Russian revolution. A very short introduction

by S. A Smith

  March 1924

  Stalin group responded by sedulous lye u It ivating the myth of Lenin as the incarnation of the proletariat - 'Lenin is with us always and everywhere' - tapping into a deep-seated need for a father figure who would take care of his people. In every club, school, and factory, the Lenin corner replaced the icon corner. Bolsheviks, who hitherto had fought to expose the popular belief that saints' bodies did not decompose, now embalmed Lenin's body like that of some latter-day pharaoh, and placed it in a sacred shrine. It is hard to say how far the regime used the Lenin cult to impose its values on the populace and how far it was responding to popular needs.

  The intelligentsia and the arts

  The October Revolution gave birth to an astonishing burst of artistic experiment that was unsurpassed anywhere else in the world. It was

  150

  18. The model of Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to tfre Third international

  symbolized in 1С S. Ivlalevich's Block Square^. Y. Tatlin'sA^onument to the Third International V. Y. Meyerhoid's biomechanical drama, the transrational poetry of V. Khlebnikov, the strident verses of V. V. Mayakovsky, and N. Roslavets's experiments with a new tonal system in music. The avant-garde, which had emerged around 1908, was impelled by the belief that the revolutionization of artistic practice was part of a larger project of transforming the role of art within society, art having the power to transform life*. Though divided over aesthetic matters, the avant-garde was loosely leftist in politics and iconoclastic in spirit, though by no means all endorsed the Futurist call to 'Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy overboard from the ship of modernity.* Many of its representatives, such as Ivlalevich, A. M. Rodchenko, Tatlin, and Kandinsky in the visual arts, gained positions of influence within new soviet institutions.

  151

  19. Altman's design for Palace Square

  Theatre was supreme among the arts during the civil war. However, Meyerhold's efforts to unleash a 'Theatrical October* were blocked by the Commissar of Enlightenment, Lunacharsky, who insisted on the importance of preserving the classical repertoire. Lunacharsky defended the principle of artistic pluralism but supported the avant-ga rd e, wh ereas Len in was fa г less tolera nt, con demnin g it a s 'absurd an d perverted*. With the onset of NEP, architecture, film and the novel came into their own. Constructivism was the one movement in the visual arts born directly out of October 1917. In seeking to fuse the artistic and technological aspects of production, it aspired to create an environment in which the 'new soviet person' could flourish. Constructivist interest in the properties of materials and in industrial design had a huge impact on modern architecture, on photography, print graphics, fabrics, furniture, and film. In cinema leading directors such as S. Eisenstein, D. Vertov, V. Pudovkin, and A. Dovzhenko, some of whom had cut their teeth making propaganda 'shorts' during the civil war, produced dassics of world cinema. Most experimented with montage - the juxtaposition of unexpected images - as a way of

  152

  expanding the visual awareness of the audience. As in all other artistic fields, there was vigorous debate - over the virtues of documentary as opposed to feature film, of propaganda as opposed to entertainment. However, even Eisenstein's politically impeccable films had a lukewarm reception from officialdom, not to speak of the public, because of their experimental editing, shooting, and mise-en-scene. The revival of commercial mass culture that came about with NEP, moreover, left no doubt that the public preferred escapist fiction, light music, comedy, and variety acts to avant-garde art. Official concern that art should become more accessible was one reason why in the second half of the 1920s the regime came to look with increasing favour on those artists who had continued to work within broadly realist and figurative genres.

  Literature experienced an efflorescence in the 1920s, partly because of the revival of private publishing houses. Some of the first responses to revolution, from poets such as A. A. Blok, S. A. Esenin and A. Belyi, had had an apocalyptic character, identifying with its 'spiritual maximalism'. В. Pi Г nia k's Л/afced Year (19 22), considered by many to be the first 'soviet' novel, depicted the revolution as a vengeful, Asiatic force stripping off the civilized veneer of 'mechanical Europe'. K. Fedin, M. Zoshchenko, and V. Ivanov, by contrast, hailed the revolution as a liberation of the fantastic imagination. They came under attack for being 'ideologically empty' from the Smithy group, which lauded collectivism, labour, and the cult of the machine. As the memory of the civil war faded, writing began to become less partisan and more reflective of the uncertainties of NEP. Noteworthy was the tragicomic satire of M. Zoshchenko, whose subject-matter was the absurdity of daily life. A humanistic, apolitical aesthetic also gained ground in the poetry of Mandelstam and Akhmatova, who aspired to cultivate lyricism and a language of precision, clarity, and restraint. It was in reaction to such pluralism that in 1928 the Association of Proletarian Writers demanded that literature obey a 'social command'. This aesthetic, which saw fiction as having little value except as sociological document, chimed with the tastes of newly literate readers who craved positive, unambiguous characters, a

  153

  20. Constructivist poster design for Dziga Vertov's film, The Eteventf}

  secure narrative, and moral certainties. Yet if the 1920s saw genuine pluralism in literature, it also saw the steady rise of censorship. In 1922 the Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press was

  set up, charged with censoring domestic and imported printed works, manuscripts, and photos. By July 1924,216 foreign films had been banned because of the threat to the ideological education of workers and peasants in our country*. This was stricter censorship than had pertained after 1905.

  During the 1920s the position of the intelligentsia remained ambivalent. Having reduced it to political impotence, the regime encouraged it to put its expertise to the service of socialism since it needed teachers, scientists, planners, managers, doctors, and engineers. From the mid-1920s, salaries began to rise and material privileges to accrue. The regime, however, continued to distrust the intelligentsia as a competing

  154

  elite with pretensions to moral leadership, one likely to impede its efforts to establish hegemony. Whilst a degree of pluralism was tolerated in education, the arts, and the sciences, the trend was clearly towards increased official control. In 1922 universities lost their autonomy - in spite of a strike by academics in Moscow and elsewhere -and the State Academic Council began rather tentatively to weed out 'theologians, mystics, and representatives of extreme idealism'. Uniquely, the Academy of Sciences preserved its autonomy until 1929, although a Red Academy was created to compete with it. Associations as seemingly innocuous as the Vegetarian Society were regularly refused authorization by OCPU 'for political considerations'. Nevertheless the extraordinary fact is that in spite of all its travails, the intelligentsia maintained a distinct social identity through its informal networks, personalties and institutional loyalties.

  The 1920s was thus an era of unbounded artistic and intellectual diversity yet one that saw the regime steadily intensify its control of cultural life through censorship, control of funding, and brusque intervention. Since it believed in the power of art to transform human consciousness, it was not going to allow its direction to be determined by the spontaneous whims of the individual artist or by the imperatives of the marketplace. Moreover, the gap between the avant-garde and popular taste troubled a leadership that recognized the tremendous propaganda potential of such new media as film. Stalin, an aficionado of the cinema, described it as 'the most important means of mass agitation'. Finally, the tendency of the party to take a less tolerant attitude to the avant-garde was an indirect reflection of the party's own increasing concern with stability and its repudiation of anything that smacked of permanent revolution. That said, the exercise of party control was never secure or efficient in this period and debate about what constituted an appropriate art for a socialist society remained relatively free. A qualitative difference exists
between the diversity of the 1920s - however compromised - and the stifling conformism of the 1930s.

  155

  By highlighting the disparity between ideal and reality, NEP may be seen as reining in the utopianism of the civil war, but one should not conclude that utopianism died. The hopes placed in electrification, Taylorism, and cultural revolution were Utopian and evinced the ongoing dynamism of the regime. However, Russian realities were beginning to make themselves felt. Paradoxically, as the regime stabilized so the deeper structuring forces of Russian development reasserted themselves: forces of geography (huge distances, scattered populations, inadequate communications), climate (the risk attached to agriculture), geopolitics (the difficulty of defending frontiers), the underdevelopment of the market and the paucity of capital, the deeply ingrained patterns of peasant culture, the traditions of the bureaucratic state. The Bolsheviks, who had so categorically rejected Russia's heritage, found that the greater the distance they travelled from October, the more these forces madethemselves felt. This did not mean £ that they became captive to those forces, nor that impulses to

  g revolutionary transformation exhausted themselves: Stalin's'revolution

  I

  e from above' was to prove the contrary. But in many areas one can see a

  jg distancing from early iconoclasm and the beginning of a synthesis of

  1 revolution and tradition.

  i-

  156

  Conclusion

  In the most trenchant recent interpretation of Soviet history, Martin Malia has argued that the Soviet Union was an Mdeocracy" whose development was driven by the Bolshevik desire to realize a millenarian vision of communism through the abolition of private property, profit, the market, and civil society. Many agree with Malia that ideology constitutes the key to understanding the development of Soviet totalitarianism, but there is little agreement as to which particular elements in Marxism-Leninism are to blame. Some endorse Malta's view that the seeds of totalitarianism lay in Marx's aspiration to abolish private property; others point to his belief in class struggle as the motor of history or to his assertion that the proletariat must exercise a dictatorship during the transition to socialism. Others point to more general features of Marxism such as its claim to provide 'scientific* knowledge of the laws of history or its rejection of morality as a constraint on action. No doubt some, and possibly all, of these elements in Marxism played a part in shaping the course of Soviet history. The fact that there is uncertainty as to which particular elements were decisive, however, should make us pause before underwriting a view that in ideology lies the root of all evil. This is especially so when we consider that in 1917 the elements of Marxism that appealed were very different from those mentioned above; the promise to end inequality and exploitation, and the promise to abolish the state and vest power in the hands of the toiling people.

  157

  It is beyond question that ideology was of central importance in determining the course of the Bolshevik revolution. All Bolsheviks -including Stalin - believed in the Marxist vision and it is impossible to comprehend the scale of their ambition, their astounding energy, and their ruthless determination unless one takes the ideas that inspired them seriously. Their victory in the civil war, for example, is inexplicable except in terms of their unwavering conviction that they were exercising dictatorship on behalf of a temporarily 'declassed* proletariat. However, the civil war also reminds us that Bolshevik ideology changed overtime, in many respects profoundly. In 1917 Lenin spent valuable time developing Marx's notion of the withering away of the state. By 1918 Lenin's State and Revolution was an irrelevance. Within months, Lenin had come to see in the massive strengthening of the state the sole guarantee of advance towards socialism. Not all Bolsheviks agreed-Through the civil war and into the 1920s, Bolsheviks understood their

  с

  Iideology in different ways - the barracks' vision of communist society

  1associated with War Communism, the productivist vision associated

  сwith NEP - and the sharp disagreements that arose out of these

  9differing perspectives were just as important in determining the course

  21. Demonstration: 'Let us direct our path towards the shining life.*

  IK

  Mof the revolution as the beliefs and values shared in common. By

  presenting Bolshevism as monolithic and unchanging, the 'ideocracy' thesis radically simplifies the ways in which ideas - and conflict over ideas - shaped the conduct of the Bolsheviks.

  If we look back on the developments described in this book, all too often it is the Bolsheviks' incapacity to realize their ends, their blindness ratherthan their vision, that is striking. After they came to power, they faced a huge array of problems for which Marxism-Leninism left them ill-equipped. Ideology could not tell them, for instance, whether or not to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Policy, therefore, was frequently the outcome of improvisation and pragmatism as much of the hallowed tenets of ideology. In other words, the relationship between belief and action was complex, influenced by a far larger range of factors than the 'ideocracy' thesis allows. If ideology was critical in shaping the institutions and practices of the Soviet state, so were geography, geopolitics, economic and political structures, the specific conjunctures thrown up by revolution, civil war, and a shattered economy and, not least, events that no one foresaw. All of these things were interpreted through the lens of ideology, so their significance is inseparable from the meanings with which they were invested. Nevertheless they exercised a weight of determination in their own right and cannot be reduced to ideology. Throughout the period we have looked at, the 'real world' - whether in the shape of a railway system brought to paralysis, the ravages of typhus, or a dazzling military offensive by Denikin- had a nasty habit of sneaking up on the Bolsheviks from behind, throwing into confusion their best-laid plans.

  The story we have traced has been in part one about how possibilities opened up in 1917 were steadily closed off. As early as January 1918, key components of the 1917 revolution - power to the Soviets, workers' control of production, the abolition of the standing army - were jettisoned. By 1921 the Bolsheviks no Iongersawtheworking class as the agent of revolution, but the party-state and the Red Army. This narrowingof the meaning of the revolution had less to do with ideology

  159

  than with the structural logic of the Bolsheviks' situation. In the teeth of determined political opposition and intense popular resistance, they came to rely on force. They had little difficulty justifying this in ideological terms, but the logic that drove them down the path to one-party dictatorship was structural more than it was ideological. Otherwise it is hard to explain why they formed a coalition with the Left SRs or displayed a certain fastidiousness in banning opposition parties outright. The belief that the end justified the means served them well, blinding them to the way in which means corrupt ends. In August 1919 the newspaper Red Sword proclaimed: 'Everything is permitted to us because we are the first in the world to raise the sword not in the name of enserfment and oppression but of general happiness and liberation from slavery.' Very quickly, however, liberation from slavery had been fatally subverted by the means chosen to achieve it.

  £ The meaning of the revolution also changed as it became embedded in g the Russian environment. By the 1920s, the Bolsheviks were responding e to many of the same pressures -the need rapidly to industrialize, to jg modernize agriculture, to build defence capability - that had motivated 1 Nicholas N's regime. These aims were now articulated very differently, but the objective exigencies of modernization made themselves felt nevertheless. The revolution was redefined as an authoritarian form of modernization in which the state would mobilize the human and material resources of an impoverished country to industrialize, modernize agriculture, and raise the cultural level of the people. This required, in particular, breaking the passive resistance of the peasantry in order to provide capital for what Preobrazhensky called '
primitive socialist accumulation'. Ideology adapted to these deeper structural and cultural constraints as much as it inspired the drive to escape them.

  This is to paint a rather bleak picture, since it implies that the vicious circle of economic backwardness and international isolation could not have been broken without the use of coercion by the state. This did not

  160

  mean, however, that the Bolsheviks were deprived of political agency: they faced real choices at each turning-point. It is ironic that those most inclined to depict the Bolsheviks as conscious architects of tyranny- i.e. who ascribe to them a large degree of agency - attach so little importance to the actual choices they made. Yet logically, if the relationship of agency to circumstances was skewed so heavily in favour of the former, then opting for Bukharin's course or Trotsky's course, instead of Stalin's, should have had a marked impact on future developments. However, such analysts deny that there was much at stake in the inner-party struggle. Even if, as has been argued, Bukharin and Trotsky were engaged in fundamentally the same enterprise as Stalin - socialism as it was understood in 1917 having long ceased to be on the cards - it is still quite reasonable to insist that if either had defeated Stalin, the horror and bloodshed of the 1930s could have been avoided.

  This raises the central question of the relationship of Leninism to Stalinism. Were the horrors of Stalinism inscribed in the logic of Leninism? No less a person than the young Trotsky warned in 1904 of the logic of Lenin's views on party organization:

  The party apparatus at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the apparatus; and finally a single 'dictator' substitutes himself for the Central Committee.