Russia A History
Page 35
Revolutionary Culture
Besides the market-place, culture was another key battleground. Under the Provisional Government, cultural leaders organized unions and demanded the creation of a Ministry of Culture to replace the traditional state and court patronage of the arts. As important as cultural creation was cultural destruction (the iconoclastic demolition of symbols from the ancien régime) and the search for new symbols and festivals.
Here too the party divided into radical and conservative camps, reflected in the debate between A. A. Bogdanov and Lenin over the historical meaning of culture and its place in a proletarian state. Both recognized the importance of culture for revolutionary transformation, but had long disagreed on fundamental principles of Marxism and culture. Lenin (the more orthodox Marxist) saw culture as pure superstructure, subordinate to class conflict and the task of seizing and rebuilding power. Culture (from literacy campaigns to university learning) was crucial, yet secondary; it was just another component of the superstructure. Lenin’s conservative tastes carried an aversion to utopian experiments, an affinity for classical Russian culture, and a desire to integrate artists and writers into well-defined hierarchies under party control. His tool was A. V. Lunacharskii’s bailiwick, the Commissariat of Enlightenment, the very ‘Ministry of Culture’ that intellectuals and artists had proposed in 1917. This new patron of the arts sponsored a full range of artistic activities (including the feeding, shelter, and clothing of the intelligentsia); it also attempted to create a new educational system based on such radical doctrines as the Unified Labour School, which jettisoned traditional disciplines and substituted practical work and learning through labour.
Bogdanov’s vision, similar to that of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, could hardly have been more different. It posited the defining role of culture—i.e. cultural transformation was the pre-condition of social and political transformation. To complete the revolution, argued Bogdanov, it was vital to have ‘new people’ mastering the dominant forces of technocracy and technology, information and language. The new people had to create their own culture and hence create themselves. Bogdanov was a true radical, rejecting the traditional high culture as the product of old élites and hence antithetical to the needs of the proletariat. To help fashion proletarian culture (therefore its own essence or being), Bogdanov created the ‘Proletarian Culture Movement’ (proletkult’), a fusion of organization and theory at the grass-roots level all across the country. It enabled ‘workers’ (broadly defined to include not only factory workers, but also white-collar employees, peasants, and others) to produce their own cultural artifacts, from literature to stage performances, from belles-lettres to literary readings. Although the movement was for a time exceedingly popular, that very popularity sealed its doom: proletcult was culture ‘from below’, inevitably representing an alternative to party dogma and inviting different readings of Marxism itself. In addition, the ‘cultural front’ (a military metaphor typical of the time) had too many players (not only the Commissariat of Enlightenment, but the trade unions and party itself), all competing for scarce resources. By the early 1920s, in short, proletarian culture faced a phalanx of determined foes in this ‘proletarian’ state.
Revolutionary enthusiasm pervaded culture and society at many other levels. It was a driving force in high culture—fine arts, literature, architecture, which reflected powerful modernist currents, buttressed by aggressively anti-bourgeois and apocalyptic topoi. ‘Non-objective’ movements like suprematism, as well as constructivism and futurism, flourished in the heady atmosphere of revolution. The same spirit penetrated daily life, most dramatically in the question of the family and women’s status. After secularizing marriage and radically liberalizing divorce, the party sought to address these questions by creating the Women’s Section (Zhenotdel), an apparatus summoned to fashion a new Soviet woman—proudly proletarian, independent, an activist in the vanguard of the party as a leader and builder of consciousness. This vision, like revolutionary culture itself, would arouse rising hostility and suspicion from state and society alike in the 1920s.
In these years, however, the Bolsheviks were cultural revolutionaries, particularly in their feverish attempt to construct a new symbolic world—with new icons, new language, new monuments, new festivals—to bestow legitimacy on the new order. Suggestive of this campaign was the attempt, in early 1918, to sponsor a competition for the design of monuments to commemorate the great deeds of the Russian Socialist Revolution. Lenin himself issued a ‘plan’ for legitimate festivals and for rewriting the past (especially the ‘history’ of the still ongoing revolution itself). The use of festivals for education, socialization, and morale was quickly apparent—in the well-orchestrated celebrations of May Day, the first anniversary of the Revolution in 1918, and later in the public participatory spectacle to re-enact the October Revolution in 1920. Of course there were glitches and crudities (for example, offering special rations and luxury goods to arouse ‘enthusiasm’), and this political theatre allowed variant decodings. The regime also adopted the Gregorian calendar, modernized the alphabet, and expropriated urban space (by renaming streets and squares). Finally, Bolshevik ‘God Builders’ (i.e. those who saw Bolshevism as a new religion with the proletariat as deity) began to foster a cult of Lenin, especially after an SR terrorist critically wounded Lenin in 1918. Party intellectuals then made haste to foster the idea of his immortality and to promote the public worship of this new saint, casting the die for the far more ominous elaborations in later years.
10. The New Economic Policy (NEP) and the Revolutionary Experiment 1921–1929
WILLIAM B. HUSBAND
With NEP, the new Bolshevik regime pragmatically sought to consolidate power and rebuild a shattered economy. But these were also years of insoluble economic problems, fierce social tensions, and deep divisions in the party. Ultimately, NEP did more to exacerbate than solve fundamental problems; it was a critical prelude to Stalin’s ‘great turn’ in the late 1920s.
ONCE the Bolsheviks had consolidated their victory in the Russian civil war, the revolutionary experiment in socialism could begin in earnest. The defeat of principal military enemies in conjunction with the use of mass mobilization and repressive force seriously impaired those rivals not completely driven from the political arena. By that time, the Bolsheviks had already undertaken a broad programme of social and economic change. They attempted to co-ordinate all economic life by creating the Supreme Council of the National Economy in 1917, soon thereafter nationalized factories, and outlawed private trade. Their endorsement of workers’ control aspired to establish innovative management and labour relations, and the collapse of the national currency appeared to hasten the transition to a barter economy. New laws attacked social institutions and practices that reflected the values of the former regime. And in both city and village, workers and peasants implemented their own agendas, beginning with the appropriation of property belonging to élites of the old order.
Only revolutionary maximalists could have equated these early measures with socialism: by the early 1920s building a new society was still a task for the future. Despite the bold language of revolutionary pronouncements, years of ‘government by decree’ in 1917–20 had given the Communist Party only a paper hold on most spheres of life, while seven years of warfare had reduced the national economy to ruin. During the closing months of the civil war, the population increasingly demanded that the state produce tangible improvements to justify the sacrifices made in the name of revolution. As public tolerance of grain requisitioning and other emergency measures reached its limit, workers and peasants openly defied Soviet power. Even the most ideological Bolshevik could not deny the gravity of the situation. In March 1921—on the eve of the important Tenth Party Congress—the state had to use force to repress an anti-Bolshevik uprising at the Kronstadt Naval Base, a bastion of revolutionary radicalism in 1917.
Both in response to public pressure and in keeping with their own ideological predilec
tions, in 1921–9 the Bolsheviks pursued what would be the most open and experimental phase of Russian communism. The turning-point came in 1921 when the Tenth Congress endorsed the controversial New Economic Policy (NEP). Its aims were many: to ease public resentment against the emergency measures of the civil war; to regularize supply and production through a limited reintroduction of the market; to invigorate the grass-roots economy and generate investment capital for industrialization; and, in general, to lay the foundation for the transition to socialism at some unspecified but inevitable future date. At the same time, the political and military victory demanded that revolutionaries fulfil their promise of a more equitable social and economic order. In that sense, the extensive destruction of the pre-revolutionary system in 1917–20 provided a mandate for broad reconstruction and social transformation.
With opportunity, however, came responsibility; the real tasks of a ruling party soon brought the limitations of Bolshevism into sharp focus. The political leaders were divided; their control of the country was largely illusory. The international proletarian revolution that the Party had confidently predicted failed to materialize, and Soviet Russia found itself the steady object of international suspicion and antagonism. Ongoing economic problems threatened the survival of the regime, forcing compromises on the state that engendered widespread resentment. Social and artistic innovations produced genuine improvements, but their unanticipated results frequently offended public sensibilities. In the end, NEP promoted at once conservative and revolutionary sentiments. Paradoxically, enthusiasm for experimentation and for Stalinist regimentation sprang from the same source.
The Politics of Revolutionary Consolidation
The Communist Party faced a pressing need in 1921 to transform itself from a revolutionary cadre into an effective ruling institution. Early in the year, the Bolsheviks continued to increase repression and centralization despite popular discontent; only in the face of the Kronstadt revolt did the awareness of the need to retreat strike root. The leadership also faced challenges within the party. One faction advocated the reinstitution of greater internal democracy; another sought to restore the independence of trade unions; and a third complained that the party had lost its revolutionary vision. Faced with such contradictory pressures, the Tenth Party Congress did not rush into political reform. It did endorse NEP—a market, an end to grain requisitioning, a tax on harvests, and denationalization of small-scale enterprises—but not before the Bolsheviks had outlawed opposing political parties and banned party factions.
In the politics of the 1920s, the Bolsheviks were neither omnipotent nor single-minded. As before, their policy reflected as much mass pressure as Marxist ideology; the problem of discipline was as great as ever. Regional and local institutions were weak, unreliable, even non-existent; considerable segments of intermediate and lower officials resisted central authority and opposed the NEP. When Lenin declared that the party would pursue NEP ‘seriously and for a long time’, he tacitly admitted that Bolshevism had failed to establish a dictatorship of workers and poorer peasants. Rather, Lenin admitted, Soviet power had produced a burgeoning bureaucracy that was staffed largely by officials from the old regime and by opportunists, especially in the local areas.
The Eleventh Party Congress (March–April 1922) specifically addressed this issue. Lenin himself complained that communists frequently adopted the ways of the pre-revolutionary ministries and thus launched the attack on bureaucratism. The delegates resolved to tighten discipline in lower organs and to combat the internal factionalism that had earlier been outlawed but by no means eradicated. Partly in an effort to reach these objectives, the Central Committee elected I. V. Stalin as General Secretary—i.e. head of the Secretariat, a post with extensive appointment powers. Although he would use these prerogatives for his own political advancement, the initial intent was to reform the personnel apparatus of the party.
Lenin’s partial incapacitation by a cerebral haemorrhage in May 1922 seriously altered the dynamics of Soviet politics, however, and the reformism adopted at the Eleventh Congress never ran its intended course. Lenin’s deteriorating health—he suffered additional strokes in December 1922 and March 1923—triggered a succession crisis and exacerbated factional conflict that lasted well beyond his death in January 1924. Uncertainty and instability prevailed at the top. Lenin’s authority, unparalleled if not always unchallenged, was personal rather than institutional. His dominance derived from his experience, intellect, and political acumen, not any title or office. To replace Lenin, it was necessary not just to name a successor, but to reconsider the very concept of leadership in the party.
Lenin himself contributed to the contentiousness when he dictated his so-called ‘testament’ in December 1922, emphasizing the shortcomings of all major political figures. It declared that Nikolai Bukharin was ‘the favourite of the whole party’ and its ‘most significant theoretician’, but weak on dialectics and somewhat scholastic. Lenin noted that Grigorii Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev had wavered at the time of the October Revolution—which was ‘not, of course, accidental’. Of the younger Bolsheviks, G. L. Piatakov was too preoccupied with administration ‘to be relied on in a serious political situation’. And Lenin especially feared that a rivalry between Stalin and Leon Trotsky might split the party. Although Trotsky was ‘certainly the most able man in the present Central Committee’, he was given to ‘excessive self-confidence’ and an exaggerated concern with ‘the administrative aspect of affairs’. Stalin as General Secretary ‘had concentrated boundless power in his hands’, and Lenin worried whether Stalin would ‘always know how to use this power with sufficient caution’. In a postscript he added that ‘Stalin is too rude’ to be General Secretary and recommended that ‘the comrades consider removing Stalin from this post’.
The succession struggle commenced even before Lenin died. In 1923 and despite a pledge of collective leadership, a triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev accused Trotsky of Bonapartist aspirations. At the same time, Lenin launched his own assault against Stalin: he strongly criticized Stalin’s treatment of minority nationalities and threatened to sever relations for Stalin’s insulting behaviour towards Nadezhda Krupskaia, Lenin’s wife. Lenin also asked Trotsky, Stalin’s most bitter rival, to represent his views at the forthcoming Twelfth Party Congress of April 1923. But Trotsky, for reasons still unclear, chose not to present Lenin’s case against Stalin and thereby squandered a unique opportunity to use Lenin’s authority against Stalin. By December 1923 the triumvirs had prevailed in party infighting and put Trotsky and his followers on the defensive.
Lenin’s death in January 1924 had a mixed impact. Publicly, it signalled the beginning of a cult of Lenin: thousands viewed the open coffin, Petrograd became Leningrad, and quasi-religious symbolism of Russian Orthodoxy crept into the funeral. And over the objections of Krupskaia, the Central Committee placed the embalmed body on permanent display in Red Square. Behind the scenes, however, Lenin’s death—long anticipated—did not interrupt adversarial high politics. In February 1924 the Central Committee launched a recruitment campaign, the Lenin Enrolment, to ‘proletarianize’ the party by admitting more actual industrial workers. Although this step would ultimately erode the meaning and significance of party membership, in the short term it added primarily to the numerical strength of Stalin’s supporters. By the time the Thirteenth Party Congress opened at the end of May 1924, over 128,000 new candidates had joined. That number would soon surpass 240,000, thus increasing the size of the party by more than half. The triumvirate also fortified itself in other ways. Krupskaia pressed the leadership to make public the criticisms in Lenin’s testament, which had been kept secret (even from the party members for over a year), but was rebuffed. When Trotsky attacked Zinoviev and Kamenev in his Lessons of October, published for the anniversary of the revolution, he succeeded only in driving them back into a closer alliance with Stalin. And in December 1924 Stalin cast down an ideological challenge to Trotsky, counterposing his own id
ea of ‘socialism in one country’ to Trotsky’s concept of ‘permanent revolution’. Stalin’s argument—that the Soviet Union could create a socialist state without an international proletarian revolution—directly controverted Trotsky’s belief that the final victory of socialism depended on successful revolutions in the West. With the prospects of international revolution clearly receding (especially after the Ruhr débâcle of 1923), Stalin’s view resonated strongly with the rank and file.
With Trotsky weakened, the struggle entered a second phase in early 1925 when the triumvirs turned against one another. In 1924 Stalin had already begun to use his appointment powers as General Secretary to replace followers of Zinoviev and Kamenev with his own. This rivalry now intensified, just as the character of NEP itself became the central public issue. Indeed, 1925 would prove to be the apogee of private economic initiative during NEP. Zinoviev, ostensibly alarmed at capitalist ‘excesses’ in a socialist state, went on the attack. That impelled Bukharin, NEP’s strongest advocate in the top leadership, to join forces with Stalin. Ultimately however, this phase of the struggle was decided more along factional than policy lines. At the Central Committee meeting of October 1925 and again at the Fourteenth Party Congress in December, the more numerous Stalin–Bukharin bloc simply ran roughshod over the Zinoviev–Kamenev group.