A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

by Orlando Figes

  Lenin wrote a great deal at this time on the need for a 'cultural revolution'. It was not enough, he argued, merely to create a Workers' State; one also had to create the cultural conditions for the long transition to socialism. What he stressed in his conception of the cultural revolution was not proletarian art and literature but proletarian science and technology. Whereas Proletkult looked to art as a means of human liberation, Lenin looked to science as a

  means of human transformation — turning people into 'cogs' of the state.* He wanted the 'bad' and 'illiterate' Russian workers to be 'schooled in the culture of capitalism' — to become skilled and disciplined workers and to send their sons to engineering college — so that the country could overcome its backwardness in the transition towards socialism.27 Bolshevism was nothing if not a strategy of modernization.

  Lenin's emphasis on the need for a narrow scientific training was reflected in the change in education policies during 1920—I. The Bolsheviks viewed education as one of the main channels of human transformation: through the schools and the Communist leagues for children and youth (the Pioneers and the Komsomol) they would indoctrinate the next generation in the new collective way of life. As Lilina Zinoviev, one of the pioneers of Soviet schooling, declared at a Congress of Public Education in 1918:

  We must make the young generation into a generation of Communists. Children, like soft wax, are very malleable and they should be moulded into good Communists .. . We must rescue children from the harmful influence of family life . .. We must nationalise them. From the earliest days of their little lives, they must find themselves under the beneficent influence of Communist schools. They will learn the ABC of Communism... To oblige the mother to give her child to the Soviet State — that is our task.

  The basic model of the Soviet school was the Unified Labour School. Established in 1918, it was designed to give all children a free and general education up to the age of fourteen. The practical difficulties of the civil war, however, meant that few such schools were actually established. During 1920 a number of Bolshevik and trade union leaders began to call for a narrower system of vocational training from an early age. Influenced by Trotsky's plans for militarization, they stressed the need to subordinate the educational system to the demands of the economy: Russia's industries needed skilled technicians and it was the schools' job to produce them. Lunacharsky opposed these calls, seeing them as an invitation to renounce the humanist goals of the revolution which he had championed since his Vperedist days. Having taken power in the name of the workers, the Bolsheviks, he argued, were obliged to educate their children, to raise them up to the level of the intelligentsia, so that they became the 'masters of industry'. It was not enough merely to teach them how to read and write before turning them into apprentices. This would reproduce the class divisions of capitalism, the old culture of Masters and Men separated by

  * Stalin often referred to the people as 'cogs' (vintiki) in the vast machinery of the state.

  their power over knowledge. Thanks to Lunacharsky's efforts, the polytechnical principles of 1918 were basically retained. But in practice there was a growing emphasis on narrow vocational training with many children, especially orphans in state care, forced into factory apprenticeships from as early as the age of nine and ten.28

  Lenin's patronage of Taylorist ideas ran in parallel with this trend. He had long hailed the American engineer F. W. Taylor's theories of 'scientific management' — using time-and-motion studies to subdivide and automate the tasks of industry — as a means of remoulding the psyche of the worker, making him into a disciplined being, and thus remodelling the whole of society along mechanistic lines. Lenin encouraged the cult of Taylorism which flourished in Russia at this time. The scientific methods of Taylor and Henry Ford were said to hold the key to a bright and prosperous future. Even remote villagers knew the name of Ford (some of them thought he was a sort of god guiding the work of Lenin and Trotsky). Alexei Gastev (1882—1941), the Bolshevik engineer and poet, took these Taylorist principles to their extreme. As the head of the Central Institute of Labour, established in 1920, he carried out experiments to train the workers so that they would end up acting like machines. Hundreds of identically dressed trainees would be marched in columns to their benches, and orders would be given out by buzzes from machines. The workers were trained to hammer correctly by holding a hammer attached to and moved by a hammering machine so that after half an hour they had internalized its mechanical rhythm. The same process was repeated for chiselling, filing and other basic skills. Gastev's aim, by his own admission, was to turn the worker into a sort of 'human robot' (a word, not coincidentally, derived from the Russian verb to work, rabotat'). Since Gastev saw machines as superior to human beings, he thought this would represent an improvement in humanity. Indeed he saw it as the next logical step in human evolution. Gastev envisaged a brave new world where 'people' would be replaced by 'proletarian units' so devoid of personality that there would not even be a need to give them names. They would be classified instead by ciphers such as A, B, C, or 325, 075, 0, and so on'. These automatons would be like machines, 'incapable of individual thought', and would simply obey their controllers. A 'mechanized collectivism' would 'take the place of the individual personality in the psychology of the proletariat'. There would no longer be a need for emotions, and the human soul would no longer be measured 'by a shout or a smile but by a pressure gauge or a speedometer'. This nightmare Utopia was satirized by Zamyatin in his novel We (1924), which inspired Orwell's 1984. Zamyatin depicted a future world of robot-like beings, the 'we', who are known by numbers instead of names and whose lives are programmed in every detail. The satire was dangerous enough for We to remain banned in the Soviet Union for over sixty years.

  Gastev's vision of the mechanized society was no idle fantasy. He believed it was just around the corner. The ABC of Communism, written by Bukharin and Preobrazhensky in 1919, claimed that a 'new world' with 'new people and customs', in which everything was 'precisely calculated', would soon come into existence. The mechanistic motifs of Proletkult art were supposed to foster this new Machine World. There was even a League of Time, whose 25,000 members in 800 local branches by the time Zamyatin wote We, kept a 'chronocard' on which they recorded how they spent each minute of their day ('7.00 a.m. got out of bed; 7.01 a.m. went to the lavatory') so as to be more efficient in their use of time. The crusaders of this clockwork world wore oversized wristwatches (there is still a fashion for them in Russia today). As self-appointed 'Time Police', they went round factories and offices trying to stamp out 'Oblomovism', that very Russian habit of the wastage of time. Another one of their plans to save time consisted of replacing the long words and official titles of the Russian language with shorter ones or acronyms. Politicians were told to cut their verbose comments, and speakers at congresses to keep their speeches short.29

  * * * The war against religion played a vital role in this battle for the people's soul. The Bolsheviks saw religion as a sign of backwardness (the 'opium of the masses') and the Church as a rival to their power. In particular, they saw the religion of the peasants as a fundamental cultural gulf between their own Enlightenment ideals and the 'dark' people of the countryside, a people they could neither understand nor ever really hope to convert to their cause. The war against religion was thus an aspect of their broader campaign to conquer the 'otherness' of the peasantry.

  Until 1921 the war against religion was fought mainly by propaganda means. The Bolsheviks encouraged the popular wave of anti-clericalism that had swept away the Church lands in 1917. The Decree on the Separation of Church and State in January 1918 aimed to place the clergy at the mercy of the local population by taking away its rights to own property — church buildings were henceforth to be rented from the Soviets — or to charge for religious services. Religious instruction in schools was also outlawed. Bolshevik propaganda caricatured the clergy as fat parasites living off the backs of the peasantry and plotting for the return of the Tsar. M
ost provincial newspapers had regular columns on the 'counter-revolutionary' activities of the local priests, although in fact most of the parish clergy had either gone or been dragged along with the peasant revolution. Needless to say, the Cheka jails were full of priests.

  The aim of Bolshevik propaganda was to replace the worship of God with veneration of the state, to substitute revolutionary icons for religious ones. Communism was the new religion, Lenin and Trotsky its new arch-priests. In this sense the Bolshevik war against religion went one step further than the

  Jacobin dechristianization campaigns: its aim was not just to undermine religion but to appropriate its powers for the state.

  On the one hand was the Bolsheviks' iconoclastic propaganda. Christian miracles were exposed as myths. Coffins said to hold the 'incorruptible' relics of Russian saints were opened up and found to contain bare skeletons or, in some cases, wax effigies. The celebrated 'weeping icons' were shown to be operated by rubber squeezers that produced 'tears' when an offering was made. The peasantry's attachment to religious and superstitious explanations was ridiculed as foolish: harvest failures and epidemics were to be avoided by agronomic and meteorological science rather than prayer and rituals in the fields. 'Godless acres' were farmed beside 'God's acres' — the former treated with chemical fertilizers, the latter with holy water — to drive home the point. Peasants were taken for rides by aeroplane so that they could see for themselves that there were no angels or gods in the sky. Most of the local press had special columns for this sort of 'scientific atheism'. Hundreds of atheistic pamphlets and stories were also published. Literature and music deemed to be religious were suppressed. The works of Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Tolstoy were all banned on these grounds, as was Mozart's Requiem, nearly all of Bach and the Vespers of Rachmaninov. There was also an atheist art — one especially blasphemous poster showed the Virgin Mary with a pregnant belly longing for a Soviet abortion — and an equally iconoclastic theatre and cinema of the Godless. Then there were study groups and evening classes in this 'science' of atheism (a good grounding in it was essential for advancement in the party-state). A Union of the Militant Godless was established in 1921 with its own national newspaper and hundreds of local branches which held 'debates' with the clergy on the question: 'Does God Exist?' These debates usually involved the staged conversion of at least one priest, who would suddenly announce that he had been convinced that God did not exist, and would call on the Soviet authorities to forgive him his error. Most of these priests must have been tortured in the Cheka jails, or else threatened with imprisonment, in order to make them confess in this way. Even so, the victory of the Godless was by no means assured. In one debate the priest asked the Godless who had made the natural world. When they replied that Nature had made itself through evolution there were hoots of laughter from the peasant audience, to whom such a proposition seemed quite ridiculous, and a victory for the priest was declared.30

  On the other hand was the Bolshevik propaganda which held up Communism as the new religion. The festivals, rituals and symbols of the Communist state were consciously modelled on their Christian equivalents — which they sought to replace. Soviet festivals were scheduled on the same days as the old religious holidays: there was a Komsomol Christmas and Easter; Electric Day fell on Elijah Day; Forest Day (a throwback to the peasant-pagan

  past) on Trinity Sunday. May Day and Revolution Day were heavily overladen with religious symbolism: the armed march past the Kremlin, the religious centre of Orthodox Russia, was clearly reminiscent of the old religious procession, only with rifles instead of crosses. The cult of Lenin, which flourished in the civil war, gave him the status of a god. The very symbol of the Communist state, the Red Star, was steeped in religious and messianic meaning deeply rooted in Russian folklore.

  A Red Army leaflet of 1918 explained to the servicemen why the Red Star appeared on the Soviet flag and their uniforms. There was once a beautiful maiden named Pravda (Truth) who had a burning red star on her forehead which lit up the whole world and brought it truth, justice and happiness. One day the red star was stolen by Krivda (Falsehood) who wanted to bring darkness and evil to the world. Thus began the rule of Krivda. Meanwhile, Pravda called on the people to retrieve her star and 'return the light of truth to the world'. A good youth conquered Krivda and her forces and returned the red star to Pravda, whereupon the evil forces ran away from the light like owls and bats', and 'once again the people lived by truth'. The leaflet made the parable clear: 'So the Red Star of the Red Army is the star of Pravda. And the Red Army servicemen are the brave lads who are fighting Krivda and her evil supporters so that truth should rule the world and so that all those oppressed and wronged by Krivda, all the poor peasants and workers, should live well and in freedom.'31

  In private life, as in public, religious rituals were Bolshevized. Instead of baptisms children were 'Octobered'. The parents at these ceremonies, which boomed in the early 1920s, promised to bring up their children in the spirit of Communism; portraits of the infant Lenin were given as gifts; and the Internationale was sung. The names chosen for these Octobered children — and indeed for adults who also changed their names — were drawn from the annals of the revolution: Marx; Engelina; Rosa (after Rosa Luxemburg); Vladlen, Ninel, Ilich and Ilina (acronyms, nicknames or anagrams for Lenin); Marlen (for Marx and Lenin); Melor (for Marx, Engels, Lenin and October Revolution); Pravda; Barrikada; Fevral (February); Oktiabrina (October); Revoliutsiia (Revolution); Parizhkommuna (Paris Commune); Molot (hammer); Serpina (sickle); Dazmir (Long Live the World Revolution); Diktatura (Dictatorship); and Terrora (Terror). Sometimes the names were chosen on the basis of a misunderstanding or simply because they were foreign sounding and were thus associated with the revolution: Traviata, Markiza, Embryo and Vinaigrette. Red weddings were another Bolshevik ritual, popular among the Komsomol youth. They were usually held in a factory or some local club. Instead of the altar the couple faced a portrait of Lenin. They made their vows of loyalty both to each other and to the principles of Communism. In his satirical novel Dog's Wedding (1925), Brykin reproduced such a vow. 'Do you promise', asks the officiator, 'to follow the path

  of Communism as bravely as you are now opposing the church and the old peoples customs? Are you going to make your children serve as Young Pioneers [the Komsomol organization for younger children], educate them, introduce scientific farming methods, and fight for the world revolution? Then in the name of our leader, Comrade Vladimir Ilich Lenin, I declare the Red Marriage completed.' Finally, there was the Red Funeral, mainly reserved for Bolshevik heroes, which drew on the funereal traditions of the revolutionary movement — with its guard of honour, the coffin set high on a bier draped in red, the dirgelike hymn 'You Fell Victim', the graveside orations and the gunfire salute — originally used at Bauman's burial, that first martyred Bolshevik, in 1905.32

  From 1921 the war against religion moved from words and rituals to the closure of churches and the shooting of priests. Lenin instigated this totally gratuitous reign of terror. Apart from the Academy of Sciences, the Church was the only remaining national institution outside the control of the party. Three years of propaganda had not undermined it — in many ways the civil war had made people turn to religion even more — so Lenin sought to attack it directly. The famine of I92I-2 gave him the pretext he needed. Although the Church had actively joined in the famine relief campaign, offering to sell some of its non-consecrated valuables to buy foodstuffs from abroad, Lenin found a strategy that enabled him to accuse it of selfishly turning its back on the crisis. He ordered the Church to hand over its consecrated valuables for sale as well, even though he must have known that it was obliged to disobey the order (the secular use of consecrated items was sacrilegious). This provocation would make the Church appear as it was charged — as an 'enemy of the people'. To rally the public against it the press called hysterically for all the Church's valuables to be sold for the famine victims: 'Turn Gold into Bread!' was the emotive s
logan. In a last desperate effort to prevent the pillage of his churches, Patriarch Tikhon offered to raise money equivalent to the value of the consecrated items through voluntary subscriptions and the sale of other property; but his offer was refused. Lenin was not interested in the money; he wanted a pretext to assault the Church.

  On 26 February 1922 a decree was sent out to the local Soviets instructing them to remove from the churches all precious items, including those used for religious worship. The decree claimed that their sale was necessary to help the famine victims; but little of the money raised was used for this purpose. Armed bands gutted the local churches, carrying away the icons and crosses, the chalices and mitres, even the iconostases in bits. In many places angry crowds took up arms to defend their local church. In some places they were led by their priests, at others they fought spontaneously. The records tell of 1,414 bloody clashes during 1922—3. Most of these were utterly one-sided. Troops with machine-guns fought against old men and women armed with pitch forks and