 1861 act deprived nobles of their traditional authority in local government. To
restore the balance, a number of liberal nobles proposed the creation of elected local
government assemblies representing all classes. Some nobles, such as the nobility of
the
Tver province, even proposed the creation of a central elected assembly to advise
88 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

tsar. The government rejected this proposal outright. However, it accepted the idea of
elected local government assemblies. These proposals were the origin of the zemstva,
which the government created in 1864.
At first sight, the zemstva looked like genuinely democratic institutions. They were
separate from the bureaucracy, and represented all classes. Yet they never fulfilled the
hopes Russian liberals placed on them, for the Russian government was too jealous of
its own powers to permit them an independent role. It granted the zemstva modest
powers over local education, health, agriculture, roads and many other aspects of local
government. However, their budgets were small, and they had to raise revenue from
local taxes. Provincial governors had the power to reverse all zemstvo decisions that they
found to be ‘contrary to the laws and to the general welfare’. Zemstva also appeared
only in the thirty-four Russian provinces. Finally, elections were indirect, and
landowners were over-represented. As a result, in 1874, nobles held some seventy-four
per cent of all positions on provincial zemstva. As a step towards more liberal
government structures, we must judge the zemstva a failure. Nevertheless, their mere
existence was an important symbol of the more liberal governmental structures that
might have appeared in the 1860s.

The judicial reform, 1864

The judicial reform suffered a similar fate. It created open courts, jury trials and an
independent judiciary. However, the government limited the authority of the new courts.
They could try government officials only under special rules and with the government’s
permission. Certain types of cases had to go to military courts. Besides, the majority of
the population, including most ex-serfs, remained under thejurisdiction of special
courts. The government also managed to exercise considerable pressure over the
formally independent judges. Finally, during the terrorist crisis of the late 1870s, the
government introduced martial law to many provinces, thus suspending the activities
of the new courts in these regions. Still, despite their limitations, the reformed courts
remained a potent symbol of what might have been. For Russia’s growing minority of
liberals, they were also a symbol of what could still be.

Reforms in other areas

The other reforms of the 1860s suffered from similar ambiguities. Most appeared
liberal and progressive when first introduced. Yet in practice most preserved and some
enhanced the power of the central government. The government introduced for the
first time a public budget of government finances in 1862. In 1863, it granted Russia’s
universities greater autonomy. In the same year, it abolished the corrupt practise of
farming out the collection of its most important indirect tax, on liquor. It was this
system that had generated most of the peasant protests in 1859. In place of the tax
farms, the government established an excise on liquor distilling, which it collected
through its own officials. In 1865, the government issued a new, and more liberal,
censorship law. In 1870, it created elective municipal government institutions to match
the rural zemstva. Finally, in 1874, Dmitrii Miliutin introduced the military reform he
had first proposed almost twenty years before. The reform extended military
recruitment to all classes. It shortened the period of active service to six years, with a
further period in the army reserve. It also introduced elementary education for all
recruits, which made the army for a few years one of the most potent educational
institutions in the Russian Empire.”°
 THE ‘GREAT REFORMS’ AND THE RISE OF A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT 89

ASSESSING THE ‘GREAT REFORMS’

How successful were the ‘Great Reforms’? The government had undertaken a radical
overhaul of the social, economic, political and military structure of the Russian Empire.
This was a complex, and potentially dangerous task. So the best measure of the
government’s success is the fact that it survived the reforms unscathed, unlike the
reforming government of Mikhail Gorbachev 130 years later. However, the reforms left
serious problems for future governments. In trying to balance the interests of nobles
and peasants, while retaining its own powers intact, it alienated both the major classes
of traditional Russian society. For Russian society as a whole, the reforms mark an
important, though painful, step towards modernity.

The ‘Great Reforms’ and the nobility

The nobility lost the basic privileges of serf-ownership. They lost the right to
compulsory labour and feudal dues, and they lost their traditional judicial and police
powers over the peasantry. In effect, the reforms cut them out of government. The
declining influence of the nobility was part of a larger process.
Ever since they had
emancipated themselves from compulsory service in 1785, nobles had become less
necessary to the autocracy. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the government
depended more on its bureaucracy than on the traditional nobility. Clear proof of this
change in the Russian ruling group had come in 1858, when Alexander II had
excluded the nobility from the preparation of reforms that would change their entire
status. After this, many nobles began to see the bureaucracy as a symbol of
governmental insensitivity to the needs of the noble class.
In the short run, nobles gained from the payments they received in return for the
land the government forced them to sell. In the long run, this meant little. By 1871,
248 million roubles of the 543 million paid for nobles’ land had gone to repay old
debts.2” The reforms also created serious problems for the nobility. Serf-owners no
longer enjoyed a guaranteed income. To survive without free labour, nobles would
have to learn businesslike habits of mind. Yet most nobles despised mercantile habits
of mind, and few had the training or the inclination to run their estates like businesses.
sky
Many failed to adapt. Like Stepan Oblonsky in Anna Karenina) or Madame
evskayainChekhov’s play, The Cherry Orchard, they found it easier to sell their land
than to economise. In 1862 nobles owned eighty-seven million dessyatiny of land (1
dessyatina= 1.09 hectares). By 1882, they owned only seventy-one million dessyatiny, and
by 1911, only forty-three million. The ‘Great Reforms’ had cast the Russian nobility
unprepared into a world where entrepreneurial skills counted for more than birth or
rank.
The attempt to reintegrate the nobility into the political system through the zemstvo
reform failed because it was so half-hearted. Most nobles found that the reforms had
reduced both their economic and their political influence, and many lost their faith in
The
a government that seemed to have ignored their inter reforms had created a
ests.
rift between government and nobility which widened, by 1905, into revolution.

The ‘Great Reforms’ and the peasantry

Peasants showed what they thought of the reforms in a new wave of disturbances.
and troops
According to the police, in 1861 there were disturbances on 1176 estates,
90 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

had to quell disorders on 337.* The prospect of paying for land they had always
believed to be theirs by right, appalled most peasants.
Serfs also lost the protection of their former masters, and that could mean a lot. The
English traveller Mackenzie Wallace described what serfs lost as a result of the reforms.

Document 3.5: Mackenzie Wallace on the price of emancipation

If the serfs had a great many ill-defined obligations to fulfill [under serfdom] — such as the
carting of the master’s grain to market ... they had, on the other hand, a good many ill-
defined privileges. They grazed their cattle during a part of the year on the manor land; they
received firewood and occasionally logs for repairing their huts; sometimes the proprietor
lent them or gave them a cow or a horse when they had been visited by the cattle plague or
the horse stealer; and in times of famine they could look to their master for support. All this
has now come to an end. Their burdens and their privileges have been swept away together,
and been replaced by clearly defined, unbending, unelastic legal relations. They now have to
pay the market price for every stick of firewood which they burn, for every log which they
require for repairing their houses, and for every rood of land on which to graze their cattle.
Nothing is now to be had gratis. The demand to pay isencountered at every step. If a cow
dies or a horse is stolen, the owner can no longer go to the proprietor with the hope of
receiving a present, or at least a loan without interest, but must, if he has no ready money,
apply to the village usurer, who probably considers twenty or thirty per cent as a by no means
exorbitant rate of interest.”

Most important of all, the land settlement sold peasants less land than they had used
before the reform, at artificially high prices. On average, ex-serfs ended up with about
four per cent less land than they had used before emancipation. In the western
provinces they did better than average because the government discriminated against
their Polish landlords. Excluding these regions, the average decline in peasant
landholdings was close to nineteen per cent. In the fertile black soil lands of the central
and southern provinces, the peasants lost nearly twenty-five per cent. It is hard to place
an objective market value on the lands they bought, but the best estimates suggest that
ex-serfs paid on average 134 per cent of the free market price. In effect, this meant
that the government made ex-serfs pay for their personal freedom as well as for their
land. It is hardly surprising that many peasants believed for years that nobles and
officials had hidden the true emancipation statute.
Population growth during the next half century compounded the problem of land
shortage. Between 1858 and 1897, the population of the Russian Empire rose from
about seventy-four million to 125 million. Average peasant land holdings declined by
almost the same ratio. By 1900, land hunger was a national calamity. It was worst in the
densely settled belt of agrarian provinces immediately south of Moscow. By 1902, the
problem of land shortage had turned the peasantry into a revolutionary force far more
dangerous than Nicholas I could ever have imagined. The rebellion that governments
so feared in the 1850s finally came half a century later.
Nevertheless, the reform clearly meant a lot to peasants once they had absorbed its
real meaning. It gave them freedom. It rid them of the arbitrary interference of
landlords. It confirmed the autonomy of the commune. Though we cannot quantify
these gains, peasants clearly valued them. We can get some idea of the immediate
benefits of reform from the following document. In early 1861, the government sent
 THE ‘GREAT REFORMS’ AND THE RISE OF A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT ol

167 so-called ‘heralds of liberty’ to the villages to explain the reform to the serfs. One
of these, N. V. Sakharov, reported that the men were mainly interested in the land
settlement. However, the women were delighted when they realised that they would
no longer have to supply their owners with goods in kind. A woman called Lukeria,
whom Sakharov described as ‘no longer young and, apparently, a bit saucy’, checked
that this was really true.

Document 3.6: peasant reactions to reform

‘Tell me, does this mean that turning chickens over to the lords is now shabash [finished]?’
‘Now it’s shabash.’
‘And the eggs are shabash.’
‘And the eggs, too...’
‘And gathering mushrooms and berries for the lords is shabash?’
‘Yes, all shabash.’
‘And when will it be shabash.’
‘From this very moment, it’s all shabash . . .’
‘Does that mean that when summer comes, | don’t have to go around getting mushrooms
and berries for the squires?’
‘You can do it for money or go for yourself, if that is your sweet will.’
‘You’re not kidding?’
‘No, it’s the solemn truth. See, it’s all written in this law book.’
‘Hey, girls, see what’s turned up for us!’ Lukeria joyfully cried, turning to the women. ‘Isn’t
that nice. All right, Aleksandra Sergeevna, here’s for you.’ And she unceremoniously gave the
finger (a greasy finger) in the direction of the manor house.”

The most powerful evidence that the peasants felt they had gained something
through the reform is that the peasant disturbances which had continued for so long,
like approaching thunder, died away to a distant rumble for forty years after 1862. The
government had succeeded in the complex task of abolishing serfdom without
provoking an immediate rebellion. That was a considerable achievement.

The ‘Great Reforms’ and the government

In the short run, it was the government and its officials who gained most from the
reforms. Before 1861 the nobility had ruled almost half of the peasantry. Now the
government ruled these same peasants through the commune. It also received the
equivalent of the old feudal dues in the new form of redemption payments. The
reforms had extended the powers of the government in the countryside. Further, the
government had retained the political initiative despite the pressure from liberal
nobles to concede parliamentary or semi-parliamentary institutions.
In the long-term, however, the government paid a heavy price for the inadequacies
of the reforms. While its own powers grew, so did the discontent of the two most
important groups in traditional Russian society, the nobility and the peasantry. The
government finally paid the price in 1905. The seeds of the 1905 revolution were sown
during the era of reform.
92 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

The ‘Great Reforms’ and the ‘modern’ revolution

Did the reforms push Russia into the modern world? The government’s own intentions
were uncertain. It hoped for increases in productivity and greater social stability. Yet it
had no wish to create an urban industrialised society with a large proletariat like those
of Western Europe. Historians have been equally uncertain in their assessments of the
impact of the reforms on the process of modernisation.
The model of modernisation proposed in the Introduction may help clarify this
issue. That model suggests that the important question is: did the reforms encourage
the emergence of the sort of social structure that drove the capitalist engine of growth?
The answer is that they did; but they did so in indirect ways. ;
The emancipation act removed some of the barriers that protected both landlords
and peasants from market forces. Landlords could no longer count on feudal dues,
while ex-serfs could no longer hope for the protection of their landlords in a crisis.
Both had to learn how to earn their incomes in a market economy, either as
entrepreneurs or as wage-earners. In this way, the emancipation act accelerated the
transformation of landlords and peasants into entrepreneurs and wage-earners by
increasing the importance of market forces. In doing so, it encouraged the
development of all three main ingredients of the capitalist engine of growth: markets,
entrepreneurs and wage-earners.
The government itself did not see reform in this way. It clearly hoped to protect both
the traditional nobility and the traditional peasantry, for these had been the basis of its
power. Yet unwittingly it had encouraged the transformation of Russia’s old class
structure. Though they marked a step towards the creation of a modern capitalist
society, the reforms also threatened the very classes on which the power of the
autocracy was based. During the next half century the government slowly realised what
a dangerous gamble this was.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY

MOVEMENT
Though it took decades for most educated Russians to shed their traditional loyalty to
autocracy, a minority was so disillusioned by the reforms that they became
revolutionary socialists in the 1880s.

Socialism and Russian Populism

Socialism, like Liberalism,
was a philosophy of emancipation. Both philosophies
emerged from the political and ideological conflicts of the American and French
revolutions. However, while liberals defined freedom and equality mainly in legal and
political terms, socialists saw them also as economic issues.
For liberals, freedom meant legal guarantees of individual rights (in particular the
right to private property), while equality meant equality before the law. Socialists
argued that legal and political equality was not enough. In a society based on private
property, civil and political rights alone could not prevent those who owned property
from exploiting those who did not. Socialists saw private property from the point of
 THE ‘GREAT REFORMS’ AND THE RISE OF A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT 93

_view of the proletarians—the growing number of ex-peasants who owned no land and
thereby had to live on wages earned by working for those who did have property. True
freedom, the socialists argued, required freedom from economic as well as legal or
political oppression. True equality meant equality in economic as well as in civil rights.
It meant abolishing the right to private property and replacing it with collective
ownership of society’s resources.
Many liberal-minded Russians took the path from Liberalism to Socialism because
of their disillusionment with the emancipation act. They saw that the legal rights
granted to the peasants meant little while the peasants remained in grinding poverty.
The lead came from radical journalists. Nicholas Chernyshevskii (1828-89) was the
son of a priest, which made him a raznochinets. Alexander Herzen (1812-70) was a
member of the nobility. Between 1857 and 1867, Herzen published an illegal
revolutionary newspaper, The Bell, from exile in London. He had been a Westerniser
in the 1840s, but lost his faith in the capitalist West after leaving Russia in 1847. In exile,
he took up the Slavophile view of the Russian peasant commune as the basis for an
egalitarian society, and used it to construct a distinctively Russian brand of Socialism.
Herzen saw the commune as the basis for a regenerated Russia, free of exploitation
and inequalities in wealth. In the 1860s, these ideas provided the core of the Russian
ideology of ‘Populism’.

The revolutionary movement

By 1861, Herzen and Chernyshevskii, like many others, had decided that the reforms
would leave the peasantry as exploited and as unfree as before. They had deprived
peasants of the protection of their landlords without giving them enough land to fend
for themselves in a world increasingly dominated by market forces. The radicals argued
that revolution was now the only way to achieve a genuine emancipation.
In 1861, peasant uprisings in the countryside and student unrest in the universities
created an extremely tense atmosphere. In the summer, several revolutionary
manifestos appeared, written by radical students. These illustrate well the main
ingredients of revolutionary Populism. They also illustrate the emergence of a style of
Russian Socialism that rejected the western path to modernity, as the Slavophiles had
in the 1840s.

Document 3.7: a revolutionary manifesto, September 1861

The sovereign has betrayed the hopes of the people; the freedom he has given them is not
real and is not what the people dreamed of and need...
Are the economic conditions and the land situation in Europe the same as they are here?
Does the agricultural commune exist there . . . ? Can every peasant and every citizen there
own landed property? No, but here he can. We have enough land to last us tens of thousands
of years.
We are a backward people and in this lies our salvation. We should thank our good
are
fortune that we have not lived the life of Europe. Her misfortunes and desperate straits
a lesson to us. We do not want her proletariat, her aristocracy, her state principle, or her
imperial power . . .
to
We want all citizens of Russia to enjoy equal rights; we do not want privileged classes
to high position;
exist; we want ability and education, rather than birth, to confer the right
94 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

we want appointments to public office to follow the elective principle. We do not want a
nobility and titles. We want everyone to be equal in the eyes of the law and equal in [the
assessment of] exactions, taxes, and obligations by the state.
We want the land to belong to the nation and not to individuals; we want each commune
to have its allotment, without the existence of private landowners; we do not want land to
be sold like potatoes and cabbage; we want to give every citizen, whoever he may be, the
opportunity of becoming a member of an agricultural commune, i.e. either by joining an
existing commune or by forming a new commune with several other citizens. We want to
preserve communal possession of the land, with periodic redistribution at long intervals.;!

In 1862, liberals in Tver province had called for an elected assembly representing
the entire people. However, the liberals always stopped short of calling for revolution.
Student radicals were less restrained. In 1862 a manifesto entitled Young Russia
contrasted privileged and unprivileged Russia even more brutally than had earlier
revolutionary manifestos.

Document 3.8: a second revolutionary manifesto, Young Russia, 1862

Society is at present divided into two groups, which are hostile to one another because their
interests are diametrically opposed.

The party that is oppressed by all and humiliated by all is the party of the common people.
Over it stands a small group of contented and happy men. They are the landowners . . . the
merchants ... the government officials—in short, all those who possess property, either
inherited or acquired. At their head stands the tsar. They cannot exist without him, nor he
without them. If either falls the other will be destroyed . . . This is the imperial party.

There is only one way out of this oppressive and terrible situation which is destroying
contemporary man, and that is revolution—bloody and merciless revolution—a revolution
that must radically change all the foundations of contemporary society without exception
and destroy the supporters of the present regime.?”

In the summer of 1862 there were outbreaks of arson in St Petersburg and several
provincial towns, and new outbreaks of student unrest. The Polish insurrection of 1863
divided educated Russian society. It turned many liberals into conservative nationalists,
but radicalised others. In 1866, a student, Dmitrii Karakozov, tried to assassinate the
tsar. While conservatives and moderates rallied to the autocracy, radical students
formed small circles of revolutionaries. Together with the illegal newspapers and
manifestos, these circles formed the main elements of the populist revolutionary
movement throughout its early history.
Populism also attracted many young women, such as Catherine Breshkovskaya (see
document 3.9). Populism appealed to radical women because of its progressive ideas
on the emancipation of women in a society where most women were denied education
and confined to domestic roles.
In the 1870s the populist movement became a real threat to the government. In
1873 and 1874, more than 2000 students ‘went to the people’. They travelled through
the countryside and small towns trying, without success, to incite a popular uprising.
 THE ‘GREAT REFORMS’ AND THE RISE OF A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT 95

Occasionally peasants were so suspicious of these educated youths from the nobility
and intelligentsia that they turned them over to the local police. Even those populists
who found sympathetic listeners discovered that the peasantry were pessimistic about
the chances of improving their lot. Catherine Breshkovskaya, the daughter of a noble
and later a founder of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, spread propaganda in Ukraine,
disguised as a peasant. She left vivid memoirs of the world she found in the town of
Smela, a centre of the sugar-beet industry.

Document 3.9: ‘Going to the People’, 1874

Soon we moved to Smela. This enormous country town, which already contained one sugar
refinery and six factories, was spread over a wide area. The house of the landlord, with its
garden, park, and lake, surrounded by a sea of trees, seemed to draw away from the noisy,
dirty streets, which teemed with factory people. The large market place swarmed with
traders. The police and fire stations were at the market place. At the end of the place was a
pond, its muddy water surrounded by very steep banks. Earthen huts were dug out of these
banks, and the shores ofthe lake were thus lined with habitations resembling dens for animals.
In them the workers who came from other places lived—former dvorovye [household serfs],
who had no land, who had come from northern [provinces]. They lived in these huts with
their large families; here they were born and here they died.
In Smela we soon found a corner to live in. No one in the town occupied a whole house.
Small rooms were rented, usually without tables or seats. The father of the owner of our
hut, an old fighter for the welfare of this community, offered us his own room, a dark den,
and himself moved into the passage, where he slept on planks. This old man helped me a
good deal in understanding the life of the factory population. They had been brought to Smela,
when serfdom still existed, from one of the central [provinces] to work in the factories,
having abandoned their land and their houses. With their liberation as serfs they had got new
small patches of land, but only large enough to build their houses on, and were still obliged to
work in the factories, receiving a ration of bread as wages. | do not remember further details,
but | know that the factory population lived in constant fear of losing their work at the whim
of managers and directors. Those with large families had an especially hard time. Our old
man was always weak from hunger. His son had his own family to care for; his daughter-in-
law was unkind; and the old man, who had been twice flogged and sent to Siberia for
defending the common interests, was at the end of his days almost a beggar. An old pink
shirt, a jacket, and an old peasant coat were his only clothes. He also had a wooden basin and
several wooden spoons, which he kindly put at our disposal.

At noon we... sat with the old man around the wooden basin and swallowed our soup
with great appetites. | talked a great deal with the old man, questioning him concerning the
life of the workers and listening to his tales of the past. It was a cruel story. The peasants,
transferred from their homes against their wills and placed by their landlords in a position of
hopeless slavery, had ‘revolted’ several times, demanding that they be sent back, and refusing
to work in the factory. They were punished for this. Every fifth or tenth man was flogged.
Detachments of soldiers were quartered in the place. Like grasshoppers these soldiers
The fate of the serf
devoured everything, leaving not a crust of bread for the inhabitants.
had been
leaders was most terrible. These were the men who had spoken the loudest and
the most obstinate in defending the rights of the villagers.
the old man
To the request that he help me in my revolutionary propaganda in Smela
punished. One soldier stood on one
answered: ‘I have no strength left. | have been cruelly
96 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

WW
WAY
re

A blast furnace in central Russia, c 1890.

arm, another on the other, and two on my legs. | was beaten, beaten until the earth was
soaked with blood. That is how | was flogged. And that did not happen merely once or twice.
| was exiled to Siberia, came back, and began all over again; but | can’t do it any more.’...
[Other peasants] made no protest against my proposal to prepare the soil for a general
revolt; but it was evident that the recent punishments [after the 1861-63 uprisings] had made
a terrible impression on them. They said as one man: ‘If everyone agreed to rise at the same
time, if you went around and talked to all the people, then it could be done. We tried several
times to rise. We demanded our rights to the land. It was useless. Soldiers were sent down
and the people were punished and ruined.’

The failure of the movement ‘to the people’ hardened the tactics of those who
remained committed to revolution. A group called ‘Narodnaya Volya’ (‘The People’s
Will’) argued for a campaign of terror and assassination, led by a party of tightly
organised professional revolutionaries. In 1881, twenty years after the emancipation
statute, they succeeded in assassinating the ‘tsar liberator’, Alexander II. Several paid
for this success with their lives.

Government reactions

nent with increasingly conservative

The wave of patriotic feeling generated by the Polish
revolt of 1863 had already created support for conservative policies. After the attempt
on the life of the tsar in 1866, even Alexander II turned away from reform.
His son, Alexander III (1881-94), was much more conservative, partly
because of
the influence of his former tutor, Constantine Pobedonostsev (1827-1907). Alexander
III managed to suppress the revolutionary movement for over a decade.
He also
whittled away at the achievements of the reform era. This made sense, for conservatives
were becoming aware of how dangerous reform could be for a traditional monarchy.
Alexander III’s government reduced the already limited powers of the zemstvaan
d the
 THE ‘GREAT REFORMS’ AND THE RISE OF A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT 97

reformed courts, and re-established harsher censorship regulations. In the

countryside, he created a new semi-official post, that of Land Captain, in 1889.
Reserved for members of the nobility, it restored some of the nobility’s administrative
and judicial powers over the peasantry. The government began a policy of systematic
discrimination against non-Russian nationalities, in particular Jews. This policy, and
the accompanying pogroms, or attacks on Jews, did much to discredit Tsarism in the
last thirty years of its existence. It also generated new national movements in Finland,
the Baltic, Poland, Ukraine and the Caucasus.
The government and the revolutionary movement had joined battle. Temporarily,
at least, the government was victorious. However, it was unclear whether either side
could gain enough support from the rest of the population to achieve a decisive victory.
Beneath that question there lurked an even deeper question: could Russian society and
economy adapt to the modern world without a revolutionary upheaval of some kind?
Political reform seemed to have failed. However, beneath the surface, and even with
the support of Alexander III’s government, economic and social change accelerated
in the second half of the nineteenth century. The next chapter will consider these
changes in more detail.

Questions for discussion

1 Did the Russian government have to introduce major social and political reforms in
the middle of the nineteenth century? Or could it have postponed reform? For how
long?
2 What problems was the government trying to solve when it undertook the ‘Great
Reforms’?
3 Could the ‘Great Reforms’ have been handled better? How?

4 How did the reforms affect the lives of peasant women and peasant men? How did
they affect the lives of nobles?
5 Did the reforms stimulate change or repress it?
6 Why did revolutionaries object to the reforms?

7 What distinguishes Socialism from Liberalism? Why did both ideologies prove so
popular in the early stages of the ‘modern’ revolution?

Further reading
See bibliography:
Adams, Imperial Russia
Kochan and Abrahams, The Making of Modern Russia
Lichtheim, Socialism
Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution
Saunders, Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform
Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire
98 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

In addition:
B Eklof and JBushnell (eds), The ‘Great Reforms’, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1994
T Emmons (ed), Emancipation of the Russian Serfs, Dryden Press, Hinsdale, Illinois, 1970
P Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Mass, 1987
WB Lincoln, The ‘Great Reforms’: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia,
DeKalb, Illinois, 1990
F Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century
Russia, Universal Library, New York, 1966
P A Zaionchkovskii, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, Academic International Press, Gulf Breeze,
Florida, 1978; a translation of a fine Soviet account
L G Zakharova, ‘Autocracy and the Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, 1856-61’, in GM Hamburg
(tr & ed), Soviet Studies in History, 26 (1987), no 2, pp 11-115

Endnotes
1 TEmmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1967, p 44
2 GVernadsky, et al (eds), A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917, 3 vols, Yale
University Press, New Haven, Conn, 1972, vol 2, p 462
3 AP Zablotskii-Desiatovskii, ‘O krepostnom sostoianii’, in Graf P D Kiselev i ego vremya.. .,
Tipografiya M M Stasulevicha, St Petersburg, 1882, vol 4, p 327 (tr D Christian)
4 T Emmons (ed), Emancipation of the Russian Serfs, Dryden Press, Hinsdale, Ill, 1970,
pp 38-9
5 Cited in A Gerschenkron, ‘Agrarian Policies and Industrialization, Russia 1861-191 7 in
Cambridge Economic History ofEurope, vol VI, pt 2, Cambridge, 1966, p 710
6 Struve’s argument is summarised in the extracts in Emmons (ed), Emancipation of the Russian
Serfs, pp 34-41
7 SS Dmitriev, et al (eds), Khrestomatiya po istorii SSSR, gos-oe uchebno-pedagogicheskoe izd-
vo min-va prosveshcheniya RSFSR, Moscow, 1948, vol 2, pp 646-7
8 NM Druzhinin, Russkaya dereunya na perelome, 1861-1880 gg, Nauka, Moscow, 1978, p 12
9 SV Tokarev, Krest tanskie kartofel’nye bunty, Kirovskoe oblastnoe izd-vo, Kirov, USSR, 1939,
pp 89-90 (tr D Christian)
10 On the liquor riots, see D Christian, ‘The Black and the Gold Seals: Popular Protests Against
the Liquor Trade on the Eve of Emancipation,’ in E Kingston-Mann & T Mixter (eds),
Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800-1921, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, 1990, pp 261-93
11 Cited in Emmons (ed), Emancipation of the Russian Serfs, p '77
12 N Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, University of California Press,
Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969, p 14
13 See the extracts from A Rieber, introduction to The Politics of Autocracy. Letters ofAlexanderII
to PrinceA I Bariatinskii 1857-1864, cited in Emmons (ed), Emancipation of the Russian Serfs,
pp 72-80
14 J Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, Atheneum, New York, 1968, p 537
15 W Bruce Lincoln, The ‘Great Reforms’, DeKalb, Illinois, 1990, p 29
16 cited from N V Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 4th edn, Oxford University
Press, Oxford,
1984, p 327
17 An American historian, W B Lincoln, has shown the importance of this new generatio
n of
officials. See In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-1 856, DeKalb,
Illinois, 1982
18 Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 3, p 589
THE ‘GREAT REFORMS’ AND THE RISE OF A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT 99

19 AI Levshin, assistant minister of internal affairs, 1856-1859, cited from Vernadsky, Source
Book, vol 3, p 589
20 This argument is described (and criticised) by K D Kavelin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol 2,
Tipografiya M M Stasulevicha, St Petersburg, 1898, p 46
21 From the memoirs of Senator Ia A Solov’ey, cited in Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 3,
pp 592-3
22 Druzhinin, Russkaya dereuvnya, pp 16-18
23 Stephen Hoch has analysed this crisis in an important article, “The Banking Crisis, Peasant
Reform, and Economic Development in Russia, 1857-1861’, American Historical Review, June
1991, pp 795-820
PAs A Gerschenkron, ‘Agrarian Policies and Industrialization’, p 752
25 Emmons (ed), The Russian Landed Gentry, p 135
26 However, compulsory education of recruits was abandoned in the more conservative
atmosphere of the 1880s. ]Bushnell, Mutiny amid Repression: Russian Soldiers in the Revolution
of 1905-1906, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1985, p 9
ra L Kochan & R Abrahams, The Making ofModern Russia, 2nd edn, Penguin, Harmondsworth,
1983, p 189
28 Dmitriev, Khrestomatiya, vol 3, p 69
29 Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace, Russia on the Eve of War and Revolution, (ed) C E Black,
Random House, New York, 1961, p 340
30 Cited from Daniel Field, ‘1861: “God Yubileya” ’, in L Zakharova, B Eklof & J Bushnell
(eds), Velikie reformy v Rossii 1856-1874, Moscow University Press, Moscow, 1992, p 74
31 Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 3, p 639
32 ibid, p 640
Bo Cited in T Riha, Readings in Russian Civilization, vol 2, University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
1964, pp 359-61
 CHAPTER FOUR

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL

CHANGE BEFORE 1914

THE CHALLENGE OF THE ‘MODERN’ REVOLUTION IN

THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

+ ere tran [ y Riic 1 ociety,

This chapter describes those changes, using the theoretical ideas explained in the
Introduction.
The Russian government tried hard to control social and economic change and to
limit its political impact. However, like Russian society as a whole, the government
found itself drifting in currents it could not master as Russia entered the choppy waters
of the ‘modern’ revolution.
Two distinct but related pressures dragged Russian society into the modern world.
First, spontaneous forces were transforming Russia’s class structure and its economy.
The importance of market forces was increasing. So was the number of those who
depended on wage-labour or profits for their incomes. The government did not really
understand these processes, though it had unwittingly accelerated them by
introducing the ‘Great Reforms’. The second type of pressure was military. In the
second half of the nineteenth century, imperialist wars extended European control
over much of the globe. These showed spectacularly the close link between military
power and the ‘modern’ revolution. The sudden decline of ancient agrarian states such
as China showed that it was impossible to remain a great power without radical
economic and social changes.
How could traditional governments respond to these twin challenges? At the time,
it was hard to see any clear answers. In practice, governments responded by borrowing
some aspects of Capitalism while rejecting others. However the models described in
the Introduction suggest that, in theory at least, two distinct types of response
were
possible. First, governments could try deliberately to transform the social and
economic structures of the societies they ruled, to create modern capitalist societies
 ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE BEFORE 1914 101

and stimulate intensive growth. However, this was a dangerous option for traditional
governments, as it meant dismantling the social structures on which they based their
power. The second option was to rely on traditional methods of extensive growth.
Governments could try to mobilise resources on a large enough scale to compete with
the more productive economies of the capitalist world. They could pit direct
mobilisation against indirect mobilisation; extensive against intensive growth. In
reality, strategies were never this clear. Governments improvised, reacting most of the
time to immediate pressures. Only occasionally did they attempt a more planned
response to the challenge of modernity. Nevertheless, it will help in discussing
economic change if we think of government policies as tending towards one or the
other of these abstract solutions.

BEFORE 1850: GOVERNMENT STRATEGIES AND

SPONTANEOUS MODERNISATION
Government strategies
The challenges faced in the late nineteenth century were not entirely unfamiliar. In
less serious forms, Muscovite governments had faced similar challenges since at least
the sixteenth century. The more energetic Muscovite governments had responded
with a two-pronged strategy. First, they borrowed selectively from their more modern
neighbours. They borrowed ideas, techniques and experts, particularly if they had
military significance. However, they realised that modern ideas could threaten a
traditional society, so they tried to limit the impact of foreign ideas by quarantining
foreigners and imposing strict censorship. Second, to pay for foreign techniques and
to compensate for lower levels of productivity, Russian governments relied on their
superior powers of direct mobilisation. So, while western ideas and techniques began
to enter Russia from the sixteenth century, the state itself became more powerful and
more authoritarian. This combination explains why so many foreigners found Russian
society so paradoxical a mixture of modern and archaic elements.
As early as 1550, Ivan the Terrible created the first Russian companies of
musketeers, the streltsy. Russia’s use of imported gunpowder technology helped turn
the tide against the pastoral nomads who had dominated Inner Eurasia for over two
millennia. The streltsy playe an important: role in the conquest of Kazan, the first step
towards Muscovy’s conquest of the steppelands and Siberia. Characteristically, the
import of foreign technologies coincided with a strengthening of autocracy and an
intense hostility to European cultural and religious ideas.
In the 1630s, the government of Tsar Mikhail Romanov imported foreign military
units trained in European military techniques. To supply them, the government
jed a Russian arms industry based in Tula, south of Moscow, with the help of a
Dutch engineer, Vinnius. Tula remains a centre of Russian armaments production
today. Once again, modernisatio ni incided with the preservation of
traditional social, political and cultural structures. The government used the
mobilisational power of autocracy and serfdom to pay for foreign expertise. At the
same time, Muscovite governments tried to limit the impact of foreign ideas on Russian
society. A good symbol of this was the nemetskaia sloboda,or ‘foreign quarter’. This was
102 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

a special suburb of Moscow, founded by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in 1652, to which all
foreigners were confined.
ruler to launch a systematic strategy of military and industrial
modernisat Peter t he Great.
: Western technology fascinated Peter, particularly
western military and naval technology. He also understood that western technology
and western education were necessary if Russia was to survive as a great power.
However, he used the great mobilisational power of the Russian state to introduce his
reforms. Stalin was to imitate this approach over two centuries later.
In 169 took the first major trip abroad by a Russian tsar. On his
or

return he sent a number of young Russian nobles abroad to acquire western learning,
particularly technical and scien
artisans. He built
up the iron industry of the Ural Mountains and the arma
industry of Tula to equip Russian armies with Russian-made weaponry. In Mosc
ydern textile industry to clothe Russian armies in Russian-made
clay is reign, the Russian Empire had two |
was the world’s major producer of iron.

of ng ther ditior Peter did little to stimulate i endent

entrepreneurial activity or
wage-labour.
free On the contrary, he relied on coercion.
He forced unwilling nobles to go abroad to get a western education. He forced
merchants to set up enterprises, and most of the funding for economic growth came
not from entrepreneurial profits, but from increases in state taxes. Finally, to provide
labour, his government mobilised forced labour on a vast scale for projects such as the
building of St Petersburg. Peter even created a special class of industrial serfs and
assigned them to factories for life.
Peter’s reforms worked because the government was so powerful and had such
immense human and material resources at its disposal. And they worked because the
technological gap between Russia and Western Europe was not too wide in the
eighteenth century. Largely because of Peter’s reforms, the Russian Empire became a
great military power and remained one throughout the eighteenth century. However,
this was not a strategy for continuous innovation. Technologies pioneered in the
commercial environments of Western Europe, proved sterile in a traditional world in
which entrepreneurs and wage-workers played only a limited role. The iron foundries
of the Urals or the weapons factories of Tula survived while the government supported
them. But they did not stimulate growth in other sectors of Russian industry, and by
1800 Russian iron technology was falling behind that of Europe. Without a flourishing
entrepreneurial economy, ideas alone could not stimulate continuous growth.
In the nineteenth century, the technological and military gap between a capitalist
Europe and more traditional societies such as Russia began to widen. Could older
strategies work in this changed environment?

Social and economic changes

As the technology gap widened, spontaneous social changes were already undermining
traditional Russian social and economic structures. Changes in the world economy and
within Russia encouraged the growth of all three major elements of the capitalist
engine of growth, despite the government’s efforts to preserve traditional social
structures.
Though it is impossible to measure the change with any precision, the increased
—_ OS
 ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE BEFORE 1914 103

use of cash suggests that market forces were becoming more important from at least
the sixteenth century. The government itself stimulated cash transactions because it
needed cash to pay for its growing military expenditures. To raise cash it demanded
the payment of direct taxes such as the poll tax in cash rather than kind. It also
increased its reliance on indirect taxes. These were taxes on the purchase of goods such
ee dle oie Cie on eentury, tciodl, taxes alzendy
ee
To pay cash taxes peasants had to earn cash by seeking wage-work, or selling surplus
produce or goods produced in local ‘domestic industries’. This was particularly true
near the large urban centres of Moscow and St Petersburg. The spread of domestic
industries corresponds to the phenomenon known in the economic history of Western
Europe as ‘Proto-industrialisation’. This was an early form of industrial development
in which merchants used the labour of peasants working in their own households.
Proto-industrialisation increased the cash incomes of peasant households, multiplied
opportunities for small and medium-sized entrepreneurs, and expanded the range of
market forces. It may also have encouraged population growth by increasing
opportunities to turn spare labour into cash, thereby allowing couples to marry
younger.
Meanwhile, the demand of the Russian ruling group for foreign military and luxury
goods also stimulated trade. Though subordinate to the government, and usually at its
mercy, merchants and entrepreneurs had always played a significant role in Russian
life. The Stroganov family, which had made its money trading in salt and furs, had
pioneered the exploration of Siberia in the seventeenth century. Merchants ran many
of the new industries established by Peter the Great. By the early nineteenth century
there existed enough demand for industrial textiles, and enough wage-labour and
entrepreneurial capital to stimulate a small-scale industrial revolution in Moscow. In
the 1840s textile entrepreneurs introduced steam engines to most of Moscow’s textile
works. So rapid was the mechanisation of textile production in the 1840s that one
Soviet historian even argued that Russia’s ‘industrial’ revolution occurred in that
decade.’
So, through many different channels, and despite the government’s efforts,
elements of the capitalist package of wage-labour, capitalist entrepreneurs and the
market, were appearing in Russian society even before the abolition of serfdom.

1850 TO 1914: ECONOMIC CHANGE AND GOVERNMENT

POLICY
1850 to 1890
In the 1850s, the government and most educated Russians supported economic
growth, but resisted industrialisation. They did not want to create a large industrial
proletariat of the kind that had brought down European governments during the 1848
revolutions. They hoped Russia could remain an agrarian society.
However, after its humiliating defeat in the Crimea in 1856, the government
in
understood the need for further economic and social change. It abolished serfdom
forced
part because it had concluded that wage labour was more productive than
104 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

0 160 320 480km

-_—+—_ +4
0 100 200 300 miles

FINLAND URALS METALLURGICAL

REGION

INDUSTRIANS
TULA REGION

; “EKATERINOSLA
Dombrowa

Basin” : RUSSIA
AUSTRIA KRIVOY ROG Hl
\ 2p Be

HUNGARY

ROMANIA

Various industries iP Caucasus petroleum areas

Textiles @ Other towns

Metallur, eae ; ,
BY Major industrial regions
lron ore

Coal

Figure 4.1 Main industrial regions of European Russia before 1917.

labour. It also supported economic change in other areas. It supported the creation of
new banks, and of new industries such as oil extraction. After its embarrassing
difficulties in supplying its armies during the Crimean War, it also encouraged railway
building. Immediately after the war the government backed a consortium of Russian
and foreign capitalists who planned to build a large network of railways. The
government guaranteed five per cent interest on all capital invested in the project on
the understanding that the government itself would eventually assume control of the
railways. These terms proved attractive to potential investors, and Russia’s railway
network expanded from 2000 kilometres in 1861 to more than 30 000 kilometres in
1891.
As in the United States, the economic impact of railways was profound, for they cut
transportation costs over the huge Russian land mass. Reduced transportation costs
were particularly important for the grain trade, the largest branch of Russian
commerce. In the late nineteenth century exports of grain through the Black Sea port
of Odessa increased rapidly. In the middle of the century, less than two per cent of the
 ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE BEFORE 1914 105

grain harvest was exported. By the early 1880s, more than six per cent was being
exported, and by the late 1890s about eighteen per cent was going abroad.? The growth
in grain exports explains the increased importance of the Straits of Constantinople for
Russian foreign policy.
Railway building encouraged the emergence of a new iron and coal industry in the
Ukraine. In the 1860s, a Welsh engineer called John Hughes built an ironworks in the
Donets Basin to supply iron rails for the government. In 1885, a rail link was built
between the coal of the River Donets region and the iron ore of the Krivoy Rog region.
This encouraged rapid expansion of iron production in Ukraine. By the 1890s Ukraine
had replaced the Urals as Russia’s major producer of iron (see Figure 4.1). In a similar
way, the Baku—Batum railway, opened in 1883, linked the oil-producing region of Baku
on the Caspian Sea to the ports of the Black Sea. This stimulated a rapid expansion of
oil exports. By the 1890s, railway construction used about sixty per cent of all iron and
steel produced in Russia.*

1890 to 1900
In the 1890s, the Russian government finally accepted that if Russia was to remain a
great power it could not remain a country of peasants and farms trading with industrial
powers. It must become an industrial power in its own right. As a result, the
government began actively to support industrialisation.

A strategy for industrial development

The tsarist government now adopted a carefully thought-through strategy of industrial
development. Sergei Witte, the minister of finance from 1892to 1903, symbolised the
change in policy. Witte’s background was unusual for a tsarist minister, for he was not
a noble but had made his career in business and railway administration. It was
therefore natural for him to encourage closer contacts between the government and
business. He also used the government’s immense propaganda resources to stimulate
business and enterprise through the press, exhibitions, special training programs, and
through generous use of government subsidies.
Witte supported industrial growth because he saw more clearly than others that
Russia would fall behind its European rivals if it remained an agricultural power. He
believed that if Russia did not catch up industrially it would slip into the position of a
colony itself, a fate already facing the Chinese Empire. The following comes from a
memorandum he wrote in defence of his policies in 1899.

Document 4.1: Sergei Witte’s 1899 memorandum on industrial development

The economic relations of Russia with Western Europe are fully comparable to the relations
as
of colonial countries with their metropolises. The latter consider their colonies
and of their
advantageous markets in which they can freely sell the products of their labor
the raw materials necessary for
industry and from which they can draw with a powerful hand
such a hospitable colony for all
them ... Russia was, and to a considerable extent still is,
cheap products of her soil
industrially developed states, generously providing them with the
Russia
and buying dearly the products of their labor. But there is a radical difference between
right and the strength
and a colony: Russia is an independent and strong power. She has the
economically.’
not to want to be the eternal handmaiden of states which are more developed

Von mai a Z
106 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Witte did not rely merely on the state to stimulate industrial growth. He believed
firmly in the need to stimulate the activities of independent entrepreneurs as well. The
government’s role was to give industrial growth a kick-start. Eventually, he hoped it
could retreat from direct involvement in economic growth. Private entrepreneurs
would then take over. Because of this larger perspective, Witte spent much energy
encouraging entrepreneurial activity by funding credit institutions, encouraging trade
fairs and protecting Russian entrepreneurs from foreign competition through the
introduction of tariffs.
However, his strategy also contained some archaic elements. Kick-starting industrial
growth required a large injection of cash, and Witte saw the autocracy as the institution
best able to mobilise these resources. So Witte believed firmly in the need to preserve
the autocracy, and even wrote a famous book in its defence. He also defended
traditional institutions such as the peasant commune, which played a crucial role in
the collection of government taxes. Like Peter the Great, Witte hoped to use Russia’s
traditional political and fiscal structures to pay for economic modernisation.

The trans-Siberian railway

The centrepiece of Witte’s strategy was the use of government funds to construct the
trans-Siberian railway. He hoped this would stimulate growth by providing rapid and
cheap transportation for the first time between the western and eastern edges of the
Russian Empire. By now, railway building was a familiar element of tsarist military and
economic policy. However, Witte gave it a new significance. Instead of encouraging
railway building by private entrepreneurs, the government began to take a direct
interest in railway building. By 1914, it owned and ran two-thirds of Russia’s railways.°
Construction of the trans-Siberian railway began in 1891, when Witte was minister of
transport. It was completed in 1904. In eleven years, the amount of railway track in
Russia nearly doubled, rising from 30 000 to 56 000 kilometres.
During its construction, government orders for iron, coal, locomotives and
equipment boosted the development of Russian heavy industry and engineering. The
railway also reduced transportation costs, thereby stimulating trade throughout the
Russian Empire. Finally, through freight charges and passenger fares, the railway
earned the government large revenues. (See Figure 4.2.)

Mobilising resources for industrial development

Witte’s policies were expensive. However his predecessors as ministers of finance had
worked hard to raise government revenue and balance the budget. The most
significant elements in their policies had been high protective tariffs (i.e. duties on
imports), the export of grain, the borrowing of foreign capital and heavy taxation.
From 1877, Witte’s predecessors had steadily raised tariffs from the low level typical
of the 1850s and 1860s. In 1891, I. A. Vyshnegradskii introduced the highest tariffs in
Russia’s commercial history. By the 1890s, tariffs accounted for thirty-three per cent of
the value of all imports, while before 1877 they had accounted for only twelve per cent.®
Tariffs were not just a way of raising money. They have also played an important
role in industrial development in most countries, by protecting infant native industries.
One of the first economists to recognise this was the German, Friedrich List (1789-
1846), of whom Witte was a great admirer. List argued that high tariffs were the key to
American industrial development in the early nineteenth century, for they had
protected American industry from the competition of cheaper English imports.
107

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QAOHAWS IHS
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE BEFORE 1914

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108 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

German industry had also developed behind the high tariff barriers of the Zollverein
customs union established in 1818. Witte argued that tariffs should play the same role
in Russia’s development.
Witte’s predecessors had also advocated the expansion of Russian grain exports.
Exports of grain earned the reserves of gold and foreign currency needed to guarantee
repayments on foreign loans. Such guarantees were necessary if Russia was to attract
foreign loans. Here, too, Witte pursued a traditional policy with a new purpose and
new energy. In 1897 he placed the Russian currency on the gold standard. This meant
fixing the value of the rouble against other currencies and against gold, so foreign
creditors would know the real value of the interest they could earn on Russian loans.
As a result of Witte’s energetic encouragement of foreign investment, the amount of
foreign capital (mainly French and Belgian) in Russian industrial companies rose from
twenty-six per cent in 1890 to forty-one per cent by 1915. Foreign shares of Russia’s
national debt rose from thirty per cent in 1895 to forty-eight per cent in 1914.’
Foreign loans didn’t come free. Interest Se cite keThoeterof railway building,
had to come from tax revenues. Ultimately, it was peasants and urban workers who paid
these costs. As consumers, they paid for the government’s economic policy through
high tariffs on imported goods, and rising indirect taxes on consumer goods such as
vodka. Peasants also paid through the pressure the government applied to make them
pay arrears of redemption dues, even when payment became more difficult later in
the century.
Witte was well aware that consumers in general and peasants in particular, paid a
heavy price for his strategy of development.

Document 4.2: from Sergei Witte’s 1899 memorandum

Of all charges against the economic policy of Russia, the minister of finance is most keenly
aware of the following: that because of the tariff, a Russian pays for many items considerably
more than the subjects of other countries; . . . that the cost of living also grows for both rich
and poor; and that the paying powers of the population are strained to the utmost, so that in
many cases consumption is directly curtailed. The minister of finance recognizes that the
customs duties fall as a particularly heavy burden upon the impoverished landowners and
peasants, particularly in a year of crop failure. These imposts are a heavy sacrifice made by
the entire population, and not from surplus but out of current necessities.®

The impact of the growing tax burden can be seen most clearly in the methods used
to collect direct taxes from the peasantry. Government officials collected taxes in
autumn, just after the harvest. This allowed peasants to sell their newly harvested grain
to pay their taxes. Of course the autumn was the worst possible time for peasants to
sell. Grain was abundant and millions of peasants were selling it, so competition forced
prices down and peasants had to sell more. Many sold grain they would eventually need
for their own subsistence. By spring, many households had run out of grain and had to
return to the market. Now they entered the market as buyers in a seller’s market, as
increased demand forced prices up. The government and grain merchants gained at
both ends of this unpleasant deal. Peasants knew they lost twice, but there was nothing
they could do. As they took their rye to market in the autumn, they would say: ‘Don’t
be sorry, Mother Rye, that my path is city-wards. In the spring I will overpay; but I will
take thee back!’.®
 ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE BEFORE 1914 109

When such methods failed, the government

resorted to direct brutality. Members of a
commune were collectively responsible for the
commune’s total payments. In the last resort,
the land captains (an official position created in
1889) could, and did, inflict mass whippings to
force the commune to pay for households that
had fallen into arrears.
Though levels of taxation undoubtedly rose
in this period, some historians have argued that
this did not lead to a decline in average rural
living standards. Agricultural output rose fast
enough to feed the population most of the
time, and opportunities for wage-work meant
that many rural families had increasing cash
Peasant carters, late nineteenth century, bringing grain to é ;
Kiev on its way to the Black Sea port of Odessa
forexport. incomes. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt
that government policy created genuine
hardship for millions of peasants at a time when
average landholdings were declining. The difficulties were worst in what Stephen
Wheatcroft has described as the ‘Central Producer Region’, the band of agricultural
provinces to the south of Moscow. Heavy taxation was not the only cause of peasant
difficulties. Poor harvests were also frequent. However, the government deserved and
received much of the blame for the difficulties peasants suffered in these years.
Such methods of paying for modernisation forced the government to preserve the
more archaic elements of rural life. It had to keep the peasantry tied to the commune,
and it had to keep the commune as a device for collecting taxes. Witte’s strategy of
growth also meant preserving the autocracy, for only an autocratic government could
exert this degree of fiscal pressure on the population.

1900 to 1913
The slump of 1899 increased protests about the results of government economic
policy. Famines in the countryside and strikes in the towns finally took their toll.
Nicholas II lost his nerve in 1903 and sacked Witte. From then until 1914, the
government was too concerned with its own survival to undertake a systematic program
of economic development. Indirectly, though, government policies may have
stimulated further growth through government purchases of military equipment and
further expenditure on railways. The dismantling of the commune after 1906 also
accelerated economic change in the countryside. Economic growth continued, but it
owed less and less to systematic government policies of growth, and more to social and
economic changes over which the government had little control.

ASSESSING ECONOMIC GROWTH

of the
How rapid was economic growth between 1850 and 1914? Which sectors
producti vity levels catching up with those of the
economy grew fastest? Were Russian
capitalist West?
110 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

isti
The statistics reproduced in isti
i the Statistical sugg:
.1 suggest
i Table 4.1
appendixi and in some
preliminary answers.

Index numbers
Table 4.1 and Figure 4.3 use index numbers to help us compare different rates of
growth. Index numbers are ratios. They show how much a given variable has increased
since the base year (in this case 1861). I have calculated them by dividing the original
figures (most of which come from the Statistical appendix) by the figure for the base
year, 1861.

Intensive or extensive growth?

The population of the Russian Empire (C) more than doubled between 1861 and 1913.
However, industrial and agricultural production grew more rapidly. This suggests that
output per caput (i.e. the amount produced for every individual) was increasing.
Clearly, the general level of productivity of the Russian economy increased throughout
the period. This shows there was intensive, as well as extensive growth.

Industrial growth
All indicators of industrial production show rapid increases. The growth of the urban
population (D) shows indirectly the increase in the number of wage-earners and
factory workers. However, total industrial production (A) increased even more rapidly
than the urban population (D). This suggests that the productivity of the urban work
force was increasing more rapidly than its numbers.

Table 4.1 Index numbers of economic growth, 1861-1913

Total Total Pop Urban Volume Railways Iron Govt
ind = agric pop of grain length revenue
exports

Year A B Cc D E*? F G H
1861 100 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00
187 Aw cleat tO: rene2 ZAL 6.18 1.33 1.25
1881 252) i236 3.09 10.50 1.67 1.60
1891 B.yoee elit?? 1:62 5.04 13.95 3:33 wee 19
1896 So3rem 90 71.70) §405 6.47 [7.95 5:33 3.36
1901 (0 eel 183 7.40 25.64 9.67 4.41
1906 S10 oo) 1.99 7.25 28.9 | 2.00 jepanr07,
1913 6523-095 2.32— "6.96 7.83 31.91 14.00 8.38
Notes: * A famine year (1890 = 1.49; 1892 = 1.43)
** Figures for 1861-65, 71-75, 81-85, 91-95, 96-98, 1901-05, 1906-10, 1911-13
Sources: A and B based on R W Goldsmith, ‘The Economic Growth of Tsarist Russia’, in Economic
Development and Cultural Change, vol 9 (1960-61), pp 446-7 (column 5) & pp 462-3 (column 8);
C, D, F, G based on Statistical appendix; E based on G Pavlovsky, Agricultural Russia on the Eve of the
Revolution, London, |930, pp 113, 267; H based on P A Khromov, Ekonomicheskoe razvitie Rossii v XIX-
XX w, Moscow, 1951
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE BEFORE 1914 111

14
== =< Railways at fe
13 —-— Iron output fae 7
oli -—— Ind, output oo 7
iS pyre ss Govt. rev. ZO fF A
2 - = = Grain exports yA yp ye
= !0 — Urban pop. ee pee / a
$ sins lgete ta Agric. output 7 Aa eae.
;
5 8 Population 94 : bse a wH
Bo f Pe OE
nae 2
6= 6
5 5
ms)
eZ!
3
2
|
0 Note: Based on information in Table 4.|

1861 1871 1881 189] 1901 1911

Years

Figure 4.3 Economic growth of the Russian Empire, 1861-1913.

Particular sectors of heavy industry, such as iron (G) or the railways (F), grew even
more rapidly than total industrial production (A). (Note that the figures in column F
look more impressive than they should because growth began from such a low level in
1861.)
When was industrial growth most rapid? Is there any sign of the sudden spurt of
growth some historians have detected in the 1890s? Rates of industrial growth in the
1890s (about eight per cent a year) were indeed remarkable. They have rarely been
equalled in the industrial history of any country. Nevertheless, the growth rates of the
1890s continued an accelerating trend that had begun even before the “Great
century,
Reforms’. After a decline in growth rates in the first few years of the twentieth
the acceleration resumed in the years before 1914.

Table 4.2 Rates of industrial growth, 1885-1913

Years Average annual rate of growth of industrial production
%

1885-89 6.10
1890-99 8.03
1900-06 1.43
1907-13 6.25
Macmillan, London, 1972, p 46
Source: M E Falkus, The Industrialisation of Russia: 1700-1914,

was rapid in the

The growth of railways followed a slightly different path. Growth
rapid in the 1890s, during the
1860s and 1870s, but even in this sector growth was most
construction of the trans-Siberian railway.
 112 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Consumer goods and domestic

industry
Accounts of Russian industrial development have
often exaggerated the importance of heavy
industry and underestimated growth in domestic
(kustar) and consumer goods industries. This is
partly because the government itself focussed
mainly on heavy industry. Yet domestic industries
and consumer goods industries had a far greater
impact on the life of most peasants, and probabl
had a greater impact on the economy as a whole.”

mestic industries, was as important in Russia’s

economic history as in that of early modern
Europe or many third world countries today.
Available figures suggest that in Russia about
800 000 people worked in domestic industries in
Cz, 1861, and about three million in 1913. These
figures are similar to those for the numbers
employed in industry and mines (see p 120).
Domestic industry: a woman weaver, late nineteenth Though kustar industries sometimes competed
century.
with factories, they could also be part of a larger
organisation. In Vladimir province in the 1850s,
fifty-eight cotton factories had 900 looms and
5800 workers on the premises. They also had
another 45 000 looms and 65 000 workers
working in peasant homes in nearby villages.!!
Consumer goods industries, particularly
textiles and foodstuffs, also grew at respectable
rates throughout the nineteenth century.
Populists in the nineteenth century claimed that
the self-sufficiency of Russia’s peasants severely
restricted the demand for consumer goods. As a
‘ ea a We o : : result, they claimed, Russia could never become
Interior of a Ukrainian peasant house, with a loom. From a capitalist society. Modern economic historians
the Ukraine Museum of Folk Architecture and Life, near have often shared this assumption. In reality, even
Kiev.
in the early nineteenth century, most peasants
had many links with the market, either as wage-
earners or as purchasers, and these links multiplied later in the century. Those
who
earned cash had to spend it. As a result, there was a steady increase
in the demand for
consumer goods in the towns and in the countryside. Far from
stagnating, consumer
goods industries flourished throughout the century. In 1913, textiles and foodstuff
s
made up fifty per cent of total industrial production.’ Of
course, increased
expenditure was not necessarily a sign of growing wealth. For many
peasant households
it was a sign of poverty. They earned and spent more cash because the land
could no
longer support them.
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE BEFORE 1914 113

Agriculture
Until recently, researchers argued that agricultural growth lagged behind population
growth in the late nineteenth century, thereby reducing the availability of foodstuffs
and depressing average peasant living standards. That in turn was seen as a major cause
of the 1905 revolution. Recent research portrays a more dynamic agricultural sector.
Output of grains provides the best single indicator of agricultural output, for grains
were the main foodstuff, and accounted for ninety per cent of the sown area even in
1913. Harvests varied wildly from year to year, so it is the longer trends that interest us.
In the 1870s and 1880s, grain production per caput may have declined slightly, and
between 1889 and 1892 there was a series of four bad harvests, culminating in a major
famine. Between 1890 and 1913, per caput grain production rose, even after deducting
exports, though there was another brief decline during the crisis of 1905—08.'* From
1890 to 1913, grain production kept just ahead both of population growth and the
growth in grain exports.
Between 1860 and 1914, Russian grain harvests roughly tripled in size. Only about
one quarter of this increase reflects expansion in sown areas. The rest reflects genuine
increases in productivity.'* Much of the gain came from intensive capitalist farming of
the newly colonised black earth lands of Ukraine and the south east. Here, merchants
leased land and farmed it commercially. Some gains were realised on the estates of
entrepreneurial nobles who produced for the market. Some farmers began to
concentrate on commercial crops such as sugar-beet or tobacco. Even peasants
improved productivity. Some village communes introduced fertilisers, or drained
marshlands, or introduced new crop rotations. Between 1860 and 1910, crop yields on
peasant lands may have increased by as much as fifty per cent.° nts i
icultural productivity were associated with an expansion
n €xpd 1 ns10n 1n-

ecades before 1914, alm

export.’®
These national figures mask important regional differences. Output in newly
colonised regions in Ukraine, the south-east and west Siberia expanded faster than the
average. In contrast, in the belt of agricultural provinces south of Moscow and along
the middle Volga, the ‘Central Producer Region’, per caput production fell steadily in
the thirty years before the First World War. This was a region of real a ricultural crisis
in the last decades of tsarist rule.'’ It was also the heart of the rural revolutions of the
early twentieth century. The agricultural crisis ofthe late nineteenth century was real
but itwas
enoug h, Region.
largely confined to the Central Producerbesides
of peasant households
Livestock was the main resource land and their own
labour, and it is clear now that the average numbers of cattle, horses and pigs owned
by each household fell steadily throughout this period.'® This is a clear sign that
peasants were coming under great economic pressure.

A successful strategy of growth?

al
Summing up this complex picture of economic change is not easy. In an influenti
that the economic
essay first published in the 1960s, Alexander Gerschenkron argued
would
reforms of Peter the Great set a pattern of state-led economic growth that
period, under Stalin.!°
reappear in the late nineteenth century, and again in the Soviet
114 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

The government encouraged economic changes, and mobilised the necessary

resources. As the government’s aims were military, industrial growth favoured heavy
industry rather than consumer goods industries or agriculture, so it did little to
generate increased consumer goods or to improve living standards. Instead, living
standards declined as taxation increased to fund growth in the military-industrial
sector. This was a style of economic growth that depended on direct mobilisation of
resources. The heavy demands it placed on the population impoverished most people
and generated widespread discontent. Such strategies required governments able and
willing to use force to maintain their power. It was, Gerschenkron argued, an
appropriate strategy for autocratic governments such as those of the Russian Empire.
Gerschenkron divided the economic history of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries into two main phases. The ‘Great Reforms’, and in particular the
emancipation act, shaped the first phase. During this phase, he argued, government
policies retarded industrial development by tying peasants to the land. In the late
1880s, the government finally abandoned its resistance to industrial growth. In the
1890s, the policies of Witte triggered an unprecedented spurt of rapid industrial
growth, concentrated almost entirely in heavy industry and transportation. Some
economic historians, such as Walt Rostow, argued that the 1890s marked the point at
which the Russian economy ‘took off into sustained growth’. Despite a slump in the
early twentieth century, Gerschenkron argued that growth resumed in the half decade
before 1914. By then, he claimed, Russia was well on the way to successful
industrialisation. In other words, Gerschenkron believed that Witte’s policies had
offered a successful solution to the dilemma of backwardness. However, the
intervention of war and revolution diverted Russian history into new paths.
This has been an influential account of economic growth in Russia before the First
World War. However, it now needs serious modification. As even Gerschenkron
conceded, the state was not the only significant force for economic growth in the late

sche,
bey,
nineteenth century. We have seen that there was much economic development in areas
of the economy of little interest to the government. It now appears that change was
VaNy less erratic and more continuous than Gerschenkron suggested. Instead of a series of
© Fileaee oan ee ate IeHEY RR cE history of the last
century of Tsarist rule consisted of a prolonged acceleration in economic output across
most sectors of the economy. Finally, Gerschenkron exaggerated Witte’s reliance ona
traditional mobilisational strategy of growth. In reality, Witte, unlike either Peter the
Great or Stalin, was an enthusiastic advocate of Capitalism. Though he used traditional
mobilisational methods, he saw them as steps towards a capitalist pattern of growth.
Gerschenkron’s account of the late Tsarist period no longer stands, though his analysis
of the reforms of Peter the Great and Stalin retains its importance.
Was growth sufficient to allow the Russian Empire to remain a great power? We have
seen that there was growth in all sectors of the economy. It was particularly rapid in
heavy industry and communications. However, from the government’s point of view,
the real issue was — Russia was holding its own as a great power. Was Russia
catching up economically with Europe? Did it have the economic foundations
necessary for a modern military establishment?
Comparisons are difficult. However, Russia’s industrial output per caput (i.e. total
industrial output divided by population), appears not to have risen any faster than
it
did among other major industrial powers between 1860 and 1910. On the contrary,
Russia fell behind Italy into tenth position.” Undoubtedly, Russia’s position
as an
industrial power would have been even worse had it not been for the industrial
growth
 ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE BEFORE 1914 115

that occurred in this period. However, there was still a long way to go before Russia
reached the levels of productivity of capitalist Western Europe. Even in 1913, Russia’s
economy remained mainly agricultural. Only eighteen per cent of the population lived
in the towns, and industry still produced only twenty per cent of national income.?!
These conclusions suggest that the government had at best partial success in
x stimulating intensive growth. What of the other side of the dilemma? Did it manage to
preserve the social foundations for its own power? Here, the success of government
strategies is even less certain. The government made strenuous efforts to preserve its
own power and to prevent the destruction of the landed nobility and the peasantry.
Despite this, Russian society underwent profound changes in this period, changes over
which the government had little control.

Rion eee GROWTH AND SOCIAL CHANGE, 1861 TO

In its desire to PECveR the CMerg ence OF2Nase eae the

government of Alexander II had emancipated the serfs in ways that made it difficult
for them to leave the land. Though free, most remained tied to allotments controlled
by communes. The commune appeared to prevent the emergence of classes of wage-
earners and entrepreneurs from amongst the peasantry, by equalising landholdings
between households. This made it difficult for successful households to accumulate
land and become small entrepreneurial farmers. Equally, the 1861 act made it difficult
for less successful households to sell their land and become full-time wage-workers.
These aspects of Russian society after 1861 persuaded many contemporaries that
Russia had its own, unique, path of development. Populists, in particular, concluded
that Russia would never become a ‘capitalist’ society, but would remain a peasant
society. In reality, legislation alone could not prevent social change. After the 1861 act,
peasants came under increasing pressure to engage in the market, either as wage-
labourers or as petty entrepreneurs or traders. Landlords, too, found they had to enter
new
the market if they were to survive. These processes, in turn, generated
opportunities for other entrepreneurs, and stimulated the growth of the market.

Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurs increased in numbers and influence during the last century of Tsarist
rule. The rising entrepreneurial class came from many different groups within
y, the
traditional Russian society. Three were particularly important: the merchantr
nobility, and the peasantry.
000 to about
Officially, the merchant class increased its numbers from about 246
1850 and 1900. However, their economic, political and social
600 000 between
the traditional
influence grew even more rapidly as Russia industrialised. Slowly,
into a modern capitalis t class of bankers and
merchant class transformed itself
of industrial ists can be measure d by the
industrialists. The increase in the number
1866 and 1903, the number of
increase in medium- and large-sized factories. Between
to 9000.”
factories employing more than sixteen workers increased from 2500
116 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

The changing role of the merchantry can be

illustrated from the history of the Guchkov
family. Fedor Alekseevich Guchkov, an obrok-
paying serf, founded the family’s fortune. In
the late eighteenth century, he set up a weaving
shop in Moscow, with the permission of his
master. Typically, Fedor Alekseevich continued
to dress and look like a serf even after he
purchased his freedom. His sons began to run
the business in the 1820s, and by the 1840s the
Guchkovs owned one of the largest woollen
factories in Russia. By 1853 his factories
employed 1880 workers. His grandsons, Ivan
and Efim, were ‘modern businessmen who
dressed in western clothing, had western
educations and had travelled in Europe’. The
A merchant household from Nizhny-Novgorod, about 1900. fourth generation was less actively involved in
business, preferring to live off profits from the
family concerns. One member, Ivan, took on
posts in urban government and state administration. Another, Nikolai, became mayor
of Moscow. é \ 10 g is in

We will meet this Guchkov again. ?

By 1900 the leading members of thefbourgeoisievhad clearly ‘arrived’ in Russian
high society. Some, like Sergei Witte, were now playing leading roles within the ruling
group.
Not all entrepreneurs were merchants. Some came from the nobility. Not only did
many nobles succeed in becoming entrepreneurial farmers; many diversified into
industries such as cotton or distilling. Particularly in the black soil provinces of the
south, commercial agriculture flourished in the late nineteenth century. Both
merchants and nobles engaged in it, hiring labour, using modern agricultural
techniques, and producing wheat for the growing export markets of Odessa.
Peasants also became entrepreneurs. On the face of it, the 1861 act should have
ensured that the peasantry remained a homogenous, egalitarian class of self-sufficient
small farmers. Land, the basic productive resource, was distribut
ed according to the
number of males in a household. This should have ensured a basic equality
of wealth,
which is why the populists saw in the Russian commune the germs of Socialism
.
However, the commune was less egalitarian than it seemed. The other major
productive resource, labour, was distributed quite unequally as a result of
accidents of
birth and death. Large families could often generate enough money to buy
additional
farming equipment, lease additional land or set up small
domestic industries. Such
peasants became small entrepreneurs. In the villages they were often
known as kulaks,
or ‘fists’, a term which combined envy and respect. Leninargued in The Development of
Capitalism inRussia (1899) that the kulaks represented an emerging rural bourgeoisie.
However, recent research shows that changing fortunes, such as
the break-up of large
households, could destroy wealthy peasant families as fast
as they created them. Few
kulaks founded long-lived dynasties of entrepreneurs.
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE BEFORE 1914 117

Wage-labour
We have seen that the expansion of wage-labour is a fundamental aspect of
modernisation. However, as Marx pointed out, from the point of view of those forced:
to become wage-labourers against their will, the process was extremely painful. This
helps explain why so many recently recruited wage-workers were attracted to
revolutionary politics. The class of wage-workers expanded in two distinct ways.

Intellectual wage-workers
First, the number of intellectual wage-workers increased. The late nineteenth century
saw the birth of the professions. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, all formed professional
associations. The zemstva also hired veterinarians, statisticians and agronomists to work
with the peasantry. These were known as the ‘third element’ in the zemstva (the first
being government officials, the second being elected members).
This new class of intellectual wage-workers came mainly from members of the
former upper classes. They came from declining noble families or from those
borderline classes which had access to education despite their non-noble birth.

Manual wage-workers
Far more important numerically was the rising class of manual wage-workers. These
are the groups that Marx called the ‘proletariat’. Though many new proletarians came
from the towns, most came from the countryside. _ Ga [
In a peasant society, creating a class of wage-labourers meant denying peasants
access to the land, the primary productive resource in an agrarian sogicty. Creating a
class of wage-labourers has always, therefore, required the@xpropriattom of peasants.
This was the process that Marx referred to as ‘primitive capitalist accumulation’. He
meant by this the mechanisms that created the class structure necessary for Capitalism
to work. In the Russian Empire, these processes took confusing forms. The 1861 act,
far from creating a large class of landless labourers, forced most peasants to remain on
the land. It therefore seemed to prevent the emergence of a proletariat. However, as
[Leninlpointed out, she1861actmerely changed thewaysinwhichthepeasantry lost
control ofthe land. Instead of being severed from the land with a single blow, like
eighteenth century English peasants under the so-called ‘enclosure’ acts, Russian
peasants were squeezed from the land over several decades. As a result, there appeared
a vast and growing class of part-time wage-earners, rather than the full-time proletariat
that Marx saw in Victorian Britain. These processes had a profound affect on the
nature and the grievances of Russian workers.
What pressures forced peasants to earn wages? The most important pressures were
rising taxation and land shortage, though rising consumption may also have played a
role.
The rising tax burden has already been discussed. Growing land shortage played an
even more important role in pushing peasants on to the market as wage-earners and
Between
then as consumers. As population grew, the land available per person shrank.
1860 and 1900, the average allotment of male peasants had declined by about forty-six
per cent, from 5.2 to 2.8 hectares. Meanwhile, a growing number of poor peasants did
not have the livestock necessary to work and manure their land. By 1900, about thirty
-per cent of all peasant households did not have a single horse, and thirty-five per cent
their
had no cows. Such households could no longer survive by farming. Many leased
land to wealthier households and began to live off wages.”
118 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

These pressures meant that peasants who in the past had supported themselves from
their own land now had to enter the market. If they had spare cash, they could lease
extra land. If they had surplus grain, they could sell it. Between 1850 and 1914 more
and more peasants put grain on the market. In 1850 peasants produced forty-five per
cent of all marketed grain; by 1914, they produced seventy-five per cent.”
However, if they had neither surplus cash nor surplus grain, they had to seek wage-
work. This strategy had the greatest effect on village life, for it took peasants away from
their families and their villages, sometimes for months or years on end. As noted in
Chapter two, the search for wage-work took three main forms. Each represented one
more stage in the severing of ties with the traditional ways of life of rural Russia. Each
also represented an increase in the total labour expended.
First, peasants could find work in domestic, kustar, industry. There were many types
of domestic industry: weaving, spinning, boat making, or any of the numerous money-
making activities that could be carried on in the household or the village. The
advantage of domestic industry was that people could stay in the village and continue
to farm their allotments. It simply meant making more productive use of the time not
used in agriculture. The disadvantage was that domestic industry often involved very
hard work indeed, even for the very old and the very young. Workdays of fifteen to
sixteen hours were not uncommon in households that spun or wove cloth. The hours
became longer when kustar industries began to face competition from factories using
modern equipment. The agrarian economist, A. V. Chayanoy, called this incr ease
ase ir
1D
ploitation’. Here is an account of one such trade by a modern
historian.

In a trade such as the making of wooden spoons, every member of the family had a
specific function, well adjusted to his age and capabilities. The youngest children
would sort out pieces of wood according to size. Those aged ten to fifteen would
shape them roughly. The adult men would give them their final shape with knife
and chisel. The women and the old would smooth and polish them; and the
daughters of the family would apply patterns and lacquer. It was this family
cooperation which kept costs low and made for prices accessible to the poorest, and
also made for great resilience and ability to withstand competition, often also factory
competition.”

Second, there was rural wage-labour. This usually meant that males of working age
left the village for long periods, returning only for the harvest. Meanwhile, the women,
the young, and the old took on the burden of farming the family’s allotment. However,
rural wage-work meant that males who sought work could still make use of the many
skills they had learnt growing up in the village, as they tried to find work as farm
labourers, ditch diggers, or in building or construction.
To cater for the growing numbers seeking rural wage-work there developed special
‘hiring markets’ in the commercial grain farming provinces of Ukraine and the south
east. Peasants travelled to these in the traditional work-gangs known as artels. They
travelled by foot or on dangerous home-made rafts known as duby. On the day the
market began, negotiations would start at a given sign, such as the ringing of a bell.
Often, artel leaders negotiated with potential employers on behalf of the group asa
whole. The following document, from a contemporary source, conveys the relationship
between employers and employees in this emerging world of petty Capitalism.
 ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE BEFORE 1914 a)

Timber rafts. Aquatint from Atkinson and Walker, Picturesque Representation of the Manners,
Customs and Amusements of the Russians, 1812.

Document 4.3: a hiring market near Taganrog, early 1860s

Usually negotiations are conducted with the uncle [the artel head]; the others all lay on the
ground in very free and easy poses, and only rarely, in chorus, interfere in the conversation,
[which is] of extreme interest to them. Their half crude and even insolent treatment of the
employer during negotiations represents a strange and funny contrast with their deferential
and even servile behavior with regard to that same employer, if, by mutual consent, they
become his batraki [labourers]. The rude treatment before hire is as if a farewell to freedom,
which they sell for four whole months to their employer. The tone of the employer likewise
changes somewhat, but in inverse ratio: before hire, he is mainly exhorting, fawning and to
the highest degree kind, especially when he contends to the workers, that it is [more]
advantageous for them to hire cheaply to him than to another more expensively. After hire
he adopts a tone imperious and strict and no longer talks with them amicably, but limits
himself to orders.””

Finally, there was urban wage-labour. From the peasants’ point of view, this option
was the most drastic. It was often the resort of the most desperate poor peasants.
Factory work not only meant leaving the village for long periods. It also demanded new
skills, and devalued the skills of village life. It meant a new living environment, often in
long periods
unsanitary factory barracks, a different way of using one’s labour, and
in
away from one’s family and village. Wages were low—a quarter to a third of those
Western Europe. Accident rates were high. Hours of work were long and discipline was
towns.
harsh. For women workers conditions could be particularly harsh in the
women. Asa result, ‘the women workers used to hide
Employers often sacked pregnant
120 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

(their pregnancy) until their mouths foamed and the child was born at the bench. And
after the confinement—back to the bench. . . There used to be many women workers
who cursed their children’.*

Numbers of wage-earners
There was a steady increase in all three types of wage-work. Between 1860 and 1913 the
numbers employed in domestic industry rose from 800 000 to three million (a 275 per
cent increase). During the same period, the numbers employed as agricultural wage-
labourers rose from 700 000 to 4.5 million (a 543 per cent increase). The numbers in
other forms of non-industrial employment (building, transport, domestic service), rose
from 1.7 million to 6.9 million (a 314 per cent increase). Meanwhile, the industrial
work force—those employed in factories and mines—increased from 860 000 to three
million (a 275 per cent increase).
These figures show that the total number of wage-earners was far greater than the
number of factory workers. Total wage-earners had increased from about 4 021 000 in
1860 to 17 480 000 in 1913 (a 335 per cent increase), and this figure does not include
millions more who earned some wages as a supplement to farming.

Economic amphibians’: the nature of the Russian working class

What is less obvious from these figures is that the various categories of manual wage-
work overlapped. Any manual wage-earner might earn money in all these ways during
a lifetime. In fact by 1900 most Russian workers were neither peasants nor proletarians,
but belonged to a transitional group of peasant-proletarians—‘economic amphibians’
as one writer has described them.” They spent considerable periods of time earning
wages but also maintained an allotment of land in the village. A common pattern was
for males to seek work outside the village between the ages of about twenty and forty,
and then ‘retire’ to their villages. As a result, many families were split, with adult males
in a town and the rest of the family maintaining the farm. In 1900 only forty-eight per
cent of married wage-earners lived with their families.*' In these ways, economic
change slowly undermined the traditional peasant family. This pattern of making a
living remained characteristic until the upheavals of the 1930s introduced a sharper
division between rural and urban work.
Not surprisingly, peasant habits persisted in the towns, despite the efforts of factory
owners to re-educate and discipline their work force into modern work habits. It was
impossible to stop workers abandoning work and returning to their villages during the
harvest. Employers also found their workers’ frequent holidays frustrating. In the
villages, there were many religious or family festivals during which all work ceased. At
first, factory owners had to accept that they could not expect their workers to do much
on those days but drink. However, employers gradually reduced the number of
permissible holidays. At a machinery works in Kolomna, the number of work days a
year increased from 240 to 260 days in twelve years, an increase of about three weeks in
the working year. Still, Russian factory owners had a long way to go to match the
average working year of American workers. At the end of the century this was 283 days,
compared with an average of 260 days for Russia.*?
The following account of the life of an industrial worker shows this odd mix of rural
and urban life-styles. It comes from the autobiography of a worker who later became a
Bolshevik. The passage also shows how different degrees of urbanisation created
different groups within the working class.
 ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE BEFORE 1914 121

Document 4.4: from the autobiography of A. S. Shapovalov

| was thirteen years old when [in 1884] the railway repair workshop accepted me in its
embrace. Although becoming a locksmith coincided with my desires, and although | had not
been spoiled by fate and had already graduated from a hard school, still, after one day spent
under the authority of the coppersmith, Aleksei Igniievich Sokolov, | wanted to run away.
Instead of giving me a chance to learn a trade, | spent the whole day being sent out to fetch
vodka . . Boozeups were organised for any excuse. The birth of a child, a baptism, a funeral,
a wedding—all these were marked with boozeups. When a new worker started at the works,
he had to buy ‘welcoming’ drinks for his comrades. When he was discharged, they demanded
a ‘farewell’. They drank most on the saint’s day of the icon which hung in the workshop . . .
Only a year later—during which time | had caught severe colds from running in the frost
without warm clothing—was | released from the coppersmith Sokolov and transferred to
the locksmith workshop.
| heard constantly from the grown-up locksmiths that | should count myself lucky that |
was not beaten and was paid thirty kopeks a day on payday, and so | contented myself with
the position of a locksmith’s apprentice [slesarnogo uchenika]. | became coarser, and lowered
my standards; | stopped reading books, learnt to smoke, to drink, and to swear with the
choicest Russian swear-words . . . A work day ‘with evenings’ (overtime) lasted from seven
o’clock in the morning until ten-thirty at night. We also worked on Sundays and all the major
holidays, such as Christmas, Easter, and so on. From the constant hard work | became even
more coarsened...
In autumn and winter fist fights used to be arranged. Two opposing teams would line up,
‘wall to wall’. When adults joined in, these sometimes became ferocious. At the end of the
fights people left with black eyes, broken teeth, bloody faces, broken ribs. Once, after being
thrown to the ground, | received such a blow in the spine that | was left unconscious . . .
The most backward of the railway workers were the firemen and labourers. They lived in
barracks, which were filthy. They were peasants, torn from the plough, who had come to
St Petersburg merely to earn a bit and return to their villages. They were extremely hardy
and had minimal needs. After working for a bit, and accumulating some money, a fireman
would buy a ‘troika’—a suit, polished boots with shining leggings, a crimson blouse, and a
harmonica (a ‘Talyaiika’)—and return to his village. In their spare time they wandered the
streets in groups and played Russian songs on their ‘Talyankas’: ‘| have been in Petersburg,
lots of money have | earned, scarves for the girls I’ve bought’, and so on.
The locksmiths, assistant engine-drivers, and drivers were a sort of aristocracy among
the workers ... Recognition of their human worth was rare amongst the workers. The
master was a ‘tsar’, a ‘god’. Usually, he not only knew what was going on in the factory, but
also what was going on in the workers’ families. When he walked through the workshop, the
workers, before waiting for him to bow, would humbly bow, stutteringly remove their hats
and say: ‘Good morning, our Lord and Master!’ All the foremen and clerks, with rare
exceptions, robbed the till mercilessly and took bribes. This inheritance of tsarist slavery also
affected the workers. They stole from the workshop everything they could, even the tools
of their comrades. ‘Don’t yawn, and keep a lookout!’ became the rule. If someone stole a
steal,
locksmith’s cutter . . . everyone would laugh when he said, ‘Who took my cutter?’ To
were honest, and correct, who
to cheat, to deceive, was thought all to the good. Those who
neither lied nor stole, were regarded as fools or eccentrics.”
122 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

CONCLUSION: WAS THERE A VIABLE STRATEGY OF

GROWTH?
Between 1850 and 1914, Russian society saw both the creative and the destructive sides
of modernisation. Productivity rose in agriculture and even more spectacularly in
industry. By 1914, Russia had the heavy industrial basis needed to support a reasonably
modern military machine. Yet economic growth had also undermined traditional
Russian society. Slowly, sometimes with the support of government policies, sometimes
despite them, Russia’s social structures were assuming the familiar features of
Capitalism. As wage-earning increased, as capitalist entrepreneurs acquired more
influence, and as market relations extended into every corner of Russian life, the
traditional social and economic structures of Russian society lost vitality. Peasants,
nobles and government found the sands shifting beneath them. By 1900 many peasants
and many nobles had abandoned their traditional way of life. It is no coincidence that
in 1905 the Tsarist government came close to collapse.
Did this mean that the government had failed to solve the dilemma of
modernisation? Not necessarily. As we have seen, there was no easy solution to the
problems the government faced as Russian society modernised. To survive, it had to
preserve the traditional bases of its support. Yet to modernise, it had to allow the
emergence of new social and economic forces. Eventually, the government would have
to start looking for support amongst these new groups without alienating its traditional
supporters. This was a delicate political manoeuvre, and the Meiji dynasty in Japan was
one of the few traditional governments to complete it successfully. The crises of the
first decade of the twentieth century suggested that the Russian government lacked
the insight or the skills needed to imitate the success of the Japanese government. In
a sense, the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05 was a contest between two strategies of
modernisation. Its outcome was a warning that the Russian government was drifting in
very dangerous waters.

Questions for discussion

1 Why did the emergence of capitalist societies pose such a threat to the Tsarist
government?
2 Did the Tsarist government understand the challenge of the ‘modern’ revolution?
What options were available to it? Could it have found better policies?
3 How much control did the government have over economic and social
development?
4 How did social and economic change affect a) peasant women; b) peasant men?
5 How did social and economic change affect the Russian ruling group?
6 How much did Russian society change between the early nineteenth century and
the beginning of the twentieth century?
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE BEFORE 1914 123

Further reading
See bibliography:
Clements (ed), Russia’s Women
Eklof & Frank (eds), The World of the Russian Peasant
Falkus, The Industrialisation of Russia
Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy 1850-1917
Kingston-Mann & Mixter (eds), Peasant Economy, Culture and Politics
Kochan, Russia in Revolution
Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation
Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire
Von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin?

In addition:
“Witte’s Secret Memorandum on the Industrialisation of Russia’, in Vernadsky, Source Book, and
Adams, Imperial Russia

Endnotes
1 VK Yatsunsky, ‘The Industrial Revolution in Russia’, in W L Blackwell (ed), Russian
Economic Development from Peter the Great to Stalin, New Viewpoints, Franklin Watts Inc, New
York, 1974, pp 111-35
2 Figures from S Wheatcroft, ‘Crises and the Condition of the Peasantry’, in E Kingston-Mann
and T Mixter (eds), Peasant Economy, Culture and Politics, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, 1991, p 135
3 PGatrell, The Tsarist Economy 1850-1917, Batsford, London, 1986, p 153
aN T Riha (ed), Readings in Russian Civilization, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1964,
vol 2, p 431
M Falkus, The Industrialisation of Russia: 1700-1914, Macmillan, London, 1972, p 55
ibid, p 57
ibid, pp 72, 69
T Riha (ed), Readings, vol 2, p 432
Or
O
OTM J Mavor, An Economic History of Russia, Dent and Sons, London and Toronto, 1925, vol 2,
289
10 The first edition of this book shared the tendency of many historians to exaggerate the role
both of the state and of heavy industry in Russian economic growth.
11 Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, p 147
12 ibid, p 144
13 Wheatcroft, ‘Crises and the condition of the Peasantry’, p 133
14 Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, pp 100-101
15 ibid, p 122
16 SG Wheatcroft, ‘Agriculture’, in RW Davies (ed), From Tsarism to the New Economic Policy:
Continuity and Change in the Economy of the USSR, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1990, p 84
17 Wheatcroft, ‘Crises and the condition of the Peasantry’, pp 137-42
18 ibid, p 143
19 Alexander Gerschenkron, ‘Problems and Patterns of Russian Economic Development,’ in
1970, pp
M Cherniavsky (ed), The Structure of Russian History, Random House, New York,
982-308, and elsewhere
4,7
20 A Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 3rd edn, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992, pp
t and
21 RW Goldsmith, ‘The Economic Growth of Tsarist Russia’, in Economic Developmen
Cultural Change, vol 9, 1960-61, p 442
124 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Ze Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia [1st published 1899], Progress Publishers,
Moscow, 1956, p 472
23 W L Blackwell (ed), Russian Economic Development from Peter the Great to Stalin, pp 154 ff.
24 H Rogger, Russia in the Age ofModernisation and Revolution: 1881-1917, Longman, New York,
1983, pp 76, 82
25 Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, p 139
26 O Crisp, ‘Labour and Industrialization in Russia,’ in Cambridge Economic History of Europe,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978, vol 7, pt 2, p 337
Pal T Mixter, ‘The Hiring Market as Workers’ Turf’, in Kingston-Mann and Mixter (eds),
Peasant Economy, Culture and Politics, p 301
28 S Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1974, p 139
29 Cited in M McCauley (ed), Octobrists to Bolsheviks: Imperial Russia 1905-1917, Edward Arnold,
London, 1984, pp 137-8
30 O Anweiler, The Soviets, the Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils 1905-1921,
Random House, New York, 1974, p 21
31 Crisp, ‘Labour and Industrialisation in Russia’, p 368
32 ibid, p 381
33 S S Dmitriev, et al (eds), Khrestomatiya po istorii SSSR, gos-oe uchebno-pedagogicheskoe izd-
vo min-va prosveshcheniya RSFSR, Moscow, 1948, vol 3, pp 467-9 (tr D Christian)
 CHAPTER FIVE

THE 1905 REVOLUTION

The social changes of the late nineteenth century increased the size and the power of
classes hostile to autocracy. They also undermined the unity and discipline of the
government and its traditional supporters. An increase in resistance from below anda
decrease in power above—these were the preconditions for the breakdown of 1905. In
1904-05, military defeat once again exposed the limitations of both government and
army. Amidst these growing tensions, it was Nicholas’ refusal to make the necessary
concessions that brought the government to the verge of collapse.

WORKING CLASS DISCONTENT

The crisis began in 1900, when a sudden economic slump released a wave of working
class discontent that had been building throughout the 1890s.

Economic slump
of poor
The industrial boom of the 1890s ended in 1899. Between 1897 and 1901 arun
in their wake. Foreign funds dried up as a result of an
harvests brought famine
crisis triggered by the Boer War in South Africa and the Boxer
international financial
l products as tax
Rebellion in China. The government reduced its orders for industria
completion.
revenues and foreign investment declined and the Siberian railway neared
one per cent.
Annual rates of industrial growth fell from eight per cent to about
unemplo yment and wage cuts, particula rly in the metal
Declining growth brought
industries that had grown fastest in the 1890s.
of the slump.
The figures on industrial growth rates in Table 4.2 show the effect

Urban workers: the proletariat

working class.
The slump provoked a wave of strikes among Russia’s urban
the number of urban workers
Though still a small proportion of the population,
ial might. According to the 1897
had increased in the 1890s. So had their industr
nal 8.8 million
census, there were 13.3 million meshchane [town dwellers]. An additio
126 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

The workmen’s dormitory in a factory, c 1900.

peasants also lived permanently in the towns. These two groups together accounted
for 17.6 per cent of the total population. The industrial working class was, of course,
smaller. Lenin estimated that in 1897 there were 5.2 million industrial workers and
another 700 000 workers in railways and communications. Together, these two groups
made up about 4.7 per cent of the total population.’ The Statistical appendix gives the
lower (and more widely accepted) figure of four million workers, or 3.2 per cent of the
population. However, even this figure represents an increase of more than 300 per cent
in the size of the urban working class since 1861.
Appalling working conditions gave urban workers plenty of reasons for protest. Even
more dangerous for the government was their increased organisation. As Marx had
argued, the proletariat was a more dangerous revolutionary force than the peasantry,
O}

for, though less numerous, they were better able to coordinate their actions. The
following is from the Communist Manifesto.

Document 5.1: Marx on the power of the proletariat

With the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes
concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more... the
collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the
character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form
combinations (Trade Unions) ...
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles
lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union
is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry
and that places the workers in different localities in contact with one another2
 THE 1905 REVOLUTION 127

The Russian government knew the dangers posed by an urban proletariat. It had
tried to limit the growth of such a class in Russia by tying peasants to the land in 1861.
It also tried to stifle working class organisations by making unions and strikes illegal.
However, there were illegal unions and strikes throughout the nineteenth century.
The number of strikes grew from twenty to forty a year in the 1870s and 1880s to more
than 100 a year in 1895 and more than 200 in 1898. The army, which had been
employed earlier in the century to suppress peasant disturbances, now found itself
called out to put down strikes. This was usually a more violent business.”
Populists had organised the first large strikes in the 1870s, but by the 1890s Marxists
were taking over this role. This was a natural development for, while the Populists
hoped to build a rural Socialism based on the peasantry, Marx had always insisted that
the urban working classes would lead the socialist revolution.
Several future leaders of

_ \de) qOo

During the slump, the government did more than the revolutionaries to develop
traditions of unionism among Russian urban workers. A Moscow police chief, S. V.
Zubatov, suggested that officially sponsored unions might be able to divert working-
class discontent into safe channels. His general idea was that, to survive, the autocracy
must divide its upper class from its lower class opponents. In theory Zubatov was
certainly correct.

Document 5.2: S. V. Zubatov on the principle of ‘divide and rule’

The principle of our internal policy must be to balance between the classes, which, at present,
hate each other. An autocracy should keep above the classes and apply the principle of ‘divide
and rule’. Do not leave them time to agree between themselves: that would mean revolution,
which we should help along if we were to take one side in this conflict . . . We must create
we
a counter-poison or antidote to the bourgeoisie, which is growing arrogant. Accordingly,
must bring the workers over to us, and so kill two birds with one stone: check the upsurge
of the bourgeoisie and deprive the revolutionaries of their troops.‘

Between 1901 and 1903 Zubatov organised several large unions. However, by 1903
e
his unions were exploiting the advantage of police sponsorship to organise large-scal
survived. A year later,
strikes. In June 1903 Zubatov was dismissed. However, his ideas
an officially sponsore d union that
in St Petersburg, a priest, Father Gapon, organised
helped
was to play a major role in the crisis of 1905. Meanwhile Zubatov unions
of the Caucasus and the industrial
organise the large strikes of 1903 in the oilfields
regions of Ukraine.
from the
The rising intensity of the strike movement provoked greater violence
strikes nineteen times in 1893,
government. The government used troops to suppress
fifty times in 1899, and 522 times in 1902.°

The peasantry
no serious peasant
Despite rising taxes and shrinking landholdings, there had been
in the late 1890s finally
disturbances since 1863. However, a string of poor harvests
on the property of landlords
broke the patience of the peasantry. Sporadic attacks
began once more.
128 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Document 5.3: peasant unrest, 1898

In certain provinces, predominantly southern and south-eastern, there has recently emerged
a series of peasant disorders in the form of systematic damage to the landowners’ fields and
meadows, together with the driving away of cattle under the protection of men armed with
sticks, staves and pitchforks, and attacks on the landowners’ watchmen and guards or
considerable illegal timber-cutting in the landowners’ woods and brawls with the foresters.
When the guards seize the peasants’ cattle, the peasants, hoping to free it, often moving by
whole villages, carry out armed attacks on the buildings and farm-houses of the landowners
and divide up the working and even the living quarters, attacking and wounding servants and
guards.®

As always, geographical separation and lack of education made it difficult for

peasants to coordinate their actions. Most revolts were spontaneous, local affairs. At
most, the local commune might meet to decide what to attack. However, the barriers
to effective rural organisation were breaking down. Since the military reforms of 1874,
many recruits had learned the rudiments of literacy, and when they returned to the
village as reservists they could use their military skills to help organise peasant
insurrections. Growing literacy also meant that more peasants could read revolutionary
propaganda. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of migratory workers helped spread
revolutionary ideas picked up in the towns.
In 1902, there was a wave of peasant revolts in Poltava and Kharkov provinces in
Ukraine. During the next three years, disorders spread to other provinces. By 1904
there were rural insurrections throughout the country. In 1905 landlords wrote
desperately from Penza province:

Country houses are being burned and looted; agitators go around in army uniforms;
there is no protection; few troops; we urgently beg you to place more army units
and cossacks at our disposal; we implore help, otherwise, the province will be utterly
devastated.’

Working class aims

Workers concentrated mainly on economic goals. Urban workers demanded a shorter
working day, higher wages, and improved working conditions. They also had political
aims, and expressed them by demanding the right to organise unions and strikes, and
to enjoy the civil and political rights needed to defend their economic situation.
However, most saw political rights as a means to an end, not an end in themselves.
Peasants wanted more land. They also hoped to reduce the burden of taxes, but this
was a secondary demand. Both classes also demanded to be treated with dignity.
However, in a still hierarchical society, this was so Utopian a demand that it appeared
only at moments of extreme crisis.
 THE 1905 REVOLUTION 129

DIVISIONS WITHIN THE RULING GROUP

While working class pressure mounted, divisions opened within Russia’s ruling elites.
The social changes of the late nineteenth century had altered the balance of power
and influence within the ruling elite. While working class grievances generated new
forms of organisation, the grievances of the upper classes widened existing divisions.

Changes within the ruling group

Table 5.1 gives rough estimates of the numerical changes within the ruling group
between 1850 and 1900.
The nobility was the only group whose relative weight within the ruling group had
declined. Nobles had also lost the political and economic influence they wielded
before 1861. Many were not even landowners, but lived off salaries from the
government or institutions such as the universities or the zemstva. By 1900 the nobility
was no longer a well defined group with a common culture and common attitudes and
problems. Its members could no longer act as the natural leaders of the ruling group.

Document 5.4: P. N. Milyukov on the changing role of the gentry [nobility], 1903
What must be mentioned first is the enormous growth of the politically conscious social
elements that make public opinion in Russia. The gentry still play a part among these elements,
but are by far not the only social medium of public opinion, as they were before the
emancipation of the peasants. Members of the ancient gentry are now found in all branches
of public life: in the press, in public instruction, in the liberal professions, not to speak of the
state service, and particularly the local self-government. But it would be impossible to say
what is now the class opinion of the gentry. The fact is that the gentry are no longer a class;
they are too much intermingled with other social elements in every position they occupy,
including that of landed proprietors. By this ubiquity the gentry have added to the facilities
for the general spread of public opinion; but as a class they influence public opinion in an
even smaller measure than in former times.°

Table 5.1 Changes in the structure of the ruling group, 1850-1900

Class Size 1850 Size 1900 Increase
000s % ’000s % %

1000 7\ 1800 oe) + 80

Nobility
114 8 500 is 339
Officials
50 4 400 ) + 700
Intelligentsia
246 17 600 18 + 144
Merchantry/‘Bourgeoisie’
c 1410 100 c 3300 ~=—100 + 134
Total
tson, The Russian Empire,
Source: My estimates based on several different sources including H Seton-Wa
1801-1917, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1967
 130 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

As the nobility declined, the new upper classes, the merchantry, the intelligentsia
and the officials, grew in numbers, importance and assertiveness.
The number of officials had multiplied four times since 1861. Officials now enjoyed
much of the power once wielded by nobles. With the introduction of martial law to
many provinces after 1881, they also took over many functions of the zemstva and the
courts. By 1900 the bureaucracy and army were the real instruments of the tsar’s
authority. They remained the most loyal and disciplined sections of the ruling elite
until 1917.
The numbers and the influence of the merchantry increased dramatically in the late
nineteenth century, which meant that the Russian government could no longer ignore
them. The rise of figures such as Witte to positions of great influence and the growing
interest of the government in banking, railways
and industry marked a significant change in
both government attitudes and in the nature
and attitudes of the tsarist ruling group. Some
entrepreneurs, such as Savva Mamontov or
Pavel Tretyakov, became great patrons of the
arts. At his estate of Abramtsevo, seventy
kilometres from Moscow, Mamontov organised
and funded a famous colony of artists, painters
and musicians. This included some of the best
known names in Russian cultural life, such as
the painters, Repin, Serov and Levitan, and the
singer, Chaliapin. Tretyakov founded one of
Moscow’s best known collections of Russian
painting. Such people gave the rising capitalist
class increased respectability and prestige in
fi Adi A; upper class society.
oscow, 1896. The Coronation procession of Nicholas II. The intelligentsia grew fastest of all. A
The carriages are travelling along Tverskaya Street towards modernising economy needed experts of many
the Koomisi. kinds, and many nobles had been forced to take
up intellectual wage-labour of various kinds.
Many members of the intelligentsia worked closely with the peasantry and knew their
problems. They were also poorly paid, which eroded their sense of loyalty to the system,
and encouraged their radicalism. As a result, the intelligentsia provided most leaders
of the revolutionary movement and of the leftwing of Russian Liberalism. As Milyukov
noted, ‘The “men of mixed ranks”, the raznochintsy, have enormously increased in all
vocations; and the democratic spirit brought by them, and fostered by the liberal and
radical press, is a distinctive feature of the educated class in present-day Russia’.°
Slowly and painfully, what had been a traditional aristocracy dominated by landed
nobles was becoming a heterogeneous elite of urban and rural entrepreneurs and
intellectual wage-workers. The traditional structures of autocracy had less and less to
offer Russia’s transformed elites.
The alienation of the educated classes was extremely dangerous, for these were the
people who were beginning to dominate the press and the educational institutions
of
the Russian Empire. The low educational standards of the Orthodox Church and the
Church’s lack of independence, ensured that it could do little
to counterbalance the
growing ideological influence of the educated classes. Increasingly, the machiner
y of
persuasion was falling into the hands of opponents of autocracy. Their dissatisfa
ction
 THE 1905 REVOLUTION 131

with the government was expressed in dissident ideologies and the formation of
political parties committed to political reform.
Dissident members of Russia’s upper classes took up three distinct ideologies in the
early twentieth century—Liberalism, Socialism and Nationalism. After 1900,
supporters of each ideology formed illegal political parties. Liberals demanded the
granting of basic civil and political rights to everyone. Socialists championed the
economic demands of the working classes. Nationalists defended the rights of the
many non-Russian inhabitants of the Russian Empire.

Liberalism
In the mid-nineteenth century, Liberalism had been an ideology of disgruntled nobles
concerned to reduce the powers of the autocracy and its officials (see Chapter three,
p 87). Since 1864, the zemstva had provided the institutional base for this ‘gentry’
Liberalism. Its chief aim had been to create institutions through which forces outside
the bureaucracy could shape government policy. Liberal nobles from the Tver zemstvo
proposed the creation of a national zemstvo, or Duma, in 1862, and again in 1895.
Though they saw this purely as an advisory body, the government regarded the idea as
a threat to autocracy. In 1895, Nicholas II dismissed the idea as no more than a
‘senseless dream’. Despite these rebuffs, congresses of zemstvo leaders began to meet
regularly from 1896 under the leadership of D. N. Shipov (1851-1920). These
meetings provided a national forum for a moderate Liberalism, whose members were
willing to cooperate with an autocratic government.
Radical Liberalism emerged later. Its first organisational expression was an illegal
paper, ‘Liberation’, established in 1902 in Germany. The paper’s founders were the
In
historian, P. N. Milyukov (1859-1943) and an ex-Marxist, P. B. Struve (1870-1944).
January 1904, at a secret meeting in St Petersburg, supporters formed an illegal
political party, the ‘Union of Liberation’. Milyukov and Struve led the new party, along
with the veteran zemstvo leader I. I. Petrunkevich (1844-1928). The ‘Union of
Liberation’ demanded a Legislative National Assembly with real legislative power,
direct ballot,
elected under ‘four-tail’ suffrage. By this liberals meant a universal, secret,
held in equal electoral constituencies. Their intention was to abolish autocracy, though
parties, the
most favoured a constitutional monarchy of some kind. Like all liberal
hoped
‘Union of Liberation’ hoped to represent all classes and sections of society. It
classes, as well as its national minorities. Despite
for the support of Russia’s working
this, its proposals for the vote did not include women.

Document 5.5: the program of the Union of Liberation

liberation of Russia.
The first and main aim of the Union of Liberation is the political
incompatible with the
Considering political liberty in even its most minimal form completely
before all else the abolition
absolute character of the Russian monarchy, the union will seek
regime.
of autocracy and the establishment in Russia of a constitutional
regime can be realized in
In determining the concrete forms in which a constitutional
the political problem resolved in
Russia, the Union of Liberation will make all efforts to have
fundamentally essential that the
the spirit of extensive democracy. Above all, it recognizes as
made the basis of the political
principles of universal, equal, secret, and direct elections be
reform.
132 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Putting the political demands in the forefront, the Union of Liberation recognizes as
essential the definition of its attitude in principle to the socio-economic problems created by
life itself. In the realm of socio-economic policy, the Union of Liberation will follow the same
basic principle of democracy, making the direct goal of its activity the defense of the interests
of the laboring masses.
In the sphere of national questions, the union recognizes the right of self-determination
of different nationalities entering into the composition of the Russian state.'°

Despite the efforts of the Union of Liberation, in 1905 there remained two distinct
strands within Russian Liberalism. There was a moderate strand, dominated by
members of the nobility and organised mainly in the zemstva. There was also a more
radical strand, dominated by members of the intelligentsia, and organised around the
Union of Liberation. Radical liberals were concerned with social as well as political
issues, above all with the plight of the peasantry.
In November and December of 1904, liberals of both kinds agitated for reform.
While a large conference of zemstvo liberals met, the Union of Liberation organised
revolutionary banquets in imitation of those held during the French Revolution of
1848. At these, speakers attacked the government and demanded basic political and
constitutional changes.
On their own, the liberals were unable to shake the government. This drove them
closer to more radical groups. By 1905 even moderate liberals saw little alternative to
revolution. In July 1905 Petrunkevich said of the liberals: ‘Till now. . . they had hoped
for reform from above, but henceforth their only hope was in the people... We cannot
keep the storm in check, but we must at least try to avert too much turmoil’.!!

Socialism
After 1900 two major socialist parties emerged. One adopted the Marxist version of
Socialism, which saw the proletariat as the main revolutionary class. The other, the
Socialist Revolutionary Party, continued the populist tradition of rural Socialism that
had first appeared in the 1860s. I will concentrate mainly on Russian Marxism because
of the role it was to play later in Russia’s history.

Marxism
Marxism was a particular type of Socialism. Its founders were two Germans: the
philosopher, Karl Marx (1818-83) and his lifelong friend Friedrich Engels
(1820-95).
They first presented their ideas in systematic form in 1848, in the ‘Communist
Manifesto’. Marx developed his ideas more thoroughly in the three volumes of
Capital.
The first volume appeared in 1867 and was translated into Russian in 1872.
Engels
published the second and third volumes after Marx’s death. In Capital, Marx
analysed
the nature and evolution of the economy of Great Britain, which
he regarded as the
most advanced and the most typical of modern capitalist economies.
Marx made an immense contribution to the ideology of Socialism
(see Chapter
three, pp 92-3 for a general discussion of Socialism). He was impatie
nt with the early
socialists who spent much of their time describing what socialist society
would be like.
Marx saw such writings as ‘utopian’ fantasies. He believed it was
necessary, first, to show
that Socialism was possible. Only then was Socialism worth fighting
for. For this reason,
Marx spent most of his life analysing existing societies to
see if they contained the
THE 1905 REVOLUTION 133

materials needed to construct Socialism. He argued that during most of human history
the socialist ideal of a free and egalitarian society had indeed been utopian. However,
the emergence of ‘capitalist’ societies made Socialism a real possibility for the first time
in human history, for Capitalism created the building bricks of Socialism. For this
reason, he claimed that his form of Socialism was not utopian but ‘scientific’. In Marx’s
view, Socialism would be founded on the achievements of Capitalism.
How did Capitalism make Socialism possible? Marx argued that Capitalism created
two necessary preconditions for Socialism. The first was material abundance. Marx
believed there was no point creating a society based on material equality in an
environment of poverty. To try to make everyone equal where there was not enough to
go around could only mean making everyone poor, and that was bound to cause new,
and vicious, forms of class conflict. Yet this had been the situation in all previous
societies. This is why he argued in the ‘Communist Manifesto’ that: “The history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’. As early as 1846 Marx wrote:
‘this development of productive forces . . . is an absolutely necessary practical premise
because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for
necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced’.”* It
followed that Socialism could only be built in conditions of high productivity and
abundant material wealth. Only then would equality mean an equality of wealth rather
than of poverty. Marx saw that modern capitalist society created for the first time in
history the high levels of productivity necessary if Socialism was to be a realistic vision
of the future.
Marx argued that Capitalism raised productivity because of the existence of two
distinct classes. These were the wage-earners, or proletarians, who did not own
productive resources; and the capitalists, who did. In other words, Capitalism required
inequality. It was therefore incompatible with Socialism. This meant that though
Capitalism created the first precondition for Socialism (high productivity), the second
precondition for Socialism would be the overthrow of Capitalism. Marx argued that
Capitalism also created the conditions for its own demise. As Capitalism developed the
number of wage-earners would increase. Since wage-earners owned no productive
property, they would have no reason to support Capitalism. Eventually, the proletariat
would be powerful enough to overthrow a system that deprived them of control over
bourgeoisie
productive resources. As Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto, ‘What the
... produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers’.
When Marx was developing his ideas in Europe in the 1840s, his vision of the
proletariat as a revolutionary class seemed perfectly reasonable. Indeed, most
politicians agreed with him. Many wage-earners were peasants who had recently lost
they owned.
their land, or artisans or small property-owners who had had to sell what
degraded
Having owned property, they resented a system that had impoverished and
indeed, a dangerous
them. During the 1848 revolutions such people were,
revolutionary force. However, the belief that proletarians would always oppose
Capitalism has prove be wrong. The main reason is that ‘modern Sapa has
material wealth back
generated such high levels of productivity that it can redistribute
itsownarners. This isa aclass
wage-e
to consumer Capitalism
central feature ofthe which, of the
of wage-earners
It creates far from wishing to
twentieth century.
was first-generation
overthrow Capitalism, sees itself as a beneficiary of Capitalism. It
that had ruined
proletarians who had most reason to strike back at the capitalist system
normal. Many
them. For second-and third-generation proletarians Capitalism seemed
in the countryside.
even saw themselves as better-off than the peasants left behind
134 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Marx’s failure to predict the political passivity of second- and third-generation

proletarians had momentous consequences. It explains the failure of his other
prediction: that anti-capitalist revolutions would occur in the most developed capitalist
countries. On the contrary, most twentieth century anti-capitalist revolutions occurred
in countries where Capitalism was in its infancy, and where most proletarians still had
links with the countryside. The result, in Russia as elsewhere, was that socialist
governments tried to build Socialism without the high levels of productivity
characteristic of mature Capitalism. They tried to build Socialism without the material
abundance that Marx himself regarded as the basic precondition for a successful
socialist society. Paradoxically, the failures of twentieth century Communism have
shown the accuracy of Marx’s claim that Socialism required a foundation of material
abundance.
But this was in the future. For Russia’s first Marxists, the general message of Marxism
was clear. Capitalism itself would create the preconditions for Socialism. It would do
so by creating high levels of productivity and by raising the number of wage-earners.
The task of revolutionaries was to organise the proletariat for the coming revolution.

Russian Marxism before 1905

However, when they tried to draw up a specific plan of action, Russian Marxists faced
some complex problems. In the late nineteenth century the main problem was that
most Russian intellectuals did not believe Russia would ever be capitalist. Even those
who respected Marx argued that his ideas had little relevance for Russia. For this
reason, most populist revolutionaries ignored Marx, at least until the 1880s.
The founders of Russian Marxism were revolutionaries who had become
disillusioned with the peasant Socialism of Populism. In 1883, in exile in Switzerland,
they founded a Marxist group called ‘Emancipation of Labour’, which supported the
Marxist idea of a socialist revolution led by the urban proletariat. G. V. Plekhanov
(1856-1918) emerged as their leading theorist.
For a decade, Plekhanov’s group had little influence in Russia, as most Russian
socialists continued to believe that Russia would bypass Capitalism. However, the
industrial upsurge of the 1890s made the Marxist approach seem more relevant to
Russia, and the ‘Emancipation of Labour’ group began to attract disciples among a
younger generation of revolutionary intellectuals. Among them were Vladimir Ilyich
Ulyanov (who was to adopt the underground name of Lenin) and Julius Martov. They
spent much of the 1890s trying to prove that Russia was, indeed, becoming a capitalist
nation. It was the young Lenin who clinched this argument with a massive volume
called TheDevelopment of Capitalism in Russia, which he wrote in exile in Siberia between
1896 and 1899. .
By 1900, few could doubt that Russia was becoming capitalist. However, its
Capitalism remained primitive. Neither of Marx’s two preconditions for socialist
revolution existed. Average levels of productivity were extremely low; and Russia’s
industrial proletariat was small. Under these conditions, what should
a Marxist do? At
first sight, it might seem that they should support the development of Capitalism, and
some early Russian Marxists, including the young Lenin, did just that. Politically
,
though, this was unattractive. How could a party that supported Capitalism hope for
the support of the working classes that Capitalism exploited? Before 1905, no
Russian
Marxist had an adequate answer to this question.
Meanwhile, Russia’s Marxists concentrated on organisational problems. Everyone
expected that eventually a Russian Marxist party would lead a revolutio
n. So it made
THE 1905 REVOLUTION 135

sense to prepare the organisational structures that would provide leadership when the
crisis came. Lenin saw more clearly than most that a working class party would need
the leadership skills of radical intellectuals such as Marx or, indeed, Lenin. Russian
Marxists also understood that in Tsarism they faced a formidable opponent. To survive,
revolutionary parties would need a high level of unity and discipline.
In 1900, Plekhanov, Lenin and Martov founded an illegal newspaper, Iskra (‘The
Spark’), and began smuggling it into Russia. The network of agents they formed
provided the organised nucleus for the Russian Social Democratic P rty. This held its
founding Congress in 1903. (Technically, this was the Party’s second Congress, as a
first had met in 1898, only to be dispersed by penuen, During the 1903 Congress, the
party split into two factions, the ‘Mensheviks’ and ‘Bolsheviks’. The split occurred
primarily over the degree of discipline and professionalism required of Party members.
Lenin led the Bolsheviks (or ‘Majoritarians’). He opposed amateurism in revolutionary
politics and insisted that t
the Party needed a disciplined core of professionals, most of
whom would come from the intelligentsia. This was vital if it was to provide clear
theoretical leadership and to survive against tsarist police agents with much experience
of fighting and infiltrating such organisations. Lenin’s organisational ideal was
‘Narodnaya Volya’, the populist group that had assassinated Alexander II. However,
Lenin rejected Narodnaya Volya’s populist ideals and their tactics of terror. His
opponents, the Mensheviks (‘Minoritarians’) argued for a greater degree of internal
democracy within the Party.
We should not exaggerate the differences between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in
1903. Many grass-roots revolutionaries ignored the differences, and all Marxists saw the
need for a disciplined underground party. On the other hand, even Lenin defended
the principle of ‘democratic centralism’ within the Party. This meant that all decisions
should be taken democratically by the elected Central Committee of the Party, but
once taken, such decisions became binding on all Party members. The early
differences were of degree and emphasis, not of kind.
Personal conflicts overlaid these disputes over Party organisation. Plekhanov and
Martov sided with the Mensheviks in part because they found Lenin too dictatorial.
After 1905, new differences appeared. The most important concerned the strategies
appropriate in a country lacking the preconditions for a socialist revolution. By 1912,
the split had become permanent. I will discuss these later differences within Russian
Marxism in Chapter seven.

The Socialist Revolutionanes

In 1900, the Socialist Revolutionary Party was formed. This took up the populist ideal
of peasant Socialism (see Chapter three). Its most important thinker and leader was
Victor Chernov (1873-1952). The new party imitated the organisational and tactical
methods of Narodnaya Volya. It formed a terrorist wing, which assassinated many
prominent officials, including one of the tsar’s uncles, Grand Duke Sergei
Aleksandrovich, in February 1905. The SRs, as they were known, also conducted
revolutionary agitation among the peasantry. In July 1905, they organised an All-
Russian Peasant Union.

Nationalism
.
Nationalism was as dangerous a force for the government as Liberalism or Socialism
per cent of the populati on of the
In 1897, Great Russians made up only forty-five
136 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Russian Empire, yet in the late nineteenth century the Russian government had
launched a policy of systematic Russification. As early as 1876, it banned the
publication of books or plays in Ukrainian, and the teaching of Ukrainian in
elementary schools. It even ordered schools to remove Ukrainian language texts from
their libraries.!* Similar laws were passed in other non-Russian areas of the Empire.
Russification was particularly brutal in Finland between 1898 and 1905, and it
produced a particularly violent nationalist reaction. This culminated in the
assassination of the Governor-General of Finland, Bobrikov, in 1904. In Ukraine, the
Caucasus, Poland, the Baltic and Finland, the government’s policies stimulated
demands for greater cultural and political autonomy. Everywhere, nationalist
movements emerged first amongst the intelligentsia.

MILITARY DISASTER: THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR

Tsarist policy in the Far East
As so often in the past, military defeat showed the seriousness of the looming crisis.
The Russian government continued to regard itself as a major world power, and was
determined not to miss out on the imperialist land-grab of the late nineteenth century.
Blocked in the Balkans since the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the logical area for
Russian expansion seemed to be in the Far East, in northern China and Korea. Indeed,
one of the aims of building the trans-Siberian railway was to ease the task of dominating
this region.
After its defeat in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95, the Chinese government
allowed Russia to build a railway across northern China—i.e. Manchuria (see Figure
4.2). In 1898 China granted Russia a twenty-five year lease on the Liaotung Peninsula
_and the right to build a further railway to Port Arthur. Not content with this, the more
ambitious members of the Russian government began to consider expansion into
Korea. This group gained the support of the tsar. A project for concessions on the Yalu
River (the modern border between China and North Korea) brought the Russians into
conflict with the Japanese, who regarded Korea as their sphere of interest.
The Russians had little interest in negotiations. They knew their position would
improve when the trans-Siberian railway was completed and they could transport more
troops. For the same reason, the Japanese wanted a quick decision. So, when
negotiations broke down, Japanese troops attacked Port Arthur in February 1904.

The war: January 1904 to August 1905

The war that followed was a series of disasters for the ill-prepared Russian navy and
army. The Japanese attack on Port Arthur crippled the Russian Pacific fleet. Attempts
to break out in February and August only led to further losses. Finally, Port Arthur
surrendered in December 1904.
Japanese control of the sea allowed them to bring reinforcements more rapidly than
the Russians, who relied on the single track of the trans-Siberian railroad. Russian
armies suffered defeats on the Yalu River in April, and twice at Mukden, north of Port
Arthur, in August 1904 and in February 1905. The stalemate on land was broken at
 THE 1905 REVOLUTION 137

sea. In October 1904 the Russian Baltic fleet set out to relieve Port Arthur. After circling
the world, it arrived three months after Port Arthur had surrendered. In February
1905, the waiting Japanese fleet met the Russian ships in the Tsushima Straits, between
Japan and Korea, and within a few hours the entire Russian fleet had been destroyed.
Japan’s victory was a victory for the Meiji strategy of modernisation.
In August 1905, peace negotiations opened in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with
Sergei Witte heading the Russian delegation. Three weeks later, the Russian and
Japanese delegations signed a treaty under which Russia withdrew altogether from
Manchuria.

Political results of military defeat

For Russia the war had been a disaster, militarily and politically. The minister of
internal affairs, V. K. Plehve, said early in 1904 to a critic of the war: ‘You are not
familiar with Russia’s internal situation. We need a little, victorious war to stem the tide
of revolution’.
Defeat, of course, had the opposite effect. Each Japanese victory encouraged new
disturbances. Plehve himself was assassinated in July 1904, not long after the defeat on
the Yalu River. Further defeats provoked the series of political banquets organised by
the Union of Liberation in November and December. The loss of Port Arthur in
December 1904 triggered a new wave of demonstrations.

REVOLUTION
Bloody Sunday
An industrial dispute at the Putilov metal works in St Petersburg started the new wave
of strikes at the beginning of January 1905. Paradoxically, it was a government
sponsored union, the ‘Assembly of Factory Workers,’ that organised the strikes. This
head of
was led by a radical priest, Father G. A. Gapon, who soon found himself at the
the largest strike in Russia’s history. By 8January, 111 000 workers were on strike in the
capital. The next day, Gapon led a crowd of striking workers towards the tsar’s Winter
Palace in St Petersburg, carrying a petition to the tsar.

Document 5.6: the working class petition of 9 January

and
We working men of St Petersburg, our wives and children, and our parents, helpless
protection ...
aged men and women, have come to you, our ruler, in quest of justice and
are approaching that
We have no strength at all, O Sovereign. Our patience is at an end. We
.. .
terrible moment when death is better than the continuance of intolerable sufferings
this was refused to us:
Our first wish was to discuss our needs with our employers, but
ns . . .
we were told that we have no legal right to discuss our conditio
is at the mercy of your officials, who accept bribes, rob the
Every worker and peasant
acy of the government
Treasury and do not care at all for the people’s interests. The bureaucr
nearer and nearer
has ruined the country, involved it in a shameful war and is leading Russia
138 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

to utter ruin. We, the Russian workers and people, have no voice at all in theexpenditure of
the huge sums collected in taxes from the impoverished population. We do not even know
how our money is spent. The people are deprived of any right to discuss taxes and their
expenditure. The workers have no right to organize their own labour unions for the defence
of their own interests.
Is this, O Sovereign, in accordance with the laws of God, by whose grace you reign? And
how can we live under such laws? Break down the wall between yourself and your people
. . The people must be represented in the control of their country’s affairs. Only the people
themselves know their own needs. Do not reject their help, accept it, command forthwith
that representatives of all classes, groups, professions and trades shall come together. Let
capitalists and workers, bureaucrats and priests, doctors and teachers meet together and
choose their representatives. Let all be equal and free. And to this end let the election of
members to the Constitutional Assembly take place in conditions of universal, secret and
equal suffrage.
This is our chief request; upon it all else depends; this is the only balm for our sore
wounds; without it our wounds will never heal, and we shall be borne swiftly on to our
death.'*

The St Petersburg police gave the following account of the events that followed.

Document 5.7: a police account of Bloody Sunday

Today, at about 10 am, workers began to gather at the Narva Gates, in the Vyborg and
Petersburg districts, and also on Vasilievsky Island at the premises of the Assembly of Factory
Workers, with the aim, as announced by Father Georgy Gapon, of marching to Palace Square
to present a petition to the Emperor. When a crowd of several thousand had assembled in -
the Narva district, Father Gapon said prayers and then together with the crowd, which had
at its head banners and icons stolen from a Narva chapel as well as portraits of Their
Majesties, moved off towards the Narva Gates where they were confronted by troops.
Despite pleas by local police officers and cavalry charges, the crowd did not disperse but
continued to advance . .. Two companies then opened fire, killing ten men and wounding
twenty...
A little later about 4000 workers who had come from the Petersburg and Vyborg districts
approached the Trinity Bridge: Father Gapon was also with them. A volley was fired into the
crowd, killing five and seriously injuring ten . . .
Towards | p.m. people began to gather in the Alexander Garden, over-flowing out of the
garden itself into the adjoining part of Palace Square. The cavalry made a series of charges to
disperse the crowd, but as this had no effect a number of volleys were fired into the crowd.
The numbers of dead and wounded from these volleys is not known as the crowd carried off
the victims.
The crowd then engulfed Nevsky Prospect and refused to disperse: a number of shots
were fired, killing sixteen people, including one woman.'®

Police estimates of the casualties (130 killed and 450 wounded) are far too low. In
reality, many hundreds may have died as a result of police fire and the horrifying sabre
charges of the Cossack troops. Along with the victims died the traditional popular
belief in the tsar as the people’s protector. Father Gapon, although a priest and a
 THE 1905 REVOLUTION 139

believer in autocracy, denounced ‘Nicholas Romanoy’ as a traitor to the people. The

United States consul in Odessa reported: ‘The present ruler has lost absolutely the
affection of the Russian people, and whatever the future may have in store for the
dynasty, the present tsar will never again be safe in the midst of his people’.'®

Breakdown: January to October 1905

In January and February peasant revolts broke out in Kursk province. Soon they spread
to the Volga region and most of the black earth provinces. On 14 June, mutiny broke
out on the battleship Potemkin in the Black Sea. Liberal leaders in the zemstvo
movement and in various professional organisations put forward constitutional
demands. In May an alliance of professional associations, the Union of Unions, was
formed in Moscow. It elected Milyukov as its chairman. University students went on
strike and made university buildings available for public meetings. —
Meanwhile, an important new working class organisation had ap peared the Soviet
The Russian word, ‘Soviet’, means advice or counsel. It was also applied to meetings,
such as the peasant commune. Indeed, it was probably the traditions of the commune
that inspired the first Soviet. This was a spontaneous strike committee that emerged in
May 1905 in the textile town of Ivanovo, east of Moscow. The committee’s members
were elected from all workers in the town, just as communes consisted of all heads of
households in the villages. Similar institutions soon appeared in other towns. By far
the most important met in St Petersburg on 14 October, and rapidly assumed
leadership of Soviets throughout the Empire. A young Marxist, Leon Trotsky (1879—
1940), became its leader. Trotsky was independent of both Menshevik and Bolshevik
factions and one of the revolution’s most inspiring public speakers.

The October crisis and the general strike

In the face of opposition from most sections of Russian society, the government agreed
in August to convene an elected, but purely consultative, national assembly. In January
this might have worked. By August it was not enough. Printing workers went on strike
on 19 September and workers in both capitals soon followed them. On 7 October
railway workers went on strike, and within a few days Russia was facing the first general
strike in its history.
The general strike came under the direction of the St Petersburg Soviet, which
acquired more popular support than any of the socialist parties. The strike soon gained
the support of most strands of the opposition movement. This rare display of united
opposition finally brought the government to its knees.
Of all classes it was the industrial working class that had the most direct impact
through the novel weapon of the general strike. In October the strike brought
communications of all kinds to a standstill, paralysing the government. On his return
tsar’s palace
from the United States in October, Witte found that even contact with the
at Peterhof was possible only by boat."”

Document 5.8: the general strike in Kharkov

In Kharkov, in the Ukraine, work stopped everywhere: on the railways, in all factories,
workshops, in shops of all types, in the University, in all schools, in all administrative offices,
140 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

even the telegraph offices . . the whole population was on the streets, either as sightseers
or as demonstrators. From the evening, people began to ransack arms stores and to smash
the windows of the large stores and conservative journals. On the 24th, students directed by
lawyers, doctors and teachers and helped by workmen and Jews, seized the district
neighbouring the University and set up ten barricades made of heavy oak planks, telegraph
and telephone poles, electric light standards and large paving stones. The rioters seized the
law courts where the archives were and threw them into the streets.
All the police could do was organize a poor demonstration at one rouble a head, with a
portrait of the emperor and the national flag. This demonstration failed pitifully before the
student’s revolvers—they tore the tsar’s portrait and the flags to shreds.'®

Most dangerous of all for the government, even the bureaucracy and army cracked.
In the middle of October, the staff of central government institutions, including the
Treasury and all the Ministries, went on strike. Employees of the State Bank even called
for a Constituent Assembly. The Russo—Japanese war had drained the army in
European Russia of its better trained troops and officers, leaving behind discontented
reservists and inexperienced officers to deal with the turmoil in European Russia.
Beginning with the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin there were ten mutinies in the
army and navy in June and July.’® Nevertheless, discipline held in most units and
soldiers continued to suppress demonstrations. The real military problem in October
was that there were too few soldiers to both repress disorders and run essential services
such as the railways.
Under these conditions, the repressive apparatus was useless. It was impossible to
issue orders to troops or to begin transporting troops back from Manchuria. The last
time government had broken down like this had been during the Time of Troubles
three centuries before.

SURVIVING THE REVOLUTION, 1905 TO 1906

In October 1905 the government was near to collapse; a year later, it was firmly in
control once again. How did it recover its balance?

Fiscal retreat
As early as 1902, the government had begun a large-scale fiscal retreat to relieve the
economic pressure on the peasantry. It abolished the collective responsibility of
commune members for each other’s tax payments; it cancelled all@rrearsof taxation;
and it abolished corporal punishment. Most important of all, a law of November 1905
cancelled remaining redemption payments as of 1 January 1907. These laws dismantled
the structures of rural life created in 1861 and granted the peasantry full ownership of
the land they had used since then. They reduced the fiscal pressure on the peasantry,
but they also weakened the government financially. However, this had little immediate
effect on the mood either in the towns or in the countryside.
THE 1905 REVOLUTION 141

Political retreat: the October Manifesto

Witte showed Nicholas how to deal with the immediate political crisis. In the middle of
October he persuaded the reluctant tsar to concede the constitutional and political
demands of Russian Liberalism, which had become by then the demands of most
sections of Russian society. On 17 October the tsar issued what is known as the ‘October
Manifesto’. It granted basic civil liberties. It also promised to create a State Duma (or
parliament), elected by universal male suffrage and capable of sharing in the law-
making process. The Manifesto marked the formal end of autocratic government, as
the tsar would now have to share his law-making powers. The government issued the
details of the new constitutional system over several months and published them
together in the Fundamental Laws of April 1906. The first Duma met in May 1906.

Splitting the revolutionary coalition

The October crisis confirmed what the police chief, Zubatov, had argued some years
before: to survive, the autocracy had to divide its opponents. The October Manifesto
broke the revolutionary coalition of October 1905. The rightwing of Russian
Liberalism immediately accepted the Manifesto as a satisfactory end to the revolution.
On 4 December moderate liberals formed a new liberal party, the Union of 17 October
(or ‘Octobrist’ Party), and Alexander Guchkov became their leader. Leftwing liberals
had already organised the Constitutional Democratic Party (or Kadets) at a founding
Congress held between 12 and 18 October. The Kadets, led by Milyukov and
Petrunkevich, denounced the October Manifesto, as they sought an elected
constitutional assembly that would write a new constitution. However, they were willing
to end revolutionary activity and accept the new system as a starting point for reform.
Though the October Manifesto ended the upper class revolution, the working class
revolution gained momentum after October. The Manifesto satisfied few working class
demands, and the St Petersburg Soviet saw little reason to end the General Strike.
Peasants interpreted the Manifesto as permission to seize the gentry land they had long
believed was theirs by right. So peasant disorders rose to a peak in November and
December.”

The November Crisis

Most dangerous of all for the government, discipline collapsed within the army.
Between October 15 and the end of the year, there were at least 211 mutinies, affecting
one-third of all military units in European Russia. On the trans-Siberian railroad
mutinies of returning troops prevented the return of more disciplined troops from the
Far East until 1906. The breakdown of military discipline was a response to the
apparent collapse of authority in October. Soldiers mutinied only when they believed
that the existing authorities had already collapsed. Like peasants (which is what most
of them were), soldiers interpreted the October Manifesto as permission to ignore
authority structures, even within the army.”
One of the first, and most violent, of these mutinies occurred in late October at the
twenty-six men
Kronstadt naval base outside St Petersburg. In the chaos of the mutiny,
in the Far East, mutinous troops
were killed, and 107 were wounded. Three days later,
were not
burned much of the port city of Vladivostok.22 However, most mutinies
violent. Instead, troops disobeyed orders and presented their officers with petitions
the
demanding improvements in their conditions. Mutineers usually acted with
142 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

unanimity traditional in the peasant commune. Either the entire unit went out or no
one went out. Like peasants, too, many mutinous units proclaimed their loyalty to the
tsar who they believed had liberated them.
In late November garrison mutinies deprived the government of control in ten of
the Empire’s largest nineteen cities, including Moscow.
As November turned into December, the regime’s situation was truly desperate: it
had lost control over the peasantry, it was losing control over the urban garrisons and
therefore over the cities, and the Soviets were operating with near impunity. Mutinous
reserves clogged the line through Siberia, many of the Siberian garrisons had mutinied
and given revolutionaries the opportunity to seize effective power, and the field army
was trapped in Manchuria.” :
The government’s one consolation was that the divisions within the revolutionary
coalition were now clear. In October, many employers had supported the general
strike and some had even paid their workers half wages. In November, when the same
workers struck for the eight-hour day, their employers locked them out. The Kadet
leader Milyukov called the November strikes a ‘crime against the revolution’.
In December, emboldened by these divi-
sions, the government regained its nerve. Its
decisive actions in early December broke the
mutinies within the army. On 3 December, the
government arrested all 260 members of the
St Petersburg Soviet. Between 9 and 20
December, it successfully used troops who only
a few days before had been in a state of mutiny
to suppress an insurrection in Moscow with
great bloodshed. Government promises of
better conditions may have eased some of the
soldiers’ grievances, while civilian attacks on
soldiers angered them. Similar events occurred
aes
in several large cities. News that the old order
Soldiers guarding a burnt out building, Moscow, 1905. was back in charge brought mutinous troops to
heel.
Liberals made only mild protests at the
crushing of working class strikes and army mutinies. The reappearance of the
traditional divisions between Russia’s educated elite and its urban and rural working
classes now gave the government valuable room for manoeuvre.

1906 and the end of the crisis

Early in 1906, the reimposition of discipline within the army, the return of troops from
Manchuria, and the negotiation of a French loan of 2250 million francs by Witte on 3
April, further improved the government’s situation. The meeting of the first Duma,
from 27 April to 8 July, concentrated the minds of Russia’s educated elite on
constitutional rather than revolutionary activities. With a more secure military and
financial position and the qualified support of much of Russia’s upper classes, the
government could move onto the offensive. However, before it could do that, it had to
endure one more serious crisis in the summer of 1906.
The opening ceremonies of the Dumain the Winter Palace highlighted the divisions
within Russian society, as the minister of finance, Kokovtsov, noted.
 THE 1905 REVOLUTION 143

Document 5.9: the opening of the Duma, 26 April 1906

St George’s Hall, the throne room, presented a queer spectacle at this moment, and | believe
its walls had never before witnessed such a scene. The entire right side of the room was
filled with uniformed people, members of the State Council and, further on, the tsar’s retinue.
The left side was crowded with the members of the Duma, a small number of whom had
appeared in full dress, while the overwhelming majority, occupying the first places near the
throne, were dressed as if intentionally in workers’ blouses and cotton shirts, and behind
them was a crowd of peasants in the most varied costumes, some in national dress, anda
multitude of representatives of the clergy. The first place among these representatives of the
people was occupied by a man of tall stature, dressed in a worker’s blouse and high, oiled
boots, who examined the throne and those about it with a derisive and insolent air. It was
the famous F. M. Onipko, who later won great renown by his bold statements in the first
Duma... While the tsar read his speech addressed to the newly elected members of the
Duma, | could not take my eyes off Onipko, so much contempt and hate did his insolent face
show.”4

In 1906, there were at least 200 mutinies, affecting more than twenty per cent of
army units. Most occurred between April and July, while the Duma was in session.”
Peasant disturbances increased at the same time. Both movements were inspired by
the debates over land in the Duma, and by what peasants and soldiers took to be the
Duma’s support for a radical program of land redistribution. In June, the police
reported from Voronezh province that: ‘{soldiers] are beginning to reason that they
are all peasants and shouldn’t go against their own, they are talking about the
possibility of disobeying orders, about refusing to fire. Moreover, the enlisted men are
deeply interested in the debates in the Duma and throw themselves upon newspapers
that come into their hands, especially newspapers of an extreme tendency’.”® The
following ‘instruction’ to the peasant Trudovik party expresses well the demands of
both peasants and soldiers.

regiment of
Document 5.10: instruction to the Trudovik party from an unidentified
soldiers
ed action.
We soldier peasants salute the Trudovick group [in the Duma] for its determin
in communal
We will support it in the moment of need if necessary, if it demands all land
the land should be
tenure without redemption, and all liberty. In our view, the land is God’s,
it; the right to buy is fine for the
free, no one should have the right to buy, sell or mortgage
are poor, we have no money
rich, but for the poor it is a very, very bad right... We soldiers
peasant needs land desperately
to buy land when we return home from service, and every
on this, God’s free land,
_.. The land is God’s, the land is no one’s, the land is free—and
and kulaks. These words
should toil God’s free workers, not hired laborers for the gentry
if you will demand
pleased us very much, we soldiers even learned them by heart. Deputies,
these demands. Further, we
this then we, for our part, will lay down our lives to support
to demand of the
most humbly ask your excellencies, respected deputies, immediately
rs—are we really not men,
authorities that they no longer persecute us for reading newspape
. . ek
are we little children that they won’t let us know anything
144 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

While the army remained unreliable, the government had little hope of suppressing
peasant revolts, or containing any new waves of insurrection in the towns.
Paradoxically, the military organisations of the revolutionary parties did most to
restrain mutineers, for they were convinced that the time was not yet right for a general
insurrection. The crisis came to a head on 9 July, when the government dissolved the
first Duma. Two hundred deputies crossed the border to the Finnish town of Vyborg
and issued a manifesto calling for passive resistance and a tax strike. This was an
extremely dangerous moment for the government, as dangerous as the crises of
October and November 1905. As in October 1905, representatives of Russia’s educated
elite were once again supporting revolutionary activity.
However, there was little response to the Vyborg manifesto. There was a mutiny
amongst troops in Kronstadt and Helsinki, and an attempt at a general strike in
St Petersburg later in July. However, reluctant and confused leadership ensured that
the actions of the government’s opponents lacked coordination. Most revolutionary
parties believed the time was not right for a general uprising, so they restrained their
supporters in the towns and in the army. Once the critical moment had passed, soldiers
understood there was no alternative but to obey. This transformed them once more
into reliable instruments of repression.
The mopping up of rural insurrections continued throughout the rest of 1906 and
into 1907. The government tried oppositionists in courts martial and made free use of
the hangman’s noose, known as ‘Stolypin’s necktie’ after Nicholas’ new prime
minister. Between 1905 and 1909, the government executed 2390 people on charges
of terrorism, while 2691 died at the hands of terrorists.28

The long-term prospects for Tsarism

The crisis of 1905 showed that the government was extremely vulnerable. It had
survived because of the cultural and economic gulf between Russia’s educated elites
and the mass of rural and urban working people. However, as long as Russia’s upper
classes remained discontented with the existing political system, there remained the
possibility that, in a moment of crisis, they might reluctantly support a working class
insurrection. Meanwhile, the smouldering discontents of urban workers and land-
hungry peasants ensured that there was plenty of inflammable material in Russian
society. The crisis of 1905-06 showed that if working class and upper class dissidents
could unify, even temporarily, that might be sufficient to break the discipline of an
army consisting mainly of peasants and workers. If the army’s discipline broke, the
government’s situation would be critical.
What could the government do to rebuild support within Russian society? What
were its chances of surviving into the modern era?

Questions for discussion

1 How had the social and economic changes of the late nineteenth century
undermined the power of the Russian autocracy and the Russian ruling
group?
2 Could the Tsarist government have avoided revoluti
on in 1905? How?
THE 1905 REVOLUTION 145

3 Which was the most dangerous revolutionary force in 1905? The intelligentsia? The
peasantry? The urban working class?
4 What were the main weaknesses of the forces opposing the government in 1905?

5 What did soldiers, workers and peasants hope to achieve through revolution?
6 Was the 1905 Revolution a success or a failure?

¥i What role did socialist, liberal, conservative and nationalist ideologies play in the
1905 Revolution?

Further reading
See bibliography:
Adams, Imperial Russia
Kochan, Russia in Revolution
Lichtheim, Socialism
Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation
Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire

In addition:
A Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, Stanford, California, 1988
J Bushnell, Mutiny amid Repression: Russian Soldiers in the Revolution of 1905-1906, Indiana
University Press, Bloomington, 1985
M McCauley, Octobrists to Bolsheviks: Imperial Russia 1905-191 7, Edward Arnold, London, 1984;
documents
R McNeal (ed), Russia in Transition: 1 905-1914, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1970

Endnotes
1 VI Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1956 (first
published 1899), p 506
342-3
RC Tucker (ed), The Marx-Engels Reader, Norton, New York, 1972, pp
Russian Soldiers in the Revolution of 1905-1906, Indiana
NO
oo J Bushnell, Mutiny amid Repression:
University Press, Blooming ton, 1985, pp 26-7
worth, 1990, p 78
cited in M Ferro, Nicholas IT The Last of the Tsars, Penguin Books, Harmonds
London, 1966, p 47
L Kochan, Russia in Revolution 1890-191 8, Granada,
ibid, pp 51-2
79
D Floyd, Russia in Revolt: 1905, Macdonald, London, 1969, p
Readings in Russian Civilizati on, vol 2, Universit y of Chicago Press, Chicago,
oFT Riha (ed),
Oonrm

1964, p 425
Oo ibid, p 425
Early Times to 1917, 3 vols, Yale
10 G Vernadsky, et al (eds), A Source Book for Russian History from
University Press, New Haven, Conn, 1972, vol 2, p 425
11 Kochan, Russia in Revolution, p 99
The Marx-Engels Reader, Norton, New
12 ‘The German Ideology’, cited from Robert G Tucker,
the old filthy business ’, is a prudish translation of
York, 1972, p 125. The weak phrase ‘all
Marx’s more forthright ‘die ganze alte ScheiBe’.
146 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

13 O Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1988, p 283

14 Kochan, Russia in Revolution, p 99
15 M McAuley, Octobrists to Bolsheviks: Imperial Russia 1905-1917, Edward Arnold, London,
1984, pp 12-13
16 Kochan, Russia in Revolution, p 92
17 ibid, p 103
18 ibid, pp 103-4
19 Bushnell, Mutiny amid Repression, pp 55-6, 68
20 ibid, p 75
21 ibid, pp 76-7, 81
22 ibid, p 85
23 ibid, p 109
24 cited from Ferro, Nicholas II, p 109
25 Bushnell, Mutiny amid Repression, p 172
26 ibid, p 176
27 ibid, p 180
28 Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 3, p 750
CHAPTER SIX

THE FINAL DECADE OF

TSARIST RULE AND THE
FEBRUARY REVOLUTION

The survival of the Tsarist government was not just a matter of concern for the royal
family. In different ways, it would affect everyone in the Russian Empire. In the past,
the Tsarist autocracy had provided the linchpin for the ruling group that dominated
the empire. It had held together the empire’s diverse elites, giving them the unity and
discipline needed to control the largest land empire on earth. However, by 1900 social
and economic changes had so transformed Russian society that the autocracy could
‘no longer perform its traditional role. Its weakness deprived the empire’s elites of the
unity needed to maintain their power during a period of great instability. Without a
government capable of uniting them into a cohesive ruling group, many in the elite
believed they faced a period of anarchy and chaos as terrible as the ‘Time of Troubles’
on
in the early seventeenth century. They believed with some justice that a breakdown
this scale would threaten all classes of society.
What prospects were there of maintaining stable government despite the tensions
To survive, a government would have to deal with some of the
of modernisation?
for the
grievances of a growing working class. It would also have to provide a focus
to satisfy
diverse and changing interests of an emerging capitalist society. It would have
professional
the interests and defend the privileges of the rising entrepreneurial and
government
classes as well as those of a declining landed aristocracy. Could the Tsarist
have done this?
of Meiji Japan
There is every reason to think that it could. The traditional monarchy
nth century, to transform itself
had managed, during a few decades in the late ninetee
ng the remnants
into the government of a rising entrepreneurial class without alienati
class discontent.
of the traditional aristocracy or provoking an explosion of working
government not have
Though transformed, it had survived. Why should Russia’s
were complex political
undergone a similar transformation? The trouble was that these
the Russian government
manoeuvres requiring great political skill and flexibility, and
the support and advice of
lacked both qualities. Its autocratic methods deprived it of
rising intelligentsia and
many intelligent and perceptive members of the
to the problems facing his
entrepreneurial classes. And Nicholas himself was blind
government would have to
government. In transforming the basis of its power, the
transform itself, for the main demand of the new elites after 1905 was for greater
ning autocracy in favour of a
participation in government. This meant abando
148 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

constitutional monarchy. Yet Nicholas believed his main duty was to preserve the
autocratic powers granted to him by God, and pass them on, intact, to his son. He
rejected all thought of building coalitions through concessions.
The decade from 1907 to 1917 offered the Tsarist government a last chance to avoid
revolution.

THE STOLYPIN ERA: 1906 TO 1914

Some of Nicholas’ ministers saw the situation more clearly than he did and tried hard
to persuade him of the need for reform. Most promising of all was the strategy
proposed by P. A. Stolypin, his prime minister from July 1906. Though Stolypin was
assassinated in 1911, his policies dominated the era between the 1905 revolution and
the outbreak of war in 1914. His strategy had three main elements. He tried to regain
the support of Russia’s changing elites by taking the Duma seriously; he tried to build
support amongst peasants through a land reform that would satisfy the more
enterprising peasants without alienating the landed nobility; and he repressed any
remaining discontent by force. Stolypin’s main task was to sell this strategy to both
Nicholas and the majority in the Duma.

The constitutional experiment

The attempt to construct a workable constitutional system did not get off to a good
start. In drawing up the Fundamental Laws, Nicholas II did all he could to limit the
powers of the Duma. The electoral system discriminated in favour of landlords and
peasants and against urban workers by setting up separate constituencies (or ‘curia’)
for each class. The new constitution created an upper house, the State Council, many
of whose members were to be nominated by the government. Ministers were to remain
responsible solely to the emperor. The Duma had the power to reject only parts of the
state budget. Finally, Nicholas insisted on referring to his own authority as ‘autocratic’,
though he agreed to drop the word ‘unlimited’ from the traditional formula
describing the monarch’s power. This now read: ‘Supreme autocratic power belongs
to the emperor of all Russia’ (article 4). The ministerial discussions in April, that
preceded this decision, show clearly how little Nicholas understood his situation.

Document 6.1: Nicholas’ views on autocracy and the October Manifesto

lam filled with doubt. Have Ithe right, before my ancestors, to alter the limits of the powers
they bequeathed to me? This inner conflict still troubles me and | have yet to reach a decision.
It would have been easier for me to make up my mind a month ago . . . but since then | have
received heaps of telegrams, letters and petitions from all parts of Russia and from persons
belonging to all classes of society. They express their loyalty to me and, while thanking me
for the October Manifesto, ask that | do not limit my powers. They want the Manifesto and
preservation of the rights granted to my subjects, but are against any further step being taken
which would limit my own powers. They desire that | remain autocrat of All Russia.
 THE FINAL DECADE OF TSARIST RULE AND THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION 149

| am, believe me, sincere when | tell you that if |were convinced that Russia wanted me to
abdicate my autocratic powers, | would do that, for the country’s good. But | am not
convinced that this is so, and | do not believe that there is need to alter the nature of my
supreme power . . . It is dangerous to change the way that power is formulated. | know, too,
that if no change is made, this may give rise to agitation, to attacks .. . But where will these
attacks come from? From so-called educated people, from the proletariat, from the Third
Estate? Actually, | feel that eighty per cent of the people are with me.'

Finally, article 87 tempted the government to rule by decree when the Duma was
not in session. It read:

Document 6.2: article 87 of the ‘Fundamental Laws’

While the Duma is not in session, if extraordinary circumstances demand a measure requiring
legislative sanction, the Council of Ministers shall submit the matter directly to the emperor.
Such a measure, however, may not introduce any changes into the Fundamental State Laws,
the establishing acts of the State Council or the State Duma, or the laws governing elections
to the Council or the Duma. Such a measure becomes inoperative if the appropriate minister
or chief administrator of a separate department does not introduce in the State Duma a
legislative bill corresponding to the adopted measure within the first two months of the next
Duma session, or if it is rejected by the State Duma or the State Council.”

The first Dumamet on 27 April. Socialist parties, except for the Mensheviks, boycotted
the elections. This ensured a Kadet majority. But even the Kadets were in a radical mood.
Their program, which most Duma members supported, demanded changes to the
constitution and a radical land reform. The government refused to discuss these
demands, though it did consider appointing some Kadet leaders as ministers. When
negotiations broke down, the government dissolved the Dumaon 9July.
Once it had survived the immediate crisis caused by the dissolution of the Duma,
the government was firmly back in the saddle. On the day the Duma was dissolved, the
tsar appointed P. A. Stolypin (1862-1911) as chairman of the Council of Ministers. The
second Duma met in February 1907. It was even more radical than the first, because
the Social Democrats, who had boycotted the first Duma, sent delegates to the second.
Stolypin dismissed the second Duma on 3 June 1907.
On the same day, the government used article 87 to issue a new electoral law, which
favoured Russia’s traditional classes, the landed nobility and the peasantry.
Technically, the government had breached the Fundamental Laws which forbade any
tampering with the electoral system without the consent of the Duma and the State
Council. But there were few protests, and Stolypin’s ‘coup d’etat’ succeeded in its
political aims. Under the new law, it took 230 landowners to elect a single deputy; 1000
and
wealthy business people; 15 000 lower-middle-class electors; 60 000 peasants;
125 000 urban workers. Here was a clear indication of the government’s conservative
outlook, even under Stolypin. Though willing to court the emerging business elite, it
still found it easiest to work with its traditional supporters, the landed nobility.
November
The law succeeded in its immediate aim. The third Duma, which met in
1907, was dominated by the moderates in the Octobrist party. For the first time the
its
government found itself dealing with an assembly willing to support some of
150 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

legislation. For three or four years it looked as if the Duma would hold together a
political alliance between the government and the nobles, officials and capitalists who
supported the Octobrist Party. However, by 1911, even the Octobrists found the
government of Nicholas too reactionary for their tastes. The parliamentary alliance
broke down and the Octobrists split into separate factions. In September 1911 Stolypin
was assassinated, probably by a police agent. His death deprived the government of its
last clear-sighted politician.
From then on the autocracy had as little support amongst Russia’s upper classes as
it had in 1905. Enthusiastic supporters of autocracy could be found only on the far
right of Russian politics, among proto-Fascist, anti-Semitic organisations such as the
Black Hundreds, or ‘Union of the Russian People’, first formed in 1905. By refusing to
take the Duma seriously, the government had lost the support not merely of the new
upper classes of intellectuals and entrepreneurs, but also of its more traditional
supporters amongst the landed nobility. It had also deprived itself of their advice and
expertise. Now the Duma could do little more than parade the divisions within Russia’s
upper classes.

The Stolypin agrarian reform

Peasant insurrections had continued in spite of the abolition of redemption dues from
January 1907. Clearly, more had to be done to solve the problem of rural discontent.
In 1905 even the Kadets argued for the redistribution of landlords’ land to land-hungry
peasants. This seemed reasonable enough. As Lenin pointed out, the 30 000 largest
landowners in Russia each held enough land to support 330 average peasant
households. In 1905 even some big landowners were prepared to accept that the
compulsory redistribution of some gentry land was the only way of salvaging something
from the wreck. D. F. Trepov, the minister of internal affairs, remarked to Witte: ‘Iam
myself a landowner and shall only be too pleased to give away half of my land for
nothing as I feel certain that it is the only way of saving the other half for myself.’
However, by 1906 landlords were regaining their confidence in the government and a
wholesale redistribution of land seemed an unnecessary sacrifice.
Stolypin adopted an alternative approach to reform that had first been proposed in
1902. Its main attraction was that it did not require the surrender of landlords’ land.
This meant that it might gain the support of the Octobrist party. Stolypin proposed
abandoning the commune and allowing peasants to own their land individually. This
would introduce private property into the Russian village.
Though Stolypin’s proposal reversed the government’s policy on the commune,
officials supported it because most had already decided that the commune was
economically inefficient and politically dangerous. As one noble put it, the commune
had become a ‘seed-bed of socialist ideas’.*
Stolypin hoped the introduction of private property would create a class of
prosperous peasant farmers. These would support the government to protect their own
property rights, creating a new and conservative class of small landowners among the
traditionally monarchist peasants. The government also hoped the reform would raise
agricultural productivity by rewarding more enterprising peasants. As in his approach
to constitutional reform, Stolypin showed his conservatism by courting the traditional
class, the peasantry, rather than the rising class of wage-earners.
Stolypin introduced the agrarian reform under article 87, in November 1906. The
decree made three changes. First, it abolished collective ownership within the family
 THE FINAL DECADE OF TSARIST RULE AND THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION 151

by declaring that land belonged to the head of each household. As most heads of
households were male, this gave legal sanction to rural traditions of male control over
land. Second, the decree permitted heads of households to demand that their land be
separated from the commune’s holdings. This turned the land into private, rather than
communal, property. Third, the decree allowed the new owner to demand that the
various strips of land be consolidated into a single block to form a separate farm or
khutor. Though they came into effect in late 1906, Stolypin’s decrees acquired full legal
force only when passed by the Duma in 1910. Joined with these measures were others
designed to help migration to Siberia and to raise the productivity of peasant
agriculture.
How successful was the reform? It was skilful enough in its intentions to persuade
Lenin (who was abroad again after returning briefly in 1905) that it might work. He
saw, as did Stolypin, that a class of wealthy and
independent peasants might provide powerful
support for a strong, conservative government,
as it had in France since the French Revolution.
However, the process was too slow to save the
government. By 1915, about thirty per cent of
all peasant households had requested indi-
vidual ownership of the land, and twenty-two
per cent had received it. Of these, about sixty
per cent (or ten per cent of all households)
took the more difficult and costly step of
consolidating their land and setting up separate
es _ farms. The number of exits declined rapidly
Sunday in a village, 1912, during the Stolypin era. The after 1910, which suggests that the number
children are playing lapta, a traditional Russian game would not have increased much even if there
similar to baseball and cricket. had been a generation of peace. Besides, most
of these separate farms appeared in the western
and southern provinces where individual land-
holding was already familiar to the peasants. The reforms had least effect in the
overcrowded Central Producer Region, where land shortage and peasant discontent
were at their worst. In these areas, the commune provided considerable protection to
poorer peasants, and most households clung to it desperately.

The failure of reform

The agrarian reform did not create the politically conservative rural society that
Stolypin had hoped for, as the renewed peasant insurrections of 1917 proved. Nor had
the constitutional reform helped to bridge the gap between the government and
Russia’s rapidly changing educated elites. As a result, the government remained as
isolated as in 1905. Its power rested now on the bureaucracy and the army alone, for
the support it could expect from other groups, even from its traditional supporters,
was uncertain and hesitant. This was a narrow base for a government about to lead its
country into the first great war of modern times.
army
On the other hand, the government still held some strong cards. Though the
powerful and
and bureaucracy had cracked under pressure in 1905, both remained
a deep
responsive instruments of the royal will. Most important of all, there remained
cultural and economic gulf between Russia’s educated classes and the bulk of the
152 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

working population. This made it difficult to organise combined action by all sections
of Russia’s population. These divisions showed up clearly after the issuing of the
October Manifesto and again in the middle of 1906. On both occasions, upper class
revolutionaries tried to restrain working class insurrections which they feared they
could not control.
These deep class divisions offered the government opportunities to survive through
a policy of divide and rule. This is why the most dangerous aspect of the government’s
position was the political naivety of the tsar. He simply did not see how isolated his
government was. He saw no need to balance repression with concessions. In 1909, a
French diplomat reported that: ‘He [the tsar] is certain that the rural population, the
owners of land, the nobility and the army remain loyal to the tsar; the revolutionary
elements are composed above all of Jews, students, of landless peasants and of some
workers’.° Nicholas’s assessment deprived him of any incentive to try to consolidate his
power basis. It also explained his failure to back perceptive reformers like Stolypin.

THE TSARIST GOVERNMENT IN 1914

The renewal of opposition: 1912 to 1914
On the eve of war, the most ominous sign for the government was the revival of popular
discontent between 1912 and 1914. The revival mainly affected the urban population.
In his History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky used estimates of the number of
strikers, based on police records, as a measure of the political temperature of Russia’s
workers. These show clearly the change in mood between 1912 and 1914 (see Table 6.1).

fier ed é Spe seater

The Lena gold mines in the late nineteenth century.

THE FINAL DECADE OF TSARIST RULE AND THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION 153

Table 6.1 Trotsky on the numbers striking for political reasons, 1903-17
Year No of Year No of
strikers strikers
000s 000s

1903* 87 1911 8
1904* 25 1912 550
1905 1843 1913 502
1906 65 | 1914 1059 (first half of year)
1907 540 1915 156
1908 93 1916 310
1909 8 1917 575 (January—February)
1910 4

Note:* Figures for both economic and political strikes

Source: L Trotsky, The History of The Russian Revolution, Sphere Books, London, 1967, vol |, p 49

Early in 1912, 270 miners died when police and troops suppressed strikes in the
Lena goldfields in Siberia. Like the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1905, this provoked
sympathy strikes among workers and then among students. However, the proletariat
was now larger than in 1905, and the strikers were more radical. One sign of their
radicalism was the rise in Bolshevik party membership after the post-revolutionary lull,
for the Bolsheviks now offered the most radical of all revolutionary programs. Many
new recruits to the party were peasants who had only recently had to sell their land. So
it is likely that the revival of working class discontent reflected in part the anger of these
first-generation proletarians. This suggests that the Stolypin reforms, far from solving
the problems of discontented peasants, may have driven them to the towns. Here, they
posed a greater political threat than in the villages.
In July 1914 a general strike began in the capital. Barricades went up in some
working class districts, and there were violent clashes between workers and police.
Militant young workers fresh from the countryside provided energetic leadership and
resisted the efforts-of socialist parties to call off the strike.
As in 1905, some members of the upper classes supported the strike movement in
the hope that it might force the government to take the Duma more seriously. A. I.
Konovalov, a Moscow capitalist and deputy for the newly formed Progressive or
Business Party, even proposed funding the Bolshevik Party to increase pressure on the
government. But he was not typical.
This near-revolution collapsed only on the outbreak of war. We cannot know if the
crisis could have turned into a full-scale revolution. It showed that many of the
discontents of 1905 were still alive. Yet, in contrast to the 1905 crisis, the peasantry
remained passive and the army remained loyal. Most important of all, despite the
and
discontents of liberal Duma deputies, the class alliance of 1905 between workers
liberal intelligentsia did not reappear.

No demonstrations, no public meetings, no collective petitions—no expressions of

solidarity even barely comparable to those that Bloody Sunday had evoked were now
aroused. Thus, in the last analysis, the most important source of the political
impotence revealed by the Petersburg strike was precisely the one that made for its
‘monstrous’ revolutionary explosiveness: the sense of isolation, of psychological
privileged society.°
distance, that separated the Petersburg workers from educated,
154 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Sources of government strength

Despite everything, traditions of loyalty to Tsarism survived among many sections of
the population. These resurfaced immediately after the declaration of war, on 20July
1914. In the first flush of patriotic enthusiasm, the capital was renamed Petrograd
instead of the Germanic ‘St Petersburg’. In the Duma, criticism of the government
ceased. So did the demonstrations and strikes in the capital. Patriotic manifestations
took their place. The Octobrist deputy M. V. Rodzianko (1859-1924) described the
patriotic demonstrations outside the Winter Palace where, a mere nine years before,
the Bloody Sunday massacre had taken place.

Document 6.3: Rodzianko on the declaration of war

On the day of the manifesto of war with Germany a great crowd gathered before the Winter
Palace. After a prayer for the granting of victory, the tsar spoke a few words, ending with the
solemn promise not to end the war while the enemy still occupied one inch of Russian soil.
A loud ‘hurrah’ filled the palace and was taken up by an answering echo from the crowd on
the square. After the prayer, the tsar came out on the balcony to his people, the empress
behind him. The huge crowd filled the square and the nearby streets, and when the tsar
appeared it was as if an electric spark had run through the crowd, and an enormous ‘hurrah’
filled the air. Flags and placards with the inscription ‘Long live Russia and Slavdom’ bowed to
the ground, and the entire crowd fell to its knees as one man before the tsar. The tsar wanted
to say something; he raised his hand; those in front began to sh-sh-sh; but the noise of the
crowd, the unceasing ‘hurrah’, did not allow him to speak. He bowed his head and stood for
some time overcome by the solemnity of this moment of the union of the tsar with his
people.’

The government could also count on the loyalty of its bureaucracy and its army. The
Russo-Japanese war was now a distant memory, and reforms had improved the
condition of common soldiers, tightened discipline, and raised the level of training
and equipment. The Russian army finally abandoned its traditional reliance on the
bayonet.
There had also been renewed economic growth in the period after the 1905
Revolution. Growth affected both industry and agriculture. Growth in industrial
output in this period may have been as rapid as six per cent a year. This is below the
remarkable eight per cent growth rate of the 1890s, but remains impressive. Though
the government no longer pursued a systematic policy of industrial growth,
government orders for military equipment stimulated growth in heavy industry as the
building of the trans-Siberian railroad had under Witte. In agriculture, rising world
prices, a string of good harvests, and increased use of artificial fertilisers and
agricultural machinery raised productivity during the years of the Stolypin reforms.
(See Table 4.1 and the Statistical appendix.)

The danger of war

Was war likely to weaken or strengthen the government? Immediately, the war rescued
the government from a dangerous political crisis. However, it also created new strains.
These help explain why the final collapse of Tsarism proved so spectacular. At least
 THE FINAL DECADE OF TSARIST RULE AND THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION 155

one Tsarist official understood this as early as 1914. He was P. N. Durnovo, who had
served in the Tsarist police, and also as a government minister and a member of the
State Council. Like those other police officials, Benkendorff and Andropoy, he knew
better than his masters what dangers lurked beneath the surface of Russian society. In
1914, Durnovo submitted to the tsar a memorandum that forecast with astonishing
accuracy the crisis the war would generate.

Document 6.4: Durnovo on the dangers of war

In the event of defeat [in a war with Germany] . . . social revolution in its most extreme form
is inevitable...
It will start with all disasters being attributed to the government. In the legislative
institutions a bitter campaign against the government will begin, which will result in
revolutionary agitation throughout the country. There will immediately ensue Socialist
slogans—which alone are capable of arousing and rallying the masses—first the complete
reapportionment of land and then the reapportionment of all valuables and property. The
defeated army, having lost its most dependable men during the war, and carried away for the
most part by the tide of the general elemental desire of the peasant for land, will prove to be
too demoralized to serve as a bulwark of law and order. The legislative institutions and the
opposition intelligentsia parties, lacking real authority in the eyes of the people, will be
powerless to stem the rising popular tide, which they themselves had aroused, and Russia
will be flung into hopeless anarchy, the outcome of which cannot even be foreseen.°

THE IMPACT OF WAR

The army
Defeats in the Crimea and in Manchuria had cast doubt on the ability of the Russian
army to deal with foreign opponents. Mutinies during 1905 had shown that its
willingness to suppress internal dissent was not absolute. And there is little sign that
ordinary soldiers greeted the outbreak of war with enthusiasm. Nevertheless, in 1914

aan se

A cossack charge at the battle of Tannenberg, August 1914.

156 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

the Russian army remained an impressive and responsive instrument of the royal will.
By March 1917 this was no longer true.
Several factors explain the decline in the army’s reliability. The first was the sheer
scale of the war. By 1917, 1.7 million soldiers had died. Another eight million were
wounded or incapacitated and 2.5 million were prisoners of war. Irrespective of the
human cost of these losses, their military effect was disastrous. In 1914, the army
consisted of an elite of professional officers drawn from the ruling class, commanding
recruits who underwent three full years of training. By 1917, hastily-trained draftees
had swamped the professionals. All too often, young officers drafted from the dissident
intelligentsia tried without success to command peasants recently drafted from the
countryside and keen to return home. The army was no longer insulated from the
grievances or the social divisions of society at large. To some extent this was true of all
combatant armies. What made such problems peculiarly dangerous in Russia was the
extent of the divisions between Russia’s different classes. If discipline cracked, as it had
in 1905, the army would cease to be the last defence of the government and become,
instead, an instrument of revolution. Conditions at the front also undermined the
morale of troops and officers. Most demoralising of all was the inadequacy of supplies.
The supply situation was worst in the earlier stages of the war. In December 1914 only
4.7 million rifles were available for the 6.5 million men mobilised.’ In July 1915 a
Russian general informed the French ambassador, Maurice Paleologue: ‘In several
infantry regiments which have taken part in the recent battles at least one-third of the
men had no rifles. These poor devils had to wait patiently, under a shower of shrapnel,
until their comrades fell before their eyes and they could pick up their arms.’!° There
were not enough artillery shells, and clothing was inadequate. In December 1914
General Yanushkevich, the chief of staff, complained that: ‘Many men have no boots,
and their legs are frostbitten. They have no sheepskin or warm underwear, and are
catching colds. The result is that in regiments which have lost their officers, mass
surrenders to the enemy have been developing’.”’
Supplies improved in 1916, but morale did not. In October a government official
who visited Riga reported:

the atmosphere in the army is very tense, and the relations between the common
soldiers and the officers are much strained, the result being that several unpleasant
incidents leading even to bloodshed have taken place. The behavior of the soldiers,

A Russian field hospital in Lithuania in 1915, immediately after a battle. A priest blesses the wounded.
THE FINAL DECADE OF TSARIST RULE AND THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION 157

especially in the units located in the rear, is most provocative. They openly accuse
military authorities of graft, cowardice, drunkenness and even treason.

Another report claimed that:

every one who has approached the army cannot but carry away the belief that
complete demoralization is in progress. The soldiers began to demand peace a long
time ago, but never was this done so openly and with such force as now. The officers
not infrequently even refuse to lead their units against the enemy because they are
afraid of being killed by their own men.”

We should not exaggerate. Similar problems occurred in all European armies

during the First World War. In any case, the Russian army did keep fighting even
during much of 1917. Discipline held best at the front, where troops faced the enemy
directly and understood the dangers of indiscipline. Nevertheless, by February 1917,
revolutionary propaganda found an eager audience amongst soldiers at the front and
in the rear. The machinery of persuasion was now being turned against the
government even in the army. The increase in mass surrenders and desertions was the
visible sign of widespread demoralisation. This proved most dangerous in units away
from the front, particularly in units garrisoning the major towns.

Fiscal capacity
How did the government mobilise the resources needed to fight a modern war? Did it
still have its traditional ability to mobilise labour, resources and money on the scale
necessary to make up for its relative backwardness?
The 1905 Revolution had undermined the government’s fiscal power and its
prestige, which made it difficult to mobilise enough manpower and resources for a
prolonged war. The government’s achievements were astonishing despite these
difficulties, but they were not quite enough.
The drafting of men into the army provides a good example. In 1914, the peacetime
army consisted of 1.4 million men. Mobilisation of reserves immediately added another
four million, and by the end of the war a further ten million had been drafted.
However, many potential draftees secured exemptions. This was particularly true
among the educated and wealthy, but also among skilled industrial workers. As a result,
Russia drafted a smaller proportion of its population than the other major combatants:
8.8 per cent, compared with 12.7 per cent in Britain, 19.9 per cent in France, and 20.5
per cent in Germany.”
Its efforts to supply the army with ammunition and the industrial towns with food
and supplies were also inadequate. In both cases, Russia paid for its relative
backwardness. The entry of Turkey into the war on the German side in October 1914
closed the Straits of Constantinople. This was disastrous for Russia, as the straits were
was now
the last convenient route for importing Western European supplies. Russia
could not
dependent on its own industry and raw materials. Yet Russian industry
immediately produce enough weapons, munitions, clothing and boots for the army.
By 1916 improved organisation of industry, increased industrial output and increased
which
imports had solved many of the supply problems. However, these successes,
in the rear. These internal
prevented a collapse at the front, created additional strains
form of revolution
strains explain why, when the collapse finally came, it took the
rather than military defeat.
158 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Supplying the towns was a less immediate priority for the government than
supplying the army, but in the long run it turned out to be equally important. Rapid
growth in wartime industrial production caused an influx of labour into the towns.
Petrograd’s population increased from 2.1 to 2.7 million, and Moscow’s from 1.6 to 2
million between 1914 and the beginning of 1917.’ How could this rapidly growing
town population be fed? In theory, there should not have been a problem. Wartime
harvests were only slightly below the pre-war level. The army’s demand for grain was
balanced by a decline in civilian demand. Meanwhile, exports of grain had ended. The
difficulty was to get the grain from producers to those who needed it.
Part of the problem was that the railway network had been designed to transport
grain surpluses north and south, to the ports of the Black Sea or the large cities of the
north. Now the government had to move grain to its armies in the west. It had neither
the spare railway capacity, nor the organisational capacity to make the switch
efficiently. Part of the problem was commercial. Production on the large commercial
farms which marketed all their produce declined sharply as their farm labourers were
drafted into the army. In the northern and central producer regions, which normally
supplied the towns of the north, marketed surpluses declined as the large farms
dropped out of the market. Supplies now had to come from peasant farms in the south
and the south-east. This meant transporting grain over larger distances than in peace-
time. It also pushed up the commercial price of grain, for peasants, unlike commercial
farmers, did not have to sell grain. Yet the government offered low prices for grain,
and wartime inflation reduced incentives for peasants to sell by raising the real price
of industrial goods. Increased production of military equipment reduced production
of consumer goods and pushed their price even higher. For most peasants, it made
more sense to feed surplus grain to their livestock and pigs. There was little point in
selling it at low prices in exchange for over-priced consumer goods from the towns. So
trade between town and country began to break down. In 1914, twenty-five per cent of
the grain harvest came on to the market. By 1917 only fifteen per cent entered the
market.'° Here was an early example of what the Soviet government was to call a
‘procurement crisis’ in the 1920s. Not surprisingly, the government gave priority to the
army in distributing the available surpluses. As a result, supplies of food to the towns
became unreliable late in 1916.
The failures of the mobilisation system appear also in the government’s search for
additional revenue. Customs revenues dropped with the sudden decline in foreign
trade (almost half of which had been with Germany). Even more disastrous was
Nicholas’ high-minded decision, in August 1914, to prohibit the production and sale
of alcoholic drinks during the war. It made sense to prohibit alcohol sales during
mobilisation. The Russo-Japanese war had shown that unless this was done the call-up
of reservists would turn into a series of drunken riots. However, it made little sense to
prolong the ban during the war, for thirty per cent of the government’s revenue came
from its monopoly over liquor sales. The ministry of finance clearly hoped to use liquor
revenues to pay for war. Indeed, on 26July, it hastily passed a law raising the excise on
liquor through a special session of the Duma. However, Nicholas decided in August to
make the ban on alcohol sales permanent. He thereby deprived his government of
almost one-third of its revenues on the eve of the greatest war Russia had ever fought.
In October 1916 the minister of finance, Peter Bark, admitted that it had taken two
years for government revenues to recover from the introduction of prohibition.!® A
Duma member, A. I. Shingarev, reporting for the Duma’s budgetary and financial
commission on 18 August 1915, put it like this:
THE FINAL DECADE OF TSARIST RULE AND THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION 159

From time immemorial countries waging war have been in want of funds. Revenue
has always been sought either by good or by bad measures, by voluntary
contributions, by obligatory levies, or by the open confiscation of private property.
But never since the dawn of human history has a single country, in time of war,
renounced the principal source of its revenue.”

The decision was a characteristic example of Nicholas’s political naivety. Even

sadder, prohibition was a failure. For a time there was a real decline in consumption.
However, as a contemporary explained, Russian drinkers soon began the search for
ways around the new laws.

At first, instead of vodka, they tried to use various other substances containing
alcohol—eau-de-cologne, varnish, or denatured alcohol. But these were hard to get
hold of, they were expensive, and they were unpleasant tasting and obviously
dangerous to the health of consumers. Then people turned to domestic beers and
braga [a strong domestic beer], trying to make them as strong as possible, but these
couldn’t get you drunk enough. Finally . . . they learnt how to extract spirits by
distilling fermented grains or sugary substances."®

Within a few years, distillers of illicit vodka, or samogon, had appeared in most
villages and towns. Widespread production of poor-quality samogon deprived Soviet
governments of revenues and left them with a vast, and apparently insoluble, problem
of alcoholism, which has lasted to the present day.
Mobilising cash was as tricky as mobilising grain or munitions, for the war proved
costlier than anyone had imagined. It cost 1655 million roubles in 1914, 8818 in 1915,
14573 in 1916, and 13 603 for the first eight months of 1917."° By 1916, the war alone
cost 4.7 times total government expenditure in the last peacetime year, 1913. How
could the government pay for so expensive a war? The 1905 Revolution had forced the
government to abandon its traditional policy of squeezing the peasantry. Taxing the
rich through an income tax seemed reasonable and fair, though it was unlikely to raise
the
much revenue, and might discriminate against wartime manufacturers. In 1916
government did finally introduce modest income taxes and excess-profits taxes, but
these raised little.
The only remedies left were to borrow and to increase the money supply. Both
a disguised form
merely postponed the problem. The second method was, in reality,
inflation. This, in turn, led to a severe decline in
of indirect taxation, for it led to rapid
supply
real living standards, particularly in the towns. In two and a half years the money
increased by about 336 per cent and prices rose on average by 398 per cent. Inflation
weak governments raise revenue withoutap earing to do so.
is how

Popular discontent
those paying it.
Increasing demands for revenue generated discontent among
the government
However, the precise form of discontent reflected the ways in which
led to rising wages.
raised its revenues. Rising demand for labour for war production
even more rapidly.
However, the disguised taxation by inflation raised prices
difficult ies in food supplies , declinin g real wages.created
Combined with the growing
Petrograd secret police, who
an explosive situation in the major towns by 1916. The
1916.
watched the situation closely, reported as follows in October
160 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Document 6.5: living standards in Petrograd, October 1916

Despite the great increase in wages, the economic condition of the masses is worse than
terrible. While the wages of the masses have risen fifty per cent, and only in certain categories
100 to 200 per cent (metal workers, machinists, electricians), the prices on all products have
increased 100 to 500 percent. According to the data collected by the sick benefit fund of the
‘Triangle’ plant, a day’s wages for a worker before the war were [as follows in comparison
with current wages] [in roubles]:
[Type of Worker] [Prewar Wages] [Present Wages]
Unskilled 1.00 to 1.25 2.50 to 3.00
Metalworker 2.00 to 2.50 4.00 to 5.00
Electrician 2.00 to 3.00 5.00 to 6.00
At the same time, the cost of consumer goods needed by the worker has changed in the
following incredible way [in roubles]:

[Item] [Prewar Cost] [Present Cost]

Rent for a corner
[of a room] 2.00 to 3.00 monthly 8.00 to 12.00
Dinner (in a tearoom) 0.15 to 0.20 1.00 to 1.20
Tea (in a tearoom) 0.07 0.35
Boots 5.00 to 6.00 20.00 to 30.00
Shirt 0.75 to 0.90 2.50 to 3.00
Even if we estimate the rise in earnings at 100 percent, the prices of products have risen,
on the average, 300 percent. The impossibility of even buying many food products and
necessities, the time wasted standing idle in queues to receive goods, the increasing incidence
of disease due to malnutrition and unsanitary living conditions (cold and dampness because
of lack of coal and wood), and so forth, have made the workers, as a whole, prepared for the
wildest excesses of a ‘hunger riot’. . .
If in the future grain continues to be hidden, the very fact of its disappearance will be
sufficient to provoke in the capitals and in the other most populated centers of the empire
the greatest disorders, attended byfpogroinsjand endless street rioting. The mood of anxiety,
growing daily more intense, is spreading to ever wider sections of the populace. Never have
we observed such nervousness as there is now. Almost every day the newspapers report
thousands of facts that reflect the extremely strained nerves of the people in public places,
and a still greater number of such facts remains unrecorded. The slightest incident is enough
to provoke the biggest brawl. This is especially noticeable in the vicinity of shops, stores,
banks, and similar institutions, where ‘misunderstandings’ occur almost daily.”°

Whether the government could deal with such discontent when it finally erupted
would depend on the loyalty of the troops and particularly on the garrison troops in
the rear. However, that was something no one could count on any more.

Unity and cohesion of the ruling group

The government’s prospects would also depend on the support it could expect from
Russia’s upper classes. Yet the divisions between the government and the Duma,
which
had vanished on the outbreak of war, soon re-emerged. There also appeared
signs of
a growing unity among the disparate elite groups opposed to the autocracy
.
THE FINAL DECADE OF TSARIST RULE AND THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION 161

The role of Nicholas II

The renewed split between the government and its traditional supporters owed much
to the obstinacy of Nicholas II. Typical of his attitude is a conversation he had with the
British ambassador, George Buchanan, two months before his abdication. Buchanan
told the tsar:

‘Your Majesty, if Imay be permitted to say so, has but one safe course open to you—
namely, to break down the barrier that separates you from your people and to regain
their confidence.’ Drawing himself up and looking hard at me, the Emperor asked:
‘Do you mean that I am to regain the confidence of my people, or that they are to
regain my confidence?””!

The tsar’s attitude made it impossible for him to work with the leading politicians
of the day, all of whom now saw the need for a proper constitutional government. His
refusal to face political realities explains his growing dependence on people who
understood the political situation as little as he did. In particular, he relied on his wife,
the Empress Alexandra. She, in turn, relied on her spiritual adviser, the dissolute monk
Gregory Rasputin, whose influence derived from his ability to control the haemophilia
of the heir to the throne, Alexei, through hypnosis. Both Alexandra and Rasputin
insisted that the tsar must not concede any of his powers. By 1916, after Nicholas had
left for the front, Rasputin in effect chose the various government ministers. While
Rasputin exercised such influence, the government was headed by a succession of
nonentities whose only qualification for office was that they also refused to see the
dangers facing the government. Contemporaries referred contemptuously to their
comings and going as ‘ministerial leapfrog’.

The attitude of the upper classes

In July 1914 the upper classes had rallied around the government. The Duma met for
one day and voted war credits (with moderate socialist leaders abstaining and the
Bolsheviks opposing the vote). A provisional committee of Duma members was set up
under M. V. Rodzianko, the Duma president, to organise aid for victims of the war.
Zemstvos and town councils throughout Russia held conferences to consider how they
could support the war effort. By August, an ‘All-Russian Union of Zemstvos for the Relief
of the Sick and Wounded’ had been formed. In May 1915 representatives of industry
and trade set up another body—the Central War Industries Committee (WIC)—to
.
coordinate war production. It included workers’ representatives as well as industrialists
In June, the WIC elected Alexander Guchkov, the Octobrist leader, as its chairman.
Union of
Also in June, zemstvo and municipal organisations merged in the All-Russian
ns, dominated by
Zemstvos and Cities, or ZemGor. In these interlinked organisatio
the embryo of an alternative government.
liberals and industrialists, there emerged
cooperatio n, these organisatio ns did much to
Despite the lack of government
coordinate Russia’s war effort.
rear had revived
By mid-1915 defeats at the front and bureaucratic muddle in the
elite. When the Duma met in August
the pre-war demoralisation of Russia’s educated
some rightwing deputies allied
1915, it was hostile once again. Octobrists, Kadets and
the Duma. The
to form the ‘Progressive Bloc’. This soon commanded a majority in
goal of a parliame ntary assembly with
Progressive Bloc fought for the traditional liberal
of public confidence’. By this, it
real authority. Above all, it demanded a ‘government
meant a ministry appointed from the majority group in the Duma.
162 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

There can be little doubt that such a ministry would have been much more
competent than the ministries appointed by Nicholas II. It would also have had the
support of the Duma, of the voluntary organisations such as ZemGor and the WIC, and
of most educated Russians. It would therefore have been in a better position than the
existing government to coordinate the war effort. Members of the Progressive Bloc
argued that only a government with genuine popular support would be able to lead
the country to victory. They were probably right.
Nevertheless, Nicholas rejected their demands. Instead, in late 1915, he dismissed
the most liberal of his ministers for opposing his decision to take personal command
of the armies at the front. Their replacements were both incompetent and isolated.
Leaders of the Progressive Bloc became bitter and pessimistic. Many feared that the
tsar’s stubbornness was leading Russia to defeat, and perhaps to social revolution. Yet
they feared that any attempt to force their demands on the tsar might be equally
disastrous. Their mood and the dilemmas facing Russia’s upper classes as a whole are
expressed vividly in a fable told by a leading liberal, Vasily Maklakov.

Document 6.6: Maklakov’s fable of ‘The mad chauffeur’, September 1915

Imagine that you are driving in an automobile on a steep and narrow road. One wrong turn
of the steering-wheel and you are irretrievably lost. Your dear ones, your beloved mother,
are with you in the car.
Suddenly you realise that your chauffeur is unable to drive . . . should you continue in this
way, you face inescapable destruction.
Fortunately there are people in the automobile who can drive, and they should take over
the wheel as soon as possible. But it is a difficult and dangerous task to change places with
the driver while moving. One second without control and the automobile will crash into the
abyss.
There is no choice, however, and you make up your mind; but the chauffeur refuses to
give way . . . he is clinging to the wheel and will not give way to anybody ... Can one force
him? This could easily be done in normal times with an ordinary horse-drawn peasant cart at
low speed on level ground. Then it could mean salvation. But can this be done on the steep
mountain path? ... One error in taking a turn, or an awkward movement of his hand, and
the car is lost. You know that, and he knows it as well. And he mocks your anxiety and your
helplessness .. .
You will not dare touch him. . . for even if you might risk your own life, you are travelling
with your mother, and you will not dare to endanger your life for fear she too might be killed
. . SO you will leave the steering-wheel in the hands of the chauffeur. Moreover, you will try
not to hinder—you will even help him with advice, warning and assistance. And you will 2
right, for this is what has to be done.”

Fearing a direct attack on the government, leaders of the Progressive Bloc began to
attack it indirectly, arguing that, through its incompetence, it was consciously or
unconsciously sabotaging the war effort. Their hostility focused on the ‘German
woman’, the German-born Empress Alexandra. In November 1916 Milyukov attacked
the government bitterly in the Duma.
 THE FINAL DECADE OF TSARIST RULE AND THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION 163

Document 6.7: Milyukov accuses the government of treachery

[The] present government has sunk beneath the level on which it stood during normal times
in Russian life . . And now the gulf between us and that government has grown wider and
has become impassable... .
Today we see and are aware that with this government we cannot legislate, any more
than we can with this government lead Russia to victory .. . We are telling this government,
as the declaration of the Bloc stated: We shall fight you; we shall fight with all legitimate means
until you go... When the Duma with ever greater persistence insists that the rear must be
organized for a successful struggle, while the government persists in claiming that organizing
the country means organizing a revolution and deliberately prefers chaos and disorganization,
then what is this: stupidity or treason?”

In December, three members of the inner circle of the ruling elite murdered
Rasputin. The murderers were Prince Felix Yusupov, one of the richest Russian
landowners, V. M. Purishkevich, a rightwing Duma deputy, and Grand Duke Dmitrii
Pavlovich, one of the tsar’s uncles. This was as near as the ruling class dared come to
directly seizing the wheel of government from the ‘mad chauffeur’. We can regard the
murder of Rasputin as a symbolic attack on the tsar himself.
By this stage, most members of Russia’s upper classes had united not in support of,
but in opposition to, the government that had traditionally defended their interests.
In the Duma, ZemGor and the War Industries Committee, and through other networks
and connections, they already had the ability to form a new government without the
tsar. But they dared not take that step alone. The final push came from outside the
ruling elite.

THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION

Working class demonstrations
The crisis began with demonstrations in the capital. On 22 February, a lockout at
the giant Putilov metalworks brought many metal workers onto the streets. There was
before
nothing unusual about such demonstrations. There had been demonstrations
momentum with
and during the war. However, this time the demonstrations gained
terrifying speed.
onal
The twenty-third (8 March in the Western European calendar) was Internati
of Socialist Women in
Women’s Day, a date chosen by the International Conference
1908. On that
1910 to commemorate a strike of women textile workers in New York in
The number of women
day, large numbers of women textile workers went on strike.
de, and
workers had increased greatly during the war. Many came from the countrysi
left for the front. Once on
many were supporting families alone, as their husbands had
and munitions
strike, the women called out the mainly male workers in the metal
factories. A worker from the Nobel works remembered:

voices in the lane overlooked by the windows of our

We could hear women’s
for the
department: ‘Down with high prices?’, ‘Down with hunger!’, “Bread
164 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

workers!’ I and several comrades rushed at once to the windows. . .. The gates of
No. 1 Bol’shaia Sampsonievskaia mill were flung open. Masses of women workers in
a militant frame of mind filled the lane. Those who caught sight of us began to wave
their arms, shouting: ‘Come out!’, ‘Stop work!’ Snowballs flew through the windows.
We decided to join the demonstration.”

By the twenty-fifth, about 240 000 workers were on strike. Factories stopped work,
newspapers did not appear, city transport stopped, banks, shops and restaurants
closed. Loose networks of revolutionary socialists from different parties joined together
to provide strikers with a degree of organisation. Slogans demanding an end to the
war and to autocracy now replaced earlier slogans demanding bread and better
working conditions.
On 25 February, General Khabaloy, the commander of the Petrograd garrison,
telegraphed the tsar:

I report that, as a result of the bread shortage, a strike broke out in many factories
on February 23 and 24. On February 24, around 200 000 workers were out on strike
and forced others to quit their jobs. Streetcar service was halted by the workers. In
the afternoons of February 23 and 24, some of the workers broke through to the
Nevskii [the main street], whence they were dispersed. Violence led to broken
windows in several shops and streetcars.”

Meanwhile, the tsar ordered the Duma, which had convened on 14 February, to
close again on 27 February. On the twenty-sixth, Rodzianko, the Duma president,
telegraphed the tsar:

The situation is serious. The capital is in a state of anarchy. The government is

paralyzed; the transportation system has broken down; the supply systems for food
and fuel are completely disorganized. General discontent is on the increase. There
is disorderly shooting in the streets; some of the troops are firing at each other. It is
necessary, that some person enjoying the confidence of the country be entrusted
immediately with the formation of a new government. There can be no delay. Any
procrastination is fatal. I pray God that at this hour the responsibility not fall upon
the sovereign.”°

The tsar commented: “That fatty Rodzianko has sent me some nonsense, which I
shan’t even answer’.?’ Instead of making the concessions Rodzianko demanded, he
ordered the immediate suppression of the disorders.

The mutiny of the Petrograd garrison

General Khabalov already understood how unreliable his troops were. Some regiment
s
drew their recruits from the Petrograd region. Others were billeted with
working class
families. Others were wounded evacuees from the front, who had had
their fill of
military discipline. Cossack regiments had already shown their reluctance
to suppress
demonstrations. On the twenty-fifth, one cossack soldier had even
cut down a
policeman trying to arrest demonstrators.
Khabalov had hoped to let the momentum of the demonstrations die away
without
forcing soldiers to choose between obedience and mutiny. Now he reluctan
tly took the
tsar’s order as a command to use maximum force. He informed unit
commanders that:
THE FINAL DECADE OF TSARIST RULE AND THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION 165

The sovereign has ordered that the disorders be stopped by tomorrow. Therefore
the ultimate means must be applied. If the crowd is small, without banners, and not
aggressive, then utilize cavalry to disperse it. If the crowd is aggressive and displays
banners, then act according to regulations, that is, signal three times and open fire.”

The decision to use force was fatal. Reluctant troops now had to choose between
mutinying and firing on crowds whose grievances they shared. On 26 February, troops
were ordered to fire on the demonstrators. The next day, one of the garrison units,
the Volynskii Regiment, mutinied. The men killed some of their officers, and went over
to the demonstrators. Other regiments soon followed their example. Later that day
Khabalov cabled the tsar: ‘I cannot fulfill the command to re-establish order in the
capital. Most of the units, one by one, have betrayed their duty, refusing to fight the
rioters’.°? Within two days, the entire Petrograd garrison of 170 000 troops had
mutinied.

Formation of an alternative government

The main institutions of government now crumbled. The Council of Ministers ceased
to meet. After Nicholas closed the Dumaon the twenty-seventh, a group of leaders from
all parties continued to meet illegally in an effort to control the situation. The first
Provisional Government emerged from this group of Duma politicians a week later.
‘The liberals had attempted to avoid a revolution at any cost during the war, but when
the revolution became a reality, their goal was not to crush it but to contain it.’*
On the evening of 27 February, a group of leftwing socialist intellectuals and worker
representatives on the War Industries Committee summoned a meeting of the
Petrograd Soviet. This had not met since the government had closed it down in
December 1905. Within hours, delegates assembled from the suburbs and factories
and from troop units in the capital. Soon the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and
Soldiers’ Deputies (to give its full title), was acting as a second alternative government.
It met in the same building as the Duma, the magnificent Tauride Palace, originally
built for the lover of Catherine the Great, Prince Potemkin. On 3 March, V. N.
Kokovtsov, a member of the State Council who had just been arrested by the Soviet,
described the scene in the palace:

Even the most vivid imagination could not picture what was taking place within the
Tauride Palace. Soldiers, sailors, university students of both sexes, nondescript
upon
persons by the score, deputations to see someone, anyone, orators perched
tables and chairs shrieking unintelligibly, arrested persons like me escorted by
to
guards, .. . orderlies and unknown persons transmitting some sorts of orders
all wandered
someone, a steady hum ofvoices! It was bedlam. And in the midst of it
members of the Duma.”

This ordered all

The chaos was not total. On 1 March the Soviet issued Order No. 1.
and file to its meetings and
troop units to send representatives from the rank
y of the Soviet, ‘in all political
demanded that troops submit themselves to the authorit
troops of the
matters’. By doing this, the Soviet asserted its control over the garrison
of the army.
capital, thereby bypassing the normal command structure
166 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Abdication
Meanwhile, the tsar himself tried to return from army headquarters in Mogilev.
However, striking railway workers diverted his train to the ancient city of Pskov. This
was the headquarters of General. Ruzsky, commander of the northern front. Here the
tsar consulted with the army High Command. General Alekseev, the army chief of staff,
argued that the army could not suppress the Petrograd insurrection, for any attempt
to do so would simply spread disaffection within the army. He advised that the tsar had
to resign if the army was to continue fighting at the front.

The situation apparently does not permit of any alternative solution, and every
minute’s hesitation only serves to reinforce these demands, which are based on the
fact that the army’s existence and the work of the railways are actually dependent
on the Petrograd Provisional Government. The army in the field must be saved from
disintegration.*°

Most other front commanders supported Alekseev. Indeed, some had already
contacted members of the Duma about the possibility of removing the tsar. As in
October 1905, Nicholas waited until even the army cracked before backing down. One
last blow clinched his decision: the news that the old capital, Moscow, had also fallen.**
Late in the evening of 2 March, while still in General Ruzsky’s train at Pskov,
Nicholas II abdicated. His manifesto of abdication transferred power to his brother,
the Grand Duke Mikhail Aleksandrovich. The next day, on 3 March, the Grand Duke
announced that he would not accept the throne. He transferred power to the
provisional committee of the Duma, on condition that it transfer sovereignty as soon as
possible to an elected constituent assembly. These decisions marked the end of just
over three centuries of Romanov rule. The birth of the Romanov dynasty had marked
the end of one Time of Troubles; its death marked the beginning of another.

COULD THE TSARIST GOVERNMENT HAVE SURVIVED?

By 1914, there were two basic types of political division in Russia. One was the division
between Russia’s upper classes and the working class majority. The other division was
between the majority of the ruling group and its traditional leader, the tsar. A Russian—
American historian, Leopold Haimson, describes the two divisions as follows: ‘By July,
1914, along with the polarization between workers and educated, privileged society...
a second process of polarization—this one between the vast bulk of privileged society
and the tsarist regime—appeared almost equally advanced’.*°
At times, such as during the October 1905 general strike, divisions within the ruling
group appeared even deeper than those between the ruling group and the working
classes. In October 1905, the whole of Russian society appeared united in its opposition
to the tsar. The collapse of this temporary class alliance after October 1905 revealed
the weakness of the revolutionary coalition. The willingness of most educated Russians
to support the new constitutional order, despite the government’s obvious disdain for
constitutional politics, reflected their growing fear that a violent revolution might lead
to chaos and anarchy. Unless checked, any abrupt change of government might sweep
 THE FINAL DECADE OF TSARIST RULE AND THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION 167

away the entire structure of privilege on which the position of Russia’s educated classes
rested.
A clear understanding of the dilemma of Russia’s educated elite suggests that the
February Revolution could have been avoided. As Maklakov’s parable suggests, there
remained, even in 1916, a willingness within the upper classes to rally around the tsar,
if only he could bring himself to create a genuinely constitutional government. If the
tsar had been willing to accept the demands of the Progressive Bloc, this would have
greatly narrowed the gulf within the ruling group. The Progressive Bloc, whose
members now dominated much of the Russian press, would have swung the media
behind the government and behind the war effort. A Progressive Bloc ministry would
also have improved the conduct of the war. There was much political and commercial
expertise within the Duma leadership. Besides, members of the Progressive Bloc
already played a crucial role in supplying the armies, through their own business
operations and through organisations such as the War Industries Committee. When
discontent did break out in the towns, as it almost certainly would have sooner or later,
the demonstrators would have faced a united ruling class, unwilling to support a
change of government. The history of 1917 would have been very different.
But Nicholas was incapable of seeing this alternative. By February 1917, he had
alienated the only groups in the empire who might have been able to rescue him. In
doing so, he had prevented the emergence of a stable bourgeois government. His
failures as a politician help explain why, when the revolution finally came in 1917, it
swept away not only the autocratic government, but the whole traditional ruling group
of Russia. Ever since the emergence of Russia’s traditional autocratic political system,
this had been its weak point. Leaders had great power. But if they did not know how to
use their power properly they could threaten the future of the entire ruling group. In
the Soviet period, the same rules would apply, but in even more violent circumstances.

Questions for discussion

1 What policies should the government have adopted between 1906 and 1914?
9 How secure was the Russian government in 1914? Who supported it? Who opposed
it?
3 How did war undermine the Tsarist government? Could the government have used
the war to build up greater support? Or did the war create insoluble problems for
the government?
n?
To what extent can Nicholas II be blamed for the February Revolutio

Why did the final collapse come in Petrograd rather than at the front?
What were the major dilemmas facing liberal politicians during the war?
ce
S&S
SS
& What were the major problems facing Russian urban workers and Russian peasants
during the war?
168 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Further reading
See bibliography:
Kochan, Russia in Revolution
Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation
Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire
Suny & Adams (eds), The Russian Revolution

In addition:
York, 1931
M Florinsky, The End of the Russian Empire, Collier Books, New
sworth, 1990
M Ferro, Nicholas II The Last of the Tsars, Penguin Books, Harmond
1976
N Stone, The Eastern Front: 1914-17, Hodder & Stoughton, London,
n Universit y NJ, 1980
Press, Princeton,
A Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, Princeto

Endnotes
1990, p 107
1 M Ferro, Nicholas II The Last of the Tsars, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth,
Times to 1917, 3 vols, Yale
2 GVernadsky, et al (eds), A Source Book for Russian History from Early
University Press, New Haven, Conn, 1972, vol 3, p 773
1971, p 127
G Katkov, et al (eds), Russia Enters the Twentieth Century, Methuen, London,
2nd edn, vol 1, Mysl’, Moscow, 1974,
S P Trapeznikov, Leninizm i agrarno-krest yanskii vopros,
p 186
1983, p 55
D CB Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War, Macmillan, London,
’, cited from
L Haimson, ‘The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917
p 359
M Cherniavsky (ed), The Structure ofRussian History, Random House, New York, 1970,
Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 3, p 831
CO ibid, p 797
H Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire: 1801-191 7, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1967,
p 700
10 Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 3, p 835
11 M T Florinsky, The End of the Russian Empire, Collier Books, New York, 1961, p 209
12 ibid, pp 214-15
13 J N Westwood, Endurance and Endeavour, Russian History 1812-1980, 2nd edn, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1981, p 186
14 Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, p '720
15 N Stone, The Eastern Front: 1914-1917, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1976, p 296
16 Even this claim depended on some accounting sleight-of-hand. Bark’s report is reprinted
in Krasnyi arkhiv, 1926, vol 17 (4), pp 51-69
Lyi Florinsky, The End of the Russian Empire, p 44
18 D N Voronov, O samogone, Moscow-Leningrad, 1929, p 6
tS Florinsky, The End of the Russian Empire, p 46
20 Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 3, pp 867-8
ral ibid, p 876
ry G Katkovy, Russia 1917, The February Revolution, Fontana/Collins, London, 1969, pp 249-51
23 Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 3, p 870
26 cited in S Smith, ‘Petrograd in 1917’, in D H Kaiser (ed), The Workers’ Revolution in Russia,
1917 The View from Below, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, p 61
25 Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 3, p 878
26 ibid, p 879
ra Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, p 725
28 A Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1980,
pp 157-8
THE FINAL DECADE OF TSARIST RULE AND THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION 169

29 ibid, p 136.
30 L Kochan, Russia in Revolution, 1890-1918, Granada, London, 1966, p 192
31 T Hasegawa, The February Revolution: Petrograd 1917, University of Washington Press, 1981,
p 584
32 Vernadsky, Source Book, vol 3, p 883
33 Katkov, Russia 1917, p 441
34 Hasegawa, The February Revolution, p 490
35 Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability’, p 360
 CHAPTER SEVEN

1917

In February 1917 the autocracy fell. Yet the traditional ruling group, though weakened
and leaderless, survived. It continued to dominate the economy, the army and the new
government. In October the ruling group itself lost control of the government. In its
place there appeared a new ruling group. This claimed to represent Russia’s industrial
workers and peasants, though most of its leaders belonged to the radical intelligentsia.
They created the first communist government ever formed. In doing so, they set
Russian and World history off on new and unmapped paths. Why and how did these
momentous changes take place?

THE FORMATION OF THE PROVISIONAL

GOVERNMENT
By 3 March, two alternative revolutionary governments had appeared. Each had its own
supporters within Russian society. Each also controlled the elements of a coercive
machinery of power.

The new government

On 1 March the provisional committee of the Duma formed itself into a Provisional
Government. It immediately chose a new Council of Ministers. Its chairman was a
wealthy landowner, aristocrat and zemstvo lead-
er, Prince G. E. L’vov (1861-1925). Milyukov
became foreign minister. Guchkov became
minister of war. A. I. Konovalov (1875-1948),
became minister of trade. Finally, A. F.
Kerensky (1881-1970), a lawyer and member of
the moderate socialist Trudovik party, became
minister of justice. Landowners, industrialists,
intellectuals and members of the radical
intelligentsia—this was a representative cross-
section of Russia’s changing ruling group.
1917 171

It was to this group that Grand Duke Mikhail Aleksandrovich surrendered supreme
power on 3 March, ‘until the Constituent Assembly. . . shall by its decision on the form
of government express the will of the people’. The formal transfer of power gave the
Provisional Government legitimacy in the eyes of educated Russians. This secured the
loyalty of those who staffed the traditional Tsarist machinery of power—army
commanders, government officials and police. However, indiscipline in the army and
the desertion of many police officials during the February uprising had sapped the
power of the old coercive machinery.

The Petrograd Soviet

Simultaneously, there emerged a second alternative government, the Petrograd Soviet.
Most of its leaders came from the moderate socialist parties, the Mensheviks and
Socialist Revolutionaries. The Soviet rapidly gained the allegiance of most of the
Petrograd working class. On 1 March, it issued its famous Order No. 1. This required
that troops obey only those orders which did not conflict with the orders of the Soviet.
Soon the Petrograd Soviet secured the allegiance of most of the troops in the capital,
and within weeks Soviets sprang up throughout the country. In June, when the first
All-Russian Congress of Soviets met in Petrograd, it included representatives from at
least 350 local Soviets. Simultaneously, soldiers’ committees began to appear at the
front. These local institutions gave the Petrograd Soviet the rudiments of a new, and
largely working class, machinery of power reaching across the entire country. In March,
this machinery was still ill-organised and unreliable, but it gave the Soviet enough
power to impose its will within the capital.
At this stage, the Soviet had more real power than the Provisional Government.
Guchkov, the new minister of war, wrote on 9 March: “The Soviet . . . has in its hands
the most important elements of real power, such as the army, the railways, the posts
and telegraphs. It is possible to say flatly that the Provisional Government exists only as
long as it is allowed by the Soviet’.! If it had wanted to, the Soviet could have seized
power on its own, at least in the capital. Yet the Soviet did not take power. Why not?
Ideological and psychological pressures both encouraged restraint. Most socialist
leaders believed that Russia was too backward for a socialist revolution. They
remembered that even Marx had warned against trying to build Socialism without the
necessary preconditions. Capitalism, they believed, still had much work to do before

Informal meeting offront-line soldiers early in I 917. Such

meetings were the origins of the soldiers’ Soviets which played a
crucial role in the February and October revolutions.
172 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Socialism could be built in Russia. Meanwhile, Russia needed the bourgeoisie, who at
least had the skills and experience necessary to keep the economy running. The
following document comes from the memoirs of a prominent Menshevik and one of
the Soviet’s early leaders, N. N. Sukhanov.

Document 7.1: Sukhanov on the Soviet’s decision not to take power

The epoch of worldwide imperialist war could not but culminate in world-wide Socialist
revolution. . . [But] though our revolution had been consummated by the democratic masses
it lacked both the material power and the indispensable prerequisites for an immediate
Socialist transformation of Russia. We could only construct a Socialist society against the
background of a Socialist Europe and with its help. But as for the consolidation of abourgeois
dictatorship in the present revolution—that was quite out of the question. .. .
The Soviet democracy had to entrust the power to the propertied elements, its class
enemy, without whose participation it could not now master the technique of administration
in the desperate conditions of disintegration, nor deal with the forces of Tsarism and of the
bourgeoisie united against it. But the conditions of this transfer of power had to assure the
democracy of a complete victory over the class enemy in the near future.
Consequently, the gist of the question was whether propertied Russia would consent to
take power in such conditions, and the task consisted of compelling it to embark on this
risky experiment as the least of the evils lying before it.”

These were the ideological arguments for restraint. However, psychological factors
may have been equally important. Most socialist leaders came not from Russia’s
working classes but from its educated elite. Only sevenout of the forty-two members of
the Soviet’s first Executive Committee were workers. The rest were intellectuals.
Despite their radical political beliefs, most socialist leaders shared the culture and |
outlook of Russia’s upper classes and feared that a working class revolt in backward
Russia ¢
could lead only to anarchy.
The events of the next few decades showed that these fears had some pass. However,
they also raised immediate problems of tactics and strategy. In 191’
between their radical socialist ideals and their cautious politi
Revo itionariess and Mensheviks, who ¢ dominated the revived Pe
extremely dif
a ta it
enjoyed at the erie of the year.

Dual power
In pursuit of a stable bourgeois government, the Soviet had to compromise with the
emerging Provisional Government. The delicate negotiations between the Soviet and
the Provisional Government took place in the corridors of the Tauride Palace on 1
March, as Kerensky, the only member of both institutions, moved between the two
wings of the palace with proposals and counter-proposals.
In return for supporting the Provisional Government, the Soviet made demands of
its own. It demanded a general amnesty; the granting of basic civil liberties even to
soldiers; the abolition of all legal disabilities based on class, religion and nationality;
the right of labour to strike and to organise; and the summoning of a Constituent
Assembly. These demands were similar to those of the ‘Liberation’ Movement of 1905.
 1917 173

They were also similar to the program of the wartime Progressive Bloc in the Duma. So
the members of the Provisional Government had little difficulty in accepting them.
Members of the Soviet made no effort to demand more basic social changes. They did
not mention land redistribution, or the nationalisation of large industrial enterprises.
Indeed, such demands were unrealistic and inappropriate while the leaders of the
Soviet hoped to cooperate with a government of the ‘bourgeoisie’.
These negotiations laid the basis for what came to be known as ‘dual power’,
dvoevlastie. This was an alliance of the Provisional Government and the Petrograd
Soviet. Together, they formed an uneasy coalition of institutions and classes, claiming
to represent both Russia’s traditional elites and its workers and peasants. ‘Dual power’
recreated the fragile coalition of forces that had nearly brought the Tsarist government
down in October 1905. In principle, the new government had enough support to
create genuinely democratic institutions for the first time in modern Russian history.
But was democratic government possible in a country where the gulf between upper
classes and working classes was so profound? Would ‘Dual Power’ prove any less fragile
in 1917 than it had in 1905?

How powerful was the new government?

In March each part of the awkward coalition contributed its own supporters and its
own machinery of power. Russia’s traditional elites mostly supported the Provisional
Government. So did the remnants of the Tsarist bureaucracy and the High Command
in the army. The Soviet had the support of urban workers and peasants. It also gained
the loyalty of the Soviets which sprang up in the towns and villages and at the front.
The factory committees which appeared in large industrial enterprises also supported
the Soviet. Both elements in the new coalition benefited from the universal relief at
the downfall of the autocracy. The new government could therefore count on a
honeymoon period during which it would enjoy the support of most Russians.
These were immense political assets. Yet within eight months the power of the
Provisional Government/Soviet coalition had shrivelled to nothing. How did this
happen?

DECLINE OF THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT

Tsarist political system as the
In previous chapters, I have described the decline of the
the traditional
result of two opposite processes. These were: growing disunity within
groups. Similar processes
ruling group, and the increased organisation of opposition
and the changes that
also occurred in 1917, but they were speeded up. To underst
s, events and leaders that did
occurred in 1917 we must concentrate on those program
most to organise some social groups and disorganise others.
of the Provisional
There were two crucial processes. The first was the decline
ive, working class government led
Government. The second was the rise of an alternat
processes were intertwined.
by the Bolshevik Party and based on the Soviets. The two
them separately.
However, for the sake of clarity, I will discuss
adopting policies that
The Provisional Government hastened its decline by
social support.
undermined both its machinery of power and its
174 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

The machinery of power

Dismantling the bureaucracy
As the agreement between the Soviet and the Provisional Government showed, it was
liberal principles that united_the two elements of the ‘dual power’. With the end of
a aati torce must give way to government by
consent. On 26 April, the new government declared that ‘the power of the state should
be based not on violence and coercion, but on the consent of free citizens to the power
they themselves created’.* This meant that the government should rule not through a
coercive machinery, but with the consent of the population. But was this possible in a
society as divided as wartime Russia and without any traditions of democracy?
The government took its program seriously. It announced freedom of religion and
the press, which deprived it of control over much of the machinery of persuasion. Even
riskier was the government’s decision to dismantle important components of the
traditional machinery of coercion. Within two months it had dismantled two key
institutions of Tsarist government. It replaced the Tsarist system of police with a
‘people’s militia’, and the provincial governors with elected zemstvos.
Though admirably democratic, these measures made it difficult for the government
to enforce its orders in the provinces. Power slipped from local officials into the hands
of the local population. “The peasant revolution . . . destroyed piecemeal the old state
apparatus in the countryside—the provincial governors, the district zemstva, the volost’
administration . . . the land captains, and the police officials. . . It replaced them with
a network ofad hoc peasant committees (and later soviets), elected by the communal
or village assembly.’ By the middle of 1917, the Provisional Government no longer
controlled the countryside.

Disintegration of the army

Revolution accelerated the breakup of the army. As in 1905, the collapse of the Tsarist
government persuaded many soldiers that they need no longer obey their officers. The
Soviet’s Order No. 1 encouraged this belief. Though aimed at the garrison troops in
the capital, it soon applied to rank and file soldiers even at the front. Soldiers began
electing soldiers’ committees or ‘Soviets’, which reserved the right to reject officers’
orders. Under the agreement between the Soviet and the Provisional Government, the
new government also abolished the death penalty at the front. The ending of
censorship led to an increase in anti-war propaganda within the army, and rumours of
a land redistribution convinced soldiers from rural areas that they had to return home
quickly to get their share of land. Under these conditions, it was extremely difficult for
officers to maintain discipline. The supply situation also worsened as discipline broke
down in the munitions factories of cities such as Petrograd.
These problems would have mattered less if the new government had intended to
make peace with Germany. However, most leaders of the new government had agreed
to the abdication of the tsar in the hope of improving the army’s fighting capacity. Far
from ending the war, the Provisional Government intended to fight it more
energetically. Amongst Russia’s working population this was an extremely unpopular
decision. In late April the government learned the extent of popular anti-war feeling
when its foreign minister, Milyukov, announced that his government would continue
fighting until it could reach a ‘just peace’. His declaration provoked massive anti-war
demonstrations in the capital. These persuaded Milyukoy to resign, together with the
 1917 175

minister of war, Guchkov. In June the government tried to rouse patriotic feelings with
a huge military offensive on the Galician front. However, this merely showed the extent
of anti-war sentiment within the army. Soldiers told General Brusilov, the commander
of the offensive: ‘What we want is to return home and enjoy freedom and land. Why
should we go on being wounded?’. Many officers did not know until they attacked
whether their men would follow them into battle.’
By July 1917, the government no longer had a reliable army or a trustworthy
machinery of local government. The weakened machinery of power it had inherited
in March could no longer maintain the government’s authority. To survive, the
government would have to depend on popular support.

Social support
Yet it alienated its supporters too. The new government hoped to rule with the support
of all sections of Russian society. To do so, it would have to offer a program that satisfied
both the upper class supporters of the Provisional Government and the working class
supporters of the Soviet. In reality, the deep divisions within Russian society made it
impossible to construct such a program. By trying to do so, the government merely
alienated both groups. The interests of upper class and working class Russians
conflicted at so many points that policies that pleased one group inevitably alienated
the other. M. T. Florinsky, a Russian historian who fought during the war, writes: “The
conflict between the attitude
rr
of the masses
a
and that of the educated classes . . . was
was no room for compromise between the two
fundamental, insoluble, fatal . _. There
had to
points of view, and theconfl befought out to itsbitter end’
ict
argument are bleak. It implies that democratic
The implications of Florinsky’s
government was impossible in wartime Russia, for it was impossible to rule with the
support of both upper and lower classes. All the key political issues of 1917—war, land,
industrial relations and the Constituent Assembly—illustrate the truth of Florinsky’s
judgement.

The upper classes

The government lost upper class support because it failed to protect their property, to
maintain order, or to prosecute the war successfully.
to defend
In the countryside, the abolition of the Tsarist police made it impossible
landowners’ property from peasant attacks. All too often, the hastily organised
‘people’s militias’ sided with the peasants who supplied most of their recruits. In any
case the government’s vague pronouncements on the land problem seemed to
condone land seizures. These began to spread rapidly in April. In March the police
in July, in 325.’
reported peasant disorders in thirty-four districts; in April, in 174; and
Given the momentousness of these events, the massive land expropriations of 1917
were surprisingly orderly.

ce
Document 7.2: land seizures in 1917 in Samara provin
of the autumn or spring
The majority of the estates were expropriated just before the start
to place under the control of the
sowing. A general gathering of the peasants resolved
time, the peasants assembled their
commune all or part of the estate property. Ata selected
with guns, pitchforks,
carts in front of the church and moved off towards the manor, armed
176 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

axes, and whatever came to hand. The squire and his stewards, if they had not already fled,
were arrested and forced to sign a resolution placing the property of the estate under the
control of a village committee. The peasants loaded on to their carts the contents of the
barns and led away the cattle, excepting the property which had been left for the use of the
landowner and his family. Pieces of large agricultural machinery, such as harvesters and
winnowing machines, which the peasants could not move or could not use on their small
farms, were usually abandoned or destroyed. The Saratov provincial land department left a
vivid account of this plundering of the estates in December 1917:
‘Yesterday, 26 January, at 12 noon the entire commune of Kolybelka, led by the chairman
of the village committee, appeared at my khutor. They arrested me and my family, as well as
two policemen who happened to be at my house, and left a guard with us with a warning not
to go out of the house. They also placed armed guards around my farm and made threats to
my labourers. Then they took away all my grain and seed, except forty pud of rye, and locked
up my barns. | asked them to weigh the grain they had taken, but they refused as they loaded
up their fifty-six carts until they were overflowing ... That night some of the peasants
returned, broke the lock on the barn and took away my scales and tubs with weights of five
pud measure.”®

Traditional power structures also crumbled in the army and in industry. The Soviet’s
Order No. 1, and the abolition of the death penalty at the front, had reduced the
authority of officers. In industry, concessions to labour, such as the eight-hour day and
the recognition of factory committees, undermined profitability and labour discipline.
In May, the industrialist A. I. Konovalov predicted economic disaster.

Document 7.3: Konovalov on the economic crisis

The normal working of industrial enterprises has been seriously interrupted and the energy
of the nation must be marshalled to overcome the economic disintegration, to prevent
economic ruin overtaking the country, and to adequately defend the country. When we
overthrew the old regime we believed absolutely that freedom would bring about a great
expansion of the productive forces of the country. Now it is not a question of thinking about
developing productive forces, but of making every effort to protect [industry] . . . from total
ruin. And if the confused minds do not see reason soon, if people do not realise that they are
sawing off the branch they are sitting on, if the leaders of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’
Deputies do not manage to control the movement and to guide it into the channels of
legitimate class struggle, then scores and hundreds of enterprises will close down. We shall
experience the complete paralysis of national life and shall embark upon a long period of
irreparable economic disaster when millions will be unemployed, without bread, without a
home, and when the crisis will affect one branch of the economy after the other, bringing
with it everywhere death, devastation, and misery, partly ending credit and producing financial
crises and everyone’s ruin.’

By the summer, landowners, army officers and entrepreneurs began to think that
strong government might be preferable to democratic government, particularly in
time of war. Many believed the Provisional Government had moved too far to the left.
The changing composition of the government reinforced these fears. In April,
Milyukov, the leader of the Kadet party, and Guchkoy, the leader of the Octobrist party,
 1917 177

had both resigned. Intensive negotiations with the Soviet led to the appointment of
socialist members of the Soviet to the new cabinet. These included Victor Chernov (the
founder of the Socialist Revolutionary Party) and two Mensheviks. Meanwhile,
Kerensky, a socialist and a member of the Soviet, became the new minister of war.
Despite its socialist majority, the Petrograd Soviet was now playing an active role in a
government committed to retaining upper class support. Early in July, Prince L’vov
resigned as premier, and Kerensky took his place.
After the attempted Bolshevik coup early in July, the mood of Russia’s upper classes
underwent a sea-change. Members of upper class society lost their faith in the
Provisional Government and began to dream of a strong, unified government capable
of holding the Russian Empire together and preventing anarchy. Members of the
Kadet party began to adopt a frankly upper class perspective. In early August, the
industrialist P. P. Riabushinskii struck a sympathetic nerve at a conference attended by
many Kadets, when he said:

We ought to say. . . that the present revolution is a bourgeois revolution, that the
bourgeois order which exists at the present time is inevitable, and since it is
inevitable, one must draw the completely logical conclusion and insist that those
who rule the state think in a bourgeois manner and act in a bourgeois manner."

t Reed:
John
In September, a Russian journalist, Burtsey, told the American journalis
‘Mark my words, young man! What Russia needs is a Strong Man. We should get our
minds off the Revolution now and concentrate on the Germans’.'’ This more
authoritarian mood found a symbolic focus in the personality of General L. G. Kornilov
(1870-1918).
the
Kornilov, a strict military disciplinarian, had persuaded Kerensky to reintroduce
death penalty at the front on 12 July. On 16 July Kerensky made Kornilov commander-
in-chief of the army. Kornilov had the support of a newly formed Union of Army and
Navy officers. He also received financial backing from a committee of leading
financiers, which included Guchkov, and which hoped to overthrow the Soviets.
Prominent Kadets such as Milyukov and Rodzianko gave him their moral support.
in the
In August, Kornilov spoke in Moscow of the need to re-establish discipline
illustrated the
rear as well as at the front. The reception he received in Moscow
resurgence of rightwing feeling among Russia’s upper classes. Here is Trotsky’s
colourful and ironic account of Kornilov’s arrival in Moscow.

August 1917
Document 7.4: Trotsky on Kornilov’s reception in Moscow,
those from the Church
Kornilov ... was met by innumerable delegates—among them
from the approach ing train in their bright red
Council. The Tekintsi [his bodyguards] leapt
the platform. Ecstatic
long coats, with their naked curved swords, and drew up in two files on
this body-gua rd and the deputations.
ladies sprinkled the hero with flowers as he reviewed
the cry: ‘Save Russia, and a
The Kadet, Rodichev, concluded his speech of greeting with
were heard. Morozova, a millionaire
grateful people will reward you!’ Patriotic sobbings
out to the people on
merchant’s wife, went down on her knees. Officers carried Kornilov
his way—in the steps of the czars—to
their shoulders . . From the station Kornilov took
presence of his escort of Mussulmen
the lvarsky shrine, where a service was held in the
together with his portrait, was
Tekintsi in their gigantic fur hats ... Kornilov’s biography,
178 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

generously scattered from automobiles. The walls were covered with posters summoning
the people to the aid of the hero. Like a sovereign, Kornilov received in his private car
statesmen, industrialists, financiers. Representatives of the banks made reports to him about
the financial condition of the country.’

Unfortunately for his admirers, Kornilov proved as incompetent a politician as

Nicholas II. One supporter, the former army chief-of-staff Alekseev, said that Kornilov
had “a lion’s heart and the brains of asheep’.!’ When he tried a coup d’etat at the end
of August, he bungled it.

The working class

The Provisional Government alienated the left as thoroughly as it alienated the right,
though for opposite reasons. The key issues were war, land, industrial relations and
the Constituent Assembly.
Continuing to fight the war was dangerous, as most Russian peasants, workers and
soldiers had no desire to continue fighting. For peasants (and most soldiers were
peasants), the real issue was land. Yet on this issue the government refused to act, even
when the Socialist Revolutionary leader, Victor Chernov, became minister of
agriculture in May. The government argued that only the Constituent Assembly could
undertake so basic a redistribution of Russia’s resources. Peasants took the land
anyway, knowing the government could no longer stop them. Meanwhile, peasants in
the army deserted in increasing numbers to take part in the land repartition which they
knew would soon take place.
A Constituent Assembly might have solved some of these problems. Yet the
government claimed that wartime conditions made it impossible to hold elections for
a Constituent Assembly. Eventually it set up an electoral commission in May, and
promised elections for November. However, its hesitation on the issue had planted the
suspicion that a ‘bourgeois’ government was deliberately avoiding elections which
would certainly overthrow it.
The government also dithered on the issue of industrial relations and urban living
conditions. It had conceded the eight-hour day, the freedom to strike and to organise
unions, and the right to form factory committees. Yet as long as it devoted resources to
the war the government could do little to improve conditions in the factories, to
improve the supply situation, or to raise working class living standards. Real wages
fell
more rapidly than ever in 1917, as prices rose. In January 1917 prices were 300
per cent
of the 1914 level. By October 1917 they had risen to 755 per cent.'* Meanwhile, the
supply of food was no better than in March. The American journalist John Reed
described the situation in September and October.

Document 7.5: John Reed on the effects of inflation

Week by week food became scarcer. The daily allowance of bread fell from a pound
and a
half to a pound, then three-quarters, half, and a quarter-pound. Towards the
end there was
a week without any bread at all. Sugar one was entitled to at the rate of
two pounds a
month—f one could get it at all, which was seldom ... There was milk for
about half the
babies in the city; most hotels and private houses never saw it for months
. as
For milk and bread and sugar and tobacco one had to stand in queue long hours
in the
 1917 179

chill rain. Coming home from an all-night meeting | have seen the kvost [queues] beginning to
form before dawn, mostly women, some with babies in their arms.'°

In its efforts to supply the army, the government also angered workers by trying to
reimpose discipline in the factories. In August, industrial workers were treated to the
depressing spectacle of a Menshevik minister of labour, M. I. Skobelev (1885-1939),
reaffirming the right of management to dismiss workers, and forbidding factory
committees to meet during working hours. Skobelev announced that: ‘the task of every
worker before the country and the revolution is to devote all his strength to intensive
labour and not lose a minute of working time’.’®
Workers saw attempts to reimpose factory discipline as a form of class conflict. Some
factory committees tried to increase their control of factories in the belief that they
could run them more efficiently than their owners. Failing that, they tried to keep
factories running when their owners began to talk of closures. ‘It is very likely,’ warned
one speaker in August, ‘that we stand before a general strike of capitalists and
industrialists. We have to be prepared to take the enterprises into our hands to render
harmless the hunger that the bourgeoisie so heavily counts upon as a counter-
revolutionary force.’!” By backing employers in such conflicts, the Provisional
Government alienated its working class supporters as effectively as its more radical
measures had alienated the upper classes.
Finally, for workers and peasants, the Provisional Government lacked legitimacy.
The Soviet was ‘their’ government. As early as April, workers at the Puzyrev and Ekval’
factories declared:

The government cannot and does not want to represent the wishes of the whole
toiling people, and so we demand its immediate abolition and the arrest of its
members, in order to neutralize their assault on liberty. We recognize that power
must belong only to the people itself, ie. to the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’
Deputies as the sole institutions of authority enj oying the confidence of the people.”

By September the Provisional Government no longer had the active support of any
large section of society. Nor did it have the coercive machinery needed to impose its
will by force. By the time of its final collapse, the government no longer had real power.
Delivering the death blow proved all too easy.

POLITICAL ALTERNATIVES IN 1917

all classes pleased
The Provisional Government failed because its attempts to please
ive was a governm ent ruling with
no one. But what alternative was there? The alternat
or its working classes. Such a
the support of either Russia’s educated classes
ts. It would have
government would have to be willing to use force against its opponen
government of the right
to be relatively authoritarian. But would it be an authoritarian
(like the former Tsarist government) or of the left?
most likely, for Russia’s
At the time, the first possibility must have appeared the
govern ment of the right
upper classes were used to government. An authoritarian
180 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

would have meant a dictatorship (probably dominated by the military or a member of

the royal family), capable of protecting property, maintaining the powers of the army,
and suppressing working class discontent. In essence, this was the program of Kornilov
and his supporters. As Kornilov himself put it:

It is ime to hang the German agents and spies with Lenin at their head, to disperse
the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and scatter them far and wide .. . I
have no personal ambition, I only wish to save Russia, and will gladly submit to a
strong Provisional Government purified of all undesirable elements.’

Kornilov failed, but his mistakes, unlike those of the Provisional Government, were
tactical rather than strategic, for his aims were realistic enough. Russia had a long
tradition of rightwing authoritarian government, and during the Civil War several new
governments of this kind were to emerge.
The second alternative was an authoritarian government of the left. Such a
government would represent the interests of Russia’s working class population—
peasants, workers and soldiers. It would therefore represent the interests of most of
the population of the Russian Empire. In this sense, it would be far more democratic
than the traditional political systems of Russia and Europe.
Yet at the time this possibility must have appeared unlikely. There was no precedent
for such a government anywhere in the world. There had never existed a socialist
government, and few seriously believed a working class government would have the
competence to rule. Why was it this most unlikely outcome that triumphed in October
1917?

THE RISE OF A LEFTWING ALTERNATIVE

In March 1917 the idea that the Bolsheviks would be ruling the country a year later
appeared far-fetched. At that time, they were the smallest of the major socialist parties.
They had about 25 000 members, and only forty representatives among the 1500 or so
members of the Petrograd Soviet. None of their front-line leaders were in the capital.
Lenin was in exile in Switzerland.J. V. Stalin (1879-1953) and L. B. Kamenev (1883-
1936) were in Siberian exile. G. Y. Zinoviev (1883-1936) and N. I. Bukharin
(1888-1938) were also abroad. In February, even Lenin had said in a speech in
Switzerland, that revolutionaries of his generation would not live tosee the revolution.

the Provisional Government? The decline in the power of the Provisional Government
provides part of the answer. The gulf that existed between working class
and upper
class Russians is also part of the answer. But the critical element was the leadership
of
Lenin. Lenin created the Bolshevik party in 1903. He held it together during
the years
of exile. He gave it a political program that gained working class support.
Finally, in
1917, he provided decisive leadership at critical moments.
We will look first at the Bolshevik Party and its Leninist ideology. Then
we will
discuss the Party’s conduct in 1917.
 1917 181

Leninism
In the Soviet Union, Stalin transformed Lenin’s ideas into rigid dogmas. To
understand Leninism, we must shake off the dogmatic approach that sees his ideas as
either right or wrong. Instead, we will approach Lenin as one of many Marxists who
tried to apply Marx’ ideas to a country in which Capitalism barely existed. (On
Socialism and Marxism, see Chapters three and five.) What distinguished Lenin’s ideas
from those of other Russian Marxists, and gave
them such prestige even outside the Soviet
Union, is that they worked. They led to the
creation of a revolutionary government of the
working classes. Whether they succeeded in
creating a genuinely socialist society is another
matter, and one we will explore later.
At the time of the Bolshevik/Menshevik split
in 1903, two features distinguished Lenin’s
thinking. First, he had an exceptional com-
mitment to party discipline. Second, he
believed that intellectuals would provide most
of the leaders in a revolutionary working class
party. The 1905 revolution widened the split
amongst Russian Marxists, for it posed complex
problems of both tactics and strategy. It showed,
that even if one precondition for Socialism was
absent in Russia (a high level of productivity),
the other (a revolutionary proletariat) was
present. What should Marxists do in such a
situation? Should they support the further
development of Capitalism? Or should they use
the revolutionary energies of the proletariat to
8 a _ attempt an anti-capitalist revolution?
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1 870-1921), better known by his Marx himself offered few clear guidelines,
revolutionary pseudonym, Lenin. for in most of his writings he had assumed that
the two preconditions would arise together as
Capitalism evolved. He argued that capitalist
away the
societies had appeared through ‘bourgeois’ revolutions that had swept
Capitalism. Such
remnants of feudal society and laid the basis for a flourishing
in France in the
revolutions had occurred in England in the seventeenth century,
was Russia’s
eighteenth century, and in much of Europe in 1848. Presumably, 1905
‘bourgeois’ revolution.
is and socialist
Most Russian Marxists saw a clear distinction between the bourgeo
a long time in the
revolutions. They believed that the bourgeoisie would rule for
, Capitalism would flourish
interval between the two revolutions. During this interval
a socialist revolution.
and build up both the material and social preconditions for
routes, at the belief that in Russia the
However Lenin and Trotsky arrived, by parallel
in 1905 that the Russian
two revolutions would run into each other. Lenin argued
bourgeois revolution. Russian
bourgeoisie was too conservative to push for a radical ge
government that could encoura
entrepreneurs would prefer a strong, autocratic
democratic government.
economic growth, to a weaker, though more
182 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

The big bourgeoisie, the landlords, the factory owners, the ‘society” which follows
the ‘Liberation’ lead, . . . do not even want a decisive victory. We know that owing to
their class position they are incapable of waging a decisive struggle against Tsarism;
they are too heavily fettered by private property, by capital and land to enter into a
decisive struggle. They stand in too great need of Tsarism, with its bureaucracy,
police, and military forces for use against the proletariat and the peasantry, to want
it to be destroyed.”°

Therefore, he argued, it fell to the working classes of Russia to radicalise the

revolution. They would have to push the bourgeoisie into making radical political
demands that would speed up the development of Capitalism in Russia.
In 1905, the revolutionary energy of peasants and workers so impressed Lenin that
he began to envisage the creation of a working class government even during the
bourgeois revolution. His slogan in 1905 was: ‘A Revolutionary Democratic Dictator-
ship of the Proletariat and Peasantry’. This would not be a socialist government, but it
would be one in which Russia’s working classes played a dominant role.

While recognising the incontestably bourgeois nature of a revolution incapable of

directly overstepping the bounds of a mere democratic revolution our slogan
advances this particular revolution and strives to give it forms most advantageous to
the proletariat; consequently, it strives to make the utmost of the democratic
revolution, in order to attain the greatest success in the proletariat’s further struggle
for Socialism.?!
‘et how could a working class governmen
=
rule
t in a capitalist society? For a Marxist
this was a serious riddle. Most Russian Marxists resolved it by dismissing the prospect
of a working class government in a country as underdeveloped as Russia. This is why,
in March 1917, they supported the formation of a bourgeois government.
Trotsky and Lenin came up with a very different solution. They argued that a
working class government might emerge even in backward Russia. However, it could
survive only if its creation triggered revolutions in the more developed capitalist
countries of Europe. As early as 1905, Lenin wrote: ‘a revolutionary-democratic
dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry . . . will enable us to rouse Europe;
after throwing off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, the socialist proletariat of Europe will
in its turn help us to accomplish the socialist revolution’ .2?The conclusion was clear.
The duty of a Marxist party was not to support the bourgeoisie. It was to overthrow the
bourgeoisie, even in backward Russia. Revolutions would take place, not in distinct
stages, but as part of a continuous process, linking local bourgeois revolutions with
a
world-wide socialist revolution. To describe this process, Trotsky picked up ona phrase
Marx had used as early as 1850: ‘Permanent Revolution’.3
This line of argument led to a conclusion utterly different from that reached by the
moderate socialists. The Mensheviks argued that Capitalism barely existed in Russia.
Therefore Russia was not ready for a socialist revolution. Therefore Russia’s working
classes would have to live under a bourgeois government for a long period. Lenin
agreed that Capitalism barely existed in Russia. But he argued that the rest of Europe
was highly developed and ready for a socialist revolution. Therefore it was the duty of
Russia’s working classes to overthrow their own bourgeoisie and detonate a European
revolution. These different conclusions threatened to put Bolsheviks and Mensheviks
(and other moderate socialists) on opposite sides of the barricades.
 183
1917

These strategic differences implied different tactics and different programs. For the
moderate socialists, proletarian revolution was a distant dream. For the Bolsheviks it
was an immediate reality. They therefore took it seriously, and prepared for it carefully.
In the Bolshevik Party, they already had a revolutionary headquarters with the
traditional military commitment to discipline, unity and secrecy.
Lenin’s insistence on the imminence of a proletarian revolution in Russia also
implied a distinctive party program. The moderate socialists, believing that Capitalism
would exist for some time, had to devise programs compatible with Capitalism. It made
no sense to undermine the rights of bourgeois landlords or bourgeois factory owners
if they wanted Capitalism to flourish. So they could not promise the peasantry land.
Nor could they promise workers’ control over the factories. However the Bolsheviks
saw no need to compromise with a bourgeoisie they intended to overthrow. They could
therefore support workers’ control in industry, or peasant control of the land. For
Russia’s peasants and workers, such a program had much greater appeal.
The decision of the German Social Democratic Party to support the German
government in 1914 confirmed Lenin’s fear that, when the chips were down, moderate
socialist parties would support the bourgeoisie. From this time, Lenin saw the
moderate socialists as enemies, fighting for, rather than against the bourgeoisie. The
scale of the war also confirmed Lenin’s radicalism, for it persuaded him that the final
crisis of Capitalism had arrived. In a work published in 1916, Lenin argued that the
war arose from the growing conflicts between capitalists over colonial profits. As
Capitalism came to dominate world markets, the opportunities for easy profits would
vanish. Less developed societies would find it harder to develop Capitalism on their
own territory. For them, the only escape from colonial exploitation would be through
an anti-capitalist revolution. Meanwhile, imperialist capitalist powers would have to
fight each other for colonies and profits. The war marked the death agony of
Capitalism. A country like Russia, part-capitalist, part-colony, was where he expected
world Capitalism to crack.
By 1917, Lenin believed firmly that a period of world-wide socialist revolutions was
imminent. He also believed that a Russian revolution would play a key role in the world-
would
wide socialist revolution. However, he understood that the Russian revolution
until
not be a socialist revolution. It would be impossible to build Socialism in Russia
the triumph of revolution in the developed capitalist countries of Europe. At best, a
proletarian state might survive as an embattled fortress until revolution triumphed
rivalries:
elsewhere. In 1916, he wrote, in an eerie anticipation of Cold War

The development of Capitalism increases to the highest degree inequalities among

various nations ... From this fact an unchallengeable conclusion emerges;
of all
Socialism cannot triumph simultaneously in all countries. It will triumph first
or several countries, while the remainder, for some time, will remain
in one
but direct
bourgeois or pre-bourgeois in character. This will create not only conflict,
victorious
attempts on the part of the bourgeoisie of other countries to destroy the
necessary and just from
proletarian socialist state. In these circumstances, war will be
of other peoples
our perspective. This will be a war for Socialism, for the liberation
from bourgeois hegemony.”
yet be a classless
What sort of society would the revolution create? It would not
ions for Socialism.
society. Russia was too backward to do more than lay the foundat
had existed so far,
However, the new society would be more democratic than any that
184 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

as it would represent for the first time in history the interests of most Russians, rather
than those of a privileged minority. Lenin hoped to create a government based on the
social support of most Russians. Specifically, he believed the new government would
represent an alliance (or smychka) of peasants and proletarians. (Peasants used the
word smychka to describe the yoking together of oxen to pull a plough.) Though
democratic, such a government would still need a coercive apparatus, for it would face
both internal and external enemies. To fight them, a socialist government would have
to use whatever coercive methods it could devise. So even this government would need
to build and maintain a coercive machinery of power, and use it against its enemies.
To describe the type of government he expected to create, Lenin borrowed from
Marx the provocative label, ‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. He used this phrase
to describe a government representing the majority of the population (unlike all
previous governments), but prepared to use force to control the minority that still
opposed it.

The Bolshevik Party in 1917

When the tsar abdicated, Lenin had been in exile almost continuously since 1900,
apart from a brief return in 1905. After the fall of the autocracy, he negotiated
frantically to return through enemy country. Eventually the Germans, having decided
that Lenin’s return could only harm the Russian war effort, gave him safe passage to
neutral Sweden. From there, he entered Russia and arrived at Petrograd’s Finland
station on 3 April.
To his disgust, he discovered that the Bolsheviks in Petrograd had decided to
support the ‘bourgeois’ Provisional Government. The decision to do so was taken by
Stalin and Kamenev after they returned from Siberian exile in mid-March and assumed
control of Party affairs. On his arrival, Lenin issued what came to be known as the April
Theses. This is an immensely important document, for it contains an outline of the
strategy which, within seven months, was to bring the Bolsheviks to power. In the April
Theses, Lenin advocated the overthrow of the Provisional Government by the Soviets.
To achieve this, he offered a program designed to gain the support of workers,
peasants and soldiers. His program promised to end the war, to expropriate
landowners and capitalists, and to establish a working class government.

Document 7.6: Lenin’s April Theses

| In our attitude towards the war, which under the new government . . . unquestionably
remains on Russia’s part a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of that
government, not the slightest concession to ‘revolutionary defencism’ is permissible.
The class-conscious proletariat can give its consent to a revolutionary war, which
would really justify revolutionary defencism, only on condition: (a) that the power pass to
the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants aligned with the proletariat; (b)
that all annexations [i.e. all plans of the belligerent powers to annex the territory of
Opponents] be renounced in deed and not in word; (c) that a complete break be effected
in actual fact with all capitalist interests ...
The most widespread campaign for this view must be organised in the army at the
front...
2 The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from
1917 185

the first stage of the revolution—which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and
organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie—to its
second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest
sections of the peasants...
3 No support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be
made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of annexations .. .
4 Recognition of the fact that in most of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies our Party is ina
minority, so far a small minority . . .
As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticising and exposing
errors and at the same time we preach the necessity of transferring the entire state power
to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by
experience.
5 Nota parliamentary republic—to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of
Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step—but a Republic of Soviets of Workers’,
Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country ...
Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy. (The standing army to be
replaced by the arming of the whole people.)
6 ... Confiscation of all landed estates.
Nationalisation of all lands in the country, the lands to be disposed of by the local
Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. The organisation of separate
Soviets of Deputies of Poor Peasants...
8 It is not our immediate task to ‘introduce’ Socialism, but only to bring Socialism and the
distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.”

Despite his prestige, Lenin had to fight hard to get the Bolshevik leaders to accept
this radical program. An ex-Bolshevik, Bogdanoy, said of the speech in which Lenin
announced the new program: ‘This is the raving of a madman! It’s indecent to applaud
this claptrap!’.?° However, many rank and file workers and Party members shared
Lenin’s outlook, and his ferocious argumentation in Party committees, combined with
rank and file pressure, persuaded a Party conference early in May to adopt the April
Theses as official Party policy. This decision distinguished the Bolsheviks from all the
other socialist parties.
The decision to overthrow the Provisional Government meant that the Bolsheviks
had no need to court Russia’s upper classes. Freed from the need to compromise, the
Bolsheviks could promise land for the peasants, an end to the war, and improved
Soviet
supplies in the towns. These promises made fora simple, but attractive program:
power, plus bread, land and peace. Whether they could satisfy these demands was
another matter.
Lenin’s program gave the Bolsheviks a huge advantage in the search for working
class support. They picked up support in the factories and from the peasant-soldiers
who made up the bulk of army units in the towns and at the front. As the old coercive
of power in the
machinery collapsed these ordinary soldiers came to hold the balance
proletarians,
towns. In 1917, Lenin built his political strategy on this alliance of
that its
peasants and soldiers. The Party’s commitment to revolution also meant
This project gave the Party
members could concentrate on the task of seizing power.
an élan and a sense of purpose that the moderate socialists lacked.
k, but it is clear that
In the chaotic conditions of 1917 most statistics are guesswor
February the Bolsheviks
Bolshevik membership began to rise. The best guess is that in
186 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

had about 25 000 members, far fewer than either the Mensheviks or the Socialist
Revolutionaries. By May, they had the support of most factory committees in the
capital. In the same month, soldiers at the Kronstadt naval base, just outside Petrograd,
announced that they no longer recognised the Provisional Government, and placed
themselves at the disposal of the Soviet. Bolshevik support also increased in the army.
By June, the rise in Bolshevik strength was clear to everyone. The first All-Russian
Congress of Soviets met in that month. The Bolsheviks had 105 delegates; the
Mensheviks, 248; and the Socialist Revolutionaries, 285. Most delegates to the first
Congress of Soviets still refused to take seriously Lenin’s claim that the Bolsheviks were
willing to seize power. When he said the Bolsheviks were willing to take power, most
delegates laughed. However, in the same month, demonstrations called by the
Petrograd Soviet showed that the Bolsheviks were now a serious political force in the
capital. The Menshevik Sukhanov described the (to him) gloomy sight as follows:

Document 7.7: Sukhanov on the June demonstrations

But what was the political character of the demonstration?
‘Bolsheviks again,’ | remarked, looking at the slogans, ‘and there behind them is another
Bolshevik column. . .
Apparently the next one too,’ | went on calculating, watching the banners advancing
towards me and the endless rows going away towards Michael Castle a long way down the
Sadovoy.
‘All power to the Soviets!’ ‘Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers!’ ‘Peace for the hovels,
war for the palaces!’
In this sturdy and weighty way worker-peasant Petersburg, the vanguard of the Russian
and the world revolution, expressed its will. The situation was absolutely unambiguous. Here
and there the chain of Bolshevik flags and columns was interrupted by specifically SR [Socialist
Revolutionary] and official Soviet slogans. But they were submerged in the mass; they seemed
to be exceptions, intentionally confirming the rule. Again and again, like the unchanging
summons of the very depths of the revolutionary capital, like fate itself, like the fatal Birnam
wood—there advanced towards us: ‘All power to the Soviets!’ ‘Down with the Ten Capitalist
Ministers!”

In July, Trotsky and his small group of followers joined the Bolshevik Party. This
brought together the two revolutionary leaders most committed to an immediate
overthrow of Capitalism. They were the most determined, and perhaps the most
brilliant, of all Russian socialists. Together they were a formidable team.
So powerful was the groundswell of support that it carried the Bolsheviks further
than they wished. Lenin understood the danger of trying to seize power prematurely.
Such a move might provoke a rightwing reaction strong enough to crush the Bolsheviks
permanently. Yet on 3 July, pro-Bolshevik army units in the capital forced the Party,
against its better judgement, to support an attempted coup. The Provisional
Government still had the backing of loyal troops, and after two days of rioting pro-
government troops suppressed the revolt. The government arrested several Bolshevik
leaders, but Lenin and Zinoviev escaped across the Finnish border, a few kilometres
from the capital. Kerensky, the new prime minister, published documents claiming
that the Bolsheviks were receiving money from the German enemy, and support for
the Party plummeted.
 1917 187

At the time the ‘July Days’ looked like a disaster for the Bolsheviks. In reality the
damage was limited. A large core of supporters did not waver, and in mid-July the Party
even held a secret Party Congress in Petrograd. Besides, Russian society was as polarised
as ever. Early in August, when supporters of Kornilov gathered in Moscow, cab-drivers
refused to drive them from the station to the Bolshoi Theatre, and restaurant workers
refused to serve them.”®
Ironically, it was Kornilov who saved the Bolsheviks from obscurity. In July, Kerensky
appointed him commander-in-chief of the Russian armed forces. Late in August,
Kornilov ordered several cavalry units to march on Petrograd, apparently with the aim
of crushing the Petrograd Soviet and forming a military dictatorship. However, his
move was as ill-prepared as the Bolshevik insurrection ofJuly. In panic, Kerensky called
on the Soviet to help defeat Kornilov, and released Bolshevik leaders from prison to
help organise resistance. Railway workers diverted or delayed the trains carrying
Kornilov’s troops. As they waited on railway platforms, Kornilov’s soldiers listened to
the speeches of agitators sent by the Petrograd Soviet. These explained that Kornilov
was using the soldiers to crush the revolution. Many soldiers agreed not to move
further; Petrograd was saved; and Kornilov was arrested. It now appeared that the main
danger to the Provisional Government came from the right, and Bolshevik support
soared again.
Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were free to organise openly again, except for Lenin,
whom the government still planned to arrest. Early in September members of the
Petrograd Soviet supported a Bolshevik resolution demanding the transfer of power
to the Soviets. As a result, the Bolsheviks secured a majority on the Soviet executive
committee and could now claim to represent the majority opinion in the Petrograd
Soviet. A few days later, the Bolsheviks secured a majority in the Moscow Soviet.

THE OCTOBER INSURRECTION

Lenin, still in hiding, decided that this was the wave to ride. Signs of growing discontent
in the armies of other combatant countries convinced him that the wave of revolution
might
was Europe-wide. Capitalism was close to breakdown, so that a coup in Petrograd
trigger a world-wide revolution even if it failed in Russia. The issue was urgent. He
wrote to the central committee of the Party that the time was now ripe for a direct
transfer of power.

Document 7.8: Lenin on the need to prepare for insurrection

Without losing a single moment, [we must] organise a headquarters of the insurgent
detachments, distribute our forces, move the reliable regiments to the most important
arrest the
points, surround the Alexandrinsky Theatre, occupy the Peter and Paul Fortress,
the Savage
General Staff and the government, and move against the officer cadets and
approach the
Division—those detachments which would rather die than allow the enemy to
to fight the
strategic points of the city. We must mobilise the armed workers and call them
at once, move our
last desperate fight, occupy the telegraph and the telephone exchange
connect it by telephone
insurrection headquarters to the central telephone exchange and
all the points of armed fighting, etc.
with all the factories, all the regiments,
188 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Of course, this is all by way of example, only to illustrate the fact that at the present
moment it is impossible to remain loyal to Marxism, to remain loyal to the revolution unless
insurrection is treated as an art.””

As always, Lenin saw clearly that power was the issue. Success meant controlling the
communications network and getting the support of the Petrograd garrison. With their
support, the Party would have real political muscle in the capital.
However, the Party’s Central Committee in Petrograd was more cautious. Far from
accepting Lenin’s advice, they decided to ignore his letters. They had had their fingers
burnt in July, and had no desire to make the same mistake twice. In frustration Lenin
returned secretly to the capital. On 10 October, at a secret meeting of the Central

LS ee a ON cE
VASILEVS Ve. ea Palace7

YP Ee, | TION
Mil)
NN og
fi
ected ISTATION

Bc
Uf '
ELECTRICAL

SA\VCSTATION/
STATION oa
NX
TSARSKOYE SEL! (e)

O 2)>
a > A2

Ri
ae tHe / | 1
Figure 7.1 Petrograd during the October Revolution.
 1917 189

Committee, he bullied most of the Central Committee into supporting a coup.

However, their decision was still half-hearted. Two members, Kamenev and Zinoviev,
voted against the decision and publicised the fact in the press. The rest, except for
Trotsky, dragged their heels.
Preparations for the coup were rudimentary. The Bolshevik Party was more
disciplined than its opposition. However, as the behaviour of Kamenev and Zinoviev
showed, Lenin’s authority was by no means absolute. Nor did the Party have a coercive
machinery of its own, except for the Red Guards, a part-time militia formed mainly
from younger factory workers. This meant that success depended less on careful
military planning, than on working class support, particularly amongst the garrison
troops. With that support they might succeed; without it they would certainly fail. Social
support was the key to power. The crucial activity was, therefore, oratorical rather than
military, as Bolshevik leaders hurried from factory to factory and barracks to barracks
whipping up support for the Soviet.
By the middle of October everyone knew that a coup was in the air. Yet no one, not
even the Bolsheviks, knew when or how the crisis would break. Kerensky’s nerve broke
first. On 23 October, he ordered a unit of soldiers to close down the Bolshevik military
newspaper. Immediately, the Soviet called upon Red Guards and troops loyal to the
Soviet to resist this attack on its authority and reopen the presses. John Reed described
the frantic and chaotic atmosphere in the Soviet headquarters at Smolny (formerly an
elite girls school) at this critical moment.

Document 7.9: John Reed on Smolny during October

The massive facade of Smolny blazed with lights as we drove up, and from every street
converged upon it streams of hurrying shapes dim in the gloom. Automobiles and motor-
red
cycles came and went; an enormous elephant-coloured armoured automobile, with two
flags flying from the turret, lumbered out with a screaming siren. It was cold, and at the outer
gate the Red Guards had built themselves a bonfire. At the inner gate, too, there was a blaze,
down. The
by the light of which sentries slowly spelled out our passes and looked us up and
guns on each side of the doorway, and
canvas covers had been taken off the four rapid-fire
breeches. A dun herd of armoured cars
the ammunition-belts hung snake-like from their
illuminated halls
stood under the trees in the courtyard, engines going. The long, bare, dimly
... There was an atmospher e of
roared with the thunder of feet, calling, shouting
workers in black blouses and round
recklessness. A crowd came pouring down the staircase,
in rough dirt-
black fur hats, many of them with guns slung over their shoulders, soldiers
a leader or so—Lunach arsky,
coloured coats and grey fur shapki pinched flat,
talking at once, with harassed anxious
Kameniev—hurrying along in the centre of a group all
faces, and bulging portfolios under their arms.”

Bolshevik Party
The activities of the pro-Bolshevik troops were directed not by the
The Soviet had
itself, but by the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Soviet.
ad against counter-
created this body on 16 October, nominally to defend Petrogr
as the Mensheviks and
revolution. It was led by Trotsky and dominated by Bolsheviks,
twenty-third, in response to Kerensky’s
Socialist Revolutionaries refused to join. On the
utionary Committee appointed
attempt to close the Bolshevik press, the Military-Revol
These persuaded most
commissars, or representatives, to all troop units in the capital.
On the evening of the
units to obey them rather than the Provisional Government.
190 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Soldiers loyal to the Soviet government operating the Petrograd telephone exhange in October 1917.

twenty-fourth, under pressure from Lenin (who was still in hiding), the Military-
Revolutionary Committee directed Red Guards and loyal units of soldiers to seize the
key points in the city: the bridges, the railway stations, the central post office and the
central telephone exchange. There was hardly any resistance as they took over the
capital. That night, Lenin himself travelled by tram to Smolny and took charge of the
insurrection.
The final task was to seize the Winter Palace, where Kerensky and the ministers of
the Provisional Government were meeting. The palace was threatened by artillery from
the Peter-Paul Fortress across the River Neva and the guns of the battleship Aurora.
Eventually, pro-Bolshevik units stormed it
during the evening of 26 October. They
arrested all the members of the Provisional
Government except Kerensky, who had es-
caped in a car belonging to the United States
embassy. That evening Lenin confessed to
Trotsky his astonishment at what had
happened. ‘You know, from persecution anda
life underground, to come so suddenly into
power . . . es schwindelt [it makes you giddy]!’3?
The October uprising marked the final
collapse of the traditional Russian ruling group.
‘eer
‘The Bolshevik-led Soviet seized power despite
Guards ou tside the Soviet headquarters of Smolny in October
its weakness, because the existing government
1917.
was even weaker. John Reed wrote:

Wednesday, 7 November [25 October, Old Style], I rose very late. The noon cannon
boomed from Peter-Paul [the fortress opposite the Winter Palace] as I went down
the Nevsky. It was a raw, chill day. In front of the State Bank some soldiers with fixed
bayonets were standing at the closed gates.
‘What side do you belong to?’ I asked. ‘The Government?’
‘No more Government,’ one answered with a grin. ‘Slava Bogu! Glory to God!’
That was all I could get out of him.*?
 HOU 191

Questions for discussion

1 Who ruled the Russian Empire after the February Revolution?

2 What options did the Provisional Government have in March 1917? Did it fail to find
appropriate policies? What problems did it face?

3 How important was Lenin’s role in 1917? What were the most distinctive features of
Lenin’s brand of Marxism?
4 What role did the men and women of Petrograd play in the revolutions of 1917?
What role did the army play?
5 Was the October Revolution ‘inevitable’, as Soviet historians claimed?
6 What were the chances for the emergence of a viable liberal democracy in Russia in
1917?

Further reading
See bibliography:
Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution
Kochan, Russia in Revolution
History of the USSR
Lichtheim, Socialism
Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire

In addition:
York and London,
W H Chamberlain, The Russian Revolution: 1917-1921, 2 vols, Macmillan, New
1935
in Teaching History, vol
D Christian, ‘Lenin, October, and the role of the individual in history’,
14, no 4, 1981, pp 73-4
ke, 1977 & 1981
N Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought, 2 vols, MacMillan, London & Basingsto
Workers’ Revolution in Russia, Cambridg e Universit y Press, Cambridge, 1987
D Kaiser (ed), The
1968
R Pipes (ed), Revolutionary Russia, Doubleday, Cambridge, Mass,
1976
A Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, Norton, New York,
Victory, 3rd edn, Heath and Co,
R Suny & A Adams (eds), The Russian Revolution and Bolshevik
Lexington, Mass, 1990
Books, New York, 1932
L Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, 3 vols, Sphere

Endnotes
London, 1966, p 208
1 L Kochan, Russia in Revolution, 1890-1918, Granada,
Personal Record, ed and tr J Carmichael,
2 NN Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution: 1917. A
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1955, pp 104-5
‘The Political Thought of the First
3 From a declaration of 26 April. See L Schapiro,
ionary Russia, Doubleday & Co,
Provisional Government’, in R Pipes (ed), Revolut
Cambridge, Mass, 1967, p 123
192 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

4 O Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution 1917-1921, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1989, p 31
Kochan, Russia in Revolution, p 245
M T Florinsky, The End of the Russian Empire, Collier Books, New York, 1961, pp 228-9
Kochan, Russia in Revolution, p 238
Or Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War, pp 52-3. The quotation comes from an account ‘written in
COnwrIm

January 1918 by a small landowner in Samara district about the expropriation of his
farmstead (khutor)’. :
18 May 1917, from M McCauley (ed), The Russian Revolution and the Soviet State: 1917-1921,
Macmillan, London, 1975, p 67
10 W G Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917-
1921, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1974, cited from R Suny & A Adams (eds), The
Russian Revolution and Bolshevik Victory, 3rd edn, Heath & Co, Lexington, Mass, 1990, p 298
11 John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1966, p 50
12 L Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Sphere Books, London, 1967, vol 2, p 152
13 ibid, p 147
14 McCauley (ed), Russian Revolution, p 72
15 Reed, Ten Days, pp 37-8
16 Kochan, Russia in Revolution, p 253
VW From D Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure ofPower: From the July Days 1917 to
July 1918, MacMillan, London, 1984, cited from Suny & Adams (eds), Russian Revolution,
p 349
18 S Smith, ‘Petrograd in 1917’, from D Kaiser (ed), The Workers’ Revolution in Russia 1917,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, p 66
19 R Daniels, Red October, Scribner’s, New York, 1967, p 46
20 VI Lenin, Selected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971, p sl
21 ibid, p 107
22 ibid, p 103
23 Marx’s address to the ‘Communist League’ in 1850 concluded that ‘Permanent Revolution’
should be the ‘battle cry’ of the proletariat.
24 cited in R C Nation, Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy,
1917-1991, Cornell
University Press, Ithaca, 1992, p 6, from ‘The Military Program of the Proletarian
Revolution’
re) B Dmytryshyn, USSR: A Concise History, 2nd edn, Scribner’s, New York, 1971, pp 368-70
26 T Cliff, Lenin, Pluto Press, London, 1976, vol 2, pu2t
ai Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, pp 416-17
28 Diane Koenker, ‘Moscow in 1917’, in D Kaiser (ed), The Workers’ Revolution in Russia 191 Wp
p 85
29 Lenin, Selected Works, p 361
30 Reed, Ten Days, p 96
oil Trotsky, My Life, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1975, p 351
32 Reed, Ten Days, p 88
 CHAPTER EIGHT

CIVIL WAR AND THE ORIGINS

OF A NEW SOCIAL ORDER

NEW AND OLD

and fall of the
Chapters one to seven traced the emergence and then the decline
power.
traditional Russian ruling group. In October 1917 a new government claimed
claimed to represen t
Most of its leaders came from the radical intelligentsia, yet they
elite promised to
the peasants and workers of the Russian Empire. The new ruling
not of a
build an entirely new type of government that would serve the interests
privileged minority, but of the working class majority of society.
of most
The Bolsheviks believed that a mature socialist society, enjoying the support
. The state would simply ‘wither
of society, would not need to use systematic coercion
ks also understood
away’ in Friedrich Engels’s famous phrase. However, the Bolshevi
. To deal with them,
that in the immediate future they would face dangerous enemies
backwardness and
they would need a coercive machinery of some kind. Russia’s
and egalitarian society.
poverty would also make it difficult to build a truly democratic
e Socialism? How
How long would these problems delay the creation of a genuin
society would emerge during
long would the transition period last? And what type of
the transition to true Socialism?
e of the Bolshevik
The remaining chapters of this book will describe the outcom
iks could build Socialism, they had
experiment. They will argue that before the Bolshev
to face two other hurdles: political survival and economic backwardness. Sadly, the
them far from their original goals, forcing
solutions they found to these problems led
depressingly similar to that of Tsarist
them to build a society whose political culture was
Russia.
goals? What did they achieve?
How and why were they led so far from their long-term
ideals unrealistic?
Were their failures inevitable? Were their socialist
194 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

THE NEW SOVIET GOVERNMENT: THE FIRST SIX

MONTHS
Formally, it was not the Bolsheviks who led the October Revolution, but the Military-
Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. In this sense, the October
Revolution represented the belated assumption of power by the Soviet and those it
represented. The meeting of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on the
evening of the twenty-fifth confirmed this impression. The Second Congress met in
Smolny, the headquarters of the Petrograd Soviet, and the headquarters for the
uprising. Of 670 delegates, 300 were Bolsheviks. Another 193 leftwing Socialist
Revolutionaries allied with the Bolsheviks in support of the uprising. Altogether, more
than 500 delegates supported the creation of a socialist government. However, many
of these opposed the violent methods used to assume power.!
The Congress elected a new executive committee dominated by Bolsheviks and
leftwing Socialist Revolutionaries. This replaced the old executive committee elected
in June, which had been dominated by moderate socialists. During the night of 25-26
October, as pro-Soviet soldiers stormed the Winter Palace, Menshevik and rightwing
Socialist Revolutionary delegates to the Congress walked out in protest at the use of
armed force. This left the Bolshevik—Left Socialist Revolutionary coalition in charge of
a diminished Congress. For the moderate socialists, the walkout proved a fatal mistake.
As they left the room, Trotsky shouted contemptuously: ‘Go where you belong, to the
rubbish bin of history)’.
Early in the morning of the twenty-sixth, the Bolshevik Kamenev announced to the
Congress that the Winter Palace had fallen. Its fall meant the end of the Provisional
Government. All ministers had been arrested, except Kerensky who had escaped. The
Second Congress of Soviets now assumed power in the name of Soviets throughout the
former Russian Empire. The announcement came in a decree drafted by Lenin.

Document 8.1: the assumption of power by the Congress of Soviets, 26 October

1917 [Old Style]
To All Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants:
The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies has
opened. It represents the great majority of the soviets, including a number of deputies of
peasant soviets. ...
Supported by an overwhelming majority of the workers, soldiers, and peasants, and basing
itself on the victorious insurrection of the workers and the garrison of Petrograd, the
congress hereby resolves to take governmental power into its own hands.
The Provisional Government is deposed and most of its members are under arrest.
The Soviet authority will at once propose a democratic peace to all nations and an
immediate armistice on all fronts. It will safeguard the transfer without compensation of all
land—landlord, imperial, and monastery to the peasant committees; it will defend the
soldiers’ rights, introducing a complete democratization of the army; it will establish workers’
control over industry; it will insure the convocation of the Constituent Assembly on the date
set; it will supply the cities with bread and the villages with articles of first necessity; and it
will secure to all nationalities inhabiting Russia the right of self-determination.
The Congress resolves that all local authority shall be transferred to the soviets of
CIVIL WAR AND THE ORIGINS OF A NEW SOCIAL ORDER 195

workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ deputies, which are charged with the task of enforcing
revolutionary order...
Soldiers, Workers, Employees! The fate of the revolution and democratic peace is in your
hands!
Long live the Revolution!
The All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and Delegates from the
Peasants’ Soviets.”

The Congress immediately passed two more decrees drafted by Lenin. These dealt
with the issues of peace and land. The first proposed immediate negotiations to end
the war ‘without annexation and without indemnities’. The second abolished private
ownership in the land and allowed local peasant Soviets to take control of all private
lands. In effect the decree on land sanctioned the slow takeover of the land that had
already begun throughout the empire.
Finally, the Congress appointed a new government, the Soviet of People’s
Commissars, or Sovnarkom. Lenin became its chairman, and Trotsky its commissar
(minister) for foreign affairs.
Thus, it was as the dominant party of a government of Soviets that the Bolsheviks
first assumed power. As a result, the October Revolution gained the support not just of
Bolsheviks, but also of many others who saw it as a victory for the Soviets and for Russia’s
workers and peasants.

How powerful was the new government?

The government did not have a traditional machinery of power. There were no
bureaucrats, soldiers or police whose obedience it could take for granted. When the
new commissars entered the Tsarist ministries, most officials refused to obey them.
Clerks emptied ink wells; bank tellers refused to cash cheques; guards hid the keys to
offices and safes. They had good reason, for the new commissars had no experience of
government, and no formal right to issue orders. There was indiscipline even within
the Bolshevik Party. Not only did Kamenev and Zinoviev publicly oppose the October
insurrection, but Lenin himself disobeyed a Central Committee order to remain in
hiding until the insurrection had succeeded. Instead, risking arrest or assassination,
he travelled by tram to Smolny on the evening of the twenty-fifth. If such indiscipline
was possible at the very top of the Party, the discipline of distant provincial committees
and Soviets was even less certain.
The government’s lack of a reliable coercive machinery persuaded many that it
could not last more than a few days or weeks. Sukhanov argued that five hundred
disciplined troops loyal to the Provisional Government could easily have dispersed the
their
government in the weeks after October. Even Lenin and Trotsky knew that
government might go down as another heroic failure. They half expected it to suffer
the fate of the Paris Commune of 1871, whose working class government had lasted
decide the
only three months. Both believed that the international revolution would
of Soviets, Trotsky
fate of the Russian revolution. In a speech to the Second Congress
of Europe does not crush imperialism, we
put it bluntly: ‘If the rising of the peoples
will be crushed . . . that is unquestionable’.®
it to survive
However, the government had several sources of strength which helped
the crucial six months of its infancy.
196 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

In spite of its weakness, the new government wielded considerable coercive power
in the weeks after the October uprising. This coercive power rested not on the
discipline of a traditional army and bureaucracy, nor on popular support alone, but
on the support of groups of armed men. Most important of all were the garrison
soldiers in the capital and the major towns. Less important were the armed workers
organised in units of Red Guards. As long as it had the active support of these two
groups, the government could wield considerable force in the towns. In the weeks after
the Petrograd uprising it made free use of that force to spread the revolution
throughout Russia. Between October and December, town after town fell to Soviets
dominated by local Bolsheviks and supported by local troop garrisons. Where the
support of the troops was uncertain, as in Moscow, there were violent and bloody
clashes. Elsewhere, the transfer of power in the towns was surprisingly smooth.
Bolshevik influence in the countryside was insignificant. Very few Bolsheviks came
from rural areas and most village Soviets preferred the Socialist Revolutionaries to the
mainly urban Bolsheviks. In the anarchic conditions of late 1917, however, it was the
towns and the railways that held the keys to power, and by early 1918 the Bolsheviks
controlled both. The countryside remained a world apart, invaded but never
conquered by the armies that marched across it during the Civil War.

A government of the people

In the early months after October, the Bolsheviks, like the Provisional Government
before them, took seriously the aim of ruling through popular support rather than
through a machinery of power. They certainly used force—in the October uprising
itself and, as early as 27 October, to close down anti-Bolshevik newspapers. In
December, they created a new secret police institution, the Cheka, or All-Russian
Commission for Suppression of Counter-Revolution, Sabotage and Speculation.
However, the Bolsheviks did not yet start systematically building a new machinery
of power. During their first six months in power, the Bolsheviks relied on the
considerable support that the new government of Soviets enjoyed in the towns and
among the rank and file of the army.
During his months in hiding before October, Lenin had written the classic State and
Revolution. In this almost anarchistic essay, he argued that a socialist government would
not be a special organisation, separate from and above the people. On the contrary, it
would require the direct or supervisory participation of most members of the working
class population. In this sense, it would be the people. In the same way, its army would
be the people in arms.
After October, the government acted on these assumptions, partly out of conviction,
but partly because it had no other source of power. The land decree turned the
administration of the land over to village Soviets. On 14 November the government
granted to committees of workers control of the running of factories and enterprises.
The first Red Armies were militias. Their recruits were volunteers, their officers were
elected by soldiers councils, and they dispensed entirely with the hierarchy of ranks,
and the harsh discipline of traditional armies. The Bolsheviks hoped that Bolshevik
armies, like those of revolutionary France, would make up in revolutionary élan for
what they lacked in discipline and training. Working class democracy would triumph
over ruling class discipline.
The government also continued the process (well advanced by October) of
dismantling the old machinery of coercion. They abolished the old legal system,
and
CIVIL WAR AND THE ORIGINS OF A NEW SOCIAL ORDER 197

replaced it with a system of elected ‘people’s courts’. In early November, they abolished
the old class system, along with Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks. The old police and
bureaucracy disintegrated without any help. In November, the Bolsheviks declared an
armistice at the front. This led to the final collapse of the army, as peasant-soldiers
deserted en masse and the government began active demobilisation. Finally, the
decrees on land and on workers’ control of industry abolished the private property in
productive resources (above all, in land and capital), that had been the economic
foundation of the old ruling group. These decrees destroyed the power of the main
ruling classes of Tsarist Russia: the landed nobility and the moneyed bourgeoisie.
The Bolsheviks also began to carry out the long-established socialist commitment to
the emancipation of women. The Provisional Government had already granted women
the vote. The Soviet government abolished all forms of legal discrimination based on
sex, and its Marriage Code of 1918 gave married women complete legal equality with
their partners. It also made divorce easier. In 1920 the government legalised abortion.
By the standards of the time, this was remarkably advanced legislation.
Within the Bolshevik Party a special Women’s Department (Zhenotdel) was set up in
1919 under the direction of the most active Bolshevik feminist, Alexandra Kollontai
(1872-1952). Lenin and Trotsky wanted to mobilise women in support of the new
government. They also shared the traditional socialist belief that the building of
Socialism would emancipate women as women, not just as proletarians. Socialist society
would allow women to enter the paid workforce on equal terms with men. To do this,
socialist governments would have to provide extensive social services to free women
from domestic labour. However, Kollontai went much further than most Bolshevik
leaders in her commitment to sexual liberation and the abolition of the traditional
family.
In early 1918 the flimsy fabric of Soviet power rested almost entirely on the popular
support of key sectors of the population. The decrees on land and peace earned the
sympathy of most peasants and soldiers, and the decrees on factory control
consolidated urban working class support. Most important of all was the support of
those with guns: soldiers and Red Guards.
But working class support was not as total or as enthusiastic as the Party might have
wished. The peasants’ first loyalty remained to the Socialist Revolutionaries. This was
shown clearly when elections were held for the Constituent Assembly in November.
The Bolsheviks received only 9.8 million out of 41.7 million votes (twenty-four per
cent), and 168 out of 703 deputies (twenty-four per cent). The Socialist Revolutionaries
had 17.1 million votes (forty-one per cent) and 380 deputies (fifty-five per cent). The
left Socialist Revolutionaries (now allied with the Bolsheviks) had only thirty-nine
delegates. The new government also faced the hostility of those working class
organisations, such as the railway unions, which had opposed a violent overthrow of
the Provisional Government. By early 1918, many urban workers were already
disillusioned at the new government’s failure to halt the economic collapse that began
ingly:
In the early months of its existence the new government benefited from the
weakness and disorganisation of its opponents. The collapse of the old machinery of
power left the old ruling classes politically naked. They had neither the organisation
with which to replace the old coercive machinery, nor the popular support necessary
to undermine Bolshevik power. Sukhanov’s five hundred disciplined and loyal troops
(see p 195) simply did not exist. Few soldiers felt strongly enough to oppose a govern-
when he tried
ment that promised them so much, as Kerensky found late in October
198 POWER AND PRIVILEGE :

to rally Cossack units to retake Petrograd. Further, the conviction that the Bolsheviks
could not last long induced a lethargy in their opponents that prevented them from
organising effective resistance.

THE DRIFT TOWARDS CIVIL WAR

While the new government faced a disorganised enemy, it could survive on a wave of
urban working class enthusiasm. But as working class enthusiasm waned and its
enemies began to organise in earnest, the rules changed. The Bolsheviks now
discovered how desperately weak they were. To’'stay in power, they would now have to
impose their will on friends as well as foes. They would have to build a new coercive
machinery.

The German army

The Bolsheviks’ most dangerous enemy in the early months was the German army. Late
in November the Bolsheviks announced an armistice, and early in December peace
negotiations began at Brest-Litovsk. However, the Germans demanded so high a price
for peace that many Bolsheviks found their terms unacceptable. Early in February the
Bolshevik delegation, led by Trotsky, marched out of the negotiations, announcing

Victims offighting during the winter of 1917-18.

CIVIL WAR AND THE ORIGINS OF A NEW SOCIAL ORDER Ne

grandly that it would accept ‘neither peace nor war’. The German armies exploited
this foolish gesture to the full by advancing, unopposed, into Russian territory. The
realists in the government, headed by Lenin, rapidly agreed to even harsher peace
terms. On 3 March they signed the Treaty of Brest—Litovsk, which surrendered most of
the territory conquered by Russia since the seventeenth Century, including the Baltic
and Polish provinces, Georgia, Finland, and much of Ukraine. Along with sixty million
people, the treaty surrendered two million square kilometres of land, which had
provided almost a third of the Russian Empire’s agricultural produce.
This was a heavy price to pay. Still, many Bolsheviks believed that a German
revolution would soon render the treaty void. In any case, the treaty bought the
Bolsheviks a crucial breathing space. They used it to prepare for the encounter with
domestic opponents who, though weaker than the Germans, fought for higher stakes.
In March the Bolsheviks moved their capital from Petrograd to Moscow. Here it was
less vulnerable to attacks from the west. Meanwhile, their enemies began to organise.

Internal enemies
At the end of 1917 several army commanders, including Kornilov, Alekseev and
Denikin, had fled to the south of Russia. Here they began to form an anti-Bolshevik
Volunteer Army in the lands of the Don Cossacks. They formed an uneasy alliance with
the cossacks and through them began to purchase arms and munitions from their
former enemies, the Germans.
The Bolshevik declaration of the right of all subject peoples of the Russian Empire
to secede encouraged the emergence of separatist movements in Finland, the Baltic
and the Caucasus. On 18 December (31 December according to the European
calendar) Finland became an independent state. In Ukraine an elected rada or
parliament negotiated a separate treaty with Germany and set up an independent
government that was soon fighting pro-Bolshevik forces.
Leftwing opponents of the Bolsheviks initially put their faith in the Constituent
Assembly. This met in Petrograd on 6 January and elected the Socialist Revolutionary
Chernov as its president. However, their hopes of forming a new, elected government
of the left were soon crushed. After one session, the Bolsheviks used loyal troops to
disperse the Assembly.
After this, even socialists took up arms against the Bolshevik government. In March,
the left Socialist Revolutionaries split with the Bolsheviks over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty
and over the Bolsheviks’ hostility towards the wealthier peasantry. In July 1918 they led
a series of urban uprisings against the Bolsheviks. In June Chernov formed a Socialist
Revolutionary government in Samara on the Volga. He soon allied with a conservative
government that had been set up in Omsk, in western Siberia. In Arkhangel’sk, in the
north, a Socialist Revolutionary government was established in August. Though its
leader was a veteran populist, Chaikovsky, it rested on the power of British troops.
On 17July 1918, local Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg in the Urals murdered the tsar
and his family, fearing that advancing anti-Bolshevik troops might release them. We
now know that they acted on orders from Moscow. On 30 August, a left Socialist
Revolutionary, Dora Kaplan, shot and wounded Lenin. The Cheka took a terrible
revenge, shooting thousands held in Bolshevik-controlled prisons. Feliks Dzerzhinskii
(1877-1926), the head of the Cheka, wrote to his wife from Moscow: ‘Here there isa
dance of life and death, a moment of truly bloody battle’.*
200 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Foreign intervention
In the first half of 1918, foreign powers began to intervene in Russia’s increasingly
confused affairs. They did so partly to protect foreign interests, and partly to help
debts
overthrow a government that had unceremoniously repudiated Tsarist foreign
and Tsarist military commitments and nationalised foreign-owned enterprises. British
troops landed at Murmansk in the far north in March. British and Japanese troops
1918, Italian,
landed at Vladivostok in the Far East in April. In the second half of
French and American troops also landed in the Far East, while British and French
the Caucasus and the Black Sea region. Meanwhil e, German armies
troops entered
occupied much of the west of the country and most of Ukraine. Allin all, over 250 000
foreign troops from more than fourteen different states took part in the war.?

The Czechoslovak Army of Liberation

The first direct blow came from an unexpected source. During the war, a Czechoslovak
Army of Liberation had been formed in Russia from Czech residents and prisoners of
war. By 1918, this numbered 45 000 soldiers. In early 1918 it was the only disciplined
army unit left on Bolshevik-controlled territory. In March the Bolsheviks granted
permission for it to travel eastward through Siberia so they could travel by sea to join
the fighting in France. The Czechs set off on the trans-Siberian railway in a convoy of
sixty trains, strung out along hundreds of kilometres. However, in May Bolshevik
officials at Chelyabinsk station in the Urals tried to arrest Czech soldiers involved in a
fight with Hungarian troops. During the skirmish that followed, the Czechs seized
control of Chelyabinsk station, and then of stations from Penza to Irkutsk. With the
trans-Siberian railway in their hands, they controlled much of western Siberia and parts
of eastern European Russia. After abandoning hope of reaching the Far East, Czech
soldiers allied with anti-Bolshevik forces, and began to advance westwards from the
Urals towards Moscow.

WAR COMMUNISM
The Bolsheviks reacted to the crisis of mid-1918 with energy and decisiveness. In doing
so, they laid the foundations of a new social order very different from the idealised
socialist society they had envisaged before coming to power. Faced with the threat of
all-out civil war they began to construct a new coercive machinery. They built an army,
a new police system, a disciplined ruling group, and the fiscal machinery necessary to
support these structures.

A new army
The evolution of the Red Army shows clearly how this transformation occurred.
The renewed German attacks in February forced the government to abandon the
idea of a ‘People’s Army’. While some party members persisted with the ideal of a
socialist militia, others argued for the adoption of more traditional methods of
discipline, training and mobilisation. Lenin and Trotsky both supported the more
 CIVIL WAR AND THE ORIGINS OF A NEW SOCIAL ORDER 201

pragmatic approach. So did the ‘military specialists’, professional soldiers prepared to

serve the Communist government. On 8 April Trotsky became commissar for war. In
the same month, plans were drawn up to attach Party commissars to each army, to
ensure the loyalty of the mainly non-Bolshevik ‘military specialists’, and the
‘revolutionary discipline’ of the troops. The role of the military commissars was to
prove crucial in maintaining discipline in the Red Armies. Indirectly, the anti-Bolshevik
Armies recognised this by executing captured commissars.
The crisis of May 1918, provoked by the Czech advance, strengthened the hand of
military traditionalists within the party. Though there were bitter clashes within the
Party, the traditionalists won the day. At the end of May, the government introduced
compulsory military service for the working classes and began to mobilise new Red
Armies. Here was one of the many points at which the new government crossed the
divide between power based on ‘social support’ and the establishment of a ‘machinery
of power’. In mid-March, the various Red Armies probably included only 100 000 to
200 000 men. By August, the Bolsheviks had mobilised 500 000 more. By January 1920
the Red Army was five million strong.® Meanwhile, the Communists had also recruited
over 48 000 former Tsarist officers.’ Along with compulsory recruitment went other
changes. Soldiers’ committees disappeared. Ranks and harsh military discipline
reappeared, including the reintroduction of the death penalty for desertion.
In August 1918, with the fall of Kazan on the Volga, the situation was so critical that
Trotsky personally took charge of the Red troops who faced the advancing Czechs and
Whites at Sviyazhsk. This was a crucial period. Trotsky ordered that if any unit retreated
without orders its commissar and commander would immediately be shot. When a new
regiment of soldiers deserted, seizing a steamer to flee down the river, Trotsky sent
one of his own lieutenants, Markin, to stop them. Here is Trotsky’s account of what
followed:

Document 8.2: Trotsky at Sviyazhsk, August 1918

Boarding an improvised gunboat with a score of tested men, he [Markin] sailed up to the
steamer held by the deserters, and at the point of agun demanded their surrender. Everything
depended on that one moment; a single rifle-shot would have been enough to bring on a
catastrophe. But the deserters surrendered without resisting. The steamer docked alongside
the pier, the deserters disembarked. | appointed a field-tribunal which passed death sentences
on the commander, the commissary, and several privates—to a gangrenous wound a red-
hot iron was applied.®

Trotsky’s savagery paid off. The Red units held Sviyazhsk and soon launched a
counter-offensive. A series of episodes like this shaped a rabble of soldiers and armed
workers into a disciplined regular army. Trotsky wrote: ‘In the autumn [of 1918] the
great revolution really occurred. Of the pallid weakness that the spring months had
shown there was no longer a trace. Something had taken its place, it had grown
stronger.”

The machinery of persuasion

The Bolsheviks had always understood the importance of propaganda. Indeed, the
party had largely organised itself around the editorial board and distribution networks
202 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

of its underground newspapers. After October, the Bolsheviks took immediate steps to
seize control of the machinery of persuasion so as to mobilise support. They banned
all ‘counter-revolutionary’ newspapers as early as 28 October 1917 and seized control
of all forms of public communication. During the Civil War the Communist
government created one of the most sophisticated propaganda machines of the early
twentieth century. It established a wide range of government-controlled newspapers.
Amongst the most important were the army newspapers, whose correspondents
included the writer, Isaac Babel. The government pioneered the use of posters and
encouraged experimentation with new media such as film. It also gained the support
of radical artists and of poets such as Mayakovsky (1893-1930). Education itself became
an instrument of persuasion, as literacy brigades combined education and
propaganda. Propaganda trains and riverboats brought newspapers, books, films and
teachers to remote villages and to army units. In 1919 the government nationalised
theatres and cinemas. These were the first steps towards the creation of the all-
embracing machinery of persuasion of the Stalin era.

A new ruling group

The change from spontaneity to discipline affected not just the armies. It affected all
areas of life during the Civil War, and in both the Red and White camps. Both sides
began to make free use of secret police to arrest suspected traitors, and to arrest and
frequently murder the families of opponents or traitors. Rigid press censorship and
ubiquitous secret police suppressed internal opposition. In June the Bolshevik
government expelled all Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks from the Soviets.
(Other non-Bolshevik parties further to the right had already met the same fate.) From
now on the government included only members of the Communist Party, the name
assumed by the Bolsheviks in March 1918.
In July 1918, the government issued the first Soviet constitution. This described the
new governmental structure. On the face of it, the new structure was extremely
democratic. Elected Soviets at all levels became the main organs of government. Each
elected delegates to the next level of Soviets—district, provincial and republican.
Supreme power was held by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. This elected a central
executive committee to take decisions between meetings. The executive committee in
turn appointed a cabinet, Sounarkom (Soviet narodnykh kommuissarov).
In reality, the new government was less democratic than it appeared. The banning
of all non-Communist parties left the Bolsheviks/Communists as the only organised
group within the political structure. This was already a one-party state.
The Party also changed during the Civil War. In the early months after the
revolution, the rough and ready democracy of the revolutionary underground
survived. Election was common in Party appointments. Debate and controversy were
endless. Contacts between the centre and local Party cells were sporadic. Local Party
officials frequently rejected, criticised, or ignored orders from the centre. At the centre
itself, the crucial decisions—over Brest—Litovsk, or the reintroduction of military
discipline—provoked bitter controversy and debate.
By the end of the Civil War, the atmosphere of party life was permanently
transformed. Numbers had expanded rapidly as workers and soldiers joined the party.
Early in 1917, the Party had only about 25 000 members. By 1918 it had almost 400 000
members, and by March 1921 it had almost 750 000. The vast majority of Party
members had joined during the Civil War. Inevitably, the Party itself was militarised.
 CIVIL WAR AND THE ORIGINS OF A NEW SOCIAL ORDER 203

During the Civil War, most new Party members were not intellectuals or factory workers
but soldiers or bureaucrats. The hierarchical structures of the army and bureaucracy
shaped the atmosphere of the Party profoundly. By 1921, Party officials had survived
two or three years of bureaucratic and military campaigns, and the unending crises
had hardened them to the brutalities of civil war. Party members expected to give and
to receive orders, and they expected harsh punishment for indiscipline. To debate or
reject the decisions of the centre was now unthinkable. The Civil War buried the
democratic traditions of the revolutionary underground for ever, creating instead a
new ruling group, organised and disciplined through the Communist Party. By 1921 it
displayed the discipline and unity that had characterised Russia’s traditional ruling
elites. As so often in Russia’s past, members of the new ruling group began to see
themselves as the desperate defenders of a besieged fortress. Most willingly accepted
the discipline their situation demanded.
Characteristic of the changing mood of the Party is the following decision of the
Eighth Party Congress, held in March 1919.

Document 8.3: on the organisation question, eighth Party Congress, March 1919
#7 Centralism and discipline
The Party finds itself in a situation in which the strictest centralism and most severe
discipline are an absolute necessity. All decisions of a higher body are absolutely obligatory
for lower ones. Every decree must first be implemented, and appeal to the corresponding
party organ is admissible only after this has been done. In this sense outright military discipline
is needed in the Party in the present epoch. All party enterprises which are suitable for
centralization (publishing, propaganda, etc.), must be centralized for the good of the cause.
All conflicts are decided by the corresponding higher party body.'°

The demand for strict discipline came as much from below as from above. Local
Party organisations often wrote to Moscow asking for the appointment of central
government officials to help cope with local crises. All sections of the Party needed,
demanded and accepted a discipline that was increasingly military in its strictness and
ruthlessness.
As the Party became disciplined, it also became corrupt. Many joined it because the
Party had become the only avenue to influence and power. Where most goods were
rationed, Party members were in a position to make sure they were first in line. Warm
leather jackets soon became a symbol of party membership. By 1919 the Party leaders
were already discussing the need to remove those who had joined the Party for the
wrong reasons, and who were now disgracing it with their corrupt, brutal and drunken
behaviour. ‘The word commissar has become a curse,’ said a delegate to the Eighth
Party Congress. ‘The man in the leather jacket . . . has become hateful among the
people.’!! The Congress decided to renew all Party membership cards in mid-1919 in
order to weed out the corrupt. Unfortunately this, the first Party purge, provided as
many opportunities for the settling of old scores within the Party, as for the removal of
corrupt members. It set a dangerous precedent.

Mobilising resources—War Communism

The economic structures that emerged during the Civil War were the outcome of two
distinct pressures: the need to fight a civil war, and the Party’s notions of how to build
204 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

a socialist society. Where the two pressures conflicted, the needs of defence prevailed.
Where the two coincided they created the illusion of a rapid transition to Socialism.
For a time, the illusion convinced many members of the Party that they were building
Communism itself in the midst of war. It is this uneasy combination of utopian and
practical elements that characterised the economic structures known as War
Communism.
As with the army, the early decisions of the new government were more concerned
to destroy old structures than to create new ones. The Bolsheviks expropriated
landowners, industrialists and foreign capitalists. The peasants took charge of the land
and workers took charge of the factories through the factory committees. As a way of
destroying the old ruling elite these measures were extremely successful. Ideologically
they seemed progressive, and their implementation fulfilled the promises contained
in the Bolshevik Party program.
However, as methods of organising a war economy, they were disastrous. Trotsky
wrote:

The spring and summer of 1918 were unusually hard. All the aftermath of the war
was then just beginning to make itself felt. At times it seemed as if everything was
slipping and crumbling, as if there was nothing to hold to, nothing to lean upon.
One wondered if a country so despairing, so economically exhausted, so devastated,
had enough sap left in it to support a new regime and preserve its independence.
There was no food. There was no army. The railways were completely disorganized.
The machinery of state was just beginning to take shape. Conspiracies were being
hatched everywhere.”

Who would control society’s resources after the overthrow of the capitalists and
landlords? Socialists agreed in principle that all members of society should have some
share in the control of society’s resources. But how was this shared control to be
exercised? By locally elected Soviets or factory committees? By trade unions? Or by a
central government claiming to represent the working class as a whole? Would market
forces survive during the transition period or not? Ideology provided no clear-cut
answers. Neither Marx nor Lenin offered a blueprint. After October it seems that
Lenin was ready for a long transition period in which markets would remain important
in the country’s economic life. Indeed, he talked much in this period of the transitional
era of ‘state capitalism’.'*
In practice, the pressures of Civil War forced the government to assert control from
the centre. This meant a return to the direct mobilisation of resources. The towns and
the countryside posed two distinct problems. Control of the towns gave the Bolsheviks
control of the factories, their labour force, and the goods they produced. Far harder
was the task of controlling the countryside, and the labour and produce of the
peasantry, for as yet the Bolsheviks had little power outside the towns.

The urban economy

In December the government established the Supreme Council of the National
Economy, or Vesenkha. Its task was to control and plan the economic life of the whole
country. In reality it lacked the skills, the resources and the power to do so.
Nevertheless, the government tried to assert control from the centre. Nationalisation
of industrial enterprises began slowly and chaotically. The government nationalised
railways and the mercantile fleet in the spring of 1918. Local Soviets often decided to
CIVIL WAR AND THE ORIGINS OF A NEW SOCIAL ORDER 205

‘nationalise’ individual enterprises. Then in June, the government decided to

nationalise all factories. By September 1919 Vesenkha claimed to control 3300
enterprises employing 1.3 million workers.'* How real this control was is impossible to
say. What is clear in retrospect is that these were the first steps towards the vast
command economy that was to emerge in the 1930s.
As the government tightened its grip on industrial enterprises, managerial control
replaced the factory committees of 1917. As the economic role of the government
expanded, that of the market contracted. The breakdown of exchange between town
and country, inflation, nationalisation of banks, the need to take military rather than
commercial decisions, and ideological assumptions about the building of Socialism
combined to limit the role of money. There emerged a system of semi-controlled
barter. Increasingly, goods were produced and allocated by government order, and
workers were paid with rationed goods. Eventually, the government tried to abolish
private trade, altogether.
Many ideologically minded Communists saw in these changes the birthpangs of
Socialism. In retrospect, though, even most Communists came to admit that they were
merely the consequences of a deep social and military crisis. Some came to suspect that
they had indeed witnessed a birth, but that the terrible agonies of the Civil War had
deformed the new-born child.

The rural economy

The government had little control over the countryside, where most of the country’s
resources lay. The desperate and brutal techniques it used in the rural areas gave it
just enough resources to continue fighting the war, but the price the rural population
paid was high. The methods of direct mobilisation that the government used in the
countryside meant that tax-collecting began to take on once more the aspect of
medieval tribute collection.
The government tried hard to put down roots in the countryside. It created a new
local government institution, the Volispolkom (VIK), the executive committee of the
volost’, or district Soviet. These were elected councils handling the affairs of several
villages. During the Civil War, increasing numbers of young peasants who had served
in the army and joined the Communist Party entered the executive committees of the
new volost’ Soviets. They became, in this way, the first peasant-controlled organs of
Communist power in the countryside. However, as they turned into instruments of
central power, they lost local support.
In practice, the Communists had to use more direct methods to control the
countryside. A first priority was to supply bread to the towns and factories. Here was
where the Communists’ main support lay and here were produced the munitions
needed to fight the Civil War. The Communists had no magical solution to the supply
problems that had brought down the Tsarist government the previous F ebruary and
had plagued the Provisional Government throughout its short life. On the contrary,
land seizures, encouraged by the decree on land, made it even harder to persuade
peasants to sell grain for scarce and over-priced factory produce. Like its predecessors,
the new government tried to control grain prices. This forced it to deal harshly with
grain speculators and hoarders. Eventually, it tried to control the grain trade directly.
The Brest—Litovsk treaty, the loss of the major grain source of the Ukraine, and the
drift into civil war, made the food supply situation critical.
To bypass private traders and grain speculators, detachments of workers and
soldiers from the larger towns began visiting villages to buy grain and to confiscate the
206 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

surpluses of the richer peasants, the so-called kulaks. The Cheka began to seize stocks
held by hoarders. In June the government tried to split the peasantry. It set up
committees of poor peasants, who were encouraged to help seize the grain hoarded by
their richer neighbours. For the most part, the peasantry did not divide along class
lines. Whatever divisions existed within most villages, they were insignificant in
comparison with the far greater division between the village and the outside world.
Besides, the land repartitions of 1917 had reduced the differences in wealth within
most villages.
The government soon regularised the system of food detachments. Like the
druzhina of a medieval prince, armed workers or army units began to extract resources
from the villages. Soon, grain requisitioning units began to requisition other goods as
well—horses, carts, firewood. They paid if they could, and if they felt well disposed
towards the peasants. Otherwise, they took what they needed. Lenin admitted after the
Civil War:

The essence of War Communism was that we actually took from the peasant all of
his surpluses and sometimes not only the surpluses but part of the grain the peasant
needed for food. We took this in order to meet the requirements of the army and to
sustain the workers.’

The government labelled this system of forced requisitioning of produce

prodrazverstka. The fancy label masked a modern form of tribute, for prodrazverstka
relied on the direct and overt use of force. Often, grain requisitioning detachments
received a share of what they collected as a reward. This was an economics that the
soldiers of Genghis Khan would have understood perfectly. What justified this
primitive system was the absence of any alternative, for existing supply systems had
collapsed. In late 1918, the commissar for food supplies, Tsyurupa noted:

Prodrazverstka. Communist soldiers watch as peasant women harvest potatoes.

 CIVIL WAR AND THE ORIGINS OF A NEW SOCIAL ORDER 207

There is complete economic dislocation in the localities. There is no political

authority whatsoever; postal and telegraph communications have been disrupted;
the technical infrastructure for the collection of grain has been destroyed; there is
insufficient administrative personnel; the military authorities interfere in the
procurement of grain; the peasants have been intimidated and say they are afraid
to transport their grain.'®

Document 8.4: grain requisitioning detachments

oo Harvesting and grain requisition detachments, 4 August 1918

All guberniya and uezd [provincial and district] Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’
Deputies, all committees of the poor, all trade union organisations of workers, together
with the local organs of the People’s Commissariats of Food and Agriculture are to
form immediately harvesting and grain requisition detachments. Detachments of
workers and peasants from starving [provinces], sent to requisition grain, are to help
in bringing in the new harvest. Form immediately new detachments from among the
local peasants and workers to carry out these tasks...
All grain collected by harvesting and grain requisition detachments, is to be distributed
on the following basis: firstly, of course, the necessary amount of grain to satisfy the
need for food of the poorest strata of the local population is to be distributed. This
part of the grain collected is not to be removed but to remain at the local level. All
other grain is to be immediately and unconditionally delivered to grain collection
centres. The distribution of this grain is to be carried out by the [provincial] food
committees on the instructions of the People’s Commissariat of Food.
Members of harvesting and food requisition detachments, if they are not being
rewarded according to previously published decrees . . . are to be rewarded, firstly, by
an allowance in natura [in kind]; secondly, by payment in cash according to local
conditions and; thirdly, by special bonuses for successful and rapid fulfilment of
harvesting work and the transfer of grain to storage centres. The extent of rewards
and bonuses are to be determined by [provincial] food committees on the basis of
instructions from the Commissariat of Food.

Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars

V. ULYANOV (LENIN)
People’s Commissar of Food
A. TSYURUPA

oy Instructions for requisitioning grain, 20 August 1918

Every food requisition detachment is to consist of not less than seventy-five men and
two or three machine guns.
J) A commander is to head each detachment. He is to be appointed by the chief
commissar responsible for the organisation of food armies and a political commissar
appointed by the Commissariat of Food. The commander is to control purely military
and economic activities. The political commissar’s duties are (a) to organise local
committees of the rural poor and (b) to ensure that the detachment carries out its
duties and is full of revolutionary enthusiasm and discipline.
[Province and district] military commanders are to be in charge of all food requisition
detachments operating in a given [province or district].
208 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

4 Plans for grain requisition in a [district] are to be drawn up by the head of the
requisition department appointed by the [provincial] food committee.
5 Food requisition detachments are to be subject only to the orders of their com-
manders...
7 The food requisition detachments shall be deployed in such a manner as to allow two
or three detachments to link up quickly. Continuous cavalry communication shall be
maintained between the various food requisition detachments.

People’s Commissar of Food

A. TSYURUPA"”

Though archaic, prodrazverstka seemed to work. Despite its crudeness and brutality,
it supplied the towns and armies with just enough food and supplies to keep producing
war material and to keep fighting.

Resistance from below

For the peasantry, the experience was a harsh disillusionment. This was especially true
of the richer peasants, or kulaks, whom the Communists treated as class enemies.
Peasants began to think they had been granted land only to have its produce seized by
force. Often, they reacted with violence. As the Civil War dragged on, more and more
bands of peasants took up arms. The largest, such as that of the anarchist leader Nestor
Makhno, formed regular armies that took on both Red and White Armies, levied their
own taxes, and organised miniature governments. (See Document 8.5.) The peasants
also reacted by sowing less. Why produce surplus grain only to have it confiscated? In
Ukraine, formerly the bread basket of the Russian Empire, the sown area declined by
up to eighty per cent.'* Peasants reacted to government attempts to control trade by
circumventing them. Black markets emerged, trading privately despite government
bans. Even Lenin admitted that at least half of the trade between towns and countryside
was illegal in 1919."
Most of all, however, the peasants reacted to the Civil War by trying to avoid it. A
recent study of peasants in the Volga region concludes that:

The primary concern of the vast majority of the peasantry was not to get itself
involved in the Civil War any more than it had to. The peasants were willing to fight
against the landowners in their own localities: they formed their own peasant
brigades; and they were even ready to fight for the Red Army as long as it was seen
to be defending the revolution in their own locality. But the peasants came to see
the Civil War increasingly as an alien political struggle between the socialist parties.
Their attitude towards this struggle was one of indifference, as a recruiting officer
of the People’s Army in Simbirsk province pointed out: ‘the mood of the peasants is
indifferent, they just want to be left to themselves. The Bolsheviks were here—that’s
good, they say; the Bolsheviks went away—that’s no shame, they say. As long as there
is bread then let’s pray to God, and who needs the Guards?—let them fight it out by
themselves, we will stand aside. It is well known that playing it by ear is the best side
to be on’.”°
 CIVIL WAR AND THE ORIGINS OF A NEW SOCIAL ORDER 209

MILITARY VICTORY
By late 1918, there were already several anti-Communist governments, each with its
own armies. Denikin was organising the volunteer army in the south. Victor Chernov,
the leader of the SRs, had formed a Socialist Revolutionary government in Samara on
the Volga. Anti-Communist governments had also appeared in Omsk in western
Siberia, and in Arkhangel’sk in the far north. As we have seen, in August Trotsky had
checked the first anti-Communist offensive at Sviyazhsk, near Kazan.
In November 1918, a new rightwing government in western Siberia, headed by
Admiral V. Kolchak, overthrew the ‘Directory’, which had briefly united the various
anti-Communist groups. By early 1919, all anti-Communist forces acknowledged
Kolchak as their overall commander. However, even this did not provide the anti-
Communist forces with the unity necessary for success. In March 1919 Kolchak
launched a new offensive from western Siberia, with Czech support. Soon after,
Denikin attacked from the south, and General Yudenich attacked Petrograd from
nearby Estonia. This triple offensive was the critical moment of the Civil War. The
failure of the Whites to coordinate their attacks allowed Communist forces to deal with
them one by one.
By June 1919 the Communists had checked Kolchak’s forces and begun to turn
them back. A Communist counter-offensive led by a young party worker, Mikhail
Frunze (1885-1925), soon recaptured the Urals. By November Frunze controlled
much of western Siberia, and Kolchak’s government collapsed as partisan war erupted
throughout Siberia. In November Kolchak fled east along the trans-Siberian railway.
In Irkutsk the socialist leaders of an anti-Kolchak revolt tried and executed the
Supreme Commander of the White forces in February 1920.
Denikin’s advance was at first more successful. By October 1919 his forces had
captured Orel, a mere 400 kilometres south of Moscow. In the same month General
Yudenich reached Gatchina on the outskirts of Petrograd. From here, Yudenich’s men
could see the spires of Petrograd’s Peter Paul fortress. This was the high tide for the
Whites. Trotsky successfully led the defence of Petrograd, and within a month Red
forces had driven Yudenich’s army back to Estonia. By 20 October Denikin’s armies
were also in retreat. In their rear, the peasant anarchist army of Nestor Makhno had
risen, threatening their communications with the Black Sea ports. By January 1920,
Communist armies had recaptured Ukraine, and in April Denikin resigned his
command. The Arkhangel’sk government collapsed early in 1920.
In 1920 the tide briefly turned once more. Polish armies occupied western Ukraine
in April and May. Simultaneously, General Wrangel, one of Denikin’s lieutenants, led
a new offensive northwards from the Crimea. However, in May General Tukhachevsky
led the Red Army’s counter-attack against the Poles. By July the Poles had retreated to
Warsaw. Lenin hoped these advances would spread the revolution westwards into the
European heartland of world capitalism. Red Armies now turned on Wrangel and
forced his army to evacuate the Crimea. But Lenin’s hopes of a Polish revolution came
to nothing. A Polish counter-offensive drove the Russians out of Poland, and in
October an armistice brought the Russo—Polish war to an end.
The armistice with Poland ended the Civil War. In eastern Siberia local Cossack
armies, supported by the Japanese, survived until February 1922. But in European
Russia, the Civil War was over by the end of 1920. The Communists now controlled
210 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

In Siberia:
Americans
British

_ ~eVOLOGDA
NIZHNI-
eT ONN

Re
1

EBSK “PENZA..

WARSAW ® POLES] it
RUSSIANS]

ROSTOV
NOVO-
ROSSIISK

800 km

500 miles

Under Bolshevik rule November 1918

Principal armies attempting to destroy Bolshevism
Maximum advance of the anti-Bolshevik forces 1918-19
Remnant of anti-Bolshevik forces, defeated 1920-21
Established Russian frontiers, March 1921—October 1939

Figure 8.1 The Civil War, 1918-20.

 CIVIL WAR AND THE ORIGINS OF A NEW SOCIAL ORDER 211

most of the old Russian Empire except for Poland, Finland and the Baltic States, which
had become independent nations.
Something of the confusion and savagery of the fighting during the Civil War is
conveyed in the following account. It describes a clash between the forces of Denikin
and those of the Ukrainian anarchist, Nestor Makhno, whose armies fought both
Whites and Reds. The battle described here was fought on 26 December 1919, in the
Ukrainian village of Peregonovka. The author was an anarchist and follower of
Makhno, Peter Arshinov.

Document 8.5: a Civil War battle, September 1919

The fighting started between 3 and 4 a.m. ... in a hurricane of machine gun fire on both
sides. Makhno himself, with his cavalry escort, had disappeared at nightfall, seeking to turn
the enemy’s flank. During the whole battle that ensued there was no further news of him. By
9 in the morning the outnumbered and exhausted Makhnovists began to lose ground. They
were already fighting on the outskirts of the village. From all sides enemy reinforcements
brought new bursts offire to bear on the Makhnovists. The staff of the insurrectionary army
as well as everyone in the village who could handle a rifle, armed themselves and joined in
the fighting. This was the critical moment, when it seemed that the battle and with it the
whole cause of the insurgents was lost. The order was given for everyone, even the women,
to be ready to fire on the enemy in the village streets. All prepared for the supreme hour of
the battle and of their lives. But suddenly the machine-gun fire of the enemy and their frantic
cheers began to grow weaker, and then to recede into the distance. The defenders of the
village realized that the enemy was retreating, and that the battle was now taking place some
distance away. It was Makhno who, appearing unexpectedly, at the very moment when his
troops were driven back and were preparing to fight in the streets of Peregonovka, had
decided the fate of the battle. Covered with dust and fatigued from his exertions, he reached
the enemy flank through a deep ravine. Without a cry, but with a burning resolve fixed on his
features, he threw himself on the Denikinists at full gallop, followed by his escort, and broke
into their ranks ... A hand-to-hand combat of incredible ferocity, a ‘hacking’ as the
Makhnovists called it, followed. However brave the First Officers’ Regiment of Simferopol’
[the Denikin unit] may have been, they were thrown into retreat, at first slowly and in an
orderly manner, trying to halt the impetus of the Makhnovists, but then they simply ran. The
other regiments, seized by panic, followed them, and finally all of Denikin’s troops were
routed, and tried to save themselves by swimming across the Sinyukha River.
Makhno hastened to take advantage of this situation, which he understood perfectly. He
sent his cavalry and artillery at full speed in pursuit of the retreating enemy, and himself went
at the head of the best mounted regiment by a shortcut which would enable him to catch the
fugitives from behind. The pursuit continued for eight to twelve miles. At the critical moment
when Denikin’s troops reached the river, they were overtaken by the Makhnovist cavalry,
and hundreds of them perished in the river. Most of them, however, had time to cross to the
other bank, but there Makhno himself was waiting for them. The Denikinist staff and the
reserve regiment which was with it were surprised and taken prisoners. Only an insignificant
part of these troops, who had raged for months in the stubborn pursuit of Makhno, managed
to save themselves. The First Simferopol’ Regiment of officers and several others were
entirely cut down by the insurgents’ sabres. The route of their retreat was strewn with
corpses for over two miles. However horrible this spectacle was to some, it was only the
natural outcome of the duel between Denikin’s army and the Makhnovists. During the entire
212 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

pursuit, the Denikinists had had no thought except to exterminate the insurgents. The
slightest error on Makhno’s part would inevitably have led to the same fate for the
revolutionary insurrectionary army. Even the women who supported the Makhnovist army
or fought alongside the men would not have been spared. The Makhnovists were experienced
enough to know this.”!

WHY DID THE COMMUNISTS WIN?

In comparison with their opponents, the Communists had three crucial advantages
during the Civil War. The social basis of their power was broader; they acted with
greater unity and discipline; and finally, their control of the geographical and
industrial heartland of European Russia gave them a superior strategic position.

The social basis of Communist power

The key areas of Communist support were, of course, among the urban working
classes. Working class support explains the superior morale and discipline of those Red
army units with a high proportion of urban workers. Working class pride also counted.
As Trotsky told a workers’ meeting in 1918:

Although we are still weak, the course of events has raised us up to an immense
height. The Russian working class is at this moment the only working class in the
entire world which does not suffer political oppression. Yes, things are bad for us
right now, but the Russian working class has been the first to draw itself up to its full
height and say: “This is where I begin to learn how to steer the ship of state’.”

A small section of the intelligentsia also served the Communists. As the war
progressed, so too did many army officers, such as General A. A. Brusilov, who had led
the successful offensive of 1915. Some served because the Communists held their
relatives hostage. Others, though uninterested in ideology, saw the Communists as
national leaders, determined to throw out foreign invaders and re-establish strong
government.
The Communists had little support among the peasantry. However, the White
Armies failed to exploit this weakness, for most were determined to restore the land to
the gentry. As a result, the Reds found it easier to recruit peasants than the Whites. ‘It
is symbolic that at the critical stages of their campaigns the armies of Kolchak and
Denikin were crippled by peasant uprisings behind the White lines. The Red Army also
suffered from peasant uprisings, but at the critical moments the rural areas behind the
Red lines remained solid. The peasants’ dislike of the Communists, it would seem, was
not as powerful, and certainly not as ingrained, as their hatred and fear of the old
political order.’*? The Communists were also more successful than the Whites in
incorporating younger peasants into the new power structures that emerged during
the Civil War. They did this mainly through the army. In the 1920s, ex-servicemen
accounted for the vast majority of rural Communist Party members.”!
Abroad, war-weariness and working class sympathy for the Communist cause gave
the Communists other allies. Domestic opposition to intervention, particularly in
CIVIL WAR AND THE ORIGINS OF A NEW SOCIAL ORDER 213

England and France, ensured that foreign aid to the Whites was uncertain and small-
scale.
As the elections to the Constituent Assembly had shown, the Communists were not
as representative of the population as they claimed to be. The Whites, however, were
even less representative. They found support mainly among members of the former
ruling classes. Even the socialists who joined the Whites after the closing of the
Constituent Assembly had to compromise with former landlords, industrialists and
army officers.
The policies of the various anti-communist governments also reflected the deep gulf
between the old ruling elite and the majority of Russian society. The conservatism of
the White governments on issues such as industrial relations and land earned them
the active hostility of urban workers. They also failed to pick up the peasant support
the Communists were losing. After 1918, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the traditional
party of the peasantry, played only a secondary role in formulating the policies of White
governments.

Unity and discipline

Unlike the Whites, the Communists were united. Leading the Red Armies was a single-
party government, united under Lenin’s leadership. Lenin dominated the government
through Sovnarkom. His government was guided by a coherent political and social
program worked out over many years. Yet it never followed ideology slavishly. On the
contrary, the Communists showed exceptional ability to improvise. The Party also
displayed a remarkable capacity to close ranks in a crisis. As Party members supervised
the work of military commanders and government officials at all levels, they instilled
their own discipline and energy into the army and bureaucracy. Finally, the
government mobilised support by creating a powerful, sophisticated and original
propaganda machine.
The White governments never succeeded in creating a unified political program,
or even a unified government. Old divisions within the traditional ruling group could
not be smoothed over in a matter of months. Indeed, it was impossible to produce a
political program that could unite ex-radicals, such as the liberal leader Milyukov or
the Socialist Revolutionary Chernov, with aristocratic landlords, successful
industrialists and conservative army officers. Within the anti-ccommunist governments
feuding continued between different factions. Each had its own ideas about how to
fight the war and about the sort of society they would build once they had defeated the
Communists.
An astute and charismatic leader on the right might have imposed some unity on
this motley group, but such a leader did not appear, and the murder of the royal family
deprived the anti-Bolshevik forces of the one remaining unifying focus. The Whites
paid a high price for their lack of unity and discipline.

Strategic factors
Geography exaggerated the disunity of the Whites. By mid-1919 there were White
Armies in Arkhangel’sk, in Baltic Estonia, in the Caucasus and in western Siberia, but
there was no land connection between the four areas. It proved impossible to
coordinate the political and even the military plans of such a widely scattered coalition.
While it weakened the Whites, geography favoured the Reds. The Communists
214 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

never lost control of the heartland of European Russia, dominated by the two
capitals—Petrograd and Moscow. Control of the centre meant control of Russia’s
industrial heartland—Moscow itself, and the armaments factories of Tula and
Petrograd. The Reds also held the hub of the railway network, whose various lines
converged on Moscow. This eased the task of moving troops from front to front.

DIRECT MOBILISATION AND THE COMMUNIST

EXPERIMENT
The advantages of the Reds—strong and united leadership, control of the industrial
heartland, and working class support—meant that they were better able than their
opponents to mobilise human and material resources for war. More than anything else,
the Communist victory reflected the successful mobilisation of resources by a
determined and highly militarised ruling group. However, success in the Civil War set
a fateful precedent for it meant a return to traditional strategies of direct mobilisation,
and the autocratic political culture that had sustained them. Eventually, the
Communist party would fall back on these traditions to solve the even greater problems
they faced once the Civil War ended. In this way, the Civil War marked a return to the
past rather than a leap into the future. The Civil War retreat from indirect to direct
forms of mobilisation provides a short, sharp epitome of the entire Soviet experiment.

Questions for discussion

1 What sources of power did the Soviet government have at the end of 1917? What
were the main elements of the new Soviet ‘ruling group’?
2 Why did members of the traditional group let power slip from their grasp in
1917?
3 What made the new government attractive to so many working class Russians?
What aspects of the new government did they find less attractive?
4 What was ‘War Communism’?

5 Could the anti-Bolshevik governments have opted for more successful policies
and military strategies?
6 How important was Lenin’s role in the Civil War? What were the crucial
decisions he took?

7 What choices did peasants have when faced with demands for taxes, goods and
recruits from the two opposing sides in the Civil War?
8 Why were working class Russians so disillusioned with the Bolshevik government
by the end of the Civil War?
CIVIL WAR AND THE ORIGINS OF A NEW SOCIAL ORDER 215

9 What sources of strength did the Communists have by the end of the Civil War?

10 How different was the Communist government in 1921 from the Tsarist
government in early 1917?

Further reading
See bibliography:
Carr, History of Soviet Russia
Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution
History of the USSR
Nove, Economic History

In addition:
W H Chamberlain, The Russian Revolution: 1917-1921, vol 2, Macmillan, New York and London,
1935; old, but still one of the best brief accounts
WB Lincoln, Red Victory, Sphere Books, London, 1991
E Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War, Allen & Unwin, Boston & London, 1987
TH Rigby, Lenin’s Government. Sounarkom: 1917-1921, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1979
R Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution. A Study in Organizational Change. 1917-1923,
Macmillan, London, 1979

Endnotes
1 A Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd, Norton, New
York, 1978, pp 291-2
2 ibid, pp 303-4
3 cited from RC Nation, Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy, 1917-1991,
Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1992, p 2
4 George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police, Oxford, 1981, p 105, cited from
WB Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War, Sphere Books, London, 1989,
p 146
5 Nation, Black Earth, Red Star, p 32
n J Erickson, ‘The Origins of the Red Army’, in R Pipes (ed), Revolutionary Russia, Doubleday
& Co, Cambridge, Mass, 1976, pp 307, 317. During World War I, the Russian army had been
9 million strong.
Nation, Black Earth, Red Star, p 18
L Trotsky, My Life, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971, p 418
cited in Lincoln, Red Victory, p 161
—co
~7
Oo
S M Matthews, Soviet Government: A Selection of Official Documents on Internal Policies, Jonathan
Cape, London, 1974, p 134
11 cited in Lincoln, Red Victory, p 479
12 Trotsky, My Life, p 411
13 M Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates, Pluto Press, London, p 76
14 A Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 3rd edn, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992, p 62

15 P Avrich, Kronstadt 1921, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1970, p 9

16 O Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (1 917-1921), Oxford
University Press, Oxford, p 184
216 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

17 MMcCauley (ed), The Russian Revolution and the Soviet State: 1917-1921, Macmillan, London,
1975, pp 249-51
1971, p 110
18 B Dmytryshyn, USSR: A Concise History, 2nd edn, Scribner’s, New York,
19 Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War, p 260 '
20 ibid, p 175
& Red, Detroit/Chicago,
21 P Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement: 1918-1921, Black
1974, pp 142-5
22 cited in Lincoln, Red Victory, p 200
23 Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War, pp 4-5
24 ibid, p 225
 CHAPTER NINE

THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY

DEFEAT IN VICTORY
The military emergency of the Civil War ended when Wrangel’s armies evacuated the
Crimea in November 1920, a month after the armistice with Poland. But before the
Party could begin to think about the long-term problem of building a socialist society,
it had to face the disastrous economic and political aftermath of seven years of war and
revolution.

International aspects of the crisis

First the Communists had to accept that the world revolution they had hoped for in
October 1917 had not occurred. There had been promising flickers of revolution and
three great empires had fallen. The German Kaiser had been overthrown in November
1918. In the spring of 1919, Soviet Republics appeared in Bavaria and Hungary. There
was even a Communist uprising in Berlin in January 1919. In 1920, during the Polish
War, the Red Army had tried to export revolution on the point of its bayonets. In
March 1921, a further attempt at a Communist uprising in Berlin failed. However, by
the middle of 1921 all sparks of revolution had been doused. This meant that instead
of surviving weeks or months of international isolation, the new government might
remain besieged by world Capitalism for years or even decades.

Economic aspects of the crisis

The situation inside Russia was equally bleak. H. G. Wells visited the country in 1920
and wrote this description.

Document 9.1: H. G. Wells on Russia in 1920

.
Our dominant impression of things Russian is an impression ofavast irreparable breakdown
in 1914, the administra tive, social, financial and
The great monarchy which was here
218 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

commercial systems connected with it have, under the strains of six years of incessant war,
fallen down and been smashed utterly. Never in all history has there been so great a debacle
before. The fact of the revolution is to our minds altogether dwarfed by the fact of this
downfall . .. The Russian part of the old civilized world that existed before 1914 fell and is
now gone ... Amid this vast disorganization an emergency government supported by a
disciplined party of perhaps 150 000 adherents—the Communist Party—has taken control.
It has—at the price of much shooting—suppressed brigandage, established a sort of order
and security in the exhausted towns and set up a crude rationing system.!

The literature on the period—Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, Isaac Babel’s Red

Cavalry, Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don—conveys the same impression of
breakdown.
The proletariat, the basis of Bolshevik support, had shrunk. The number of workers
employed in enterprises with more than sixteen employees fell from 3.5 million to
about 1.5 million early in 1921.2 Many former proletarians were now in the army.

Table 9.1 The Soviet economy under the New Economic Policy
Absolute figures Index numbers (1913 = 100)

1913 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926

Industrial production
10 251 million (1926) roubles 14 20 26 39 45 a5 108

Coal
29 million tonnes 30 3| 33 47 56 62 95

Electricity
1945 million kilowatt hours — 27 40 59 80 150 180

Pig iron
4216 thousand tonnes — 3 4 7 18 36 58

Steel
4231 thousand tonnes — A 9 17 Qi 50 74

Rail freight carried

132 million tonnes — 30 30 44 S| 63 —

Cotton fabrics
2582 million metres — 4 14 27 37 65 89
Sown area
105 million hectares —- 86 74 87 93 99 105
Grain harvest
80.1 million tonnes 58 47 63 7\ 64 91 96

Notes: —figures not available; figures in italics = over 100 per cent of 1913 figure; the 1913 grain harvest was unusually
high, so the figures in the final row underestimate the decline in agricultural production in the early 1920s

Source: A Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 3rd edn, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992, p 89
 THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY 219

Others had left the poorly supplied towns for the villages, to claim a share in the
redistributed land. There, at least, they could grow their own food. The population of
Petrograd had fallen from 2.5 million in 1917 to 600 000 in 1920. Yet the villages had
also suffered, particularly where fighting and requisitioning had been most ferocious.
The harvest of 1920 was only fifty-four per cent of the 1909-13 average. The 1921
harvest was even smaller. Famine affected many areas, and with famine came typhus.
In some areas there was cannibalism. Millions died in what soon turned into one of
the worst famines of the twentieth century.
Production had fallen in all sectors of the economy. Even in 1914 Russia was
backward by comparison with Western Europe. By 1921, it was even more backward,
and the building of Socialism seemed more remote than ever. Statistics on economic
output tell the sad story (see Table 9.1).

Political aspects of the crisis

By 1921 the Communists had defeated the old ruling group. However, the methods
they used had placed an appalling burden on workers and peasants. In the spring of
1921, these accumulated discontents exploded. The continuation of prodrazverstka
threatened famine in the villages because requisition detachments often took even the
grain needed for food, fodder and seed. With the threat of a White victory gone,
peasants were no longer willing to tolerate such a system. In February 1921 the Cheka
reported 118 separate peasant uprisings in various parts of the country.* In Tambov
province and parts of Ukraine, peasant armies ruled large areas of the countryside,
torturing, mutilating and executing Communist officials or members of food
detachments wherever they found them.
The same grievances overflowed into the towns. Russian workers still had close
contacts with the countryside. Indeed, these ties had intensified during the years of
war and civil war as peasants sought work in the towns and workers sought land in the
villages. Besides, by preventing private trade in foodstuffs, Bolshevik policy threatened
famine in the towns. Both townspeople and peasants suffered from the activities of the
so-called ‘cordon’ or ‘blockade’ detachments. These were special army units set up in
1918 to prevent illegal trade by ‘sackmen’, or peasants with sacks of goods. An English
eyewitness recorded this account of their activities at a Petrograd station.

Document 9.2: the activities of the ‘Cordon Detachments’

At nine [the train] reached the straggling buildings of the Okhta Station [in Petrograd] . ..
and there | saw a most extraordinary spectacle—the attempted prevention of sackmen from
entering the city.
As we stood pushing in the corridor waiting for the crowd in front of us to get out, |
heard Uncle Egor [a peasant] and his daughter conversing rapidly in low tones.
‘Il make a dash for it,’ whispered his daughter.
‘Good,’ he replied in the same tone. ‘We'll meet at Nadya’s.’
The moment we stepped on to the platform Uncle Egor’s daughter vanished under the
railroad coach and that was the last | ever saw of her. At each end of the platform stood a
string of armed guards, waiting for the onslaught of passengers, who flew in all directions as
they surged from the train. How shall | describe the scene of unutterable pandemonium that
ensued! The soldiers dashed at the fleeing crowds, brutally seized single individuals, generally
220 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

women, who were least able to defend themselves, and tore the sacks off their backs and
and on
out of their arms. Shrill cries, shrieks, and howls rent the air. Between the coaches
the outskirts of the station you could see lucky ones who had escaped, gesticulating frantically
to unlucky ones who were still dodging guards. ‘This way! This way!’ they yelled wildly,
‘Sophia! Marusia! Akulina! Varvara! Quick! Haste!’
In futile efforts to subdue the mob the soldiers discharged their rifles into the air, only
increasing the panic and intensifying the tumult. Curses and execration were hurled at them
by the seething mass of fugitives. One woman | saw, frothing at the mouth, with blood
streaming down her cheek, her frenzied eyes protruding from the sockets, clutching
ferociously with her nails at the face of a huge sailor who held her pinned down on the
platform, while his comrades detached her sack.
How | got out of the fray | do not know, but | found myself carried along with the running
stream of sackmen over the Okhta Bridge and toward the Suvorov Prospect. Only here, a
mile from the station, did they settle into a hurried
walk, gradually dispersing down side streets to
dispose of their precious goods to eager clients.
Completely bewildered, | limped along, my
frost-bitten feet giving me considerable pain. |
wondered in my mind if people at home had any
idea at what cost the population of Petrograd
secured the first necessities of life in the teeth of
the ‘communist’ rulers.°

In the towns there were other complaints

too. Food was scarce (as it had been in 1917).
a Working hours were long. Wages (now mostly
The black market in Moscow during the Civil War or early paid in kind) were low. Finally, factory
1920s. Illegal traders flourished during both periods because discipline was harsher than ever as the
of the failures of the government-controlled supply network. Communists introduced military rule in the

factories. There was growing resentment at the

new elite of Party officials who got a
disproportionate share of rationed goods and behaved increasingly like bosses. Many
people hoped for a return to the more democratic working class politics of late 1917—
to freely elected Soviets and factory committees. These wére potent symbols of what
had proved a brief era of genuine working class democracy.
In February 1921 there was a rash of factory meetings in Moscow and then
Petrograd, protesting against the harsher aspects of War Communism. In March, the
naval garrison of the fortress island of Kronstadt mutinied. Kronstadt had been one of
the most loyal Bolshevik bases in 1917, and its sailors had fought hard and loyally
during the Civil War. This made their mutiny all the more shocking for the
Communists. The mutineers demanded a democratic working class government
representing all working class parties.

Document 9.3: demands of the Kronstadt insurgents, 28 February 1921

| In view of the fact that the present soviets do not represent the will of the workers and
peasants, to re-elect the soviets immediately by secret voting, with free canvassing among
all workers and peasants before the elections.
THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY 221

2 Freedom of speech and press for workers, peasants, Anarchists and Left Socialist Parties
[i.e. not for members of the former ruling group].
3 Freedom of meetings, trade unions and peasant associations.
4 To convene, not later than | March 1921, a non-party conference of workers, soldiers
and sailors of Petrograd City, Kronstadt and Petrograd Province.
5 To liberate all political prisoners of Socialist Parties, and also all workers, peasants,
soldiers and sailors who have been imprisoned in connection with working class and
peasant movements [i.e. but not upper class prisoners].
6 To elect a commission to review the cases of those who are imprisoned in jails and
concentration camps.
7 To abolish all Political [propaganda] Departments, because no single party may enjoy
privileges in the propagation of its ideas and receive funds from the state for this purpose.
Instead of these Departments, locally elected cultural—educational commissions must be
established and supported by the state.
8 All ‘cordon detachments’ are to be abolished immediately.
9 To equalize rations for all workers, harmful sectors [i.e. types of work] being excepted.
10 To abolish all Communist fighting detachments in all military units, and also the various
Communist guards at factories. If such detachments and guards are needed they may be
chosen from the companies in military units and in the factories according to the
judgement of the workers.
11 To grant the peasant full right to do as he sees fit with his land and also to possess cattle,
which he must maintain and manage with his own strength, but without employing hired
labour.
12 To ask all military units and also our comrades, the military cadets, to associate
themselves with our resolutions.
13 We demand that all resolutions be widely published in the press.
14 To appoint a travelling bureau for control [i.e. supervising and checking up on the work
of officials].
15 To permit free artisan production with individual labour [i.e. hiring labour was to remain
illegal].
The resolutions were adopted by the meeting unanimously, with two abstentions.

President of the Meeting

PETRICHENKO
Secretary
PEREPELKIN®

The Kronstadt mutiny began on 28 February 1921, a week before the Tenth
Congress of the Communist Party met in Moscow on 8 March. On 11 March, more than
three hundred members of the Congress took the train to Petrograd, where they
helped Trotsky and Tukhachevskii prepare the assault on Kronstadt. The issuing of
Lenin’s decree abolishing grain requisitioning, on 15 March, immediately improved
the morale of the Communist troops waiting on the chilly shores of the Baltic. On 17
across
March Red units, fortified with vodka and dressed in white camouflage, attacked
ice that was breaking up under constant shelling. They suppressed the mutiny only
after desperate and bloody fighting in which at least 15 000 defenders died.
The bloody fighting in Kronstadt showed the seriousness of the crisis. Though they
222 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

had expelled the White Armies, the Communists could no longer. contain the
discontent their wartime rule had provoked among their working class supporters.
The crisis of the spring of 1921 challenged the ideals of the Communist Party as well
as its power. A government claiming to represent the working class now found itself on
the verge of being overthrown by that same working class. The crisis had undermined
the loyalty of the villages, the towns and, finally, sections of the army. It was fully as
serious as the crises faced by the Tsarist government in 1905 and in February 197.
Could the Communist government react to crisis more successfully than its
predecessors? What sacrifices would it have to make to survive?

THE INTRODUCTION OF THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY

There were two options: advance or retreat. The government could persist with War
Communism or it could back down.

The decision to retreat

As early as February 1920, Trotsky had argued for a retreat to indirect methods of
mobilisation. On his travels around the country as war commissar, he saw clearly the
extent of the economic collapse. He saw that, as in 1917, the crucial problem was that
of grain supplies—of trade between town and country. Direct control of twenty-five
million peasant farms was as yet quite beyond the government’s means. So was the
direct control of the grain trade that the government tried to achieve during the Civil
War. The alternative, Trotsky argued, was to give the peasants an incentive to produce
and sell surplus grain. Instead of requisitioning grain at arbitrary prices, the
government should tax peasants in kind, taking a fixed percentage of the grain they
produced. It should then let them sell the rest of their produce at free market prices.
The idea was simple. Yet its implications were profound, for it affected the activities
of the eighty-four per cent of people still on the land.’ Because it satisfied popular
demands, it promised to end popular discontent and restore grain supplies to the
towns. However, the change would require compromises that many in the Party would
find painful. It would mean ending prodrazverstka, the foundation of War Communism.
The government would have to abandon the attempt to control the rural sector
directly. That, in turn, would mean a partial return to a free market in grain, driven by
the profits earned by peasant producers and traders. In other words, it meant a partial
return to Capitalism.
Trotsky argued for these changes in February 1920, but Lenin would not consider
them. Like many others in the Party, Lenin resisted the idea of reintroducing
Capitalism to the countryside after fighting a terrible civil war to overthrow it.
Logically, Trotsky then began to argue for an intensified strategy of direct
mobilisation. If the government refused to abandon War Communism, it would have
to extend it. The solutions that had worked during the military crisis of 1918 should
now be applied to the economic crisis of 1921. Such methods had already produced
results on the railways. So Trotsky now proposed militarising the entire labour force.
By early 1921, Lenin was the realist. During the Kronstadt revolt, he finally saw the
THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY 223

force of Trotsky’s original idea. To the tenth Party Congress he proposed replacing
prodrazverstka with a tax in kind. Further, he proposed setting the new tax lower than
the existing delivery quotas for 1920-21. He suggested lowering the grain quota by
forty-three per cent, the quota on potatoes by forty-five per cent, and the quota on meat
by seventy-four per cent.®
Lenin’s proposal marked the end of War Communism and the beginning of what
the Party began to call the New Economic Policy (NEP). It meant a partial return to
indirect methods of mobilisation, and to the ‘state capitalism’ that Lenin had talked of
in the eight months after the October revolution. As in the past, when faced with
widespread rural insurrection, a Russian government had beaten a fiscal retreat. The
retreat showed that, though the government now controlled the towns, it did not yet
control the countryside.

Implications of the New Economic Policy

Other concessions had to follow if the reform was to work. The government abolished
the cordon detachments and allowed peasants and small traders to buy and sell
produce. It denationalised small non-agricultural enterprises, and leased them, often
to their former owners. Small businesses could now employ up to twenty workers and
produce goods for a profit.
The ‘bagmen’, whose activities it had repressed only months before, now flourished,
and a whole class of small traders and entrepreneurs appeared. Following more
cautiously in their tracks came larger traders. These two groups came to be known as
‘NEP men’. They mediated between town and country, taking on economic tasks that
the cumbersome planning system could not handle. The New Economic Policy
depended on the success of the NEP men and the wealthy peasants who produced the
grain surpluses. Yet it was inevitable that the Communist government would treat their
activities with suspicion.

A mixed economy
The government retained control in the urban sectors of the economy. It held what
Lenin dubbed, in a crisp military metaphor, the ‘commanding heights’ of the
economy. These included large industrial enterprises, banking, foreign trade, the
railways, and large industrial projects such as Lenin’s plan for the electrification of
Russia. It also held the most important of all economic levers—the state itself. However,
it had surrendered the vast agricultural sector and the retail trade based on it to the
capitalist instincts of the peasantry and the NEP men. The Party gambled that as long
as it held the commanding heights, the capitalist lowlands would remain under its
indirect control.
This mixture of Party control of the ‘commanding heights’ and small-scale
Capitalism in the rural areas and retail trade was the essence of the New Economic
Policy.

The short-term impact of the New Economic Policy

These measures provided a short-term solution to the political crisis of 1921. With the
abolition of prodrazverstka, popular opposition evaporated. The peasants now had what
they had wanted for centuries: ownership of the land and a government too weak to
impose heavy taxes.
224 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

The economic impact was less immediate. The grain harvest of.1921 was
catastrophic, yielding only 37.6 million tonnes, or forty-three per cent of the average
for 1909-13. In the worst affected areas famine and disease may have killed millions.
Eventually the government had to accept famine relief from capitalist America.
However, after 1922 the recovery was rapid, particularly in agriculture. It was slower in
industry, where restoration of productive capacity was more difficult and more costly.

NEP AND MODERNISATION: THE GREAT DEBATE

The task of modernisation
Though it solved some short-term problems, the New Economic Policy offered few
solutions to the long-term problems facing the government.
The Communist government’s long-term aim, and the reason for its existence, was
to build Socialism. Party members often used the words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’
as synonyms, though in strict usage Socialism meant the transitional stage after the
overthrow of Capitalism, while Communism meant the ultimate goal of an egalitarian
and classless society. The immediate problem for the government was to build
Socialism. What did this mean in practical terms?
During the Civil War, the task had seemed simple enough. Many party members
believed that Socialism would emerge naturally with the overthrow of Capitalism. To
many, War Communism, with its attempt at central planning, its moneyless economy,
and its rough egalitarianism, looked like Socialism. The collapse of War Communism
showed that building Socialism would not be that easy. Party leaders had to think the
problem through more thoroughly.
Marx had insisted that Socialism required material abundance. He had also argued
that Capitalism would generate such abundance by stimulating intensive growth. Yet
the Bolsheviks had seized power in backward Russia before Capitalism had done its
work, in the hope that their uprising would detonate a world-wide revolution. A
friendly socialist Europe could then help backward Russia to build Socialism.
By 1921 it was clear the world-wide anti-capitalist revolution would not occur. This
changed the problem entirely. It meant that the Communists now faced the nightmare
that moderate socialists had warned against in 1917. They found themselves trying to
build Socialism in a backward country. Even Marx had said this was impossible. Indeed,
he had warned that if they tried to do so, they could only create new forms of class
struggle.
What should the Bolsheviks do? The logical answer was to give up. How could they
ignore Marx’s clear warnings?
In reality, the issue was less clear cut. For those who had spent their lives fighting
Capitalism, first in the underground and then during the Civil War, giving up was
unthinkable. No one in the Party seriously proposed abandoning the socialist project.
Besides Marx himself had sometimes been more optimistic about the chances of
building Socialism under conditions of backwardness. So, the Party had to press ahead
and find some way of building Socialism despite Russia’s backwardness.
How? This was territory Marx had not charted.
One thing was clear. Any path to Socialism required overcoming Russia’s
THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY 225

backwardness quickly. There were three reasons for this. First, the Party had to build
up Russia’s productive resources to provide the economic abundance Marx saw as the
basis for Socialism. Second, socialist Russia was isolated and vulnerable in a capitalist
world. To defend itself, it would need a modern armaments industry and a modern
army. Third, modernisation was necessary to expand the proletariat, the only class
from which the Communists expected solid support.
The problem, then, was how to modernise. Throughout the 1920s there took place
a wide-ranging debate over strategies of socialist modernisation in a backward country.
The discussions were profound, committed and original. They took place in
newspapers and books, within the Party, the planning agencies and the economic
ministries. These rich debates pioneered the subject often described in the West as
‘development economics’, for this was the first time that anyone had discussed the
problems of planned industrialisation with such urgency, thoroughness and expertise.
Marx’s analysis suggested that Capitalism itself offered the best strategy for rapid
modernisation. However, the Party’s own ideology ruled out a purely capitalist
solution. So the Communist government began to look for a non-capitalist engine of
growth. The problem, then, was this: Was there a socialist engine of growth? If there
was, could it match the capitalist engine of growth, which had demonstrated its power
so spectacularly during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? The fate of the
Soviet experiment would turn on the answers the Soviet government found to these
questions.

Mobilising resources
We can simplify the discussion by concentrating on the problem of mobilisation.
Growth of any kind requires the mobilisation of labour, raw materials and cash. We
have seen it is possible to mobilise resources through the direct use of power, or
indirectly, through the operation of market forces.
The industrialisation strategy of Peter the Great had relied on the direct
mobilisation of resources by the state. The strategy of Sergei Witte had relied on a
mixture of direct and indirect mobilisation. He had used the state to mobilise cash and
grain through taxation and had used these resources for a program of railway building
and industrial development. Simultaneously, he had encouraged the indirect
mobilisation of resources through the commercial activities of Russian and foreign
capitalists.
What mechanisms could a socialist government use to mobilise resources? Could it
use market forces? Or would it have to rely mainly on the power of the state? The
difficulty was that the Soviet government had fewer options than the government of
Sergei Witte, thirty years before. It was also in more of a hurry.
Opportunities for indirect mobilisation of resources were limited. There were
several reasons for this. The first was ideological. In principle, the Soviet government
opposed the use of market forces, for most Marxists saw them as the very essence of
Capitalism. This is why the government reintroduced markets so reluctantly in 1921.
However, Lenin had shown many times that Bolshevik ideology could be flexible when
necessary. If they could use market forces to further Socialism, then why not?
The second difficulty was that the Bolsheviks had destroyed the Russian bourgeoisie.
Most large entrepreneurs were dead or in exile. What remained was a large class of
petty entrepreneurs, consisting of peasants and small retailers, both legal and illegal.
Could the government work with such entrepreneurs? If so, what would it gain? Would
226 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

not a revival of the market lead to a dangerous resurgence of petty Capitalism, and
eventually of large-scale Capitalism?
Third, the chances of working with foreign capitalists were also limited. Witte had
mobilised much of the cash needed for developing heavy industry through foreign
loans. Yet foreign capitalists were unwilling to lend to the Soviet government. They
knew that it was committed to their eventual overthrow. Even more important, the
Soviet government had repudiated the massive foreign debts accumulated by the
Tsarist government. It was a bad debtor.
Allin all, a strategy of indirect mobilisation through market forces would not be easy
for a government committed to building Socialism, and even if it worked, it could do
so only by encouraging a partial revival of Capitalism. The only alternative was the
direct mobilisation of resources for industrial development. .
Here, too, there were serious difficulties. To mobilise enough resources for rapid
industrialisation the government would have to be immensely powerful. Yet the crisis
of 1921 had shown that the Soviet government was very weak, particularly in rural areas.
In any case, were the resources there to be mobilised? The revolution had left Russian
agriculture even more backward than before the First World War. The large farms that
had pioneered modern farming methods and produced the bulk of the grain surplus
before the war had vanished. The number of small peasant farms, using primitive
methods and producing largely for their own subsistence, had increased from fifteen
to twenty-five million. As a result, the total amount of grain put on the market—the
most important measure of rural surpluses—had declined. Even in 1927 only 630
million poods (1 pood = 16.3 kilograms) of grain were marketed. This was only forty-
eight per cent of the 1913 figure of 1300 million poods.®
In general terms, then, the problem was this: building Socialism required
industrialisation. Industrialisation required mobilising resources. Yet there seemed to
be no way of mobilising enough resources in a poor country while simultaneously
building Socialism.
During the debates of the 1920s, two main strategies emerged. Both depended ona
mixture of indirect mobilisation through market forces and direct mobilisation
through the use of state power. However, the first leaned more towards market forces,
while the second relied more on the mobilisational power of the Soviet state.

Bukharin: NEP as a socialist strategy of growth ~

The first strategy is associated with the name of Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938).!°
However, before 1927 it was the official policy of the entire Party leadership, including
Stalin.
In 1921 most Party members saw the New Economic Policy as a temporary retreat
that they hoped to reverse as soon as they could. However, after its introduction,
growth was so rapid in industry and agriculture that many began to think that NEP
itself might offer a solution to the problem of industrialisation. This was the starting
point for the ‘Bukharinite’ strategy of socialist industrialisation. The argument went
like this.
The success of NEP in its early years had shown that there were good prospects for
mobilising resources through market forces. The government should encourage the
peasantry to prosper and flourish. It should set taxes at a modest level, and allow
peasants to sell their surpluses on the free market. It should also promise peasants a
THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY 227

120

(oo)So
100)

60

40

of
Index
(1913
output
20 Industrial output

Note: Based on information in Table 9.|

1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926

Years

Figure 9.1 Economic Growth during NEP, 1920-26.

stable future. Such policies would earn the support of the peasantry, and encourage
them to raise productivity. This would encourage intensive growth in the countryside
where most of the country’s wealth remained.
Increased grain production would feed the growing town population and provide
exports to pay for imported modern machinery. A prosperous peasantry would use the
income generated by grain sales to buy industrial goods produced by the state-
controlled industrial sector. The greater the income of the peasantry, the more they
could buy, and the greater the revenues earned by government-run agencies trading
in grain and producing consumer goods such as textiles, vodka or agricultural
equipment. The government could invest the profits of government enterprises in
further industrial growth. In short, trade between government-controlled industries
and a flourishing rural sector operating under free market conditions would provide
the resources for rapid industrialisation.
Though the state would continue to play an active role, indirect mobilisation of
resources through market forces played the central role in Bukharin’s strategy, as it
had in Witte’s.
This strategy had several attractive features. As it depended on the continuation of
NEP, it required no social upheavals in the next few years. As Bukharin said, there must
be ‘no third revolution’.'! Because Bukharin’s strategy required some compromise
with Capitalism, it would make it easier to deal with foreign capitalist powers. It would
therefore allow a lengthy period of coexistence with Capitalism, during which it might
be possible to extract foreign loans and borrow foreign technology and expertise.
Ideologically, Bukharin’s strategy was attractive for it promised to maintain the
smychka, the alliance of peasants and proletarians that was the cornerstone of Lenin’s
strategy in 1917. Lenin’s own vague pronouncements on economic policy during the
last two years of his life also appeared to support the continuation of NEP for a long
time.”
228 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

To summarise, Bukharin’s strategy depended on:

1 maintaining the New Economic Policy for a long time, with private enterprise in
the rural sector and retail trade, and socialist control of the urban and industrial
sectors;
2 low taxation of the peasantry, and minimal pressure on living standards;
3 slow growth, based on growing exchange between the urban and rural sectors,
and led by agriculture and consumer goods industries; and
4 a foreign policy based on peaceful coexistence with Capitalism.
However, Bukharin’s strategy had some serious weaknesses. Opponents such as
Trotsky and Preobrazhensky pointed these out in the debates of the mid-1920s.
First, Bukharin’s strategy was slow. Bukharin admitted this when he talked,
picturesquely, of ‘riding to Socialism on a peasant nag’. His strategy depended on the
pace of development of the most backward sector of the Soviet economy—peasant
agriculture. It also depended on the ability of Soviet industry to produce consumer
goods cheaply. It offered little hope of a rapid build-up of heavy industries such as iron,
steel and oil, or of armaments industries. It therefore did little to end the Soviet
Union’s military weakness. Opponents argued that under Bukharin’s strategy, socialist
Russia would remain at the mercy of the advanced capitalist nations for decades.
Second, Bukharin’s strategy favoured the peasantry, in particular the semi-capitalist
kulaks. Most party members considered this both dangerous and improper for a
proletarian party. The peasantry had been a revolutionary force when they were short
of land and sought the overthrow of the landlords. This had been the basis for the
Bolsheviks’ alliance with the peasantry in 1917. However, after 1917 most peasants were
firmly committed to private property in the land. They were, in short, small capitalists.
Yet they made up almost eighty-five per cent of the population. The more they
flourished, the more Capitalism would flourish with them. From the kulaks and the
NEP men there would emerge a vast and dangerous class of small capitalists. Their
growing economic power would soon enable them to undermine the government’s
control of the economy and of Soviet society. For a proletarian party keen to abolish
private property in productive resources, the resurrection of peasant Capitalism was
very threatening.
Finally, the economist Eugene Preobrazhensky, a former ally of Bukharin’s, argued
that Bukharin’s strategy could not work. The rapid increase in output since 1921 was
all very impressive, but it was also misleading. It simply reflected the post-war recovery.
Peasants put old fields back into cultivation. Workers and managers repaired factories
and locomotives, and drained mines. All this cost very little. However, once recovery
was complete, further progress would require the building of new factories, new
railways, and the introduction of advanced farming methods. This would demand
massive investment funds. Where would they come from? Bukharin’s strategy allowed
investment funds to rise only ‘at the pace of a peasant’s nag’. Preobrazhensky argued
that the crisis would come in 1926 or 1927, when recovery was complete. At that point,
he predicted, rates of growth would fall off rapidly unless the government found new
sources of investment funds.

Trotsky and the leftwing: beyond NEP

If the leftwing criticisms were accurate, what was the alternative?
THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY 229

Bukharin’s critics argued that the government had to force the pace at home and
abroad. It had to find more resources to fuel industrial growth—and quickly. But
where could it find them? Foreign capital could hardly be expected to help much, and
there were no longer any large native capitalists. Nor did the Soviet Union have
colonies to exploit. (This was not true, of course, as any Ukrainian or Kazakh could
have told Preobrazhensky, the economist who made this claim.) This meant that,
whether the Party liked it or not, it would have to exact ‘tributes’ from the peasantry
through what Preobrazhensky called ‘primitive socialist accumulation’. There was no
alternative. The government would have to tax peasants as hard as possible. The
leftwing proposed increasing agricultural productivity not with the methods of
Capitalism, but with the methods of Socialism. They argued that it was vital to replace
private peasant farming with large collective farms using modern agricultural methods.
A more productive rural sector could then provide resources for investment in
industrial development. The government should use these resources not for the
production of consumer goods, but for heavy industry, electricity, mining, iron and
steel, and, of course, armaments. A growing defensive capability would enable the
government to adopt a more aggressive foreign policy. Instead of appeasing capitalist
powers, it could foment revolution abroad in the hope of provoking socialist
revolutions. Socialist revolutions abroad would ease the problems of the Russian
government by ending its isolation. Alternatively, the government could attract foreign
investment from a position of strength rather than weakness.
To summarise, the Trotsky/Preobrazhensky strategy depended on:

1 the abandonment of the New Economic Policy and a rapid extension of Socialism
in the countryside;
2 high taxation of the peasantry, and pressure on living standards, particularly in
the rural areas;
3 rapid industrial growth led by the heavy goods and armaments industries and
supported by collectivised agriculture; and
4 an aggressive foreign policy aimed at ending Russia’s isolation through the rapid
spread of Socialism.
The leftwing strategy also suffered from serious problems. In particular, it
threatened to provoke retaliation from two directions—from Russia’s peasantry and
from abroad. The rightwing argued that the government was too weak to face either
challenge.
Two peasant responses were possible, either of which could bring the government
down. First, peasants could simply withdraw from the market. They could stop selling
and producing surplus grain. Exports would dry up and the towns would starve. Instead
of selling grain, the peasants would eat better themselves or feed surpluses to their
livestock, as they had during the First World War. For the government the result would
be bread shortages, unrest in the towns, and rapid economic decline—the script of
February 1917.
Something like this had already happened during NEP, in the so-called ‘scissors’
crisis of 1923. Since 1921, agriculture had recovered more rapidly than industry, so
industrial production could not satisfy growing peasant demand. Asa result, industrial
prices rose, while agricultural prices declined. On a graph, the two lines crossed,
forming the blades of the ‘scissors’ from which the crisis took its name. Instead of
selling surplus grain in return for overpriced and scarce industrial goods, the peasants
230 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

stopped marketing grain. Trade between town and country began to break down,
which threatened the very foundations of the New Economic Policy. The government
moved to force industrial prices down to satisfy the peasantry, and just weathered the
storm. Still, the threat remained.
Faced with a government that refused to back down, the peasantry had a second
weapon: revolt. This was the script of 1861, 1905 and 1921. The 1921 crisis appeared to
show that the Soviet government was too weak to deal with a widespread peasant revolt.
But during NEP the party’s influence in the countryside continued to decline. The
recruitment of young peasants into the army and the Party during the Civil War, and
intensive literacy campaigns, had maintained some Party influence in the villages.
During NEP, demobilisation and the ending of literacy programs, sharply reduced the
Party’s influence in the villages. The countryside became foreign territory, beyond the
reach of most Party institutions, and beyond the control of the Party’s economic
planners.
In short, the right argued that the government was too weak and the proletariat too
small to risk breaking the smychka with the peasantry.
The right also argued that the government was too weak to risk a foreign policy that
might provoke intervention from imperialist enemies abroad. Stalin, who still
supported Bukharin’s approach, argued that Russia could go it alone in any case and
build ‘Socialism in one country’. Stalin opposed this slogan to Trotsky’s slogan of
‘permanent revolution’.

Common ground
I have described a complex debate in over-simple terms. In reality, though debate
forced opponents apart, the left and right shared much common ground. Above all,
they agreed that massive use of force could not solve the problem of modernisation.
According to Bukharin, Lenin had told him ina private conversation before his death
that there must be ‘no coercion against the peasantry in building Socialism’.'* Second,
they agreed on the need to maintain a balance between the various sectors of the
economy during the period of growth. They realised that unbalanced growth could
only cause colossal wastage. Third, both sides agreed on the need to maintain elements
of the market within the socialist economy. Stalin eventually found a solution to the
difficulties of the 1920s by breaking all three of these rules.

THE END OF NEP

The procurements crisis
The debate over industrialisation was inconclusive. However, the problems facing the
government worsened in the late 1920s, and the need to find a solution became more
pressing. Several events brought the issue to a crisis by exposing the inadequacies of
both strategies of socialist industrialisation.
In the mid-1920s, the Bukharinite strategy looked promising. Economic growth was
THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY 231

rapid, and the strategy had the support of the main Party leaders. A year or two later
things looked very different. A decline in the growth rate of heavy industry in 1926 and
1927 suggested that Preobrazhensky had been right: the New Economic Policy could
not generate enough funds to sustain industrial growth once post-war recovery was
complete. Meanwhile, the international position of the Soviet Union worsened. In May
1927, the British government broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union,
creating a serious, if temporary war scare. This reminded everyone forcibly of the Soviet
Union’s military weakness. The slowdown in industrial growth and the prospect of war
persuaded the government to increase investment funds rapidly, particularly for heavy
industry and armaments. So it compromised slightly with the left by increasing fiscal
pressure on the private sector, on both NEP men and kulaks. It increased taxes on
private trade and lowered the price the government paid for purchases of grain
surpluses—the so-called grain ‘procurements’. Even Bukharin accepted that the pace
of industrial growth had to increase, and that this meant extracting more resources
from the peasantry. The question was how?
Bukharin had warned that lowering procurement prices could make the problem
worse. Late in 1927 it became clear that, faced with lower grain prices, and a growing
shortage of industrial goods, peasants were marketing less of their recently harvested
grain. By January 1928, peasants had placed only 300 million poods of grain on the
market, in comparison with 428 million poods in January 1927.'* The ‘procurements’
crisis of December 1927 was an ominous sign for the government. It seemed to show
that if the government squeezed the peasantry too hard, it would destroy trade between
town and country, and the economy would collapse. Yet if it did not squeeze the
peasantry, it would not have the resources needed to build up heavy industry. The
Soviet Union would remain defenceless against military threats from abroad, and the
building of a powerful, secure, socialist society would remain a utopian dream.
Once again, the government could either advance or retreat. It could resort to more
direct forms of mobilisation or it could persist with the indirect forms of mobilisation
it had used since 1921. It could take grain by force, risking peasant hostility and
starvation in the countryside. Or it could back down, offering higher prices for grain
in order to attract peasants back to the market.

The collapse of NEP and the ‘Urals—Siberian’ method

When the procurements crisis first struck, late in 1927, Bukharin argued for retreat.
The government should pay the peasants more for grain procurements. However,
Stalin argued for advance. Prices should remain as they were. Using a law of 1926 that
banned all ‘evil-intentioned increases in prices of commodities through purchase,
hoarding, or non-placing on the market’, Stalin urged party officials to seize hoarded
grain.!© He made it clear that he was not fussy about the methods they used as long as
they got results. He even talked, loosely, of collecting ‘tribute’. For local Party officials,
many of whom had vivid memories of the harsh methods used during the Civil War,
the message was clear. The methods of War Communism were back in favour.
In January 1928, Stalin travelled to the Urals and western Siberia to urge Party
officials to secure hoarded grain. His ‘solution’ to the procurements crisis therefore
became known as the ‘Urals—Siberian’ method. At each stop, he lectured local Party
bosses.
232 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Document 9.4: Stalin and the ‘Urals—Siberian’ method

You’re working badly! You’re idle and you indulge the kulaks. Take care that there aren’t
some kulak agents among you. We won't tolerate this sort of outrage for long.
Take a look at the kulak farms, you’ll see their granaries and barns are full of grain, they
have to cover the grain with awnings because there’s no more room for it inside. The kulak
farms have got something like a thousand tons of surplus grain per farm.
| propose that:
a) you demand that the kulaks hand over their surpluses at once at state prices;
b) if they refuse to submit to the law, you should charge them under Article 107 of the RSFSR
Criminal Code and confiscate their grain for the state, twenty-five per cent of it to be
redistributed among the poor and less well-off middle peasants.
You must steadfastly unify the least productive individual peasant holdings into collective
farms.'®

For peasants, too, the government’s actions wakened memories of War

Communism. Violent conflicts broke out between peasants and Party officials. By
mid-1928, there were reports of 150 peasant revolts.’ This raised worrying questions
about the reliability of an army that recruited primarily from the villages.
In the short run the ‘Urals—Siberian’ method was a success. By the spring of 1928,
grain procurements were satisfactory. By the summer, however, it was clear (as
Bukharin had warned) that squeezing the peasants would lead them to cut down the
amounts they sowed. This ensured that the situation would be even worse later in the
year. After the 1928 harvest, there was a renewed procurements crisis. Once again,
Stalin insisted on resorting to the forcible methods that had worked a year before.
By now, the split between Stalin and Bukharin was open. Bukharin was appalled at
the resort to coercion. In a private letter he referred to Stalin as a new Genghis Khan,
bent on extracting tribute from the peasantry by ‘military-feudal exploitation’.'*
The ‘Urals—Siberian’ method broke the smychka. It broke the peasantry’s trust in the
government, and the trading relationship between town and country that had been
the heart of the NEP. Whether Stalin realised where all this was leading is unknown.
But the die were cast. The party found itself in the grip of a momentum that was both
terrifying and exhilarating, particularly for those on the Party’s leftwing.
In 1932, when it was clear where such policies led, a bleak joke did the rounds in
official circles:

Question: What does it mean when there is food in the town but no food in the
country?
Answer: A Left, Trotskyite deviation.
Question: What does it mean when there is food in the country but no food in the
town?
Answer: A Right, Bukharinite deviation.
Question: What does it mean when there is no food in the country and no food in
the town?
Answer: The correct application of the general line.
Question: And what does it mean when there is food both in the country and in the
town?
Answer: The horrors of Capitalism."
 THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY
233

The Crisis of NEP: 1927 to 1928

The crisis of 1927 and 1928 affected more than grain supplies. It affected all spheres of
Soviet life. The breakdown of food supplies threatened the towns with shortages. By
early 1928, many foodstuffs were scarce and queues were lengthening. Some town
authorities introduced rationing, and there were food riots in several towns, including
Moscow.” Work discipline began to break down in response to shortages, poor
housing, and attacks by the government on bourgeois managers. Combined with the
war scare of May 1927, these problems increased tensions within the leadership. To
deal with opposition both within the Party and in the villages, the government
increased the powers of the secret police, or GPU, to supervise all areas of Soviet life.
In the middle of 1928, the government tried, for the first time, to blame the
country’s difficulties on sabotage. It staged the first of the great show trials, the so-called
‘Shakhty’ case. The prosecution accused fifty-three engineers and managers from the
mines of the Donets Basin (or ‘Donbass’) region, of ‘wrecking’ and sabotage. Three of
the accused were German advisers. This ensured that the foreign press would cover
the trial with horrified fascination. In the Soviet Union, the trial encouraged
disgruntled workers to blame their troubles on class enemies. The court finally
sentenced five of the accused to death and they were executed within weeks.

NEP AND THE CHANGING POLITICAL STRUCTURE

Political developments eventually offered the government an escape from the terrible
dilemmas of the late 1920s. To understand how, we must retrace the history of the new
ruling group under the New Economic Policy.

The anti-faction rule: maintaining Party discipline

While the government retreated on fiscal and economic issues in 1921, politically it
held firm. Lenin talked of the need for heightened discipline during a retreat. Yet the
Kronstadt mutineers, and even sections of the Party, had called for a relaxation of Party
control, believing that Socialism was inseparable from increased democracy. Many
believed that autocratic methods were permissible only in an extreme crisis such as the
Civil War. With the war over many Party members expected the restoration of
democracy, at least for the working classes. They hoped to reduce the powers of the
centre, and to allow more freedom to debate policy at the grass-roots level of politics.
The Workers’ Opposition, the most influential group of this kind within the Party, was
led by Alexandra Kollontai and Alexander Shlyapnikov. It demanded greater power
for trade unions and other working class organisations.
Frightened by the implications of the Kronstadt revolt, the Party majority opposed
such liberalism. Concessions to the peasantry were sacrifice enough. There was no
need to weaken the government as well. During the Civil War, the Party had banned
the activities of other parties, though Mensheviks and Left SRs had continued to work
within Soviets. Early in 1921, even this limited tolerance of non-Communist parties
ended. The Party imprisoned or expelled all the leading figures in non-Communist
parties. This left the Communist Party with a monopoly on political power and
234 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

undisputed control over the levers of power. At the same time, the Party maintained
the monopoly over the press and other means of communications that it had
established during the Civil War. In 1922, it created GlavLit (the Main Directorate of
Literature), whose task was to supervise the censorship of all forms of literature.
Though censorship was relaxed in the twenties, the government now had the
machinery with which, eventually, it would prevent the public expression of any views
that diverged from its own.
The Party leadership also increased discipline within the Party. The tenth Party
Congress denounced the views of the Workers’ Opposition and passed a resolution on
‘Party unity’. This was a classic expression of the need for discipline and unity within a
beleaguered ruling group, and of the complementary need to break the organisational
potential of rival groups.

Document 9.5: resolution of the tenth Party Congress on Party unity, March 1921
| The Congress directs the attention of all members of the Party to the fact that the unity
and solidarity of its ranks, guaranteeing complete confidence between members of the
Party and work that is really enthusiastic, work that genuinely embodies the unified will of
the vanguard of the proletariat, is especially necessary at the present moment, when a
number of circumstances increase the waverings among the petty-bourgeois population
of the country [the Party’s jargon for the peasantry and NEP men].
2 ...All class-conscious workers must clearly recognise the harm and impermissibility of
any kind of factionalism, which inevitably leads in fact to a weakening of amicable work
and a strengthening of the repeated attempts of enemies who have crept into the
governing Party to deepen any differences and to exploit it for counter-revolutionary
purposes.
The ability of the enemies of the proletariat to exploit any departures from a strictly
maintained Communist line was most clearly revealed at the time of the Kronstadt mutiny,
when the bourgeois counter-revolution and the White Guards in all countries of the
world showed their readiness even to accept the slogans of the Soviet regime in order to
overthrow the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia...
6 ... The Congress gives instructions that all groups which have been organized on the basis
of any platform whatever should be immediately dissolved and commissions all
organisations to watch out very closely so that no factional demonstrations may be
permitted. Nonfulfilment of this decision of the Congress must incur unconditional and
immediate expulsion from the Party.
7 In order to bring about strict discipline in the Party and in all Soviet work, and to achieve
the greatest possible unity by removing all factionalism, the Congress empowers the CC
[Central Committee] to apply, in the case (or cases) of violation of party discipline or
reappearance of, or connivance at, factionalism, all measures of Party punishment right up
to expulsion.”!

The decrees passed at the tenth Party Congress showed that the Party intended to
maintain the high levels of discipline and unity established during the Civil War. This
enhanced the power of Party leaders over the Party rank and file. Party members
understood the dangers of such autocratic methods, but many also saw the need for
them. ‘In voting for this resolution,’ said Karl Radek (1885-1939), ‘I feel that it can
well be turned against us, and nevertheless I support it. . . Let the Central Committee
in a moment of danger take the severest measures against the best Party comrades, if it
THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY 235

finds this necessary. .. . Let the Central Committee even be mistaken! That is less
dangerous than the wavering which is now observable.’ Radek himself was to become
a victim of the 1921 law. The Party expelled him in 1927, and he died in prison in 1939.
There was a less obvious consequence of these changes that was to prove immensely
important. The banning of open political conflict between or even within political
parties did not mean the banning of conflict. Vicious conflicts continued, but they took
place out of the public gaze. We have seen already that this was a characteristic feature
of Russia’s autocratic political culture. By demanding total unity, the Party did not end
internal conflict. It ensured a public facade of unity, but drove conflicts underground,
where they encouraged plotting and paranoia. This mood of furtive conflict explains
the extreme suspiciousness of the Party in the 1930s and the savagery with which the
Party leadership lashed out at suspected opponents.

Power and the Party machine

However, the very fact that open political struggle was now impossible weakened
dissidents and enhanced the power of leaders. How did the Party leaders exercise their
authority?
While the Party was small, undisciplined and weak, Lenin dominated it through his
skill in argumentation within elected Party bodies such as the annual Party congresses
or their various standing committees. He was a skilful backstairs politician, always
willing to manoeuvre and apply pressure on delegates if necessary. However he had no
means of guaranteeing loyalty, apart from his own personal prestige. As a result,
debates at Party congresses remained energetic and serious while Lenin was active.
Something of the ideal of ‘democratic centralism’ survived, at least at the upper levels
of Party life.
At lower levels, the Party had changed greatly. Party numbers grew rapidly during
the Civil War. This posed new organisational problems and generated new forms of
power within the Party. Before his death in March 1919, Y. M. Sverdlov (1885-1919)
had handled most of the Party’s organisational tasks. After his death, the eighth Party
Congress set up three new subcommittees of the Central Committee to handle day-to-
day governmental tasks. These were the Politburo (Political Bureau), which took the
major policy decisions; and two housekeeping committees, the Orgburo (Organisation
Bureau) and the Secretariat. These two bodies kept records on the rapidly growing
Party membership, and assigned Party workers to particular Party tasks.
The role of the Secretariat turned out to be peculiarly important, for its powers of
appointment gave it great influence over the careers of professional Party workers at
all levels. It rapidly acquired extensive patronage over the nationwide network of Party
secretaries, who were the backbone of Party life. Party secretaries in turn acquired
immense power over rank and file members. At the provincial level they soon exercised
something of the arbitrary authority of the Tsarist provincial governors. Indeed, it is
helpful to think of two distinct layers of government. The central govérnment took
general policy decisions. However, at the provincial level regional party secretaries
were the real bosses, controlling and sometimes stifling the implementation of central
government orders.
In the early 1920s, both central and provincial Party officials began drawing up lists
of key positions in all areas of government. They also drew up parallel lists of officials
suitable for appointment to these positions. These lists, the nomenklatura, remained the
best guide to the dominant figures in the Soviet ruling group throughout Soviet
236 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

history. Like the Petrine Table of Ranks, they listed those positions and individuals that
members of the ruling group regarded as important. Through these mechanisms, the
Secretariat gained control of the apparat (the Party machine) of professional Party
workers. Meanwhile, the party apparat, with the Secretariat at its head, and regional
party secretaries as its key link in the provinces, emerged as the backbone of the Soviet
political system.
These mechanisms gave the centre great power over the rank and file of the Party.
They also reduced the level of democracy within the Party and the government, while
enhancing the influence of particular central and regional party bosses. Trotsky, who
had supported central authority during the Civil War, began to criticise these
developments as early as October 1923, when he could already sense the ground
shifting under his own feet.

Document 9.6: Trotsky on the bureaucratisation of the Party, October 1923

Even during the harshest days of War Communism, the system of appointments within the
Party was not practiced on one-tenth the scale it is now. The practice of appointing
secretaries of province committees is now the rule. This creates for the secretaries a position
that is essentially independent of the local organizations. In the event that opposition,
criticism, or protests occur, the secretary, with the help of the center, can simply have the
opponent transferred ... The secretary, appointed by the center and thereby virtually
independent of the local organizations, is in turn a source of subsequent appointments and
dismissals within the province itself. Organized from the top down, the secretarial apparatus
has, in an increasingly autonomous fashion, been gathering ‘all the strings into its own hands’.
The participation of the Party ranks in the actual shaping of the Party organization is becoming
more and more illusory ...
The bureaucratization of the Party apparatus has reached unheard-of proportions through
the application of the methods of secretarial selection. Even in the cruelest hours of the Civil
War, we argued in the Party organizations, and in the press as well, over such issues as the
recruitment of specialists, partisan forces versus a regular army, discipline, etc.; while now
there is not a trace of such an open exchange of opinions on questions that are really
troubling the party. There has been created a very broad layer of Party workers, belonging
to the apparatus of the state or the Party, who have totally renounced the idea of holding
their own political opinions or at least of openly expressing such-opinions, as if they believe
that the secretarial hierarchy is the proper apparatus for forming Party opinions and making
Party decisions. Beneath this layer that refrains from having its own opinions lies the broad
layer of Party masses before whom every decision stands in the form of a summons or
command.”#

In the early 1920s open conflict was already being driven underground. Meanwhile,
the Secretariat, through its control of the nomenklatura, was beginning to function as a
disciplined inner elite of the Party. In many ways, its role was similar to that of the
bureaucracy in the Tsarist ruling group in the late nineteenth century. However, it took
some time for party members to appreciate the extent of the power this gave to the
Secretariat, and to those who dominated it.
THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY 237

The struggle for succession

These changes in the structure of the Party gained importance with the removal of
Lenin. He had a stroke in May 1922, from which he never fully recovered. He died in
January 1924. During his illness the various Party bosses began jockeying for position.
Each of the major Party leaders—Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Stalin—
had their own particular sources of power, their own ‘fiefdoms’ as they were known
informally. Grigorii Zinoviev (1883-1936) headed the prestigious Party Organisation
of Petrograd (renamed Leningrad after Lenin’s death in 1924), Lev Kamenev (1883-
1936) headed the influential Moscow Party Organisation. Both had supported Lenin
since 1903, and Zinoviev had been a member of the Party’s central committee since
1912. Lev Trotsky (1879-1940) remained commissar for war. He enjoyed immense
national and international prestige as the leader of the October insurrection and
organiser of victory in the Civil War. However, he had joined the Bolsheviks only in
1917. Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) was the youngest of the Party leaders. He edited
Pravda, the Party newspaper, and had considerable influence as a theorist.
Joseph Stalin (born in Djugashvili, 1879-1953), like Zinoviev and Kamenev, was a
long time Party member. He had supported Lenin ever since 1903, and joined the
party central committee in 1913. From 1917, he was commissar for nationalities, and
therefore responsible for the creation of the USSR in 1924. He played a leading role
in the military campaigns of the Civil War, which brought him into conflict with
Trotsky. From 1919, he belonged to the Politburo and the Orgburo. In May 1922 he
became the general secretary of the Communist Party. This placed him at the head of
the Party Secretariat.

Lenin’s funeral, January 1924. People queue to pay their last respects outside the House of Trade Unions
(formerly the Nobles’ Club).
238 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Though Stalin dominated the apparat, this did not guarantee that he would emerge
as Lenin’s successor. Equally important, Stalin had the political skills necessary to
maximise the power the Secretariat gave him without ever overplaying his hand. Like
all great politicians, Stalin knew precisely how much power he had at any moment, and
where his power ended. Where he had enough power, he acted decisively. Where he
did not, he manoeuvred discreetly; so his pubiic defeats were very rare. His successes
were visible; his failures were not. Though it may sound paradoxical, it was Stalin’s
political restraint that eventually built up an impression of limitless power. The fact
that the immense leverage available to the Secretariat was not widely recognised in the
early 1920s—on the contrary many regarded both Stalin and his official position as dull
and insignificant—gave him a further advantage. His rivals failed to take Stalin
seriously until it was too late. In his account of 1917, which appeared in 1922, the
Menshevik Sukhanov, wrote: ‘Stalin ... during his modest activity in the executive
committee [of the Petrograd Soviet] produced—and not only on me—the impression
of a grey blur, looming up now and then dimly and not leaving any trace. There is really
nothing more to be said about him’.
The struggle for leadership was played out by a succession of changing political
alliances between the Party bosses. While Lenin was dying, Trotsky appeared the
obvious successor. This made him vulnerable. As early as 1923, Zinoviev, Kamenev and
Stalin—the Bolshevik old guard—formed a ‘triumvirate’ of allies against the newcomer
Trotsky. Though popular within the army and within many sections of the Party,
Trotsky never had the numbers within the Party apparatus. His defeat in 1925 was
marked by his removal as commissar of war. This began a long odyssey whose next stage
led him to exile in Alma-Ata in Soviet Central Asia in 1928. In 1929 the government
expelled him from the Soviet Union, dumping him unceremoniously in Turkey. After
periods of exile in Turkey and Norway, he died in Mexico in 1940 at the hands of a
Stalinist assassin.
Zinoviev and Kameneyv fell out with Stalin in 1925. In 1926, they tried to ally with
Trotsky and the so-called ‘left opposition’ against Stalin and Bukharin. In November
1927, the Party expelled them along with Trotsky. The fifteenth Party Congress, which
met in December, confirmed the expulsions. The third phase of the leadership
struggle began during the procurements crisis of 1927, when Stalin and Bukharin fell
out. Stalin turned on his rival in 1928, and in the middle of 1929 Bukharin lost his place
on the Politburo.
Party leaders fought out their rivalries within the Party and in articles and books of
polemics on Party policy. However, it was votes at the Party congresses that decided
the outcome of the struggles. On the face of it, this was proof of considerable intra-
Party democracy. These procedures also allowed the victorious alliances to claim that
they represented the will of the entire Party, and to brand their opponents as minority
factions whose actions breached the 192] anti-faction ruling.
The reality was more complex. Delegates to the congresses were of course elected
by their local Party organisations. However, the Civil War habit of electing those the
centre wanted elected had taken firm hold, particularly in the provinces, and it was
Stalin, through the Secretariat, who benefited from this tradition. Increasingly,
opposition leaders claimed that the votes that defeated them reflected not the free
decisions of independent minded Party delegates, but the disciplined behaviour of a
unified Party machine directed by the general secretary.
There was certainly some truth to this. The Secretariat’s power of appointment and
transfer gave the machine wide disciplinary powers over Party members. In 1925, a
THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY 239

delegate claimed that many voted against their own convictions for: ‘not everyone will
hold up his hand in opposition in order to be sent, as a result, to Murmansk or
Turkestan’.*°
Other changes enhanced the patronage available to the Party machine. The
existence of a one party state gave the Party control over all positions of influence
within the Soviet Union. The Party controlled careers in the military, industry,
education, the arts and sciences. From now on, anyone with any ambition had to
reckon with the Party, and people found that if they were not Party members their
careers would falter. The Party and the Party machine had become the key to success
in any sphere of Soviet life.
The nature of the Party also changed during the 1920s in ways that enhanced central
control. First, it expanded in size. At the end of 1917, there were about 250 000 Party
members. By 1921, there were over 700 000. By 1930 there were almost 1.7 million.
These figures underestimate the numbers who joined the Party, for many left again
during periodic purges. By the late 1920s, those who had joined the Party before 1917
represented no more than one per cent of the Party membership. Most Party members
had joined during the Civil War or the 1920s. This cohort of Party members was very
different from the pre-1917 cohort. They had not joined an underground
revolutionary party, but the most powerful political institution in Russia. They were
joining the institution most likely to provide them with a life of power and privilege. It
is a fair assumption that many joined not out of idealism, but in the hope of making a
good career. This made them peculiarly susceptible to the patronage wielded by the
Secretariat.
Second, the composition of the Party had changed. The old Bolsheviks came largely
from the intelligentsia. They were committed revolutionary intellectuals who expected
to be able to debate the policies of the government they had helped create. Those who
joined in the Civil War and the 1920s came from Russia’s working classes. They were
mostly young. They had only limited education, and recruitment during the Civil War
accustomed them to obedience rather than to debate.
These changes transformed the new ruling group of Soviet Russia. The relation
between general secretary and provincial Party secretaries recreated something like the
alliance between autocrat and lesser nobility that had been the basis for the power of
both Ivan IV and Peter I. This mixture of backgrounds allowed Party leaders to play
newer Party members against their rivals just as Ivan IV had used the oprichniki against
the boyars (see Chapter one).
Lenin had always understood the need for a disciplined leadership. However, to his
credit, he also glimpsed some of the dangers this posed. As early as the end of 1922, he
wrote from his sickbed: ‘Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary [General], has
unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always
be capable of using that authority with enough caution’.*» A month later, Lenin
demanded that the Party remove Stalin from his post as general secretary. Away from
the centre of power Lenin began to see the basic paradox of autocratic government:
the more powerful the leaders the greater the group’s chances of survival, but the
smaller its capacity to protect itself against the caprice of its own leader.
Fortunately for Stalin, his rivals took no action against him. Then, in March 1923,
Lenin suffered a further stroke that finally put him out of action. Having survived this
crisis, Stalin could consolidate and build on the power he held as general secretary.
However, patronage was by no means the only source of his power. Policies counted,
too. By 1928, Stalin was becoming identified with a forceful economic strategy that had
240 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

great appeal to many Party members. He offered a clear way out of the dilemmas of
the 1920s. He claimed that Soviet Russia could build Socialism without foreign help
and without relying on market forces. It simply had to return to the forceful methods
that had worked so well during the Civil War. This approach appealed greatly to praktike
within the Party. His resistance to demands for greater democracy within the Party
earned him the support of the crucial provincial Party secretaries, for it shielded them
from excessive scrutiny. His approach to the peasantry increased the influence of the
secret police and earned him valuable support within the police apparatus. He also
managed better than any of his rivals to present himself to the Soviet public as the
legitimate heir of Lenin. His lecture series, ‘Lessons of Leninism’ did much to create
the notion of Leninism as a distinct body of ideas. In short, despite the great influence
he wielded through the Party Secretariat, Stalin, like any other politician, had to
negotiate, compromise and coax potential supporters to get the Congress or Central
Committee votes that built up his power and buried his rivals.

THE CRISIS OF MODERNISATION: FROM INDIRECT TO

DIRECT MOBILISATION
Stalin’s rise to power transformed the situation of the Soviet ruling group. It gave it
once more the unity, strength and sense of purpose it had shown during the Civil War.
This, in turn, offered a way out of the economic crisis. Both strategies of growth
available in the 1920s assumed that the Party was too weak to take on the peasantry
directly.
By the late 1920s changes in the political situation of the Party offered it a third
strategy—to tackle the peasantry head on and take what was necessary by force as it
had during the period of War Communism. Strategies of direct mobilisation appeared
once more on the Party’s agenda, with Stalin as their main sponsor. The precondition
for such strategies was a strengthened ruling group and a powerful and ruthless
leadership. By 1929 the nomenklatura, organised through the Secretariat at both the
national and the provincial levels of government, provided the spine of such a system.
The emergence of Stalin as undisputed leader gave the systema unity and decisiveness
it had lacked during the power struggle. Meanwhile the other key organs of coercive
power—the army and the police in particular—had had a decade of relative stability
in which to consolidate, grow and develop their own traditions. The Party was larger
than in 1921. Its rank and file members were also more committed to a system that
offered them a degree of wealth, status and power unthinkable under any other system.
Not only was the government more unified and disciplined than in 1921, it was also
far more disciplined than the Tsarist elite had been for well over a century before its
demise. The new system had one further advantage. The old ruling group had
hesitated to encourage economic modernisation, because modernisation threatened
the position of its most influential members, above all, the landed nobility. The Soviet
elite came overwhelmingly from the working classes and the intelligentsia. Both groups
were products of economic modernisation. Their numbers and influence were likely
to grow as Russia modernised, and their commitment to the system would grow with
each success, instead of being eroded by the very process of modernisation.
 THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY 241

As leader of such a group, Stalin was in a position to pursue the twin goals of
industrial growth and military power more ruthlessly than any Russian ruler since Peter
the Great. During the 1930s he showed that he had the will, the strength and the ability
to do so.

Questions for discussion

1 What were the main problems that had to be solved in 1921 a) from the point of
view of Communist Party members, b) from the point of view of peasants and urban
workers, c) from the point of view of non-Communist members of the intelligentsia,
and d) from the point of view of the Kronstadt mutineers?

What guidance did Marxism offer in handling the problems that the Communist
Party faced in the 1920s?
Why was ‘mobilisation’ so crucial a problem for the Soviet government? What
methods of mobilising resources were available?
How did the Russian ruling group change in this period? Were the changes
inevitable? What did Trotsky mean by the “bureaucratisation’ of the Party?
From the point of view of ambitious young working class members of the
Communist Party, which of the Party’s main leaders seemed to offer the most
promising policies in the middle and late 1920s?
How did peasants view the policies of the Soviet government in the 1920s?
Was democratic government possible in Russia in the 1920s; or was authoritarian
government of some kind unavoidable?

What qualities accounted for Stalin’s political successes in the 1920s?

Further reading
See bibliography:
Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution
Nove, Economic History
Schapiro, The Communist Party

In addition:
S F Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980
M Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, Pluto Press, London, 1975
L Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918-1929, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1992
242 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Endnotes
1 H G Wells, ‘Russia in the Shadows’, London, 1921, quoted in A Nove, An Economic History of
the USSR, 3rd edn, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992, p 61
L Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918-1929, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1992, p 27
J N Westwood, Endurance and Endeavour: Russian History 1 §12-1980, 2nd edn, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1981, p 277
P Avrich, Kronstadt 1921, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1970, p8
L Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921, University of California Press, 1990, pp 193-
4, citing Paul Dukes, Red Dusk and the Morrow: Adventures and Investigations in Red Russia, New
York, 1922, pp 196-8
M Matthews, Soviet Government: A Selection of Official Documents on Internal Policies, Jonathan
Cape, London, 1974, p 148
V P Danilov, Rural Russia under the New Regime, tr O Figes, Hutchinson, London, 1988, p 47
(es) Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, p '79
M Lewin, ‘The Immediate Background to Soviet Collectivisation’, in The Making of the Soviet
System, Methuen, London, 1985, p 93
10 On Bukharin, see the superb biography by Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik
Revolution, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980
11 M Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates, Pluto Press, London, 1975, p 42
2 On these, see M Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, Pluto Press, London, 1975
13 Lewin, Political Undercurrents, p 18
14 Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, p 149
Us ibid, p 150
16 cited in D Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, tr H Shukman, Prima Publishing,
Rocklin, CA, 1992, p 164-5
ig M Reiman, The Birth of Stalinism, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1987, p 53
18 Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, pp 306-7
19 A Koestler, The Invisible Writing, Hutchinson, London, 1969, p 72
20 Reiman, The Birth of Stalinism, p 70
21 Matthews, Soviet Government, pp 149-51
22 cited in L Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 2nd edn, Methuen, London,
1970, pp 215-16
ao L Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1923-25), Pathfinder Press, New York, 1979,
pp 55-6, from Trotsky’s letter to the Central Committee of 8 October 1923
24 N N Sukhanoy, The Russian Revolution: 1917. A Personal Record, ed & tr JCarmichael, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1955, p 230
48, E H Carr, Socialism in One Country, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1970, vol 2, p 231
26 VI Lenin, Selected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971, p 682
 CHAPTER TEN

COLLECTIVISATION AND
INDUSTRIALISATION

A SOCIAL REVOLUTION
The October Revolution had launched a basic transformation of Russian society. By
1921, revolution and civil war had removed the upper classes of Tsarist society. Most of
the landed nobility, the bourgeoisie and the clergy had vanished, through emigration,
expropriation or death. Yet there remained a large class of small property-owners, NEP
men and, above all, peasants.
In 1929 the Soviet government launched a final assault on the remnants of
Capitalism. It banned the activities of NEP men, expropriated kulaks, and forced the
rest of the peasantry into collective farms. ‘Collectivisation’ and ‘dekulakisation’ were
the beginnings of a ‘revolution from above’, which within a few years completed the
work of the ‘revolution from below’ begun in 1917. After the revolution from above,
there were no longer any classes living off the ownership of property. All members of
Soviet society lived from wage-labour. (Collective farmers were a partial exception. For
many years they received payment not in wages but in shares from the farm’s surplus
after procurements.) The distinction Arsenev made in the early nineteenth century
between ‘productive’ and ‘non-productive’ classes lost its force in the Soviet Union
after 1930.
After the proclamation of the Stalin Constitution in 1936, the Soviet government
recognised the existence of only two classes. These were the proletariat (the urban
working classes), and the peasantry (the rural working classes). It also recognised the
existence of a ‘stratum’ recruited from both working classes: the Soviet ‘intelligentsia’.
This was a larger group than its Tsarist counterpart, for it included all white-collar
workers, from scientists and artists to clerks and typists. Table 10.1 summarises the
social results of these changes. Figure 10.1 illustrates them graphically.
The revolution from above also created the basic institutions of Soviet society. These
were: collective and state farms; a command economy geared for rapid industrial
of the
growth; and a centralised political system headed by the general secretary
censored communic ations system, and
Communist Party, controlling a rigidly
supported by secret police with an extensive network of informers.
of the methods and
Despite the peculiarities of the Soviet system, it inherited many
nt, like that of
attitudes of Russia’s traditional political culture. The Stalinist governme
244 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Table 10.1 Transformation of the Russian class structure

Class 1913 1939 1970
(including members of families) % % %

| Nobility, clergy, merchants, professionals,

senior civil servants 49 — a
2 Peasants:
Individual 78.1 2.6 _—
Collective —_— 47.2 20.0
3 Urban workers 14.7 32.5 55.0
4 Intelligentsia (office workers, specialists) 23 17.7 25.0

Total 100.0 100.0 100.0

Source: B Kerblay, Modern Soviet Society, Methuen, London, 1983, p 212

Ruling elite, Nomenklatura (1.2%)

Predominantly urban

Urban workers (55%) Intelligentsia (25%) Peasants (20%)

Figure 10.1 Social structure of the Soviet Union in 1970.

Source: Based on B Kerblay, Modern Soviet Society, Methuen, London, 1983, p22:

Peter the Great, had built a huge and powerful fiscal system, and a coercive machinery
strong enough to contain the vast social pressures it generated. In doing so, it shaped
a more disciplined ruling group and built a defence establishment that re-established
the country as a great power.

COLLECTIVISATION
In the last resort, the difficulties facing the Soviet government in the late 1920s all
turned on the fiscal problem. Somehow the government had to mobilise the resources
needed to pay for the modernisation of the economy and the army. As the peasantry
still made up almost eighty-five per cent of the population, and much of the country’s
wealth remained locked up in the countryside, the main task was to extract more
labour and resources from the peasantry.
COLLECTIVISATION AND INDUSTRIALISATION 245

By 1928 neither of the major strategies considered in the 1920s seemed adequate.
Stalin’s achievement was to find a third strategy. This contained elements of both the
right and leftwing strategies, but applied them with a brutality that would have appalled
most participants in the debates of the 1920s. We do not know when Stalin began to
conceive of such an approach. However, it was probably the success of the ‘Urals—
Siberian method’ early in 1928, along with memories of the Civil War, that persuaded
him of the potential of a more direct approach to mobilisation. Michael Reiman, a
Czech historian of this era, has written:

From [Stalin’s] point of view, achieving the maximum version of the plan was
merely a question of mobilizing material and financial resources. Since Stalin had
accumulated extensive experience during 1928, when he intervened forcibly in
economic and social life, he lost all respect for the mysteries of the economic
process. He openly expressed his contempt for the ‘fetishism of doctors’ robes and
hidebound textbooks.’ In his thinking, Stalin put one factor first, one he
understood and was familiar with: the ‘will of the party’. What could be done
economically was decided in a totally new way (although the War Communism of
the first years after the revolution served as a model)—through total mobilization
of the machinery of administration and repression.’

The procurements crisis of 1927-28 had threatened the economic logic of NEP,
which depended on continuing trade between town and country. As a result of poor
harvests, low official prices for grain, and severe shortages of industrial goods, peasants
marketed less grain than the previous year. How could the Party solve the problem of
procurements, the key to the larger issue of socialist industrialisation?
In theory, every Party member knew the answer. Indeed, Lenin had described it in
one of his last articles, ‘On Co-operation’. It was to collectivise agriculture. Slowly, and
gently, the government would persuade peasants to give up small-scale private
agriculture and join together in collective farms. The government would subsidise
collective farms, provide them with modern equipment, and offer credits and technical
support. Benefiting from economies of scale and better technique, the collective farms
would generate the surpluses the state needed to industrialise. As they flourished, more
and more poor peasants would see the advantages of joining them. Meanwhile, richer
peasants would find it harder to compete with collective farms. Private agriculture
would wither and die.
This optimistic scenario promised to solve both the economic and the political
problems the Party faced in rural areas. Stalin put it like this in December 1927:

The way out is to turn the small and scattered peasant farms into large united farms
based on cultivation of the land in common, to go over to collective cultivation of
the land on the basis of a new higher technique. The way out is to unite the small
and dwarf peasant farms gradually but surely, not by pressure but by example and
persuasion, into large farms based on common, cooperative, collective cultivation
of the land .. . There is no other way out.”

Unfortunately for the government, peasants saw things differently, and few joined
collective farms. As late as 1928, individual peasant households still farmed ninety-
a
seven per cent of the area under crops. Yet the procurements crisis demanded
solution, for it affected all aspects of Soviet society. What was to be done?
246 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

The first tractor in the village, 1926. For the Soviet government, tractors were a symbol of agricultural
modernisation and the assembly lines that made them could easily be converted to the manufacture of
tanks. Peasants were often less enthusiastic about changes that threatened their traditional way of life.

The commitment to mass collectivisation

From early in 1928, Stalin had experimented with the use of direct force as a solution
to the rural crisis. In some areas local officials had used various forms of pressure to
increase the numbers of collective farms. Elsewhere, they bore down heavily on kulaks
and NEP men. In a brutal way, force appeared to work. It helped the government to
extract more cash and more grain from the countryside.
Stalin took the critical decisions late in 1929. On 7 November 1929, after the harvest
was in, he published a famous article called ‘The Great Turn’. This announced an all-
out drive to collectivise agriculture, expropriate the richer peasants (kulaks), and
abolish the private sector in the countryside. Party officials and government agents who
for two years had visited the villages to deal with the procurements crisis now appeared
once more. But this time their job was to achieve total collectivisation before the spring
sowing. At village meetings, Party officials encouraged the heads of less wealthy peasant
households to join collective farms. They then encouraged them to take over the land
and livestock of richer households as the basis for the new collective farms. Often this
meant depriving richer neighbours of their homes in the middle of a Russian winter.
Many who suffered were not kudaks but merely the victims of village quarrels. Many were
‘former people’, former landlords, priests, white army soldiers or merchants; while
others were just outsiders, such as teachers or vets.* The policy of systematically
eliminating the richer peasants was known as ‘dekulakisation’. As in 1918, the
government tried to divide the peasantry the better to rule them.
COLLECTIVISATION AND INDUSTRIALISATION 247

It succeeded in imposing its will partly because of the strategic weaknesses of all
peasantries—their illiteracy, their geographical dispersion, and their inability to
coordinate resistance. In the 1920s, Russia’s 124 million peasants were scattered over
614 000 rural settlements, whose average size was 200 people, or thirty to forty
households.’ Besides, in 1926 over half of all peasants were under twenty years of age.”
Most had been born after the 1905 revolution. These factors help explain not only the
weakness of the peasantry, but the speed with which many adapted to their new
conditions of life after collectivisation.
The formal results of the collectivisation campaign were spectacular. By February
1930 the government claimed that fifty per cent of peasants had joined collective farms.
However, many collective farms existed only on paper and the process of
collectivisation was disorderly and chaotic. Such was the uncertainty in the spring of
1930 that officials began to fear for the spring sowing. It may have been this that
induced Stalin to slow the pace. In a famous article published on 2 March 1930, Stalin
claimed many local Party officials had become ‘dizzy with success’ and committed
serious excesses. ‘Collective farms,’ he wrote, ‘must not be established by force. That
would be foolish and reactionary. The collective farm movement must rest on the
active support of the main mass of the Party’.® Party officials reacted quickly by easing
pressure on the peasants. By July collective farms included only twenty-four per cent of
peasant households and commanded thirty-four per cent of the sown area.
However, the Party had not abandoned the goal of total collectivisation and the
retreat in 1930 proved temporary. Renewed pressure raised the figure to fifty-three per
cent of peasant households (and sixty-eight per cent of the sown area) in July 1931,
and ninety per cent (and more than ninety-four per cent of the sown area) in July
1936.’ By 1936, the government had completed collectivisation. Rural Capitalism was
dead in the Soviet Union.
Collectivisation replaced the twenty-five million small peasant farms of the 1920s
with three new institutions. These were: collective farms (kolkhozy), state farms
(sovkhozy) ,and machine tractor stations (MTS). By the middle of the 1930s, there were
about 250 000 kolkhozy, covering most of the country’s farm land. Most included whole
villages. Members of the kolkhozy collectively leased from the state the land their
families had farmed for generations. They received a share of the farm’s produce after
it had supplied its procurement quotas to the government and the machine tractor
stations. The sovkhozy were state enterprises, and their members were state employees,
receiving wages. Most sovkhozy were created from former gentry estates. The machine
tractor stations hired out tractors, machinery and skilled operators to the kolkhozy, most
of which lacked modern equipment and skills. The MTS grew from a mere eight in
1928 to 7069 by 1940.°

The impact of collectivisation

What really happened in the villages?
The government claimed that collectivisation had the support of most poor and
middle peasants. In reality, most peasants resisted collectivisation, not just the minority
of kulaks. Their resistance, which often took violent forms, turned mass collectivisation
into a virtual civil war. This pitted the new Soviet ruling group, dominated by the 1.5
million-strong Party, against the country’s 120 million peasants, from Ukraine, to
Kazakhstan, to Siberia. As collectivisation began, Bukharin said to Kamenevy, ‘He
[Stalin] will have to drown the risings in blood’.® He was not far from the truth.
248 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Resistance took many forms. Often women led the assault, as officials were usually
reluctant to use violence against them. The following account comes from a Ukrainian
village.

A crowd of women stormed the kolkhoz [collective farm] stables and barns. They
cried, screamed, wailed, demanding their cows and seed back. The men stood a way
off, in clusters, sullenly silent. Some of the lads had pitchforks, stakes, axes tucked
in their sashes. The terrified granary man ran away; the women tore off the bolts
and together with the men began dragging out the bags of seed."

There were many direct attacks on Party officials. In response, officials sought the
protection of secret police officials or army units, and collectivisation began to look
like a military operation. Faced with armed officials determined to impose their will,
many peasants tried to hide their grain in the ground. Others slaughtered their cows,
pigs, poultry and even horses rather than turn them over to a collective farm. Many
did so because excessive procurements left them with no fodder. Others did so to
reduce their stocks and avoid being labelled as kulaks.
The Party defined all who opposed collectivisation as enemies of the Soviet regime.
It even coined a special category of ‘sub-kulaks’. This included those who, though not
kulaks, displayed kulak attitudes by opposing collectivisation. In this way,
dekulakisation subjected many poor and middle peasants to the fate of the kulaks:
expropriation, exile, exclusion from collective farms, imprisonment and often death.

The results of collectivisation

A human and economic disaster for the peasantry
For most peasants and most consumers collectivisation was a disaster. Total grain
production declined and did not return to the 1928 level until the late 1930s. The
setting up of collective farms, many now headed by Party officials from the towns with
little agricultural experience, disrupted traditional agricultural routines. Meanwhile
peasants had slaughtered almost half their livestock. As livestock accounted for about
half of the total value of agricultural means of production, this meant the loss of about
one quarter of agricultural capital.’ This was a catastrophe for an agricultural country
and condemned a whole generation of Russians to a meatless diet.
The human costs were even more horrifying. Collectivisation affected all peasants
in some way or another. Material standards of living fell sharply in the towns, and even
more rapidly in the countryside. The economic historian, Alec Nove, has written of
this period: ‘1933 was the culmination of the most precipitous peacetime decline in
living standards known in recorded history’.'* While grain harvests fell, state
procurements rose. In Ukraine, the northern Caucasus, the Volga provinces, and parts
of Central Asia, the imposition of excessive procurements quotas created a terrible
famine in the winter of 1932-33. Recent estimates suggest that four to six million may
have died in these man-made famines.”
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of peasants classified as kulaks or sub-kulaks
ended up in exile, or in the forced labour camps whose numbers increased rapidly
from 1930 (see Chapter eleven). Conditions in the camps were such that large
numbers died of hunger or overwork or from brutal camp discipline. The memoirs of
the writer, Arthur Koestler, who visited the Ukraine during 1932 and 1933, hint at the
reality of life in the Soviet countryside in this period.
 COLLECTIVISATION AND INDUSTRIALISATION 249

Document 10.1: Arthur Koestler in Ukraine, 1932-33

The train puffed slowly across the Ukrainian steppe. It stopped frequently. At every station
there was a crowd of peasants in rags, offering ikons and linen in exchange against a loaf of
bread. The women were lifting up their infants to the compartment windows— infants pitiful
and terrifying with limbs like sticks, puffed bellies, big cadaverous heads lolling on thin necks.
| had arrived, unsuspecting, at the peak of the famine of 1932-33, which had depopulated
entire districts and claimed several million victims . . . My Russian travelling companions took
pains to explain to me that these wretched crowds were kulaks, rich peasants who had
resisted the collectivisation of the land and whom it had therefore been necessary to evict
from their farms.

In Kharkov, Koestler described the bazaar:

This was a permanent market held in a huge, empty square. Those who had something to sell
squatted in the dust with their goods spread out before them on a handkerchief or scarf.
The goods ranged from a handful of rusty nails to a tattered quilt, or a pot of sour milk sold
by the spoon, flies included. You could see an old woman sitting for hours with one painted
Easter egg or one small piece of dried up goat’s cheese before her. Or an old man, his bare
feet covered with sores, trying to barter his torn boots for a kilo of black bread and a packet
of mahorka tobacco...
Officially, these men and women were all kulaks who had been expropriated as a punitive
measure. In reality, as |was gradually to find out, they were ordinary peasants who had been
forced to abandon their villages in the famine-stricken regions. In last year’s harvest-collecting
campaign the local Party officials, anxious to deliver their quota, had confiscated not only the
harvest but also the seed reserves, and the newly established collective farms had nothing to
sow with. Their cattle and poultry they had killed rather than surrender it to the kolkhoz; so
when the last grain of the secret hoard was eaten, they left the land which no longer was
theirs. Entire villages had been abandoned, whole districts depopulated; in addition to the
five million kulaks officially deported to Siberia, several million more were on the move. They
choked the railway stations, crammed the freight trains, squatted in the markets and public
squares, and died in the streets; | have never seen so many and such hurried funerals as during
that winter in Kharkov. The exact number of these ‘nomadised’ people was never disclosed
and probably never counted; in order of magnitude it must have exceeded the modest
numbers involved in the Migrations after the fall of the Roman Empire.'*

A fiscal victory for the government

In spite of the devastation it caused, the Party leaders had good reason to regard
collectivisation as a success. Table 10.2 gives the crucial figures. Figure 10.2 graphs
columns A and B. =i
These figures and the graph show that though total agricultural production fell in
the early 1930s, the proportion of agricultural produce at the disposal of the
government increased. In 1928, procurements accounted for fifteen per cent of the
harvest. By 1933 they accounted for thirty-three per cent, and by 1938 for over forty
per cent. The government gained twice, for by 1933 it was reselling grain in the towns
at four times the price it paid to collective farmers.””
The collective farms had failed as efficient producers of agricultural goods.
However, they had succeeded as mobilisers of resources. The reason is simple. Instead
250 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Table 10.2 The meaning of collectivisation

Year Harvest Procurements Cattle
M. Tonnes M. Tonnes % of Harvest M. Head

A B Cc D
1921 42.0 3.8 9 43.7
1922 54.0 6.9 13 40.9
1923 56.6 6.5 11 41.8
1924 51.4 52 10 47.3
1925 1p) bi
1926 76.8 54.0
1927 723 56.5
1928 7353 10.8 15 66.8
1929 71.7 16.1 22 58.2
1930 78.0 ye | 28 50.6
1931 68.0 22.8 34 42.5
1932 67.0 18.5 28 38.3
1933 69.0 22.6 33 33:5
1934 72.0 26.1 36 33
1935 77.0 275 36 38.9
1936 59.0 215 47 46.0
1937 98.0 31.9 33 47.5
1938 75.0 30.0 40 50.9
1939 75.0 30.0 40 53.0
1940 86.2 36.4 42 478
1941 56.3 24.4 43 54.8
Notes: 1) Grain figure for 1941 from Clarke, p 112
2) Procurements figures for 1925-7 are missing from Clarke’s table
3) Procurements figures for 1935-6 and 1938-9 are averages

Source: Column A: S G Wheatcroft, figures cited in R T Manning, ‘The Soviet Economic Crisis of 1936—
1940 and the Great Purges,’ in ]Arch Getty and R T Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p 120; Columns B & D: R Clarke, Soviet Economic Facts
1917-1970, Macmillan, London, 1972, pp 113, 129. Clarke uses unprocessed figures from Soviet
sources.

of dealing with twenty-five million independent farms, the state now dealt with about
250 000 collective farms, each headed by a state-appointed manager. These it could
control in a way it could never control millions of private farms. By law, collective farms
had to sow what government planners told them to sow. Then they had to hand over
their planned procurements to the state and to the MTS before paying or feeding their
own members.
Once it had broken the peasantry, the government could afford some modest, but
significant, concessions. These increased the fiscal efficiency of the kolkhozy by
reconciling the peasantry to the new institutions. The crucial concession allowed
collective farmers to keep a small plot of land for their private use and to sell the
produce at free market prices. This was a faint echo of the concessions made in 1921.
The 1935 Collective Farm Charter described the private plots as follows:
COLLECTIVISATION AND INDUSTRIALISATION PAs)

120

----- Harvest
100
Procurements ,
1\ 4
i N
a 1 \ ee
3oO 80 ory is a 1 f \ iv, ‘
= dia Pad eatin Bon f Ae Ys 1 \ / \
(o) 1 << _ \ 1 Voted \
p 1 “= \ I \

6 60 / \, \
= ya th A \ ‘
= ¢ S
v7
v7
40
c

20

—_ ——_._ Note: Data missing 1925-27; based on information in Table 10.2

1921 1926 1931 1936 1941

Years

Figure 10.2 The meaning of collectivisation.

A small tract of land shall be allocated from the collectivized landholdings for the
personal use of each household in the collective farm in the form of a house-and-
garden (vegetable garden, orchard).
The size of plots assigned for individual use by households (exclusive of the site
of the house) may vary from one-quarter of a hectare to one half of a hectare and,
in certain districts, to one hectare, depending on regional and district conditions."°

The private plots saved many peasants from starvation. They also represented one
of the few areas of legal private entrepreneurship that survived in the Soviet Union.
Collective farm markets, selling produce from the private plots at free market prices,
existed in all Soviet towns. However the government always restricted their activities. It
limited the amounts of land peasants could use, taxed their produce, and banned the
employment of hired labour to make a profit.
By permitting private plots, the government had recreated in modern forms the
nineteenth century peasant usad’ba. Only those who worked on a kolkhoz could receive
a private plot. To receive private plots, collective farmers had to work kolkhoz land and
supply labour for which they received virtually nothing. As most collective farms
coincided with pre-revolutionary communes, the parallels with serf villages were close.
The ban on travel without the permission of the kolkhoz chairman or the local Soviet
reinforced the impression that there had emerged a new form of serfdom." Peasants
joked, bitterly, that the initials of the All-Union Communist Party (VKP in Russian)
spelt out ‘second serfdom’ (Vitoroe Krepostnoe Pravo).
From the government’s point of view, collectivisation was a victory because it gave
the government direct control of the countryside. The government could now mobilise
the vast human and material resources of the Soviet countryside directly. In this way,
direct mobilisation through the massive use of coercion offered a solution to the
problems of the 1920s. As Stalin’s colleague Lazar Kaganovich (1893-—) wrote,
procurements were the ‘touchstone on which our strength and weakness and the
strength and weakness of our enemy were tested’."®
252 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

INDUSTRIALISATION
The first three Five-Year Plans
The Party had committed itself to rapid industrialisation even before it knew how it
would pay for its ambitious projects. One idea was clear, though. Marxists had always
believed in what they called ‘planning’ of the economy. Marx had argued that a
socialist society would be free of the arbitrary control of market forces, or the self-
interested control of the capitalist class. Instead, socialist society would control
resources directly and plan production to meet the real needs of its people. _
What this meant in practice was not so clear. The Civil War had provided some
brutal experience of planning under conditions'of crisis and economic breakdown. In
Vesenkha, the Supreme Council of National Economy (see Chapter eight), there existed
a body supposed, in principle, to plan the entire economy. However, in 1921 the
government gave up this first attempt at planning. In the same year the government
created Gosplan, the body that eventually took over the task of long-term planning.
Gosplan’s mainly non-Bolshevik economic staff began to explore some of the
theoretical and practical problems of long-term planning. They began to prepare the
theoretical groundwork for an entirely new project, that of planning the inputs and
outputs of an entire economy.
The political decision to implement a long-term plan was taken only in 1927. At the
same time, the government embarked on a number of huge prestige projects, such as
the Dnieper hydroelectric dam and the TurkSib railway, which was to link western
Siberia and Central Asia. As Party members became more concerned at the slow
progress of industry under NEP, planners came under pressure to raise their targets.
The government made planners prepare the first Five-Year Plan, which was to run from
the end of 1928, in two drafts: an optimal version and a more modest version.
In reality, no one had the statistical information or the theoretical understanding
needed to predict the workings of a whole economy over five years. At best, the plans
could set more or less realistic targets for growth. As Stalin became more impatient
with slow rates of growth under NEP, careful planning gave way to the demands of
politics. Instead of a ‘planned’ economy running according to carefully formulated
plans, there appeared a ‘command’ economy, running according to the orders and
priorities of the government. Where the plan conflicted with the government’s
priorities, the plan was adjusted. As collectivisation showed, the political will and
determination now existed to fulfil targets, whatever the economic and human cost.
Asa result, the first three Five-Year Plans (1928-40) succeeded much better than many
planners expected, at least in some key areas.
The following analysis of the achievements and costs of the industrialisation drive
relies mainly on the statistics in tables 10.2 to 10.5.

How reliable are Soviet statistics2

Statistics for this period are unreliable. Methods of collecting statistical information
were primitive. Besides, figures for output look different depending on the prices used.
Statistics that use 1928 prices yield high rates of growth, while those based on 1937
prices yield lower rates of growth. For example, Western calculations of the growth rate
of the Soviet GNP (gross national product, a rough measure of total production) range
 COLLECTIVISATION AND INDUSTRIALISATION 253

from 4.8 per cent per annum (using 1937 prices) to 11.9 per cent per annum (using
1928 prices). These figures imply that after ten years of growth the Soviet GNP was
between 1.6 and 3.1 times its size in 1928.
There is a further problem with Soviet statistics. From the late 1920s, the
government began to manipulate statistics for propaganda effects. However, Soviet
statistics are the only ones available, so we must make the best use we can of them.
Helping us is the fact that Soviet planners needed accurate figures on the details of the
country’s economic performance. Roughly speaking, this means that detailed Soviet
statistics are more trustworthy than very general statistics such as those on total national
output. These were of greater use to propagandists than to planners. So western
specialists have recalculated the general figures using detailed Soviet statistics. The
figures used here come mostly from western recalculations of Soviet statistics.

Achievements of the first three Five-Year Plans

Given the difficulties of using Soviet statistics, we must not expect precision. It is the
broad picture that interests us. However, the most important changes are so
spectacular that they show up despite these difficulties. Tables 10.4 and 10.5 show the
results of the Stalinist industrialisation drive as calculated by Western scholars.

Table 10.3 Index numbers of Soviet economic development, 1928-80 (1928=1.00)

Year Pop Nos in Nos in Grain Nos of Meat Total
towns employ- harvest cattle Prod Consump-
ment tion

A B Cc D E F G
1928 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00
1932 —_— —_— 1.97 0.95 0.64 0.57 —
1937 — — 235 les 0.79 0.61 0.97
1940 25 2:29 2.62 1.01 0.80 0.96 0.93
1945 1.12 _ — 0.62 0.91 0.53 0.64 (1944)
1950 1.16 yey —_— 1.06 0.97 1.00 It
1965 1.49 4.38 6.63 2.04 1.45 2.04 1.85 (1958)
1980 173 6.05 9.70 2.62 1.85 3.08 —

Year Iron Steel Coal Oil Electric Motor

power vehicles

H I J K L M
1928 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00
1932 1.88 [337 1.81 1.84 2.70 29.88
1937 4.39 4.12 3.61 2.46 7.24 249.88
1940 4.52 4.26 4.67 2.68 9.66 181.25
1945 2.6L 2.86 4.2\ 1.67 8.66 93.38
1950 5.82 6.35 7.35 3.27 18.24 453.63
1965 20.06 21.16 16.27 20.94 101.34 770.38
1980 32.42 34.42 20.17 51.98 258.80 2748.75

n in the Soviet Union’, in

Source: Statistical appendix for cols A-F & H-M; Col G, is based on JG Chapman, ‘Consumptio
323-34
M Bornstein & D Fusfeld (eds), The Soviet Economy, 2nd edn, R D Irvin, Homewood, Ill, 1966, pp
254 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Table 10.3 covers the period from 1928 to 1980. Table 10.4 offers some general
measures of growth during the first three Five-Year Plans. Table 10.5 shows how these
changes, taken together, altered Russia’s economic position in international terms. It
compares the gross national product of different economies at three dates. F inally, the
Soviet victory over Nazi Germany during the Second World War showed that economic
and industrial growth could translate into military strength.
These tables illustrate five important aspects of the industrialisation drive. Roughly
speaking, the first three aspects reveal achievements, while the last two reveal costs.
First, Soviet production of industrial goods increased rapidly. Table 10.4, row A,
suggests that total industrial output in 1940 was 2.6 times the level of 1928. Production
of individual sectors of heavy industry, such as iron, oil and electricity (rows B to D),
increased even more rapidly. |
Second, as industrial output increased, so did the size of the urban population and
the paid workforce (rows N and O). The size of the proletariat grew rapidly.
Third, industrialisation altered the international economic ranking of the Soviet
Union. Table 10.5 shows that Soviet industrial output grew spectacularly when
compared with the major capitalist economies, all of which suffered during the
Depression. According to these figures, Soviet gross national product almost tripled in
nine years. No other major economy even doubled output. These changes altered the
economic ranking of the great powers. In 1928, Soviet output was comparable to that
of second rank capitalist countries, such as Germany, France and Britain. By 1937, it
was second only to the United States. By then, the Soviet Union had twice the
productive power of the major European powers.
These figures, together with the Soviet victory in the Second World War, show that
in some sense the Soviet Union had solved the problem of industrialisation and
overcome its military weakness. By 1945 the Soviet Union was well on the way to being
a superpower.

—-—- Electricity <

Se CON a
840 oe Coal A cs
= easeseccaces Employed
: “4

<All Mion eg ta Grain harvest Z Fi

o Consumption » 7
= 6
=°
=
chal
re)
Sy

x
vo
vu
£
2

" Note: Based on information in Table 10.3

1928 1930 1932 1934 1936 1938 1940

Years

Figure 10.3 Soviet economic growth, 1928-1940.

Tee
COLLECTIVISATION AND INDUSTRIALISATION 255

Table 10.4 Increases in output between 1928 and 1940 (1928 = 1.00)
1937 (%pa 1940* (%pa
increase) increase)
Industry
A Total industrial production 2.63 (8.39)
B lron 4.39 (20.31) 4.52 (13.40)
Cc Oil 2.46 (11.91) 2.68 (8.56)
D Electric power 7.24 (28.08) 9.66 (20.80)

Agriculture
E Total agricultural production 1.05 (0.41)
F Grain harvest [LS (1.76) 1.01 (0.08)
G Nos of cattle 0.79 (—2.90) 0.80 (-1.84)

Living standards
H Total production of consumer goods 1.8] (5.07)
I Consumption per caput 0.97 (0.38) 0.93 (0.60)
J Meat production 0.61 (-5.99) 0.96 (-0.34)
K Living space per caput 0.78 (—2.05)
L Real wages 0.54 (-5.01)

Population and the workforce

M Population 22 (1.88)
N No in towns 2.29 (7.15)
Oo No in wage-earning employment 2.33 (11.15) 2.62 (8.36)

Note: * Some figures for 1940 are inflated by the absorption of the Baltic provinces, and parts of Poland
and Romania during 1939 and 1940

Table 10.5 Comparative historical aggregate levels of GNP (in billions of 1964
US $)
Year 1928 (% pa 1937 (%pa 1950 (%pa
increase) increase) increase)
1928-37 1937-50 1928-50

USSR 33 (11.93) 9| (2.41) 124 (6.20)

Britain 45 (2.46) 56 (1.50) 68 (1.89)
France 46 (-1.01) 42 (1.35) 50 (0.38)
Germany 34 (2.64) 43 (1.17) 50 (1.77)
Japan 28 (3.15) 37 (-I.11) 32 (0.61)
USA 203 (1.30) 228 (4.15) 387 (2.98)

Sources: Tables 10.4 and 10.5 based on Statistical appendix and Table 10.3
S Cohn,
In addition, A Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 3rd edn, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992;
‘The Soviet economy: performance and growth’, in WL Blackwell (ed), Russian Economic Development
Cohn,
from Peter the Great to Stalin, New Viewpoints, Franklin Watts Inc, New York, 1974, pp 321-58; S
Economic Development in the Soviet Union, Heath & Co, Boston, Mass, 1967
256 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

However, rapid industrial growth was not matched by improvements in the sectors
of the economy that most affected the life of Soviet citizens—agriculture, consumer
goods and housing.
Our fourth conclusion concerns agriculture. Agricultural production (Table 10.4,
rows E to G) barely rose at all, and livestock numbers remained below the 1928 level
until the 1950s. Even productivity did not rise significantly, despite more modern
technology. In 1953 the farm labour force was only slightly smaller than in 1928."
Fifth, statistics on Soviet living standards are even less impressive. While production
of consumer goods rose, average consumption levels per caput (a crude measure of
material living standards, but the only one available) declined. So did the quality of
the diet and of housing, as well as the level of real wages (rows H to L).
Despite these limitations, the results of the first three Five-Year Plans suggested that
the Soviet government had indeed found the alternative engine of growth they were
looking for in the 1920s. Was this a new type of growth? If so, how did it work?

Why was industrial growth so rapid?

The government claimed that its successes were due to central planning. But as we have
seen, in practice the government ignored its own plans where they conflicted with
priority targets. Indeed, Stalin treated the entire planning system with some contempt,
preferring to rely instead on the praktzkt—those willing to obey orders and get things
done. Economics as an independent discipline ceased to exist. For twenty years, there
did not even exist an official textbook on political economy.” The most helpful model
is not that of a plan, but of a war, for the new system owed more to the experiences of
the Civil War than to the economic theory of the 1920s.
How did the ‘command economy’ work? The best way of answering this question is
to ask whether it relied on intensive or extensive growth. Did it achieve high growth
rates by increasing inputs (of labour, money and resources), or by increasing the
efficiency with which inputs were used?
The natural way to answer such a question is to examine changes in inputs and
compare them with changes in total output. If inputs increase less rapidly than total
production, then clearly the inputs are being used more efficiently. If the inputs
increase as rapidly as total production, then economic growth is clearly dependent on
the mobilisation of more resources and labour.

Labour: making people work harder

Labour is the ‘input’ into production whose quantity and quality most directly affected
the life of Soviet citizens. How did changes in the expenditure of labour compare with
the changes in total output already summarised? Did Soviet men and women work
more, or did they work more efficiently?
There clearly were gains in the productivity of labour. The government invested
heavily in education during the 1930s, and the educational level of Soviet society rose
sharply. Between 1928 and 1940, the number of high school students increased from
169 000 to 811 000. The numbers in classes eight to ten rose from 170 000 to 2.5
million.’ The rate of literacy rose as well, from fifty-one per cent in 1929 to eighty-one
per cent in 1940, as a result of mass literacy campaigns aimed mainly at the young. By
1939 only six per cent of those aged between nine and forty-nine were illiterate in the
towns and fourteen per cent in the villages.”
 COLLECTIVISATION AND INDUSTRIALISATION 257

Table 10.6 Output per unit of labour and capital, 1928-40

Category of Output Average annual rates of growth
1937 prices 1928 & ’37 prices*
Net national product (NNP) 4.2 9.3
NNP per worker 0.5 5.4
Fixed Capital 9.8 11.0
NNP per unit of fixed capital =5.1l —|.6
Note: * This column used 1928 prices up to 1937 and 1940 prices from 1937-40
Source: D A Dyker, Restructuring the Soviet Economy, Routledge, London and New York, 1992, p 5

However, despite these changes, productive methods remained wasteful and

inefficient.
Table 10.6 uses calculations of rates of increase of inputs between 1928 and 1940,
by the American economist, A. Bergson. Bergson’s figures suggest that output per
worker rose at between 0.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent per annum, as compared to rates
of between 4.2 per cent and 9.3 per cent per annum for total output. These figures
imply that improved labour productivity can account for at most one half of the
increased output in this period. That suggests that people not only worked more
efficiently; they also worked harder.
There is no doubt that they did. Economists use a statistic known as the
‘participation rate’ to measure the proportion of the working-age population (aged
from fifteen to sixty-four) engaged in wage-earning employment. Between 1928 and
1937 the Soviet participation rate increased at an astonishing rate, from about fifty-
seven per cent to about seventy per cent. There is no precedent for so rapid an increase
in the participation rate in any other industrialising country.” Plan targets for the size
of the labour force were amongst the few targets to be overfulfilled during the first Five-
Year Plan.
Cold statistics reflect harsh changes in the daily life of Soviet people. There were
two main trends. The first was a vast influx of peasants into the towns to find wage-work.
Their arrival transformed the industrial working class, lowering its levels of skill and
experience, and weakening traditions of working class solidarity. The second trend was
a vast increase in the number of women in the wage-earning labour force. During the
second Five-Year Plan and the Great Patriotic War, women provided most new recruits
to the urban workforce. Declining real wages were the main lever that forced women
. into the paid workforce, for families found they could no longer live on a single
income. As a result of these changes, the percentage of women in wage-earning
employment increased from twenty-seven per cent in 1932 to thirty-five per cent in
1937, to fifty-three per cent during the war.2* Women now entered industries that men
had dominated before, though they usually took up the worst-paid jobs.
all worked
These changes meant that men and women, peasants and proletarians,
harder. Peasants had to adapt to the more regular work rhythms of urban factories.
Women had to work both inside and outside the household. We can be sure that
women worked harder because the government did little to ease their domestic
burden. Nor did it do anything to persuade Soviet males to help around the household.
about male and
The persistence, with government encouragement, of traditional ideas
female work ensured a rapid increase in the burden carried by women.
Clearly, the industrialisation drive succeeded at least in part because Soviet citizens
258 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

(particularly Soviet women) were working harder than before. They produced more
because they worked harder.
How did the government mobilise labour on this scale? In the countryside, collective
farms forced their members to spend more time and labour supplying the government
with cheap grain. Collectivisation also drove many peasants off the land into the towns,
beginning with dekulakised kulaks. Between 1928 and 1932, 8.5 million of the 11
million who joined the urban workforce were peasants.” Once they had arrived in the
towns, the government locked them in by reintroducing internal passports. These were
a Tsarist bureaucratic device that the Provisional Government had proudly abolished
in 1917. The Soviet government furtively reintroduced them in 1932. The passports
gave the government much greater control over where people lived and worked, for
they enabled it to tie workers either to the town or the countryside. Instead of
depending partly on factory wages, partly on a.peasant farm, workers now had to
choose to live either as peasants or as proletarians. The ‘economic amphibians’ of the
late nineteenth century finally vanished. In their place, there emerged a class of
workers, most of whom were disoriented by the sudden transformations in their lives,
and still clung to peasant ways of thinking.
Once in the paid workforce, managers had to discipline workers to ensure they got
full value from their labour. However, the immense demand for labour during the
1930s made this task difficult. After 1930, unemployment ceased to be a threat for there
was plenty of work. Unemployment had stood at 1.7 million in April 1929. By early 1931
it had dwindled almost to nothing. Rapid labour turnover now became the most
serious problem. Without the ‘economic whip’ of unemployment, the government had
to find other ways of disciplining the workforce. With government support, managers
fined workers, threatened to deprive them of living quarters, or took away their ration
cards after the reintroduction of rationing in 1929.”* In 1930 the government abolished
unemployment benefits on the grounds that unemployment no longer existed. The
government borrowed many of its techniques directly from Capitalism. Lenin had
admired the work of F. W. Taylor, the pioneer of time-and-motion studies. His work
inspired, among other devices, the introduction of piece-work, which tied wages closely
to actual output. Under this system, managers paid workers not for hours worked but
for the amounts they produced.
As war threatened from 1938, the government introduced more ferocious penalties
for indiscipline. It made workers carry work books which included a complete record
ofan employee’s career and behaviour. Workers could lose health and maternity rights
for six months if they arrived late for work. The government raised average hours of
work from seven to eight hours a day. It also introduced a six-day working week. Such
legislation affected women more harshly than men as most women returned from work
to a heavy domestic burden, made worse by over-crowded housing conditions and the
need to stand in long queues to shop. Finally, as Hitler invaded France in June 1940,
the government abolished the right to leave a job without permission. The same law
made it a criminal offence to arrive at work more than twenty minutes late. Within six
months, almost 30 000 people had been sentenced to labour camps for breaching
these new laws.” This extraordinary law survived until 1956, although it had fallen into
disuse well before then.
Not all the government’s methods were punitive. It also found incentives to
encourage hard work. Traditionally, socialists had believed in egalitarianism. They had
always believed there should be as small a gap as possible between the richest and the
poorest members of society. In June 1931 Stalin denounced this ideal as a sign of ‘petit-
 COLLECTIVISATION AND INDUSTRIALISATION 259

bourgeois egalitarianism’. Incentives for

increased productivity began to rise, as did
wage differentials. Model workers received
better wages, higher status, better housing and
special allocations of consumer goods.
National campaigns encouraged workers to
over-fulfil the norms set by the plans. The most
famous of these ‘shock workers’ was a coal
miner, Alexei Stakhanov. In 1935, Stakhanov
produced fourteen times his planned output of
coal through a combination of hard work, help
| from other workers, and some cheating. He
eh eee: 2 w- = and other so-called ‘Stakhanovites’ received
Alexei Stakhanov, a Donets coal-miner. In 1935 he achieved Star treatment and large material rewards for
spectacular increases in his output of coal, thereby becoming their achievements. Many of their fellow-
a celebrity of the second Five-Year Plan. workers detested them as ‘norm-busters’. In
1936 work norms were, indeed, increased by
twenty-five to fifty per cent in many industries. These and many other devices helped
mobilise and discipline the hidden reserves of labour that existed in a poor, but
populous country.

Resources: directing resources from consumption to investment

As with labour, so with resources. Increased output depended as much on increased
inputs as it did on greater efficiency. Between 1928 and 1932, the percentage of
national income devoted to capital investment rose from nineteen per cent to thirty
per cent.”*One measure of the efficiency with which the government used these funds
is the output achieved for every rouble of capital invested. The figures in Table 10.6
suggest that total capital increased faster than total output between 1928 and 1940.
This means that the efficiency with which capital was used actually fell in this period.
On Bergson’s figures, output per unit of capital fell. Its ‘growth’ rate was between
—5.1% and -1.6% per annum.
Such figures reflect in part the immense wastage of the early years of the
industrialisation drive. Plants were built before machinery was ready for them. Peasants
wrecked machines they did not understand. Workers left machines idle for lack of
spares or raw materials. The chaos and confusion of these years is indescribable.
Looking back, it is astonishing that anything was built.
Where did the government find the vast sums of money needed for this wasteful
strategy of growth? Much came from the countryside. In 1935, one-third of government
revenues came from the resale of agricultural procurements purchased at artificially
low prices.” This was why collectivisation was so crucial to the industrialisation drive.
Indeed, some have argued that this was the main source of investment funds for
industrialisation. N. Valentinov, an economist who worked in the planning agencies
in the 1920s, claimed that Stalin had solved the problem of industrialisation using the
methods of Tamerlaine. ‘The financial basis of the first Five-Year Plan, until Stalin
found it in levying tribute on the peasants, was extremely precarious . . [It seemed
that] everything would go to the devil.’*°
It is now clear, however, that resources did not just flow from countryside to town.
On the contrary, there was a vast flow of money and resources in the opposite direction.
Peasants earned extra income by selling the produce of their private plots in the towns
260 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

at free market prices. In addition, in the early years of collectivisation, the government
had to invest heavily in agriculture, mainly in the production of tractors to replace the
livestock killed during collectivisation (see table 10.3, row M). These factors directed
resources back from the town to the countryside. Building the new fiscal apparatus of
the collective farms was so costly that some economic historians have doubted whether
the economy gained anything at all. However, these could be regarded as construction
costs, just as the massacres of 1237-40 were the costs of setting up the Mongol fiscal
machinery in the thirteenth century. By the late 1930s the collective farms worked
extremely effectively as a way of pumping resources from the countryside to the
government.”!
In any case, the town population paid as well. The turnover tax on grain hit urban
consumers as well as rural producers. The government also taxed vodka, matches and
salt, as well as many other consumer goods. During the 1930s Soviet citizens came
under intense pressure to buy ‘voluntary’ government bonds. Finally, like the Tsarist
government during the First World War, the Soviet government resorted to the
printing press, so that Soviet consumers suffered from taxation by inflation.
It is therefore not enough to say that the Soviet Union industrialised at the expense
of the peasantry. It industrialised at the expense of both peasants and proletarians.
Living standards declined in both the towns and the countryside. In both areas,
declining consumption levels released resources for investment. The resources that
fuelled industrialisation came from the consumption fund of Soviet society as a whole.
One symptom of this was the decline in housing conditions. In the 1920s the
government had invested heavily in new housing. In the 1930s and 1940s it invested
very little in housing, diverting funds into heavy industry instead. As a result, the
housing conditions of Soviet citizens declined drastically, as more and more people
crowded into small, badly built, poorly equipped apartments. In Moscow, in 1935, six
per cent of renting families occupied more than one room, forty per cent had a single
room, twenty-four per cent occupied part of a room, five per cent lived in kitchens and
corridors, twenty-five per cent lived in dormitories.** Conditions in provincial towns
were often far worse. What was true of housing was true in other areas as well. In the
1930s, there was a direct, though inverse, relationship between rising investment and
declining living standards.
This was a revolution in the relationship between the new ruling group and the
people it ruled. The industrialisation drive depended on a huge increase in the
government’s power to mobilise labour, money and raw materials. It is hardly
surprising that some contemporaries compared the early 1930s with the Mongol
invasions of seven hundred years before.

Innovation?
We must not exaggerate. Productivity increased in many areas and there was plenty of
innovation. Whole new industries appeared as the Soviet Union began to produce its
own machine tools, synthetic rubber, high-grade cements and steels. These new
industries depended at first on foreign models and foreign expertise, but it was mainly
Soviet engineers and scientists who adapted foreign models to Soviet conditions.
Sometimes they improved on them, particularly in weapons technology. In the T-34
tank or the Katyusha rocket launcher the Soviet Union produced some of the finest
military equipment in the world. Indeed, Soviet engineers and scientists were
themselves amongst the best in the world. The educational level of the workforce also
rose rapidly. Between 1928 and 1941 the number of trained engineers rose from 47 000
COLLECTIVISATION AND INDUSTRIALISATION 261

to more than 900-000.

However, the command economy encouraged heroic effort in priority areas rather
than the widespread but small-scale cost-cutting innovations typical of Capitalism. To
produce and introduce new technologies, the planners had to make a special effort.
By 1935 the Soviet Union spent 0.6 per cent of national income on organised research
and development, while the USA spent only 0.35 per cent.** Planned innovation could
achieve spectacular results, as it did later in the Soviet nuclear technology and space
programs. But the results were concentrated in specific areas, and spread with great
difficulty to other areas of the economy. Diffusion was particularly slow from the
military to the civilian sector, partly because of official secrecy, partly because civilian
industries had little reason to change existing methods, particularly when innovation
threatened existing plan targets.”
So, though there was plenty of innovation in the 1930s, the Soviet industrialisation
drive depended more on extensive than on intensive forms of growth.

The Stalinist “engine of growth’

In the 1930s, under the brutal but purposeful leadership of Stalin, the Soviet
government discovered the ‘engine of growth’ it had been looking for in the 1920s.
What was new about the Stalinist ‘engine of growth’? Very little. Most of its features
would have seemed quite normal in the pre-modern world. In its main lines, Stalin’s
strategy was identical to that of Peter the Great. Both depended on the ability of a
powerful state to mobilise resources.
Why did the Soviet government choose such an archaic strategy? It did so by a
process of elimination. It had to find a strategy of growth of some kind if the Soviet
Union was to defend itself and build a viable socialist society. Yet its own ideology ruled
out many elements of the capitalist engine of growth. During NEP, the Soviet
government experimented with an economy that used some elements of the capitalist
structure, but in a subordinate capacity. Markets existed, but the government reserved
the right to fiddle with prices when necessary. Entrepreneurs existed, but the
government reserved the right to tax them out of existence when their activities
conflicted with its own goals. Such policies limited the ability of market forces to
generate growth. To the extent that market forces succeeded, they were a threat to the
government, for they recreated new forms of Capitalism. To the extent that they failed,
they were also a threat for they generated only sluggish growth.
By 1928 Stalin and many other Party members had concluded that the half-and-half
policies of NEP could not work. In 1929, they dismantled the capitalist engine of
growth altogether, eliminating the Soviet Union’s last capitalist entrepreneurs and
suppressing market forces. That left one alternative: the engine of growth of the pre-
modern world. Far from leaping ahead of Capitalism, the Stalinist system had fallen
back on the pre-modern methods of extensive growth. If there did indeed exist a
socialist ‘engine of growth’, combining equitable social policies and rapid growth, the
Soviet government had failed to discover it.
The Stalinist strategy set up a global competition between two very different engines
of growth, and that competition was to shape world history for much of the twentieth
century. One strategyofgrowth depended on extensive growth, the other on intensive
run it
growth. In the short run, the Stalinist strategy achieved much. But in the long
was bound to fail because it was too wasteful of resources. Why?
Under strategies of extensive growth, measuring costs is less important than
262 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

achieving a particular level of output. This was as true for Soviet planners and
industrialists as it had been for feudal landlords. Enterprises did not pay for their
capital resources, but lobbied for them from the planners. This meant that the capacity
to fulfil plans depended more on connections and political influence than on
efficiency. Once enterprises got the resources they needed, they treated them as ‘free
goods’.*° What mattered was fulfilling the planned targets for gross output or ‘val
(valovaya produktsiya). How economically they did this was a secondary consideration.
Besides, efficiency itself was hard to measure within the command economy, for
without markets there could be no objective prices. This meant that the prices placed
on labour, raw materials, land, water, were all arbitrary. All these factors encouraged
an extremely wasteful approach to resources.
Protected from economic competition, Soviet managers and planners hoarded
resources and squandered them to achieve their goals. As the economist, Nikolai
Shmelyov, wrote:

The [administrative system of management] . . . by its very nature cannot provide

for growth in the quality of output or for raising the efficiency of production or for
achieving the greatest result with the least expenditure. It aimed at the necessary
gross quantity, not in accord with objective economic laws, but contrary to them.
And ‘contrary’ simply means, at the cost of inconceivably high expenses of material
and especially human resources.*’

Eventually, such an economy was bound to run out of resources. Meanwhile, the
sheer extravagance of the command economy explains why it threatened to waste the
natural wealth, ruin the health, and devastate the landscape of one of the richest
countries in the world. The command economy constructed under Stalin deployed
medieval strategies of growth on a twentieth century scale. Such strategies could
succeed in the era of Peter the Great, when levels of productivity were low throughout
the world. But the challenge was much greater in the twentieth century, when levels of
productivity were so much higher and rates of change so much faster.
The Stalinist strategy succeeded for several decades, but only because it enjoyed
specific short-lived advantages. First, the techniques it borrowed from abroad gave a
sharp boost to productivity. Like Peter’s strategy of growth, Stalin’s raised levels of
productivity by borrowing foreign technologies and foreign approaches to education.
The Soviet government also borrowed many capitalist tricks for enforcing labour
discipline. However, as in the time of Peter the Great, gains in productivity based on
foreign techniques were not self-sustaining. What was missing was the social structure
that drove the capitalist engine of growth. Low levels of productivity and sluggish
innovation were to prove the Achilles heel of the Soviet command economy.
In addition to foreign technology, the Soviet government enjoyed two other
advantages. It ruled the largest country in the world. This meant that vast human and
material resources were available if it could mobilise them. Finally, Russia’s autocratic
traditions made it easier to build a state capable of mobilising resources on the heroic
scale necessary for rapid industrialisation. The next chapter describes how this was
done.
 COLLECTIVISATION AND INDUSTRIALISATION 263

Questions for discussion

1 Faced with the procurements crisis of 1927, did the Soviet government take the best
available choice?
2 Did Stalin’s policies destroy NEP, or was it bound to fail anyway?
3 What problems did collectivisation solve? What problems did it not solve? What
problems did it cause?
4 Did peasant men and women have any ways of resisting the demands of the
government in the 1930s?
5 Was the Stalinist industrialisation drive a success? By what criteria?
6 What did the industrialisation drive offer to ordinary Soviet citizens? What did it
offer to the new Soviet ruling group?
7 How did Stalinism change the life of Soviet women?
8 Could the industrialisation drive have worked without Stalin?
9 Did the Soviet government find an ‘alternative engine of growth’ in the 1930s?

Further reading
See bibliography:
Daniels, The Stalin Revolution
Getty and Manning, Stalinist Terror
Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society
Nove, Economic History; Stalinism and After
Ward, Stalin’s Russia

In addition:
D Christian, ‘Perestroika and World History’, in Australian Slavonic and E. European Studies, vol 6,
no | (1992), pp 1-28
S Cohn, ‘The Soviet Economy: Performance and Growth’, in W L Blackwell (ed), Russian
Economic Development from Peter the Great to Stalin, New Viewpoints, Franklin Watts Inc, New
York, 1974, pp 321-58
S Fitzpatrick (ed), Cultural Revolution in Russia: 1928-1931, Indiana University Press,
Bloomington, 1978
S G Wheatcroft, R W Davies & J M Cooper, ‘Soviet Industrialization Reconsidered’, in Economic
History Review, 2nd ser, XXXIX, 2(1986), p 284

Endnotes
1 M Reiman, The Birth of Stalinism, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1987, p 106
2 Cited in A Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 3rd edn, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992,
p 147
3 L Viola, ‘The Second Coming: Class Enemies in the Soviet Countryside, 1927-1935’, inJ
Arch Getty & R T Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1993, pp 65-98
264 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Hutchinson, London, 1988, p 47

V P Danilov, Rural Russia under the New Regime, tr O Figes,
ibid, p 43
York, 1971, p 419
B Dmytryshyn, USSR: A Concise History, Ond edn, Scribner’s, New
Nove, Economic History, p 173
New York & London, 1978,
Orr
oe See R and Z Medvedev, Khrushchev: The Years in Power, Norton,
pp 24-5
in The Making of the Soviet
M Lewin, ‘The Immediate Background to Soviet Collectivisation’,
and the Bolshevik Revolution,
System, Methuen, London, 1985, p 99; and S F Cohen, Bukharin
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980, p 316
10 cited in L Viola, ‘Bab’i Bunty’, in Russian Review, vol 45, 1986, p 37
Ih S G Wheatcroft, R W Davies & J M Cooper, ‘Soviet Industri
alization Reconsidered’, in
Economic History Review, 2nd ser, XXXIX, No 2 (1986), p 284
12 Nove, Economic History, p 210
US See S G Wheatcroft, ‘More light on the scale of Repression and excess
Mortality in the Soviet
Union in the 1930s’ in Getty & Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror, p 280
14 A Koestler, The Invisible Writing, Hutchinson, London, 1969, pp 63-4, 69-70
15 Nove, Economic History, p 213
16 M Matthews, Soviet Government: A Selection of Official Documents on Internal
Policies, Jonathan
Cape, London, 1974, p 338
Wi R and Z Medvedev, Khrushchev, p 28
18 M Lewin, ‘Society, State and Ideology during the First Five-Year Plan’, in S Fitzpatrick
(ed),
1978, p 64
Cultural Revolution in Russia: 1928-1931, Indiana University Press, Bloomington,
IS) D A Dyker, Restructuring the Soviet Economy, Routledge, New York, 1992, p31
116
20 M Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates, Pluto Press, London, 1975, p
21 B Kerblay, Modern Soviet Society, Methuen, London, 1983, p 149
J N Westwood, Endurance and Endeavour: Russian History 1812-1980, 2nd edn, Oxford
22
University Press, Oxford, 1981, p 364
23 S H Cohn, ‘The Soviet Economy: performance and growth’, in W Blackwell (ed), Russian
Economic Development from Peter the Great to Stalin, New Viewpoints, Franklin Watts, New York,
1974, p 333
24 D Atkinson (ed), Women in Russia, Harvester Press, Brighton, 1978, p 194
25 S Schwarz, Labour in the Soviet Union, Prentice-Hall, New York, 1951, p 9
26 See D Christian, ‘Labour in a non-capitalist economy: the Soviet counter-example,’ in Jill
Roe (ed), Unemployment: Are there Lessons from History?, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1985,
pp 85-104
27 E Bacon, ‘Glasnost’ and the Gulag’, Soviet Studies, vol 44, no 6, 1992, p 1078
28 Nove, Economic History, p 197
29 Figures on revenues in 1935 from Nove, Economic History, p 213
30 Nove, Economic History, p 158
ll Dyker, Restructuring the Soviet Economy, p 31
32 Nove, Economic History, p 254
a) ibid, p 235
34 S G Wheatcroft, R W Davies & J M Cooper, ‘Soviet Industrialization Reconsidered’, p 279
35 There is a good discussion of how these problems affected the post-Stalin economy in R W
Campbell, The Failure of Soviet Economic Planning, Indiana University Press, Bloomington,
1992, ch 5, ‘Problems of Technical Progress in the USSR’
36 Dyker, Restructuring the Soviet Economy, pp 17-18
37 N Shmelyov, ‘Loans and Debts’, cited from R Daniels (ed), The Stalin Revolution, 3rd edn,
Lexington, Mass, 1990, p 238
 CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE STALINIST POLITICAL

ORDER

This chapter describes the construction of the political system that drove the Soviet
‘engine of growth’. The foundations of the Stalinist system were laid during the 1920s,
but the system itself was erected in the early 1930s to deal with the twin challenges of
collectivisation and industrialisation. Though the details of the system were new, the
logic behind its creation was not. Building a powerful fiscal system generated massive
popular discontent. To overcome resistance, it was necessary to build a powerful
coercive apparatus. This needed the support of a united and disciplined ruling group.
The previous chapter described the construction of the Soviet fiscal system and the
methods it used to mobilise resources. This chapter describes resistance to the new
system, the building of a powerful coercive apparatus, and the formation of a highly
disciplined ruling group with an exceptionally powerful leader. It also describes how
Stalin’s government mobilised popular and elite support through a combination of
calculated concessions and systematic propaganda.

THE IMPACT OF COLLECTIVISATION AND THE FIRST

FIVE-YEAR PLAN: 1928 TO 1934
Resistance
Internal enemies
the
Measuring resistance to the Soviet government is not easy. During the early 1930s
monopoly
government took over control of all forms of communication. It used its
of all conflicts
over newspapers, radio and official records of all kinds to hide evidence
evidence
except those it chose to publicise itself. It even managed to hide most of the
strike
of peasant resistance to collectivisation. Besides, the government’s pre-emptive
on the peasantry during dekulakisation reduced the scale of resistance.
comes
Nevertheless, resistance was widespread and dangerous. Part of the evidence
during
from the sheer scale of the coercive effort the government made
ent understo od perfectly well that it was fighting a virtual
collectivisation. The governm
After the famine of 1932-33, a Party official who had
civil war against the peasantry.
taken part in the collectivisation process put it bluntly:
266 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

A ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime. It’s a struggle
to the death. This year was a test of our strength and their endurance. It took a
famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the
collective farm system is here to stay. We’ve won the war.'

Stalin himself saw collectivisation as the critical struggle of his career. In a wartime
conversation with Churchill, he implied that collectivisation had been even more
terrible than the war with Nazi Germany.

Document 11.1: Stalin on collectivisation, 1945

‘Tell me,’ [Churchill asked], ‘have the stresses of this war been as bad to you personally as
carrying through the policy of the Collective Farms?’
This subject immediately aroused the Marshal [Stalin].
‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘the Collective Farm policy was a terrible struggle.’
‘| thought you would have found it bad,’ said [Churchill], ‘because you were not dealing
with a few score thousands of aristocrats or big landowners, but with millions of small men.’
‘Ten millions,’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘It was fearful. Four years it lasted. It was
absolutely necessary for Russia, if we were to avoid periodic famines, to plough the land with
tractors. We must mechanise our agriculture. When we gave tractors to the peasants they
were all spoiled in a few months. Only Collective Farms with workshops could handle
tractors. We took the greatest trouble to explain it to the peasants. It was no use arguing
with them. After you have said all you can to a peasant he says he must go home and consult
his wife, and he must consult his herder.’ This last was a new expression to me in this
connection.
‘After he has talked it over with them he always answers that he does not want the
Collective Farm and he would rather do without the tractors.’
‘These were what you call Kulaks?’
‘Yes,’ he said, but he did not repeat the word. After a pause, ‘It was all very bad and
difficult—but necessary.”

After 1933, the government held the whip hand. There is no more evidence of large-
scale resistance. However, there was plenty of hidden conflict. We can measure its
extent partly by the huge apparatus of police, labour camps and terror that the
government erected to contain conflict.

External enemies
The government was also acutely aware of the hostility it faced from foreign capitalist
powers. The rise of Nazi Germany heightened the government's sense of danger. Stalin
never forgot that foreign armies had invaded the Soviet Union during the Civil War.
He understood that if it was to survive, the Soviet Union would have to deal with the
military challenge from foreign Capitalism. As early as 1931 he told Soviet industrial
managers that the main task of the industrialisation drive was to build up a modern
defence establishment.

Document 11.2: Stalin’s 1931 speech to industrial managers

It is sometimes asked whether it is not possible to slow down a bit in tempo, to retard the
movement. No, comrades, this is impossible. It is impossible to reduce the tempo! On the
THE STALINIST POLITICAL ORDER 267

contrary, it is necessary as far as possible to accelerate it. To slacken the tempo means to fall
behind. And the backward are always beaten. But we do not want to be beaten. No, we do
not want this! ... The history of old Russia is the history of defeats due to backwardness.
She was beaten by the Mongol Khans.
She was beaten by the Turkish beys.
She was beaten by the Swedish feudal barons.
She was beaten by the Polish-Lithuanian squires.
She was beaten by the Anglo-French capitalists.
She was beaten by the Japanese barons.
All beat her for her backwardness—for military backwardness, for cultural backwardness,
for governmental backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness.
She was beaten because to beat her was profitable and could be done with impunity.
. . Do you want our Socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence? If you
do not want this you must put an end to this backwardness as speedily as possible and develop
genuine Bolshevik speed in building up the socialist system of economy. There are no other
ways. That is what Lenin said during the October Revolution: ‘Either death, or we must
overtake and surpass the advanced capitalist countries.’ We are fifty to a hundred years
behind the advanced countries. We must cover this distance in ten years. Either we do this
or they will crush us.’

The government’s awareness of the hostility it faced within and outside the Soviet
Union forced it, and helped it, to build the coercive machinery and the habits of
discipline and unity it needed to survive.

The coercive machinery: police and labour camps

The main elements of the expanding coercive machinery were the army (which is
discussed in Chapter twelve) and the secret police.
There was a long tradition of secret police agencies in Russia. But never had the
secret police flourished as they did under Stalin. Lenin set up the first Soviet secret
police agency, the Cheka, in December 1917. The Cheka flourished during the Civil
War, as did the secret police agencies of the anti-Bolshevik governments, and all made
systematic use of terror. With the end of the Civil War, the use of mass terror ended. In
February 1920, Lenin explained the shift in policy:

We were forced to use terror because of the terror practiced by the [Anglo-French]
Entente, when strong world powers threw their hordes against us, not avoiding any
type of conduct. We would not have lasted two days had we not answered these
attempts of officers and White Guardists in a merciless fashion; this meant the use
of terror, but this was forced upon us by the terrorist methods of the Entente.
But as soon as we attained a decisive victory, even before the end of the war,
immediately after taking Rostov, we gave up the use of the death penalty and thus
proved that we intend to execute our own program in the manner that we promised.
We say that the application of violence flows out of the decision to smother the
exploiters, the big landowners and the capitalists; as soon as this was accomplished
we gave up the use of all extraordinary methods.*

Now called the GPU, under NEP the secret police retained a large network of
informers and controlled several labour camps. However, it diminished in size and lost
the right to try and sentence at will.
268 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

During the crisis years at the end of the 1920s, the role of the secret police expanded
again. Late in 1927 Stalin demanded the creation of a network of GPU agents
throughout the government apparatus and even in the army. These were to hunt out
external and internal opponents of the government. Stalin made systematic use of the
GPU during the final stages of his struggle with the Left Opposition at the end of 1927,
and this set the ominous precedent of secret police involvement in party affairs.
Uncertain of the reliability of the army, the government also encouraged an expansion
of GPU troops. In 1928 the GPU received new powers to deal with the procurements
crisis in the countryside.
During collectivisation the GPU took an active part in the suppression of kulaks,
bourgeois ‘wreckers’, and dissident members of the old intelligentsia. It played a
particularly important role in dekulakisation, supervising the deportation of five
million kulak men, women and children. The prison-camp population controlled by
the secret police increased from about 30 000 in 1928, to more than 500 000 by 1934.°
Forced labour began to play an important role in industrialisation, particularly in large
prestige projects such as the White Sea canal between Leningrad and the Arctic.
In 1930 the government established a special institution within the police to
supervise the labour-camp population. This was the Main Administration of Corrective
Labour Camps (Gulag). The first boss of the new organisation was Genrikh Yagoda
(1891-1938). When it first established labour camps, the Soviet government intended
to use them to rehabilitate class enemies through useful labour. However, as Gulag’s
empire grew, conditions within the camps deteriorated. The work load increased; food
rations declined in quality and quantity; discipline became more brutal; and more and
more camps appeared in areas of extreme cold. As a child, Stalin’s biographer, Dmitri
Volkogonoy, lived in a Siberian village to which his mother had been exiled after the
execution of his father. Here he watched as soldiers and prisoners set up a new labour
camp.

Document 11.3: setting up a labour camp

| grew up in the village of Agul, Irbei district, in the south of Krasnoyarsk region. In the
distance one could see the majestic snows of the Sayan mountains and their spurs jutting out
towards the Yenisei, the Kana and the Agala. This was the genuine, drowsy taiga, the land of
the Kerzhaks, indigenous Siberians who had migrated from the western territories of Russia
a century or two earlier. In 1937 or 1938 some soldiers turned up in our little village, followed
by columns of prisoners. They started cordoning off zones, and in some six months camps
were established in Agul and a number of neighbouring settlements. Barbed wire appeared
and high fences behind which one could just make out the huts, the armed sentries on watch-
towers and the guard dogs.
The locals soon began seeing long columns of exhausted people constantly arriving on
foot from the railhead sixty miles away. It seemed the camps must be infinitely expandable.
Later they understood what was happening. Long ditches started appearing beyond the
outskirts of the settlements, and the corpses of dead prisoners would be taken on carts or
sleighs, covered with tarpaulins, and buried there at night. Many died from the sheer hardship.
Many were shot out in the taiga. Boris Frantsevich Kreshchuk, who was living then in Agul
and whose father, a blacksmith, and elder brother had been shot, told me of the time he and
some other boys were out looking for pine nuts when they suddenly heard the crack of
gunfire nearby, ‘just like the sound of a large canvas being ripped apart’. They ran to the place
and from behind some bushes watched as the firing squad threw some twenty executed
 THE STALINIST POLITICAL ORDER 269

prisoners into a ditch. ‘| remember one of them was clinging to the grass, obviously he wasn’t
dead. We ran away.’¢

By the mid-1930s, conditions in labour camps were so harsh that many prisoners
did not expect to live out their full term. Alexander Solzhenitsyn described these
conditions vividly in Gulag Archipelago, and in his short novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich.
In 1934 the secret police became part of the People’s Commissariat of Internal
Affairs (NKVD). The NKVD now managed all prisons and labour camps, all police and
frontier guards, and all aspects of state security. All the institutions of internal coercion
now belonged together in a single organisation.

The political system in the early 1930s

How did the ruling group itself change in this period?

The party in the late 1920s

By 1929, the Soviet political system was already very centralised. After the removal of
Stalin’s last serious rival, Bukharin, Stalin emerged as undisputed leader of the
Communist party and the Soviet government. His power rested, first, on bureaucratic
patronage exercised through the party. Through the Secretariat of the Central
Committee, he controlled the more important appointments to the party apparat.
The apparatchiki, in turn, controlled the
nomenklatura. This gave them control of
appointments to all positions of importance
throughout Soviet society. Stalin made skilful
use of the huge powers of patronage he
controlled in this way during the political
struggles of the 1920s.
However, his power also rested on support
Baa GEN)
within the Party, the government, the police
and the army. The brutal and energetic policies
he advocated appealed particularly to younger,
less educated Party members, most of whom
had joined the Party since the revolution. By
1929, his power was immense, and during the
celebrations for his fiftieth birthday there
emerged the first signs of the Stalin cult.

The impact of collectivisation

Collectivisation reinforced the party’s tradi-
tions of unity and discipline by creating an
BE atmosphere of intense crisis. Collectivisation
transformed the atmosphere within the Party.
It placed the party once more in the position of
a? eat a He
ei, E

Beginnings of the Stalin cult. The front page of Pravda on an occupying army, and this justified a return
7 November 1930, Stalin’s 50th birthday.
to Civil War methods and attitudes. Bukharin
270 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

argued that collectivisation had Brutalised those Party members who took part. In 1933
he told a friend that during the Civil War, he had seen

things that I would not want even my enemies to see. Yet 1919 cannot even be
compared with what happened between 1930 and 1932. In 1919 we were fighting
for our lives. We executed people, but we also risked our lives in the process. In the
later period, however, we were conducting a mass annihilation of completely
defenceless men, together with their wives and children ... [This experience, he
added, had caused] ... deep changes in the psychological outlook of those
Communists who participated in this campaign, and instead of going mad, became
professional bureaucrats for whom terror was henceforth a normal method of
administration and obedience to any order from above a high virtue. [The whole
process had caused] a real dehumanization of the people working in the Soviet
apparatus.’

Collectivisation was one aspect of a larger ‘cultural revolution’. Between 1928 and
1932 the whole tone of Soviet life changed. Military metaphors invaded the language.
The papers began to talk of ‘industrial fronts’, of ‘storming’, of ‘saboteurs’ and
‘traitors’. The government clamped down on all forms of dissent. Trade Unions lost
their independence. Non-Marxists lost positions of influence in universities,
government offices and industrial enterprises. Rigid censorship ended the broad-
ranging debates of the 1920s. Using the notion of ‘socialist realism’, government
officials even tried to harness the arts to the tasks of the revolution from above.
In these ways, the Party projected its embattled and militaristic mood on the whole
of Soviet society between 1928 and 1932. Such processes increased the power of the
leader, for the many dangers facing the Party made dissidents reluctant to destabilise
existing structures. The brutalisation of Party life also prepared the way for a bloody
resolution of internal conflicts.

Dissent within the Party

However, in the early 1930s there were still limits to the unity of the elite and the
powers of its leader. After the completion of collectivisation and the first Five-Year Plan,
many Party members felt it was time to call a halt. At the upper levels of the Party, even
among Stalin’s closest followers, many were unhappy about the events of these years.
Collectivisation itself had been a dangerous gamble and its social and political costs
appalled many Party members. Stalin had alienated many provincial Party secretaries
with sweeping Party purges in 1929-30. His ‘Dizzy with Success’ speech in 1930
disoriented local Party officials who might otherwise have been sympathetic to Stalin’s
policies. Collectivisation also unnerved many in the army. The destruction of livestock
posed serious difficulties for an army that still relied on horse-drawn transport, while
the alienation of most of the peasantry undermined morale.
However, analysing the extent and significance of opposition to Stalin is difficult
because dissent became invisible. Russian traditions of solidarity, reinforced by
Bolshevik traditions of discipline, prohibited the public expression of dissent. The
exclusion of non-Communist parties from political life, and the 1921 anti-faction ruling
gave formal expression to this powerful convention. As in the past, such conventions
did not end conflict. They merely drove it underground. Party members colluded in
public displays of unity at formal ceremonies and in unanimous votes in public Party
meetings. At the same time, they engaged in furtive conflict behind closed doors, in
 THE STALINIST POLITICAL ORDER 271

whispers, or in hints and innuendoes. Hidden conflict reinforced the atmosphere of

insecurity and suspicion generated by the crises of the early 1930s. Where enemies hid
themselves, it was tempting to see enemies everywhere.
There are indirect signs of several attempts to limit Stalin’s powers in the early 1930s.
The best known is associated with the name of M. N. Riutin (1890-1937). An army
officer from Siberia, who joined the Bolsheviks in 1914, Riutin became famous as a
guerilla fighter for the Communists during the Civil War. In the late 1920s he
supported the Rightists, and in 1930 he criticised Stalin’s policies in a personal
interview with the leader. For this Stalin had him expelled from the Party and arrested.
However, within months he was released and reinstated as a Party member. In 1932,
he circulated a document addressed to all Party members, in which he criticised
Stalin’s policies.

Document 11.4: extract from the ‘Riutin Platform’, Summer 1932

The adventurist tempos of industrialisation have involved a colossal reduction of the real
wages of manual and clerical workers, unbearable open and concealed taxes, inflation, price
increases and the decline in the value of the ruble. Adventurist collectivisation has been
assisted by dekulakisation, directed in practice against the mass of middle peasants and poor
peasants in the countryside. The countryside has been exploited by all kinds of imposts and
compulsory collections of agricultural products. This has led the country to a very profound
economic crisis, the monstrous impoverishment of the mass of the people, and famine . . .
The rights of the Party have been usurped by a tiny gang of unprincipled political intriguers
... Stalin and his clique are destroying the Communist cause, and the leadership of Stalin
must be finished with as quickly as possible.®

In August Riutin met with other critics of Stalin’s policies, and this group began to
circulate Riutin’s essay. Its readers included Zinoviev and Kamenev. Some days after
their meeting, police got a copy of the essay and arrested Riutin and several of those
who shared his views. Stalin demanded Riutin’s execution. However, several members
of the Politburo opposed Stalin, and Riutin received a ten year prison sentence instead.
Stalin got his revenge in 1937, when he had Riutin shot together with friends and
members of his family. Meanwhile, these events showed the limits to Stalin’s power in
the early 1930s.
By 1934 when the seventeenth Party Congress met, there were hints that others
hoped to limit Stalin’s powers or even to remove him from office. According to Anastas
Mikoyan (1895-1978), who was to join the Politburo in 1935, almost one quarter of
the deputies voted against Stalin’s election to the Central Committee. Stalin learnt
about this and insisted on recording only three hostile votes. At the same congress,
several delegates asked the rising star, Sergei Kirov (1886-1934), to stand as General
Secretary instead of Stalin. Kirov refused and told Stalin of the plan.’ Dissidents could
also take heart from the knowledge of what was now an open secret: that Lenin himself
had wanted to remove Stalin.
However, the crisis atmosphere of the early 1930s put those who opposed Stalin in
a difficult situation. Like liberal politicians during the First World War, they faced the
terrible dilemma that V. Maklakov had described in his parable of the ‘mad chauffeur’
and
(see Chapter six). The turmoil of industrialisation, the hatred of the peasantry,
the hostility of foreign capitalist powers made it extremely dangerous to indulge in a
272 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

leadership struggle. In 1933 a correspondent of Trotsky’s said of the old Bolsheviks,

‘they all speak about Stalin’s isolation and the general hatred of him. . . But they often
add: “Ifit were not for that (we omit their strong epithet for him) . . . everything would
have fallen to pieces by now. It is he who keeps everything together”’.'° On his last trip
abroad in 1936 Bukharin, who already knew he was doomed, said much the same to
the exiled Mensheviks, Lydia and Fedor Dan. Of Stalin, he said: ‘This is a small, wicked
man...no, nota man, a devil’. However, he added, ‘He is something like the symbol
of the Party. The rank-and-file workers, the people believe him. We are probably
responsible for it ourselves ... and this is why we are all . . . crawling into his jaws
knowing for sure that he will devour us’.!! This sort of thinking paralysed Stalin’s
opponents. Twenty years before, members of the Duma had failed to move against
Nicholas II because they, too, believed that a bad leader was better than no leader at
all at a time of extreme crisis.

TERROR AND STALIN’S RISE TO DOMINATION: 1934 TO

1939
Stalin reacted to dissent with manoeuvres as subterranean as those of his rivals.
However, Stalin had a stronger hand, and played his cards more decisively. The Riutin
affair showed Stalin the limits of his power. Formally, his power rested entirely on the
Party machine. It depended on his ability to secure majority votes in the main Party
organs, from the Party Congresses to the Politburo. If Stalin was to increase his own
power and crush those who threatened him, he had to extend his personal power base
beyond the Party apparatus. He did so partly by extending his influence within the
secret police apparatus and increasing the power and influence of the secret police.

The Kirov murder and its aftermath

Before 1934, the police had only limited powers of arrest and sentence, and the
Procuracy, the body responsible for legal supervision of government institutions, still
retained some control over the police. In law, at least, the secret police could not carry
out death sentences. Further, Party members were beyond its reach unless the Party
expelled them. The police had arrested members of the former right and left
oppositions, but treated them leniently by the standards of the time.
With the murder of Kirov on 1 December 1934, the position of the secret police
changed radically. Kirov had replaced Zinoviev as head of the Leningrad Party
apparatus in 1926. He became a candidate member of the Politburo in the same year,
and a full member in 1934. His murderer, Nikolayev, was a disgruntled Party member.
He shot Kirov in Smolny, the headquarters of the Leningrad Party apparatus and the
building from which the October Revolution had been launched seventeen years
before. Though there is no firm proof, indirect evidence suggests that Stalin may have
organised the murder. Khrushchey hinted at Stalin’s complicity in his Secret Speech
of 1956. Amongst other details, Khrushchev pointed to the ‘unusually suspicious fact
that when the Chekist assigned to protect Kirov was being brought for interrogation,
on 2 December 1936, he was killed in a car accident in which no other occupants of
the car were harmed’.””
 THE STALINIST POLITICAL ORDER 273

On hearing of Kirov’s murder, Stalin left for Leningrad by train the same evening.
Yagoda, the head of the NKVD, accompanied him. When Stalin arrived, he personally
interrogated Nikolayev. Even more important, before leaving Moscow, Stalin issued a
decree on new judicial procedures for dealing with terrorism. Pravda published it even
before the full Politburo saw it. Two days later, the members of the Politburo lamely
accepted the decree Stalin had issued. The crisis atmosphere in which the Party found
itself deprived Party leaders of the will to oppose Stalin’s personal authority. They had
allowed Stalin to take decisions of fundamental importance without getting the
agreement of the Politburo. By 1937 they no longer had the power to rein him in.
The so-called Kirov Decrees, first introduced in this arbitrary manner, remained in
force for twenty years.

Document 11.5: the Kirov Decrees

The Central Executive Committee of the USSR decrees that the following amendments on
the investigation and consideration of cases relating to terrorist organizations and terrorist
acts against agents of the Soviet Government shall be introduced into the existing codes of
the union republics.
| The investigation of such cases must be terminated during a period of not more than ten
days.
2 The indictments should be presented to the accused twenty-four hours before the hearing
of the case in court.
The cases must be heard without participation of a defence counsel.
WwW Appeal against the sentences and also petitions for pardon are
bh
not to be admitted.
5 Sentence to the highest degree of punishment [i.e. the death penalty] must be carried out
immediately after passing of the sentence.

President of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR

M. KALININ
Secretary of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR
A. YENUKIDZE”

The Kirov Decrees allowed the police to arrest political dissidents, try them in secret,
and execute them immediately. Within days, the NKVD arrested and shot a hundred
Leningraders accused of complicity with Nikolayev. It also arrested thousands more
suspected dissidents, including Kamenev and Zinoviev. Stalin launched a simultaneous
than expulsion
purge of Party members. Originally, such purges had meant little more
they came to mean something
from the Party, but in the atmosphere of the 1930s,
of course.
more terrifying. Soon the police began to arrest Party members as a matter
in the
This marked a sharp rise in the influence of the police and a decline
also marked a sharp
independence of the Party. As Stalin now controlled the police, it
increase in the leader’s power.

Defeat of the opposition and decline of the Party

responsible to Stalin.
By 1934 there had emerged a small nucleus of officials directly
to lead the secret police during the great purge.
They included N. I. Yezhov, who was
headed by A. N.
Stalin had also established a private Secretariat of his own,
274 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Poskrebyshev. This allowed Stalin to communicate directly with the police and other
government agencies without going through the Party bureaucracy. In addition, he
had formed a special State Security Committee that included Poskrebyshev and
Yezhovy. In the early 1930s Yezhov headed the records and assignment department of
the Central Committee. This was the body that kept records on the careers of all Party
members, and assigned them to new jobs. Slowly Stalin had prepared for the time when
he could give orders to the secret police on his own authority and thereby use the
police against the Party.
The aftermath of the Kirov assassination showed that Stalin could now order the
secret police to arrest members of the Party. These changes marked a revolution in
the political structure of Soviet Russia, for Stalin could now bypass the Party if he chose
to do so. The Party, once the dominant political institution, now became one of several
more or less equal political structures. All were now subject to the personal authority
of Stalin. Khrushchev described these changes in his Secret Speech to the twentieth
Party Congress.

Document 11.6: extract from Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of 1956

What is the reason that mass repressions against activists increased more and more after
the 17th Party Congress? It was because at that time [1934] Stalin had so elevated himself
above the Party and above the nation that he ceased to consider either the Central
Committee or the Party. While he still reckoned with the opinion of the collective before
the |7th Congress, after the complete political liquidation of the Trotskyites, Zinovievites
and Bukharinites, when as a result of that fight and socialist victories the Party achieved unity,
Stalin ceased to an ever greater degree to consider the members of the Party’s Central
Committee and even the members of the Political Bureau. Stalin thought that now he could
decide all things alone and all he needed were statisticians; he treated all others in such a way
that they could only listen to and praise him.

The clearest sign of the reduced authority and independence of the Party was the
irregularity with which its main institutions now met. Party congresses had been annual
or biennial events in the 1920s. Then the gap between congresses began to widen. The
fourteenth Congress met in 1925; the fifteenth in 1927; the sixteenth in 1930. The
seventeenth did not meet until 1934; the eighteenth met in 1939; and the nineteenth
did not meet until thirteen years had passed, in 1952. The Central Committee also
ceased to meet regularly. So did the Politburo. Stalin would call individual members
of the Politburo together for specific tasks, leaving other members in the dark.
However, Stalin avoided the mistake of elevating the police in place of the Party. On
the contrary, the great purge ended in 1938 with a purge of the secret police and the
execution of its leader, Yezhov. Stalin no longer depended on any single institution.
He could now manoeuvre freely between the various institutions of power that
dominated Soviet society.

The Great Terror: 1936 to 1938

In 1936 Nikolai Yezhov (1895-1939) replaced Yagoda as head of the NKVD. Then,
between 1936 and 1938, the government launched what has come to be known as the
Great Terror, or the Yezhovshchina.
THE STALINIST POLITICAL ORDER 275

To foreigners, the visible sign of the purge was a series of carefully staged show trials
at which the defendants were leading Party and government figures. Most defendants
confessed publicly to crimes against the Soviet state. Their confessions wove a
melodramatic tale of intrigue and treachery, involving foreign governments, and
coordinated by the arch-villain, Trotsky. At the time, most observers did not know that
the police got their confessions using torture and threats to defendant’s families. Police
interrogators also exploited the curious sense of loyalty to the Party that many
defendants retained to the bitter end. (This is described superbly in Arthur Koestler’s
novel, Darkness at Noon.)
At the first trial, in August 1936, the prosecution accused Zinoviev, Kamenev and
other prominent old Bolsheviks of plotting with Trotsky to murder Party leaders,
including Kirov. After confessing to most of the charges, the defendants were shot.
Massive publicity campaigns in the papers and on the radio accompanied the trials.
Papers published thousands of letters, purporting to come from ordinary Soviet
citizens and demanding the death sentence for the accused.
In January 1937 several other prominent Bolsheviks were tried and executed with
similar publicity. In June there was a purge and show trial of military leaders. These
included the dominant figure in the Red Army, Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky (1893-
1937). In March 1938 came the turn of Bukharin, A. I. Rykov (1881-1938), Yagoda,
and several other old Bolsheviks. In 1938 Yezhov was himself executed. His
replacement as head of the NKVD was Lavrentii Beria (1899-1953). This final purge
of the secret police marked the end of the worst period of the pre-war purges. Stalin
apparently decided that the disruption caused by the purges was beginning to
outweigh any advantage he might gain from them. However, the legal and institutional
machinery of the purges remained in place and Stalin used it sporadically to the end
of his life.

The Stalinist propaganda machine at work. Photos of Stalin visiting the Volga-Don canal. Yezhov, the
head of the NKVD before December 1938, has been removed from the second photograph.
ee SOD 2 EEE eee en
276 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Beneath the surface (and largely invisible to foreigners) a holocaust was taking
place. Proportionately, the purges hit the Party worst of all. They hit both the pre-
revolutionary generation of old Bolsheviks and many who joined during the Civil War
or the early 1920s. Stalin clearly saw the main threat to his own position coming from
these older, established sections of the Soviet ruling group. The abolition of the once
prestigious ‘Society of Old Bolsheviks’ in 1935 was an ominous sign of what was to
come. In the early 1930s, G. I. Petrovskii told another old Bolshevik, S. V. Kosior
(1889-1939): ‘for some reason [Stalin] has taken a dislike to old Bolsheviks; he’s out
to get them’.'° In his Secret Speech of 1956, Khrushchev described the impact of the
purges on the Party elite.

Document 11.7: extract from Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of 1956

It was determined [by a special Party commission set up after Stalin’s death to investigate the
purges] that of the 139 members and candidates of the Party’s Central Committee who were
elected at the 17th Congress [1934], ninety-eight persons, i.e. seventy per cent, were
arrested and shot (mostly in 1937-1938). [Indignation in the Hall.] What was the composition
of the delegates to the 17th Congress? It is known that eighty per cent of the voting
participants of the |7th Congress joined the party during the years of conspiracy before the
revolution and during the civil war; this means before |921. By social origin the basic mass of
the delegates to the Congress were workers . .
The same fate met not only the Central Committee members but also the majority of the
delegates to the |7th Party Congress. Of 1966 delegates with either voting or advisory rights,
| 108 persons were arrested on charges of antirevolutionary crimes, i.e. decidedly more than
a majority.'¢

Below this level, at least 200 000 Party members died between 1936 and 1939,
though some estimates have put the figure much higher.’ Other sections of the elite
also suffered. The purge of the army, for example, removed sixty-five per cent of the
upper command, including three out of five marshals, thirteen out of fifteen generals,
and sixty-two out of eighty-five corps commanders.
These figures give little idea of the impact of the purges at lower levels of Soviet
society. The press and radio helped create an atmosphere of general paranoia. Public
statements encouraged people to look for and denounce enemies, wreckers, possible
spies, or even people whose relatives had been class enemies. In a frenzy of
denunciations, the purges spread to include relatives, friends, and casual
acquaintances of those arrested at first. Eventually, under pressure to fulfil quotas, the
police began to arrest completely arbitrary victims.

By and large, the Organs [the police] had no profound reasons for their choice of
whom to arrest and whom not to arrest. They merely had overall assignments, quotas
for a specific number of arrests. These quotas might be filled on an orderly basis or
wholly arbitrarily. In 1937 a woman came to the reception room of the
Novocherkassk NKVD to ask what she should do about the unfed unweaned infant
of a neighbour who had been arrested. They said: ‘Sit down, we’ll find out’. She sat
there for two hours—whereupon they took her and tossed her into a cell. They had
a total plan which had to be fulfilled in a hurry, and there was no one available to
send out into the city—and here was this woman already in their hands!!®
THE STALINIST POLITICAL ORDER 277

Counting the cost

How many suffered during the purges? This is an important, if gruesome, question.
Material released by the Soviet government in the late 1980s allows us, at last, to give
some figures based on archival evidence. By and large, these tend to lower the estimates
accepted by most Western historians ever since the publication of Robert Conquest’s
influential book, The Great Terror. However, these adjustments do nothing to excuse
the horror of the purges.
How many people were arrested and executed during the purges? In 1990 Soviet
researchers who had used KGB archives claimed, with what seems excessive precision,
that between 1931 and 1953 government tribunals sentenced 3 778 234 people, of
whom 786 098 were executed. Almost 700 000 of those executed died in 1937 and
1938, at the height of the purges.’’ At present, these are the best estimates available.
However, we can be certain that many more died unrecorded, so these count as low
estimates.
How many ended up in labour camps and how many died there? Archival material
released late in the 1980s suggests that the numbers in camps rose from about 500 000
in 1934 to about 1.2 million in 1937, and to almost two million on the eve of war.
During the war, the numbers fell to about 1.2 million by 1944. They then rose again to
a post-war peak of 2.6 millions in 1950, and remained at that level until Stalin’s death.”°
However, these figures do not include those in ordinary prisons or in exile. It is likely
that the numbers exiled to so-called ‘labour settlements’, whose regimes were less
severe than those in camps, were as high as seventy-five per cent of the numbers in
camps.”! These figures suggest that in the late 1930s and the 1940s, between two and
four million lived in labour camps or as exiles in labour settlements. Death rates in the
camps were high, but, except during the war, they were probably not as high as the ten
per cent per annum that Conquest regards as the normal rate.” Recent archival
research suggests that death rates in the camps reached ten per cent per annum only
in 1939, and again during the war. At other times, they ranged from 3.5 to almost seven
per cent per annum.”
It is worth noting that far fewer died during the purges of the late 1930s than during
collectivisation and the collectivisation famine of 1933. Though historians have usually
seen the purges as the height of Stalinist repression, it was collectivisation that inflicted
the greatest human cost. The difference is that the purges were a far greater shock to
the Soviet elite, and its view of Stalinism has had a disproportionate influence on
historical accounts of the period.

Explaining the terror

on and
What sort of political system can inflict such brutality on its own populati
survive?

Building a loyal ruling elite: the vydvizhentsy

of Stalin’s
The simplest explanation of the purges sees them as a product
truth in this
determination to remove all possible rivals. There is undoubtedly some
during the
explanation. Stalin bears direct responsibility for much of what went on
ds of purge
purges, for his signature appears on death warrants for many thousan
victims.
278 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

From Stalin’s point of view, there was also a more positive aspect to this process. The
purges did not merely remove potential enemies. They also raised up a new ruling elite
which Stalin had reason to think he would find more dependable. Particularly
important is the career of the so-called vydvizhentsy, those ‘brought forward’. By the
late 1920s, the government was beginning to worry that most people with technical,
scientific and industrial skills were not Party members. Many were of bourgeois origin,
which made them, technically, class enemies. The Shakhty trial of 1928 gave full rein
to these suspicions and helped make them a national obsession.
Stalin’s solution was to speed up the training of a new generation of experts from
the working class. These ‘Red experts’ would eventually form a new ‘proletarian
intelligentsia’. Between 1928 and 1932, the Party drafted more than 100 000 young
Communist workers into colleges and universities for engineering and industrial
training. This generation of vydvizhentsy turned out to be of immense significance, for
they provided many of the managers and officials who replaced those removed during
the purges. By 1939, many vydvizhentsy had risen to dizzy heights. Stalin was well aware
of the turnover of elites accomplished during the purges. At the eighteenth Party
Congress, he described the emergence of a new Soviet intelligentsia:

Hundreds of thousands of young people, offspring of the working class, the

peasantry, and the toiling intelligentsia, went to higher school and tekhnikums and,
returning from the schools, filled the depleted ranks of the intelligentsia. They
poured new blood into the intelligentsia and revitalised it in a new Soviet way. They
radically changed the contours of the intelligentsia, remaking it in their own
image.”

The career of Aleksei Kosygin (1904-80) is typical of the politicians of this

generation. Born in 1904, he fought in the Red Army during the Civil War. He went
on to a technical college, and worked in cooperative organisations in Siberia during
the 1920s. In 1927 hejoined the Party. In 1931 he entered the Leningrad Textile
Institute as one of the vydvizhentsy, and on graduating in 1935, he became a department
head in a Leningrad textile factory. His career took off during the purge era. In 1937
Kosygin was a factory director. A year later he was the head of the executive committee
of the Leningrad city Soviet. Early in 1939, at the age of thirty-five, he became people’s
commissar (i.e. minister) for light industry for the entire Soviet Union. In 1940 he
became deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, coordinating all light
industries. Kosygin remained at the pinnacle of the Soviet political hierarchy until his
death in 1980.
Other vydvizhentsy rose as fast. By 1952 they made up thirty-six per cent of the
Central Committee. By the early 1980s, fifty per cent of Politburo members came from
this group. As Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown, this generation dominated Soviet politics
from the late 1930s to the mid-1980s. It included Aleksei Kosygin, Leonid Brezhnev
(1906-82), Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971), Dmitrii Ustinov (1908-84), and Andrei
Kirilenko (1906-82). The ‘Stalin generation’ of politicians left the Soviet scene only in
the mid 1980s. The purges had, indeed, created a new ruling elite.

Institutionalised paranoia
Stalin could hardly have succeeded in such a ruthless destruction of the Soviet ruling
elite, if there had not been other factors that made the purges possible.
THE STALINIST POLITICAL ORDER 219

The paranoia of the purge era reflected the workings of the entire system, not just
of Stalin himself. As we have seen, driving conflict underground created an
atmosphere of pervasive suspicion, and made it difficult to distinguish friends from
foes. The real dangers faced by the Soviet government in the 1930s intensified the
atmosphere of suspicion. The government itself exacerbated the popular mood by
manufacturing conflicts where none existed. Ever since the Shakhty trial, it had
diverted discontent from its own failings and on to foreign powers or internal saboteurs
and ‘wreckers’ by creating an atmosphere of permanent and acute crisis. By putting
foreign experts on trial in the Shakhty trial, the government planted the idea that
foreign and internal enemies of the Soviet state worked together. As early as 1927 Stalin
announced: ‘We are a country surrounded by capitalist states. The internal enemies of
our revolution are the agents of the capitalists of all countries’.” In the atmosphere of
the 1930s, the plots the government claimed to have discovered during the purges
appeared all too plausible to ordinary Soviet citizens. In 1988, a former collective farm
chairman wrote to Izvestiya:

We believed everything. I refer to people like myself from the village ... I can
honestly say that when they told us about the conspiracy of Bukharin and the others,
I did not doubt for a second that everything was like that. My soul sought for
revenge. We believed everything, everything in the newspapers. After all, we read
their own confessions. Moreover, the iron will of the exposures, the mercilessness,
had the effect that I believed Stalin still more, blindly ... Everything was so
obvious!*°

The same atmosphere undoubtedly encouraged Stalin’s own paranoias. He could

rarely be certain who was an enemy. However, he knew that he had enemies and he
knew that they plotted in secret. The same was true for the many petty Stalins planted
in local Party cells, industrial enterprises or military units throughout the country. The
social upheavals of the early 1930s ensured a receptive atmosphere for the
government’s own paranoid propaganda even amongst the working class population.
Particularly for peasants forced off the land and into the bewildering and threatening
atmosphere of Soviet towns, it was all too easy to believe there were enemies
everywhere. \
The atmosphere of the 1930s also helps explain how the purges spread in a chain
reaction from relatives of victims, to friends, to casual acquaintances to completely
innocent bystanders. In a period of great turmoil, they offered many chances for the
settling of old scores.

The purges as a sign of weakness

Historians have often taken the purges as proof of the power of the Soviet government.
This is partly true. Yet it is also misleading. To lash out with such violence may also
have been a sign of weakness. Recent studies of the era have shown that the
government launched the purges, in part, out of an acute sense of its own weakness.
Earlier attempts to purge provincial Party officials had shown how little control the
centre had over the lower levels of Soviet political life. The central leadership could
replace local Party bosses, local enterprise managers, and local police and army
commanders but it was almost impossible to supervise the day-to-day activities of
this.
provincial Party bosses. The Soviet bureaucracy was just not efficient enough to do
travelled by horse,
In a society where telephones were a novelty and local officials often
280 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

the centre lacked the means to exercise detailed supervision over its own agents. The
central Party apparatus even found it difficult to control such elementary matters as
Party membership. Party files were chaotic throughout this period, which made the
task of weeding out undesirables extremely difficult. In the following passage the
historian,J.Arch Getty, describes the career of one Podol’skii-Fel’dman.

Actually named Fel’dman, he joined the Komsomol [Communist Youth League] in

the Ukrainian town of Korosten in 1931. Ambition took him to Baku, where he
presented himself as Podol’skii, claiming that he had lost his Komsomol
membership card. He turned up later that year in Piatigorsk and was soon expelled
for violations of discipline. He stole his personnel file and went to Bukhara, where
he rapidly rose through the Komsomol to candidate Party membership. Expelled
there for criminal activity, Podol’skii-Fel’dman kept his Party card, stole three blank
personnel file records, stamped them with the Party seal, and moved to the city of
Dnepropetrovsk. Promoted there to full Party membership in 1932, his ‘references’
won him a position on the regional newspaper. Expelled from the Party for
‘personal corruption,’ he used a set of his blank documents, stamped them with the
Dnepropetrovsk seal and moved on to Kiev. Passing unscathed through the Party
purge of 1934, he was holding a responsible position in a district prosecutor’s office
in 1935.77

The limited reach of the central authorities left plenty of power in the hands of local
bosses. To protect themselves, local leaders worked together in so-called ‘family
groups’ held together by ties of friendship and sometimes, literally, by kinship. The
dominant figures were usually the provincial Party secretaries. However, they usually
worked closely with local police chiefs, army commanders and industrial managers to
magnify local successes and hide local failures.
Amongst other things, the purges were an attempt by the centre to break the power
of these local fiefdoms. In 1937 the centre encouraged ordinary Party members to
denounce corrupt provincial officials. In the middle of the year most provincial Party
secretaries and many lower level Party officials vanished. However, though the purges
removed many local cliques, the same phenomena soon reappeared. Indeed local
cliques, partly insulated from central control, became an endemic feature of the Soviet
political system, for the system could hardly work without them.* The purges had
shown the limits as well as the extent of central power.

A new political order: from institutional to personal power

When the purges ended, the Soviet political system had been transformed. In 1934,
Stalin’s power derived from his position as head of the Party apparatus. Decisions
flowed from the Politburo, through the Party apparatus and then to the economic
ministries, the secret police, the army, and the various other organs of government. By
1939 the Party apparatus could no longer control Stalin. Stalin had achieved a personal
authority independent of any single institution. He had established his right to issue
orders on his personal authority, using any bureaucratic channels he chose. In
particular, he could act directly through the secret police against the Party, the army
or the economic ministries. Yet there was nothing to stop him from acting also through
other institutions against the secret police.
 THE STALINIST POLITICAL ORDER 281

[Stalin] developed a system of competing and overlapping bureaucratic hierarchies

in which both the Party and the police, penetrating and watching each other,
simultaneously pervaded and controlled the armed forces, the administration, and
all other organized sectors of life. He reserved his own ultimate authority to direct
and coordinate the system by providing no point of final resolution for differences
and conflicts short of himself... He capitalized on the diffusion of power among
his subordinates to prevent them from challenging his own.”

We must not exaggerate Stalin’s power. There always remained the slim chance that
his own main supporters would ally against him. There are signs that members of the
Central Committee opposed a continuation of the Party purge at its February-March
meeting in 1937. In 1938 Stalin apparently hoped to replace Yezhoy, the head of the
NKVD, with G. M. Malenkov (1902-1988). However, the rest of the Poliburo outvoted
him, choosing instead Laurentii Beria.*’ Clearly divisions continued even within the
Politburo, and often Stalin’s role was to adjudicate between different positions within
the Politburo. Besides, the inefficiency of the Soviet bureaucracy blunted his power at
the regional level. Nevertheless, after 1936 his personal power was so extensive that it
became almost impossible to move against him.
The changes that occurred between the meeting of the seventeenth Party Congress
in 1934 and the eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 had transformed a one-party state
with a powerful leader into a personal dictatorship. By 1939 Stalin himself was the most
important single institution in Soviet political life.

MOBILISING SUPPORT
The coercive elements of Stalinism are so striking that it is easy to forget that the system
depended also on a surprising degree of genuine support. This explains the resilience
the Stalinist system displayed during the war.

Support for Stalinism within the ruling group

A new ruling class
Within the Soviet ruling group, many had powerful reasons to support Stalin despite
the insecurities of the purge era. Stalin enjoyed the support, in particular, of the
generation of younger Party members, industrial managers, and government and
police officials who benefited from the changes of the 1930s. These we can think of as
the new, Soviet dvoriane. Like the service nobles of Muscovite Russia, they owed their
status, privileges and power, not to birth or to past services. They owed them to their
willingness to obey the state and its current leadership, and serve it with all the skill
and energy they could muster. Their elevation transformed the nature and atmosphere
of the Party and nomenklatura.
The rapid social changes of the 1930s created many opportunities for ambitious
young Party members. For every Party member who vanished during the purges,
fora
someone else gained a promotion. The very scale of the purges created openings
but
new generation of Soviet leaders. For them, the 1930s were a period of dangers,
Most striking of all is the
also. of spectacular successes, both personal and national.
282 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

career of the vydvizhentsy, but below them there were many others of working class
origin for whom the 1930s offered similar, if less dazzling opportunities. In the early
1930s at least half a million people of working class origin moved into white-collar and
managerial jobs. Here was the raw material for a new ruling group recruited largely
from the working classes, but also including many from the former intelligentsia.”

Privilege and hierarchy

Despite their working class origins, the Stalinist elite soon formed a distinct group within
Soviet society, separate from the rest of the Russian working class. Stalin encouraged this
tendency by magnifying the privileges, the power and the status of the new elite. After
attacking egalitarianism in 1931, Stalin encouraged the introduction of higher wages
and special privileges for elite groups and skilled workers. The power and status of
industrial managers increased particularly during the early Five-Year Plans.

The creation of a hierarchical scaffolding of dedicated bosses, held together by

discipline, privilege and power, was a deliberate strategy of social engineering to
help stabilise the flux. It was born, therefore, in conditions of stress, mass
disorganization, and social warfare, and the bosses were actually asked to see
themselves as commanders in a battle. The Party wanted the bosses to be efficient,
powerful, harsh, impetuous, and capable of exerting pressure crudely and ruthlessly
and getting results ‘whatever the cost’. Rudeness .. . became a virtue and, more
significantly, the boss was endowed with quasi-police power in the workplace: among
his prerogatives were fines and dismissals, which meant deprivation of lodging and
food, and he had the further resource (even more corrupting) of the local security
organs and the public prosecutor. The formation of the despotic manager was
actually a process in which not leaders but rulers were made. The fact that their own
jobs and freedom were quite insecure made the tyrannical traits of their rule more
rather than less capricious and offensive.”

Typical of this style is the advice given by Stalin’s industrial troubleshooter, L. M.

Kaganovich (1893-), to enterprise managers to behave so that ‘the earth should
tremble when the director walks around the plant’.
A whole generation of petty Stalins emerged, their style and behaviour that of
traditional Russian officials. Material privileges bound them together as effectively as
political power. From 1931, the privileges of Party leaders, industrial managers, shock
workers, army officers, police officials, and intellectuals rose sharply. Wages were the
least important of these privileges. Favoured groups had access to better housing, to
government cars, to luxury goods inaccessible to anyone else, and to special stores. For
long periods they even received secret wage packets that could double or treble their
official wages.
Within this elite there appeared rigid hierarchies of rank and privilege. These
affected the tone of public life as the Table of Ranks had in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.

Document 11.8: Koestler on privilege, 1933

Among citizens of the privileged categories who travelled armed with bronis [special permits],
the speed with which they obtained a train reservation depended on the ‘strength’ of their
organizacia—meaning the administrative department, trust, factory, state-farm or other body
 THE STALINIST POLITICAL ORDER 283

for which they worked. The GPU [secret police] had absolute priority; next to it came the
Party, then the government administration, army, heavy industry, light metal industry,
consumer industries, trade unions, research centres, etc., approximately in that order. The
same system of hierarchic priorities was applied to the allocation of flats, rooms, or a share
in a room, through the city Soviet’s Housing Department, and to the allocation of a bed ina
hotel room, for travellers arriving in a town, by the Central Hotel Management Trust. The
same system of priorities determined to which food cooperative you belonged; the same
system decided whether you gained access to an official parade or theatre performance. The
first question one was asked when applying for any commodity or facility, from railway tickets
to ration cards, was always ‘What is your organizacia?’ The rights and privileges of the
individual were entirely dependent on the rank which his ‘organisation’ occupied in the social
pyramid, and on the rank which he occupied inside that organisation. There has never perhaps
been a society in which a rigid hierarchical order so completely determined every citizen’s
station in life and governed all his activities.**

It was this new elite group that Trotsky described as the Soviet ‘bureaucracy’. The
Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas called it the ‘new class’. This group not only
dominated Soviet society politically and economically. It also set the moral and even
the aesthetic tone of official Soviet life—its standards of behaviour, of ethics, of
political morality. Though the Party was in eclipse, the nomenklatura still bound the
ruling elite together.
How large was the new ruling group? If we accept that it coincides with the
nomenklatura, we can estimate it roughly. In 1970, the nomenklatura included about
700 000 positions. If we include families, this represents about three million people,
or 1.2 per cent of the Soviet population.» Assuming the proportions were similar in
1940, there should have been about 600 000 officials on the nomenklatura. Including
families, this should represent about 2.3 million people.
For members of this group, the Stalinist system appeared progressive. For them the
1930s were a period of heroic achievement. This explains their inability to see the less
pleasant sides of Stalin’s system. Lev Kopelev knew the system from the inside. Here,
he describes the psychology of its members.

Document 11.9: Lev Kopelev on the psychology of the Party

We were taught, when we were young, that it was our duty as citizens and members of the
Komsomol to denounce friends and relatives, if need be, and to keep nothing from the Party.
| never believed that Bukharin and Trotsky were Gestapo agents or that they had wanted to
kill Lenin, and | was sure that Stalin never believed it either. But | regarded the purge trials of
1937 and 1938 as an expression of some far-sighted policy; | believed that, on balance, Stalin
was right in deciding on these terrible measures in order to discredit all forms of political
opposition, once and for all. We were a besieged fortress; we had to be united, knowing
neither vacillation nor doubt ... Therefore, the opposition leaders had to be depicted as
deviationists and villains, so that the people would come to hate them.
Finding myself among those marked out for such hatred [Kopelev was arrested in 1945
while serving with the army in Germany], | did not lose my convictions. . . In prison | became
that my
even more consistent a Stalinist. What | was afraid of, more than anything else, was
to the life
sense of personal injury would impair my view of what remained most important
spiritual
of my country and of the world. That vision was essential to me as a source of
284 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

strength, of my conception of myself as part of a great whole. Without that conviction my

life would lose its meaning—my past life and whatever lay ahead . . . | also believed that the
generals, the men of the NKVD, the judge and the jailers were all blood of my blood, bone
of my bone; that we were all soldiers in one army. Only some were more intelligent and
conscientious than others, and some were stupider and worse than they should be. Even ifa
majority of the NKVD men, the prosecutors and the judges were no good, the overall
objectives of the sum total of their work were just and historically necessary. And so |
believed that no amount of mistakes or miscalculations or injustices could alter the aggregate
or halt the coming triumph of Socialism.”

Popular support
Social mobility and the role of ideology
Privilege was not confined to members of the new Soviet elite. Below them were
millions for whom the turbulence of the 1930s created opportunities.as well as dangers.
In spite of the appalling living conditions in the towns and the personal disorientation
many peasants experienced when they left the villages, materially town life was better
than village life. During the second Five-Year Plan (1932-37), average real wages began
to rise again, particularly in the towns. By 1937, they were thirty-five per cent above the
levels for 1935, though still well below the levels for 1928.37 Meanwhile the
government’s investment in ‘communal consumption’—education, welfare services,
medicine, public canteens, kindergartens—increased rapidly in the 1930s.
Propaganda also played a role in mobilising support. Peasants, barely literate and
confused and embittered by the changes they had endured, seized readily on the
simple messages of government propaganda. Some of those messages seemed very
plausible. The Soviet Union did have many enemies. The capitalist world in the 1930s
did appear on the verge of collapse. The government’s claim that the difficulties of
the 1930s were the birth pangs of a new and better world was therefore credible to
many Soviet citizens, as to many outside the Soviet Union.
In these ways, the Stalinist system created supporters as well as opponents and
victims. This explains its remarkable durability in spite of its excesses and its brutality.
As the dissident Soviet historian Roy Medvedev has written: ‘Stalin did not rely on
terror alone, but also on the support of the majority of the people; effectively deceived
by cunning propaganda, they gave Stalin credit for the successes of others and even
for “achievements” that were in fact totally fictitious’
.**

Cultural conservatism and the ‘great retreat’

The Soviet government also built support by adapting its own attitudes and methods
to those of a still traditional and conservative society. In the 1930s, it made many
concessions to the patriarchal and nationalistic attitudes of what remained a very
traditional society. This meant abandoning many of its more radical ideals.
Marxism itself changed. Like Christianity in the later Roman Empire, an ideology
of the oppressed became the ideology of a brutal and authoritarian ruling elite. In the
hands of Stalinist propagandists, the complex and subtle arguments of a German
philosopher turned into the ritualistic and dogmatic formulae of Stalinism. For many,
ideology offered a partial substitute for traditional religion. Peasants placed pictures
of Stalin or Lenin where they had placed icons or pictures of the tsar. The demonology
of the purges made sense to peasants who lived in a world of good and evil spirits.
 THE STALINIST POLITICAL ORDER 285

The retreat from socialist and democratic ideals affected the whole of Soviet life.
Under the New Economic Policy, Soviet educationists led by Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya,
had experimented with new, more liberal approaches to education. Soviet attitudes to
the role of women and to aspects of family law such as divorce and abortion were
extremely advanced by the standards of the time. In the 1930s the government turned
its back on the cultural and social experimentation of the 1920s. In education there
was a return to discipline. Teachers had to emphasise traditional basic skills. In history
they concentrated on the national and military history of Russia. In family law, the
government began to stress traditional family values. The government abolished
abortion once again, and made divorce more difficult. It also began to stress traditional
family values. In a novel written in the 1930s, the leader of a delegation of women who
visited Stalin in 1937 made the following speech:

Our feminine hearts are overflowing with emotions and of these love is paramount.
Yet a wife should also be a happy mother and create a serene home atmosphere,
without, however, abandoning work for the common welfare. She should know how
to combine all these things while also matching her husband’s performance on the
job.

Stalin’s response to this speech is: ‘Right!’.

This fictional meeting conveys well the style of family life that the government began
to advocate. The government was unwilling or unable to fund enough creéches or
public canteens or laundries to free women from domestic labour. Dominated as it was
by traditional working class men, the government was also unwilling to encourage
Soviet men to share in domestic tasks. Instead, it encouraged women to keep their
traditional roles as housekeepers and mothers. Most women now had little choice but
to carry a crippling double burden of domestic and wage-earning employment. While
Alexandra Kollontai survived the Stalinist period (much of it as Soviet ambassador to
Norway, Mexico and Sweden), her hopes for a genuine liberation of Soviet women did
not survive. Soviet life assumed an old-fashioned, slightly puritanical, and even
‘bourgeois’ tone. This remained the characteristic style of the Soviet elite until the
1980s.
What emerged in the 1930s was a society very different from the socialist ideals of
the October Revolution. Instead of a classless society, there emerged a hierarchical
society dominated by a privileged elite organised around the Party and nomenklatura.
The democratic structures of the Soviets, though enshrined in the ‘Stalin Constitution’
(largely prepared by Bukharin and issued in 1936), counted for little in practice. The
employers,
urban and rural working classes, freed from the exploitation of capitalist
found themselves driven as ruthlessly by new Soviet bosses. Instead of ‘withering away’,
extensive, and
as Engels had hoped it would, the state became more formidable, more
more brutal than ever.

WAS STALIN REALLY NECESSARY?

l base for
Was it all necessary? Could the Soviet government have built the industria
Socialism without the violence and coercion of Stalinis m?
286 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

The decisions the Soviet leadership took in the late 1920s had such momentous
results for Soviet society, and for the rest of the world, that we must take such questions
seriously. They are particularly important for those who take seriously the socialist
vision of a society combining democracy, equality and a basic level of material affluence
for all.
At the height of the Cold War, it was fashionable to argue that Stalinism followed
automatically from Marxism. Few scholars would now accept this view undiluted.
Certainly, there are authoritarian tendencies in the writings of Marx and of Lenin.
However, there are also democratic, even anarchistic tendencies in their writings. It
was Lenin, for example, who said in 1918, ina quotation from Ovid: ‘The golden age
is coming; people will live without laws or punishment, doing of their own free will what
is good and just’.”°
Paradoxically, Marx himself had already hinted at a better explanation for Stalinist
authoritarianism when he argued that the attempt to build Socialism in an
environment of scarcity would simply revive ‘all the old crap’ of class struggle. As the
Mensheviks had insisted in 1917, a premature revolution was very likely to result in a
brutal dictatorship. Alec Nove argued a similar case in a famous essay entitled, ‘Was
Stalin Really Necessary?’ first published in 1962.*' Nove argued that, given the Party’s
ideology and the difficulties it faced in the 1920s, forced collectivisation was the only
strategy that provided enough resources to fund rapid industrialisation. Without it, the
Soviet Union would surely not have survived the Great Patriotic War. So, collec-
tivisation was necessary once the Communists decided to try to build Socialism in
backward Russia, as was the authoritarian apparatus that imposed collectivisation.
However, Nove argued that there was no need for the purges. Far from aiding
industrial growth they stifled it.
In the 1970s several scholars challenged the claim that Stalinism was, in some sense,
‘necessary’. In a polemic with Nove, first published in 1976,J.R. Millar argued that
even collectivisation was unnecessary.” Millar offered two distinct types of argument.
The first stressed the wastefulness of the Stalinist growth strategy. Millar pointed to
the immense destructiveness of collectivisation. He argued that, far from increasing
the resources available for industrial growth, collectivisation reduced them. For
example, the government had to pump vast sums of money back into agriculture just
to replace lost livestock. The expansion in tractor production, of which the
government was so proud, merely replaced the draught horses killed during
collectivisation. In the urban sector, the absurd pace of industrialisation led to
breakages of complex machinery. Valuable plant lay unused for lack of raw materials
or skilled operators, while highly trained experts vanished during the purges.
Millar’s second argument takes us back to the late 1920s. It appeared then that both
the slowdown in industrial production and the 1927 procurements crisis proved the
failure of the New Economic Policy. Millar argued that this may not have been true.
The statistical information available to the government was extremely unreliable, and
the government may well have exaggerated the seriousness of both problems.
Inadequate statistics probably exaggerated the slowdown in industrial production.
The issue of procurements is more complex. At the time, the government believed it
had no choice but to back down (by raising the price it paid for grain deliveries), or
launch an assault on the peasantry. Such arguments assumed that the peasants could
afford not to sell their grain indefinitely. However, as Millar pointed out, this may not
have been true. Certainly, many peasants chose not to market their surplus grain as
grain prices declined. Yet they increased their marketing of other products, in
THE STALINIST POLITICAL ORDER 287

particular of small livestock for meat. Faced with falling grain prices and stable prices
for other produce, they fed surplus grain to their pigs and cattle, and then sold the
meat. They had to sell something, for by now they depended more than the
government realised on purchasing industrially produced items no longer made in the
villages. The Russian peasantry had ceased to be as self-sufficient as the government
believed.
The implications of these rustic economics are profound. They suggest that there
may have been a third way out of the procurements crisis for the Soviet government. It
simply had to lower the price it paid for livestock produce as well as for grain. Peasants
would have had to sell their grain. They would also have had to sell it cheaply, leaving
the government sector with the profits it needed to finance rapid industrial growth.
This conclusion is not as trivial as it may appear. It implies that the government
could have used market forces to extract more resources than it realised from the
countryside. Peasants might have grumbled, but they need not have resisted actively,
for such measures would not have affected their interests as much as collectivisation
did. In other words, there may have been a strategy of growth which would have made
use of market forces while retaining socialist control of the “commanding heights’. This
strategy would have combined elements of Bukharin’s strategy of growth with those of
the leftwing. Like Witte’s strategy, it would have combined market forces with a
considerable, but not extreme, degree of fiscal pressure from the government. It was a
strategy that still relied on indirect mobilisation. The peasantry would have been taxed
harder; the rate of industrial growth could have increased; the country would have
avoided the wasteful excesses of Stalinism; and the basic framework of the New
Economic Policy would have evolved gradually into Socialism as the socialist industrial
sector expanded. As in the 1920s, the government would have been authoritarian, but
not ‘totalitarian’. During the era of perestroika such arguments were of great interest,
for they seemed to point to a ‘third way’, combining elements of Socialism and
Capitalism.
Such strategies were certainly available. However, the failure of perestroika suggests,
as did the failure of NEP, that they were likely to be unstable. Finding a stable balance
between direct and indirect forms of mobilisation was bound to be extremely difficult
under conditions of great social and economic strain. Besides, could such a strategy
have generated enough growth, particularly in heavy industry, to sustain a war against
Nazi Germany by 1941? The strength of the Stalinist system was its ability to mobilise
resources—people, money, and goods—on a scale huge enough to compensate for its
inefficiency. Would a social structure closer to that of the NEP period have survived
the strains of the war years? It would have wasted fewer human and material resources
than the Stalinist system. However, it could never have generated the full power of the
capitalist engine of growth, for it would have entailed many restrictions on the activities
of entrepreneurs. Stalin himself clearly believed that such strategies would have failed.
When, in 1944, the Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas remarked: ‘Without
industrialization the Soviet Union could not have preserved itself and waged such a
war,’ Stalin replied, ‘It was precisely over this that we quarrelled with Trotsky and
Bukharin.’*”
The argument presented in this book is close to the position of the Mensheviks or
of Alec Nove. Under conditions of backwardness, the attempt to build Socialism was
bound to be dangerous. It required rapid growth, yet the hostility of socialist ideologies
to Capitalism ruled out use of the capitalist strategy of growth. This left two alternatives.
Either a halfand-half strategy such as NEP, or a strategy of direct mobilisation. The
288 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

first strategy required a delicacy of touch that the Bolsheviks lacked. Besides, the
difficulties they faced allowed no time to learn how to manage so unstable an economic
structure. Many Bolsheviks opposed such a strategy anyway, as an improper
compromise with Capitalism. This left only the strategy of direct mobilisation. There
was a certain simplicity about it. Most Party members could understand its logic. And
its approach to economics and politics was familiar. Indeed, it had deep roots in
Russian tradition. In the circumstances, the emergence of an extremely authoritarian
state, relying on Russia’s traditional political culture, was extremely likely. Whether it
need have reached the extremes of High Stalinism is, however, doubtful.

Questions for discussion

1 What links the economic and the political changes of the 1930s?

no How similar was the new Soviet ruling group to the traditional Tsarist ruling group?
What were the differences?
Why did so many ordinary Soviet citizens admire Stalin?
Why did Stalin’s opponents within the Party fail to limit his power?

Did the purges benefit anyone?

Was Stalinism necessary for the building of Socialism in Russia?
O09
#
Ot
NID Was the Soviet Union of the 1930s a Socialist society? If not, what sort of society was
it?

Further reading
See bibliography:
Daniels, The Stalin Revolution
Deutscher, Stalin
Getty & Manning, Stalinist Terror
Gill, Stalinism
McAuley, Soviet Politics
Medvedev, Let History Judge
Nove, Stalinism and After
Schapiro, The Communist Party
Volkogonoy, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy
Ward, Stalin’s Russia

In addition:
E Bacon, *Glasnost’and the Gulag’, Soviet Studies, vol 44, no 6 (1992) pp 1069-86
R Conquest, The Great Terror, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971
D Christian, “History, Myth and the Stalinist Purges’, Teaching History, vol 22, pt 3 (Oct 1988),
pp 12-25
G Gill, Origin of the Stalinist Political System, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990
M McCauley, Stalin and Stalinism, Longman, London, 1983
THE STALINIST POLITICAL ORDER 289

J R Millar and A Nove, ‘A Debate on Collectivisation’, in Problems of Communism, July-August,

1976, pp 49-62
A Nove, Was Stalin Really Necessary?, Praeger, London, 1964
L Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Pathfinder, New York, 1977

Endnotes
Victor Kravchenko, J Chose Freedom, Robert Hale, London, 1947, p 130
no W Churchill, The Hinge of Fate, Cassell, Boston, 1950, p 498
Maurice Hindus, Mother Russia, William Collins, London, 1943, pp 62-3, from a speech
delivered on 4 February 1931 at a conference of managers of Soviet industry
Cited by Khrushchev in his Secret Speech in 1956. B Dmytryshyn, USSR: A Concise History,
2nd edn, Scribner’s, New York, 1971, p 497
R Conquest, The Great Terror, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971, p 454, and figures for 1934
from E Bacon, ‘Glasnost’ and the Gulag’, Soviet Studies, vol 44, no 6 (1992), p 1071
D Volkogonoy, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, tr H Shukman, Prima Publishing, Rocklin, CA,
1992, p 563
Conquest, The Great Terror, p 50
cited in R W Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution, Indiana University Press,
Bloomington, Ind, 1989, p 84
Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, p 200
10 I Deutscher, Stalin, rev ed, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1966, p 349
11 cited in M Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates, Pluto Press, London, 1975,
p 28
12 Dmytryshyn, USSR, p 496. However, recent evidence has failed to prove Stalin’s complicity.
See J Arch Getty, ‘The Politics of Repression Revisited’, in JArch Getty & R T Manning
(eds), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993,
pp 42-49
1) M Matthews, Soviet Government: A Selection of Official Documents on Internal Policies, Jonathan
Cape, London, 1974, pp 252-3
14 Dmytryshyn, USSR, p 495
15 R Medvedev, Let History Judge, Alfred A Knopf Inc, New York, 1971, p 154
16 Dmytryshyn, USSR, p 495
17 Stephen Wheatcroft, ‘On assessing the Size of Forced Concentration Camp Labour in the
Soviet Union, 1931-1956’, Soviet Studies, vol 33 (1981), no 2, April, p 286, and “Towards a
Thorough Analysis of Soviet Forced Labor Statistics’, Soviet Studies, vol 35 (1983), no 2, April,
p 227. Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, p 713, estimates party victims at 1 million.
18 A Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Fontana/William Collins, London, 1974, vol 1, p 11
19 A Nove, ‘Victims of Stalinism: How Many?’ in Getty & Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror, p 270
20 Bacon, ‘Glasnost’ and the Gulag’, p 1071
21 ibid, p 1071
22 Conquest, The Great Terror, p 710; and seeJBarber & M Harrison, The Soviet Home Front 1941—
1945, Longman, London & New York, 1991, pp 116-19 & 217
23 Bacon, ‘Glasnost’and the Gulag’, p 1080
S Fitzpatrick, ‘Stalin and the Making of a New Elite, 1928-1939’, in Slavic Review, vol 38,
ve
no 3, 1979, p 399
, Mass, 1963,
25 M Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled, rev edn, Harvard University Press, Cambridge
p 42s
Revolution, p 82
26 Izvestiya, August 2, 3, 1988, cited in Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev
vol 42 (1983), no 1,
27 J Arch Getty, “Party and purge in Smolensk: 1933-1937’, Slavic Review,
capital of the Derevlians.
pp 63-4. Fel’dman’s home town, Korosten, had been the medieval
See Chapter one, Documents 1.1 and 1.2.
290 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

28 See G Gill, The Origins of the Stalinist Political System, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1990
29 See Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled, p 578
30 B A Starkov, ‘Narkom Ezhov’, in Getty & Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror, p 38
31 S Fitzpatrick, ‘Stalin and the Making of a New Elite, 1928-1939’, in Slavic Review, vol 38,
no 3, 1979, pp 377-402. See also, S Fitzpatrick, ‘Cultural Revolution as Class War’, and M
Lewin, ‘Society, State and Ideology during the First Five-Year Plan’, in S Fitzpatrick (ed),
Cultural Revolution in Russia 1928-1931, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Ind, 1978.
See also J F Hough and M Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1979
32 M Lewin, ‘Society, State and Ideology during the First Five Year Plan’, in Fitzpatrick (ed),
Cultural Revolution in Russia 1928-1931, p 74
30 Fitzpatrick (ed), Cultural Revolution in Russia 1928-1931, p 62
Oe A Koestler, The Invisible Writing, Hutchinson, London, 1969, pp (os
35 M McCauley, The Soviet Union since 1917, Longman, London, 1981, p 262
36 L Kopelev, No Jail for Thought, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1979, pp 121-2
37 A Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 3rd edn, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992, p 253
38 R Medvedev, On Stalin and Stalinism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979, p 161
39 G Lapidus, in D Atkinson, et al (eds), Women in Russia, Harvester Press, Brighton, 1978,
p 131
40 cited in M Feshbach & A Friendly, Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege, Basic
Books, New York, 1993, p 27
4] See A Nove, Was Stalin Really Necessary?, Praeger, London, 1964
42 J R Millar and A Nove, ‘A Debate on Collectivisation’, in Problems of Communism, July-August,
1976, pp 49-62. See also the preface to S Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980
43 M Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1963, p 62
 CHAPTER TWELVE

THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR

The ultimate challenge for any ruling group is to defend its territory against external
as well as internal enemies. We have seen that this task was peculiarly difficult in the
cold flatlands of the Eurasian plain, where agriculture was hard and there were few
natural defensive barriers. Indeed, the difficult task of defence did much to shape the
autocratic political culture of Russian society. Judged by this test, imperial Russia was a
great success before the mid-nineteenth century. However, the defeat in the Crimea
(1853-55) marked the beginning of a period of decline. This culminated in the defeats
of the First World War, revolution, and the humiliating Treaty of Brest—Litovsk. In
international terms, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was the worst humiliation a Russian
government had faced since the foreign intervention of the early seventeenth century.
How successful was the new Communist ruling group in solving the difficult
defensive problems that faced all Russian ruling groups?

FOREIGN POLICY, 1917 TO 1941

A revolutionary or a traditional foreign policy? 1917 to 1921
When the Bolsheviks led the October Revolution, they believed it would be the first
in a series of anti-capitalist revolutions. Their conception of foreign policy was
therefore simplistic. They hoped to turn the war between nations that began in 1914,
irrelevant. So
into a war between classes. In a socialist world, nation states would be
would traditional foreign policy. When asked by Lenin to act as commissar for foreign
affairs, Trotsky claimed the job would be easy. He would issue a few proclamations and
then ‘shut up shop’.
Within weeks of seizing power in 1917, the Bolsheviks realised that this was too
did not break out abroad, they would have to reach an
simple. If revolution
anything
arrangement with foreign capitalist powers, because they were too weak to do
threat
else. This was particularly true of Germany, whose armies posed an immediate
So, on 3 March 1918, after much heart-searching, the Soviet
to the revolution.
formal
government signed a ‘pact with the devil’ at Brest-Litovsk. This was its first
treaty with a capitalist government.
Should
The dilemmas of Brest—Litovsk haunted Soviet foreign policy for many years.
292 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

the Soviet government support a revolutionary overthrow of its capitalist enemies by

helping foreign revolutionary movements? Or should it defend the socialist homeland
through a policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with foreign Capitalism, even if this meant
betraying the international revolution?
During the Civil War, these two approaches—the revolutionary and the
traditional—were represented by different foreign policy institutions. In March 1919,
the Communist government held the first Congress of the ‘Communist International’
(Comintern). The Soviet government intended this to replace the ‘Second
International’, which had collapsed in 1914. Comintern provided a single organisation
to unify the activities of revolutionary socialist parties throughout the world. Its
members immediately accepted Soviet leadership.
There also existed a more conventional instrument of Soviet foreign policy. This
was the Commissariat (Ministry) of Foreign Affairs. Trotsky headed it before the fiasco
of Brest—Litovsk. His successor was G. V. Chicherin (1872-1936). After the Civil War,
the Commissariat began to act like a traditional foreign ministry, negotiating and even
signing alliances with foreign capitalist governments.
Comintern and the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs symbolised the deep ambiguities
of Soviet foreign relations.

Lo Zia 23
In the 1920s, Soviet foreign policy tried to combine conventional diplomacy and
revolutionary activism. Through the Commissariat, the Soviet government maintained
normal diplomatic relations with major capitalist governments. As early as March 1921,
it signed a trade treaty with Britain. In 1922 it negotiated an alliance with Germany. As
a symbol of the traditional nature of official Soviet diplomacy, Soviet delegates
appeared at their first international conference in 1922, wearing top hats and silk
gloves.!
However, Comintern remained active. Under the New Economic Policy it tried to
work through broad, leftwing coalitions, like those that had supported the Provisional
Government in early 1917. This led to some contradictions. In China, it meant
cooperating with the non-Communist Chiang-Kai-Shek who, in 1927, turned on his
Communist allies and massacred them. Relations with Britain broke down for opposite
reasons. Here, the propaganda activities of Comintern and Soviet encouragement for
the general strike of May 1926 undermined the efforts of the Commissariat of Foreign
Affairs to establish stable political and economic relations at the official level. In 1927,
Britain broke off relations with the Soviet Union, causing a brief war scare.

The left turn

The war crisis of 1927 helped the Stalin faction to remove leftwing critics such as
Trotsky, who had argued for a more revolutionary foreign policy. Simultaneously, the
new government borrowed the foreign policy ideas of the left opposition. The collapse
of the alliance with Chiang-Kai-Shek in China and worldwide economic depression
persuaded the government that foreign Communist movements should once again
aim at revolution. Comintern demanded that foreign Communist parties break all links
with moderate socialist parties and prepare for revolution alone, as the Bolsheviks had
done in the autumn of 1917.
THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR 293

However, the tactics that had worked in Russia in 1917 would not necessarily work
for foreign Communist parties in the early 1930s. On the contrary, the new tack proved
disastrous for the world Communist movement. Instead of working with other leftwing
groups against the growing menace of Fascism, Communist parties concentrated their
fire on moderate socialist parties. By doing so they weakened the entire leftwing of
politics in Europe. In Germany, this tactic helped the Nazis gain power in 1933.

The return to a traditional foreign policy

The mid-1930s saw another shift in Soviet foreign policy during Maxim Litvinov’s
(1876-1951) term as commissar for foreign affairs from 1930 to 1939. The growing
threat from Nazi Germany and the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in 1931-32
persuaded the government to seek closer defensive alliances. The most important of
these was with France in 1932. In 1933 the Soviet Union gained diplomatic recognition
from the United States and joined the League of Nations. In line with this new policy,
Comintern abandoned its ‘revolutionary’ direction. Instead, it encouraged foreign
Communists once more to seek broad alliances with other leftwing groups, in ‘popular
fronts’. This triumph of traditional over revolutionary foreign policy was characteristic
of the ‘great retreat’ of the mid-1930s. By then, rhetoric was all that survived of the
revolutionary foreign policy advocated during the Civil War and the 1920s. There
remained only the forlorn hope that a socialist revolution might still occur in the
advanced capitalist countries and break the isolation of the Soviet Union. Comintern
itself held no more Congresses after 1935, and Stalin formally abolished it in 1943.
In the 1930s traditional great power calculations shaped Soviet foreign policy. The
immediate effect of collectivisation and the first Five-Year Plans was to weaken the
Soviet Union. It embroiled the army in a vicious conflict with the Soviet peasantry, its
main source of recruits. Meanwhile, collectivisation caused the slaughter of millions
of horses at a time when the army still made great use of cavalry and of horse-drawn
transport. During this period of weakness, the Soviet government had to avoid a major
war. How could it best achieve this result? Through the anti-Fascist alliance that
emerged in the early 1930s? Or through alliance with Fascism? The democratic states
revealed their weakness when they negotiated the Munich agreement in September
1938. After this, Stalin began to reconsider the second option. Hitler also wanted to
avoid the war on two fronts which had been Germany’s downfall in the First World War.
On 23 August 1939, after a year of tentative (and secret) soundings, the Soviet
government signed a ten-year non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. The two sides
carved up
also concluded a trade pact. In a secret protocol to the pact, the two powers
Eastern Europe. The appointment of Stalin’s close follower, V. M. Molotov (1890-
1986), as minister of foreign affairs in May 1939 prepared the way for this abrupt switch
in Soviet foreign policy.
Poland. He
On 1 September, with his eastern front secure, Hitler attacked
Britain. Two weeks later, Soviet armies
understood that this meant war with France and
the Baltic States and
occupied the eastern half of Poland. In June 1940, they occupied
Latvia and Moldova were
the Bessarabian provinces of Romania. Lithuania, Estonia,
regained with
to remain parts of the Soviet Union until 1991. The Soviet Union had
interest the territorial losses of Brest-Litovsk and the Civil War.
a two year
As it turned out, the Nazi—Soviet pact merely gave the Soviet Union
for so long began on 22
breathing space. The war the Soviet government had dreaded
June 1941.
294 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

PART OF FINLAND
LITHUANIA Russian before 1917
Russian before 1914 Finnish 1918-39
Independent 1919-39

LATVIA
Russian before 1914
Independent 1920-39
Russian before 1917
Independent 1918-39

EASTERN POLAND
WARSAW e Russian before 1914
‘
Polish 1919-39
“mad

BUKOVINA
~Austrian before 1918
EASTERN GALICIA Romanian 1918-40
Austrian before 1918
Polish 1918-39

800 km
500 miles

Boundaries

1914
1921—Sep 1939
194]
1946-1991
Communist bloc

Figure 12.1 The changing western boundaries of the Soviet Union, 1917-46.
 THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR 295

THE SOVIET UNION IN 1941

The economy
The industrialisation drive of the 1930s had given the Soviet Union a substantial
industrial base by 1941. In this general sense, the Stalinist system had done much to
enhance the military potential of the Soviet Union.
Equally important, the methods used to industrialise increased the power of Soviet
governments to mobilise labour and resources. The Soviet ruling elite was more
powerful, more united, and better led than the Tsarist ruling elite in 1914. As the
danger of war came closer, the government redirected its mobilisational effort towards
defence. In 1933, 3.4 per cent of the Soviet budget went towards defence. By 1937 this
figure had risen to 16.5 per cent, and by 1940 to 32.6 per cent.” By 1940 the output of
munitions industries was seventy times as great as in 1928.°
However, the economic achievements of the 1930s hid three serious weaknesses.
First, the Soviet Union’s industrial heartland remained dangerously close to its
western borderlands. Most industry remained around Moscow and Leningrad, in
Ukraine, and in the Caucasus and the Urals. During the 1930s the government
continued to invest in these areas, rather than in Siberia. Planners began to build up
industrial centres further east, particularly in the area linking the iron ore of the Urals
and the coking coal of the Kuzbas area around Novosibirsk. However, the early months
of the war showed that not enough had been done to relocate defence industries.
Second, during the purge era, the rate of economic growth slowed, even in crucial
defence industries such as vehicles, oil, and iron and steel. (See the Statistical appendix
and tables 10.3 and 10.4. Compare, in particular, rows B to D of table 10.4, between
1937 and 1940.) The slowdown reflected the disruption caused by the purges.
Experienced managers and specialists had vanished, and their replacements were
often inexperienced and ill-educated. Further, the atmosphere of terror discouraged
initiative and experimentation.
Third, and most disastrous of all, was the poor quality of much of the equipment
supplied to the army. Most Soviet tanks and planes were inferior to those of the
Germans. The problem was no longer one of technological inferiority. Plans existed
for equipment such as the T-34 tank or the Katyusha rocket launcher that was superior
to anything the Germans produced. However they were not yet in full production at
the start of the war. Perhaps most catastrophic of all was the lack of motor transport
(see the Statistical appendix, column N). In 1941, the Red Army still used horses to
haul much of its artillery and heavy equipment.‘ In these areas, Soviet planning for
war was deplorable, and the Soviet government wasted the years gained by the Nazi—
Soviet pact. Millions of Soviet citizens and soldiers paid with their lives for these
blunders by Stalin’s government.

The army
Trotsky had largely created the Red Army. In the early 1930s, General
M. N. Tukhachevsky presided over its modernisation. Under his leadership, the army
took to heart the strategic ideas of Liddel Hart, who foresaw the importance of tank
armies. The Red Army also pioneered other forms of modern warfare, such as the use
of parachute troops. By the mid-1930s, it had a reputation as one of the most advanced
armies in the world.
296 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

The purges changed this. They removed much of the army’s leadership and stifled
initiative at all levels. Between 1937 and 1938 about 34 000 officers, or about ten per
cent of all officers, were discharged from the army and air force. At least 8000 of these
were arrested by the NKVD. By 1940, about thirty per cent of those discharged had
been reinstated.® The post-purge leadership abandoned Tukhachevsky’s reforms and
broke up his tank armies. Commanders such as Voroshilov and Budenny, whose
military experience went back to the primitive cavalry battles of the Civil War, now took
command of the Soviet defence establishment.

The shocking truth can be stated quite simply: never did the officer staff of any army
suffer such great losses in any war as the Soviet army suffered in this time of peace.
Years of training cadres came to nothing .. . At the beginning of 1940 more than
seventy per cent of the division commanders, about seventy per cent of regimental
commanders, and sixty per cent of military commissars, and heads of political
divisions had occupied these positions for a year only. And all this happened just
before the worst war in history.°

Internationally, too, the purges had disastrous results, for they convinced Hitler that
defeating the Red Army would be easy. This is why, in 1941, he risked a war on two
fronts. The disastrous performance of Soviet armies in the brief ‘winter war’ with
Finland in 1939 and 1940 reinforced Hitler’s belief. In December 1939, after analysing
the pitiful performance of the Red Army in Finland, the German General Staff
concluded that the Soviet Army was ‘no match for an army with modern equipment
and superior leadership’.’ Hitler put it more bluntly: ‘You have only to kick in the door
and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down!’.®
Other weaknesses reflected the chaos of the purge years. Training, particularly of
tank crews and pilots, was superficial. In June 1941 many Soviet tank crews went into
battle with less than two hours experience in handling their tanks. Many pilots fought
with less than fifteen hours flying experience.’ Characteristically, they made up for this
with desperate courage. Some just rammed enemy planes.
Stalin and the high command also made serious strategic blunders. Before 1939,
army engineers had built a formidable defence line along much of the Western border.
After the Nazi—Soviet pact, the Soviet frontier moved west and the army abandoned
the old defensive line. Yet it did little to fortify the new borders in Poland, the Baltic
and western Ukraine.
Stalin contributed much to the initial catastrophes. He seems to have decided that
the Soviet Union could not fight the Germans until 1942 at the earliest. As a result, he
concentrated less on preparing for war, than on attempts to appease Hitler. He
received repeated warnings about the imminence of a German attack from Soviet
intelligence, from the British, and even from Nazi deserters. Yet he chose to ignore
them, partly because he also received very different information, some of which
represented deliberate Nazi disinformation. Until the war began Stalin would not let
the army prepare any contingency plans for fear of antagonising Hitler. As a result,
Soviet armies had no plans for a defensive war. Meanwhile, official propaganda
persuaded the Soviet population and army that war was unlikely. A young Pole living
in Rostov at the outbreak of war remembered:

The people of the USSR were living as if anaesthetized . . . put to sleep by their own
leaders who repeated to them only ten days before the start of hostilities that the
Germans would respect their treaty commitment to refrain from any aggression.!°
 THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR 297

Militarily, the lack of preparation was disastrous. In June 1941 Soviet army units had
to wait several hours after the Germans attacked before receiving orders to return fire.
Even worse, most Russian aircraft were on the ground and concentrated in a few
airfields. Within hours, German planes destroyed 1200 Soviet combat aircraft. This
deprived the Red Army of air cover for the first six months of the war.'!

Strengths of the Stalinist system

The Soviet Union had many weaknesses in 1941. Yet it also had many long-term
strengths. It had immense reserves of labour, both military and civilian. Most
remarkable of all, the war showed that it enjoyed the loyalty of most Soviet citizens.
Further, the Stalinist system had an exceptional ability to hold together under strain
and to mobilise resources in a crisis. By 1940 the Soviet government had more
experience of centralised industrial production and rapid mobilisation of resources
than any other government in the world. These long-term strengths meant that if it
could survive the first months of a German blitzkrieg, the Soviet Union’s situation
would slowly, but surely, improve.

THE WAR
Initial disasters
Germany and its allies attacked on 22 June 1941 with 5.5 million men, 2500 tanks and
5000 planes.” The Soviet armies had 2.9 million front-line troops equipped with 1800
mostly obsolete tanks.’

Mozhaisk, December 1941, a Soviet counter-attack. The two soldiers in front come from a punishment
battalion. They are wearing black to draw enemy fire.
298 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Soviet soldiers fought with desperate ferocity. A few days after the fighting began, a
Soviet staff officer, Ivan Krylov, was told by a colleague:

The men have been ordered not to die before taking at least one German with them.
‘If you are wounded,’ the order says, ‘sham death, and when the Germans approach,
kill one of them. Kill them with your rifle, with the bayonet, with your knife, tear
their throats out with your teeth. Don’t die without leaving a dead German behind
you. ... Russians are terrible fighters. They like it and they have a contempt for
death. If we can keep them armed the Germans will leave their own corpses
scattered all over the steppes as so many have done before them’.'*

Brutal military discipline played a role in this desperate heroism. Special troops
from a section of the secret police called ‘Smersh’ (‘death to spies’) stood behind
advancing Soviet units with machine guns ready to shoot deserters. In August Stalin
ordered that all soldiers captured alive by the Germans were to be treated as deserters,
and their families would lose their military pensions.'° The secret police took this order
seriously, and treated captured Soviet soldiers as deserters even if they later escaped
from the Germans. For less major infractions of military discipline, commanders
placed soldiers in special penal battalions. They sent these units into battle without
camouflage to draw enemy fire, or used them to clear minefields.'® Civilians were not
spared. In September 1941, as the German army approached Leningrad, they forced
captured civilians to beg the defenders to sue for peace. Here is Stalin’s response.

It is said that the German scoundrels approaching Leningrad are sending ahead of
their troops old men and old women, women and children, delegates from areas
occupied by them to ask the Bolsheviks to surrender Leningrad and make peace.
My advice is: don’t be sentimental, but hit the enemy and his auxiliaries, willing or
unwilling, in the teeth. War is merciless, and it will bring defeat in the first instance
to him who shows weakness and vacillation . . No mercy to the Germans and their
delegates, whoever they may be.!”

Courage, desperation and savagery alone could not win the war. In the early days of
the war even Stalin despaired. A tape-recording from these days records Stalin as
saying, with characteristic brutality: ‘Lenin left us a great inheritance and we, his heirs,
have fucked it all up!’.'* For a few days he was extremely depressed and could not take
decisions. Even the basic idea of creating a State Defence Committee came from a
nervous delegation of Politburo members. Mikoyan described this episode in his
memoirs.

Document 12.1: Stalin during the first week of the war

We decided to go and see him. He was at the nearby dacha.
Molotov said that Stalin was in such a state of prostration that he wasn’t interested in
anything, he’d lost all initiative and was in a bad way. Voznesensky, appalled to hear this, said,
“You go on ahead, Vyacheslav [Molotov], and we'll be behind you.’ The idea was that, if Stalin
was going to continue to behave in this way, then Molotov ought to lead us and we would
follow him. We were sure we could organize the defence and put up a proper fight. None of
us were downcast in mood.
THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR 299

We got to Stalin’s dacha. We found him in an armchair in the small dining room. He looked
up and said, “What have you come for?’ He had the strangest look on his face, and the
question itself was pretty strange, too. After all, he should have called us in.
On our behalf, Molotov said power had to be concentrated in order to ensure rapid
decision-making and somehow get the country back on its feet, and Stalin should head the
new authority. Stalin looked surprised but made no objection and said ‘Fine’.'?

Not until 3 July did Stalin broadcast to the Soviet people. The speech he made that
day had a profound effect, and helped transform Stalin into a popular leader of
national resistance. Even the beginning of the speech implied a new relationship
between government and people. He began: “Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters,
fighters of our Army and Navy! I am speaking to you, my friends!’. Stalin explained the
extent of the German attack and gave some idea of Soviet losses. He demanded total
mobilisation for the war effort. He called for partisan war behind German lines and
demanded the destruction of all resources that could not be evacuated. He also
ordered the formation of militia (opolcheniye) units. A Soviet novel written by
Konstantin Simonov in the late 1950s gives a vivid description of the impact of Stalin’s
speech. The narrator is a wounded soldier lying in a field hospital.

Stalin spoke in a toneless, slow voice, with a strong Georgian accent. Once or twice,
during his speech, you could hear a glass click as he drank water. His voice was low
and soft, and might have seemed perfectly calm, but for his heavy, tired breathing,
and that water he kept drinking during the speech . . .
There was a discrepancy between that even voice and the tragic situation of which
he spoke; and in this discrepancy there was strength. People were not surprised. It
was what they were expecting from Stalin ...
Stalin did not describe that situation as tragic; such a word would have been hard
to imagine as coming from him; but the things of which he spoke—opolcheniye,
partisans, occupied territories, meant the end of illusions . . . The truth he told was
a bitter truth, but at least it was uttered, and people felt that they stood more firmly
on the ground.”

Diplomatically, the situation improved with the immediate British offer of a military
alliance. The US government offered economic aid in September. After its first shock,
the government moved quickly to repair some of the damage it had caused. In 1941, it
released 420 000 men from the camps to join the army, and in the rest of the war it
released another 555 000.2! Many went straight to the front to take command of
retreating units. The high command also began to reassemble the tank armies of the
early 1930s.
However, in the short-term, disaster was unavoidable. By the beginning of
December, German armies had reached a line running from Rostov in the south to
Moscow and Leningrad in the north. In late November German units reached within
twenty-five kilometres of Moscow. German generals later reported that they could see
Moscow itself ‘through a pair of good field glasses’.”* German armies isolated
Leningrad. The prolonged siege that followed was one of the most savage in modern
million
history. During its twenty-eight months, one million of Leningrad’s three
inhabitants died.”
300 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

ln nn German front 1941-42

22 June 1941
9 July 1941
——— 5 December 1941
November 1942

800 km
500 miles

ROMANIA

TURKEY

Figure 12.2 The Great Patriotic War, 1941-45.

In the first six months of the war, the Red Army lost more than five million killed,
wounded or captured. The Germans lost one million.** The territory lost to the
Germans in the first five months had produced about sixty per cent of Soviet coal, iron,
steel and aluminium, and included forty per cent of the railway network. In November
1941 Soviet industrial production fell to fifty per cent of the level a year before.”

Mobilisation for total war

During this disastrous period, the Soviet Union began the vast mobilisation effort that
eventually won the war. The reorganisation began at the top, with the setting up of the
State Committee of Defence, headed by Stalin, on 30 June. In August Stalin became
the supreme commander of the Soviet armed forces.
Particularly spectacular was the evacuation of industry to the east. On 24 June, in
one of the few clear-headed decisions it took in these early days, the government set
up a Committee on Evacuation to supervise the process. Despite incredible hardships,
1523 industrial enterprises had been moved east by November, and with them ten
million workers and evacuees, all carried in 1.5 million wagon loads. Whole factories
were stripped down, dismantled, transported east and rebuilt. After a critical period of
a few months during which evacuation reduced the output of industry, output of
military equipment began to rise in 1942. In that year, Soviet factories produced 24 688
tanks—270 per cent more than in 1941. In total during the war, 3500 new industrial
THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR 301

enterprises were built, and 136 800 planes, 489 900 guns and 10 500 tanks were
produced. By maintaining supplies through the critical winter of 1941, the evacuation
process played a vital role in the war effort.
The United States also sent 9600 guns, 18 700 planes and 10 800 tanks under the
lend-lease program. This required no payment until after the war.*° Allied supplies
began arriving in large quantities in 1943, after the battle of Stalingrad. They did little
to help during the initial German onslaught, but helped greatly during the march on
Berlin.
Equally important was the conversion of civilian to military production. During the
1930s the government made all factories prepare advance plans for conversion. It had
also encouraged defence planners to subcontract to civilian producers. These
preparations help explain the remarkable, if bizarre, achievements of the conversion
process.

Maximum extent of German

advance

Number of factories evacuated

Number of factories
re-established
800 km

500 miles

WESTERN
SIBERIA

KAZAKHSTAN
CENTRAL ASIA

Figure 12.3 Evacuation of Soviet industry to the east.

302 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Document 12.2: conversion to military production

This is what happened in Moscow: a children’s bicycle factory began making flame-throwers.
A die-stamping works where teaspoons and paper clips were made switched to entrenching
tools and parts for anti-tank grenades. A woodworking shop producing abacuses and screens
changed over to making pistol cartridges. A furniture factory started turning out anti-tank
mines, cartridge boxes and stretchers. A typewriter works began making automatic rifles
and ammunition. In Leningrad, by early July, civilian factories were starting to manufacture
tanks, artillery, mortars and flame-throwers. A toy factory and a stove works (among others)
were producing grenades; anti-tank mines were being made in place of musical instruments
and perfumes.”

Soviet people worked astonishingly hard to increase output. This was particularly
true of Soviet women, who replaced male workers drafted into the army. During the
war women accounted for fifty-three per cent of the Soviet workforce. They were an
even larger proportion of the rural workforce. It was largely their labour that kept
Soviet armies supplied with foodstuffs.** To feed themselves, civilians had to fall back
on their own devices. The government helped by increasing the size of private plots
and encouraging town dwellers to farm allotments. A Canadian diplomat described
how, ‘Each Sunday morning during the month of May the streets of Kuibyshev were
full of men, women and children carrying spades and other tools and proceeding to
the railway station, the Volga ferry or the streetcar stops to go out to their allotments’.*”
Mobilisation for war took a huge toll. The following description of work at the Kirov
works in Leningrad (the pre-revolutionary Putilov works) suggests something of the
human cost of supplying the armies. In September 1943, while Leningrad was still
under siege, an English war correspondent interviewed a manager of the Kirov works.

Document 12.3: industrial labour during the war

Well [he said] you are certainly finding us working in unusual conditions. What we have here
isn’t what is normally meant by the Kirov Plant ... Before the war we had over 30 000
workers; now we have only a small fraction of these ... and sixty-nine per cent of our
workers are female. Hardly any women worked there before the war. We then made
turbines, tanks, guns; we made tractors, and supplied the greater part of the equipment for
building the Moscow—Volga canal . . . Before this war started, we began to make tanks in a
very big way, as well as tank and aircraft engines. Practically all this production of equipment
proper has been moved to the east. Now we repair diesels and tanks, but our main output
is ammunition, and some small arms...
The workers of the Kirov Plant ... were in reserved occupations, and hardly anybody
was subject to mobilisation. Yet no sooner had the Germans invaded than everybody without
exception volunteered for the front. If we had wanted to, we could have sent 25 000 people;
we let only 9000 or 10 000 go. Already in June 1941 they formed themselves into what was
to become the famous Kirov Division. Although they had done some training before the war,
they couldn’t be considered fully trained soldiers, but their drive, their guts were tremendous.
They wore the uniform of the Red Army, but they were in fact part of the opolcheniye, except
that they were rather better trained than other opolcheniye units . . . many tens of thousands
of them went out from here to meet the Germans, to stop them at any price ... It is no
secret—a large proportion of the Workers’ Divisions never came back .. .
 THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR 303

However, our most highly skilled workers, who were badly needed in Siberia and the
Urals, were evacuated by air, together with their families. They were flown to Tikhvin, but
after the Germans had taken Tikhvin, we had to fly them to other airfields, and from there
the people had to walk to the nearest railway station, walk through the snow, in the middle
of a bitter winter, often dozens and dozens of kilometres ... The people who left here in
October were already working at full speed in their new place, 2000 kilometres away, by
December! . . .
[The winter months] were terrible ... On December |5 everything came to a standstill.
There was no fuel, no electric current, no food, no tram-cars, no water, nothing. Production
in Leningrad practically ceased. We were to remain in this terrible condition till the first of
April. It is true that food began to come in February across the Ladoga Ice Road. But we
needed another month before we could start any kind of regular output at the Kirov Works.
But even during the worst hungry period we did what we could... We repaired guns, and
our foundry was kept going, though only in a small way. It felt as if the mighty Kirov Works
had been turned into a village smithy. People were terribly cold and terribly hungry. Many of
our people died during those days, and it was chiefly our best people who died—highly skilled
workers who had reached a certain age when the body can no longer resist such hardships

We tried to keep people going by making a sort of yeast soup, with a little soya added. It
wasn’t much better, really, than drinking hot water, but it gave people the illusion of having
‘eaten’ something. A very large number of our people died. So many died, and transport was
so difficult, that we decided to have our own graveyard right here.”

Even worse was the condition of those in labour camps mobilised for the war effort.
The NKVD made almost one quarter of a million camp inmates available for war
industries by 1944.°! This was only part of the NKVD’s huge, but often unrecognised,
role in the war effort. Throughout the war, it kept up a low-level purge aimed at incom-
petents, the disloyal, the lazy, and in particular anyone who had spent time behind
enemy lines. It also took part in the evacuation of industry and the organisation of
partisan war. Characteristically, Stalin spent more time dealing with the NKVD than with
the army, and his correspondence with NKVD officials dominates his wartime
correspondence.”
The government also strengthened its
monopoly over the machinery of persuasion. It
immediately ordered Soviet citizens to hand in
all private radios; it disconnected private tele-
phones and it began to censor private letters.
The government’s Soviet Information Bureau,
the only official source of news, deliberately
misrepresented the situation at the front,
downplaying defeats and exaggerating suc-
cesses.
As the war progressed, the desperate impro-
visations of the first year gave way to mored
Female workers building barricades at the Kirov Works in systematic planning. Improvisation achieve
September 1941, at the beginning of the twenty-eight month much during the emergencies of the early
siege of Leningrad. The factory was already within range of months. Eventually, however, it was necessary to
German artillery.
balance different sectors of the economy more
304 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

carefully, for by 1942 the army was absorbing such immense human and material
resources that it threatened to undermine its own sources of supply. The increasing
influence of N. A. Voznesensky (1903-1950), the head of Gosplan from 1942, markeda
return to the more systematic mobilisational techniques of the 1930s.

se ee . The first victories

&

The first major victories came in December

1941, during the Soviet counter-attack around
Moscow. This began on 5 December under the
direction of Marshal G. Zhukov. The Germans
were ill-prepared for a winter campaign.
Soldiers lacked proper winter clothing and the
engines of their tanks froze. Once it was clear
that Japan would not attack the Soviet Union,
the government began assembling fresh troops
from Siberia. The Moscow counter-offensive
forced German armies back, up to 300 kilo-
metres at some points, along a front stretching
for 1000 kilometres. This was the first major
defeat for the German army. It showed that the
blitzkrieg had failed. It was the beginning of the
process by which the Russians, in Churchill’s
A Soviet partisan milkinga cow. vivid phrase, ‘tore the guts out of the German
army’.*®

* 7

Primitive methods sometimes worked best. Sometimes, there was no alternative. Here, Soviet soldiers use
rifles to fire at planes, May 1942.
THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR 305

fae ae
< 8 aes 4,

The Soviet counter-attack. A cavalry attack outside Moscow by the third Guards Cavalry Division,
December 1941.

After the failure of the blitzkrieg, the balance began to tip in favour of the Red Army.
A longer, more savage war enabled the Soviet Union to exploit its reserves of raw
materials and labour, and its unmatched ability to mobilise resources. In this sense,
the battle of Moscow was a turning point.
At the time, this was less obvious. The Russian counter-offensive petered out by
March 1942. In the summer, Hitler overrode the advice of his generals to renew the
attacks on Leningrad and Moscow. Instead, he decided to attack in the south, to secure
the agrarian and mineral wealth of Ukraine and the Caucasus. He was particularly
interested in the oilfields of Baku. In the summer of 1942, German armies advanced
rapidly in the south, entering the Caucasus and reaching Stalingrad on the Volga in
September. This was the limit of the German advance. Increasing Russian resistance
combined with shortages of supplies and the beginnings of winter, to check the
German advance. In Stalingrad vicious street fighting lasted for several months. In
November the Red Army launched an offensive that took the Germans by surprise and
surrounded the German 6th Army under General Von Paulus. At the end of January
Von Paulus and the remains of his army surrendered. This was the most disastrous
defeat the Germans had suffered, and it proved a turning point in the war.

Victory
back. By the end
With minor reverses, Soviet armies now drove the Germans steadily
of
of 1943 the Germans had retreated to the river Dnieper. Something of the savagery
the fighting is conveyed by Marshal Konev’s account of the German defeats at Korsun-
Shevchenkovsky, south of Kiev, in February 1944.

eighty, or
He described, somewhat gleefully, Germany’s latest catastrophe: some
been forced
even a hundred thousand Germans had refused to surrender and had
306 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

into a narrow space, then tanks smashed their heavy equipment and machine-gun
posts while the Cossack cavalry finally finished them off. “We let the Cossacks cut
them up for as long as they wished. They even hacked the hands off those who raised
them to surrender!’ the Marshall said with a smile.”

Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslavian Communist who reported the conversation, adds: ‘I
must admit that at that moment I also rejoiced over the fate that had befallen the
Germans’.
Late in 1944 Soviet armies advanced beyond the 1939 borders, and at many points
beyond those of 1941. The final Soviet assault began in January 1945. Berlin fell on 2
May, and the Germans surrendered unconditionally on 9 May (Moscow time).

Explaining the Soviet victory

After the initial disasters, the Soviet system handled the crisis of war effectively, despite
its economic and technological backwardness. It did so partly because of the energy,
courage and ingenuity of its citizens, and the immense human and material resources
available to it. Even more important, the government mobilised these resources
successfully because it had more experience of direct mobilisation than any other
combatant nation. This was vital, for warfare is one form of competition in which direct
mobilisation can count for as much as indirect mobilisation, even in the modern world.
‘Effective in dealing with crises and in concentrating the country’s resources on the
task of achieving victory, the wartime system of government may have been; efficient
in the use of human and material resources it was not.’®°
However, in retrospect we can see that the Soviet victory fostered a dangerous, and
eventually fatal illusion. The spectacular successes of the command economy in
wartime persuaded many that it would succeed equally well in peace. Victory over Nazi
Germany made an archaic political and economic system seem more successful than it
really was. It encouraged Soviet leaders to persist with the Stalinist gamble on extensive
growth for far too long. It hid the deeper flaws of the command economy and
discouraged fundamental reform. In this paradoxical way, the victory of 1945 prepared
the defeat of 1991.

THE IMPACT OF WAR

The human and economic costs
The Soviet system had survived the war, but at what cost? Soviet people paid a far
heavier price than their western allies or even the Germans. At least nine million died
in battle or in prisoner of war camps, and eighteen million were wounded. Another
nineteen million died among the civilian population. Deaths during the siege of
Leningrad alone were greater than all the civilian and military deaths of the British
Empire, the Dominions and the USA.*®
The material damage was also huge. The fighting destroyed about half of all urban
housing in the occupied areas. Seventy thousand villages and vast numbers of industrial
THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR 307

enterprises lay in ruins. The war destroyed much of the achievement of the 1930s.
Production figures for 1940 and 1945 give a partial measure of the decline in
production (see the Statistical appendix).

Political gains
Politically, however, the war was a triumph for the Stalinist system. As Stalin said in a
speech in February 1946: ‘Our victory means, first of all, that our Soviet social system
has triumphed, that the Soviet social system has successfully passed the ordeal in the
fire of war and has proved its unquestionable vitality’
.*”
The war also made the Soviet government a popular national government. This
change was the product of three distinct developments.
One was the spontaneous reaction of millions of Soviet citizens to the German
invasion. Even many who had little reason to love Stalin’s government rallied round.
Army officers who had languished in the camps after the purges, returned without
hesitation to commanding positions after the German attack. Marshals K. K.
Rokossovsky and L. A. Govorov are the best-known commanders of this group. During
the war, a flood of anti-German novels reflected a genuine popular revulsion at the
German invasion and its brutal methods.
Second, the government itself actively encouraged the Soviet people, and the
Russians in particular, to see it as a national government. The process began during
the cultural retreat of the 1930s. Official propaganda started to emphasise Russian
patriotism in films such as Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. History
textbooks adopted an increasingly nationalistic tone. They began to glorify Russia’s
military traditions and the exploits of generals such as Kutuzov and Suvorov, who had
fought Napoleon. These changes may have reflected Stalin’s own sense of Russian
patriotism, which was strong despite his Georgian origins. The Yugoslav Communist
Milovan Djilas noted in 1944 that, in conversation, ‘Stalin used the term Russia, and
not Soviet Union, which meant that he was not only inspiring Russian Nationalism, but
was himself inspired by it and identified himself with it’. In 1943, the government
replaced the ‘Internationale’ as the Soviet national anthem. The new anthem ignored
the internationalism of traditional Marxism and emphasised Soviet patriotism.
The government made great efforts to ensure the loyalty of the army. Patriotic
slogans replaced party slogans. Instead of ‘loyalty to the international proletariat’, a
revised military oath made soldiers promise to defend ‘my homeland, the USSR’.*® On
7 November 1941, Stalin reviewed the annual parade in memory of the revolution, with
German troops only kilometres away, and their artillery already audible. He declared:
‘Let the manly images of our great ancestors—Alexander Nevsky, Dmitri Donskoy,
pire
Kuzma Minin, Dmitrii Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov, and Mikhail Kutuzov—ins
you in this war’.*° Many of those who heard this speech were at the front within hours.
Other concessions to the military were more direct. The government revived many
pre-revolutionary traditions. After reintroducing political commissars in the armed
forces in July 1941, the government abolished them in October 1942. This enhanced
the independent authority of officers. The army formed special clubs for officers, and
increased their rates of pay and material privileges. The government introduced new
the
patriotic medals. Stalin even re-established the elite guards regiments that Peter
only
Great had founded in the eighteenth century, and which had been disbanded
army closer
after the revolution. The government also tried to bring the Party and the
by May 1945
together. It made it easy for soldiers and officers to join the Party, so that
308 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

twenty-five per cent of all members of the armed forces were Party members, and
twenty per cent more belonged to the Party’s youth movement, the Komsomol."'
The government even made tentative and mainly symbolic concessions to the
peasantry. This was important militarily. Peasants made up almostas large a proportion
of Soviet as they had of Tsarist soldiers, since industrial workers found it easier to gain
exemptions from military service. The Party eased restrictions on the size and use of
private plots on collective farms. However, this was its only material concession to the
peasantry. The main concession was religious. Stalin himself is said to have remarked:
‘We will never rouse the people to war with Marxism-Leninism alone’.* He
downplayed anti-religious propaganda, and in 1943 he permitted the Church to
summon a church council, or Sobor. The Sobor elected Metropolitan Sergius as the first
Patriarch of the Russian Church (apart from a brief period after 1917) since the late
seventeenth century. The new patriarch reciprocated by describing Stalin in a Pravda
article as the ‘God-chosen leader of our military and cultural forces’. Muslim and
Jewish leaders soon followed suit.”
These concessions were part of a large-scale political and ideological retreat similar
to the fiscal retreat of 1921.
The final cause of the government’s new-found popularity was the behaviour of the
Germans in the territories they occupied. Hitler had reason to believe that non-Russian
areas in the Baltic and the Polish provinces, and some of the collectivised peasantry, as
well as nationalist intellectuals in Ukraine, might welcome the Germans as liberators.
However, the Germans themselves soon alienated these groups by their brutal and
exploitative treatment of occupied areas. The occupation authorities deported almost
three million inhabitants of occupied territories to Germany as slave-labourers. There
they suffered appalling ill-treatment. Those left behind were not much better off. In
October 1941, Marshal Reichenau announced that: ‘To supply local inhabitants and
prisoners of war with food is an act of unnecessary humanity’. To maintain grain
production, the Germans refused to dismantle the collective farms. They also refused
to set up the national governments desired by nationalists in the occupied territories.

The Soviet Union as a world power

In international terms, the war was a triumph for the government and the Soviet
system. Though devastated by war, the Soviet Union had proyed itself a great military
power. It had made good the territorial losses of 1918, and retained all the regions it
occupied during the Nazi-Soviet pact. It also took additional territory from Finland,
Czechoslovakia, Japan and Germany. Furthermore, the presence of Soviet armies in
Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany assured the
Soviet Union effective control over the borderlands of Eastern Europe, through which
Russia had so often been invaded. The Soviet government used this control to set up
sympathetic governments throughout Eastern Europe. To its internal empire, it now
added an external empire in Eastern Europe. In a speech in Fulton, Missouri, in March
1946, Churchill christened the borders of the new Soviet Empire the ‘Iron Curtain’.
In this unexpected way the Soviet government broke the ring of capitalist powers
that had circled it since 1917. After the independent successes of the Communist
armies of Mao Zedong in China in 1949, perhaps half of the world’s population lived
under Communist governments. For a time, at least, even China allied with the Soviet
Union, and treated it as the leader of the socialist world. The successful testing of a
Soviet atom bomb in 1949 further reduced the vulnerability of the world’s first socialist
 THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR 309

Bis

Stalin with President Truman at the Potsdam Conference, August 1945.

than any
state. By the early 1950s, the Soviet government controlled a larger area
re-establi shed the Soviet Union
previous Russian government. Stalin’s government had
as a world power.

RECONSTRUCTION AND COLD WAR

defence? By
How successful was the Soviet ruling elite in solving the basic problem of
the political and
1945 the answer was clear. The Soviet government had established
in the world.
industrial basis for one of the most powerful defence establishments
government.
These achievements should have reduced the need for authoritarian
s had led to a slow
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, military successe
the ruling
loosening of the political system of Peter the Great. Military success allowed
on the populat ion
group to relax its own internal discipline and the pressure it exerted
1945?
4s a whole. Would the same happen after the successes of
society at large and perhap s even within the elite expected
Many in Soviet
this mood when he
liberalisation after the war. The poet Alexis Surkov expressed
cup, and rest to our heart’s desire’.””
wrote: ‘After the victory we shall call a halt, drink a
y relations with the
Liberalisation might have allowed the maintenance of friendl
ted liberal treatment of
United States, the other major victor. It might have permit
310 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

occupied Eastern Europe. Finally, it might have allowed the reconstruction of the
Soviet economy using American loans. This would have greatly reduced the strain on
the exhausted Soviet population. We know that during 1945 Stalin himself twice asked
for huge reconstruction loans from the Americans.
However, it is unlikely that Stalin considered this option seriously. On the contrary,
Stalin saw the victory, first of all, as a triumph for his strategy of direct, coercive
mobilisation. It justified his belief that Soviet Russia could solve its military and
industrial problems without foreign help. He had little reason to change a system that
had succeeded so spectacularly. Besides, he was too old to change the political methods
he had used for so long. Finally, the Soviet Union still faced threats from abroad,
particularly from an aggressive United States, which had emerged from the war
wealthier and more powerful than ever.
For these reasons, the last years of Stalin’s life saw a return to the methods of the
1930s. For Soviet citizens, the years between the end of the war and Stalin’s death in
1953 were probably the bleakest of the whole Stalin period.
Two problems dominated these years: security and reconstruction. Stalin tackled
them in characteristic style.

Foreign policy—the search for security

By 1945 Soviet armies occupied much of Eastern Europe. Here was the opportunity, at
last, to solve the security problems that have haunted all governments of Russia. Victory
offered two new ways of defending the Soviet Union’s precarious borders. First, it
allowed the creation of a large buffer zone of weak or friendly states. Second, victory
spread Socialism, and thereby ended the isolation of the world’s first socialist state. In
these ways, Stalin determined to avoid any repetition of the catastrophe of 1941. In
1945, he remarked: “This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also
imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army
has power to do so. It cannot be otherwise’.*°
This approach meant emphasising the basic conflicts between socialist and capitalist
nations; conflicts that the wartime alliance had masked. However, this approach to
defence also implied something else that western governments missed. It set clear
limits to Soviet expansionism. Stalin knew he could not control areas such as Iran or
Greece, not directly occupied by Soviet armies. His government lacked the taste and
the resources for further expansion while its own country lay in ruins. Beyond the lands
occupied by Soviet troops Stalin conceded power to the western allies. Within them,
he conceded nothing. Stalin’s aim now was ‘to seize opportunity but to dodge
confrontation, to avoid war at all costs, and to retrench around the Motherland when
all else failed’.*”
Differences among the wartime allies, particularly over the treatment of occupied
territories, emerged early. They appeared even at the wartime summit conferences at
Teheran (November—December 1943), Yalta (February 1945), and Potsdam (July—
August 1945). In May 1945, the new United States president, Harry Truman, abruptly
ended lend-lease. This increased Soviet determination to go it alone. So did the testing
of an American atom bomb a month later, and the American refusal to grant the Soviet
Union a large reconstruction loan. The Soviet government took no part in the Marshall
plan, which funded much of the reconstruction of capitalist Western Europe.
In Eastern Europe, Soviet armies were in occupation, and the leftwing enjoyed
temporary popularity because of its role in the resistance to Fascism. This allowed the
THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR 311

establishment of pro-Soviet coalition governments. The Soviet Union set up a series of

economic and defence alliances with eastern bloc countries. In the next few years, the
government increased its influence over the economic and political life of Eastern
Europe.
By early 1946 it was clear that the wartime alliance had broken down and a ‘Cold
War’ had begun. Soon after Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, Harry Truman
announced that the United States would aid any independent country threatened by
Communism. In September 1947, the Soviet government revived, in the Cominform, a
pale ghost of the Comintern. In June 1949, in response to the Marshall Plan, it created
the CMEA (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance), a new Eastern European
economic bloc.
Cold War antagonisms encouraged a new arms race. Immediately after the war, the
Soviet government demobilised nine million Soviet soldiers. But it soon changed its
mind. In 1949, the Berlin blockade, the testing of a Soviet atom bomb, and the
emergence of Communist China intensified the hostility between the two power
blocks. In 1950, warfare broke out between US forces and Communist China in Korea.
Both sides responded by beginning an arms build-up that continued until the 1980s. It
exacted a heavy economic toll on both sides and forced an entire generation to live in
the shadow of nuclear war.

Reasserting control and rebuilding the economy

For the Soviet government, the Cold War was extremely useful, for it helped revive the
siege mentality of the 1930s. With the capitalist West cast as the Soviet Union’s main
enemy, the Soviet government could argue that it was still too early to relax. Instead,
the government re-established the coercive mobilisation structures of the 1930s during
the reconstruction period.
The government re-established rigid control of collective farms and restricted the
size of private plots. After announcing demobilisation in June 1945, the government
once more subordinated the army to the Party and government. Recruitment of
soldiers into the Party slowed down. Political commissars reappeared. The government
clipped the wings of popular and powerful Soviet generals, such as Zhukov.
. There was also an end to the ideological retreat of the war years. Under Andrei
Zhdanov, the Leningrad Party boss, there was a savage purge of the western influences
on Soviet cultural life which had seeped in during the war years. Travel abroad became
almost impossible for all but the most privileged of Soviet citizens. From 1947, the
government prohibited marriage to foreigners. Finally, a new purge affected three
main groups—the army, the Party and the non-Russian nationalities.
Many soldiers who had been abroad, either with the army or as partisans or
prisoners of war, returned home only to be sentenced to labour camps. This was the
fate of Ivan Denisovich (the hero of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novella, One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich) and of Solzhenitsyn himself.
The government purged the Party to raise ideological standards, which had
declined during the war. In 1947, it dismissed 27.5 per cent of all district Party
secretaries, mainly in areas occupied during the war. In 1948, after the death of
Zhdanovy, there was a purge of his followers in the so-called ‘Leningrad affair’. Early in
t
1953 there were signs that a new purge might be under way. The governmen
announced that several doctors who had treated prominent government officials were
working for foreign intelligence. Nikita Khrushchev claimed later that Stalin saw the
312 POWER AND PRIVILEGE i

so-called ‘doctors’ plot’ as the start of a new purge that would have removed most of
his closest followers. Instead, Stalin’s own death intervened on 5 March 1953.
The post-war purge struck whole national groups, particularly those suspected of
collaboration with the Germans. The government deported some smaller national
groups wholesale. These included the Volga Germans (the descendants of Germans
who had settled in Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great) and the Crimean
Tatars. Both groups were deported from their homelands to Siberia. In 1956,
Khrushchev claimed that ‘The Ukrainians avoided meeting this fate only because there
were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them
Nevertheless, the government deported millions from Ukraine and the Baltic States.
After 1948 there was also a wave of anti-Semitism. As a result of these purges, the camp
population grew even larger than in the late thirties, to over two and a half million.”
Economic reconstruction began during the war itself. Formally, reconstruction
began with the launching of the fourth Five-Year Plan, adopted in 1946. During the
first year, demobilisation, the need to gear industry once more to civilian needs, anda
disastrous drought and famine in Ukraine slowed progress. After that, progress was
rapid. (See the Statistical appendix and Table 10.3.)
Why was growth so rapid? As in the early 1920s, part of the answer is that
reconstruction is easier than construction. The Soviet Union also imposed savage
reparations on its wartime enemies East Germany, Hungary, Romania and Finland,
and it used the labour of two million prisoners of war. However, recovery depended
mainly on the efforts and sacrifices of Soviet citizens. As in the 1930s, planners diverted
resources from consumption to investment. A currency reform of 1947 reduced wage
levels and devalued the savings of millions. In these ways, the government recreated
the Stalinist ‘engine of growth’, which depended on direct mobilisation of raw
materials and human labour. During this period, ‘A plan for an enterprise handed
down from above had.the force of law and non-fulfilment entailed political and
criminal responsibility’.°° Workers received savage punishment for lateness or minor
breaches of discipline. Managers, too, worked long hours. Living standards remained
extremely low. Worst of all were conditions on the collective farms, which planners
exploited even more brutally than before the war. Many received less from the
government than the cost of producing and delivering grain. The sociologist, Tatyana
Zaslavskaya, studied life on collective farms in this period.

Document 12.4: Tatyana Zaslavskaya on collective farms after the war

In 1951, when | was looking through the aggregate annual accounts of collective farms in one
of the regions of Kirghizia, | noticed that on average the collective farmers received one
kopek for a day’s labour, and for a year about two pre-reform roubles . . . (the price of one
kilogram of bread). In reply to my puzzled question as to what they lived on, it was explained
to me that most of the families had a small flock of sheep and goats, which were pastured in
the mountains, concealed from the tax authorities. So it was that |, a graduate of a university
where | had been told about the advantages of the socialist distribution of income according
to work done, first came up against the fact that a social class comprising about forty per
cent of the population of the country was paid practically nothing for its work.*!
 THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR 313

Progress was fastest in heavy industry. However, there was also rapid growth in
consumer goods industries. The difference was that industrial production had
surpassed the 1940 level by 1950, while production in agriculture and consumer goods
industries had merely returned to pre-war levels. By 1950, living standards in the towns
had probably returned to the level of 1928, while industrial production had soared
ahead of these levels. The Soviet consumer had yet to reap the material benefits of
industrialisation.
According to the statistics, recovery was complete by 1950. Was it not possible, at
last, to ease the political and economic pressures that Soviet citizens had endured for
two decades? By now, Stalin himself was the main barrier to change. His power and
prestige were so immense that little could change while he remained in power. His
death, on 5 March 1953, opened the way to rapid change.

Questions for discussion

1 Was there anything ‘socialist’ about Soviet foreign policy before 1941?
2 Was Russia ready for war in 1941?
3 To what extent can Stalin be blamed for the early defeats of the Great Patriotic War?
To what extent does he deserve credit for the eventual victory?
4 Why did the Soviet government cope with wartime better than the Tsarist
government of Nicholas II?
5 Why did most Soviet citizens rally to the Soviet cause?
6 What role did women play in the Soviet victory?
7 Why was there no thaw at the end of the war? Was the Cold War inevitable?

Further reading
See bibliography:
Deutscher, Stalin
History of the USSR
McCauley, The Soviet Union
Medvedev, Let History Judge

In addition:
J Barber & M Harrison, The Soviet Home Front 1941-1945, Longman, London & New York, 1991
A Clark, Barbarossa, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1966
Stalin’s War with Germany, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, vol 1, The Road to
J Erickson,
Stalingrad, 1975; vol 2, The Road to Berlin, 1982
C Nation, Black Earth, Red Star, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1992
A Werth, Russia at War: 1941-1945, Avon Books, New York, 1964
314 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Endnotes
1 RC Nation, Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy, Cornell University Press,
Ithaca, 1992, p 40
A Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 3rd edn, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992, p 230
J Barber & M Harrison, The Soviet Home Front 1941-1945, Longman, London & New York,
1991, p5
A Werth, Russia at War: 1941-1945, Avon Books, New York, 1964, p 147
R R Reese, ‘The Red Army and the Great Purges’, in JArch Getty & R T Manning (eds),
Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, pp 199-201
R Medvedev, Let History Judge, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1971, pp 213-14
Nation, Black Earth, Red Star, p 106
A Clark, Barbarossa, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1966, p 70
Werth, Russia at War, p 149
KS Karol, Solik, Pluto Press, London, 1986, p 74
Or
TIO
CO
O
oo
©=
a M McCauley, The Soviet Union since 1917, Longman, London, 1981, pp 108, 110; Clark,
Barbarossa, p 76
12 Barber & Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, p 22
13 McCauley, The Soviet Union, p 108
14 Ivan Krylov, Soviet Staff Officer, Falcon Press, London, 1951, pp 115-16
ib Barber & Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, p 28
16 J N Westwood, Endurance and Endeavour: Russian History 1812-1980, 2nd edn, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1981, pp 344-5; and see Clark, Barbarossa, picture no 15
17 cited in Barber and Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, p 67
18 D Volkogonov, Stalin: Triwmph and Tragedy, Prima Publishing, Rocklin, CA, 1992, p 410
19 Cited in Volkogonov, Triumph and Tragedy, p 411
20 Cited in Werth, Russia at War, pp 173-4
21 E Bacon, ‘Glasnost’ and the Gulag’, Soviet Studies, vol 44, no 6, 1992, p 1079
22 Werth, Russia at War, p 250
23 ibid, p 287
24 R Medvedev, On Stalin and Stalinism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979, p 121
25 Nove, Economic History, p 276
26 ibid, pp 275-81; Werth, Russia at War, ch 9
20 Barber & Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, p 135
28 D Atkinson, et al (eds), Women in Russia, Harvester Press, Brighton, 1978, p 194
29 W Moskoff, The Bread ofAffliction: The Food Supply in the USSR during World War II, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1990, p 109
30 Werth, Russia at War, pp 329-31
Sl Bacon, ‘Glasnost’ and the Gulag’, p 1081
32 Barber & Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, pp 52-3
33 Cited in Werth, Russia at War, p xvii
34 M Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1963, pp 46-7
35 Barber & Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, p 48
36 ibid, p 40-2
37 From the election speech of February 1946, cited in B Dmytryshym, USSR: A Concise History,
2nd edn, Scribner’s, New York, 1971, p 452
38 Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, p 53
39 M ee How Russia is Ruled, rev edn, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1963,
p4
40 Dmytryshyn, USSR, p 229
4] McCauley, The Soviet Union, p 121
42 Medvedev, Stalin and Stalinism, p 124
43 Westwood, Endurance and Endeavour, p 346
THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR 315

44 Moskoff, The Bread of Affliction, p 44

45 A Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era, Viking Press, New York, 1973, p 615
46 Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, p 90
47 Nation, Black Earth, Red Star, p 194
48 Dmytryshyn, USSR, p 512
49 Bacon, ‘Glasnost and the Gulag’, p 1071. Volkogonov gives the higher figure of 3-4 million
in Triumph and Tragedy, pp 307-8.
50 T Zaslavskaya, The Second Socialist Revolution, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990,
p21
51 ibid, p 23
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

REFORMING THE STALINIST

SYSTEM, 1953 TO 1964

SOVIET HISTORY AFTER STALIN

The death of Stalin
Stalin died early in the morning of 5 March 1953. A few days before, he had a stroke.
Because of the ‘doctor’s plot’, his own doctors were now in jail, so new doctors attended
him. His daughter, Svetlana, remembered-them ‘making a tremendous fuss, applying
leeches to his neck and the back of his head, making cardiograms and taking X-rays of
his lungs. A nurse kept giving him injec-
tions... .’.' Their treatment was afitting symbol
of Stalinism’s strange and terrifying mixture of
the archaic and the modern. So was the leave-
taking of Stalin’s servants.

Document 13.1: saying farewell to

Stalin
My father’s servants and bodyguards came to say
goodbye. They felt genuine grief and emotion.
Cooks, chauffeurs and watchmen, gardeners and
the women who had waited at table all came
quietly in. They went up to the bed silently and
Stalin with his daughter, Svetlana. wept. They wiped their tears away as children do,
with their hands and sleeves and kerchiefs. Many
were sobbing. The nurse, who was also in tears,
gave them drops of valerian . . . Valentina Istomina, or ‘Valechka’, as she was called, who had
been my father’s housekeeper for eighteen years, came in to say goodbye. She dropped
heavily to her knees, put her head on my father’s chest and wailed at the top of her voice as
the women in villages do. She went on for a long time and nobody tried to stop her.”
REFORMING THE STALINIST SYSTEM, 1953 TO 1964 317

The post-Stalin period of Soviet history falls into three main stages. The first was a
period of instability and change. This lasted from 1953 until the mid-1960s.
Khrushchev’s fall from power in 1964 offers a symbolic end-point for this phase. During
this period, reforming governments, led first by Malenkov, then by Khrushchev,
dismantled much of the coercive and ideological scaffolding of Stalinism. They also
began at last to redistribute some of the wealth generated by industrialisation to the
Soviet population at large. As a result, a new ‘social contract’ was negotiated between
government and people.
After the fall of Khrushchev, there followed a period of consolidation that lasted
until the mid-1980s. Between 1964 and 1968, there was one last burst of reform,
directed mainly at the economy. After that, under the slogan ‘stability of cadres’, the
government of Brezhnev tried to freeze change. Despite this, important economic,
social and ideological changes took place beneath the surface of Soviet society.
The third period begins with the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. This
was a period of even more radical reforms than those of the 1950s and 1960s. However,
what began as an attempt to renoyate the socialist system led, within seven years, to its
collapse.
This chapter deals with the period of change that followed Stalin’s death. Its
dominant figure is Nikita Khrushchev.

Why changer
Between 1905 and 1953, Russian and Soviet society had undergone massive, traumatic
changes. Why should the post-Stalin leadership have launched new changes after his
death? The short answer is that change was unavoidable, it was possible, and it was
desirable.
Stalin’s death made change unavoidable. Indeed his death itself represented a
profound transformation of Soviet political life. Since the late 1930s, Stalin himself had
become the central institution of the Soviet political system. All political threads led to
his office. His death immediately raised the question: where does ultimate authority
now reside? Political reform was unavoidable if only to clarify who ruled the country.
Stalin’s death also weakened the political system. We have seen that strong
leadership provides an index of the power of ruling groups. With Stalin gone, there
was no longer a clear leader, or a final point for the resolution of conflict. As in the
mid 1920s, a struggle for power at the top threatened to open deep fissures throughout
the Soviet ruling group.
Not only was the new leadership weak; it was also acutely aware of its weakness. Like
the Tsarist government in the 1850s, the new leaders projected these fears onto the
population at large. Though there is little direct evidence of popular resistance to the
system, the new leaders acted as if they had to ward off popular revolt. This explains
the panic concessions they made after Stalin’s death.
Paradoxically, it was Stalin’s achievements that made possible a retreat from
Stalinism. The Stalinist system had solved many of the problems Soviet governments
had faced in the 1920s. It had created a large industrial base for the Soviet economy. It
had almost abolished illiteracy and had raised the educational level of the entire
population. Industrialisation had also increased the size of the urban proletariat.
not merely of
Finally, the Soviet Union boasted a defence establishment capable
power. These changes gave
defending the Soviet Union, but of making it a great world
in the 1920s. The
the post-Stalin government options that had not been available
318 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

industrial base of the Soviet economy was now large enough to permit considerable
material concessions to the population without slowing economic growth.
Finally, change was desirable because the ruling group itself stood to gain from
reform. As in the reign of Peter the Great, the creation of a powerful autocratic system
had exacted a price even from the elites who benefited most from the process. It
demanded high levels of discipline and created much tension and insecurity. It
therefore devalued many of the benefits of belonging to a ruling group. Once it
seemed that these sacrifices might no longer be necessary, elites had good reason to
relax the tautness of the system. Soviet society was no longer a beleaguered fortress,
and its elites no longer needed the barracks discipline of the 1930s. They could afford
to ease the pressure both on themselves and the population at large.

The limits to change

Many pressures encouraged change. Yet the new leaders had good reason to limit its
extent. The Soviet ruling group gained much from the existing system and had no
reason to see it destroyed. So there were bound to be limits to the ‘thaw’ of the post-
Stalin years. Above all, the nomenklatura elite had to preserve and defend its monopoly
of state power and the state control over resources on which its material privileges
depended. This meant preserving the one-party state and the command economy.
Negotiating these limits was complex and difficult. The government had to make
concessions to the population. Yet how much could the ruling group concede without
weakening its own grip on power? Could they allow a partial re-emergence of market
forces? Could they make political concessions, or relax censorship, or reduce the
power of the secret police? The tricky process of reforming the system while preserving
the power and privileges of the elite explains the erratic progress of the reforms and
the instability of the Khrushchev era.

EARLY MANOEUVRES AND PANIC CONCESSIONS

First manoeuvres
In 1952 Stalin increased the size of the Politburo and renamed it the Presidium of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party. This widened the circle from which his
successor could be chosen. However, there was an inner group of politicians who held
important positions and had been close to Stalin in his final years. The most influential
of these were Georgyi Malenkov and Lavrentii Beria. Malenkov was a deputy chairman
of the Council of Ministers and a leading member of the Party Secretariat. This gave
him influence within two of the most important bureaucracies—the Party apparatus
and the system of ministries. Beria headed the secret police. Other key members of
the inner circle included Molotov, who headed the foreign policy bureaucracy, and
Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971), who headed the Moscow Party apparatus. Like
Malenkov, Khrushchev also belonged to the Party Secretariat.
Those present at Stalin’s death looked for a testament or ‘will’ that might explain
Stalin’s wishes. They found nothing. Forced to take their own decisions, they
summoned an ad hoc meeting of some twenty politicians from the Presidium, the
REFORMING THE STALINIST SYSTEM, 1953 TO 1964 319

Council of Ministers, and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. This technically
unconstitutional group took some basic decisions about the distribution of authority.
They reduced the size of the enlarged Party Presidium to the size of the former
Politburo. They also presided over the first carve up of leading positions.
The first division of political spoils looks like the result of a deal struck between
Malenkovy and Beria, the two obvious contenders for leadership. Malenkov retained
his leading position in the Party Secretariat. On Beria’s recommendation, he also
became Chairman of the Council of Ministers. In this way, he gained the two positions
Stalin had held since 1941. Of the two, it was the chairmanship of the Council of
Ministers that appeared most important, for in his later years Stalin had preferred to
rule through the ministerial apparatus. He had even abolished the post of General
Secretary through which he had first risen to the leadership. In return for Beria’s
support, Malenkov proposed that Beria become head of a re-amalgamated ministry of
internal affairs and state security, the MVD. This made Beria head, once more, of an
immensely powerful secret police apparatus. If there was to be a coup, Beria was now
in the ideal position to lead it. His troops controlled the Kremlin and made up the
bodyguards of leading government officials. Stalin’s funeral even allowed him to move
MVD troops to the capital.
Like Trotsky in the early 1920s, Malenkov found that moving too fast was a mistake.
A week later, after manoeuvres that remain obscure, Malenkov resigned his position
in the Party Secretariat. Khrushchev was the main beneficiary of this change. Though
he lost his position as head of the Moscow Party apparatus, Khrushchev now became
the leading figure in the Party Secretariat. This made him the leading figure in the
Party apparatus. However, as with Stalin in 1922, no one realised how much power this
gave him. Malenkov, Beria and Molotov still seemed the main contenders for the
leadership. Although Khrushchev chaired the committee that organised Stalin’s
funeral, Malenkov, Beria and Molotov made the main speeches.
These manoeuvres showed the uncertainty of the new leadership. The unity Stalin
had provided for twenty-five years had gone. Stalin’s heirs distrusted each other and
lacked Stalin’s prestige, his popularity, and his political skill and ruthlessness. The
entire quality of leadership had changed. Announcing that there had been a return to
the ‘Leninist’ principle of collective leadership did little to hide this reality.

Panic concessions
aya
Most people heard of Stalin’s death with genuine grief. Tatyana Zaslavsk
country could
remembers that: ‘Many people honestly did not conceive how the
teacher and friend. At memorial meetings the men
continue to exist without its great
by that
were strained and grave and the women usually wept. I wept myself, although
of Stalin’s line were greater than my belief that
time my doubts about the correctness
would encourage
he was right’. There were few immediate signs that Stalin’s death
had directed. Yet there were straws in the wind.
resistance to the oppressive system he
of prisoners in labour camps in the
In the summer there was a prolonged uprising
Vorkuta region. In June there was an uprising in East Berlin.
ce was more important than
However, as in the 1850s, the fear of popular resistan
could no longer
the reality. Stalin’s successors understood that without Stalin they
industri alisatio n drive possible. The
maintain the extreme pressure that had made the
of panic explain s the irrationality
result was a series of hasty concessions. The element
of some of these measures.
320 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

On 1 April 1953 the government announced price cuts averaging ten per cent on
basic items of consumption including food and clothing.* Some gestures were purely
symbolic. It made no economic sense to reduce the price of already scarce goods such
as meat. Doing so merely lengthened queues and raised black market prices. Other
measures had an immediate impact on living standards. During 1953, a reduction in
the size of compulsory purchases of government bonds, and an increase in nominal
wages, raised real wages by eight per cent. The governmentalso raised planned output
of consumer goods. In 1953 output of consumer goods increased faster than output of
producer goods for the first time since the 1920s. Malenkov’s pro-consumer policy
soon became known as the ‘new course’.
Improving food supplies and rural living conditions meant tackling the dreadful
condition of Soviet agriculture. In some ways the situation was similar to that of March
1921. An exploitative policy towards the agricultural sector had deprived farmers of all
incentives to increase output. The most important reform therefore reduced the tax
on private plots and increased the prices paid for procurements from collective farms.
Most striking of all was a seven-fold increase in the average prices the state paid for
grains. Malenkov announced these concessions in August. Their impact was
immediate. They transformed living conditions on collective farms, and output began
to rise, particularly on the private plots that produced most of the country’s potatoes,
eggs and meat.
The government also made political concessions. Three weeks after Stalin’s death,
the new leadership announced an amnesty. This covered non-political prisoners
sentenced to less than five years for minor crimes, as well as sick or aged prisoners.
Almost 1.2 million people were released.’ Some had highly placed relatives. They
included Molotov’s wife, Zhemchuzhina, and Mikoyan’s son.® On 4 April, the ministry
of internal affairs announced that there was no basis for the so-called ‘doctor’s plot’.
The early weeks set the pattern for the next few years. On the one hand, changes
within the ruling group reorganised the political system. On the other hand, there
occurred a profound change in the relationship between the ruling group and the rest
of society. Both types of change reduced the tension and coerciveness of the Soviet
system.

POLITICAL CHANGES AND THE STRUGGLE FOR

SUCCESSION
Further changes depended on the outcome of the precarious balance of power within
the post-Stalin Politburo. Once Stalin had gone, did power lie with the Party, the
government apparatus headed by the Council of Ministers, or perhaps the police? After
14 March 1953, a member of the Presidium headed each of these bureaucracies, so
the triangular power struggle that followed embroiled institutions as well as leaders.

The fall of Beria and decline of the secret police

With Malenkov’s power reduced after 14 March, there was a real danger that Beria
would complete the rise of the secret police that had begun in the early 1930s. This
 REFORMING THE STALINIST SYSTEM, 1953 TO 1964 321

would have formally turned the Soviet Union into a police state. Beria’s rivals found
this prospect terrifying. So did most members of the Soviet elite, for they were more
vulnerable than anyone else to police persecution. Most of Stalin’s inner entourage
had suffered from the purges. Molotov’s wife had spent many years in camps, and was
in exile in 1953. Lazar Kaganovich had lost a brother in the purges. Mikhail Kalinin
had been the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, and formally head of state before his
death in 1946, yet his wife spent seven years in labour camps. All those close to Stalin
understood that they were vulnerable when the so-called ‘Doctor’s Plot’ was
announced early in 1953. In the circumstances, an anti-Beria alliance was a natural
development. However, organising such an alliance would not be easy.
In his memoirs, Khrushchev claimed to have started the delicate manoeuvres that
led to Beria’s arrest. Over several months he broached the subject, with extreme
caution, to key colleagues. Once they had agreed on the idea, there remained some
technical difficulties that Khrushchev described vividly in his memoirs.

Document 13.2: the decision to remove Beria

Once we had formally resolved to strip Beria of his posts, who would actually detain him?
The [Presidium] bodyguard was obedient to him. His Chekists would be sitting in the next
room during the session [of the Presidium], and Beria could easily order them to arrest us all
and hold us in isolation. We would have been quite helpless because there was a sizable
armed guard in the Kremlin. Therefore we decided to enlist the help of the military. First, we
entrusted the detention of Beria to Comrade Moskalenko, the air defense commander, and
five generals .. . Then, on the eve of the session, Malenkov widened our circle to include
Marshal Zhukov and some others. That meant eleven marshals and generals in all. In those
days all military personnel were required to check their weapons when coming into the
Kremlin, so Comrade Bulganin [the Minister for the Armed Forces] was instructed to see
that the marshals and generals were allowed to bring their guns with them. We arranged for
Moskalenko’s group to wait for a summons in a separate room while the session was taking
place. [When Malenkov pressed a button to give the prearranged signal, the generals entered
the room.] ‘Hands up’ Zhukov commanded Beria. Moskalenko and the others unbuckled
their holsters in case Beria tried anything.’

June, the Presidium had Beria arrested on a trumped up charge of working

On 28
for British intelligence. His arrest led to the arrest of many other leading police
officials. After an investigation and trial, Beria was executed in December 1953 under
the Kirov Decrees.
Beria’s removal placed the secret police once more under the authority of the Party
and government, as it had been before 1934. These critical changes made it possible
to start dismantling the coercive machinery of the Stalin era. That process freed Soviet
leaders and ordinary Soviet citizens from the extreme insecurity of the Stalin years.
There had already been an amnesty for some groups of prisoners. The stories they
told of police methods and the regime in the camps helped ensure Beria’s removal
and execution. The investigations into police methods set up during Beria’s trial
produced evidence that even shocked tempered Stalinists like Khrushchev with their
revelations of the extent and savagery of police repression under Stalin. Coupled with
that the
growing popular pressure, mostly from relatives of prisoners, this ensured
assault on the police would not end with Beria’s removal. Early in 1954 the government
322 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

split the police apparatus once more. The ministry of internal affairs retained control
of the ordinary police. However, a separate committee of state security (KGB) now took
control of the secret police. The new committee was subordinate to the Council of
Ministers, but its first boss was a Khrushchev supporter, I. A. Serov. The ministry of
internal affairs also lost control of the economic empire represented by the labour
camps. The ministry of justice now assumed control of the camps. The cancellation of
the Kirov laws deprived the secret police of the extensive judicial powers they had
exercised since 1934.
The new leadership also reduced the size of the secret police apparatus and its vast
network of informers. The ‘special sections’, used by the police to spy on Soviet
institutions and enterprises, were abolished. Most significant of all was the dismantling
of the Gulag. The announcement of Beria’s execution prompted thousands of people
to demand the rehabilitation of relatives who had suffered imprisonment unjustly. The
government responded by setting up several special commissions to investigate these
cases, and the prosecutor-general’s office began the vast job of investigating millions
of appeals against unjust imprisonment. By the end of 1955 courts had released ten to
twelve thousand people from the camps. They had rehabilitated many more
posthumously. This was an important gesture, for it freed their relatives from the
penalties of banishment, loss of Party membership, and loss of residence rights they
had suffered under Stalin.® The judicial review accelerated in 1956 and 1957, after the
Party had openly committed itself to destalinisation at the twentieth Party Congress.
New amnesty decrees freed most remaining political prisoners from the camps and
cleared more posthumously.
These changes allowed a partial revival of the Soviet judicial system. Freed of police
control, the Soviet judicial and legal system regained some independence. The idea of
the ‘rule of law’ once more acquired real meaning, though the judiciary remained
under Party control.
These reforms dismantled much of the Stalinist scaffolding of terror. Despite their
limitations, they had a profound effect on Soviet life, quite apart from their direct
impact on the lives of those released from the camps. Terror ceased to be a normal
method of government, and the fear of arbitrary arrest and execution receded. The
removal of the Stalinist terror apparatus made dissent possible once more.

The power struggle and the re-emergence of the Party: 1953 to

Babs)
Changes in the role of the secret police were part of a larger rearrangement of the
balance of power within the Soviet political system. They led to a new balance of power
similar to that of the 1920s, when the Party apparatus had dominated the political
system.
At first, Stalin’s successors proclaimed the principle of ‘collective leadership’. The
decree announcing Beria’s arrest, declared that:

The strength of our leadership is in its collective nature, its unity and monolithic
character. Collective leadership is the supreme principle of leadership in our Party.
This principle completely corresponds to Marx’s well-known proposition on the
harm and impermissibility of the cult of the individual figure... Only the collective
political experience and collective wisdom of the Central Committee, resting on the
scientific basis of Marxist-Leninist theory, assures correct leadership of the Party
REFORMING THE STALINIST SYSTEM, 1953 TO 1964 323

and country, assures firm unity and closeness of ranks of the Party and success in
building Communism in our country.°

In reality, the notion of ‘collective leadership’ merely papered over divisions within
the Presidium. The removal of Beria left Malenkov and Khrushchev as the main
contenders for leadership. Their rivalry went back at least to the nineteenth Party
Congress in 1952, when Malenkoy openly criticised Khrushchev’s proposals for
agricultural reform. Personal differences added piquancy to what was also a struggle
between institutions, between the Party apparatus and the ministerial system.
The Party gained most from Beria’s fall. With the decline of the secret police, it
became once more the only institution that could, through its powers of Party
discipline, influence and supervise the work of individuals throughout the political
system. This enabled the Party to recover the dominant position it had held in the
1920s. Indeed, the Party’s control over individuals throughout the system made it the
natural focus of power in the Soviet political system. As a result, power fell to the Party
as if by a basic law of Soviet political gravity. Though Stalin had suspended this law
temporarily from the late 1930s, it reasserted itself naturally after his death.
In September 1953 Khrushchev strengthened his position as head of the Party when
he became its First Secretary. This made him the head of the Party Secretariat. Using
the influence this gave him, Khrushchev began to place his own followers in key
positions within the Party apparatus. By 1956, about one-third of Central Committee
members had served under Khrushchev in Ukraine or the Moscow Party apparatus. By
late 1957, this group included most members of the Central Committee.’
Nevertheless, the government apparatus appeared dominant for eighteen months
after Stalin’s death. Until late 1954, government decrees appeared first in the name of
the government, and only then in the name of the Party."!
Malenkov’s dominance lasted until late 1954. Then things began to go very wrong.
From August 1954, decrees began to appear in the name of the Party and then the
government. In December 1954, for the first time since the 1920s, the government
paper, Izvestiya, disagreed with the Party newspaper, Pravda, over economic policy.
Finally, in February 1955, Malenkov resigned as chairman of the Council of Ministers.
Malenkov’s defeat left Khrushchev the dominant figure within the Presidium.
The defeat of Malenkov did not mean the final victory of Khrushchev or of the Party
apparatus. On the contrary, Khrushchev’s increasing influence forced his opponents
into new alliances, similar to those formed against Stalin in the late 1920s. In 1954
Khrushchev gained valuable support within the powerful ministries in charge of heavy
industry when he complained that Malenkov’s ‘New Course’ was starving them of
funds. In the same year he launched a huge agrarian reform which he used to increase
the influence of the Party apparatus he now controlled.
By 1953, Khrushchev knew more about the real situation in the Soviet countryside
than any other Presidium member. He also understood better than his colleagues the
impoverishment and inefficiency of the collective farms. In 1954, he announced a plan
to bring into cultivation large areas of ‘virgin land’ in western Siberia, northern
Kazakhstan, and the northern Caucasus. He implemented this vast plan through the
Party and the Komsomol, rather than through the ministry of agriculture. Thousands
of enthusiastic young Party and Komsomol members set off for the virgin lands in 1954
to organise the new campaign. At first, the ‘virgin lands’ campaign was a huge success.
By 1956 as many as 300 000 people had migrated to the state farms established in the
new areas, and they had started farming thirty-six million hectares of new land, an area
324 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

equal to the total cultivated area of Canada. The impact of these reforms on
agricultural output appears clearly in the statistics. For the first time in Soviet history,
agricultural production advanced well beyond the level reached in 1913! Gradually,
the Soviet countryside ceased to be an exploited colony of the Soviet town. Instead, it
became a massive recipient of investment resources and subsidies. The early success of
the virgin lands program boosted Khrushchev’s prestige and increased the Party’s
control over a crucial sector of the economy.
Khrushchev increased the power of the Party even further through economic
decentralisation. In 1954-55, 11 000 enterprises that had been under central control
were transferred to republican governments. Freed from the control of the Moscow
ministries, Party officials could exercise far more control over their activities. In 1957
Khrushchev decentralised the entire planning system by transferring most planning
powers from Moscow to 105 regional economic councils, or ‘sounarkhozy’. Most
industrial ministries, except those producing defence equipment, now vanished.
Within the sovnarkhozy, the crucial economic decisions came under the control of
regional Party officials. The most important of these officials were the regional Party
secretaries who came under the authority of the Party Secretariat.
Colleagues on the Presidium watched these moves with apprehension. However, it
was Khrushchev’s famous ‘Secret Speech’ of 1956, and the events it triggered, that
forced them to act against him.

The 1956 Secret Speech to the twentieth Party Congress

In June 1955 the government announced that the Party’s twentieth Congress would
meet on 14 February 1956. This would be the first Congress since Stalin’s death. It
provided a chance for the new leadership to explain the policies it had adopted since
the death of their old leader, and to clarify their attitude to the Stalinist period. This
was clearly a sensitive issue. Though most members of the Presidium supported the
dismantling of the Stalinist apparatus of terror, many had taken part in the purges
themselves, and were reluctant to probe too deeply into the past. However Khrushchev
argued that the leadership could no longer ignore the findings of the commissions set
up to investigate police terror. They had to clear the air at the Congress. His colleagues,
most of whom had been closer to Stalin than Khrushchey, were naturally uneasy about
this. As a result, when the Congress met, the Presidium had still not decided whether
or not to debate Stalin’s rule. Khrushchev secured his colleagues’ reluctant consent to
raise the issue only after threatening to speak out as a private delegate. They demanded
only that he deliver his speech on Stalin at a secret session and that he take no questions
from the floor.
In preparing his speech, Khrushchev used material assembled by a special
commission of the Central Committee to investigate abuses committed under Stalin,
which was headed by a historian and member of the Party secretariat, P. N. Pospelov.
Khrushchev delivered his speech early in the morning of 25 February. To Congress
delegates, who had lived in Stalin’s shadow for most of their careers, the speech was a
bombshell. Its attack on Stalin destroyed the faith of many in the infallibility of the
Party and its leadership.”
Khrushchev attacked in particular the changes that had taken place after the
seventeenth Party Congress in 1934. Above all, he criticised Stalin’s elevation above
the Party and his ruthless purging of the Party elite. Khrushchev used the catchphrase
‘cult of the personality’ to describe Stalin’s arbitrary abuse of power and the
exaggerated adulation paid to him. The speech hinted at Stalin’s involvement in
REFORMING THE STALINIST SYSTEM, 1953 TO 1964 325

Kirov’s murder, and described the brutal and arbitrary methods used to extract
confessions. Khrushchev revealed Lenin’s criticisms of Stalin in the last years of his life.
He criticised Stalin’s handling of the war and his disastrous decision to purge the
military elite, claiming that these and other blunders had cost millions of unnecessary
casualties during the first months of the war. He lampooned Stalin’s ignorance of the
country’s real problems, particularly in agriculture. Finally, he attacked the mass
deportations of whole nationalities from their homelands after the war.
What Khrushchev did not say reveals as much as what he said. He did not criticise
Stalin’s leadership before 1934. He did not mention the casualties of collectivisation
or the collectivisation famines, or the early show trials between 1928 and 1931. On the
contrary, he praised collectivisation, the first Five-Year Plans, and the overthrow of the
various oppositions as crucial stages in the building of Socialism. Equally important,
the speech gave no idea of the real extent of the purges, because it largely ignored the
non-Party victims who made up most of the casualties.
The speech defined the government’s attitude to the Stalinist past in three
distinctive ways. First, it defined those aspects of the Soviet past that Khrushchev
regarded as legitimate elements of the system. These were: collectivisation, rapid
industrialisation concentrating on heavy industry, a centralised command economy,
strong leadership through a single Party, and the elimination of factions. In short,
Khrushchev declared the political, economic and social system that existed until 1934
to be sound, legitimate and normal. This remained the official verdict on the Stalinist
period until the late 1980s.
Second, the speech criticised those aspects of the Stalinist system that most affected
the Soviet ruling group, of which Khrushchev and most Congress delegates were
members. It attacked excessively autocratic leadership, the eclipse of the Party, and the
brutal suppression of Party members. It also criticised Stalin’s mishandling of the war.
However, it largely ignored those aspects of the Stalinist years that most affected the
ordinary population. He made less of Stalin’s sacrifice of agriculture and the collective
farmers, the decline and stagnation in living standards, or the purging of ordinary
Soviet citizens. In spite of its radical implications, the speech represented a view from
above. As Khrushchev put it (perhaps unwittingly) in 1962: “We condemn Stalin
because he drew his sword and wielded it against his own class, against his own Party’.”®
Finally, the speech tried to distance the new leadership from the mistakes of the
Stalin era. The phrase, ‘cult of personality’, provided a convenient way of blaming
Stalin for the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s while absolving most Party members.

The 1957 anti-Party plot

The impact of the speech was greater than Khrushchev had intended because it was
leaked very rapidly and published abroad. For many outside the Soviet elite, his speech
undermined the legitimacy of the last twenty years of Soviet rule. In Poland, and even
more seriously in Hungary, it provoked rebellion against unpopular Stalinist
governments. Outside the Communist bloc, many foreign Communists left the Party
in disgust at the revelations about the Stalinist era. In contrast, the Chinese leadership,
which retained its admiration for Stalin, found Khrushchev’s attack unforgivable. The
Secret Speech marked the beginnings of divisions that led to a permanent rift between
the two Communist superpowers.
enough
By the middle of 1957 Khrushchev’s colleagues on the Presidium had had
This time,
of his erratic style of leadership, and they voted him out of the Presidium.
supporter s
however, the Presidium found it could not act alone. Khrushchev’s
326 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

included the heads of both the army (Zhukov) and the KGB (Serov), so it was
impossible to arrest him. Khrushchev appealed from the Presidium to the Central
Committee, the body responsible in law for appointing and dismissing Presidium
members. News of the confrontation leaked out. Central Committee members began
arriving in Moscow, often with the help of the army, which flew many in from remote
provinces. A delegation of Central Committee members, including Serov, demanded
the right to take part in discussions about the leadership.

It has become known to us, members of the Central Committee, that the Presidium
of the Central Committee is in continuous session. We have also learned that you
are discussing the question of the leadership of the Central Committee and of its
Secretariat. Matters of such great importance to the whole Party cannot be kept
from members of the Central Committee plenum. We members of the Central
Committee cannot remain indifferent to the question of the leadership of our
Party.

Seroy, who controlled the Kremlin guard as head of the KGB, arranged for a
delegation of Central Committee members to enter the Kremlin building in which the
Presidium was meeting. When abused by Voroshilov, Serov grabbed him by the collar
and threatened to call a meeting of the Central Committee with or without the
permission of the Presidium.'’ Reluctantly, the Presidium agreed to a Central
Committee meeting and the Central Committee, now dominated by Khrushchev
supporters, reversed the Presidium’s original decision. It chose a new Presidium,
dominated by Khrushchev allies such as L. I. Brezhnev.
Would there be a new purge? In a chilling reminder of what could have happened,
one of Stalin’s toughest ‘enforcers’, Lazar Kaganovich, phoned Khrushchev two days
after the Central Committee meeting. ‘Comrade Khrushchev, I have known you for
many years. I beg you not to allow them to deal with me as they dealt with people under
Stalin.’!° Instead of executing them, the Central Committee demoted Khruschchev’s
opponents to minor government posts. Molotov became ambassador to Mongolia, and
Malenkov the director of an electric power station. Members of the so-called ‘anti-
Party’ group suffered no further penalties until the twenty-second Party Congress in
1961, when they were expelled from the Party.

The fall of Khrushchev, 1964

By 1957 Khrushchev was first among equals. He was stronger than any of his colleagues
and had more power to initiate policy. Now, like Stalin in the 1930s, he began to act as
if he no longer needed the Party that had brought him to power. In 1958, he became
chairman of the Council of Ministers. This may have tempted him to rely less on the
Party apparatus, and to seek other bases for his power in the ministerial system or in
the population at large. He sacked his ally Zhukov as minister of defence late in 1957
and began to dismiss his own supporters within the Presidium. By 1961, only six out of
the thirteen supporters he had promoted to the Presidium were still there.!” At lower
levels, he began to remove regional Party secretaries he had promoted in the early
1950s. After 1957, he began to take decisions without full consultation even in the
Presidium. He also allowed the emergence of a minor cult of personality of his own.
The pace of destalinisation particularly worried the Party’s more conservative wing.
At the twenty-second Party Congress, in 1961, Khrushchev launched a new attack on
REFORMING THE STALINIST SYSTEM, 1953 TO 1964 327

Stalin without warning his colleagues. After Khrushchev’s speech, the Congress voted
to remove Stalin’s remains from the mausoleum on Red Square. Many towns and
enterprises named after Stalin now changed their names. They included Stalingrad,
which was known as Tsaritsyn before 1926, and now became Volgograd. There are signs
that Khrushchev wanted to go further and rehabilitate some of the opposition leaders
of the 1920s, such as Bukharin and Kamenev."® He also considered abolishing internal
censorship.
Closer to home, his ill-thought-out administrative reforms threatened the power
and privilege of Party bosses. In 1962, against Party resistance, he split the Party at all
levels into rural and urban sections. This halved the influence of regional and district
Party secretaries. In the same year, he introduced new Party rules designed to limit the
number of terms Party officials could serve in public positions. If carried through, this
reform would have destroyed the stranglehold on political power of the Party
apparatus.
It began to look as if Khrushchev wanted to increase popular participation in the
formulation and execution of policy at the expense of the Party elite. He encouraged
a rapid increase in the size of the Party from seven million in 1956 to eleven million in
1964 (from 3.6 to 4.8 per cent of the population). This increased the proportion of
working class members and broadened the Party’s base in Soviet society, while diluting
the power of the apparatus. Khrushchev encouraged popular participation in other
areas too by increasing the role of local Soviets; by encouraging non-Party members to
take part in various forms of supervisory activity; and by inviting non-Party members to
Party congresses.'? Khrushchev also sought popularity outside the Party through his
economic policies and through his populist political style. His frequent visits to towns,
enterprises and farms made him far more familiar than Stalin had ever been. All of
this threatened the Soviet ruling elite.
However, unlike Stalin, Khrushchev failed to escape from the Party’s control. He
was on holiday on the Black Sea when the Presidium decided to remove him. This time
it had the full support of the Party Central Committee and the heads of the police and
army. The Presidium summoned Khrushchev to an extraordinary session of the
Presidium, which voted him out of office. At first he refused to retire, but the following
day he agreed. When he returned home that evening, ‘he threw his briefcase into a
corner and said, “Well, that’s it. I’m retired now. Perhaps the most important thing I
did was just this—that they were able to get rid of me simply by voting, whereas Stalin
would have had them all arrested”’.”® His son, Sergei, later reported him as saying:

I’m already old and tired . . . I've accomplished the most important things. The
relations between us, the style of leadership has changed fundamentally. Could
anyone have ever dreamed of telling Stalin that he no longer pleased us and should
retire? He would have made mince-meat of us. Now everything is different. Fear has
disappeared, and a dialogue is carried on among equals. That is my service. I won't
fight any longer.”!

A changing political system

The power struggles of the Khrushchev era reflected profound changes in the Soviet
political system and the Soviet leadership. The terroristic, autocratic rule of Stalin had
gone. In its place, there had emerged a system similar to that of the mid-1920s. As
328 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

political
Khrushchev’s removal had shown, the Party was once again the dominant
institution. From the mid-1950s until the restoration of a multi-party system in 1990,
the Party dominated Soviet political life, and the Party’s first secretary (renamed the
general secretary after 1966) became once again the most powerful Soviet politician.
Party congresses began to meet regularly, and the Party’s leading institutions, the
Presidium (renamed the Politburo in 1966) and the Central Committee, re-emerged
as the central institutions of the political system. The dominance of the Party limited
the power of the secret police. The Party also limited the power of its own leader.
These political changes were symptoms of deeper changes in the mood and
structure of the Soviet ruling group. No longer did its members live as if in a
beleaguered garrison. By 1964 they were confident enough of their own strength and
that of the country they ruled to do without an absolute leader ruling through terror.
This marked a significant decline in the discipline and unity of the ruling group. As we
would expect, decline in the unity and discipline of the ruling group implied a decline
in the fiscal pressure that the ruling group could exert on the rest of the population.

SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND IDEOLOGICAL REFORM

A new social contract
The less coercive governments that emerged in the 1950s negotiated what many
scholars have described as a new ‘social contract’ with Soviet society. Of course, there
was no formal negotiation. However, as in the 1850s, the government was very sensitive
to popular demands, and keen to prevent popular discontent. The unspoken contract
negotiated during these years allowed the government to keep its monopoly on
political power, to maintain tight controls on travel and the media, and to control
economic planning. In return, the government began to raise material living
standards, while guaranteeing full employment and an extensive, if low-grade, network
of social services. Under this contract, Soviet consumers began to reap the benefits of
their immense efforts during the industrialisation drive.

Rising living standards

After the panic concessions that followed Stalin’s death, there came a series of more
considered concessions as part of Malenkov’s ‘New Course’. However, Khrushchev
soon stole Malenkov’s policies. In September, Khrushchev announced large
concessions to collective farmers. In 1954, he launched the virgin lands program. This
achieved great success in its early years and did much to improve Soviet diets. However,
in its haste to mobilise resources the government made serious blunders. Agronomists
had warned that the land to be farmed under the virgin lands scheme was fragile. Most
lay on the edge of arid semi-desert. It needed irrigation and careful maintenance if it
was to retain its fertility. However, under central government pressure, local officials
competed to fulfil and overfulfil their plan targets to show quick results. Good harvests
in the mid-1950s led to a sharp rise in the total grain harvest. Grain harvests rose from
82.5 million tons in 1953 to 125.0 million tons in 1956, to 134.7 million tons in 1958.22
Then harvests began to stagnate. In the early 1960s wind storms destroyed ten million
REFORMING THE STALINIST SYSTEM, 1953 TO 1964 329

acres in Kazakhstan and damaged twenty-nine million more. Altogether these ruined
half of the virgin lands.* The 1965 harvest was below that for 1956. In 1964, the Soviet
Union purchased grain abroad. After that, the Soviet Union, a traditional exporter of
grain, became a regular importer. Although agricultural output had risen and Soviet
diets had undoubtedly improved, Khrushchev’s methods of reform stored-up
problems for the future.
Khrushchev also undertook other reforms that raised living standards above the
level of 1928 for the first time. Statistics on the value of goods consumed by Soviet
households tell a clear story. Living standards had declined sharply in the early 1930s.
They returned roughly to the 1928 level by 1937, but fell sharply again during the war.
By Stalin’s death, they had recovered to the 1928 level, but this time the recovery
continued, with the active encouragement of the new leadership. If the level of
consumption in 1928 was 1.00, and the figure for 1950 was only 1.11, the equivalent
figure for 1968 was 1.85. (See table 10.3, column G.) So it was not until the 1950s that
the Soviet consumer gained materially from the efforts made during the
industrialisation drive.
Other reforms included the abolition of tuition fees (introduced by Stalin) for
secondary and higher education; improvements in pensions; and a shortening of the
working day, combined with an increase in holiday entitlements. Housing was another
crucial area in which there was radical change. Under Stalin, the government invested
very little in housing, despite the massive increase in the urban population and the
wartime destruction of housing. In 1957, Khrushchev launched a vast plan to build
cheap, functional apartment buildings. The new buildings were not beautiful. Their
construction explains the ugly suburban rings around most towns of the former Soviet
Union. Yet Khrushchev’s plan greatly improved Soviet family life, for it reduced the
severe overcrowding that had been a feature of the Stalinist period. More and more
families managed to settle in separate apartments, where they escaped the
inconveniences and conflicts of ‘communal’ or shared apartments.
From 1956 Khrushchev began to reform the wage system, to reduce the extreme
inequalities of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1946 the lowest salaries in the highest ten per
cent were 7.24 times as large as the highest salaries of the bottom ten per cent. In 1973
the equivalent figure was only 3.35, and by 1968 it had declined to 2.83." The changes
affected collective farmers most of all, for they had been the most exploited section of
the working population. Most of these changes reflected a raising of the lowest wages.
However, they also reflected a slight decline in the embarrassingly generous wages and
perks of the ruling group. For example, in 1957, the government abolished the secret
supplementary pay packets that most state and Party officials had received since the
1930s. However, the nomenklatura retained many privileges even in post-Stalinist Soviet
society.
The 1950s saw a drastic reduction in the fiscal pressure on the population at large.
This was a momentous turning point in Soviet history. If 1945 marked the arrival of
the Soviet Union as a modern military power, the 1950s marked the arrival of the Soviet
Union’s civilian population as modern, urban consumers. An important symbolic
measure of the change is the urbanisation of Soviet society. From the early 1960s, for
the first time, more than fifty per cent of the Soviet population lived in towns (see
Figure 2.2).
330 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Ideological retreat
Relaxation within the elite encouraged some to push the reforms further. There is,
indeed, a striking parallel between the growth of Liberalism and Radicalism in
nineteenth century Russia, and the growth of dissidence in the Soviet Union since
1953. Both processes reflect the easing of discipline within an exceptionally cohesive
ruling elite.
The Stalinist government’s control of censorship provided a powerful device for
hiding all public signs of conflict. It prevented public criticism of the government even
through the traditional Russian vehicle of literature and literary criticism. With Stalin
gone, there was immediate pressure to increase intellectual and artistic freedom. The
Secret Speech set an example of criticism and gave impetus to this movement. In the
early 1960s, Khrushchev gave the movement for liberalisation further support in the
second round of destalinisation, begun at the twenty-second Party Congress. He
personally gave permission for the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s novel on the once
taboo subject of life in a Stalinist labour camp, One Day in the Life of Tuan Denisovich. As
we have seen, Khrushchev even contemplated abolishing censorship altogether.”
By the mid-1960s, the freedom available to artists, historians and social scientists,
even in sensitive areas such as economics and sociology, had increased considerably.
Nevertheless, limits remained. The government tolerated no public criticism of the
bases of the socialist system. It set limits even to criticisms of Stalin. It also limited other
artistic freedoms in defence of the stuffy moral and artistic ideas typical of the Stalin
generation of politicians. The sculptor, Ernst Neizvestnyi, who was to carve
Khrushchev’s own tombstone at Khrushchev’s request, describes a famous incident at
an art exhibition held in 1962. It displays well Khrushchev’s blunt but homely manner

Soviet dwellings, old and new, Far East region, 1982.

 REFORMING THE STALINIST SYSTEM, 1953 TO 1964
331

and the primitive cultural attitudes of politicians of his generat

ion.

Document 13.3: Khrushchev and abstract art—the Manezh exhibit

ion, 1962
[Khrushchev] began his inspection in the room in which paintings by
Bilyutin and some other
friends of mine had been hung. He swore horribly and became extremely
angry about them.
It was there that he said that ‘a donkey could do better with
its tail’ and remarked of
Zheltovsky that he was a good-looking man but drew monsters. And it was
there that | had
my big clash with Khrushchey, the prelude to our subsequent conversation.
It happened like
this. Khrushchev asked, ‘Who’s the most important one here?’ Ilyichev replied,
‘This one,’
pointing at me. | was motioned to come forward and stand in front of Khrushch
ev. He started
shouting at me... | said that | would only talk about my own work and turned
away to go
into the room where my work was on display, not imagining that Khrushchev
would follow
me. But follow me he did, and so did the whole of his entourage and the rest of
the crowd.
That was when the fun and games began. Khrushchev said that | devoured the
people’s
money and produced shit. | told him that he knew nothing about art. Our conversati
on was
a lengthy one, but essentially it boiled down to this. | made it clear to him that he had
been
duped, as he was neither an artist nor a critic and was illiterate when it came to aesthetics.
(I don’t remember the actual words, but that was the gist of what | said.) He denied this.
On
what did he base his claim to expertise? | asked. He said: ‘When | was a miner, | didn’t
understand. When | was a junior Party official, | didn’t understand. At every level on my way
up the ladder, | didn’t understand. Today | am premier and leader of the Party: surely I’m
able to understand things now, aren’t I? Who do you work for?’
... My talk with Khrushchev ended like this. He said, ‘You’re an interesting man—I enjoy
people like you—but inside you there are an angel and a devil. If the devil wins, we'll crush
you. If the angel wins, we'll do all we can to help you.’ And he gave me his hand.

Economic reform
The Party’s decision to divert resources away from heavy industries and armaments
producers after Stalin’s death changed the workings of the command economy. Where
there was a clear group of priority sectors, the crude command methods of the 1930s
worked adequately. Choices about the allocation of resources solved themselves easily
enough; if in doubt, spare resources went to heavy industry or defence. The changes
of the 1950s complicated the planning problem by creating conflicts over resources
between several different sectors. The government began to divert resources to
consumer goods, to housing, and to agriculture. Khrushchev’s reforms also weakened
the power of the planning and ministerial system that had dominated the economy
under Stalin. All this called for reforms of the command economy and its planning
methods.
There were also deeper problems. Growth under Stalin depended on extravagant
use of labour, cash and raw materials. However, everyone understood that though the
Soviet Union enjoyed large reserves of these inputs such extravagant use could not
continue forever. Eventually, levels of productivity would have to rise as well. In short,
the Soviet economy had to make the change from extensive growth to intensive growth.
By the 1950s labour was becoming a scarce commodity. In the 1930s, the government
had tapped huge reserves of labour in the countryside and amongst women. By the
1950s it had used up these reserves. In addition, the rate of natural increase of the
332 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

population was declining, and war casualties had further reduced the supply of labour.
According to one calculation, the labour hours available between 1956 and 1960 grew
at a mere 0.6 per cent per annum, while total GNP grew at 5. per cent.?’ In future,
increases in available labour would have to come from increased productivity.
Shortages of other inputs were less acute in the 1950s. This meant that Khrushchev
could persist with extensive methods. The virgin lands program raised agricultural
output by increasing the amount of land farmed. As oil production declined in the
Caucasus, the government opened new oil fields in the Urals/Volga region. However,
these were all short-term solutions. It was extremely worrying that the system was still
using capital extravagantly. Western calculations suggest that output for every unit of
capital invested declined in the 1950s at a rate of -2.7 to -3.6 per cent per annum.”®
However Khrushchev, when faced with shortages, fell back naturally on the
traditional Soviet ways of raising productivity: pressure and the technological fix. Both
offered only short-term solutions. Sometimes they did not even offer that. In 1959,
Ryazan oblast achieved such spectacular increases in livestock deliveries that
Khrushchev held up their achievements as a model for other regions. Only later did it
emerge that the local Party secretary had forced local authorities to raise deliveries of
livestock at any price. As a result, many collective farmers had slaughtered breeding
stock and milk cows, which decimated livestock herds in the province. When the true
story emerged, the regional Party secretary committed suicide.
This showed the dangers of such campaigns. Yet they littered Khrushchev’s career.
In the mid-1950s, Khrushchev decided that maize was a miracle crop. Accordingly, he
demanded that it be planted even in regions in which it could not possibly thrive. In
the same period, he fell in love with systems of crop rotation that reduced fallow. He
campaigned hard for the idea, without paying enough attention to local conditions
and without ensuring that farmers who tried such rotations had adequate fertiliser and
pesticides. The amount of land under fallow fell sharply, even in marginal regions such
as the virgin lands. By the early 1960s, declining yields and increased erosion showed
how mistaken this policy had been. Apart from their immediate effects, such
campaigns disrupted the normal workings of enterprises and farms throughout the
country.
The most spectacular example of such campaigns was the sovnarkhoz reform of 1957.
Khrushchev saw, as did others, that decentralisation might solve many problems. Much
of the inefficiency of the economy reflected the sheer distance between the ministries
in Moscow and the enterprises whose activities they planned in the provinces. By the
mid-1950s, there were more than 200 000 industrial enterprises, and at least another
100 000 construction projects and it was impossible to plan everything they did from
Moscow. Besides, each central ministry ran its own economic empire. ‘A steamer
belonging to one ministry would proceed up the river Lena full and return empty,
while another steamer, transporting goods for a different ministry, went down-river full
and up-river empty.’** Khrushchev argued that it made more sense to plan at a regional
level.
However, the introduction of sovnarkhozy simply introduced new forms of
inefficiency. Local planning authorities favoured their own enterprises at the expense
of those in another region. Enterprises came under pressure not to deal with
enterprises just over the border, but with enterprises in their own region. This cut well-
established links. Even if Gosplan told it to produce a component for use in another
region, what interest could a local sounarkhoz have in fulfilling such a plan? Local plans
were far more important.
 REFORMING THE STALINIST SYSTEM, 1953 TO 1964 333

As the weaknesses of the reform became clear, Khrushchev backed off. This made
matters worse. The government transferred more and more power away from the
sovnarkhozy and back to Moscow or to republican governments. Enterprises now found
themselves serving several masters whose instructions often conflicted with each other.
In 1963, the government merged many sovnarkhozy to form a total of forty-seven larger
sounarkhozy. Organisational chaos and a decline in agricultural output led to a general
slowdown in growth. Khrushchev’s successors abandoned the entire experiment with
sovnarkhozy in 1965, a year after his fall.
Any genuine increase in productivity levels clearly demanded more than
government pressure, and more than a few technological fixes. It required a reform in
the workings of the entire command economy. But how? The theoretical aspects of
the problem came onto the agenda for public debate in the 1950s. Under Khrushchev,
economics revived as a serious discipline. Indeed, many of the reform ideas tried out
over the next thirty years first emerged in discussions in the Khrushchev era.
In 1962, E. Liberman published a classic article on “The plan, profits and bonuses’.
This set the agenda for further reform. It argued that decentralisation should extend
to the individual enterprise. Planners should grant enterprises more autonomy in the
way they used funds, but force them to live within their budgets. No longer could they
treat capital as a ‘free’ good. Such ideas treated the Soviet enterprise almost like a
traditional capitalist firm. Liberman argued that plans should set targets for profits
rather than for output of specific goods. By doing so, they would solve two key
problems. They would force enterprises to economise on resources. They would also
encourage them to innovate, to introduce more efficient equipment and work
methods.
Ideas such as these had little direct impact in the Khrushchev era. There was a first,
crude approach to them with the introduction of cost reduction as a plan target for
the first time in 1959. This required that enterprises achieve certain targets for cost-
saving. However, as one of many plan indicators that often conflicted with each other,
this could have little impact. In the context of the command economy, such measures
simply encouraged enterprises to cut corners, which led to poorer quality. The
problem of serious economic reform remained on the agenda for Khrushchev’s
successors.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS: THE SOVIET UNION AS A

SUPERPOWER
The Great Patriotic War had shown that the Soviet Union could defend itself against a
major European power. It had become a world power. Its main concern now was to
defend its position, rather than to export revolution. The final year of the war was the
main exception to this rule, the one period when expansion was possible, even
unavoidable. With that exception, the Soviet Union usually had more to lose than to
the
gain from a revolutionary or expansionist foreign policy. Stability abroad was
precondition for reform at home.
in foreign
In the early 1950s, the concessions made internally had their counterpart
policy. The new leadership abandoned an important part of the rhetoric of world
334 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

revolution when Malenkoy, and then Khrushchey, argued that nuclear weapons were
so dangerous that future wars could benefit neither Capitalism nor Socialism. There
was no alternative but for the two world systems to compete peacefully. The Soviet
government envisaged peaceful coexistence as a policy of mutual tolerance in which
different social systems would try to prove their superiority by improving the living
conditions of their citizens. This implied that the future of Socialism would depend
more on the successes of the Soviet economy than those of its army.
A peaceful international climate was attractive to Soviet leaders for two main
reasons. First, they had more direct experience of the real costs of war than their
American counterparts. Second, destalinisation meant devoting more resources to
consumption and limiting the military budget. An aggressive foreign policy was hard
to square with the need to satisfy growing consumer demand.
The twentieth Party Congress formally adopted the policy of peaceful coexistence.
The government accompanied its change of heart with practical gestures. It signed an
armistice in Korea. It tried to heal the breach with Yugoslavia. And it established closer
ties with the West through the first visits of Soviet leaders to the West. In 1956,
Khrushchev and Bulganin visited Britain. In 1959, Khrushchev visited the United
States.
The Soviet government even began to reduce the size of its defence establishment.
As part of his ‘New Course’, Malenkov cut the defence budget, and reduced the size of
the army. After Malenkov’s resignation, Khrushchev briefly reversed these cuts, partly
to maintain his alliance with the army and in particular with Marshal Zhukov. However,
in the late 1950s he resumed a policy of reducing conventional armaments.
Yet the government still needed a cheap way of maintaining Russia’s military
strength as a world power. For a time, it seemed as if nuclear weapons might solve the
problem. The Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in 1949 and its first hydrogen
bomb in 1953. The launch of the world’s first space satellite in 1957 showed that the
Soviet Union now had the missile technology needed to deliver nuclear weapons.
These developments raised the chimera of a cheap nuclear defence strategy. In the
early 1960s, for the first time in Russian history, it seemed possible to solve the problem
of defence without the extravagant expenditure of labour and resources that had
always been demanded in the past. The absence of natural defensive boundaries
became irrelevant in the age of nuclear missiles, and island powers such as Britain lost
the natural defensive advantages they had enjoyed since the Middle Ages.
However, much of this strategy depended on bluff. Though it soon had enough
missiles to attack Europe, the Soviet military found it harder to develop weapons that
could threaten its major opponent, the USA. Besides, Khrushchev now began to
pursue a more aggressive foreign policy. In 1962, the Soviet government suffered a
humiliating rebuff when United States presidentJ.F. Kennedy forced it to withdraw
nuclear missiles it had tried to install in socialist Cuba. Khrushchev’s failure to devise
a cheap but flexible security policy may have been even more important than his
domestic failures in bringing about his removal from office.*°
After the foreign policy fiascos of the early 1960s, the Soviet government had to
accept what many military leaders had been urging for some time. A build-up of
conventional forces had to accompany the expansion of the Soviet Union’s nuclear
forces. This conclusion had far-reaching consequences. It meant abandoning any hope
of maintaining great power status on the cheap. On the contrary, an adequate defence
establishment would continue to cost vast amounts in human and material resources.
Over the next two decades the burden of the Soviet Union’s huge defence
 REFORMING THE STALINIST SYSTEM, 1953 TO 1964 335

establishment worsened the country’s economic problems and made it more difficult
to maintain the ‘social contract’ negotiated in the 1950s.

A BALANCE SHEET: 1953 TO 1964

What had changed since Stalin’s death? A ruling group more confident of its power
had deliberately dismantled the more extreme forms of autocratic rule. It had reduced
the coercive powers of the secret police and weakened the power of its own leaders.
The ruling group could afford these changes because it no longer needed to lean as
hard on its population as it had in the Stalin era. It could now allow the Soviet
population at large to enjoy many of the material benefits of industrial development.
The reduction in tension benefited the entire population. It also reduced the pressure
on members of the ruling group. Like the Tsarist ruling group in the eighteenth
century, the post-Stalin leadership had begun to unravel a highly autocratic system. So
far, they had managed to do this with reasonable success. They remained firmly in
control of the government and the economy. And there seemed little doubt that,
despite the reduction in central control, they had the political and economic means to
sustain the Soviet Union’s position as a great power.
However, a perceptive observer might have noticed some worrying signs. First, the
economic reforms of the mid-1950s yielded only temporary gains. Improvements in
agricultural output depended more on increased inputs of land and cash than on real
improvements in agricultural productivity. Second, the Cuban missile crisis had dashed
all hopes of reducing the defence budget. Finally, many in Soviet society had lost the
profound faith in Socialism that had sustained them under Stalin. These three
problems, still minor in the early 1960s, were the seeds of the crisis that was to bring
the entire system down thirty years later.

Questions for discussion

1 What parallels are there between the death of Stalin in 1953 and the death of Peter
the Great in 1725?

2 How did the Soviet ruling group change in the 1950s?

3 How did life change for ordinary Soviet men and women in the 1950s? How did life
change for peasants?
4 Could Khrushchev have achieved the same degree of power as Stalin? Why did he
not do so?
5 Why did the Khrushchev ‘thaw’ grind to a haltr
6 Howhad the international position of the Soviet Union changed between the 1930s
and the 1960s?
336 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

7 Why were Soviet economists worried about the rate of Soviet economic development
despite rapid improvements in living standards and the great successes of Soviet
space and military programs?

8 Was ‘Stalinism’ still alive in the Soviet Union in 1964?

9 Why did the Soviet economy need to switch from extensive to intensive forms of
growth? How could this be done?

Further reading
See bibliography:
Kerblay, Modern Soviet Society
McAuley, Soviet Politics
Nove, Economic History

In addition:
S Cohen, et al (eds), The Soviet Union since Stalin, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1980
Khrushchev Remembers, tr S Talbot, Sphere Books, London, 1971
M McCauley (ed), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism, Macmillan, London, 1987
R and Z Medvedev, Khrushchev: The Years in Power, Norton, New York and London, 1978
R Medvedev, Khrushchev, Blackwell, Oxford, 1982

Endnotes
1 Svetlana Alliluyeva, Letters to a Friend, Hutchinson, London, 1967, p 14
2 ibid, pp 19-20
3 T Zaslavskaya, The Second Socialist Revolution, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990,
p 27
4 A Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 3rd edn, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992, p 333.
This is the most useful source for the economic changes of this period, and much of the
economic information in the rest of this chapter comes from it.
5 SG Wheatcroft, ‘More light on the scale of Repression and excess Mortality in the Soviet
Union in the 1930s’, in JArch Getty & RT Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p 300
6 R Medvedev, Khrushchev, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1982, p 64; and R and Z Medvedev,
Khrushchev: The Years in Power, Norton, New York and London, 1978, p19
7 Khrushchev Remembers, tr S Talbot, Sphere Books, London, 1971, pp 301-3
co See Medvedev, Khrushchev, p 83; and R & Z Medvedev, Khrushchev: The Years in Power, p 19
9 M Matthews, Soviet Government: A Selection of Official Documents on Internal Policies, Jonathan
Cape, London, 1974, pp 180-81
10 M McCauley, ‘Khrushchev as Leader’, in M McCauley (ed), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism,
Macmillan, London, 1987, p 13
11 M McCauley, The Soviet Union since 1917, Longman, London, 1981, p 170
12 The speech is available in Khrushchev Remembers, Dmytryshyn, USSR, and elsewhere
13. Medvedev, Khrushchev, p 212
14 cited in Medvedev, Khrushchev, p 118
15 This scene is described in Medvedev, Khrushchev, p 118
REFORMING THE STALINIST SYSTEM, 1953 TO 1964 337

16 cited from Khrushchev’s memoirs, in Medvedev, Khrushchev, p 119

17 McCauley, ‘Khrushchev as Leader’, p 21
18 Medvedev, Khrushchev, p 212. Both were rehabilitated at last in June 1988.
19 McCauley, The Soviet Union, p 187
20 Medvedev, Khrushchev, p 245
21 cited by R C Nation, Black Earth, Red Star: A History ofSoviet Security Policy, 1917-1991, Cornell
University Press, Ithaca, 1992, p 242, from a 1988 article in Ogonek, 20 (Oct 1988), p 27
Pa: Nove, Economic History, p 343
23 M Feshbach & A Friendly, Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege, Basic Books, New
YOrk, 1992; p32
24 D Lane, The End of Social Inequality? Class, Status and Power under State Socialism, Allen &
Unwin, London, 1982, p 57
25 Medvedev, Khrushchev, p 245
26 cited from Medvedev, Khrushchev, pp 217-18
23 D A Dyker, Restructuring the Soviet Economy, Routledge, New York, 1992, p 43
28 ibid, p 43
29 Nove, Economic History, p 352
30 Nation, Black Earth, Red Star, p 242
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CONSOLIDATION,
STAGNATION AND CHANGE,
1964 TO 1982

Khrushchev’s successors promised stability, particularly to the Soviet ruling group. This
commitment helps explain the appearance of immobility that the Soviet Union
presented to the rest of world in the 1970s and early 1980s. Yet appearances were
deceptive. Beneath the surface, changes were taking place over which the leadership
had little control. Educational levels rose, while popular susceptibility to propaganda
fell. Increasingly, public conformity hid private cynicism. Abroad, technological
revolutions in electronics and other fields widened the gulf between Soviet productivity
levels and those of the leading capitalist countries. They also increased the burden of
defence. Meanwhile, the rate of growth of the Soviet economy slowed.
The post-Khrushchev leadership offered few solutions to these problems. They may
not even have understood how serious they were. Like the government of Nicholas I in
the early nineteenth century, that of Brezhnev persisted with traditional, autocratic
methods of rule, avoiding the many problems for which it had no solutions.

THE RULING GROUP

Political elites: the Stalin generation
With Khrushchev gone, the positions of first secretary and chairman of the Council of
Ministers were split. Leonid Brezhnev. (1906-1982) became first secretary of the
Central Committee Secretariat. Aleksei Kosygin (1904-1980) became chairman of the
Council of Ministers. Brezhnev and Kosygin represented a distinctive generation of
Soviet politicians and the features of that generation explain much about the politics
of the Brezhnev era.
Talk of a distinct ‘generation’ of politicians is often merely metaphorical. Usually, a
steady, gradual turnover blurs the lines between generations. However, in Soviet
history the lines between generations of political leaders were drawn unusually sharply,
for the catastrophes of revolution, civil war, and the purges destroyed entire cohorts of
politicians. The impact of the purges was particularly striking. It removed from the
CONSOLIDATION, STAGNATION AND CHANGE, 1964 TO 1982 339

upper levels of government most of the old Bolsheviks, the leaders of the pre-
revolutionary Party. Most of these had came from the intelligentsia. Those who
replaced them were very different. Many came from a very specific group of politicians,
the vydvizhentsy, whose origins are described in Chapter eleven. These were young,
working class communists who had undergone crash training courses in the early 1930s
as the government tried to create a new, ‘Red’ intelligentsia.
In retrospect, the most striking thing about this group of politicians is that they
survived. There were smaller purges after the 1930s, but never again did an entire layer
of politicians vanish. As a result, many who rose through the system in the purge era
stayed there until the 1980s. The experiences of this generation of politicians were to
have a profound impact on Soviet society. Its members dominated Soviet politics for
almost fifty years. They also set the tone of Soviet official life, shaping official ideologies,
official moral and cultural attitudes, and official attitudes to the outside world. Because
their experiences were so distinctive, it is possible, with only slight exaggeration, to
compile a collective biography of this group of politicians.
There was a clear difference in age between the ‘Stalin’ generation and the
‘Leninist’ generation that they replaced. Most members of the Stalin generation were
born in the first decade of the twentieth century, while most members of Lenin’s
generation were born in the 1870s and 1880s. There was also a striking class difference.
Most leading politicians of the Leninist generation came from the intelligentsia, but
members of the Stalinist generation came from the proletariat or the peasantry. In
part, this was a matter of policy. In the 1920s the Party deliberately recruited from the
proletariat and peasantry. It chose the vydvizhentsy, in particular, for their class
background. Their working class background explains their lack of formal education.
Few had completed secondary education, and hardly any had tertiary education of any
kind before the crash courses of the early 1930s. Some members of the Stalin
generation had barely completed primary education.
We can take as an example a member of this generation who never quite rose to the
very top: N. S. Patolichev (1908-1989). Patolichev was born into a peasant family. His
father served in the army and died fighting in the Civil War. Patolichev went to his
village school, but did not complete primary education. At the age of sixteen he began
to work in a chemical plant, where he undertook an apprenticeship. Here he joined
the Komsomol and in 1928 he became a member of the Party. He took part in the
collectivisation drive in 1930. In 1931, as part of the vydvizhentsvo, he entered the
Mendeleev Chemical—Technological Institute in Moscow.’
Tertiary training and the purges opened dazzling opportunities for working class
Party members like Patolichev. To seize them, they had to be ready to work hard, to
take some risks, to cut some corners, and, most important of all, to obey orders. By
1939 Patolichev, who was still only thirty-one, became the regional Party secretary in
the important industrial province of Yaroslav. As a regional Party secretary, he now
belonged to the group of 400 to 500 top politicians who controlled Soviet society. In
the late 1940s he entered the Secretariat of the Central Committee. In the early 1950s,
he became a candidate member of the Presidium/Politburo. In 1958, he became
Soviet minister of foreign trade, and he retained this post until 1985, when Gorbachev
assumed office.
The life experiences of this entire generation shaped their psychology and outlook.
They entered adulthood and began political activity during the years of revolution and
to
civil war. This was a savage introduction to politics, and it explains their readiness
accept the brutal political methods of Stalinism. It also explains why they naturally
340 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

experienced politics as conflict rather than as negotiation. Unlike members of the

Lenin generation, few from the Stalin generation had travelled abroad or learned
foreign languages. Their first experience of international politics was during the Civil
War, when foreign troops had invaded Soviet Russia at a time of extreme weakness.
The crises of the Civil War also imbued them with a strong sense of national weakness.
These early experiences made it natural for them to see themselves as members of a
besieged garrison. Their limited education also shaped their approach to Marxism. For
them Marxism was a set of instructions for building a better society. Few members of
the Stalin generation had much patience for the ideological subtleties of Lenin’s
generation.
Their experiences in the 1930s also shaped them as politicians. As emerging
politicians, most took part in collectivisation, and then tackled the task of building an
industrial economy and a powerful defence establishment from scratch. They learnt
the brutal methods of mobilisation that characterised the Stalinist industrialisation
drive. They also learned that these methods worked. During the Great Patriotic War,
they turned to the same methods. In the 1950s and 1960s, when faced with the very
different problem of economic reform, they did so once again. The success of the
industrialisation drive, and victory over Nazi Germany, combined with the success of
their personal careers ensured that they would think positively of the Stalinist era.
Despite the dangers they had faced, for them the Stalin years were a time of national
and personal triumph. Though they willingly removed the more extreme features of
Stalinism under Khrushchev’s leadership in the 1950s, none had any reason to
dismantle the entire system. Nor did they have any interest in probing too deeply into
the blunders and crimes of collectivisation or the purges, for most were deeply
implicated in these events.
Finally, despite their lack of education and their working class origins, they found
themselves in control of Soviet cultural life. The heritage of Russian culture was
something many approached with the reverence of those whose childhood
experiences left little room for high culture. They treated cultural life with a stuffy
combination of reverence and utilitarianism that set the tone of official culture for
many decades.
When they rose to the top of the Soviet political system, members of the Stalin
generation were still young. The average age of those who entered the Politburo in
the late 1930s was forty-three. The average age of newly appointed ministers in this
period was only thirty-six.* With little further turnover at the very top of Soviet political
life, members of the Stalin generation grew old in office. By 1980, the average age of
Politburo members was seventy; that of the Secretariat was sixty-seven; while that of the
Council of Ministers was sixty-five.’ When Khrushchev fell from office, most members
of this generation were already old. They could no longer provide the dynamic,
creative leadership needed by a society very different from that which had shaped them
as politicians. This helps explain the most important aspect of policy-making in the
Brezhnev years: its immobility. Now, at last, members of the Stalin generation could
enjoy in peace the powers and privileges that many doubtless believed they had earned
in a lifetime of dangerous and exhausting political service.
Leonid Brezhnev’s style of leadership during his period as general secretary (1964—
82) set the tone. Unlike Khrushchey, he was a consensus politician. Where Khrushchev
had launched political initiatives without preparing his colleagues, Brezhnev took
decisions only after careful consultation. For several years, he proved a competent,
benign and dull manager of the affairs of the ageing Soviet ruling elite.
 CONSOLIDATION, STAGNATION AND CHANGE, 1964 TO 1982 341

This dacha in Peredelkino, outside Moscow, belonged to the writer, Boris Pasternak.

Nomenklatura and the ruling group

Stability at the top encouraged immobilism at lower levels of the ruling group. Despite
the loss of some of their privileges under Khrushchev, the nomenklatura still enjoyed a
distinctive lifestyle. In 1973, when the average monthly wage was 130 roubles, only
227 000 people received more than 500 roubles a month. A Party first secretary
received about 900 roubles, while directors of large enterprises earned anything from
450 to 600 roubles. A Marshal of the Soviet Union (the highest Soviet military rank),
received as much as 2000 roubles.’ However, in a society in which market forces played
a subordinate role, cash incomes were only a partial guide to the distribution of wealth.
Most upper class privileges depended less on high incomes than on better access to
scarce goods. These might include better quality housing and medical care, easier
travel and holidays, and access to high-quality foreign goods, purchased in special
shops. As a character in a Soviet novel, put it: ‘Money is rubbish. Power gives the right
to everything.”
The elite also saw itself as separate from the rest of Soviet society. It had good reason
to resist changes that might undermine its position. Arkady Shevchenko, a high-
following
ranking Soviet diplomat who defected to the United States in 1978, offers the
description of the nomenklatura class, to which he had also belonged.

Document 14.1: the nomenklatura hierarchy

enjoy varying
Nomenklatura is a caste system that applies only to the elite class. Its many levels
or restriction
degrees of privilege according to rank. For Politburo members there is no limit
342 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

on privileges. Below this level the grading structure begins. The Central Committee defines
the place of anyone eligible for inclusion in the various categories: high party apparatchiki,
Cabinet ministers, diplomats or individuals with unusual abilities or exceptional talents such
as artists, scientists, Olympic champions and the like. Factory workers, farmers, engineers,
lawyers, doctors, store managers and other private citizens are excluded.
Members of the elite have extensive privileges: high salaries, good apartments, dachas
[privately owned holiday homes], cars with chauffeurs, special railway cars and
accommodation, VIP treatment at airports, resorts and hospitals off limits to outsiders,
special schools for their children, access to stores selling consumer goods and food at
reduced prices. They live far removed from the common man and, indeed, have to go out of
their way if they wish to rub elbows with the less exalted. The highest group in the
nomenklatura is separated from most citizens by a
barrier as ‘psychologically imposing as the Great
Wall of China. This class constitutes virtually a
state within a state.
Those designated under the system number
many thousands. They form the backbone of the
status quo in the governmental and societal
structure. They will permit no one to transform
that society or alter its foreign or domestic policy
in any way that may affect their perquisites. It is no
small irony to know that this fossilized elite
controls the nation that calls on other countries
to renounce stability for revolution, to give up
privilege for the blessings of proletarianism.®

Higher living standards shielded the

nomenklatura elite from the problems of
ordinary Soviet citizens. Their privileges
depended more on their connections than on
their productivity or efficiency. The failures of
ae"
the economy affected them much less than
ordinary citizens and blinded them to the
The world of the nomenklatura. Members of the Academy of
difficulties faced by those they ruled.
Sciences relaxing in Leningrad.
The existence of this group justifies the
claim that there existed a ruling group in Soviet
society. However, for all its privileges, this
group was not as privileged or as distinct from the rest of society as the ruling groups
of most capitalist societies. Although privileged parents could pass on some of their
privileges to their children, they had to do so informally, exploiting connections and
friendships. (Soviet colloquial usage referred to these connections as blat, a term
originally used by criminals. Under Stalin, it was sometimes said that ‘blat is more
powerful than Stalin’.) Besides, even including the many non-monetary privileges of
the elite, their average incomes were only five to eight times the average wages in the
1970s. The equivalent ratio for the United States was at least twelve times.’ Part of the
reason for this was that the egalitarian traditions of socialist ideology still carried weight
in Soviet society. These traditions, reinforced by traditional peasant attitudes, inhibited
the conspicuous display of wealth so apparent in capitalist societies.
 CONSOLIDATION, STAGNATION AND CHANGE, 1964 TO 1982 343

SOCIAL CHANGE, DISSIDENCE AND THE LOSS OF

LEGITIMACY
Social and educational changes
If the experiences of the Stalin generation, and the privileges of the nomenklatura
explain the immobility of government policy in this era, the changes that occurred at
lower levels of Soviet society explain why immobility was so inappropriate a
governmental strategy.
Soviet society changed greatly in the post-Stalin era, becoming more urbanised and
better educated. By the 1970s, the Brezhnev generation was presiding over a society
very different from the ill-educated society of peasants they had ruled in the 1930s.
When members of the Stalin generation first rose to power, they ruled a peasant
country in a period of chaotic change. In the early 1920s, no more than sixteen per
cent of the Soviet population lived in cities.* The cities themselves, particularly the
smaller ones or the outer suburbs of the larger ones, often looked like overgrown
villages, and most of those who worked in them came from the countryside. Even in
the 1960s, the childhood memories of most Soviet citizens were of the countryside, the
village, and the peasant household.
In the 1930s, the urban population doubled from twenty-six to fifty-six million.’ Most
of the newcomers were peasants. As a result, rapid urbanisation led to a ruralisation of
Soviet cities. The disorientation so many experienced in the 1930s was, in part, the
disorientation of peasants uprooted from the familiar world of the village. At Stalin’s
death, Soviet society was still, culturally speaking, a society of peasants, ruled by a thin
layer of city-dwellers. In their attitudes and outlook, even most urban dwellers still
thought and behaved as peasants. Though they now worked in factories, most still
engaged mainly in physical work. Even in 1959, eighty per cent of Soviet workers
engaged in manual labour, either in the towns or on farms.
In the 1950s and 1960s new waves of migrants entered the towns. The urban
population rose from forty-nine per cent of the Soviet population in 1959, to sixty-five
per cent in 1972, and seventy per cent by 1985.'° Between 1959 and 1980, the number
of cities with over 100 000 inhabitants grew from 123 to 251." By the 1970s, the Soviet
Union was a country of cities and urban dwellers. It was also a country in which more
and more people engaged in brain work. By the mid-1980s, brain workers and officials
(described in Soviet literature as the ‘intelligentsia’) made up almost forty per cent of
the urban work force. Manual workers made up almost sixty percent of the total work
force, while collective farmers accounted for no more than five per cent.”
Education played a major role in changing the nature and outlook of the Soviet
population. While levels of illiteracy fell sharply in the Stalin years, educational levels
remained low. Even in 1959, ninety-one per cent of urban workers and ninety-eight
per cent of collective farm peasants had no secondary schooling. This meant they had
completed no more than four years of primary schooling. By 1984 only nineteen per
cent of manual workers had no secondary education.’”* These figures reflect a quiet,
but profound, cultural revolution in Soviet society. While the peasant manners and
outlook of a Khrushchev or a Brezhnev continued to dominate at the top of the system,
below them there emerged a sophisticated and highly educated modern society. By
highly
the 1970s and 1980s, the Stalin generation had less and less to offer a modern,
urbanised and highly educated society.
344 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Dissidence and the loss of legitimacy

The results of this mismatch between the Soviet government and its changing
populations appeared most clearly in the realm of ideology. In the 1930s, the highly
simplified Stalinist version of Marxism offered an intellectual handhold to peasants
and workers caught up in the whirlwind of industrialisation and then of war. Its very
simplicity had the power to inspire. So did its incantational quality, and its growing
Nationalism, particularly during the war. But as educational levels rose, the appeal of
so simplistic a set of ideas faded. For scientists, engineers, economists and journalists
faced with the increasingly complex society of the 1970s, the old Stalinist formulae
meant less and less. University students found compulsory courses in Dialectical
Materialism tedious and insulting. Meanwhile,
the partial relaxation of censorship under
Khrushchev appeared to promise greater
intellectual freedom to the growing numbers
of the Soviet intelligentsia. -
Under Khrushchev’s successors, the ideo-
logical thaw came to an abrupt halt. Afraid of
undermining their own legitimacy by criticism
of the Stalin years, Khrushchev’s successors
adopted a more positive attitude to Stalin. In
1965 the government arrested and tried two
writers, Yulii Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, for
publishing abroad articles critical of the Soviet
Union. Early in 1966, courts condemned them
to terms of five to seven years in labour camps.
In 1967 the government insisted on the
dismissal of A. M. Nekrich, a military historian
who published a book critical of Stalin’s
handling of the war. Censors withdrew his
book, 22 June 1941, from circulation. With the
help of the KGB, the government began to
clamp down on dissident members of the
intelligentsia.
Dissidents responded with samizdat or ‘self-
publishing’. Readers of dissident works made
extra copies before passing them on to others,
so that copies multiplied like chain letters. The
other option was tamizdat or publication
Disillusioned with Marxism, many people turned to religion. abroad. A samizdat journal, the Chronicle of
This photograph is of one of the few monasteries that was
never closed, the Pechory (‘Caves’) monastery near Pskov.
Current
:
Events,: began to appear in 1968 and
The photo was taken in the late 1970s. survived despite KGB harassment until 1982.
Also in 1968, the nuclear physicist Andrei
Sakharov (1921-1989) published his mani-
festo, Reflections on Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom. Though it gained much
coverage in the Western press, the conflict that began between government and
intellectuals had little resonance beyond the government and the more highly
educated sectors of Soviet society. In the same year, the government prosecuted
Alexander Ginzburg and Iurii Galanskov for illegally publishing material on the Daniel
CONSOLIDATION, STAGNATION AND CHANGE, 1964 TO 1982 345

and Sinyavsky trial. Just over 700 people signed public protests against this trial. Of
these, fifty per cent were academics or students. Another twenty-two per cent were
engaged in the arts, thirteen per cent were engineers and technicians, and nine per
cent were doctors, lawyers, teachers, journalists or employees of publishing houses.
Only six per cent were workers."
Despite the isolation of the intelligentsia, their prolonged battle with censorship
marked a profound change in Soviet cultural life. In the 1930s and 1940s, official
ideology had mobilised the support of much of the emerging Soviet intelligentsia. By
the 1970s, it could not longer do so. Increasing numbers of educated Russians began
to treat official propaganda with disdain. Even those who did not engage directly in
dissident activity became cynical about the promises and achievements of the Soviet
government. Increasingly, members of the intelligentsia lived double lives. Outwardly
conformist, inwardly they despised rulers whose competence and education no longer
matched that of the society they ruled. By the late 1970s, there had reappeared the
sort of gulf between government and educated society that had so weakened Tsarist
governments in the early twentieth century.
After the appointment of Yu. V. Andropoy (1911-84) as head of the KGB in 1967,
the secret police conducted the struggle against dissident opinion with efficiency and
skill. With little popular support, dissident attempts to organise, though heroic, could
not succeed for long. By the early 1980s, it seemed that the KGB had won the battle. In
retrospect, Andropoy’s was a hollow victory. He had merely driven dissident opinion
underground. The powerful machinery of persuasion that the Soviet government had
controlled for so long seemed to be losing its potency. As Andropov crushed the
dissident movement, the liberal, critical and reformist views they had defended spread
amongst the educated. One of the greatest shocks of the early Gorbachev years was the
discovery that dissident opinion had become the orthodoxy even within the
nomenklatura. Many of Gorbachev’s early pronouncements said officially what
dissidents had been saying, at the risk of imprisonment and exile, since the 1960s.

Declining living standards, rising disillusionment

The disillusionment of the intelligentsia was one expression of a wider demoralisation
in Soviet society at large. There were practical reasons for popular disillusionment in
the Brezhnev years. The post-Stalin government had struck a new social contract with
the Soviet population. The expectation of rising standards combined with secure
employment and a cheap and extensive welfare network was part of the deal. To keep
some popularity the government had to hold to its side of the bargain.
There is no doubt that it tried hard to do so, sometimes at great cost. Low
agricultural productivity meant that in the 1970s it could maintain supplies of meat
only by importing grain for cattle feed. Combined with increasing subsidies to other
areas of agriculture, this meant that agriculture, instead of being a source of investment
funds, became a drain on the budget. Keeping prices of basic consumer goods low was
and
also costly. Subsidies on the retail price of transportation, of books, on rents
domestic electricity, consumed a growing portion of the state budget.
Though living standards kept rising, Soviet consumers got poor value from this
massive and growing expenditure. After the sharp improvements in living standards in
the 1950s and 1960s, improvements in living standards began to slow down. Prices
farm produce and
stayed low in the state sector, but free market prices for collective
black market goods rose steadily. Even some official prices rose as the government
346 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

withdrew cheap, low grade products and substituted more expensive goods supposed
to be of higher quality. (In the early 1970s, there appeared a new, and more expensive
brand of vodka called EKSTRA. Older, cheaper brands soon vanished from the shops.
Consumers discovered that the new brand was in reality of inferior quality. Some
claimed that ‘EKSTRA’ stood for ‘Ekh! Kak Sud’ba Tyazhela Russkogo Alkogolika, or ‘Oh,
how sad is the fate of the Russian alcoholic!’) Official indices showed a seven per cent
rise in the cost of living between the 1950s and the late 1980s. Soviet scholars have since
estimated that the real increase was at least 100 per cent.”
Levels of consumption continued to rise throughout this period. Consumer
durables such as televisions and fridges became common. More and more people lived
in separate, rather than communal apartments. However, the rate of growth of
consumption fell after the heady rises of the 1950s. Between 1966 and 1970, per capita
consumption ofall goods and services rose at 5.1 per cent each year. In the early 1970s
the rate fell to 2.9 per cent, and by 1981 it had fallen to 1.8 per cent.'° As productivity
fell in agriculture, supplies of food became more erratic from the mid-1970s. This led
to periodic shortages of particular foods and the occasional resort to local rationing.
So serious was the food situation that one of the last initiatives of Brezhnev’s career
was a major program to improve food supplies, launched in 1982.
As important as the slowdown in the improvement of living standards, was the
perception of decline. Increasing knowledge of conditions in the industrialised
capitalist countries, and increasing contacts with western tourists and western
consumer goods, were disillusioning. They persuaded many Soviet citizens that their
living standards lagged well behind those in the west. The experiences of the

+ KOHMSHKSN—
cv SME

The railway station at the resort town of Sukhumi, Georgia, in the late 1970s. The slogan
reads: ‘Communism—the bright future of all humanity.’
CONSOLIDATION, STAGNATION AND CHANGE, 1964 TO 1982 347

sociologist, Tatyana Zaslavskaya, are typical, though she encountered the West earlier
than most Soviet intellectuals.

My first trip abroad took place at this ttime—to Sweden in 1957. It made a very great
impression indeed on me; before me was another, a different way of life, people with
different values, needs, opinions, and different ways of organizing the economy and
solving social problems. This experience not only broadened my mental outlook, it
threw additional light on our own domestic problems. My own personal impressions
shattered the idea I had been given that the life of working people in the West
consisted mainly of suffering. We saw that, in fact, the countries of the West had in
many instances overtaken us and we had lively discussions about ways of overcoming
our own weaknesses.!”

Attempts to compare Soviet consumption levels with those in other industrialised

countries are extremely difficult. For what they are worth, they suggest that even in the
late 1970s, average per capita consumption levels in the USSR were no more than one-
third the levels for the USA. Comparisons over time suggest that: ‘Although the gap
between Soviet living standards and those of Western industrial societies narrowed
during the 1960s, in the 1970s it began to widen’.’* The trouble was, in part, that the
successes of the 1950s had created rising expectations. As an American observer put it:
‘Nothing fails like success: the regime’s earlier success, its welcome promise to provide
the good life, generated even greater expectations and contributed to the current
perception of failure’.””
Harder to measure are the continued frustrations of daily life in Soviet society.
Shopping remained a nightmare. Shoppers, mainly women, had to spend hours in

@
* &
> , *

Queuing, late 1970s.

348 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

queues every day to obtain the most basic foodstuffs. The absence or poor quality of
labour-saving devices in the home ensured that housework remained exceptionally
burdensome. Crowded transportation and poor quality créches made day-care a
torment. The following is from an interview with Liza, a twenty-eight year old single
parent and editor in a publishing house. The interview was recorded in 1978. When
asked how she had spent the previous day, she began:

Document 14.2: a mother’s journey to work in Moscow

| woke at six, pulled my child out of bed, packed a bag full of stuff for the whole week, and
then he and | took off for the subway. The two of us were practically knocked down. A
woman was sitting and reading and wouldn’t give up her seat, even though my son was
squashed against the doors. He almost fell on her, and |tightened my grip to keep him from
falling and getting hurt. . . . It took us fifty minutes to get to the day-care center.
| took him inside and undressed him and then | had to rush off to work. He cried, ‘Mama,
| don’t want to stay here. | want to go home.’ | said, ‘Emil, sweetheart, please stay in the day-
care center now. I'll come and get you soon. I'll pick you up on Friday.’ And yesterday was
Monday. It was terrible, but | had to hurry off to work.
| left him crying. The teachers took him by the arm and brought him over to the group
because | couldn’t stay to comfort him. | picked up my things and put my shawl over my
head. Outside it was still rush hour. And | was going to the opposite end of Moscow. It was
another hour’s trip, and | was already late for work.”

Soviet society had promised women much. It gave them full legal equality and equal
wages. By the end of the Great Patriotic War, as many women were in paid employment
as men. This was liberating for some women, but not for all. Without any increase in
the willingness of Soviet men to share domestic burdens, full employment simply
meant that Soviet women took on a grinding double burden. This ensured that women
could not climb as high as men in most professions. Women did most of the manual
labour on farms, while men drove tractors and harvesters and sat in directors’ offices.
Women made up eighty-five per cent of those employed in medicine, but only fifty per
cent of those in leading positions. So, despite formal equality in wages, average
women’s wages were only sixty-five per cent those of men in the early 1980s. Perhaps
most important of all, women did not control the levers of power. Women accounted
for only twenty-seven per cent of Party members in the late 1970s, and only four
percent of local and regional Party secretaries and Central Committee members.
Before 1985, only two women served at the very pinnacle of power. Ekaterina Furtseva
(1910-1974) was the only woman ever appointed to the Presidium. Aleksandra
Kollontai was the only woman ever appointed as a Soviet ambassador.?!
Tatyana Zaslavskaya was one of only five members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Yet, despite her success, she paints a bleak portrait of the life of Soviet women. Her
account also suggests how little impact western feminism had on women’s attitudes in
the Soviet Union before the late 1980s.

Document 14.3: women’s work

It would seem that the high level of employment of women in social production is socially
unjustified. It has had a negative effect both on the birth rate and on the upbringing of children.
CONSOLIDATION, STAGNATION AND CHANGE, 1964 TO 1982 349

In the towns, and now sometimes in the villages as well, the one-child family is becoming the
prevalent model, which does not even ensure that the population reproduces itself and is
damaging to the upbringing of children in a family. Social habits are being lost, together with
the custom of sociable work done together and help given by older siblings to the younger
ones, which are characteristic of families with several children.
What then is the cause of the very high level of employment of women which forces them
to a certain extent to neglect their social and family functions? In the first instance, it is the
low wages paid to men, most of whom cannot today maintain a family on their own, even for
the few years that the children are growing up. It must be added that non-working women,
even those with children, have a low status in the eyes of most people. A woman is regarded
as a complete individual, not inferior in any way to a man, and therefore obliged to have a
profession and to work. Of course, women themselves have developed the need to work
and to have social contacts at work, and to belong to a particular group of workers. .. . [Yet]
Sociological research has shown that, given the choice, up to 40 per cent of women would
give up full-time employment and would prefer to work part-time. To make this possible,
however, men’s wages must be raised.”

One of the most worrying signs of changing living standards was the deterioration
in general levels of health. In the late 1970s, researchers in the West began to realise
that many indicators of public health that had improved steadily throughout Soviet
history, had begun to deteriorate. Between 1950 and 1971, deaths during the first year
of life had fallen from 80.7 per thousand to 22.9 per thousand. Then they started to
rise once again. By 1987 they had risen to 25.4 per thousand, though real rates may
have been higher.” The Soviet Union appears to be the only industrialised country in
which there has been such a sharp reversal in rates of infant mortality. At the same
time life expectancy for Soviet males dropped from 66.1 years to 62.3 between 1960
and 1980, while the equivalent figures for the USA were, respectively, 66.8 and 70.4.
Among adults of working age, death rates rose by twenty per cent between 1970 and
1989, from 399 per thousand to 480.25
To some extent these changes reflect better reporting of mortality. However, there
can be little doubt that, particularly in the late 1970s, there was a real decline in health
standards. Many factors account for this shocking change. It reflected the poor training
of doctors, inadequate medical equipment and drugs, pervasive alcoholism, poor diets,
poor sanitation and high levels of pollution in many towns and regions of the Soviet
Union. Alcoholism was a particularly serious problem. This was hardly surprising, for
the Soviet government, like the Tsarist government before it, continued to raise huge
revenues from alcohol sales. In 1980, alcoholic drinks accounted for twenty-two per
cent of the total value of all consumer goods produced.”
By the 1980s, Soviet citizens had good reason to feel that the government was not
keeping its side of the social contract negotiated in the 1950s. This added to the
cynicism and demoralisation caused by the government’s oppressive handling of
ideological matters. By the early 1980s, the Soviet system could no longer count on the
support of most of its citizens. The patriotic, optimistic tone of life in the 1950s had
given way to a pervasive sense of despair. The government’s loss of legitimacy meant
that, like the Tsarist government in the early twentieth century, its power rested,
no
increasingly, on the bureaucracy and the police. The social contract of the 1950s
longer sustained it.
350 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

ECONOMIC STAGNATION
Symptoms of crisis: the economic slowdown
The clearest sign that the Soviet government was not coping with its many economic
problems, was a slowdown in growth rates. Until the late 1950s Soviet growth rates had
been impressive. On the basis of these rates, Khrushchev had predicted that the Soviet
economy would overtake that of the USA during the next few decades. However, Soviet
growth rates began to decline precisely in the late 1950s. Improvements in the
efficiency and overall productivity of the economy also slowed. Sluggish improvements
in labour productivity were in some ways the most worrying index of all. Had not Lenin
himself written that: ‘Labour productivity is, in the last analysis, the main, the most
important factor for the victory of the new social system’.””
It is possible that the figures in Table 14.1 flatter Soviet economic performance. In
1987, two Soviet economists, V. Selyunin and G. Khanin, calculated that national
income per head of population actually fell in the early 1980s.” In 1988, Gorbachev
admitted that in recent years the appearance of economic growth had been sustained
only because of ‘trade in oil on the world market at the high prices that were
established then, and the totally unjustified increase in the sale of strong drinks. If we
look at the economic indicators of growth omitting these factors, we will see that
practically over four Five-Year Plan periods |[i.e. for two decades] there was no increase
in the absolute increment of the national income, and it even began declining in the
early eighties’.””
Meanwhile, the government’s room for manoeuvre had diminished. The social
contract negotiated in the Khrushchev years required the government to spend money
not just on heavy industry and defence, but also on consumer goods, housing and
agriculture. No longer could the government solve economic problems by diverting
resources from consumption into investment. Without a healthy rate of growth, the
government would have difficulty maintaining the huge defence establishment that
made it a superpower and the rising living standards that allowed it to rule without the
extreme coercion of the Stalin years.
Table 14.1 The slowdown—Soviet economic growth, 1951-1985 (average
annual rates of growth, official data, %)
Produced Gross Gross Labour Real
Year national indust agric prod’y in income
income prod prod industry per head

A B Cc D E
1951-55 11.4 [3.2 4.2 8.2 7.3
1956-60 a2 10.4 6.0 6.5 aw)
1961-65 6.5 8.6 abe 4.6 3.6
1966-70 7.8 8.5 3:9 6.8 5.9
1971-75 ol 7.4 they 6.8 4.4
1976-80 4.3 4.4 LZ 4.4 3.4
1981-85 3.6 30, 1.0 3.4 2.1
_ Source: Table 14.1 and Figure 14.1 based on $ White, Gorbachev in Power, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1990, p 85; figures from Narodnoe khozyaistvo SSSR 1922-1972 gg., Moscow, 1972, 56; and
Narodnoe khozyaistvo SSSR za 70 let, Moscow, 1987, pp 58-9
CONSOLIDATION, STAGNATION AND CHANGE, 1964 TO 1982 351

B —-—-- Gross industrial product

SOU) tw kine dvorabeheoes ol Na mT ET Produced national income
K ivelehaarr ite nie dts waetnteieege mi Labour productivity in industry
ee Se? p LA th Oe ae Real income per head
E 10 eae Risen Gross agricultural product
¢
a
i _— oe ee

Sarita ih Morass
ee ee | ae

° oS ata ee NO Sad shes

i PAEame (mt ws RORY oe NT OS eS NL oe eS,
SS | en Try ne ee ee ae 2

0 Note: Based on information in Table 14.1

1951-55 1956-60 1961-65 1966-70 1971-75 1976-80 1981-85

Years

Figure 14.1 Declining growth rates, 1951-85.

Diagnoses of economic stagnation

What could be done about declining growth rates?
In capitalist economies, growth occurred in long waves. During recessions pressure
increased on both entrepreneurs and workers to raise productivity. This, in turn,
encouraged the innovations that fuelled a new wave of growth. Did equivalent
mechanisms exist in the command economy of the Soviet Union? The answer of most
economists who explored the problem was that they probably did not. The
mechanisms that had generated the rapid growth rates of the 1930s could work only
once. Further growth would require new engines of growth. As early as the 1950s,
officials and economists realised that this meant moving from extensive growth to
intensive growth. How could this be done? Could the structures of the Soviet command
economy generate intensive growth as effectively as they had generated extensive
growth?
The first step to reform was to allow economists to discuss the problem. In the late
1950s, economics had reappeared as a serious discipline in Soviet Universities and
Institutes. The pioneers in these discussions were economists such as Ye. G. Liberman
(1897-1983), V. S. Nemchinov (1894-1964), L. V. Kantorovich (1912-1986) and
V. V. Novozhilov (1892-1970). Kantorovich and Novozhilov had already done
results, and
pioneering work in the 1930s. However, Stalin’s government buried their
economic
they were lucky to stay above ground themselves. The emerging signs of an
slowdown set economists a fundamental theoretical and practical challenge.
They immediately focussed on the problem of prices, for it was impossible to
did not
improve efficiency without knowing what resources really cost. Where markets
set prices by balancing supply and demand, bureaucrats had to set them. Yet planning
anything. This
officials in Moscow had no objective way of measuring the real ‘value’ of
raised the complex theoretical issue of ‘value’. Marx had insisted that value reflected
the labour that went
the labour used to produce a commodity. Estimating the value of
352 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

into production was hard enough. Yet Marx’s theory had another drawback. It
encouraged planners and managers to ignore the cost of the capital, raw materials and
natural resources also used in production, and to neglect the problem of scarcity. It
therefore encouraged the extravagant use of natural resources such as land, water and
coal.
This wasteful approach to natural resources helps explain some of the ecological
tragedies left behind by the Soviet system. In recent decades, more than fifty per cent
of all water use went to irrigation, and cotton was the main user of irrigation.” Yet,
astonishingly, farms did not pay for the water they used. Naturally, they used water
wastefully. In Central Asia, excessive water use for cotton irrigation led to an ecological
disaster. Since 1960, excessive drainage of water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya
rivers caused the Aral Sea to shrink by almost fifty per cent. In the same time, its level
fell by forty-seven feet (approximately 14.3 metres), and the amount of water draining
into it fell to one-ninth of the 1960 level.*! Water draining off poorly irrigated fields
carried into the Aral Sea high levels of salt, and high concentrations of pesticides and
fertilisers. The poor quality of drinking water in the lands around the Aral Sea caused
an increase in disease. Local doctors claimed that it was a major cause of the increase
in local infant mortality rates to double those for the rest of Soviet Union.
Poor pricing policies also made it impossible to take rational decisions about energy
use. With no Soviet market in energy, planners set prices that were insensitive to real
costs. There were some very sophisticated attempts to calculate true costs, or
‘opportunity costs’ (i.e. the costs of one source of energy in comparison to others).
However, even these came up with prices well below world prices. These misleading
calculations affected some basic decisions about energy use. Should planners continue
to use coal, or should they prefer gas and oil? Should they continue using existing oil
wells or should they invest more in exploration for gas and oil in Siberia? Without the
guidance provided by objective market prices, planners took these decisions in ways
that wasted the country’s abundant resources of energy.

With an industrial output no more than three-quarters the size of the United States
in 1975, Soviet industry used almost as much energy as did US industry. In the same
year, despite an agricultural output no more than eighty to eighty-five per cent of
the US level, Soviet agriculture used appreciably more energy than US agriculture.
Soviet automotive equipment has long had fuel efficiency.considerably inferior to
western equipment even before the rapid rise of energy costs in the 1970s.*2

For Soviet economists, the task was to find a way of pricing that placed an objective
value on labour, raw materials, capital and natural resources. Could they do this
without a return to the market? In searching for objective ways of setting prices, Soviet
economists had to rediscover, within the terminology of Marxist theory, much of the
price theory taken for granted in the economics of the capitalist world.
Arbitrary prices were one symptom of a deeper problem. The command system
encouraged waste in many ways. First, it encouraged inefficient use of existing capacity.
Planners sent draft plans to enterprises for comment. Enterprises had every reason to
negotiate plans downwards, to ease the task of fulfilling plan targets. So managers
invariably underestimated what they could produce, and their workers colluded. As a
result, managers and workers combined in a chronic ‘go-slow’. The problem was that
punishments for underfulfilment were severe (under Stalin, it could be treated as a
criminal offence), while incentives for raising productivity were weak. In a capitalist
CONSOLIDATION, STAGNATION AND CHANGE, 1964 TO 1982 353

economy, the eventual penalty for low productivity was bankruptcy. In the command
economy, this threat did not exist, for the government gained nothing from closing
down an enterprise in which it had invested effort and cash. So it continued to subsidise
thousands of loss-making enterprises. Meanwhile, managers of loss-making enterprises
or collective farms understood that if they raised productivity too much, they would
lose these subsidies.
The same mechanisms discouraged innovation. The most important sign of success
within the command economy was the ability to meet targets and occasionally overfulfil
them. (Excessive overfulfilment was dangerous for it might encourage planners to raise
plan targets next time.) Anything that disrupted the normal functioning of an
enterprise made it difficult to meet planned targets. Yet innovation was certain to
interrupt production. Installation of new plant or new production methods meant a
temporary break in production. Further breaks to deal with temporary breakdowns
were equally certain. For managers, innovation offered few advantages and many
dangers. Naturally, they put up fierce resistance to pressure from planners to introduce
new equipment or production methods.
Setting targets from above also encouraged the wasteful use of labour. Enterprises
had an incentive to underestimate labour productivity, to ensure they always had
enough labour on hand to meet planned targets. This encouraged them to hoard
labour. So did the fact that the central authorities planned and paid basic wages. This
gave managers little incentive to economise on wages. The result was that Soviet
enterprises needed workers more than most workers needed employment. Under such
conditions, it was impossible to create a disciplined and efficient work force. The
system of planned targets also affected workers directly. Workers employed to unload
bricks worked to plans that set time limits for each task. So they threw the bricks off the
truck and many broke.** Like serfdom, the command economy could make people
work hard but could not make them work efficiently.
The command system also undermined the entire notion of ‘utility’ or usefulness.
Enterprises produced goods to meet plans, not to satisfy customers. In the North
Caucasus in the 1960s construction enterprises laid drainage pipes too close to the
surface because their plans were set in metres of pipe laid. As a result, “‘backflows
occurred, and sometimes too much water was supplied, so that land had subsequently
to be drained’.3t One can give many examples of this type. Trucking companies trying
to fulfil plans measured in distances travelled, sent their trucks out empty during the
final days of a plan period. Companies producing nails had to meet targets measured
by weight. This encouraged them to use weaker alloys that increased the weight of nails,
even if the nails broke at the touch of a hammer. In technologies such as electronics,
it was even harder to devise plans that encouraged high quality products.
Problems arose not just in implementing plans. The plans themselves were also
irrational. The sheer mathematics of the problems planners faced were daunting. They
had to calculate all the inputs and outputs of thousands of enterprises producing for
solve
200 million people. In the early 1960s some argued that computerisation would
the
the problem. It is now clear that the mathematics of such a problem are far beyond
planners had to make decisions with
capacity of even the most powerful computers. Yet
ns wrong.
or without such help. In practice, they got many of their calculatio
for crucial inputs. Or suppliers
Enterprises found that the plan had not provided
produced to the wrong specifications. This, too, was a source of waste.
the plans.
The failures of planning forced enterprises and consumers to circumvent
who would get hold of
Most enterprises used the services of tolkach. These were agents
354 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

goods enterprises needed to fulfil planned targets, in return for hefty bribes. Strictly,
their activities were illegal, but the economy could not have functioned without them.
Consumers resorted to black or ‘grey’ markets of various kinds, often at considerable
cost in cash and in time. Here was one more source of waste. Both enterprises and
consumers had to spent much of their effort in circumventing the regulations of the
command economy. The pervasiveness of illegal economic activities also contributed
to the demoralisation of Soviet society by encouraging an almost universal disregard
for official laws and norms.
In short, the traditional command economy encouraged wasteful use of resources,
and the production of useless, or poor quality goods and services. No major economy,
however rich in resources, could continue to waste resources at such a rate. The main
aim of reform, therefore, was to find ways of making planners, enterprises and workers
use resources more economically and more productively.
Nemchinov warned, in 1965: ‘An economic system so fettered from top to bottom
will put a brake on social and technological progress, and will break down, sooner or
later, under the pressure of the real processes of economic life’.*

Solutions?
Diagnosing the problem was hard enough. The step from diagnosis to remedy was
harder. Certain general principles emerged from the economic debates of the 1950s
and 1960s. The most important was that the command economy would have to borrow
some of the techniques of market economies. The command economy lacked the
concern for cost-cutting and efficiency that drove the capitalist engine of growth, for
its entrepreneurs and its workers were free from competition. Enterprises did not
compete with each other for markets because they all belonged to the same,
monopolistic, state sector. Workers did not compete for work as enterprises hoarded
surplus labour so that unemployment was not a serious threat. The absence of
competition was perhaps the most fundamental difference between the command
economies of the socialist world and the market economies of the capitalist world. The
capitalist structure punished both workers and entrepreneurs for low productivity and
rewarded them both for high productivity. In the command economy, productivity
counted for little.
Most Soviet economists agreed that the command economy had to incorporate
some elements of the market economy. This idea represented a return to the realities
of the 1920s. Not surprisingly, many economists who took part in these discussions
referred to the debates of the 1920s. Many found that Bukharin, in particular, had
much of interest to say about the economics of Socialism. However, until his
rehabilitation in 1988 they had to use his ideas with discretion.*®
Any return to the use of market mechanisms meant decentralisation. Khrushchev’s
reforms had been a step in the right direction, but they had not gone far enough. In
1962, Ye. G. Liberman had argued for decentralisation to the level of enterprises.
Enterprises had to enjoy the advantages and face the penalties of budgetary autonomy
if they were to work more efficiently. Planners had to allow them more control over
their own profits; they also had to let them go bankrupt if they failed.
However, implementing such ideas was immensely difficult, for they threatened the
entire edifice of the command economy. How much independence could planners
allow enterprises? Should they be able to choose their own suppliers or decide what
they produced? Yet how could planners draw up plans if they did not know who was
CONSOLIDATION, STAGNATION AND CHANGE, 1964 TO 1982 355

producing what, or how enterprises were to get their supplies? And how could
enterprises take good commercial decisions while officials in Moscow continued to set
prices? It made little sense to give enterprises more independence unless that
independence was genuine, and they could trade with other independent enterprises.
Yet this undermined the authority of the planners. Those in the planning system and
the ministries in Moscow were bound to resist such ideas.
The dangers of reform went even deeper. Could the government grant autonomy
to enterprises without granting it to ordinary citizens? Could it continue to repress
information and ideas through censorship while encouraging enterprise managers to
take informed economic decisions? The government understood all too well that in
relaxing the centre’s grip over the economy, it would also be relaxing its grip on Soviet
culture and Soviet politics.

The Kosygin reforms

Under a government reluctant to embark once more on basic reform, the outcome of
these conflicts was, predictably, a compromise. Instead of making enterprises fully
autonomous, they would remain part of a larger command economy. However,
planning targets would change. Planners would put less emphasis on gross output or
val, and more on ‘profits’. This meant using the principle of khozraschet, or ‘self-
financing’. (This was an acronym for khozyaistvennyi raschet, or ‘economic calculation’.)
In 1963, the government began, experimentally, to place several enterprises on a
‘self-financing’ basis. This meant that their main plan target was to achieve a certain
level of profit, rather than a specific level of gross output. In addition, managers
received more control over the enterprise’s budget, and more influence over contracts
with suppliers.
In 1965, the government introduced the same principles throughout the economy.
Aleksei Kosygin, the new chairman of the Council of Ministers, presided over the
reform. It increased the number of economic decisions that enterprise managers could
take, and increased the importance of profit as a plan indicator. Managers received
more control over what they did with profits and how they controlled bonus payments.
The reform even gave managers some room to negotiate with alternate suppliers.
Simultaneously, the government began a reform of the pricing system. By introducing
interest charges and other charges on resources, this attempted to force enterprises to
use capital and resources more economically. The intention was that the new prices
would give a better indication of scarcity. Finally, a reform in 1969 gave managers
greater power to fire workers, though it also encouraged them to find these workers
new employment.
Figures on output in these years show that the decline in growth rates slowed in the
late 1960s and early 1970s. It is tempting to think that the Kosygin reforms may explain
this improvement. However, few enterprises exploited the increased flexibility the
allowed them. For example, few went outside the command economy in
reform
looking for supplies. Wholesale markets remained insignificant, accounting for only
0.3 per cent of national income in 1969.3’ The basic problem was that the reforms did
it much
so little. Enterprises remained subordinate to ministries, and ministries found
easier to judge their efforts by traditional criteria. Managers also found it easier to work
still set by
in familiar ways. The threat of bankruptcy was still remote. Most prices were
administrative decisions rather than market forces. Commands still dominated market
may owe
forces throughout the economy. The slight improvements in the late 1960s
356 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

as much to good harvests and the increased use of new energy sources such as gas and
Siberian oil, as to the economic reform.

The retreat from reform

If economic reform was to have an impact, it had to go further. Yet the post-Khrushchey
leadership lacked the energy for radical reform. Events in the late 1960s confirmed
them in their caution, and stifled any hope of genuine reform. Most important of all,
the reform movement in Czechoslovakia showed how dangerous radical economic
reforms could be for the existing political system. In Czechoslovakia economic reforms
in the mid-1960s led to rapid decentralisation of decision-making. This, in turn,
stimulated demands for liberal reforms during the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968. During
his brief period in office from January to August'1968, Alexander Dubcek abolished
censorship, established independent trade unions, and allowed the formation of non-
Communist political parties. These reforms undermined the entire command
economy. Even more important, the Czechoslovak government began to talk of leaving
the Warsaw pact. This posed a threat to Soviet security. The Soviet leadership decided
that the Czech experiment in ‘Socialism with a human face’ threatened the survival of
Communism. On 21 August 1968, Soviet troops crushed the experiment when they
led 250 000 Warsaw Pact troops into Prague.
After this experience, the government’s approach to the problem of economic
reform was more cautious. Discussion of reform continued in institutes and within the

On the outskirts of Moscow, late 1970s.

 CONSOLIDATION, STAGNATION AND CHANGE, 1964 TO 1982 357

planning bureaucracy, as discussions of serfdom had continued within the bureaucracy

of Nicholas I. However, radical solutions to the country’s economic problems had to
await the removal of the Stalin generation itself in the mid-1980s.

A SUPERPOWER IN DECLINE
Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. During the late 1960s, United
States troops took part in the prolonged civil war in Vietnam which ended only in 1975.
These events raised the level of tension between the superpowers. However, at no point
did the two powers engage in direct conflict. In the 1970s, they began to cooperate
more closely during the era of détente. Détente offered the Soviet government the
prospect of solving some of its economic problems by importing foreign technology.
However, superpower rivalry made western allies reluctant to export technology with
any possible military value. Besides, the cordiality of détente vanished in the early
1980s. The new Cold War began in 1979 with the NATO decision to station Cruise and
Pershing missiles in Europe, and the Soviet decision to send troops to Afghanistan to
prop up a beleaguered Marxist government.
Diplomatic rivalry in the Third World accompanied the cooler relations of the late
1970s. In the contest for Third World allies the Soviet government suffered from
serious strategic weaknesses. Its own economic weakness made it difficult to establish
flourishing trading and commercial links with Third World powers. Usually, Soviet aid
took the form of huge, government-to-government joint projects. This made it very
easy to sever links with the Soviet Union after a change of government, as Egypt did in
1972 and Somalia in 1977. Severing links with capitalist powers was more difficult for
these came with a whole array of public and private commercial and financial ties. The
limited scale of the Soviet economic aid program also weakened its ties with Third
World clients. In the late 1970s, the Soviet Union provided only three per cent of
foreign aid and its share of world trade with Third World countries was only five per
cent
For the Soviet government, the most threatening development in international
relations was the acceleration in the arms race. This continued despite the continuous
negotiations towards arms limitation throughout this period. By 1969 the Soviet Union
could claim equality in nuclear weaponry. Yet the initiative in most areas of research
of
and development remained with the western allies. This meant that the burden
defence was greater for the Soviet Union than for the West. The share of GNP devoted
to defence was probably at least twice as high in the USSR in the 1970s as in the USA.
period.
This makes sense, for Soviet GNP was just over half that of the USA in the same
the sophisticat ion
Technological backwardness also raised the cost of defence. Despite
was less advanced
of some Soviet military equipment, on the whole Soviet weaponry
were far less
and more costly than that of the West. For example, Soviet missiles
equivalents, so the Soviet military needed more and bigger
accurate than western
ever-increasing
weapons to be equally confident of hitting a target. Defence was placing
demands on an economy whose productivity was declining.
358 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

CONCLUSION: STAGNATION AND CHANGE

In the mid-1980s, it became customary to brand the Brezhnev era as an ‘era of
stagnation’. Everything said in this chapter suggests that this was a precise, if partial,
label. The Soviet Union suffered from what the diplomatic historian, Paul Kennedy,
has called ‘imperial overstretch’. Its economic might was inadequate for a huge
imperial power with vast international commitments.*” At the same time, it could no
longer offer the steady improvement in living conditions that had maintained popular
support for it in the 1950s and 1960s. Something had to be done. Yet the Soviet
leadership was too old and too tired to undertake reform. |
However, stagnation was only half of the story of these years. Beneath its immobile
surface, Soviet society was changing rapidly. A society of villages and peasants became
a society of cities, urban workers and intellectuals. The educational and cultural levels
of the population rose and overtook those of the Soviet leadership. The government
and its traditional methods of rule seemed less and less adequate to the tasks of the
late twentieth century.
We must not exaggerate the problems. The government remained powerful and
stable. Few doubted its capacity to control Soviet society. It could still count on great
reserves of patriotism, and many still believed in the socialist project. However, as with
the Tsarist government in the 1850s, the most perceptive observers understood that
serious problems lurked beneath the surface of the monolith. In the 1850s, a change
of leadership had brought reformist politicians to the top of the Tsarist system, and
they launched the ‘Great Reforms’ of the 1860s. In the 1980s a similar change of
leadership launched even more radical reforms in the Soviet Union.

Soviet electronic technology lagged a generation behind that of the capitalist West. Here a new computer is
being assembled in the early 1980s.
 CONSOLIDATION, STAGNATION AND CHANGE, 1964 TO 1982 359

Questions for discussion

1 Is the phrase ‘Era of Stagnation’ an appropriate description of the Brezhnev years?
2 Why was it so hard to see the changes going on beneath the surface of Soviet society
between 1964 and 1985?
3 How did the different experiences of different generations change people’s outlook
on society and political life in this era?
4 Why did Brezhnev’s generation fail to undertake serious economic reforms? Why
did they suppress dissidents?
5 What advantages did citizens of the Soviet Union enjoy in comparison with citizens
of advanced capitalist societies such as the USA or Australia? What disadvantages
did they endure?
6 Why did Soviet citizens begin to lose faith in the Socialist experiment?

Further Reading
See bibliography:
Cracraft (ed), The Soviet Union Today
Kennedy, The Rise and Fall
Kerblay, Modern Soviet Society
Nove, Economic History

In addition:
S Bialer, Stalin’s Successors: Leadership, Stability, and Change in the Soviet Union, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1980
A Brown and M Kaser, The Soviet Union since the Fall ofKhrushchev, 2nd edn, Macmillan, London,
1978
A Brown and M Kaser, Soviet Policy for the 1980s, Macmillan, London, 1982
R Byrnes (ed), After Brezhnev, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC,
1983
M Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon, Hutchinson, Rocklin, CA, 1988

Endnotes
1 S Fitzpatrick, ‘Stalin and the Making of a New Elite, 1928-1939’, Slavic Review, vol 38, no 3
(September 1979), p 386
2 SBialer, Stalin’s Successors: Leadership, Stability, and Change in the Soviet Union, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1980, p 89
3, ibid, pps3—4
4 DLane, The End of Social Inequality? Class, Status and Power under State Socialism, Allen &
Unwin, London, 1982, p 57
5 V Maksimov, The Seven Days of Creation, cited in A Nove, Political Economy and Soviet Socialism,
Allen & Unwin, London, 1979, p 203
360 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

in
Arkady N Shevchenko, Breaking with Moscow, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1985, quoted
Time, 11 Jan 1985, p 24
Lane, The End of Social Inequality?, p 58
~I M Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon, Hutchinson, Rocklin, CA, 1988, p15
eco
Oo ibid, p 31

ibid, p 31
11 ibid, p 32
12 ibid, p 51. Different sources will give slightly different figures depending on the definitions
used. Here, it is the general trends that are more important than the details.
Ils} ibid, p 47
14 figures from Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 19842, Harper & Row, New
York;,1971, p15
15 A Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 3rd edn, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992, p 388
16 G Lapidus, ‘Social Trends’, in R F Byrnes (ed), After Brezhnev, Centre for Strategic and
International Studies, Washington, DC, 1983, p 193
V7 T Zaslavskaya, The Second Socialist Revolution, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990,
pees ;
18 G Lapidus, ‘Social Trends’, p 194
19 John Bushnell, in S Cohen, et al (eds), The Soviet Union since Stalin, Indiana University Press
& Macmillan, Indiana, 1980, p 190
20 C Hansson & K Liden, Moscow Women, Allison & Busby, London, 1983, pp 4-5
21 Figures in this paragraph from M E Fischer, ‘Women’, in J Cracraft, ed, The Soviet Union
Today, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1988, pp 334-53
ay Zaslavskaya, The Second Socialist Revolution, p 95
Zo M Feshbach & A Friendly, Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege, Basic Books, New
York, 1992, pp 4-5
24 ibid, p 274
25 ibid, p 189
26 SSSR v tsifrakh v 1989 godu, Finansy i statistika, Moscow, 1990, p 7
Pa cited in M Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates, Pluto Press, 1975, p 131
28 cited in S White, Gorbachev in Power, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, p 86
29 ‘The Ideology of Renewal for Revolutionary Perestroika’, from Pravda, 19 Feb 1988, cited
fromJ L Black (ed), USSR Documents Annual 1988 Perestroika the Second Stage, Gulf Breeze,
Fla, 1989, p 27
30 See R Campbell, The Failure of Soviet Economic Planning, Indiana University Press,
Bloomington, 1992, ch 7
oil Feshbach and Friendly, Ecocide in the USSR, p 74
32 Campbell, Failure of Soviet Economic Planning, p 51
33 Lewin, Political Undercurrents, p 148
34 D A Dyker, Restructuring the Soviet Economy, Routledge, New York, 1992, p 34
35 cited in Lewin, Political Undercurrents, p 157
36 The use they made of these writings is explored in Lewin’s superb book, Political
Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates
37 Dyker, Restructuring, p 51
38 RC Nation, Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy, 1917-1991, Cornell
University Press, Ithaca, 1992, pp 272-3
39 Estimates of the size of the defence budget in the late 1980s range from 15-30 per cent. See
Ben Eklof, Soviet Briefing: Gorbachev and the Reform Period, Westview, Boulder, CO, 1989, p 100
40 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Unwin Hyman, 1988, pp 488-514
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

PERESTROIKA AND THE END OF

THE SOVIET EXPERIMENT,
stkey odLOLI USEED

By the 1980s Soviet politicians and economists understood the need for basic reforms
that would raise the level of productivity. However, they also understood that reform
would threaten the existing command economy and the political and social structures
that sustained it. When it finally came, reform
led to the collapse of the entire system created
after the October revolution. This chapter tries
to explain the complex, but mainly peaceful,
revolution that ended the Soviet experiment.

THE INTERREGNUM
Leadership changes
As in the 1850s, reform could only begin once
the older generation of politicians had gone.
The change of generations occurred between
1982 and 1985. Brezhnev died on 10 November
Brezhnev with Andropov looking over his shoulder, early 1982. For the last year or two of his life, he was
1980s. senile. He was also surrounded by scandal, as
rumours circulated of his daughter Galina’s
corrupt connections. On 12 November a plenum of the Gentral Committee elected
Yuri Andropov as general secretary.

Andropov: November 1982 to February 1984

the
Yu. V. Andropov (1914-84) is a paradoxical figure. In the West he was known as
the KGB
Soviet ambassador in Hungary during the 1956 uprising, and the head of
during its prolonged battles with dissidence. In the Soviet Union, he was known as'the
most reform-minded member of the leadership since the late 1950s. His period as head
362 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

of the KGB may have increased his sense of the need for reform for, like Nicholas I’s
police chief, Benkendorff, he gained a unique insight into the popular mood. Even
many of his opponents respected his efficiency and honesty. Those who knew him were
not surprised when, as general secretary, he embarked on a program of reform.
This program had two elements. The first was an attack on the corruption and
indiscipline that had flourished during the Brezhnev years. Andropov began to apply
to corruption the methods he had used earlier to suppress political dissidence. He
attacked corruption even amongst members of Brezhnev’s family, a gesture that the
old guard saw as an attack on the entire Stalin generation. He also attacked indiscipline
at lower levels of Soviet society. In 1983 the government launched a campaign against
absenteeism and alcoholism at work. Police began picking up pedestrians during
working hours and asking them to explain why they were not at work. These measures
broke with long-standing customs which allowed Soviet workers to shop during work
hours while colleagues covered for them. Indeed queuing was so time-consuming that
most people had to shop in work hours. Andropov’s attack on corruption and
indiscipline was part of a larger program to improve economic efficiency. In the middle
of 1983 he announced reforms that tightened success indicators and increased the
pressure on enterprises and workers to fulfil plans to the letter.
There was a second element to the Andropov reforms. Like the Kosygin reforms of
the 1960s, they tried to increase the autonomy of enterprise managers. The
government gave managers of selected enterprises greater control over their budgets,
in particular over the use of bonus funds for workers, and the disposal of profits.
Realising that discipline implied greater self-discipline, Andropov began to talk of
‘socialist selfmanagement’.
In retrospect, the Andropov reforms were far too restricted. For example, enterprise
managers found that when they tried to spend extra funds on new buildings, they could
find no one to do the construction work, as the extra work did not appear in anyone’s
plans. Andropov’s was a cautious and conservative approach to reform. Nevertheless,
it showed the government’s awareness of the need for prompt action.
Andropov was already ill when he assumed office, and he died on 9 February 1984
before the reforms could have much effect. They are important in part because they
were managed by Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-). Gorbachev had been the Central
Committee secretary in charge of agriculture since 1978. From 1982 his respon-
sibilities were broadened to include the economy as a whole, Gorbachev learned much
from Andropov’s attempts at reform. He also benefited from Andropov’s support.
Andropov had been a patron of Mikhail Gorbachev since the 1970s, and it may have
been through his influence that Gorbachev first entered the Central Committee
Secretariat in 1978. While Andropov led the Party, he was clearly grooming Gorbachev
for the succession.

Chernenko: February 1984 to March 1985

However, after Andropoy’s death, the remnants of the old guard, worried by
Andropov’s assault on their easy-going privilege, and keen to avoid instability, handed
power to one of their own. The new leader was Konstantin Chernenko (1911-85), an
old friend and client of Brezhnev’s. (A biographer of Gorbachev refers to him as
‘Brezhnev’s political valet’.)' It is likely that the various factions struck a deal. This left
Gorbachev considerable power and guaranteed him the succession once Chernenko
died.
PERESTROIKA AND THE END OF THE SOVIET EXPERIMENT, 1982 TO 1991 363

By late 1984 Chernenko was already too ill to run the country and Gorbachev
became the most influential member of the Politburo. He became the formal leader
of the Party after Chernenko’s death on 10 March 1985. The next day, a plenum of the
Central Committee elected him secretary general of the Communist Party.

The Gorbachev generation

There followed a rapid changing of the guard. Within one year, the new leadership
had replaced seventy per cent of ministers. Of the fourteen Politburo members in
March 1981, only four survived to the twenty-seventh Party Congress in March 1986.
Of the twelve member Politburo elected at the twenty-seventh Congress, five had
entered the Politburo in the year after Gorbachev came to office and another two in
1983. The new appointments included Eduard Shevardnadze (1928— ), who replaced
Andrei Gromyko (1909-1989) as foreign minister; Nikolai Ryzhkov (1929- ), who
replaced the aged Tikhonov (1905-) as prime minister; Boris Yeltsin (1931— ), who
replaced Viktor Grishin (1914— ) as head of the Moscow Party organisation; and Yegor
Ligachev (1920- ). In this way, Gorbachev cleared out the Stalin generation and those
who thought like them. He replaced them with a new generation of leaders that we
can think of as the ‘Gorbachev’ generation.
Under Gorbachev, the new leadership launched a series of basic reforms, which
came to be known as perestroika. The word means ‘rebuilding’ or ‘restructuring’. The
image, drawn from building, suggested an entire renovation of the Soviet economy and
of Soviet society. As the reforms progressed the issue became whether or not it was
possible to renovate the building at all.
To understand why the new generation of leaders launched such radical reforms, it
will help to compare their collective biography with that of the Stalin generation.
Gorbachev’s career is typical. He was born in 1931, of peasant parents, in Stavropol
province in the south. He was an adolescent during the Great Patriotic War, so his
young experiences were of a threatened, but powerful Soviet Union. Despite the
disruption of war, he completed secondary education, then went on to tertiary
education in Moscow University. He joined the Communist Party in 1952. In Moscow,
he met his future wife, Raisa Titarenko (1932-), who was completing a degree in
philosophy. She later completed a doctorate and published a book on the life of
collective farm peasants in Stavropol province.
The major political experience of Gorbachev's youth was destalinisation. After
university, he returned to Stavropol province. Here he climbed through the ranks of
the Komsomol and the Party apparatus until in 1970 he became the regional Party
secretary. Being regional secretary of a province with many resort towns, he came to
know prominent politicians such as Andropov when they holidayed in the south. In
1978 Gorbachev was summoned to Moscow to become the Central Committee
secretary in charge of agriculture. He became a full member of the Politburo in 1980.
Several aspects of this biography were typical of leading politicians of his generation.
First, most leading politicians of Gorbachev’s generation benefited from a complete
education extending to university. They were better educated and more sophisticated
than members of the Stalin generation. They lacked the rough peasant style of a
Khrushchev or a Brezhnev. This explains the surprise many westerners felt when they
encountered Soviet leaders who were sophisticated, well-educated technocrats.
Second, politicians of Gorbachev’s generation entered politics when the Soviet Union
was already a superpower. They did not experience the extreme sense of vulnerability
364 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

of those who fought in the Civil War or the early months of the Great Patriotic War.
in
They lacked the paranoias of the Stalin generation, and their extreme caution
dealing with the capitalist world. Third, the formative experience for politicians of this
generation was destalinisation. Their first political experiences were of dismantling
Stalinism rather than constructing it. As a result, they felt less inhibition about
criticising Stalin himself and the political and economic structures he had established.
The central problem of their careers was to reform an existing system, while the central
problem of the Stalin generation had been to build something from scratch. Fourth,
this meant that they spent their careers not in the brutal tasks of construction, but in
the more delicate task of improving the workings of an existing system. Their
education, their personal histories and their professional experiences ensured that
they would see efficiency as the central problem of their careers. The life experiences
of members of Gorbachev’s generation made them advocates of intensive rather than
extensive growth. Unlike their predecessors, they understood that mobilisation could
not compensate indefinitely for low productivity. .
Finally, the Gorbachev generation rose slowly through the ranks because the Stalin
generation blocked their path. They had many years to ponder the reforms the system
needed. Their formative experiences ensured they understood the need for reform.
Their relative youth gave them the energy needed to tackle reform seriously. Youth
also meant that they would have to tackle the task of economic reform in their own
lifetimes. The frustrations of not being at the top made it likely that they would move
fast.
These collective experiences explain why reform came so swiftly onto the political
agenda once the Gorbachev generation took power. The launching of perestroika was
not a personal whim of Gorbachev. It was a natural result of the emergence of a new
generation of leaders.

Generational change in Kiev, late 1970s.

 PERESTROIKA AND THE END OF THE SOVIET EXPERIMENT, 1982 TO 1991 365

THE BEGINNINGS OF REFORM: 1985 TO 1987

The need for reform
Gorbachev understood even before taking power that the root of the malaise that had
taken hold of Soviet society was the slowdown in economic growth. This is how he
described the problem in 1987.

Document 15.1: Gorbachev on the economic roots of perestroika

At some stage—this became particularly clear in the latter half of the seventies—something
happened that was at first sight inexplicable. The country began to lose momentum. ... A
kind of ‘braking mechanism’ affecting social and economic development formed. And all this
happened at a time when scientific and technological revolution opened up new prospects
for economic and social progress.
Something strange was taking place: the huge fly-wheel of a powerful machine was
revolving, while either transmission from it to work places was skidding or drive belts were
too loose.
Analyzing the situation, we first discovered a slowing economic growth. In the last fifteen
years the national income growth rates had declined by more than a half and by the beginning
of the eighties had fallen to a level close to economic stagnation. A country that was once
quickly closing on the world’s advanced nations began to lose one position after another.
Moreover, the gap in the efficiency of production, quality of products, scientific and
technological development, the production of advanced technology and the use of advanced
techniques began to widen, and not to our advantage. ...
It became typical of many of our economic executives to think not of how to build up the
national asset, but of how to put more material, labor and working time into an item to sell
it at a higher price. Consequently, for all ‘gross output’ there was a shortage of goods. We
spent, in fact we are still spending, far more on raw materials, energy and other resources
per unit of output than other developed nations. Our country’s wealth in terms of natural
and manpower resources has spoilt, one may even say corrupted, us. That, in fact, is chiefly
the reason why it was possible for our economy to develop extensively for decades.
Accustomed to giving priority to quantitative growth in production, we tried to check the
falling rates of growth, but did so mainly by continually increasing expenditures: we built up
the fuel and energy industries and increased the use of natural resources in production.
As time went on, material resources became harder to get and more expensive. On the
other hand, the extensive methods of fixed capital expansion resulted in an artificial shortage
an
of manpower. ... The inertia of extensive economic development was leading to
economic deadlock and stagnation.”

Uskorenie: traditional methods of reform

.
Like Andropov, Gorbachev began with attempts to improve discipline and efficiency
), which
These early reforms took shape under the slogan of ‘acceleration’ (uskorenie
he first mentioned at the Central Committee plenum of April 1985.
Typical of this phase was the government’s attack on alcohol abuse. Consumption
the government
of distilled liquor had steadily risen in recent decades, partly because
366 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

itself benefited from the revenues alcohol generated. In the early 1980s, alcohol sales
accounted for some thirteen per cent of the total state budget. Yet alcoholism was
extremely costly. The 4.5 million registered alcoholics in the country burdened health
and police services.’ Growing alcoholism also reduced work efficiency and caused
many industrial and traffic accidents. It lay behind the growing problem of domestic
violence and family breakdown.
On 17 May 1985, the government issued a decree reducing alcohol production and
restricting sales. Soviet embassies abroad began to offer their guests mineral water and
soft drinks, and officials privately started calling the new ‘general secretary’ the
‘mineral secretary’. In the wine-growing
regions of the south, over-enthusiastic officials
began to cut down ancient vineyards. Like
Nicholas II’s ill-fated experiment with prohi-
bition, the short-term effects of the reform were
promising. Alcohol sales fell from 14.7 billion
litres a year to 8.2.* Alcohol-related crimes and
accidents fell sharply, and hospitals found
themselves treating fewer alcoholics. However,
even in the medium-term the reform failed.
Declining revenues forced the government to
print extra money, which gave a boost to
inflation. Meanwhile, drinkers turned to illegal
distillers (samogonshchikt) or to surrogates.
Official figures reported 11 000 deaths from
consumption of illicit liquor or surrogates such
as perfume.” Soldiers in Afghanistan drank the
anti-freeze used in tank engines. Others drank
insecticides, varnish and cleaning fluids.
Perfume disappeared from the shops, and so
did sugar, the main raw material used by
samogonshchiki. In 1987 the government relaxed
the campaign, and finally abandoned it in 1989.
Vodka reappeared in state shops and foreign
embassies.
Other early reforms included the creation of
a super-ministry to deal with the many
problems of the agricultural sector. (Its name,
Gosagroprom, displayed the planners’ traditional
flair for elegant acronyms.) Another important
centralising reform was the creation, in 1986, of
A drunk in the old capital city of Suzdal, late 1970s. Gospriemka. This was a government organisation
with the power to check on the quality of goods
produced by enterprises. It replaced the
ineffective quality control sections which existed within all enterprises. These had
depended so much on plan fulfilment that, far from rejecting poor quality goods, their
main role was ‘to convince the customer that the output was acceptable despite
departures from standards and specifications’.® Gospriemka set about its work
enthusiastically. Early in 1987 it rejected up to twenty per cent of output from 1500
enterprises. This temporarily reduced industrial output. It also caused an outcry from
PERESTROIKA AND THE END OF THE SOVIET EXPERIMENT, 1982 TO 1991 367

workers and managers who lost bonuses. The high economic and political costs of real
quality control soon forced the government to cut back on the activities of the new
organisation.
These failures showed that the centre could not handle reform on its own.
Somehow, it had to stimulate enterprises and individuals to take responsibility for
improved efficiency. In a phrase first put into circulation by Tatyana Zaslavskaya, it had
to ‘mobilise the human factor’.

‘New Thinking’ in Soviet foreign policy

The burden of defence made economic reform extremely difficult. Yet the
announcement of the US Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) in 1983 suggested that in
future the defence burden would increase. The ‘star wars’ program proposed to use
the technology of the electronics revolution to neutralise the Soviet nuclear threat. To
counter the ‘star wars’ program, the Soviet government would have to spend vast sums
on computerisation and laser technology, in which it lagged behind the West. Asa
western scholar put it: ‘A nation which can outproduce the world in steel, cement and
coal is, in effect, panting along, one industrial revolution behind its major rivals, its
preponderance in conventional arms liable to be nullified by the deployment of new
weapons it cannot hope to match’.’
The alternative to a new round in the arms race was disarmament. As early as 1984,
the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, argued that the time had come to rethink
Soviet foreign policy. He suggested the need for ‘New Thinking’ on defence, in a
phrase first used by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in 1954.° Under Gorbachev,
‘New Thinking’ came to symbolise a genuine reorientation of Soviet foreign policy. It
meant recognising that in the nuclear age, and with modern communications, nations
were more interdependent than ever before. An attitude of confrontation was no
longer appropriate. In future, Soviet foreign policy would assume the need for
cooperation between the major powers to preserve the future of a common human
civilisation, and a common planetary home.
This reorientation of official attitudes made possible a reduction in the burden of
defence. From the very beginning, Gorbachev saw disarmament as an important
counterpart to internal reforms. In an interview in Time magazine in September 1985,
he said:

You ask what changes in the world economy could be of benefit to the Soviet Union.
First of all, although this belongs more to politics than economics, an end to the
arms race. We would prefer to use every ruble that today goes for defence to meet
civilian, peaceful needs. As I understand, you in the US could also make better use
of the money consumed nowadays by arms production.

Though the West reacted cautiously, Gorbachev made some serious moves towards
radical disarmament. On 7 April 1985 he announced that the Soviet Union would no
longer try to counter the NATO rearmament program in Western Europe. In August,
the Soviet Union unilaterally ended nuclear testing. Gorbachev had a first summit with
US president Reagan in November 1985, and in January 1986 he announced plans for
the abolition of all nuclear weapons by the year 2000. However suspicious western
were of his real intent, Gorbachev had transformed the issue of
governments
disarmament, and Soviet negotiators had seized the high ground in the nuclear arms
debate.
368 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

REFORMING THE COMMAND ECONOMY: 1987 TO 1989

Early economic reforms
The reform process gathered momentum between 1986 and 1989. At the twenty-
seventh Party Congress, early in 1986, the Party committed itself to a thorough
modernisation of the economy. Gorbachev announced that economic reform was ‘the
key to all our problems, immediate and long-term, economic and social, political and
ideological, domestic and foreign’.’”
The government announced its intention to decentralise economic structures.
Gosplan would concentrate more on long-term forecasting, while enterprises and
farms would be encouraged to respond to market pressures. To do this they needed
more control over their own budgets, over pricing, and over employment. The
government announced plans to relax central control of prices and to permit small
cooperative enterprises. The central idea of reform was still that of the Kosygin
reforms: the creation of autonomous enterprises, functioning on the basis of ‘full cost
accounting’ within a planned socialist economy. But the approach was much more
decisive. In 1987 Gorbachev wrote: “The essence of what we plan to do throughout the
country is to replace predominantly administrative methods by predominantly
economic methods. That we must have full cost accounting is quite clear to the Soviet
leadership’."!
In the early years of perestroika, there was much interest in NEP, for Soviet society in
the 1920s offered a model of how central planning could be combined with market
mechanisms. The comparison was appealing, for it suggested that economic growth
would occur naturally as the government relaxed its grip on the economy. This made
the task of reform appear reasonably simple. As the government relaxed its grip on
sector after sector, private initiative would take over in a smooth changeover to a
socialist market. It is no coincidence that the government rehabilitated Bukharin in
1988 and began to publish his writings.
In foreign trade the government retreated even further than Lenin had in 1921.
Ever since the revolution, the Soviet government had controlled foreign trade through
the ministry of foreign trade. From 1 January 1987 the ministry lost its monopoly. The
government permitted several other ministries and several large associations of
enterprises to trade directly with foreign countries. New regulations allowed them to
negotiate directly with foreign enterprises and to keep some of the foreign currency
they earned. Within two years the government extended these rights to all Soviet
enterprises. By early 1988, Soviet enterprises handled eighteen per cent of exports and
thirty per cent of imports directly. A second decree of January 1987 allowed the
creation of ‘joint enterprises’ with foreign companies. By the middle of 1990, there
were already more than 1800 joint ventures.'? These changes forced Soviet enterprises
to face the reality of market competition, if only, as yet, in international markets.
More cautiously, the government tried to introduce internal competition as well. In
June 1987, the government passed a new law on enterprises, replacing the laws passed
in 1965. The new law took effect from January 1988. Though the law required
enterprises to fulfil ‘state orders’, it gave them much greater freedom in deciding how
to do so. It also gave them more freedom to negotiate with other enterprises. Finally,
the law allowed for unsuccessful firms to go bankrupt. Though state orders continued
to dominate the business of most enterprises, in principle they were now more
PERESTROIKA AND THE END OF THE SOVIET EXPERIMENT, 1982 TO 1991 369

autonomous and more vulnerable. To mobilise the interests of workers within

enterprises, the law provided mechanisms by which workers could elect their directors.
New laws also permitted the creation of entirely new types of enterprises. A law that
came into effect in May 1988 allowed the formation of cooperative enterprises. These
operated largely outside the command economy, though they could supply
government enterprises, and remained subject to certain government controls.
Though most operated semi-legally, cooperatives proved much better at filling small
commercial niches than existing state enterprises. By early 1989 there were almost
80 000, mainly in service sectors such as restaurants or hairdressing.’ By early 1990
cooperatives employed more than three million workers or 2.4 per cent of the entire
work force. They accounted for about three per cent of total GNP."
Agriculture remained the most backward sector of the Soviet economy. However it
was a sector in which Gorbachev had long taken an interest. Indeed he had presided
over the cautious agricultural reforms of the early 1980s. The most original element in
these reforms was the revival of the ‘link’ method. The idea was an old one. A ‘link’
was a small group, often a family group, which assumed responsibility for a particular
piece of land or a specific agricultural task. When properly handled, the link system
gave families a real stake in more efficient farming, and some saw it as a tentative step
towards private peasant farming. Gorbachev himself had encouraged similar systems
in Stavropol province.
The 1982 reform revived the link system under the notion of ‘collective contracts’.
These allowed collective farms to grant some autonomy to small groups of farmers. The
collective farm would grant land and supplies, in return for an agreement to supply

A village on the Volga, early 1980s.

ei pee se
370 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

certain goods at contract prices. Like peasant farms under NEP, the links had freedom
to dispose of surpluses. When he became Party leader, Gorbachev tried to extend the
system of collective contracts. The government instructed the new agricultural
ministry, Gosagroprom, to encourage the system. It also tried to stimulate the activities
of private plots, which were still by far the most productive sector of agriculture. Early
reforms also gave collective farms greater freedom to dispose of produce on free
markets.
However, the new agricultural ministry turned into one more bureaucratic monster.
Its bureaucratic regulation of agriculture and the authority of local collective farm
chairmen were enough to stifle most forms of small-scale enterprise. The government
finally abolished the super ministry in 1989. .
A more important break with past practice came in October 1988, when the
government introduced the principle of leasing. New regulations allowed families to
take out long leases on plots of land. They could even pass these on to their children.
In theory, at least, this was a step towards the decollectivisation of Soviet agriculture.
In practice, collective farmers did not rush to take out leases. As under the Stolypin
reforms, many peasants feared the difficulties of independent farming. They also knew
that local collective farms and Party officials would harass them mercilessly, as their
successes would threaten the future of traditional Soviet farming methods. By early
1990, less than ten per cent of Soviet farms had allowed leases to be taken up. Part of
the problem was that in 1988 Gorbachev had put his conservative rival, Yegor Ligachev,
in charge of agriculture. Politically, this was a clever move, for it removed Ligachev
from the centre of political debate. However, it did little for the reform process in
agriculture. In early 1990, Ligachev said in an interview on British television, that he
would allow the decollectivisation of Soviet agriculture ‘over his dead body’.®
With these measures, the government had exposed the command economy to a
modest degree of external and internal competition. Yet most of the old structures
remained in place. Increasingly, the government came up against resistance from
members of the nomenklatura whose interests were bound up with the existing system.
Conservative officials and managers at all levels of government tried to strangle the
new institutions at birth. Pressure grew to restrict the activities of cooperatives. New
regulations in December 1988 excluded them from certain types of activities such as
trading in video films and forbade them to use foreign currency. Local authorities used
safety regulations to close cooperatives which competed with state businesses and retail
outlets. Enterprises trying to trade directly with foreign companies also faced many
obstacles. They found it difficult to get supplies of goods within the existing system.
Most important of all, in a financial system not geared to commerce, they found it
difficult to raise money.
There was also growing opposition to reform from the Soviet population. Any
reform that threatened to raise prices of basic consumer goods was bound to be
unpopular. This accounts, in part, for the unpopularity of cooperatives, many of which
offered improved services, but at free market prices and using corrupt methods.

Disarmament
Though normally seen as an aspect of foreign policy, it makes sense to regard
disarmament as an aspect of economic reform. Disarmament negotiations stalled after
the Reykjavik summit in 1986. However, there was more progress in 1987. The Soviet
government agreed to negotiate separately on the reduction of Intermediate Nuclear
 PERESTROIKA AND THE END OF THE SOVIET EXPERIMENT, 1982 TO 1991 371

Forces, and an INF treaty was signed in December 1987. This was the first disarmament
treaty of the nuclear age which did not simply limit the growth of nuclear weapons,
but actually reduced their numbers. The agreement planned to eliminate all nuclear
weapons in the European theatre.
In the middle of 1987, after a young German pilot, Matthew Rust, flew undetected
through Soviet air defences and landed in Red Square, Gorbachev sacked several top
Soviet commanders and replaced them with his own nominees. This reduced
resistance within the defence establishment to radical disarmament proposals. Late in
1988, at the United Nations, Gorbachev announced unilateral cuts in Soviet
conventional forces and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. The last
troops left Afghanistan a year later, in February 1989. The negotiations conducted in
this period prepared the way for the more radical cuts in nuclear and conventional
arms of the ‘START I treaty, concluded in September 1991.

Mobilising the ‘human factor’: ideological and political reform

By 1987 Gorbachev understood how important it was to mobilise support from below.
This was necessary, first to overcome resistance, and second because the success of
reform would depend on the energy and creativity of the entire population.

Document 15.2: the need for democracy

The weaknesses and inconsistencies of all the known ‘revolutions from above’ are explained
precisely by the lack of such support from below, the absence of concord and concerted
action with the masses. And, since all these things were lacking, a greater or lesser degree of
coercive pressure from above was needed. This led to deformities in the course of changes,
and hence their high socio-political and moral ‘cost’.
It is a distinctive feature and strength of perestroika that it is simultaneously a revolution
‘from above’ and ‘from below’. This is one of the most reliable guarantees of its success and
irreversibility. We will persistently seek to ensure that the masses, the ‘people below,’ attain
all their democratic rights and learn to use them in a habitual, competent and responsible
manner. Life convincingly confirms that at sharp turns of history, in revolutionary situations,
the people demonstrate remarkable ability to listen, understand and respond if they are told
the truth. This is exactly how Lenin acted at even the most trying moments after the October
Revolution and during the Civil War, when he went to the people and talked to them frankly.
This is why it is so important that perestroika maintains a high level of political and labor energy
amongst the masses.'°

In a famous article published in 1987, the economist, G. Popov, had argued that the
‘Great Reforms’ of the mid-nineteenth century had failed because the government of
Alexander II had imposed them from above, without mobilising popular support.
of the
Popov's article was called, ‘The Facade and the Reality [literally, the ‘Kitchen’
Great Reform’. In this spirit, Gorbachev began to link the success of economic reform
to the progress of political and ideological democratisation.

Glasnost’
ideas,
Abandoning the efforts of their predecessors to repress dissident thought and
the new leadership encourag ed a ferment of discussio n. As in the 1850s, it was suddenly
‘glasnost’’, or
possible to discuss topics that had long been taboo. The policy of
the distincti ve experien ces of the Gorbachev
‘openness’, reflects once more
372 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

generation, with their higher educational levels and their respect for expertise. As early
as 1984, Gorbachev insisted that: ‘Broad, up-to-date and honest information is a sign
of trust in people, respect for their intelligence and feelings, and their ability to make
sense of developments.’’” At the twenty-seventh Party Congress, early in 1986, the
government openly criticised the stagnation of the Brezhnev years.
One of the events that forced the government to become more honest with its own
population was the explosion at a nuclear plant in Chernobyl in Ukraine, on 26 April
1986. During the two critical days after the explosion, no one would admit anything.
This hindered the process of evacuation, and hid the dangers from those at home and
abroad affected by the huge cloud of radiation that issued from the crippled reactor.
The decision to publish honest information about the disaster, after the initial delays,
was itself a breakthrough in a country whose government had long suppressed news of
major disasters.
In 1987, more and more subjects entered public debate. They included the crimes
of Stalin, a subject downplayed in the official press since the late 1960s. In their attitude
to Stalin, the formative influence of the Khrushchev thaw on members of the
Gorbachev generation was clear. The new leadership now had the chance to finish the
work begun in Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. Gorbachev announced that there must be
no more ‘blank spots’ in people’s understanding of Soviet history. While encouraging
historians and journalists to probe more deeply into the Soviet past, the government
set up a commission to investigate Stalin’s ‘crimes’. In 1988, the government
rehabilitated most of those sentenced during the purge trials of the 1930s.
Meanwhile, the government ended its persecution ofdissidents. In December 1986,
Gorbachev personally phoned the great nuclear physicist and peace activist, Andrei
Sakharov, who had been in exile in the town of Gorky since 1980. Gorbachev told
Sakharov that he was free and encouraged him to support the reform process. Novels
long denied publication began to appear in print, including Anatolii Rybakov’s
Children of the Arbat and Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. In 1987, Tengiz Abuladze’s
film, Repentance, with its thinly disguised satire on Stalin, played to packed cinemas
throughout the country. In 1988, Boris Pasternak’s novel, Dr Zhivago, appeared
officially. So did other once banned works, including Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate,
the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelshtam, and the novels of Vladimir Nabokov. In 1989,
the journal, Novy: Mir began publication of Solzhenitsyn’s account of camp life under
Stalin, Gulag Archipelago.
The official press and media began to publish honest discussion on a whole range
of sensitive topics, from crime, to alcoholism, to prostitution, to drugs. Official statistics
that the government had suppressed in recent years, such as census figures or figures
on agricultural output, reappeared. Papers which had carried nothing but good news
about the successes of the Soviet system began to condemn its failings as violently as
any western cold warrior. This made heady reading and viewing for the Soviet public.
Soon they got used to media which had little good to say for the Soviet system, but
idealised the capitalist West. By 1990, the fear that prevented Soviet citizens from
honest debate with foreigners had vanished entirely. Intellectually, Soviet citizens had
joined the community of educated citizens throughout the world.

Democratisation
Democratisation allowed Soviet citizens greater freedom of political action, as glasnost’
allowed them greater freedom of thought. As with the policy of glasnost’, the
government was at last conceding what many within the intelligentsia had been
PERESTROIKA AND THE END OF THE SOVIET EXPERIMENT, 1982 TO 1991 373

demanding for years. Indeed, despite the difficulties, Soviet citizens had never been
entirely passive even earlier. Most successful of all had been the public battle, waged
over twenty years, to save Lake Baikal from industrial pollution. The government finally
banned cellulose production and restricted timber felling around the lake in 1987 as
a result of the activities of a movement which received little publicity in the West.
However, the crucial changes came from above. There was some talk of the need
for democratisation at the twenty-seventh Party Congress in 1986, but the issue of
political reform came firmly on to the agenda at the Central Committee plenum held
in January 1987. Gorbachev announced that economic reform could not progress
further without democratisation. ‘A house can be put in order only by a person who
feels that he owns this house’.'® At the January 1987 plenum, Gorbachev announced
plans to introduce multi-candidate elections for local Soviets. In Soviet elections in
June, asmall number of constituencies witnessed contested elections. This was no more
than a testing of the water. Nevertheless, in a society in which single-candidate elections
had been the rule for seventy years it marked a radical change.
A Central Committee plenum in June 1987 agreed to the summoning of a Party
‘conference’ in 1988. Though Party Congresses had met regularly, this would be the
first Party ‘conference’ in half a century. Its task was to discuss ways of democratising
the Soviet political system. Gorbachev’s book, Perestroika, appeared in the autumn of
1987. It offered a cautious description of the aims of political reform. ‘One of the
prime political tasks of the restructuring effort, if not the main one, is to revive and
consolidate in the Soviet people a sense of responsibility for the country’s destiny.”
The book proposed reviving the independence of Soviets, increasing the
independence of trade unions and enterprises, and reviving democratic elections
within all three types of institution.
The decisions of the nineteenth Party Conference, which met in June 1988, marka
critical turning point in the history of perestroika. Gorbachev proposed the creation of
a genuine parliamentary body, the Congress of People’s Deputies with 2250 deputies.
One-third would be elected by the population at large, one-third by the different
nationalities, and one-third by social and political organisations such as trade unions
and the Communist Party. The Congress, in turn, would elect a smaller Supreme
Soviet, made up of 542 of its members. Like the former Supreme Soviet, this was to
consist of two chambers, a Soviet of the Union and a Soviet of Nationalities. Heading
the new government would be a president, chosen by the Supreme Soviet, but with
functions similar to those of a US president. The effect of these rules would be to
remove power from the Party apparat, and return it to the elected institutions which,
the
in theory, had held power under all Soviet constitutions since 1918. Remarkably,
existing Supreme Soviet accepted these proposals in December 1988. The heated
debates at the nineteenth Party Conference were themselves a sign of growing
democratisation within the Party.
there
These discussions raised in an acute form the issue of the Party’s role. Where
y of power? Or could
were multi-candidate elections, could the Party keep its monopol
d of a
other parties contest elections formally? Many Party members approve
nervous about weakenin g the
broadening of democracy within the Party, but were
as early as 1987. Their effect
Party itself. Genuine elections were held within the Party
the Party apparatu s together
was to undermine the system of co-option that had bound
once taken for granted.
since the Givil War. Party officials lost the security they had
group together, began to
The nomenklatura system, which had bound the Soviet ruling
break down.
374 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Meanwhile, new ‘informal’ social organisations began to appear. By 1988 some of

these organisations already looked like embryonic political parties. They included
‘Memorial , an organisation dedicated to full disclosure of Stalin’s crimes; the Russian
patriotic and anti-semitic organisation, ‘Pamyat’ (‘Memory’); liberal, anti-socialist
organisations such as the ‘Democratic Union’; and nationalist organisations, such as
the popular fronts that emerged first in the Baltic provinces. Under the 1988
constitutional reforms, some ‘informals’ received the right to put up candidates at
Soviet elections. However, the principle that the Communist Party was the ruling Party
of the Soviet Union survived in the constitution until February 1990.
Elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies were held in the spring of 1989. The
conflicts these created provided a fascinating education in democratic methods.
Though popular participation varied from region to region, many elections were
fiercely contested. Despite pressure from above, electors refused to elect powerful
Party bosses in region after region. The Congress met on May 1989 and duly elected
Mikhail Gorbachev president, though not after some tough questioning and the
elimination of two rival candidates. The Congress immediately began to grill
government members and to criticise many aspects of government policies. The prime
minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, presented a new team of ministers, and the Congress
accepted the new ministry only after close questioning of all the nominees. Within the
Congress, some delegates moved towards the formation of political parties. In July,
there emerged the so-called ‘inter-regional’ group. This included Boris Yeltsin—who
had been dropped from the Politburo at the end of 1987 for his criticisms of the pace
of reform—and Andrei Sakharov.
Millions watched these lively debates on television. For Soviet citizens, they were a
revelation. Here was the first proof that genuine change was taking place. By now, there
could be little doubt that the reforms had galvanised ordinary citizens into action.
Whether they would act as the government wanted was another matter.

CRISIS: 1989 TO 1990

In 1990 the reform process began to fall apart. The government let slip the empire it
had inherited from the Tsarist government, and the even larger empire it had acquired
after the Great Patriotic War. At the same time, the economic reforms ground to a halt
and the Soviet economy began to disintegrate. Finally, the government lost its grip on
political power. These changes guaranteed that the reforms of the 1980s would go
further than those of the 1860s or the 1950s. In 1990 the initiative passed from the
government to forces over which the government had less and less control.

Imperial decline
Since the sixteenth century, the Russian Empire had absorbed many non-Russian
peoples, from Slavic Ukrainians, to Christian but non-Slavic Georgians and Armenians,
to Turkic and Islamic Azerbaijanis or Kazakhs. By 1900, the Russian Empire was a
bewildering patchwork of nationalities, languages, cultures and histories. Committed,
formally, to national independence, the Bolsheviks created what they thought of not
as an empire, but as a union of socialist nations. The Soviet Union, formally created in
PERESTROIKA AND THE END OF THE SOVIET EXPERIMENT, 1982 TO 1991 375

1924, included many different types of national status. In the late 1980s there were
fifteen Union Republics. Within them there were twenty Autonomous Republics, eight
Autonomous Regions and ten Autonomous Areas. The Union included at least 150
distinct peoples, and many more smaller ethnic groups. Though Russians made up
over fifty per cent of the population of the Soviet Union, it was the Communist Party
that dominated politically, rather than the Russian nation. Indeed, by the 1980s, many
Russians believed that the empire had become a burden on the Russian Republic.
Formally, the Republics of the Union had always enjoyed the right to secede. In
reality, this had been impossible since the 1920s. Yet paradoxically, the administrative
structures of the Union had kept alive, and in some areas had created, a sense of
Nationalism among the different peoples of the Union. Democratisation in the late
1980s allowed these Nationalisms to take public form.
After 1945, the Soviet Union had also gained an external empire in Eastern Europe.
In the late 1980s the Soviet government lost control of its external empire and then of
its internal empire.
Perestroika within the Soviet Union revived democratic movements long forced
underground in Eastern Europe. Indeed, the Soviet government actively encouraged
reform in Eastern Europe. In Poland, a near-revolution had been averted in 1981 by
the imposition of martial law. The Polish government at the time saw this as the only
alternative to Soviet intervention. By the late 1980s, the Soviet government no longer
had the will to intervene. It made no protests when, in 1989, elections in Poland led to
the appointment of a non-communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki.
Meanwhile, in Hungary the parliament legalised opposition groups, and began to
prepare for general elections. In the autumn of 1989 events in Eastern Europe moved
with incredible speed. Once it became clear that the conservative Communist
governments of Eastern Europe lacked the support of the reformist government of the
Soviet Union, they became more vulnerable than ever before. In October, anti-
government demonstrations broke out in East Berlin and other cities in Eastern
Germany, and the East German leader, Erich Honecker, resigned. His successor, Egon
Krenz agreed to allow East Germans to travel abroad, and the Berlin Wall fell on the
night of 9 to 10 November. Demonstrations in neighbouring Czechoslovakia led to the
fall of the Communist leadership in November. In Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov fell after
ruling the country since the early 1950s. In Romania, a popular uprising in December
led to the arrest and execution of the dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. By January 1990
every pro-Soviet government in Eastern Europe had fallen.
Nationalism also began to threaten the integrity of the Soviet Union’s internal
empire. In December 1986, when the Politburo appointed a Russian as head of the
Communist party of Kazakhstan, there was an outbreak of rioting in the Kazakh capital,
Alma-Ata. In June 1987, Crimean Tatars, deported from their homeland by Stalin,
demonstrated in Red Square to demand the recreation of a homeland in the Crimea.
In August there were demonstrations in the Baltic republics, protesting against their
illegal incorporation within the Soviet Union in 1940. In October, demonstrations in
Armenia demanded the return of the mainly Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh,
which lay inside the neighbouring Republic of Azerbaijan.
In 1988, savage conflicts broke out between Armenians and Azerbaijanis over the
status of Nagorno-Karabakh. In the Baltic provinces, nationalist ‘popular fronts’
emerged. Local government officials, and even some local communist parties, began
local independence movements, and to insist on the autonomy of
to support
republican governments. In November 1988, the Supreme Soviet of Estonia declared
376 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

that its laws took priority over those of the USSR. In 1989 the other Baltic republics
declared their sovereign status. The fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi—Soviet pact
provoked massive demonstrations throughout the Baltic. Other ethnic conflicts
emerged in Central Asia. There also emerged nationalist movements in Moldova and
Ukraine. By the middle of 1990, even the Russian and Ukrainian Republics had
proclaimed their sovereignty.
While Gorbachev did not resist the idea of independence entirely, he insisted on
negotiating the terms on which the Republics could gain independence. This demand
led to direct confrontation with the Baltic republics and required complex
negotiations with the other republics of the Union.

Economic breakdown
A successful economic reform would have strengthened the hand of the Soviet
government. Instead, economic reform led to a decline in production anda
breakdown in supplies. What had gone wrong? The trouble was that in some ways the
reforms did not go far enough, while in others, they went too far.

Breakdown of the planning mechanism

On the one hand, the reforms dismantled much of the old planning system, without
putting anything in its place. In the late 1980s, it became clear that NEP did not provide
the appropriate model for reform. Markets had flourished then, because they had
flourished before the Civil War. In 1990, the preconditions for a viable market no
longer existed. There no longer existed the attitudes, the commercial habits, or the
legal and financial structures necessary for markets to flourish. This meant that it was
not enough to dismantle the existing economic structures. Unless the government
began creating the legal and financial preconditions for a viable market, the
dismantling of the existing structures could lead only to collapse.
The difficulty became clear as the planning mechanism came apart. Managers lost
confidence in the plans and began to ignore them. Attempts to decentralise weakened

Table 15.1 Annual rates of growth of the Soviet economy, 1986-91

Year Growth in NMP GDP
(Soviet estimates) (Western estimates)
% %

1986 4.1 2.4

1987 23 lS
1988 4.4 1.5
1989 2.4 —
1990 4.0 4.0
1986-90 1.8 0.3
1991 (estimates) 5.0 —5.0
Note: NMP (Net Material Product) and GDP (Gross Domestic Product) are different ways of summing
up the total output of the Soviet economy in a given year

Source: cited from D A Dyker, Restructuring the Soviet Economy, Routledge, London & New York, 1992,
p 172; western estimates from ‘Economist’ intelligence unit
PERESTROIKA AND THE END OF THE SOVIET EXPERIMENT, 1982 TO 1991 377

the capacity of the centre to guarantee enterprises the supplies and funding they
needed to keep producing. More and more, enterprises had to look for suppliers on
their own. Yet there did not exist the flourishing wholesale markets that capitalist
enterprises rely on. Instead, enterprises had to rely on traditional ways of getting
around the inefficiencies of the planning system. Most used the services of the
increasing numbers of tolkachi or ‘fixers’, to get hold of supplies. With or without such
help, enterprises engaged in barter deals, for few had the spare cash to pay for supplies
not supplied under the plan. Even sub-sections within enterprises began to rely on
barter rather than cash. In Minsk, the repairs section of an enterprise producing
industrial lighting equipment hired its services to other enterprises in return for
supplies of consumer goods such as vodka or sausages. These it distributed to its own
members, or used to barter for other goods, like nineteenth-century workers’ artels.”°
If such deals competed with the demands of the plan, so much the worse for the plan.
By the middle of 1990, the Soviet Union presented the astonishing spectacle of a
modern industrial superpower, much of whose business was conducted without cash.
Yet barter was an extremely inefficient way of running the economy. Without
flourishing markets managers lacked the information needed to estimate costs.
Without legally binding contracts, they could never be certain that barter deals would
be honoured. The emergence of barter showed that enterprises now had greater
autonomy, but it also revealed the absence of the legal and financial preconditions for
genuine markets.
Under such chaotic conditions, total production began to decline. A Soviet
economist, Grigory Khanin, argued that real output was declining even in 1988.”
As production declined, the supply system began to break down. The planning
system could no longer handle the complex business of distributing supplies from one
region to another. Yet markets were not developed enough to take up the slack. By
1990, local officials simply ignored inconvenient orders from the centre, and regional
authorities began to hoard scarce goods rather than send them to other regions. There
emerged a regionalisation of the economy reminiscent of Khrushchev’s experiment
with sovnarkhozy. Moscow and Leningrad in particular suffered from shortages as a
result of the localism of Party officials in the agricultural regions which normally
supplied them. Yet the large cities contributed to the breakdown of exchange by
requiring purchasers of foodstuffs and other scarce goods to show local residence
permits.

Opposition to economic reform

While the economic breakdown reflected, in part, the disintegration of the planning
system, it also reflected the government’s failure to take reform far enough. If the
government hoped to generate the dynamism of a market system, it had to do more
than grant enterprises some autonomy. It had to allow the emergence of real markets
and of genuine competition between entrepreneurs and workers. Yet real markets
could not exist without real prices, and these could only emerge once the government
stopped setting prices. Creating genuine competition between enterprises meant
allowing unsuccessful enterprises to go bankrupt. Finally, creating competition
between workers meant allowing companies to dismiss surplus workers, thereby
creating what Marx called a ‘reserve army of the unemployed’. Each of these steps was
bound to create opposition both from the Soviet ruling elite and from the population
at large.
378 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Members of the nomenklatura resented the break up of the planned economy from
which they derived their powers and privileges. Gorbachev had to move against the
nomenklaturawith great caution, for his own power derived from the political structures
they represented. Like Khrushchev before him, he tried to sidestep them by creating
new forms of support through the dangerous gamble of democratisation. In this way,
Gorbachev kept the political initiative. However, he found it almost impossible to deal
with the quiet sabotage of reform conducted by local Party officials, by the managers
of large enterprises and collective farms, or by banking officials. Few enterprise or
collective farm managers took up the freedoms offered by the reforms. Most preferred
to continue dealing with the central planning authorities or with regional authorities
as long as they could. This offered familiar methods, familiar contacts, and a familiar
system of supplies. It also protected them from bankruptcy.
Ordinary citizens feared unemployment and a decline in living standards. Under
the social contract that emerged in the 1950s, the government promised Soviet citizens
rising living standards, job security, subsidised prices and cheap welfare services. In
return, Soviet citizens surrendered political and intellectual freedom. This was a deal
that offered most to the traditional working classes and least to the intelligentsia.
Though the old social contract was already breaking down under Brezhnev, perestrotka
threatened to end it entirely. In its place the reforms offered a new social contract that
promised greater economic, intellectual and political freedom in return for reduced
material and employment security. A deal of this kind had considerable appeal to the
Soviet intelligentsia, but even they would suffer from the dismantling of the older
contract. On balance, support for a new social contract was weaker than fears about
the ending of the old social contract.”
Resistance from above and below explains why the government’s reforms began to
grind to a halt in the late 1980s.
Formally, perestroika increased pressure on enterprises to shed surplus labour. On
paper, some three million industrial workers had lost their jobs by the end of 1986.”
In reality, most had either retired or been re-employed, for unemployment not only
offended accepted social norms; it was also counter-balanced by the traditional
managerial habit of hoarding spare labour. Despite this, there were some losers, mainly
among women, the sick, and those seen as less efficient or less productive.
The reforms also threatened loss-making enterprises with bankruptcy. In 1987, the
government’s own figures suggested that one quarter of all Soviet enterprises operated
at a loss, or made insufficient profits to survive without government support.” Yet
despite the introduction of greater enterprise autonomy from the beginning of 1988,
the government allowed very few enterprises to go bankrupt. There were often good
reasons for propping up loss-making enterprises. Some lost money because the
government kept the price of their products artificially low. Sometimes the costs of
allowing enterprises to go into liquidation would have been too high. This was
particularly true where enterprises were the sole employees for whole towns or regions,
or where their products, like the electricity produced by power stations, were needed
by other enterprises. Under such pressures, the government backed down late in 1988,
and decided to continue subsidising loss-making enterprises. Though it cost money
the government could no longer spare, this decision postponed the unpleasant and
dangerous prospect of mass layoffs. It thereby preserved much of the traditional social
contract, and protected the traditional managerial elite.
Workers resisted reforms of the wage system which abolished traditional bonuses
and threatened a higher level of wage discipline. By the middle of 1988, strikes against
PERESTROIKA AND THE END OF THE SOVIET EXPERIMENT, 1982 TO 1991 379

poor working conditions were common. Many were organised by newly established
independent unions. The new unions were particularly strong in mining. Many strikes
took aim at the quality control organisation, Gospriemka, which, in its early days,
rejected much poor quality produce, thereby threatening the bonuses of both
managers and workers. Breakdowns in the supply system triggered other strikes.
Even more dangerous for the government was the issue of price reform. If prices
were to reflect real costs, and the government was to reduce its deficit, it had to reduce
subsidies on the price of basic goods and services. Price reform was, indeed, a basic
requirement of economic reform. In principle, it was also one of the simpler reforms.
The government simply had to let prices float up towards more realistic levels. Yet the
government approached the issue with great caution, promising to compensate
consumers for rises in the price of foodstuffs, housing and transport, by raising wages
and pensions. Its caution was understandable, for however it was done, price reform
was bound to depress living standards. The issue threatened to turn the entire
population against reform.
When it came to the crunch, the government lost its nerve. In 1989 it postponed
basic price reforms. As a result, even in 1990, a quarter of government expenditure
still went on subsidising basic consumer goods and services.” In 1989, subsidies on
agricultural products, mainly meat and dairy produce, reached 90.2 billion roubles.
This was similar to the government’s total budget deficit, and represented twelve to
fourteen per cent of national income.”

Loss of nerve and the rising deficit

The reforms halted just as they threatened to breach the old social contract. By 1990,
the reform process had hit a wall. While the government talked of the need’ for a
‘market economy’, it preserved the main features of the command economy. In 1990
government orders still accounted for eighty-five per cent of all industrial production.
As the economist, Gavriil Popov, put it, the government was still trying to ‘tell hens how
many eggs to lay’.””
The government's loss of nerve suggests a striking analogy with the behaviour of
the Tsarist government in its final years. That government had also lost legitimacy, for
a modernising society was no longer willing to accept its autocratic methods of rule.
The power of the government rested less and less on a widespread sense of its
legitimacy and more on more on naked power. This made the government unwilling
to test the limits of its power. Consequently, it lost its fiscal nerve. When it needed to
raise revenue, it did not dare impose the costs directly on the population at large. For

Table 15.2 Growth of Soviet budget deficits (billion roubles)

Year Official Soviet figures CIA estimates

1984 me 11.0
1985 18.0 17.0
1986 47.9 49.8
1987 aH 64.4
1988 90.1 68.8
1989 92.0
1990 60.0
& New York, 1992, p 177
Source: D A Dyker, Restructuring the Soviet Economy, Routledge, London
380 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

the
the Tsarist government, the challenge came with the First World War. For
government of Gorbachev it came in the late 1980s.
The rising costs of preserving the traditional social contract through subsidies to
industry and subsidies on consumer goods and services showed up clearly in the rising
budget deficit. Like the Tsarist government during the First World War, Gorbachev’s
government found it could no longer balance income against expenditure. A serious
budget deficit appeared soon after Gorbachev took office. The anti-alcohol campaign
lost the government six billion in revenue (as prohibition had lost the Tsarist
government revenue in 1914). The sharp fall in world oil prices in 1985 and 1986 lost
it some twenty billion in export revenues.” By 1990, republican governments were
refusing to pay to the central budget their shares of revenue.
The Soviet government began to look for painless ways of raising revenue. It
considered borrowing money, but Soviet governments had always been reluctant to
borrow abroad, and they could not borrow at home because there was no domestic
money market. This left one alternative. Like the Tsarist government during the First
World War, it began to print money.
The result, in both cases, was inflation. While official prices remained low, supplies
in state stores became unpredictable and this forced consumers to buy in collective
farm markets, cooperatives, or the black market, where prices rose rapidly. Meanwhile,
even the government could not resist some price rises. Some state enterprises used
their increasing control over prices to raise their prices. Others passed on the costs of
wage rises introduced in response to growing union pressure and strikes.

COLLAPSE: 1990 TO 1991

The loss of governmental authority: 1990 to 1991
In 1990, the Communist Party lost its grip on the levers of power. The Party gave up its
constitutional monopoly on power early in February 1990. This allowed the formal
emergence of other political parties. In July, the Party gave up its monopoly over the
media. In April, a leading reformer, Gavriil Popov, was elected mayor of Moscow, and
in May, another reformer, Anatolii Sobchak was elected mayor of Leningrad. In Russia,
the newly elected parliament of the Russian republic chose Boris Yeltsin as its
chairman. Immediately, the new Russian parliament began to challenge the Soviet
government for control over the finances and the property of the largest republic
within the Union. At the May Day celebrations that year, the crowd booed Gorbachev.
He now came under attack from the right, which accused him of destroying the Soviet
system, and from the left, which accused him of propping it up. In July, Boris Yeltsin,
now de facto leader of the Russian republic, announced his resignation from the
Communist Party. So did Popov in Moscow and Sobchak in Leningrad. The communist
government headed by Gorbachev was losing control of the reform process and of the
government.
This was a fundamental turning point. Increasingly, reformers who had lost all hope
of preserving the Soviet system were taking control of the reform agenda. For radicals,
it was now clear that reform meant installing a ‘market economy’ and abandoning the
ideal of Socialism. Meanwhile, conservatives now understood that the reforms
PERESTROIKA AND THE END OF THE SOVIET EXPERIMENT, 1982 TO 1991 381

challenged the very survival of Socialism. The ‘third way’ no longer seemed a real
option. As in the early days of Soviet history, there appeared a stark choice between
Capitalism and Socialism.
During 1990 and 1991 the government’s own behaviour became increasingly erratic
as it manoeuvred between powerful opponents to the right and left. As it lost its grip
on power, as the economy fell apart, and as it saw its external and internal empires slip
from its grasp, the government dithered. The crucial issues were price reform and
relations between the Soviet government and the various Union republics.

Price reform
In May 1990, the embattled prime minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, presented a plan for price
reform that provoked an outcry amongst conservatives and a wave of strikes among
workers. Meanwhile, radical reformers criticised Ryzhkov for caution and indecision.
In August, the Russian parliament began to consider a much more radical plan of
reform, produced by a team headed by the economist, Stanislav Shatalin (1934-). This
called for ‘shock therapy’, a rapid reform of the economy over a period of 500 days. It
demanded the freeing of prices, which would allow them to rise quickly to realistic
levels. It also called for the rapid privatisation of state owned enterprises.
Simultaneously, it demanded social security measures to protect those such as
pensioners who would suffer most during the transition to a market economy.
In the autumn of 1990, the Soviet and Russian governments tried without success to
negotiate a compromise program. At the end of the year, Gorbachev found his own
room for manoeuvre narrowing. In December, his foreign minister, Eduard
Shevardnadze resigned in response to growing attacks from conservatives. As he
resigned, he warned of the danger of a conservative coup. To allay that danger,
Gorbachev began to ally more closely with conservative forces. In December, he
replaced Nikolai Ryzhkov as Prime Minister with a more traditional figure, Valentin
Pavlov (1937-). In the first half of 1991, Pavlov took several crude and ineffective steps
towards price reform, without ever making the decisive break with past practices that
was now necessary. On 2 April (on 1 April everyone would have taken it fora joke), he
introduced a price reform which allowed prices to rise by an average of 300 per cent.
However, the government was still trying to control prices.

The Union Treaty

The other nightmare Gorbachev faced in 1990 and 1991 was the issue of relations
between the republics of the Soviet Union. With the support of his foreign minister,
Shevardnadze, Gorbachev had willingly surrendered the external empire in Eastern
Europe. He was less willing to surrender the internal empire. He also knew that
of
conservatives would regard this as a final act of treachery. So he resisted the claims
of force. Soviet
the various republics for autonomy. Sometimes this required the use
(January 1990), and in Latvia
troops fired on crowds in Georgia (1989), in Baku
this period on the need fora
(January 1991). Gorbachev insisted throughout
Treaty’ to
negotiated process of change. His aim was the negotiation of a new ‘Union
Union. Gorbachev hoped that
replace the treaty of 1924 that had created the Soviet
policy, banking,
such a treaty would preserve central control over defence, foreign
to republican
transportation and energy supplies, while ceding most other powers
t the first half of 1991.
governments. Attempts at negotiation continued throughou
hand.
Slowly, it became clear that the republics held the upper
382 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

In June 1991 electors in the Russian republic chose Boris Yeltsin as their President.
This made him the first popularly elected leader ever to rule Russia. With Moscow itself
now under the control of a non-communist mayor and a Russian parliament headed
by anon-communist president, the Soviet government became increasingly irrelevant.
In July, the power of the Communist Party was further reduced when it lost the right to
operate Party cells within the police and the army. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of
Party members were following the example of prominent Party figures such as Yeltsin
and Shevardnadze, and resigning from the Party.

The August “‘putsch’

The final blow to the old order came in August
1991. Difficult negotiations during the summer
led to agreement on a draft union treaty, and
republican governments agreed to sign the new
treaty on 20 August. Fearing this would mark
the end of the Soviet Union, several leading
conservative politicians decided to act before
the treaty could be signed. On 18 August, while
Gorbachev was on holiday at Cape Foros in the
Crimea, they tried to persuade him to introduce
a state of emergency and cancel the signing of
the treaty. He refused, and they placed him
under house arrest. In the morning of 19
August, they announced that Gorbachev had
been taken ill and that government was now in
President Gorbachev, 20 August 1991. The photo is from ibe handsrat g SORES 98 eae a
the video that Gorbachev made while trapped in the Crimea emergency’ led by the vice-president, Gennadi
during the August ‘putsch’. The quality of the photograph Yanayev (1937—). The committee’s members
suggests, appropriately, that something is about to fade included the prime minister, Valentin Pavlov;
away. the head of the KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov
I _ (1924); the minister of internal affairs, Boris
Pugo (1937-91); and the minister of defence,
Marshal Dmitri Yazov (1923-).
The organisers of the ‘putsch’ seem to have acted at short notice and without careful
preparation. Though troops took up positions at many points in Moscow, they did not
control the “White House’ in which the Russian parliament met. They also failed to
arrest its leader, Boris Yeltsin. Several military units, including crack KGB troops
ordered to arrest Yeltsin, refused to obey the committee’s orders. Some of the tank
units ordered to surround the Russian parliament promptly announced that they
would defend the building. Yeltsin inspired popular opposition to the emergency
committee in a dramatic speech of defiance on top of a tank whose crew were now
defending the Russian parliament. Journalists set up a transmitter inside the
parliament building. From here they transmitted reports which western news services
broadcast back to the Soviet Union. After some initial confusion, foreign governments
refused to acknowledge the new committee. Meanwhile, its members had made a very
poor showing at a press conference. All looked ill-at-ease, and Yanayev’s hands
trembled visibly as he spoke. Within three days the ‘putsch’ was over. The leaders flew
to the Crimea where they begged the forgiveness of Gorbachev. Gorbachev flew back
 PERESTROIKA AND THE END OF THE SOVIET EXPERIMENT, 1982 TO 1991 383

to Moscow, chastened, and with his prestige and power severely shaken. The leaders of
the ‘putsch’ were arrested.
The coup finally discredited the Communist Party and the old regime. On his
return, Gorbachev ordered the suspension of Communist Party activities and the
confiscation of Party property and records. One by one, the republican governments
began to assert their independence, ignoring Gorbachev’s continuing efforts to
negotiate a new union treaty. In December, the leaders of the three Slavic republics,
Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (former White Russia), ended these efforts by negotiating
a new agreement to form a commonwealth with no central authority. A week later, at
a meeting in Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan, eight other republics joined them in the new
Commonwealth of Independent States. (The only absentees were the Baltic republics
and Georgia.)
The signatories to the new commonwealth announced that the Soviet Union no
longer existed. Gorbachev had no choice but to resign as President. The Hammer and
Sickle came down over the Kremlin for the last time on 25 December 1991. In its place
was raised the Red, White and Blue flag of the Russian republic.
The new commonwealth was extremely fragile. It inherited many of the economic
problems and the ethnic tensions of the old Soviet Union. However, its new leaders
were free of much of the ideological baggage of the old order. Most also enjoyed, for
a time at least, the prestige of having been elected by the population, and having led
their various nations to independence. However, the history of the new, post-Soviet
governments of what had been the Soviet Union takes us beyond the agenda of this
book.

Questions for discussion

1 What parallels are there between the era of perestroika and the era of the ‘Great
Reforms’ of the mid-nineteenth century? What are the most important differences
between these two eras of reform?
the existing
2 Did Gorbachev bungle perestroika? Or was reform impossible within
system?

What was the link between economic reform, glasnost’ and democratisation?

Has the collapse of the Soviet experiment proved Marx wrong? or right?

Why did Nationalism play so important a role in the final years of Soviet history?
OF
BP
oO
nm How did perestroika affect the lives of Soviet citizens?

Further reading
See bibliography:
Cracraft, The Soviet Union Today
Hosking, The Awakening of the Soviet Union
384 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon

McAuley, Soviet Politics
Nation, Black Earth, Red Star

In addition:
D Christian, ‘““Perestroika” and World History’, in Australian Slavonic & East European Studies, vol
6, no 1(1992), pp 1-28
D A Dyker, Restructuring the Soviet Economy, Routledge, London & New York, 1992
M S Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for our Country and the World, Collins, London, 1987
Z Medvedev, Gorbachev, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986

Endnotes
1 C Schmidt-Hauer, Gorbachev: The Path to Power, Pan, London, 1986, p 98
2 MS Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, Collins, London,
1987, pp 18-20
S White, Gorbachev in Power, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, p 105. The real
number of alcoholics was probably 4-6 times higher. See M Feshbach & A Friendly, Ecocide
in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege, Basic Books, New York, 1992, p 188
A Wilson & N Bachkatov, Russia Revised: An Alphabetical Key to the Soviet Collapse and the New
Republics, Andre Deutsch, London, 1992, p 10
Feshbach & Friendly, Ecocide, p 188
R Campbell, The Failure of Soviet Economic Planning, Indiana University Press, Bloomington,
1992, p 94
G Hosking, The Awakening of the Soviet Union, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1991, p 2
R C Nation, Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy, 1917-1991, Cornell
University Press, Ithaca, 1992, p 288
Time, 9 September 1985
10 cited in White, Gorbachev in Power, p 23
11 M S Gorbachev, Perestroika, p 88
12 DA Dyker, Restructuring the Soviet Economy, Routledge, London & New York, 1992, p9l
13 White, Gorbachev in Power, p 98
14 Dyker, Restructuring, p 95
5) ibid, p 125
16 M S Gorbachev, Perestroika, pp 56-7
17 cited in White, Gorbachev in Power, p 58
18 ibid, p 24
19 Gorbachev, Perestroika, pp 102-3
20 Based on conversations with the author in 1990
21 White, Gorbachev in Power, p 102
22 L Cook, ‘Brezhnev’s “Social Contract” and Gorbachev’s Reforms’, Soviet Studies, 1992,
vol 44, no 1, pp 37-56
20 Cook, “Brezhnev’s “Social Contract”’, p 40
24 ibid, p 42
a A Study of the Soviet Economy, 3 vols, IMF, World Bank, OECD & European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development, Paris, 1991, vol 1, p 265
26 Dyker, Restructuring, p 178
27 ibid, p 175
28 ibid, p 178
 CONCLUSION

WHY DID THE SOCIALIST

EXPERIMENT FAIL?

The introduction posed two major questions about modern Russian and Soviet history
and summarised the answers suggested in this book. The conclusion offers a chance to
discuss a third question raised by the book’s argument:

Question 3: Why did the socialist experiment faal?

A PREMATURE REVOLUTION?
Soviet history offers the remarkable spectacle of a determined effort to abolish the
e of
inequalities and oppressions that have dogged societies ever since the emergenc
ce. Why
the first states. The fate of the Soviet experiment therefore has great significan
conflicts?
did the experiment run into trouble so soon? Why did it cause such vicious
And why did it eventually fail?
himself
The Socialist experiment ran into trouble in Russia for reasons that Marx
conditio ns
had predicted. Marx had insisted that Socialism could be built only under
ce, the attempt
of abundance and high productivity. Without a high level of abundan
enrich. This
to create a more egalitarian society would impoverish as many as it would
g a socialist
would ensure the persistence of social and political conflict. In launchin
in backward Russia, the Bolsheviks were aware of flouting this basic
revolution
world-wide, and
principle. They did so in the conviction that the revolution would be
m did exist in the
that the high levels of productivity necessary for building Socialis
on left them high
advanced capitalist countries. The failure of the world-wide revoluti
in which even Marx had
and dry. They now had to build Socialism in an environment
explanation for the failure
insisted the project was impossible. This is the ‘Menshevik’
argued that the October
of the Soviet experiment. As early as 1917, Mensheviks
de revolution failed.
Revolution was premature. It was doomed as soon as the world-wi
on that the attempt to build
In this view, Stalinism fulfilled Marx’ gloomy predicti
generate violent social conflict.
Socialism under conditions of backwardness would
386 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

THE STALINIST STRATEGY OF GROWTH

However, once embarked on the experiment, the Bolsheviks persisted despite the
failure of the world revolution. If the Bolsheviks were to prove the Mensheviks wrong
and justify the October Revolution, they had to use their own resources to build up the
productive resources of Soviet society. They had to do this both to defend the Soviet
Union and to lay a foundation for Socialism. Could they do it? Was there a strategy of
growth as successful as the capitalist strategy, but compatible with the egalitarian goals
of Socialism? This was the challenge Stalin took on.
By the end of his life, he almost certainly believed that he had found this alternative
strategy of growth. The Soviet command economy had generated spectacular rates of
growth. Though Stalin’s strategy exacted a high cost from Soviet citizens, it offered in
return the promise of national strength and a better life in the future. These successes
convinced many within the Soviet Union and elsewhere that the Bolsheviks had indeed
found a non-capitalist route to modernity. This route was particularly attractive to the
governments of many Third World countries.
The trouble is that the successes proved to be more temporary than the failures.
Like a piece of pre-industrial machinery, the Stalinist engine of growth could maintain
modern rates of production only at great cost or in selected areas, such as defence.
This posed moral as well as economic problems. If the Stalinist strategy could not
compete with Capitalism, it could hardly justify the immense costs it had imposed on
the Soviet people. As early as the 1950s, Soviet economists and politicians began to
suspect that the Stalinist strategy could generate extensive growth much better than
intensive growth. Yet sustained growth clearly demanded intensive growth. From the
1950s until the late 1980s, successive Soviet governments sought a strategy that would
generate intensive as well as extensive growth within the Soviet planned economy. They
never found such a strategy.

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES? ALTERNATIVE ‘ENGINES OF

GROWTH’? |
Did Soviet governments miss something? Was there a ‘third’ way to modernity which
avoided the inequalities of Capitalism but generated equally rapid growth? Or was the
socialist project itself unrealistic?
Those who have argued that the Soviet government missed the right strategy have
focussed on two turning points: NEP and perestroika. In each case, it appeared that there
might be chances to exploit the dynamism of the market within the structures of a
socialist society. In each case, governments made mistakes. However, the failure of the
experiment with market Socialism on both occasions also shows how difficult the
project was. Markets and planning always threatened to destabilise each other. Market
forces undermined planning mechanisms, while plans imposed from above stifled
business activity. A restricted market could only generate slow growth, while an
unrestricted market economy was bound to create new forms of inequality. There was
a clear trade off between equity and growth.
 WHY DID THE SOCIALIST EXPERIMENT FAIL? 387

Does this mean that it is impossible to combine markets and planning? Not at all.
Most modern economies do precisely that. Most communist economies incorporated
elements of the market. And most capitalist Societies planned, for most accepted some
of the social justice goals of Socialism and used planning mechanisms to redistribute
wealth to the unemployed or the poor. However, in all modern economies one
element is dominant. Either the planners dominate the market (as in the socialist
economies of Eastern Europe and China), or market forces dominate, and all too often
undermine, attempts to plan. Markets and plans can coexist. Yet a society in which they
are equal forces is likely to be unstable, like Soviet society in the late 1920s or the late
1980s. In such a society, it is also likely that neither planning nor markets will operate
with maximum potency. Markets cannot generate intensive growth if planners harass
entrepreneurs and distort pricing mechanisms. Within a planning system, the capitalist
engine of growth could only work at half throttle. On the other hand, the experience
of modern capitalist societies shows that attempts to redistribute wealth more equally
tend to be undermined by market forces unless they are so determined that they begin
to throttle growth.
This suggests that there is, indeed, no ‘third way’ in the modern world. There is no
stable balance of planning and markets. Instead, there is a wide range of systems in
which one of these two elements dominates the other. And, looking back from the end
of the twentieth century, it appears that systems in which the market dominates are
best at generating sustained growth.
These conclusions suggest that in the modern world the goals of growth and social
equity may be incompatible. Marx had hinted at this possibility already. This is why he
concluded that the creation of a society free of oppression required the overthrow of
Capitalism. Further, of the two goals, it is growth that generates the most power in the
modern world. The rapid economic growth of capitalist societies threatened
traditional societies because it generated both wealth and military power. To choose
equity over growth was, therefore, to choose weakness. Even Stalin understood in the
1930s that excessive egalitarianism inhibited economic growth and threatened to
undermine Soviet power. So he abandoned the goal of egalitarianism. This is why
Stalinism appeared so successful while less coercive strategies for the building of
Socialism failed. Fora time, Stalinism delivered growth in the crucial heavy industrial
and defence sectors. And it delivered growth fast.

THE FUTURE OF THE SOCIALIST PROJECT

Does this mean that growth will always win? Ifso the attempt to build a more egalitarian
society is doomed and the ideals of Socialism are utopian. This is certainly the
has
conclusion many have drawn from the collapse of the Soviet experiment. Socialism
been tried and has failed.
Paul
In reality, things are not so simple. In the capitalist world, growth rules.
Kennedy has shown how economic growth sustained the power of all the great imperial
to think
powers of the modern world.! Will this rule always apply? There is good reason
was immensel y wasteful of
‘t will not. We have seen that the Soviet planned economy
results. Because of its in-built
resources, and that its wastefulness had severe ecological
of resources.
principle of ‘economy of inputs’, Capitalism is more restrained in its use
388 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

However, the social structures of modern Capitalism require constant growth. So do

the social contracts in place in most of the advanced capitalist societies. So do the
demands of military power. In the long run, the capitalist system may prove even more
extravagant in resource use than the socialist command economies, for it requires
constant expansion of output. It may already be pushing at the limits of sustainable
growth in many areas.” Growing signs of a world-wide ecological crisis suggest that
Capitalism is in danger of repeating the mistakes of the Soviet command economy. It,
too, is exploiting resources at a rate that is not sustainable.
Will the world-wide capitalist system run into a brick wall as the Soviet system did in
the 1980s? It is hard to see a way around this outcome. What will happen then? There
are many possible scenarios, most of them extremely unpleasant. However, there are
some less unpleasant scenarios. In these, human societies will deliberately tame growth.
The rates at which societies use resources, and the rates at which populations grow will
both slow to a steady state. As this happens, further growth will appear dangerous and
improper. Where growth no longer rules international relations, issues of equity will
assume greater importance than they do today. No longer will the demands of growth
undermine the demands of equity. Social justice will no longer weaken states. On the
contrary, it may become a condition of survival. In such a world, the ideals of Socialism
will appear once more on the agenda for serious political debate. And the successes
and the failures of the socialist experiments of the twentieth century will be examined
with renewed interest.

Endnotes
1 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Unwin Hyman, London, 1988
2 See, for example, D & D Meadows, & J Randers, Beyond the Limits: Global Collapse or a
Sustainable Future, Earthscan Publications, London, 1992
STATISTICAL APPENDIX

General notes

1 Territorial changes. The territory controlled by the Russian and Soviet governments was
significantly smaller between 1921 (after the Brest—Litovsk Treaty) and 1940 (after the Nazi—
Soviet pact, which allowed the Soviet government to reoccupy the territory lost in 1918). Most
figures between 1917 and 1940 reflect the contraction in territory.
2 Reliability. It is hard to be accurate about statistics of this kind. Directly or indirectly all statistics
for the Soviet period derive from Soviet sources, which may be inflated. For earlier periods,
the collection of statistical information was extremely haphazard. And in any case, statistics
are always very rough and ready, based much more on guesswork than statisticians would
generally like us to believe. So, for all these reasons, other sources may give slightly different
figures. It is, however, the long-term trends that are important, and these are not so much
affected by the inaccuracies of detail, which are certainly present in these figures.
3 Dates. have not been able to choose regularly spaced dates. Instead, I have picked those dates
that highlight the important changes in Russian and Soviet economic and social history.
4 Gaps. Where there are gaps this means either that the given commodity was not in production
The
(eg. there were no televisions in 1917), or that figures are not available for that year.
context should make the distinction obvious.

Notes to Table A
up to 1916; R
A: PA Khromov, Ekonomicheskoe razvitie Rossii v XIX—XX vv., Nauka, Moscow, 1951,
up to 1940; SSSR v tsifrakh v 1981 (a Soviet
Clarke, Soviet Economic Facts, Macmillan, London, 1972,
on the 1937 figure, see A Nove, ‘Victims of Stalinism: How
statistical publication), after 1940;
Many?’, in JArch Getty & R T Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p 263
p 55; SSSR v tsifrakh
B: Clarke; B Kerblay, Modern Soviet Society, Methuen, London, 1983,
C: Kerblay, pp 147-8
History of Europe, vol
D: O Crisp, ‘Labour and Industrialisation in Russia’, in Cambridge Economic
SSSR v tsifrakh; and F
7, pt 2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978, p 332 up to 1913;
1946, pp 219 ff. The
Lorimer, The Population of the Soviet Union, League of Nations, Geneva,
ns used changed. But
figures before and after 1917 are not, strictly, comparable, as the definitio
on of the stages in growth of an urban working class
they give a very rough impressi
Moscow, 1974, pp 117, 183,
E: AS Nifontov, Zernovoe proizvodstvo Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka,
and 1921-65; A Nove, in A
267, up to 1900; Khromov, pp 453-4 up to 1916; Clarke for 1913
Macmilla n, London, 1982, p 170 for 1980
Brown and M Kaser (eds), Soviet Policy for the 1980s,
give three-yea r averages (i.e. the average of the year
harvest. Apart from the last, these figures
the long-term trends rather than the
listed and those before and after), in order to highlight
annual fluctuations
London, 1975, to 1913; Clarke to 1965
F, G: BR Mitchell, Ewropean Historical Statistics, Macmillan,
Figures for 1989 from SSSR v tsifrakh for 1989
 390 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

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ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

This is not an exhaustive bibliography; it is a short list of some of the books that I have found
most useful.

Reference works
Bottomore, T (ed), A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 2nd edn, Blackwell, Oxford, 1991
Brown, A (ed), The Cambridge Encyclopedia ofRussia and the Soviet Union, 2nd (rev) edn, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge & New York, 1992
Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History

General works
Adams, A (ed), Imperial Russia after 1861: Peaceful Modernization or Revolution? D C Heath & Co,
Lexington, Mass, 1965: documents and articles
Atkinson, D, et al (eds), Women in Russia, Harvester Press, Brighton, 1978; a fine collection of
essays on the previously neglected history of Russian women
Auty, R, and Obolensky, D, An Introduction to Russian History, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1976; contains detailed bibliography and a good description of Russian
geography
Black, C, et al (eds), The Modernization ofJapan and Russia, Free Press, New York, 1975
Blackwell, W L (ed), Russtan Economic Development from Peter the Great to Stalin, New York, New
Viewpoints, Franklin Watts, 1974
Blum,J, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century, Atheneum, Princeton,
NJ, 1961; still the best history of Russian serfdom
Carr, E H, The Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalin 1917-1929, Macmillan, London, 1979; a
summary of Carr’s encyclopaedic History of Soviet Russia, 14 vols, Penguin, Harmondsworth,
1966-76
Clements, B A, et al (eds), Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, University
of California Press, Berkeley, 1991
Conquest, R, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Pimlico Press, London, 1990
Cracraft, J(ed), The Soviet Union Today, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1988
Daniels, R, The Stalin Revolution: Fulfilment or Betrayal of Communism?, 3rd edn, D C Heath & Co,
Lexington, Mass, 1990; documents and articles
Davies, R W (ed), From Tsarism to the New Economic Policy, Cornell Univeristy Press, Ithaca, 1990
Deutscher, I, The Unfinished Revolution, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1967
Deutscher, I, Stalin, rev edn, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1966; a classic biography of Stalin
Dukes, P, A History of Russia, 2nd edn, Macmillan, London, 1990
Eklof, B & Frank, S P (eds), The World of the Russian Peasant: Post-emancipation Culture and Society,
Unwin Hyman, Boston, 1990; an up-to-date collection of the best recent articles on peasant
society
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 393

Falkus, M, The Industrialisation of Russia: 1700-1914, Macmillan, London, 1972

Fitzpatrick, S, The Russian Revolution: 1917-1932, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1982
Gatrell, P, The Tsarist Economy 1850-1917, Batsford, London, 1986; covers recent research on
the economic history of Tsarism
Getty, JArch & Roberta T Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1993
Gilbert, M, Russian History Atlas, rev edn, JM Dent, London, 1993
Gill, G, Stalinism, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1990
History of the USSR, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977; for a Soviet account
Hosking, G, A History of the Soviet Union, 2nd edn, Fontana Press/Collins, London, 1990
Hosking, G, The Awakening of the Soviet Union, 2nd edn, Mandarin, London, 1991; one of the best
accounts of perestroika
Katkov, G & Oberlander, E (eds), Russia Enters the Twentieth Century, Methuen, London, 1971; a
collection of essays
Kennedy, P, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to
2000, Unwin & Hyman, 1988; superb on the impact of international competition on Russian
and Soviet history
Kerblay, B, Modern Soviet Society, Methuen, London, 1983; by far the best sociological account of
contemporary Soviet society
Kingston-Mann, E & Mixter, T (eds), Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia,
1800-1921, Princeton, 1991; a collection of recent essays on the Russian peasantry
Kochan, L & Abrahams, R, The Making of Modern Russia, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1983; the
best short history of Russia
Kochan, L, Russia in Revolution: 1890-1918, Granada, London, 1966; still one of the best short
books on the period it covers
Kolchin, P, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom, Harvard, Cambridge, Mass, 1987;
very good on serfdom
Lewin, M, The Gorbachev Phenomenon, Hutchinson, Rocklin, CA, 1988; despite its title, a superb
short social history of the Soviet Union
Lewin, M, The Making of the Soviet System, Methuen, London 1985; a superb collection of essays
on Soviet social and political history
Lapidus, G, Women in Soviet Society, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1978
Lichtheim, G, A Short History ofEuropean Socialism, Fontana, London, 1975
McAuley, M, Soviet Politics 1917-1991, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992; a good
introduction to different interpretations of Soviet politics
McCauley, M (ed), Octobrists to Bolsheviks: Imperial Russia 1905-1917, Edward Arnold, London,
1984; documents on the late imperial period
McCauley, M (ed), The Russian Revolution and the Soviet State 1917-21, Macmillan, London, 1975;
documents on 1917 and the civil war
McCauley, M, The Soviet Union since 1917, Longman, London and New York, 1981
Mandelstam, N, Hope against Hope, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971; a brilliant memoir of life
during the 1930s
Matthews, M, Class and Society in Soviet Russia, Allen Lane, London, 1972
Matthews, M, Privilege in the Soviet Union, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1978
Matthews, M (ed), Soviet Government. A Selection of Official Documents, Jonathan Cape, London,
1974
Medvedev, R, Let History Judge, rev edn, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989; a remarkable
account of Stalinism by a dissident Soviet Marxist historian
Nation, R, Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy, 1917-1991, Cornell University
Press, Ithaca, 1992; the best up-to-date history of Soviet defence and foreign policy
Nettl,J,The Soviet Achievement, Thames & Hudson, London, 1967
Nove, A, Stalinism and After, 3rd edn, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1989; a very fine
introduction to a complex period
394 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

le
Nove, A, An Economic History of the USSR, 3rd edn, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992; indispensab
1968; a
Parker, W H, An Historical Geography of Russia, University of London Press, London,
superb introduction to Russian geography for historians
Pipes, R, Russia under the Old Regime, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1974; an influential and
readable interpretation of Tsarist history, which includes a good account of the nineteenth
century class structure
Riasanovsky, N V, A History of Russia, 5th edn, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993
Rogger, H, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution 1881-1917, Longman, London and
New York, 1983
Saunders, D, Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform 1 801-1881, Longman, London and New
York, 1991
Schapiro, L, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 2nd edn, Methuen, London, 1970
Seton-Watson, H, The Russian Empire: 1801-1917, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1967
Smith, H, The Russians, Sphere Books, London, 1983, and The New Russians, Random House,
New York, 1990; vivid and informed accounts by an American journalist of Soviet life in the
1970s and the 1980s
Subtelny, O, Ukraine: A History, Toronto University Press, Toronto, 1988;now the standard
history of Ukraine
Suny, R G (ed), The Russian Revolution and Bolshevik Victory, D C Heath & Co, Lexington, Mass,
1990; documents and articles
Tucker, R C (ed), The Marx—Engels Reader, W W Norton, New York, 1972
Vernadsky, G, et al (eds), A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917, 3 vols, Yale
University Press, New Haven, Conn, 1972; by far the best collection of documents on pre-
revolutionary Russia
Volkogonov, D, Stalin: Triwmph and Tragedy, Prima Publishing, Rocklin, CA, 1992; translation of
a Soviet biography of Stalin published during the era of glasnost’
Von Laue, T, Why Lenin? Why Stalin?, J B Lippincott, New York, 1964; a classic now appearing in
a 3rd edition as Why Lenin? Why Stalin? Why Gorbachev?, Harper Collins, New York, 1993. An
interpretation that concentrates on the issue of modernisation
Walicki, A, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, Stanford, CA, 1979; the
best modern survey of its subject
Ward, Chris, Stalin’s Russia, Edward Arnold, London, 1993
Westwood, J N, Endurance and Endeavour. Russian History 1812-1992, 4th edn, Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 1993

Literature and history

Auty, R & Obolensky, D, An Introduction to Russian Language and Literature, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1977
Hingley, R, Russian Writers and Society 1825-1904, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1967
Hingley, R, Russian Writers and Soviet Society, Hutchinson, London, 1979

Literary works
Here is a list of literary works (in chronological order) that illuminate aspects of Russian and
Soviet history. I have not included poetry, for, though one of the glories of Russian literature, it
translates poorly.

Pushkin, A, The Captain’s Daughter (a short novel set during the Pugachev uprising of 1773-74)
Gogol, N, The Inspector General (a satire on the bureaucracy during the reign of Nicholas I); Dead
Souls (a satire on the provincial nobility in the 1930s)
Herzen, A, My Life and Thoughts, vol 1 (on the intellectual debates of the 1840s)
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 395

Turgeney, I, A Huntsman’s Sketches (on the peasantry under serfdom); Fathers & Sons (on the
radical intelligentsia)
Tolstoy, L, War and Peace (a historical novel set in the Napoleonic era); Anna Karenina (set in the
1870s)
Chekhov, A, any of the plays or short stories; for an account of peasant life in the late nineteenth
century, read Peasants
Gorky, M, My Childhood; Amongst the People; My Universities (autobiographical accounts of working
class life in the late nineteenth century)
Sholokhoy, M, And Quiet Flows the Don (on life amongst the Don Cossack communities between
1900 and the New Economic Policy era)
Babel, I, Red Cavalry (set during the Polish campaign of 1920)
Pasternak, B, Dr Zhivago (on the fate of an intellectual during the years of revolution and civil
war)
Ilf, I & Petrov, E, The Twelve Chairs (a satire on life during the New Economic Policy)
Bulgakov, M, Heart of a Dog; Master and Margarita; The White Guard
Simonoy, K, Days and Nights; The Living and the Dead (both set during the Great Patriotic War)
Ehrenburg, I, The Thaw (on the period after Stalin’s death)
Solzhenitsyn, A, August 1914 (historical novel set at the beginning of the First World War); One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (set in a Stalinist labour camp)
Rybakoy, A, Children of the Arbat (set in the 1930s)
Grossman, V, Life and Fate (set in the Great Patriotic War)
Voinovich, V, The Life and Unexpected Adventures Of the Soldier Ivan Chonkin (a satire on Soviet life
at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War); The Ivankiad (an autobiographical account of
life on the fringes of the nomenklatura elite)
Richards, D (ed), The Penguin Book of Russian Short Stories, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1981
Milner-Gulland, R & Dewhirst, M (eds), Russian Writing Today, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977
GLOSSARY

apparat—Communist Party ‘machine’; professional Party members, mainly party secretaries

autocracy—Government by a single individual whose power is not limited in law
barshchina—Feudal dues paid in the form of labour services
Bolsheviks—Faction of Russian Social Democratic Party formed after 1903 split; led by Lenin; in
1918 renamed Communist Party
bourgeoisie—Classes who live off profits from ownership of capital, or industrial, commercial,
or landed property; by 1917, often applied to all members of upper classes
boyar (pl boyare)—Hereditary nobles, usually descended from princely families of Kievan Russia;
archaic by nineteenth century
CC—Central Committee of Communist Party; standing committee elected at Party Congresses
Cheka—The first name for the Soviet secret police (1917-22); still used unofficially (see also
secret police)
chernozem—F ertile black steppeland soils of Ukraine and Central Russia; began to be farmed in
the eighteenth century
CIS—Commonwealth of Independent States; established in December 1991 to link eleven
former republics of the Soviet Union
CMEA—Council of Mutual Economic Aid; established in 1949 to coordinate economic planning
of Eastern European countries
Comintern—Third, or ‘Communist International’; leading body of world Communism, 1919-43
commissar—Term used for government minister, 1917-46
commissariat—Term used for government ministry, 1917-46
commune—obshchina, mir, the tsarist village community; collectively responsible for the land
allocated to its members, and for the payment of taxes
Congress of People’s Deputies—elected Parliament, first met in 1989, disbanded 1991
Cossacks—Free warrior—peasants settled on the southern borders of Muscovy and Russia; formed
special cavalry units in army and used for internal policing in the nineteenth century
CPSU—Communist Party of the Soviet Union; official title of Soviet Communist Party since 1952
demesne—Under serfdom, the area of land set aside to support the landlord
dessyatin—Measure of area, 1.09 hectares
druzhina—Military retinue of princes of Kievan Russia
Duma—Elected parliamentary assembly, 1905-17
dvorianin (pl dvoriane)—Service nobility; by the nineteenth century, the general term for ‘noble’
factory committees—Committees of workers from a single factory; first appeared in the late
nineteenth century; flourished during 1917; declined after 1918
glasnost —open debate, lack of censorship, used of government policies in the 1850s and again
in 1980s
GNP—Gross National Product; an estimate of the total production of a nation’s economy ina
year
Gosplan—Soviet planning agency, established in 1921
gubernator—Governor of a guberniya, or province, lynchpin of local government in imperial
Russia; term reintroduced in 1991
GLOSSARY 397

guberniya—Province; an administrative division of imperial Russia; survived in Soviet Union until

1930
Gulag—Main Directorate of Labour Camps, established in 1930
iarlyk—Charter granted by Tatars in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, confirming the
authority of Russian princes
intelligentsia—In Tsarist period, a social category referring to those who were educated but
belonged neither to the bureaucracy nor the nobility; in the Soviet period it refers to all white-
collar workers
izba—Wooden house; main form of peasant housing
Kadets—Constitutional Democratic Party; main leftwing liberal party, founded 1905
KGB—Committee of State Security; official name of Soviet secret police since 1954 (see also
secret police)
khozraschet-—the self-financing or financial independence of enterprises
khutor—Individual (non-communal) peasant farm
kolkhoz—Collective farm
kolkhozntki—Members of kolkhoz
kolkhozny rynok—Collective farm market; market in Soviet towns where kolkhozniki sell produce
from private plots
kormlenie—‘Feeding’, the right of Muscovite officials to live off the territory they administered
kormlenshchik—Official granted a kormlenie
krepostnoe pravo—Serfdom
kulak—Rich, semi-capitalist peasant; literally ‘fist’, in sense of ‘money-grabber’
kustar—Domestic industry, crafts
Mafia—used of criminal organizations that emerged during perestroika
Mensheviks—Faction of Russian Social Democratic Party founded after 1903 split
meshchanin (pl meshchane)—Legal term in Tsarist Russia for poorer categories of town-dwellers;
included shop-keepers, labourers
MGB—Ministry of State Security, official name for Soviet secret police, 1946-53 (see also secret
police)
mir—See commune
Mongols—Leading tribes of the Turkic peoples of medieval Siberia
MTS—Machine Tractor Stations, established in 1930 to supply equipment and technical
expertise to collective farms
Narodnaya Volya—Revolutionary populist party, founded 1879; assassinated Alexander IJ in 1881
NEP—New Economic Policy; mixture of capitalist rural sector and socialist urban sector, 1921-
61929
NEP men—Private entrepreneurs, small capitalists, during NEP
NKVD—AMinistry of Internal Affairs (after 1946, MVD); included secret police between 1934 and
1946 (see also secret police)
the
nomenklatura—List of key government positions to which officials are appointed by
Communist Party; or those appointed to these elite positions; first emerged in 1920s
oblast—From 1930, Soviet equivalent of guberniya, or province
obrok—Feudal dues paid in cash
obshchina—See commune
Octobrists—Union of 17 October, main rightwing liberal party, founded 1905
police 1922-34
OGPU—Unified State Political Administration, official name for Soviet secret
(see also secret police)
secret police)
Okhrana—Main institution of Tsarist secret police 1881-1917 (see also
opolcheniye—National militia or partisans
oprichnik (pl oprichniki) Servants of tsar, within oprichnina
boyare were expelled,
oprichnina—Territory owned absolutely by Tsar Ivan IV, from which
1564-72
wage-work
otkhod—‘Going away’, the term for temporary migration in search of
398 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

pech’—Brick stove in most peasant houses in the nineteenth century

perestroika—rebuilding or restructuring; used of the reforms of the 1980s
podzol—The poor soils of central and northern Russia
pogrom—Anti-Semitic riot
Politburo—‘Political Bureau’, established 1919; a sub-committee of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party; since then, the main executive institution of Soviet government
poll tax—Tax on all males (or ‘souls’), established by Peter the Great in 1724
pomeshchik (pl pomeshchiki)—Owner of a pomest ye, later the general term for noble landowners,
‘gentry’
pomest ye—Land grant in return for service (usually military)
pood—Measure of weight; 16.38 kilograms
Populism—Form of agrarian socialism that dominated Russian revolutionary movement in the
nineteenth century and remained influential in the early twentieth century
procurements—Rural supplies (mainly of grain) demanded by government; see zagotovki
prodrazverstkha—Method of grain requisitioning during Civil War
proletariat—Urban wage-earning working classes
rada—Ukrainian national assembly
raion—From 1930, Soviet equivalent of wezd, or district
Raskol—The religious schism of the seventeenth century
raskolniki—‘ Old Believers’, religious dissenters who emerged after the Raskol
Raznochintsy—People of mixed ranks, a social category in Tsarist Russia including those who were
literate but could not be fitted easily into the Table of Ranks
samizdat— ‘Self-published’, illegal literature, copied by readers and circulated by hand
Secretariat—Secretariat of Central Committee of Communist Party, established 1919; in charge
of Party personnel and appointments; the head of the Secretariat (general secretary or first
secretary) has led the Party since 1920s
secret police—See Cheka, KGB, MGB, NKVD, OGPU, Okhrana, Third Section
serfdom—Legal and social system under which landlords have a right to tax their peasants in
labour, kind, or cash (see krepostnoe pravo)
Slavophiles—Intellectuals who disapproved of Western European culture and admired the
religious traditions of Russia’s past; mainly 1840s
smychka—Alliance of workers and peasants; in Lenin’s thinking, the social basis for the October
Revolution
Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs)—Populist political party formed in 1900
souls—Legal term in imperial Russia for males of tax-paying classes, those subject to poll tax
Soviet—A working class-elected council; first appeared as a strike committee in Ivanovo in May
1905; modelled on commune
sovkhoz—State farm
sounarkhoz—Regional economic councils; regional planning bodies introduced in 1957;
abolished in 1965
Sounarkom—Soviet of People’s Commissars; the cabinet of the Soviet government under Lenin
SRs—see Socialist Revolutionaries
Stakhanovites—Shock workers, who produced more than their ‘norm’ or quota; after Aleksei
Stakhanov, a coal miner who achieved record norms in 1935
State Council—1810-1905, advisory council appointed by tsar; 1905-17, upper house of
parliament, included some elected members
Table of Ranks—List of ranks for all nobility, established in 1722
taiga—F orested zone of northern Russia
Tatars—Collective name for the Turkic tribes led by Mongols
terem—Women’s quarters; the segregated areas in which women lived in upper class Muscovite
houses
Third Section—Third Section of His Majesty’s Chancellery, founded in 1826, official name for
secret police to 1880 (see also secret police)
GLOSSARY 399

tolkachi—‘ pushers’, or ‘fixers’; suppliers who operated outside the command economy, helping
enterprises to acquire scarce goods
tsar—Monarch, or Emperor; from ‘Tsezar’, or ‘Caesar’; used of Russian monarchs from 16th
century
uezd—Until 1930, a district, subdivision of a guberniya
Ulozhenie—Code of laws
usad’ba—In Tsarist Russia, the plot of land on which a peasant’s house was sited; included
outhouses and vegetable gardens
USSR—Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, formed 1922
val (valovaya produktsiya)—gross output; the most important single target indicator for most
enterprises under the command economy
Varangians—Vikings
veche—Town meeting in city-states of medieval Russia
verst—Measure of length, 1.07 kilometres
Vesenkha—Supreme Council of National Economy; planning organisation established in 1917
voevoda—Provincial military/administrative official in Muscovy; forerunner of gubernator
volost —Administrative district in Muscovite and imperial Russia; a subdivision of an uezd
vydvizhentsy—‘Those brought forward’, working class Party members trained as technical
specialists in early 1930s
WIC—War Industries Committee; semi-official organisation set up by Duma in 1915 to
coordinate war supplies; included representatives of factory managements and labour
zagotovki—procurements
ZemGor—All-Russian Union of zemstva and town councils; semi-official body set up in 1915 to co-
ordinate war effort
Zemskii Sobor—‘Assembly of the Land’; a national assembly that met in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries; similar to the various parliamentary bodies of Western and central
Europe.
zemstvo (pl zemstva)—Elected local government institutions established in 1864; became a focus
for Liberalism
Zhenotdel—Women’s department of Communist Party, established 1919
 CHRONOLOGY

c 862 According to Russian Primary Chronicle, invitation to Riurik to rule Novgorod

c 882 Kiev becomes capital of first Russian state
c 945 Death of Prince Igor and Olga’s Revenge (Docs 1.1 and 1.2)
c957 Conversion of Olga to Christianity
c 988 Prince Vladimir accepts Christianity
1019-54 Prince Iaroslav the Wise
1037-41 Building of St Sophia cathedral in Kiev
1065 Foundation of Caves Monastery in Kiev by St Theodosius
c 1037-1118 Composition of Russian Primary Chronicle, mainly by monks of the Caves Monastery
in Kiev
1113-25 Vladimir Monomakh Grand Prince of Kiev (Doc 1.3)
11th & 12th centuries Decline of Kievan Russia
1147 First mention of Moscow
1206 Temuchin elected ‘Genghis Khan’ (universal khan) of Mongol tribes
1237 Mongols capture Riazan (Doc 1.4)
1240 Kiev sacked by Mongol armies
241 Khan Batu establishes Tatar capital at Sarai, on Volga
1246 Khan Guyuk elected sovereign of Mongol tribes
1257 First census, conducted by Chinese experts
1325-40 Reign of Ivan I (“Moneybags’) of Moscow
1326 Russian Orthodox Church makes Moscow its metropolitan centre
1327 Ivan I leads Tatar army against Tver (Doc 1.6)
1380 Tatar Khan Mamai defeated by Muscovite army under Grand Prince Dmitrii
Donskoi, at Kulikovo Polye
1386 Polish and Lithuanian dynasties unite
1462-1505 Reign of Ivan III
1478 Conquest of Novgorod by Moscow
1480 Formal rejection of Tatar rule
1505-33 Reign of Vasilii II
1533-84 Reign of Ivan IV, “The Terrible’
1547 Ivan IV crowned ‘tsar’
1564-72 Oprichnina; power of boyare weakened
1581-1639 Initial conquest of Siberia
1598 Death of Tsar Fedor I; end of Riurikid dynasty
1598-1613 ‘Time of Troubles’: Polish and Swedish armies invade, civil war, peasant uprisings
including Bolotnikov uprising (1606-07)
 CHRONOLOGY 401

1613 Zemskii Sobor elects Mikhail Romanov tsar (Doc 1.10)

1613-45 Reign of Mikhail Romanov
1645-76 Reign of Alexei Mikhailovich
1649 New Ulozhenie (Law Code); consolidation of serfdom
1654 Treaty of Pereiaslavl; beginnings of incorporation of Ukraine in Muscovy
1666 Beginnings of Church schism (Raskol)
1670 Peasant war led by Stenka Razin
1682-1725 Reign of Peter the Great (co-ruler until 1696)
1697-98 Peter travels to Europe
1700 Charles XII of Sweden defeats Russian army at Narva on the Baltic
1703 St Petersburg founded on the Baltic; becomes capital in 1712
1709 Russian victory over Charles XII at Poltava
1721 Treaty of Nystadt; Russia now dominant in Eastern Europe; Peter assumes title of
emperor
1722 Table of Ranks introduced (Doc 1.12)
1724 Poll tax established
1741-61 Reign of Elizabeth I
1761-62 Reign of Peter III
1762 Manifesto freeing nobility from compulsory service. Peter overthrown and
murdered in palace coup led by his wife, Catherine
1762-96 Reign of Catherine the Great
1772 First partition of Poland
1773-74 Peasant war led by Emelyan Pugachev
1775 Establishment of provincial government institutions
1785 Charter to the nobility
1793-95 Second and third partitions of Poland
1796-1801 Reign of Paul I
1801 Paul I murdered
1801-25 Reign of Alexander I
1801-12 Discussions of constitutional reforms; influence of Speransky
1812 Napoleon invades Russia; burning of Moscow
1814 Russian armies reach Paris
1825 14 December: Decembrist uprising
1825-55 Reign of Nicholas I
1840s Westerniser/Slavophile debates (Docs 2.8 & 2.9)
1842 Potato riots (Doc 3.3)
1843-44 Baron Haxthausen visits Russian Empire (Doc 2.6)
1848 Revolutions in Europe
1849 Russian armies help Austria suppress Hungarian uprising
1853-55 Crimean War
1856 Treaty of Paris ends Crimean War
1855-81 Reign of Alexander II
1856 and public discussion of reforms (Doc Oe)
Glasnost’
onary
1861 Emancipation of serfs; peasant insurrections (Docs 3.5 & 3.6); revoluti
of Zemlya i Volya revoluti onary organisation
manifestos (Docs 3.7 & 3.8); foundation
1862 Budgetary reform; nobles of Tver province demand national assembly
excise
1863 Polish uprising; university reform; introduction of liquor
1864 Judicial reform; establishment of zemstva
1865 Censorship reform
402 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

1866 D. Karakozov attempts to assassinate Alexander II

1873-74 ‘To the People’ (Doc 3.9)
1874 Military reform: compulsory military service for all
1877-78 Russo—Turkish War
1878 Congress
of Berlin
1878-1881 Wave of assassinations
1879 Foundation of ‘Narodnaya Volya’ (‘The People’s Will’)
1881 1 March: Alexander II assassinated in St Petersburg; withdrawal of Loris-Melikov’s
limited projects of constitutional reform
1891-94 Reign of Alexander III
1887 Poll tax abolished
1889 Land Captains established
1891 Vyshnegradskii tariff; famine ;
1892-1903 Sergei Witte minister of finance (Docs 4.1 & 4.2)
1894-1917 Reign of Nicholas II
1897 Russian currency put on gold standard; strikes in St Petersburg
1898 Renewed peasant uprisings (Doc 5.3)
1900 Slump; Marxist paper Iskra (The Spark) published abroad by Lenin and Plekhanov;
Socialist Revolutionary Party formed
1901-03 Zubatov unions (Doc 5.2)
1902 Peasant revolts in Poltava and Kharkov provinces; liberal newspaper ‘Liberation’
published in Stuttgart
1903 Russian Social Democratic Party founded; splits into Menshevik and Bolshevik
factions
1904 (January) to August 1905, Russo-Japanese War; January, Union of Liberation
formed (Doc 5.5)
1905 9 January, Bloody Sunday (Docs 5.6 & 5.7); May, first Soviet formed, Ivanovo;
October, general strike led by St Petersburg Soviet (Doc 5.8); 17 October, October
Manifesto, grants civil rights and elected legislative assembly; October, Kadet Party
formed; November, mutinies in army and navy; 3 December, St Petersburg Soviet
closed; December, Octobrist Party formed, Moscow workers’ uprising suppressed
1906-11 P A Stolypin chairman of Council of Ministers
1906 3 April, international loan negotiated; 23 April, publication of ‘Fundamental Laws’
(Docs 6.1 & 6.2); 26 April to 8 July, first Duma (Doc 5.9); 10 July, “Vyborg Manifesto’;
July, renewed mutinies in army and navy; November, Stolypin introduces agrarian
reform by decree
1907 Redemption payments cancelled; February to June, second Duma meets; 3 June,
Stolypin changes electoral law by decree; November, third Duma meets, dominated
by Octobrists, lasts to 1912
1911 Stolypin assassinated
1912 Lena goldfields massacre
1914 July, general strike; 20 July, declaration of war (Docs 6.3 & 6.4); 13-17 August, Battle
of Tannenberg, Russian retreats; 5 August, Russian offensive in Galicia
1915 May, WIC set up; June, ZemGor set up; August, Progressive Bloc formed; Nicholas
leaves to lead army at front; September, Maklakov’s article on ‘the Mad Chauffeur’
(Doc 6.6); after Russian retreats from Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, front line
stabilises
1916 22 May to 31July, Brusilov offensive in Galicia; 1 November, Milyukov’s speech to
Duma (Doc 6.7); 16-17 December, assassination of Rasputin
 CHRONOLOGY 403

1917 February, demonstrations and troop mutiny in Petrograd; 27 February, Provisional

Committee of Duma formed, Petrograd Soviet meets 1 March (Doc 7.1), Soviet’s
‘Order No 1’; 2 March, Nicholas II abdicates in favour of his brother, Grand Duke
Mikhail; Provisional Government formed after agreement with Soviet; 3 March,
Grand Duke Mikhail abdicates in favour of Provisional Government; April, land
seizures (Doc 7.2); 3 April, Lenin returns, April Theses (Doc 7.6); Milyukov (foreign
minister) resigns from government; June, first All-Russian Congress of Soviets; 18
June, demonstrations in Petrograd (Doc 7.7); 18 June-mid July, 2nd Brusilov
offensive; 3-7 July, ‘July Days’, unsuccessful Bolshevik uprising; 8 July, Prince L’vov
resigns as prime minister, Kerensky becomes prime minister; 25 August -1
September, Kornilov coup (Doc 7.4); 9 September, Bolshevik majority on Petrograd
Soviet; 13 September, Lenin demands preparation for an uprising (Doc one LO
October, decision of Bolshevik Central Committee to attempt uprising; 25-26
October, Provisional Government overthrown while second All-Russian Congress of
Soviets meets (Doc 7.9); 26 October, second Congress assumes power (Doc 8.1);
new Soviet government formed, headed by Lenin; issues decrees on land and peace;
December, armistice negotiated with Germany, Cheka formed, creation of Vesenkha
1918 5 January, Constituent Assembly meets and is dispersed; 21 January, repudiation of
Tsarist debts; 1 (14) February, Gregorian calendar introduced; 3 March, Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk; 6-8 March, seventh Party Congress, Bolshevik Party renamed
Communist Party; 12 March, capital moved to Moscow; 25 May, Czech army seizes
in
trans-Siberian railway; Spring, anti-Bolshevik governments formed in Samara,
western Siberia, in Arkhangel’sk; 10 July, first Soviet constitution; 16-17 July,
murder of royal family, at Ekaterinburg in Urals; 1 August, British troops land at
Arkhangel’sk; 6 August, fall of Kazan to Czech and White forces; battle of Sviyazhsk
(Doc 8.2)
Ukraine,
1919 April—October, Admiral Kolchak directs three-prong attack from Siberia,
Baltic; March, eighth Party Congress, Party Secretariat and Politburo established
Red counter-
(Doc 8.3), foundation of Comintern, creation of Zhenotdel, October,
attacks; by November, all White attacks defeated
from Crimea;
1920 April, Polish armies attack towards Kiev, General Wrangel attacks
ttack; November,
Soviet counter-attack reaches Warsaw; October, Polish counter-a
armistice and evacuation of Wrangel’s army from Crimea
March, Kronstadt
1921 February, demonstrations in towns, rural insurrections (Doc 9.2);
of New Economic
uprising (Doc 9.3); tenth Party Congress (Doc 9.5), introduction
Policy
Stalin becomes general
1922 Treaty of Rapallo with Germany; May, Lenin’s first stroke,
secretary of Central Committee; December, USSR formed
1924 Death of Lenin
1925 Trotsky dismissed as commissar of war
1927 Procurements crisis and Urals—Siberian method
1928-32 First Five-Year Plan (Doc 11.2)
1929 November, decision to begin mass collectivisation
(Doc 11.1); foundation of
1930 March, ‘Dizzy with Success’; collectivisation continues
‘Gulag’
1931 Stalin attacks ‘petit-bourgeois egalitarianism’ (Doc 11.8)
of Nations, United States
1932-33 Famine in Ukraine (Doc 10.1); Soviet Union joins League
recognition; Riutin plan (Doc 11.4)
1933-37 Second Five-Year Plan
404 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

1934 Seventeenth Party Congress, ‘Congress of Victors’, signs of opposition to Stalin;

December, murder of Sergei Kirov, issue of Kirov Decrees (Doc 11.5)
1935 Beginnings of Stakhanovite movement !
1936 N. Yezhov becomes head of secret police; beginning of Great Terror (Docs 11.3,
11.7 & 11.9); Stalin constitution; August, trial of Zinoviev, Kamenev
1937 June, trial of Marshal Tukhachevsky and military purge
1937-41 Third Five-Year Plan
1938 March, trial of Bukharin
1939 Eighteenth Party Congress; 23 August, Nazi-Soviet pact; 1 September, Hitler invades
Poland; September, Soviet armies occupy eastern Poland
1940 June, Soviet armies occupy Baltic states and Bessarabia
1941 22 June, Germany attacks Soviet Union (Doc 12.1); 3 July, Stalin’s broadcast to the
nation; November, German armies reach line from Rostov to Moscow to Leningrad
(Doc 12.3); 5 December, first major Soviet counter-attack outside Moscow
1942 March, Soviet offensive ends, renewed German offensive in south; September,
German armies reach Stalingrad on Volga, street fighting; November, Soviet
counter-attack at Stalingrad
1923 January, German 6th Army surrenders; May, Comintern disbanded; July, Kursk tank
battle
1944 Soviet advances
1945 February, Yalta conference; 2 May, Berlin falls; 9May, Germany surrenders; July—
August, Potsdam conference; 6 August, United States drops nuclear bomb on
Hiroshima
1946 March, Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, Fulton, Missouri; fourth Five-Year Plan
1948 February, Communists take power in Czechoslovakia;
June to May 1949, Berlin
blockade; July, break with Yugoslavia
1949 25 January, Comecon formed; March, ‘Leningrad affair’; April, CMEA formed;
September, first Soviet atom bomb tested; Communist government in China
1950-03 Korean War
1952 Nineteenth Party Congress
1953: 5 March, Stalin dies (Doc 13.1); Malenkov becomes chairman of Council of
Ministers; 1 April, price cuts; 17 June, Berlin uprising; 28 June, Beria arrested
(Doc 13.2), and executed December; July, end of Korean War; August, first Soviet
H-bomb; September, Khrushchev becomes first secretary of Central Committee
1954 Virgin lands program; Ilya Ehrenburg’s ‘The Thaw’ and beginnings of thaw; KGB
formed; Kirov Decrees repealed
1955 February, Malenkov resigns; May, Warsaw Pact formed
1953-57 Amnesties release millions of camp inmates
1956 25 February, Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to twentieth Party Congress; peaceful
coexistence; Khrushchey visits Britain; October, revolt in Hungary, Soviet
intervention
1957 February, decentralisation of economic planning, Sovnarkhozy, June, anti-Party plot;
October, launch of Sputnik
1959 Khrushchev visits United States
1961 Twenty-second Party Congress
1962 October, Cuban missile crisis; November, publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Manezh exhibition (Doc 13.3); Party split into rural and
urban sections
 CHRONOLOGY 405

1964 Soviet Union imports grain; October, Khrushchev voted out of office by Politburo;
Brezhnev becomes general secretary, Kosygin becomes chairman of Council of
Ministers
1965 Kosygin economic reforms; arrest of writers Daniel and Sinyavsky
1968 25 August, Soviet troops invade Czechoslovakia; retreat from economic reforms
1977 October, adoption of new Soviet Constitution
1979 December, Soviet troops invade Afghanistan
1982 10 November, death of Leonid Brezhnev; succeeded as general secretary by Yurii
Andropov
1984 10 February, death of Yurii Andropov; succeeded as general secretary by Konstantin
Chernenko
1985 11 March, death of Konstantin Chernenko, succeeded as general secretary by
Mikhail Gorbachev, first Soviet leader from the post-Stalin generation; 23 April, 1st
plenum of CC under new leadership, commitment to ‘uskorenie’; 17 May, decrees
against alcoholism; July, plenum of CC, changes in leadership, Shevardnadze
becomes minister of foreign affairs; Sept, Ryzhkov becomes prime minister; 23
November, creation of ‘Gosagroprom’
1986 February-March, twenty-seventh Party Congress criticises ‘era of stagnation’, adopts
twelfth Five-Year Plan; 26 April, explosion at Chernobyl; 12 May, creation of
‘Gospriemka’; 11-12 October, Reykjavik summit; December, release of A. A. Sakharov
from internal exile, nationalist riots in Alma-Ata
1987 1 January, decrees abandoning government monopoly on foreign trade, and
permitting ‘joint enterprises’; 5 February, decrees on cooperative enterprises; 27-28
February, plenum of CC, Gorbachev proposes multi-candidate elections to Soviets;
28 May, Matthew Rust lands plane in Red Square, shake up of military leadership;
June, plenum of CC announces ‘radical restructuring’ of economy and elections to
local Soviets; 30 June, new law on enterprises to apply from January 1988;
September, publication of Gorbachev’s book, ‘Perestroika and New Thinking’;
in
August, nationalist demonstrations in Baltic republics; October, demonstrations
Armenia demanding return of Nagorno-Karabakh from Azerbaijan; 11 November,
Boris Yeltsin dismissed as head of Moscow Party apparatus; December, signing of
INF treaty, Washington; Abuladze’s anti-Stalinist film, ‘Repentance’
reforms of
1988 February, plenum of CC, Yeltsin dismissed from Politburo; March,
agriculture; 13 March, article of Nina Andreeva in Sovietskay a Rossiya; 6-7 June,
um of conversio n to Christiani ty; June, rehabilita tion of
celebration of millenni
Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and others purged in 1930s; 28 June-1 July,
nineteenth Party Conference; September, plenum of CC approves political reforms,
creation of
including elected parliament; 1 December, Supreme Soviet approves
and
Congress of People’s Deputies; publication of Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago,
Grossman’s Life and Fate; appearance of ‘informal’ organisations including
between
‘Memorial and ‘Pamyat”, and popular ‘fronts’ in Baltic republics; fighting
, Estonia declares its
Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh; November
sovereignty
elections to Congress
1989 15 February, last Soviet troops leave Afghanistan; March-April,
of Congres s, Gorbach ev elected President; 30
of People’s Deputies; 25 May, opening
includi ng Sakharov , Yeltsin, G Popov, Yu
July, formation of ‘Inter-Regional Group’,
Archipelago, 12-24
Afanasev; August, publication of first part of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag
stormy debates; autumn,
December, Congress passes thirteenth Five-Year Plan after
collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe
406 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

1990 February, abolition of Communist Party monopoly on power; April-May, reformers

(G Popov, A Sobchak) elected as mayors of Moscow and Leningrad; May, Ryzhkov
announces price reforms; 29 May, Yeltsin elected president of parliament of Russian
federation; 12 June, Russian parliament announces sovereignty of Russian republic;
July, twenty-eighth Party Congress; 12 July, Yeltsin announces resignation from
Communist Party; 15 July, Communist control of radio and television ended; 16July,
Ukrainian parliament decrees Ukrainian sovereignty; August, Russian parliament
begins debating Shatalin plan; December, Shevarnadze resigns, warning of danger
of coup, Ryzhkov replaced as prime minister by Pavlov
1991 2 April, Pavlov announces price reform; negotiations on new ‘Union Treaty’; June,
Yeltsin elected president of Russian republic, first elected leader of Russia; July,
Party surrenders right to maintain Party cells within State apparatus and army; 18-21
August, failed ‘putsch’ in Moscow; September, START | treaty signed; December,
announcement of new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS); 25 December,
Soviet flag lowered over Kremlin, end of USSR
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS~

Many thanks to Linda Bowman, who read and commented on a first draft of this
revised version, to Stephen Wheatcroft, who helped me with information on
statistics, and to Graeme Gill, for some useful ideas on Stalinism. I owe much to
my students, whose questions and comments have helped me to clarify my ideas
on modern Russian and Soviet history. Of course, no one but me is responsible for
any errors that remain. Finally, my thanks and love to Chardi, Joshua and Emily.
For permission to reproduce copyright material, my thanks to the following:

Extracts
George Allen & Unwin for the extract from Muscovy Through Foreign Eyes 1553-1900
by F Wilson
Edward Arnold for the extract from Octobrists to Bolsheviks: Imperial Russia, 1905-17
by M McCauley (ed)
Cambridge University Press for the extract from The Russian Landed Gentry and the
Peasant Emancipation of 1861 by W Churchill
William Collins for extracts from Mother Russia by M Hindus; and Perestroika: New
Thinking for Our Country and the World by M S Gorbachev. Copyright © 1987 by
M S Gorbachev.
Columbia University Press for the extract from Khrushchev: the Years in Powerby R &
Z Medvedev
E P Dutton, Inc for the extract from Russia at War: 1941-1945 by A Werth
Mrs L Florinsky for the extract from End of the Russian Empire by M T Florinsky
Granada Publishing Limited and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc for extracts from
Conversations with Stalin by M Djilas
Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc for extracts from p 11 of The Gulag Archipelago 191 s—
1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation by Aleksandr I Solzhenitsyn.
Translated from the Russian by Thomas P Whitney. Copyright © 1973 by
Aleksandr I Solzhenitsyn. English language translation copyright © 1973, 1974
by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher;
and from pp 178-9 of Russia 1917: The February Revolution by George Katkov.
Copyright © 1967 by George Katkov. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row,
Publishers, Inc
Harvard University Press for the extract from Russian Liberalism by G Fischer
Houghton Mifflin Company for the extract from The Second World War, vol iv: The
Hinge of Fate by Winston S Churchill. Copyright © 1950 by Houghton Mifflin
Company. Copyright © renewed 1978 by the Honourable Lady Spencer-
Churchill, the Honourable Lady Sarah Audley, and the Honourable Lady
Soames. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company
408 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Hutchinson Publishing Group Limited for the extract from An Ambassador’s

Memoirs by M Paleologue
Alfred A Knopf, Inc for the extract from Breaking with Moscow by Arkady
Shevchenko
Lawrence & Wishart Ltd for the extract from Ten Days that Shook the World by John
Reed
Macmillan Publishing Co, Inc for the extract from The Invisible Writing by Arthur
Koestler. Copyright © 1954, Arthur Koestler
Macmillan Accounts and Administration Ltd for Table 9: Rate of Industrial Growth
in Russia 1885-1913, from The Industrialisation of Russia 1700-1914 by M E
Falkus; and the extract from The Russian Revolution and the Soviet State 191 7-21,
by M McCauley (ed) :
M Matthews for extracts from Soviet Government: A Selection of Official Documents on
Internal Policies, Allen & Unwin, 1974
Methuen & Co for extracts from Modern Soviet Society by B Kerblay
W W Norton & Company, Inc for extracts from The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The
Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd by A Rabinowitch
Pathfinder Press for extracts from My Life by L Trotsky, Pathfinder Press, 1970; and
The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1923-25) by L Trotsky, Pathfinder Press, © 2
x 1975
Penguin Books Ltd for extracts from My Life by L Trotsky, Penguin Books, 1975,
pp 411, 418. Copyright © Pathfinder Press Inc, 1970; and three tables from An
Economic History of the USSR by A Nove, Pelican Books, revised edition, 1982, pp
177, 180, 186. Copyright © Alec Nove, 1969
Fredy Perlman, translator, for extracts from History of the Maknovist Movement 1915—
1921 by P Arshinov, Black & Red, 1974
AD Peters & Co Ltd for extracts from The Invisible WritingbyArthur Koestler; and
Russia 1917: The February Revolution by George Katkov
Royal Historical Society, London, for the extracts from “The Chronicle of
Novgorod (1914)’, edited and translated by R Mitchell and N Forves, and
reproduced in G Vernadsky et al (eds), A Source Book for Russian History from Early
Times to 1917, 3 vols, Yale University Press, 1972
Martin Secker & Warburg Limited for extracts from No Jail for ThoughtbyL Kopelev
Standford University Press for extracts from A Mazour, The First Russian Revolution:
the Decembrist Movement and H H Fisher (ed), The Memoirs of Count Kokotsev, both
in G Vernadsky et al (eds), A Source Book, Yale University Press, 1972
The University of California Press for the extract from L Lih, Bread and Authority in
Russia, 1914-1921, citing Paul Dukes, Red Dusk and the Morrow: Adventures and
Investigations in Red Russia, 1992, pp 196-8
The University of Chicago Press for extracts from Riha (ed), ‘Readings in Russian
Civilisation’; and T von Laue, ‘A Secret Memorandum of Sergei Witte’, in
Journal of Modern History, vol 26, 1954, pp 64-73
A P Watt Ltd for extracts from Russia in the Shadows by H G Wells
George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd for extracts from Russia under the Old Regime by
R Pipes; and Russia in Revolution by L Kochan
Yale University Press for extracts from G Vernadsky et al (eds), A Source Book for
Russian History from Early Times to 1917, 3 vols, 1972
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 409

Illustrations
Leonello Brandolini, Paris, pp 346 (both), 347, 356 (both), 344, 366 from The
Russians by Vollrath, Sichov, Vladimir published by Little Brown and Company
Publishers, Massachusetts; BBC Hulton Picture Library, pp 57, 190 (both), 198,
220; Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, p 155; British Library, p 23; T.
Browning and KFitzlyon, pp 51, 52, 116, 130, 142, 170; Harper Collins, New York,
p 382 from Mikhail Gorbachev: The August Coup, the Truth and the Lessons; Committee
of the International Red Cross, Geneva, p 156; Herald & Weekly Times Ltd, pp
181; Library of Congress, USA, p 361; Musée de I’Elysée, Lausanne, pp 96, 126;
National Archives and Records and Administration, Maryland, p 304 (top); Novosti
Press Agency (APN), London, pp 40, 77, 151, 206, 237, 246, 259, 303; The Orion
Publishing Group Ltd, London, pp 269, 275 (both), 304 (bottom), 305, 316 from
Stalin, Triumph and Tragedy by Volkogonov published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson;
Roger-Viollet, Paris, p 109; Thames & Hudson Ltd, p 2; University of California
Press, p 112 (top); Victoria and Albert Museum, p 59.

Maps
Maps in this book are based on maps in R Auty and D Obolensky, An /ntroduction to
Russian History, Cambridge University Press, 1976; M Gilbert, Russian History Atlas,
Weidenfeld and Nicolson Limited, 1972; JNettl, The Soviet Achievement, Thames &
Hudson, 1967; and H Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire 1801-1917, The Oxford
History of Modern Europe, Oxford University Press, 1967.
INDEX

abortion, 197, 285 173-80, 182, 184-7, 189-90, 197, 212-13,

Abuladze, T Ye, 372, 405 401-2
Academy of Sciences, 342, 348 Soviet, 194-6, 198, 203
aeroplanes, 295-7, 301-2, 304 and see Red Army
Afghanistan, 107, 357, 366, 371, 405 Arsenev, KI, 47-8, 50, 70, 73, 243
agriculture, 1-3, 10, 18-19, 21, 24, 26, 50-64, 77, 88, art, 130, 330-1
105, 109-11, 113, 114-22, 150-2, 154, 158, 199, artels, 118-19, 377
218, 224, 226-9, 245-51, 254-6, 260, 291, 313, artisans, 47, 49, 133
320, 323-5, 329, 331-3, 335, 345-6, 350-2, assassination, 82, 94, 96, 135-7, 148, 150, 195, 238,
362-3, 366, 369-70, 377, 390 402
commercial, 77-8, 109, 113-16, 158, 206-8, 286 Astrakhan, 31, 37, 41, 210
see grain August putsch, 382-3, 406
alcohol, 24—5, 39, 56, 120-1, 157-9, 349-50, 362, Australia, 2, 359
365-6, 372, 380, 405 autocracy, 15, 28, 30, 32-40, 42-5, 68, 70-3, 75, 83,
see vodka 87, 89, 92, 94, 101, 106, 109, 114, 127, 130-1,
Alekseev, general, M V, 166, 178, 199 139, 141, 147-50, 160-1, 164, 167, 170, 173-4,
Alexander I, 43, 68, 71, 80, 82, 401 181, 184, 214, 233-5, 239, 262, 288, 291, 309,
Alexander II, 75, 80-1, 83-5, 89, 96, 115, 135, 371, 318, 325, 327, 335, 338, 379, 396
397, 401-2 Azerbaijan, 374-5, 405
Alexander III, 96—7, 402
Alexandra, Empress, 154, 161-2 Babel, I E, 202, 218
Alexei, 161 backwardness, 93, 114, 157, 171-2, 182, 193, 219,
Alexei Mikhailovich, tsar, 102, 401 224-6, 267, 286—7, 306, 357-8, 385
Allilueva, S, 316 Baikal, lake, 31, 107, 373
Alma-Ata, 375, 383, 405 Baku, 104—5, 107, 210, 280, 305, 381
Amalrik, A A, 1 Baltic provinces/republics, 84, 97, 199, 211, 213,
anarchists, 209, 211, 221, 286 255, 293, 296, 308, 312, 374-6, 383, 401, 403-5
Andropoy, Yu V, 155, 345, 361-3, 365, 405 see also Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania
anti-faction rule, 233-4, 238, 270, 325 Baltic sea, 21, 31, 40, 104, 107, 221, 300
apparat, 236, 238-9, 269, 272, 280, 318-9, 322-3, bankruptcy, 354-5, 368, 377-8
326-7, 342, 363, 373, 396, 405 banks, 75, 77, 85, 104, 106, 115, 130, 140, 164, 178,
April Theses, 184-5, 403 195, 205, 223, 378, 381
Arkhangel’sk, 31, 199, 209-10, 213, 403 barshchina, 64-5, '76, 396
aristocrats, see nobles, landowners Batu, khan, 27-30, 401
Armenia, 374—5, 405 Belarus, 19, 301, 383
arms race, 311, 357, 367 Belgium, 108
army, 2, 7-9, 15, 26, 100, 225 Belinsky, V G, 72
Mongol, 27-30 Belorussia, see Belarus
Muscovite, 32, 36-9, 44, 101 Benkendorff, count, 78, 82, 155, 362
Imperial, 40-3, 47-8, 64-7, 71, 75, 77-81, 83, Beria, L P, 275, 281, 318-23, 404
88-9, 95-6, 102-4, 109, 122, 125, 127-8, 130, Berlin, 217, 294, 301, 306, 311, 319, 375, 404
136-8, 140-5, 151-7, 160-2, 1647, 170-1, Bessarabia, 293-4, 404
 INDEX 411

Bezborodko, prince, 43 246, 256, 259-60, 331, 335, 341, 368, 370, 377
black earth, 55-7, 90, 116, 396 Caspian Sea, 20, 31, 37, 104-5, 107, 210
Black Hundreds, 150 Catherine II, 43-4, 65, 67, 76, 78, 81, 165, 312, 401
Black Sea, 20, 31, 43, 104-5, 107, 108, 139, 158, 200, cattle, 26, 52, 90, 113, 117, 128, 176, 221, 248-50,
209, 300-1, 327 253, 255, 287, 304, 332, 345, 390
Bloody Sunday, 137-9, 153-4, 402 Caucasus, 18-20, 31, 97, 104, 127, 136, 199-200,
Boer war, 125 210, 213, 248, 295, 305, 323, 332, 353
Bolotnikov uprising, 39, 41, 400 cavalry, 27, 30, 37-8, 138, 165, 208, 211, 293, 296,
Bolsheviks, 120, 135, 139, 153, 173, 177, 180-90, 304, 306, 396
193-204, 208, 210, 218-20, 224-5, 228, 239, 267, Caves monastery, Kiev, 22-3, 400
270-2, 275-6, 288, 291-2, 298, 339, 374, 385-6, censorship, 69, 71-2, 75, 88, 97, 101, 174, 202, 234,
396, 402-3 243, 270, 318, 327-8, 330, 344-5, 355-6, 372,
see Communists 380, 396, 401, 406
borderline groups, 7-10 census, 28, 38, 40, 47, 372, 400
bourgeois revolution, 177, 181-2, 185 Central Asia, 19, 26, 31, 238-9, 248, 252, 301, 352,
bourgeoisie, 69, 116, 126-7, 129, 133, 167, 172-3, 376
177-8, 181-3, 185, 197, 225, 234, 243, 268, 278, Central Committee, 135, 188-9, 195, 234-5, 237,
285, 396 271, 274, 276, 278, 281, 318, 322-4, 326-8,
boyare, 30, 32-6, 38, 41, 44-5, 68, 239, 396-7, 400 338-9, 342, 348, 361-3, 365, 373, 396, 398, 403-5
Breshkovskaya, C, 94—5 Central Producer Region, 109, 113, 151, 158
Brest—Litovsk, treaty of, 198-9, 202, 205, 291-4, 389, ceremonial life of peasants, 39, 61-2, 120-1
403 Chayanoy, A V, 62-3, 118
Brezhnev, L I, 82, 258, 317, 326, 338, 340, 343, Cheka, 196, 199, 206, 219, 267, 396, 403
345-6, 358-9, 361-3, 372, 378, 405 Chekhov, A, 89
Britain, 9-10, 69, 80, 83, 117, 132, 181, 199-200, Chernenko, K U, 362-3, 405
210, 213, 231, 254-5, 267, 292-3, 296, 299, 306, Chernobyl, 372, 405
321, 334, 370, 404 Chernov, V M, 135, 177-8, 199, 209, 213
Brusilov, general A A, 175, 212, 402-3 Chernyshevskii, N I, 93
Budenny, S M, 296 Chicherin, G V, 292
budget, 66, 85, 148, 295, 345, 365, 379-80, 401 Childe, V G, 1
Bukharin, N I, 180, 226-8, 229-32, 237-8, 247, China, v, 14, 18, 27-8, 100, 105, 107, 125, 136, 292,
969-70, 272, 274-5, 279, 283, 285, 287, 327, 354, 308, 311, 325, 387, 404
368, 404 Christianity, 22-4, 29-30, 32, 42, 61, 72, 81, 284,
Bulgakov, M A, 372 400, 405
Bulganin, N A, 321, 334 Nestorian, 29
Bulgaria, 300, 308, 375 chronicles, 21-3, 27, 29, 400
bureaucracy, 30, 41-2, 44, 48, 67-70, 87-9, 91, church, 6, 14, 22, 24-5, 30, 39, 42, 51, 53, 62, 67, 80,
129-31, 137-8, 140, 151, 154, 173-4, 182, 185, 130, 175, 177, 308, 400
195-197, 203, 213, 236, 241, 270, 274, 279, 281, Churchill, W, 266, 304, 308, 404
283, 349, 351, 357, 397 CIS, see Commonwealth of Independent States
see officials civil war, 36, 180, 193-215, 217, 219-20, 222, 224,
Byzantium, 20-1, 24, 26 230-1, 233-40, 243, 245, 247, 252, 256, 265-7,
see also Constantinople 269-71, 276, 278, 292-3, 296, 338-40, 364, 371,
373, 376, 398, 400, 403
classes, 2, 4—5, 13, 47-50, 88, 125-7, 131, 133, 138,
calendar, 16-19, 403
173, 243-4
Canada, 21, 324
see nobles, ruling group, working classes,
capital, 103, 106, 108, 182, 197, 257, 259, 262,
332-3, 352, 355, 396
easants, intelligentsia
clergy, 6-7, 25, 47-8, 65, 67, 69-70, 79, 93, 138, 143,
Capital, 13, 132
156, 243-4, 246
Capitalism, 11, 13-16, 50, 100-3, 109, 112, 114-15,
climate, 18
117-18, 122, 132-4, 171, 182-3, 186-7, 209, 217,
CMEA, 311, 396, 404
299-9, 232, 243, 247, 253, 258, 261, 266-7, 279,
coal, 104-6, 218, 253-4, 259, 300, 352, 367, 391
284, 287-8, 291-2, 310-11, 334, 338, 342, 351-2,
coercion, machinery of, 6-9, 15-16, 170-1, 173-5,
354, 357-8, 364, 372, 381, 386-8
179, 184-5, 189, 193, 195-8, 201-2, 244, 265,
capitalists, 11, 130, 133)(13894471505153,1:79; 182,
967, 285, 321, 371
184, 186, 204, 225-6, 228-9, 252, 267, 285
see also army
see bourgeoisie, merchants, entrepreneurs
Cold War, vi, 183, 286, 311, 313, 357
cash, 4, 50, 61-3, 78, 103, 109, 112, 118, 205, 224-6,
412 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

collective farms, 229, 232, 243-50, 258, 266, 279, Crimea, 79, 81, 83, 155, 209, 217, 291, 312, 375, 382,
308, 311-12, 320, 323, 328-9, 332, 342-3, 345, 403
353, 363, 367, 369-70, 378, 380, 397 Crimean war, 77-8, 80-1, 85, 103-4, 401
collective leadership, 319, 322-3 Cuba, 334-5, 404 ;
collectivisation, 120, 243-52, 258-60, 263, 265-6, cult of personality, 269, 324-
268-71, 277, 286-7, 293, 325, 339-40, 403 cultural revolution, 270
colonies, 105, 229 culture, Russian, 3, 70-2, 311, 340, 345
Comintern, 292-3, 311, 396, 403-4 political, 3, 15-16, 45, 193
command economy, 205, 243, 252, 256, 261—2, 306, and see autocracy
318, 325, 331, 333, 351-6, 361, 369-70, 378-9, Czech Army of Liberation, 200-1, 209, 403
386, 388, 399 Czechoslovakia, 200, 308, 356-7, 375, 404-5
commissars, political and military, 195, 2ONee2Z03y
207-8, 296, 307, 311, 396 de Custine, Marquis, 68
Commonwealth of Independent States, 383, 396, Decembrists, 7, 71, 81-2, 401
406 defence, 8, 26, 33, 40, 204, 238-9, 244, 266, 291,
commune, 58-60, 84, 86-7, 90-1, 93-4, 106, 109, 295-6, 298, 300, 309, 317, 326, 331, 334-5, 338,
113, 115-16, 128, 139, 142-3, 150-1, 174-6, 251, 340, 350, 357, 367, 371, 381, 386-7
396-8 democracy, democratisation, 173-6, 180-4, 191,
Communism, 3, 15, 134, 170, 201, 204, 311, 323, 193, 196, 202-3, 220, 233, 236, 238, 240-1,
346, 356, 387, 396, 405 285-6, 371-5, 378, 383
Communist International, see Comintern democratic centralism, 135, 235
Communists, Communist Party, 202-5, 208-9, demography, see population
212-15, 217-30, 232-41, 245, 247-8, 251, Denikin, general A I, 199, 209, 211-12
268-81, 285-6, 288, 291-3, 307-8, 311, 318, deportations, 312, 325
320-9, 331, 338-9, 348, 363, 368, 373-5, 380, desert, 18, 55, 328
382-3, 396-8, 403-6 destalinisation, 324-6, 334-5, 363-4
see Bolsheviks diets, 37, 39, 52, 56-7, 248, 345
competition, 11-12, 354, 368, 370, 377 disarmament, 367, 370-1, 405-6
computers, 353, 358, 367 discipline, 6-9, 26-8, 33-6, 39, 41-3, 69, 130, 135,
Conference of Communist Party, 373, 405 202, 204, 212, 220, 222, 233, 244, 328
Congress of Soviets, 171, 186, 194-5, 202, 403 in factories, 258-9, 262, 312, 353, 363
Congress of People’s Deputies, 373-4, 396, 405 in army, 80, 140, 144, 147, 154, 156-7, 160,
Congresses of Social Democratic/Communist Party, 164-5, 171, 174-5, 177-8, 187, 196, 200-2,
135, 187, 203, 221, 223, 234-5, 238, 240 271-2, 297-8
274, 276, 278, 281, 322-8, 330, 333, 363, 368, in party, 135, 181, 183, 189, 195, 197, 202-3,
372-3, 396, 403-6 212-14, 233-6, 238-40, 267-70, 282, 309, 318,
Conquest, R, 277 323, 328, 330
Constantine Porphyrogenitus, 24 dissidents, 7, 44, 69, 130-1, 270-3, 322, 330, 344-5,
Constantinople, 24, 105, 157 359, 361-2, 371-2
see also Byzantium distilling, 78, 88, 116, 159
Constituent Assembly, 166, 171-2, 175, 178, 194, illegal, see samogon
197, 199, 213, 403 district, 44, 68, 174, 398-9
constitution, 131-2, 138-9, 141-2, 148-51, 161, divorce, 197, 285
166-7 Djilas, M, 283, 287, 306-7
Soviet, 202, 243, 285, 373-4, 401-5 Dmitrii Donskoi, prince, 32
consumer goods, 112, 114, 158, 160, 227-30, 253-6, Dnieper River, 20, 24, 29, 31, 104, 252, 305
259-60, 283, 313, 320, 329, 331, 334, 342, 345-7, domestic industry, 56, 62-3, 103, 112, 116, 118, 120,
349-50, 377, 379-80, 391 221, 397
cooperatives, 368-70, 380, 405 Don river, 20, 104, 275
cordon detachments, 219-21, 223 Donets River, 20, 105, 233, 259
corruption, 66, 362 druzhina, 23—4, 27, 206, 396
Cossacks, 37-9, 41, 48-9, 80, 128, 138, 155, 164, dual power, 172-4
198-9, 210, 306, 396 Dubcek, A, 356
cotton, 112, 116, 218, 352 Duma, 116, 131, 141-4, 148-51, 153-5, 158, 160-7,
courts, 59, 64, 66, 86, 88, 97, 197, 233 170, 173, 272, 396, 399, 402-3
crafts, 56, 62-3, 78 Durnovo, P N, 155
see also domestic industry dvoriane, 33-6, 38, 41, 44-5, 68, 281, 396
créches, 285, 348 Dzerzhinskii, F E, 199
 INDEX 413

economic amphibians, 120-1, 258 403

educated classes, 70-3, 78, 94-5, 103, 127-31, 142, Fedor I, 36, 400
144, 147-51, 153, 157, 161-3, 166-7, 171-3, 175, feminism, 348-9
177-80, 182, 243 fertiliser, 57, 61, 113, 117, 154, 332
see bourgeoisie feudal dues, 50, 56, 63-6, 75, 78, 82, 86, 89-92,
education, 3, 14, 53-4, 61, 66, 69-70, 88, 93-4, 102, 396-7
116-17, 120-1, 128-30, 136, 202, 239, 256, 260, see also barshchina, obrok
262, 284-5, 317, 329, 338-40, 342-5, 358, 363-4, films, 202, 307
372 financiers, 69, 115, 178
see also, schools Finland, 97, 104, 136, 144, 186, 199, 210-11, 294,
egalitarianism, 258-9, 282, 329, 342, 385-8, 403 296, 300, 308, 312
Eisenstein, S M, 307 Finnic speakers, 19, 21
Ekaterinburg, 104, 199, 210, 403 First World War, 113-14, 151, 154-63, 172, 174-9,
elections, 149, 178, 197, 202, 213, 220, 238, 369, 183-5, 194—5, 226, 229, 260, 271, 291, 293, 380,
373-5, 382-3, 402, 405 402
see suffrage fiscal retreat, 140, 120, 308
electricity, 218, 223, 229, 253-5, 303, 345, 378, 391 fiscal system, see taxation
electronics, 338, 353, 358, 367 Five-Year-Plans, 252-7, 259, 261, 270, 282, 284, 293,
emancipation, 77-9, 81-7, 92-3, 115 312, 325, 403-5
act, 85-7, 90, 93, 96, 103, 114, 117, 127, 129, 401 Florinsky, M T, 175
impact, 89-92, 95 foreign policy, 63, 136-7, 174-5, 195, 198, 229-31,
Emperor, 40, 71, 148 291-4, 308-11, 313, 318, 333-5, 342, 367, 370,
see tsar 381
Engels, F, 13, 82, 132, 193, 285 foreigners, 101-2
engines of growth, 13-14, 16, 50, 92, 103, 133, 225, forests, 19, 21, 30, 52-7
256, 261-3, 265, 287, 312, 351, 354, 386-7 see taiga
England, see Britain France, 69-71, 80, 83, 108, 142, 151, 181, 196, 200,
entrepreneurs, 11-14, 49-50, 64, 76, 78, 89, 92, 210, 213, 254-5, 258, 267, 293
102-3, 106, 113, 115-16, 118-20, 130, 147, French Revolution, 70, 92, 151
149-50, 176; 181,223, 225, 261,287, 351, 354, fridges, 346, 391
377, 397 Frunze, M V, 209
estates, see classes Fundamental Laws, see constitution
Estonia, 82, 84, 209, 213, 293-4, 375-6, 405 furs, 21, 24, 103
Eurasia, 18, 21 Furtseva, E A, 348
Outer, 18
Inner, 18-19, 21, 37-8, 44, 101, 291 Gapon, priest, 127, 137-9
Europe, 3, 15, 18;°26,/42, 72-3, 81-2, 93, 102-3, 105, garrison troops, 142, 157, 160, 164-5, 171, 174, 185,
112, 114-6,.119, 157, 172, 180-2; 195, 209;.219, 189-90, 194, 196-7
924, 254, 293, 334, 357, 371, 401 gas, 352, 356
European culture, AN) 72. iON gender division of labour, 58-9, 63, 72, 257-8, 285,
Eastern, 308, 310-11, 375, 387, 396, 405 348
Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets, General Secretary, 237, 239, 243, 271, 319, 323, 328,
194, 202, 403 338, 340, 361-2, 366, 398, 403, 405
Genghis Khan, 26-8, 33, 206, 232, 400
gentry, 67, 85, 87, 129, 131, 143, 212, 398
factories, 3, 14, 95, 102, 115-16, 118-21, 126, 164-5,
174, 178-9, 185, 187, 189, 196-7, 204—5, 220-2,
see landowners, nobles
298, 257, 282, 300-1, 343 geography, natural, 8-9, 18-19, 26, 44, 55, 73
Georgia, 199, 299, 307, 346, 374, 381, 383
factory committees, 173, 178-9, 186, 204-5, 396
factory workers, vi, 95, 102, 119-21, 126-8, 137-9, Germany, 43, 81, 108, 131, 154-5, 157-8, 162, 174,
157, 160, 163-5, 173-4, 178-9, 185, 189, 203,
177, 180, 183-4, 186, 198-200, 217, 233, 254-5,
918, 342-3, 367, 369 266, 283, 287, 291-3, 295-308, 312, 340, 375,
see working classes 403-4
Gerschenkron, A, 113-14
famine, 10, 12, 56-7, 84, 90, 109-10, 113, 125, 219,
294, 299, 231, 248-9, 251, 265-6, 271, Doles glasnost’, 83, 371-2, 383, 396, 401, 405
325, 402-3 Glavlit, 234
Fascism, 293, 310 GNP, 115, 252-5, 332, 350-2, 357, 369, 376-7, 396
Gogol, N, 50, 67
see Nazis
gold, 108, 152-3
February Revolution, 114, 163-7, 170-1, 190, 205,
414 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Golden Horde, 27, 29-30, 32 Hitler, A, 258, 293, 296, 305, 308, 404
Golovachey, A A, 87 Hobbes, T, 7
Gorbachev generation, 363-4, 371-2, 405 honey, 21, 24
Gorbachev, M S, 83-4, 89, 317, 339, 245, 350, horses, 25, 27, 33, 37-8, 57, 61, 90, 113, 117, 206,
362-76, 378, 380-3, 405 948, 270, 279, 286, 293, 295
Gorbacheva, R M, 363 household, 53-4, 58, 103, 113, 115-16, 118-20, 151,
Gosagroprom, 366, 370, 405 251, 257, 343, 348-9
Gosplan, 252, 304, 332, 368, 396 housing, 51-3, 56, 61, 86, 90, 111, 233, 255-6,
Gospriemka, 366-7, 379, 405 258-60, 282-3, 306, 329-31, 341-2, 346, 350, 379
governors, 68, 79, 88, 174, 235, 396, 399 see 1zba
GPU, 233, 267-8, 283, 397 Hughes,J, 105
grain, 53, 56-8, 77, 104-6, 108-11, 113, 116, 118, Hungary, 200, 217, 300, 308, 312, 325, 361, 375, 401
158, 176, 205, 208, 218-19, 227, 248, 253-6, 258, 404
260, 308, 312, 320, 328, 345, 390, 398, 405 Huns, 18-19
yields, 26, 58, 113, 332 hunters and gatherers, 1-2, 5, 25
exports, 104-6, 108-11, 113, 158-60, 227, 229, iarlyk, 27, 397
287 Iaroslav, prince, 24, 400
imports, 329 ideologies, 131
supplies, 158, 160, 163-4, 178, 194, 205-7, 222-3, see Populism, Socialism, Liberalism, Marxism,
226, 229-33, 245-6, 249, 286-7 Leninism, Nationalism
see also diets, prodrazverstha, procurements Igor, prince, 21-2, 24, 400
grain requisitioning, see prodrazverstka India, 14, 18
great retreat, 284-5, 293, 307 industrial managers, 262, 266, 278-82, 285, 295,
Great Patriotic War, vi, 254, 257, 277, 286-7, 312, 341, 352-5, 362, 367, 370, 376, 378-9
294-309, 313, 325, 329, 333, 340, 344, 348, industrial regions, 104-5, 127, 295
363-4, 374, 404 industrialisation, 78, 102-12, 114, 122, 125, 225-31,
‘Great Reforms’, 75-92, 97, 100, 111, 114, 358, 371, 241, 243, 245, 252-63, 265-68, 271, 285-7, 295,
374, 383, 401 313, 317, 319, 325, 328-9, 335, 340, 344
Greece, 20-1, 24, 300, 310 industrialists, 11, 69, 115, 161, 170, 176, 178-9, 204,
Grishin, V V, 363 213
Gromyko, A A, 363, 367 industry, 69, 73, 96, 102-6, 108, 110-2, 114, 122,
gross output, see val 130, 154, 157, 173, 176, 205, 214, 218, 223-4,
Grossman, V S, 372, 405 227, 229, 254-6, 278, 295, 301-4, 332, 380, 390
growth, economic, vi, 3-4, 9-16, 103-15, 122, 125, military, 101-2, 156-9, 194, 205, 214, 225, 228-9,
134, 154, 158, 176, 181, 226-31, 241, 252-6, 231, 239, 254, 260-1, 266, 287, 295, 300-4,
286-7, 331-3, 336, 350-1, 355, 365, 376, 386-8 313, 331, 387-8
extensive, 9-10, 15-16, 101-2, 110, 256-62, 306, textiles, 102-4, 112, 116, 118, 127, 163—4, 227,
331-3, 335-6, 351, 363, 386 278
intensive, 9-13, 15-16, 101, 110, 115, 224, 256, see also iron, coal, oil, steel, heavy industry
260-2, 331-3, 336, 351, 363, 386-7 inflation, 158-60, 178-9, 205, 260, 271, 345-6, 366,
guberniya, see provinces 380
Guchkov, A, 116, 141, 161, 170-1, 175-7 informal organisations, 374, 405
Gulag, 268, 322, 397, 403 informers, 243, 322
innovation, 10-14, 102, 260-1, 333, 353
Haimson, L, 166 intelligentsia, 7, 49, 60, 67, 69-70, 73, 95, 117,
harvest, 58, 63, 105, 109-11, 113, 118, 120, 125, 127, 129-32, 134-6, 145, 147, 150, 153, 155-6, 165,
154, 158, 206-7, 218-19, 224, 227, 231-2, 245, 170, 172, 181, 193, 203, 212, 239-41, 243-4, 268,
248-51, 253-6, 324, 328-9, 356, 390 278, 282, 308, 339, 343-5, 347, 358, 372, 378,
Haxthausen, baron, 54, 60, 401 397-8
health, see diets, medicine, social welfare international revolution, see world revolution
heavy industry, 112, 114, 154, 223, 226, 228-9, 231, International Women’s Day, 163
254-6, 260, 283, 287, 295, 313, 323, 325, 331, investment, 228, 231, 259-60, 312, 324, 345, 350
350, 387 Irkutsk, 31, 55, 107, 200, 209
see also industry iron, 102, 104-6, 110-11, 218, 228-9, 253-5, 295,
Herberstein, 34 300, 391
Herzen, A, 93 iron curtain, 308, 311, 404
historians, Soviet, 75, 79, 191 Iskra, 135, 402
western, vi, 75 Islam, 29, 32, 308, 374
 INDEX 415

Italy, 114, 200, 210 kormlenie, 32-3, 397

Ivan I, ‘kalita’, 30, 400 Kornilov, general L G, 177-8, 180, 187, 219, 403
Tvan III, 32—4, 400 Kosygin, A N, 278, 338, 355-6, 362, 368, 405
Ivan IV, ‘The Terrible’, 35-8, 45, 101, 239, 307, 397, Kremlin, v, 319, 321, 326, 383, 406
400 Kronstadt, 141, 144, 186, 220-2, 233-4, 241, 403
Ivanovo, 139, 398, 402 Krupskaya, N K, 285
izba, 51-3, 397 Kryuchkoy, V A, 382
kulaks, 116, 143, 206, 208, 223, 228, 231-2, 243,
Japan, 14, 107, 122, 136-7, 147, 200, 209-10, 255, 246-9, 258, 265-6, 268, 397
267, 293, 304, 308 Kulikovo, 32, 400
Jews, 97, 140, 152, 308, 312 Kursk, 139, 300, 404
joint enterprises, 368, 405 kustar, see domestic industry
journalists, 69, 93, 344-5, 372, 382 Kutuzov, general, 307
judicial reform, 87-8
July days uprising, 186-8, 403 labour, 11, 76, 78, 256-62, 297, 302, 305, 312,
331-2, 350-1, 351-2, 365
Kadets, 141-2, 149-50, 161, 176-7, 397, 402 see also wage-labour, wage-earning
Kaganovich, L M, 251, 282, 321, 326 labour camps, v, 221, 248, 258, 266-9, 277, 209, 304,
Kalinin, M I, 273, 321 307, 311-2, 319, 321-2, 330, 344, 372, 404
Kamenev, L B, 180, 184, 189, 194-5, 237-8, 247, labour, forced, 4, 268
271, 273, 275, 327, 404 see also serfdom, slavery, labour camps
Kankrin, count E F, 77 land redistribution, 58-60, 86, 94, 128, 143, 149-50,
155, 173-6, 178, 183, 194-7, 204-6, 212-13, 219,
Kantorovich, L V, 351
Kazakhstan, 19, 229, 247, 301, 323, 329, 374-5, 383 403
Kazan, 31-2, 37, 101, 201, 209-10, 403 land shortage, 90, 109, 117, 127-8, 144, 150-1, 178
Kerensky, A F, 170, 172, 177, 186-7, 189-90, 194, Land Captains, 97, 109, 174, 402
landowners, 11-12, 33-9, 44, 47-50, 63-5, 67-9,
197-8, 403
KGB, 277, 322, 326, 344-5, 361-2, 382, 397, 404 76-7, 82, 84-9, 92, 94-5, 108, 115, 127-9, 147-8,
150, 170, 176, 182, 184—5, 194, 197, 204, 208,
Khabalov, general, 164-5
212-13, 228, 240, 243, 246, 261, 266-7, 396, 398
Kharkov, 104, 128, 139-40, 210, 249
see also nobles, gentry, boyare, dvoriane
Khazars, 20-1
Latvia, 82, 293-4, 300, 381
khozraschet, 355, 397
law, 4, 43, 72; 75, 117, 196
Khrushchey, N S, 272, 274, 276, 278, 311-12, 317-8,
Law Codes, 38, 399, 401
321-35, 338, 340-1, 3434, 350, 354, 363, 372,
martial, 89
377-8, 404-5
League of Nations, 293, 403
khutor, 151, 176, 397
legitimacy, see persuasion
Kiev, 20-4, 26, 27, 29, 31, 55, 104, 109, 112, 210,
Lena River, 107, 152-3, 332, 402
280, 294, 300-1, 305, 364, 400, 403
Lenin, VI, vi, 78, 116-19, 126-7, 134-5, 150-1,
Kievan Rus’, 20-30, 32, 37, 44, 54, 396, 400 180-1, 194-7, 199-200, 204, 206-9, 213-14,
kinship, 5, 7, 24, 26, 28, 280
291-3, 225, 227-8, 230, 233, 235, 237-40, 245,
Kireevskii, I, 72
258, 267, 271, 283-4, 286, 291, 298, 325, 339-40,
Kirilenko, A P, 278
350, 368, 371, 396, 398, 402-3
Kirov Decrees, 273, 321-2, 404
Leningrad, 17, 237, 268, 272-3, 278, 294-5,
Kirov, S M, 271-5, 325, 404
298-306, 311, 342, 377, 386, 404, 406
Kirov works, 302-3
Leninism, 181-4, 191, 308, 319, 322
see Putilov works
Liberalism, liberals, 42-3, 70, 83-4, 87-8, 91-4, 97,
Klyuchevskii, V O, 56
130-2, 135, 139, 141-2, 145, 153, 161, 165, 167,
Koestler, A, 248-9, 275, 282-3
174, 191, 213, 271, 330, 345, 356, 374, 397, 398,
Kokovtsov, count V, 142-3, 165
401-2
Kolchak, admiral A V, 209, 212, 403 Liberman, E G, 333, 351, 354
kolkhozy, see collective farms Liddel Hart, general, 295
Kollontai, A M, 197, 233, 285, 348 life expectancy, 54, 349
Komsomol, 280, 283, 308, 323, 339, 363 Ligachevy, Ye K, 363, 370
Konev, marshall I S, 305-6 List, F, 106
Konovalov, A I, 153, 170, 176 literacy, 3, 63, 70, 128, 202, 230, 247, 256, 317, 343,
Kopeley, L Z, 283-4
390
Korea, 136-7, 311, 334, 404 literature, 70, 234, 330, 372
416 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

Lithuania, 29-30, 36, 82, 84, 156, 267, 293-4, 400, militia, 174-5, 185, 189, 196, 200, 297, 302, 304, 397
402 Miliutin, D, 80-1, 88
Litvinov, M, 293 Miliutin, N, 85
livestock, 52-3, 56-7, 63, 90, 113, 117, 128, 158, 176, Milyukov, PN, 129-31, 139, 141-2, 162-3, 170, 174,
291, 299, 246, 249-50, 253, 255-6, 260, 270, 176-7, 213, 402-3
286-7, 312, 332 mining, 14, 63, 112, 120, 152-3, 229, 233, 379, 390
living standards, 108-9, 112-13, 114, 159-60, 178, ministries, 68, 318-20, 322-3, 326, 331-2, 338-40,
297-9, 248, 255-6, 260, 284, 312-13, 320, 325, 342, 355, 363, 374, 404-5
328-9, 334-6, 342, 345-50, 358, 378-9, 383 Minsk, 377
loans, 77, 85, 104, 106, 108, 125, 142, 200, 226-7, mir, see commune
229, 245, 301, 310, 380, 402-3 mobilisation, direct and indirect, 2, 4-16, 21-2, 24,
local government, 44, 68, 75, 97-8, 116, 174-5, 401 26-8, 38-40, 44, 63, 65-7, 73, 75-6, 81, 101-2,
Lunacharsky, A V, 189 106-9, 114, 157-9, 203-8, 214, 222-3, 225-33,
L’voy, prince G E, 170, 177, 403 940-1, 244-5, 249-51, 256-62, 265, 287-8, 295,
machine tractor stations, 247, 256, 266, 397 297, 299-302, 304-6, 310-12, 340, 364
magic, 61 ‘modern’ revolution, vi, 1-5, 13-16, 50, 70, 73, 75-6,
Makhno, N, 208-9, 211-2 89, 92, 97, 100-1, 117, 122, 147, 224-30, 240-1,
Maklakov, V A, 162, 167, 271, 402 244
Malenkov, G M, 281, 317-21, 323, 326, 328, 334, 404 modernisation, see modern revolution
Mamontoy, S I, 130 Moldova, 83, 293, 376
managers, see industrial managers Molotov, V M, 293, 298-9, 318-21, 326
Manchuria, 31, 107, 136-7, 140, 142, 155, 293 monasteries, 23, 72, 194, 344
Mandelstam, N Ya, 372 Mongolia, 19, 26, 107, 326
Mao Zedong, 308 Mongols, 20, 23, 26-30, 32-3, 40, 44, 65, 260, 267,
markets, 4, 11-13, 61, 63, 76, 77-8, 85, 92-3, 95, 397-8, 400
100, 103, 105, 113, 115-19, 122, 158, 183, 204-5, Moscow, v-vi, 27, 30-3, 55, 67, 77, 90, 102-4, 107,
208, 219-20, 222-3, 225-31, 240, 249-52, 260-1, 109, 113, 116, 130, 139, 142, 158, 166, 177, 187,
286-7, 318, 320, 341, 345, 351-2, 354-5, 368, 196, 219-20, 203, 209-10, 214, 220-1, 233, 237,
370, 376-7, 379-81, 386-7, 397 260, 273, 294-5, 299-302, 304-5, 318-19, 323-4,
marriage, 7, 32, 34, 53-4, 64-5, 86, 197, 311 326, 332-3, 339, 341, 348, 351, 355-6, 363, 377,
Marshall plan, 310-11 380, 382-3, 400-6
Martoy, Yu O, 127, 134-5 motor vehicles, 253, 295, 342, 352, 391
Marx, K, vi, 7, 11, 13, 82, 117, 126, 132-5, 171, 184, MTS, see machine tractor stations
204, 224-5, 252, 284, 286, 322, 351-2, 377, 383, Murmansk, 200, 239
385, 387 Muscovy, 9, 31-9, 44-5, 54, 56, 72, 101-2, 281,
Marxism, 15, 75, 127, 132-5, 139, 181-2, 188, 191, 396-399, 401
241, 252, 286, 307-8, 340, 344 expansion, 31, 37-8
Mayakovsky, V V, 202 mutiny, 81-2, 139-44, 155, 164-6, 174, 187, 220-1,
meat, 56, 223, 248, 253, 255, 287, 320, 345, 377, 379, 402-3
390 MVD, 319-20, 322, 397
medicine, 61, 69, 88, 117, 160, 284, 341, 348-9, 352, Nabokov, V V, 372
366 Napoleon, 47-8, 43, 70-1, 75, 307, 401
Medvedev, R A, 284 Narodnaya volya, 96, 135, 397, 402
Memorial, 374, 405 Narva, battle, 40, 401
Mensheviks, 135, 139, 149, 171-2, 177, 179, 181-3, national income, see GNP
186, 189, 194, 202, 233, 272, 286—7, 385-6, 397, nationalisation, 173, 185, 200, 202, 204—5, 223
402 nationalism, v, 71, 94, 131, 135-6, 145, 212, 284,
merchants, 11-12, 21, 30, 37, 47-9, 66-70, 94, 307-8, 344, 358, 375, 383
102-3, 108, 113, 115-6, 129-30, 244, 246 nationalities, non-Russian, 3, 97, 131-2, 135-6, 172,
meshchane, 48-9, 51, 125, 397 194, 199, 308, 311-12, 373-6
MGB, 397 NATO, 357, 367
migratory work, 50, 53, 63-4, 118-19, 128, 151, 343, navy, 47, 102, 136-7
397 Nazi-Soviet pact, 293, 295-6, 308, 376, 389, 404
see also off-farm earnings, otkhod Nazis, 254, 266, 287, 293, 296, 303, 340
Mikhail Aleksandrovich, grand duke, 166, 171, 403 Neizvestnyi, E I, 330-1
Mikoyan, A I, 271, 298-9, 320 Nekrich, A M, 344
Military-Revolutionary Committee of Petrograd Nemchinoy, V S, 351, 354
Soviet, 189-90, 194 neolithic, 1-5, 16, 19
 INDEX 417

NEP, see New Economic Policy Paleologue, M, 156

NEP men, 223, 228, 231, 234, 243, 246, 397 Pamyat’, 374, 405
New Economic Policy, 218, 222-33, 245, 252, 261, parliamentary institutions, 9, 87, 91, 94, 131,
263, 267, 285-7, 292, 368, 370, 376, 386, 397, 403 138-41, 161, 185
New Thinking, 367 see Duma, Zemskii sobor
newspapers, 94, 135, 143, 160, 167, 189, 196, 201, parties, political, 131, 155, 374, 380
225, 237, 265, 269, 273, 275, 279-80, 308, 323, and see Kadets, Octobrists, Bolsheviks,
372 Mensheviks, Trudoviks, Progressive party,
see press Communists
Nicholas I, 68, 71, 77-8, 80, 82-3, 90, 338, 357, 362, partisans, 299, 304, 311, 397
401 Party secretaries, 235-6, 239-40, 270, 279-80, 311,
Nicholas II, 109, 125, 131, 136-9, 141, 144, 147-50, 324, 326-7, 332, 339, 341, 348, 363, 396
152, 154, 158-9, 161-2, 164-7, 178, 184, 199, passports, 258
272, 313, 366, 402-3 Pasternak, B L, 218, 341, 374, 405
Nizhny—Novgorod, 116, 210 pastoralism, 18-19
NKVD, 269, 273-6, 281, 284, 296, 304, 397 pastoral nomads, 18-19, 21, 24-6, 41, 56, 101
nobles, 11-12, 14, 30, 40-4, 47-51, 64-5, 67-70, Patolichev, N S, 339
77-91, 93-5, 97, 102, 105, 113, 115-17, 122, Patriarch, 42, 308
128-32, 147-51, 197, 237, 239, 244, 281, 396-7 patronage, 238-9, 269
see landowners, gentry, boyare, dvoriane Paul I, 68, 80, 82, 401
nomadism, 1, 18 Pavlov, V S, 381-2, 406
nomenklatura, 235-6, 240, 244, 269, 281, 283, 285, peace arbitrators, 86
318, 329, 341-3, 345, 370, 373, 378, 397 peaceful coexistence, 228, 292, 334, 404
Nove, A, 248, 286-87 peasant uprisings, 39, 41, 65, 78-9, 81-5, 88-91, 93,
Novgorod, 20, 26, 30-1, 33-4, 299, 400 95-6, 113, 127-8, 141, 143-4, 150-1, 175, 178,
Novikov, N, 81 912, 219, 223, 230-2, 248, 400-3
Novosibirsk, 55, 295 peasants, vi, 3, 11-12, 14, 25, 38-9, 47-65, 67, 70-1,
Novozhilov, V V, 351 73, '76, 79-80, 82, 84-93, 95, 97, 103, 105, 108-9,
nuclear industry and weapons, 261, 308, 310-11, 112, 114-9, 121-2, 126-8, 130, 132-3, 135, 137,
334, 357, 367, 371-2, 404 140-1, 143-5, 148-53, 155-6, 158-9, 170, 173-6,
Nystadt, treaty, 40, 401 178-80, 182-5, 194-5, 197, 199, 204-8, 212, 214,
219-23, 225, 297-34, 240, 243-8, 250, 257-60,
263, 265-6, 270-1, 278-9, 284, 286-7, 293, 335,
oblast’, 397
339, 342-4, 358, 363, 369-70, 397
obrok, 64-6, 77, 116, 397
poor, 117,119, 151, 184-6, 206-7, 232, 241,
October Manifesto, 141, 148, 152, 402
245-48, 271, 308
October Revolution, 16, 170-1, 180, 187-91, 194-6,
see serfs
993, 937, 243, 267, 272, 285,'291,.361, 371,
Penza, 128, 200, 210
385-6, 398, 403
People’s Will, see Narodnaya volya
Octobrist party, 116, 141, 149-50, 154, 161, 176,
perestroika, v—vi, 17, 75, 287, 363-5, 368, 371, 373,
397, 402
375, 378, 383, 386, 397-8, 405
Odessa, 104, 109, 116, 139, 210, 300
Peresvetov, 35
officials, 44, 47-8, 65, 67-70, 78, 83, 87-8, 91,
Perm, 104, 210
129-31, 137-8, 150, 171, 244, 282
permanent revolution, 182, 230
Soviet, 220, 231, 246-8, 278, 282
persuasion, machinery of, 6-9, 16, 29, 42, 130, 157,
OGPU, see GPU
174, 201-2, 234, 265, 304, 345
oil, 104-5, 127, 228, 253-5, 295, 305, 330, 350, 352,
see propaganda
356, 380, 391
Peter I, 17, 39-45, 66-7, 71-2, 101, 103, 106,
okhrana, 397
113-14, 225, 239, 241, 244, 261-2, 309, 318, 335,
Old Believers, 14, 39, 41-2, 80, 398
398, 401
Olga, princess, 22, 400
Peter III, 43, 82, 401
oprichnina, 35-6, 239, 397, 400
Petrograd, 17, 154, 158-60, 164-7, 174, 184, 186-91,
Orgburo, 235, 237
194, 198-9, 209-10, 214, 219-21, 237, 294, 403
otkhod, 53, 63, 397
Petrograd Soviet, 165-6, 171-7, 179-80, 186-7,
see also migratory work 189-90, 194, 196, 221, 238, 403
Ottoman Empire, 80 Petrunkevich, I I, 131-2, 141
see Turkey
planning, 204-5, 223-5, 230, 250, 252-3, 256-7,
261-2, 295, 301, 304, 312, 328, 331, 333, 351-7,
418 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

362, 366, 368, 376-8, 386-7 113, 115, 122, 133-4, 151, 154, 181, 227, 229,
Plehve, V K, 137 256-62, 331-3, 335, 338, 342, 345-6, 350-4, 357,
Plekhanoy, G V, 134-5, 402 361, 364—5, 385
Pobedonostsev, C P, 96 profits, 11-12, 100, 116, 159, 183, 222-3, 251, 287,
podzols, 26, 398 333, 354-5, 362, 378
Poland, 29, 36-7, 40, 43, 67, 90, 94, 96-7, 104, 136, Progressive Bloc, 161-3, 167, 173, 402
199, 209-11, 217, 255, 267, 293-4, 296, 300, 308, Progressive Party, 153
325, 375, 400-4 prohibition, 158-9, 366, 380
police, 44, 68, 71, 78-80, 84, 89, 95, 127, 135, 138, proletariat, 60, 82, 93, 103, 115-21, 125-8, 132-5,
140, 143, 150, 152-3, 155, 159, 164, 171, 174-6, 149, 153, 181-2, 184-6, 194-5, 197, 218, 225,
182, 185, 195-7, 200, 202, 233, 240, 243, 248, 297-8, 230, 234, 243, 254, 257-8, 260, 278, 317,
266-9, 271-6, 279-82, 298, 318-24, 327-8, 335, 339, 398
345, 349, 362, 382, 396-398, 404 see workers, wage-earners
see also Cheka, GPU, KGB, MGB, MVD, NKVD, propaganda, 128, 157, 174, 201-3, 213, 221, 253,
Smersh 265, 275, 279, 284, 296, 304, 308, 338, 345
Politburo, 235, 237-8, 271-4, 278, 280-1, 298, 318, proto-industrialisation, 103, 112
320, 328, 339-41, 363, 374-5, 398, 403, 405 provinces, 44, 68, 174, 397, 399
see Presidium Provisional Government, 116, 165-6, 170-5, 177-80,
poll tax, 40, 59, 65-6, 77, 103, 398, 401-2 184-6, 189-91, 194—7, 205, 258, 292, 403
Poltava, 40, 128, 401 Pskov, 20, 33-4, 166, 300, 344
pomest’ye, 33, 38, 398 Pugachey, E, 43, 78, 82, 84, 401
Popov, G K, 371, 379-80, 405-6 Pugo, B K, 382
popular fronts, 374-5 purges, 203, 239, 270, 273-81, 283-4, 286, 288,
population, 3, 10, 18-19, 21, 26, 36, 38, 47, 90, 103, 295-6, 304, 307, 311-12, 316, 321, 324-5,
110-11, 113, 117, 126, 135, 158, 253, 255, 283, 338-40, 372, 404
332, 348-9, 390 Pushkin, A S, 50
Populism, 60, 93-5, 112, 115-16, 127, 132, 134-5, Putilov works, 137, 163, 302
199, 398 see Kirov works
Port Arthur, 31, 107, 136-7 queues, 160, 178-9, 233, 258, 320, 347-8, 362
Poskrebyshev, A N, 274 rada, 29, 199, 398
Pospelov, P N, 324 Radek, K B, 234-5
potatoes, 56, 223, 320 Radishchey, A, 44, 81
potato riots, 79, 401 railways, 77, 80-1, 85, 104-5, 108-11, 121, 126, 130,
Potemkin, battleship, 139-40 136, 139-40, 158, 166, 171, 187, 190, 196-7, 204,
Potsdam, 309-10, 404 214, 218-19, 222-3, 225, 228, 249, 252, 268, 273,
power, vi, 2-6 282-3, 300-3, 346, 390-1
state power, 5-9, 15-16 see trans-Siberian railway
Preobrazhensky, E A, 228-9, 231 rainfall, 18, 54, 56
President, 373, 382-3, 405-6 ranks, see Table of Ranks
Presidium, 318-21, 323-8, 339, 348 Raskol, 39, 42, 398, 401
see Politburo Rasputin, G, 161, 163, 402
press, 6, 87, 94, 105, 129-30, 135, 140, 160, 167, 174 > raw materials, 105, 225, 256, 258-60, 262, 286, 305,
189, 196, 201, 221, 233-4, 276, 344, 372 312, 331, 352, 365
see newspapers Razin, Stenka, 39, 41, 401
prices, 158-60, 163, 178, 205, 222, 229-32, 245, raznochintsy, 47-9, 69, 93, 130, 398
251-2, 259-62, 271, 286-7, 312, 320, 342, 345, Reagan, R, 367
350-2, 355, 365, 368, 370, 377-9, 380-1, 406 recruitment, 4, 40, 64-5, 81, 88, 128, 156-7, 175,
priests, see clergy 201, 208, 214, 239, 293, 302, 308, 402
primitive accumulation, 117, 229 Red Army, 196, 200-2, 204-9, 212-14, 217-22, 230,
private plots, 250-1, 259, 302, 308, 311, 320, 370 232, 236, 238-40, 244, 248, 267-71, 275-6,
privatisation, 381 278-83, 293, 295-300, 302, 304-5, 307-8,
privilege, 2, 5-8, 43-4, 89, 203, 239-40, 281-3, 285, 310-11, 321, 325-7, 334, 339, 341, 366, 371, 382,
307, 318, 340-3, 378 404, 406
Procurator of the Holy Synod, 42 Red Guards, 189-90, 196-7
procurements, 158, 230-2, 238, 243, 245-51, 259, Red Square, 327, 371, 375, 405
263, 268, 286-7, 320, 398-9, 403 redemption, 85-6, 90
prodrazverstkha, 206-8, 219, 221-3, 398 payments, 91, 108-9, 140, 143, 150, 402
productivity, 2-3, 8-9, 11-15, 77, 80, 92, 109-10, Reed,J, 177-9, 189-90
 INDEX 419

religion, v, 3-5, 11, 25, 29, 39, 42, 61, 70, 72-3, 101, Sakharov, A D, 344, 372, 374, 405
172-4, 284, 308, 344 salt, 39, 62, 69, 103
see also Christianity, church, Islam, Old Believers Samara, 107, 175, 199, 208-10, 403
repartition of land, 59-60 samizdat, 344, 398
Republics, 324, 333, 375-6, 380-3 samogon, 159, 366
resistance, 5-6, 8, 26, 29, 39, 41, 65, 78-9, 84, 114, Sarai, 20, 27, 30, 400
208, 219-23, 248, 265-6, 317, 319, 371, 378 Saratov, 176
see peasant uprisings, revolutionary movement Schism, see Raskol
schools, 6, 136, 342
Reutern, M Kh, 85 see education
revolution, 5—6, 14, 79-80, 82, 89, 132-4, 148, science, 3, 5, 11, 13, 72-3, 239, 260-1, 278, 344, 365
155-6, 162-6, 171-2, 177, 199, 229, 291, 333, scissors crisis, 229-30
339, 342, 403 Scythians, 18
1848, 103, 113, 132-3, 181, 217, 401 SDI, Strategic Defense Initiative, 367
1905, 91, 93-4, 113, 114, 122, 125-45, 147, Sebastopol, 83
156-7, 159, 166, 173, 181-2, 247 Second International, 292
see socialist revolution, bourgeois revolution, secret speech, 272, 274, 276, 324-5, 330, 372, 404
February Revolution, October Revolution Secretariat of CC, 235-40, 269, 318-9, 323-4, 326,
revolutionaries, revolutionary movement, 7, 49,
338-40, 362, 398, 403
69-71, 92-7, 117, 127-8, 130, 134-6, 144, 152, serfdom, 38-40, 44, 49, 54, 63-5, 67-9, 71, 73, 75-8,
80-3, 86-7, 89-90, 95, 101, 251, 353, 396-8, 401
157, 164, 180, 398, 401
Riabushinskii, P P, 177
abolition of, see emancipation
Riazan’, 26-7, 400 serfs, 34, 38-9, 48-50, 54, 63-5, 67, 77, 82, 84, 86-8,
91, 115-16
Riga, 104, 156, 294
household, 64, 86, 95
Riurik, 26, 400
industrial, 102
Riurikid dynasty, 36, 400
Serovy, I A, 322, 326
Riutin, M N, 271-2, 403
Shatalin, S S, 381
Rodzianko, M V, 154, 161, 164, 177
Shevardnadze, E A, 363, 381-2, 405-6
Romania, 255, 293, 300, 308, 312, 375
Shevchenko, A N, 341-2
Romanov dynasty, 36, 101, 139, 166, 401
Shingarev, AI, 158
Rostov, 104, 210, 267, 296, 299-300, 404
Shipov, DN, 131
Rostovtsey, general, 85
Shlyapnikov, A G, 233
Rostow, W, 114
Sholokhoy, M A, 218
ruling group, 4-9, 15-16, 291
show trials, 233, 275, 278-9, 325
Kievan, 21, 24
Siberia, 2, 19, 26, 31, 37, 49, 55, 64, 95-6, 101, 103,
Mongol, 26-8
107, 113, 134, 142, 151, 153, 180, 184, 199-200,
Muscovite, 30, 32-6
209-10, 213, 231, 247, 249, 252, 268, 271, 278,
Imperial, 39-43, 45, 48-9, 67-70, 73, 103, 116,
295, 301, 303-4, 312, 323, 352, 356, 390, 397,
122, 125, 129-31, 144, 147, 160-3, 166-7, 170,
400, 403
173, 190, 193, 197, 203-4, 213-14, 219, D2ile
Sino-Japanese war, 136
236, 240, 288, 295, 330, 335
slavery, 4.11413, 21-2,.24, 28, 39, 41, 64, 77, 81, 308
Soviet, vi, 170, 193, 200, 202-3, 214, 234-6,
Slavophiles, 72-3, 81, 93, 398, 401
939-41, 244, 247, 260, 263, 265, 269-72,
Slavs, 19, 21, 154
276-85, 288, 291, 295, 309, 317-8, 320,
Smersh, 298
398-30, 335, 338-42, 373
Smith, Adam, 5, 11, 76, 78
Rus’, see Kievan Rus’; under Mongols, 26-32 Smolensk, 56-7, 300
Russian Empire, v-vi, 1, 3, 9-10, 14-15, 37-8, 40, Smolny, 189-90, 194-5, 272
43-5, 75, 81, 89-90, 102, 106, 110-11, A, smychka, 184, 997, 230, 232, 398
130=2, 136, 147; 177, 180, 191, 194, 199, 208, Sobchak, A A, 380, 406
211, 218, 224, 285-6, 374, 401
social contract, 6, 317, 328, 335, 345, 349-50,
Russian Republic, 375-6, 380-3, 406 378-80, 388
Russification, 136
social support, 173, 175, 179, 189, 196-8, 201-2,
Russo-Japanese war, 122, 125, 136-7, 140, 154, 158, 212, 284-5, 297, 299, 307, 313, 345, 349, 358, 371
402 Social Democratic Party, 135, 152, 396-7, 402;
Ruzsky, general, 166 German, 183
Rybakov, AN, 372 see also Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Communists
Rykov, AI, 275 socialism, v, 3, 13, 15, 60, 92-3, 97, 116, 127, 131-5,
Ryzhkov, N I, 363, 374, 381, 405-6
420 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

145, 150, 153, 155, 171-2, 180-5, 193, 197, 200, Stolypin, P A, 144, 148-51
204—5, 217, 219, 224-6, 229-31, 233, 240, 252, reforms, 150-4, 370, 402
261, 284-8, 291, 293, 308, 311, 313, 325, 330, streltsy, 37, 40, 101
334-5, 342, 354, 356, 358, 380-1, 385-8 strikes, 109, 125-8, 137-9, 141-2, 144, 152-4, 163-6,
Socialism in One Country, 230, 240 172, 178-9, 292, 378-81, 402
socialist realism, 270 Struve, P B, 78, 131
socialist revolution, 127, 133-4, 171-2, 180-3, students, 93-5, 345
185-6, 229, 293 see education
Socialist Revolutionary Party, 95, 132, 135, 171-2, subsidies, 105, 345, 353, 378-80
177-8, 183, 186, 189, 194, 196-7, 199, 202, 209, suffrage, 131, 138, 141, 148-9, 197, 402
213, 221, 233, 398, 402 Sukhanov, N N, 172, 186, 195, 197, 238
socialists, 60, 92-3, 149, 164-5, 171, 177, 180, 199, Supreme Soviet, 319, 321, 373, 405
208, 213, 258 Suzdal, 20, 30, 366
soils, 26, 54-6, 60, 77 Sverdlov, Y M, 235
soldiers, see army Sviyazhsk, 201, 209-10, 403
soldiers’ committees or soviets, 171, 174, 196, 201 Sweden, 36-7, 40, 184, 267, 285, 300, 347, 400-1
Solzhenitsyn, A I, 269, 311, 330, 372, 404-5 Switzerland, 134, 180
sovereignty, 375-6, 405-6
Soviet Empire, v, 1, 3, 38, 308-9, 358, 381 Table of Ranks, 41-2, 47, 49, 68, 70, 197, 236, 282,
Soviet Union, v—-vi, 1, 3, 15, 18, 181, 228-9, 231, 233, 398, 401
237-8, 243, 247, 254, 260-1, 266-7, 284, 286, Taganrog, 104, 119
288, 292-5, 297, 300, 304-5, 307-12, 317, 321, taiga, 30, 55, 268, 398
329-31, 333-6, 338, 340, 343-4, 347-9, 351-2, Tamboy, 52-4, 58, 64, 210, 219
357-9, 361, 363, 367, 374-5, 377, 381-3, 386, tanks, 246, 260, 295-7, 299, 301-2, 304, 306, 365,
396-7, 399, 403-6 382, 404
Soviets, 139, 141-2, 165, 171, 173-4, 179-80, 184-7, tariffs, 106, 108, 402
189-90, 194-7, 202, 204-5, 207, 217, 220, 233-4, Tashkent, 301
278, 285, 327, 373-4, 309, 402-5 Tatars, 312, 375, 398
see St Petersburg Soviet, Petrograd Soviet see Mongols
Sovkhozy, see state farms Tauride Palace, 165, 172
Sovnarkhozy, 324, 332-3, 377, 398, 404 taverns, 39
Sovnarkom, 195, 202, 213, 398 taxation, 3—4, 6, 8, 12, 24, 26-30, 32-3, 39-40, 50,
space programme, 261, 334, 336 56-7, 59, 62-7, 75, 77-9, 85, 88, 91, 94, 102-3,
SRs, see Socialist Revolutionary Party 106, 109, 114, 117, 127-8, 138, 140, 144, 157-9,
St Petersburg, v—vi, 17, 40-1, 55, 67, 71, 84, 94, 161, 200, 205-8, 214, 222-3, 225, 227-9, 231,
102-4, 107, 121, 127, 131, 137-9, 141-2, 144, 244, 249-50, 260, 265, 271, 287, 312, 328, 379
153-4, 401-2 government revenue, 39-40, 65-6, 77, 81, 85,
see Leningrad, Petrograd 102, 106, 108, 110-11, 158-9, 161, 366,
stagnation, 82-3, 350-9, 365, 372, 405 379-80
Stakhanoy, A G, 259, 398, 404
indirect, 39, 66, 77, 88, 103, 108, 159, 349, 366
Stalin generation, 278, 330-1, 338-40, 343, 357, direct, 86, 103, and see poll tax, redemption
359, 361-4 payments
Stalin, JV, v-vi, 15, 102, 113-14, 180, 184, 202, 26, local, 88
230-2, 237-41, 243, 245-7, 251-3, 256, 258-9, income, 159
261-3, 265-8, 292-3, 295-6, 298-300, 304, see also prodrazverstka, tribute, turnover tax
306-13, 316-27, 329-31, 335, 339-40, 342-4, Taylor, F W, 258
350-2, 364, 372, 374-5, 385-7, 403-4 technological innovation, see innovation
Stalingrad, 27, 300-1, 305, 327, 404 technology, foreign, 37, 39-40, 42, 101-2, 260, 2O2s
Stalinism, see Stalin 357
state capitalism, 204, 223 telephones, 279, 304
state farms, 243, 247, 282, 323, 398 televisions, 346, 391
state peasants, 40, 48, 64, 66, 77, 79, 82, 86-7 terem, 42, 398
State Defence Committee, 298-9 terror, 28, 96, 135, 144, 266-7, 270, 273-7, 284, 295,
Statistics, 69, 110, 117, 126, 118-9, 227, 252-5, 286, 322, 324, 327-8, 404
329, 350, 389-91
see purges
steam engines, 103 third element, 117, 130
steel, 105, 218, 228-9, 253, 260, 295, 300, 367, 391
Third World, 13, 112, 357, 386
steppes, 19, 38, 41, 51, 54-7, 101
three-field system, 53, 57-8
 INDEX 421

tiaglo, 39, 58, 64 USA, 2, 77, 81, 104, 106, 120, 139, 190, 200, 210,
Tikhonov, N A, 363 994, 254-5, 261, 293, 299, 301, 306, 309-11, 334,
Time of Troubles, 36, 38, 140, 147, 166, 291, 400 341-2, 347, 349-50, 352, 357, 359, 367, 373,
tolkachi, 353—4, 377, 399 403-4
Tolstoy, L N, 67 usad'ba, 52, 84, 86, 251, 399
totalitarianism, vi Uskorenie, 365, 405
tractors, 246, 260, 266, 286, 348 USSR, see Soviet Union
trade, 2, 11, 13, 21, 24, 26, 103-4, 106, 108-9, 115, Ustinov, D F, 278
158, 205, 219, 223, 227-8, 231-2, 245, 286-7, Uzbekistan, 301
292, 368, 370, 405
Trade Unions, 126-8, 137-8, 172, 178, 197, 204, val, 262, 355, 365, 399
207, 221, 233, 237, 270, 283, 356, 373, 379-80, value, 351-2
402 Varangians, 21, 399
trans-Siberian railway, 106-7, 111, 125, 136-7, 141, Vasilii III, 34, 400
154, 200, 209-10, 402-3 veche, 29-30, 399
transportation, 61, 63, 77, 104, 106, 114, 120, 164, vegetables, 52-3, 56, 251, 302
345, 348, 379, 381 Vesenkha, 204-5, 252, 399, 403
Trepov, D F, 150 Vikings, 20-1, 399
tributes, 21-2, 24, 26-8, 30, 32, 65, 205-6, 229, 231- villages, 51-3, 56, 343, 349, 358, 369
2, 259 virgin lands, 323-4, 328-9, 332, 404
Trotsky, L D, 139, 152-3, 177-8, 181-2, 186, 189-90, Vladimir, city, 20, 27, 112
194-5, 197-8, 200-1, 204, 209, 212, 221-3, Vladimir I, prince, 24, 45, 400
298-30, 232, 236-8, 241, 272, 274-5, 283, 287, Vladimir Monomakh, Grand Prince, 25, 400
291-2, 295, 319, 403 Vladivostok, 107, 141, 200
Trudovik party, 143, 170 vodka, 39, 61, 66, 77, 79-80, 88, 103, 108, 159, 221,
Truman, president, 309-11 227, 260, 346, 365-6, 377
tsar, 35-6, 44, 65, 67-8, 71, 79, 83, 88, 94, 97, 130, see alcohol
138, 140-3, 152, 154, 161-7, 174, 184, 284, 345, voevody, 25, 29, 35, 399
358, 379-80, 399-400, 403 Volga river, 21-3, 27, 29, 31, 37, 63, 77, 104, 107,
Tukhachevsky, general MN, 209, 221, 275, 295-6, 113, 139, 199, 209, 248, 275, 301, 305, 312, 332,
404 369, 400, 404
Tula, 51, 101-2, 104, 210, 213 Volgograd, see Stalingrad
tundra, 54-5 Volkogonoy, D A, 268
Turkey, 18, 21, 40, 83, 157, 238, 267, 300, 397 Voroshiloy, K Y, 296, 326
see Ottoman Empire Voznesensky, A A, 298, 304
turnover tax, 260 vydvizhentsy, 277-8, 282, 339, 399
Tver, 29-30, 33, 87, 94, 104, 131, 210, 400-1
wage-earers, wage-earning, wage-labour, 11-13, 50,
uezd, see district 61-4, 76, 78, 82, 86, 92-3, 100, 102-4, 108-10,
Ukraine, 19, 29, 31, 37, 39, 44, 49, 51, 56, 95, 97, 112, 115-21, 125-8, 132-3, 137, 150, 221, 225,
104-5, 112-13, 118, 127-8, 136, 139, 199-200, 243, 251, 253-7, 285, 348, 390, 398
205, 208-9, 211, 219, 229, 247-9, 280, 295-6, see proletariat, labour
301, 305, 308, 312, 323, 372, 374, 376, 383, 396, wages, 119-21, 128, 159-60, 178, 220, 243, 247,
308, 401-3, 406 255-9, 271, 282, 284, 312, 320, 329, 341-2,
Ulozhenie, see Law Codes 348-9, 353, 378-80
Ulyanoy, V I, see Lenin war, 3-4, 6, 10, 25-6, 34, 36-8, 80, 177-8, 183,
unemployment, 12, 125, 258, 354-5, 377-8, 387 217-18
Union of Liberation, 131-2, 137, 172, 182, 402 see Crimean war, Napoleon, First World War,
Union treaty, 381-3, 406 Great Patriotic War, Korean war, Russo—
United Nations, 371 Japanese war, Russo—Finnish war,
universities, 69, 72, 88, 93, 129, 139-40, 165, 270, Sino-Japanese war, Russo—Polish war, civil war
278, 312, 339, 344-5, 351, 363, 401 War Communism, 200-8, 214, 220, 222-4, 231-2,
upper classes, see nobles, educated classes 236, 240, 245
Urals, 14, 19-21, 33, 39, 41, 102, 104-5, 199-200, Warsaw, 104, 209-10, 294, 403
209-10, 231, 295, 301, 303, 332 Warsaw pact, 356-7, 404
Urals—Siberian method, 231-2, 245, 403 weaving, 111, 116, 118
20: Weber, Max, 11
urbanisation, 2—3, 50-1, 73, 92, 110-11, Jalaeal
125-6, 158, 228, 253-5, 329, 343, 358, 390 welfare services, 284, 328, 345, 348, 378, 381
422 POWER AND PRIVILEGE

westernisation, 41-2, 67, 69-73, 77, 101-2, 116 Yagoda, G G, 268, 273-5
Westernisers, 72-3, 81, 93, 401 Yalta, 300, 310, 404
White Russia, see Belarus Yalu river 136-7
Whites, 199-200, 209-13, 219, 222, 234, 246, 267, Yanayev, G I, 382
403 Yanushkevich, general, 156
WIC, War Industries Committee, 161-3, 165, 167, Yazov, marshall D T, 382
399, 402 Yeltsin, B N, 363, 374, 380, 382, 405-6
Witte, S Yu, 105-6, 108-9, 114, 116, 130, 137, 139, Yenukidze, A , 273
141-2, 150, 154, 225-7, 287, 402 Yezhov, N I, 273-5, 281, 404
women, vi, 4, 34, 42, 52-4, 58, 64-5, 73, 77, 91, 94, Yudenich, general, 199
97, 112, 118-20, 122, 131, 151, 163-4, 179, 190, Yugoslavia, 300, 334, 404
197, 206, 211-12, 219-20, 248, 256-8, 263, 285, Yurii Dolgorukii, prince, 30
302-3, 313, 316, 331, 347-8, 356, 378, 398 Yuzovka, 104-5
wood, 51-3, 56, 90, 128, 206
work rhythms, 62, 257 Zablotskii, A P, 49, 65, 76
workers’ control, 183, 194, 196-7 zagotovki, see procurements
working classes, workers, 125-29, 131-2, 135, Zaslavskaya, T I, 312, 319, 347-8, 367
137-45, 147-9, 152-3, 157, 159-61, 163-7, ZemGor, 161-3, 399, 402
170-5, 178-89, 193-8, 201-2, 204, 206-7, Zemskii sobor, 36, 399, 401
212-14, 218-22, 233, 239-40, 243-4, 256-60, zemstva, 87-9, 96, 117, 129-32, 139, 161, 170, 174,
276, 278-9, 282, 285, 308, 327, 329, 339-40, 399, 401
349-3, 345, 351-2, 354, 367, 377-8 Zhdanov, A A, 311
see also peasants, wage-earners, proletariat Zhenotdel, 197, 399, 403
world revolution, 172, 183, 185, 187, 195, 199, 217, Zhukoy, marshal G K, 304, 311, 321, 326, 334
224, 291-3, 333-4, 385-6 Zinoviev, GY, 180, 186, 189, 195, 237-8, 271-5, 404
World War II, see Great Patriotic War Zubatovy, S V, 127, 141, 402
Wrangel, general, 209, 217, 403
 © 2H ly wes
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The Soviet experiment, which ended in 1991, was the most

serious attempt ever made to |build an ideal society. Power and
Privilege is a coherent interpretation of both the Russian and
Soviet Empires, explaining what went wrong with the
*xperiment, and how it affected the lives of ordinary men and
women.

Factors such as geographical setting and the process of

modernisation have had an enormous impact on Russian /Soviet
history. This impact is highlighted, as well as the relationship
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The second edition of Power and Privilege includes the following

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features:
@ new chapters on the Brezhnev era and perestroika
@ extensive revision and updating throughout the text and
graphs, to incorporate recent research findings
® anew introduction which discusses the impact of economic
change on Russian history since the middle ages —
@ anew conclusion which interprets the ultimate failure of the
Soviet experiment
e the sbaKel UK)Coyb iro)apnarct ohm eleaimo)ptelconm-vevemeyulcaner-lme Cece prneCoel ewe
enhance the text.

Power and Privilege is a written history of the Russian people,

their society, politics and processes of economic change up to
the 1990s. With its glossary, timeline, statistical appendices and
questions at the end of each chapter, this book will be of great
value to any reader interested in the history of the Russian and
Soviet Empires.

ISBN 0-582-80114-1
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