Russia A History

by Gregory L. Freeze

  But these innovations also led to family instability and astronomical rates of family dissolution. The 1918 provisions also made it difficult to collect alimony and support for children; by the time of NEP a significant portion of married women equated easy divorce with desertion. In theory, the emerging socialist society was to assume greater responsibility for child-rearing and for social welfare; in reality, however, such plans were no more than declarations of intent, for the state simply lacked the resources to implement them. It was not the state but individual women—whose wages rose but still lagged behind pay for males and who endured higher rates of unemployment—who bore the brunt. Thus, while the new family law seemed to enhance the legal position of women, it also subverted the males’ traditional responsibilities towards wives and children.

  The issue of divorce was closely tied to an emotional exchange taking place at the same time over public morality. One side attacked traditional standards of sexual conduct as arbitrary bourgeois restraints on the individual, and there was no shortage of young men in particular who rallied to the philosophy of free love. Those less sanguine about discarding existing conventions too quickly however, emphasized the already familiar issues of social stability, male accountability, and economic plight of the female. In the second half of the 1920s, these champions of collective responsibility prevailed over the proponents of individual choice—or, to view matters from another perspective, social conservatives defeated supporters of sexual liberation. In any event, both the party and Komsomol began to take a more direct interest in the personal lives of members, strenuously to oppose promiscuity, and to uphold heterosexual marriage as the social norm.

  The introduction of legalized abortion produced additional tension. On the eve of NEP, the state reacted to a spate of illegal abortions by allowing doctors to terminate pregnancies in state hospitals without charge. This decision, although expedient, complicated the issue of building a new society. Indeed, according to prevailing wisdom among state officials, neither abortions nor the rights of the individual over society were being condoned. Rather, the argument ran, in the more prosperous times that lay in the future, once an adequate child-care system was in place, and when better-educated women achieved a higher socialist consciousness, Soviet female citizens would recognize the social obligation of child-bearing. This did not occur in the 1920s. By the middle of the decade, registered abortions climbed to more than 55 per 100 births. Evidence also indicates that in the countryside the travel and paperwork involved in a hospital abortion caused rural women to continue to rely on illegal practitioners and folk remedies.

  The state, therefore, moderated some of its early enthusiasms with the Family Code of 1926. This new legislation addressed the issue of desertion by extending official sanction—and with it the right to alimony and child support—to unregistered unions, and it established joint ownership of property acquired during the marriage. But it also relaxed divorce requirements further by transferring jurisdiction from the courts to a simple procedure at a government office, with notification of the other spouse sometimes only by postcard. By the end of the 1920s the urban Soviet divorce rate was the highest in the world.

  In the countryside the impact was less. Church weddings were sustained far more strongly in rural areas, where marriage and birth-rates remained high. Divorces, although more numerous than previously, never approached city levels; peasants proved less eager to dissolve marital unions than their urban counterparts. Also, when the reassertion of communal authority once again made the peasant household the predominant social unit, the prospect of dividing joint property was a legal nightmare. As a result, traditional rather than Soviet legality continued to prevail in the village.

  Soviet youth, the citizens of the future, also occupied a central place in revolutionary thinking, and here the Bolsheviks faced an especially difficult situation: juvenile ‘hooliganism’ and homeless orphans had already emerged under tsarism, and the years of world war, revolution, and civil war had greatly exacerbated the problems. Thus the first years of NEP reduced the early Soviet declaration that ‘there will be no courts or prisons for children’ to a pious wish. By 1921 the besprizorniki had not only proliferated in numbers, but exhibited behaviour indicating that many were beyond the reach of any attempt to reintegrate them. As a result, in the 1920s far more besprizorniki encountered the criminal justice system than experimental rehabilitation programmes. Especially in the first half of the decade, homeless children became a fixture of the Soviet social landscape, wreaking havoc that caused all of society to demand action.

  Concern for the young, however, was not limited to dealing with juvenile miscreants. Creating the ‘new Soviet man’ also demanded a revolution in education, seen as the engine of social change. Narkompros (the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment) was called upon simultaneously to expurgate the social residue of bourgeois society, produce proletarian citizens, and cope with a dearth of economic resources. Ideally, Soviet education would transcend the narrowness (deemed characteristic of the tsarist approach), enhance the substance of instruction, and also eradicate élitism by providing free public education for all. Innovators in Narkompros devised a new pedagogy, the ‘Complex Method’, which would not teach just academic subjects, but life itself. The Complex Method would integrate the study of nature, society, and labour in order to prepare graduates for successful entry into both the labour force and society. In addition, the new pedagogy would promote secularism by teaching materialist, scientific values.

  There were successes as well as problems. The retention rate of girls enrolled in elementary schools in urban areas, but not total enrolment of girls, rose in the 1920s. Workers and peasants received increased access to higher education. A special institution for workers, the rabfak, provided an equivalent of secondary education; by 1928 rabfak graduates constituted a full third of entrants to institutions of higher learning. Night courses were added, and there was an aggressive national campaign to end illiteracy. Also, by 1921 the newly founded Communist Academy and the Institute of Red Professors were training Marxist scholars for careers in the social sciences.

  But failure was also common. Shortages of funds plagued all facets of education, and schools were forced to supplement their meagre budgets by reintroducing student fees. In addition, Narkompros encountered sharp internal divisions over the wisdom of the Complex Method; resistance was even greater in the schools. Most experienced teachers ignored the new curriculum and continued to teach traditional subjects. Moreover, classroom instructors greeted secularism with little enthusiasm, especially in the numerous instances when rural teachers were also wives of priests. Finally, the preferential enrolment of more workers and peasants in universities—where males still outnumbered females by a margin of three to one—fostered a lowering of standards, and charges of faulty preparation also haunted the graduates of the Institute of Red Professors.

  No Bolshevik assault on tradition could overlook religion. Existence, Marx taught, determines consciousness, and only knowledge derived from observed reality, without the intercession of any external force or mover, is valid. Therefore, if religion had been ‘the opiate of the masses’ under the old order, religious belief in the new world constituted superstition and, as such, an impediment to creating a progressive, scientific society. In 1918, therefore, the Soviet state decreed a separation of Church and state that nationalized church land and property without compensation. Outside the law, anti-religious militants desecrated churches and monasteries in the atmosphere of atrocity during the Russian civil war, and a significant number of bishops and priests died violently before 1921.

  Given the party’s implacable hostility, it might appear incongruous to describe NEP as a period when the persecution of religion was relaxed, but compared to 1918–21, this was in fact the case. Not wanting to alienate the peasants further, the government softened its attack between 1921 and the onset of the forced collectivization of agriculture in 1929. Thus the state allowed both rel
igious and anti-religious propaganda, and its Commission on Religious Questions advocated the eradication of religion only through agitation and education. The commission restrained rather than incited anti-religious violence and regularly ruled in favour of groups of believers against local officials. The Union of Militant Atheists did not hold its founding congress until 1925; it began serious work only following its second gathering three years later. Anti-religious propaganda was therefore the responsibility of all party organs, which in practice meant that it was conducted ad hoc and at most incorporated within its general advocacy of secularism. Even in national publications such as Bezbozhnik (The Godless), anti-religious tracts and caricatures of priests shared space with articles on popular science, public health, the eradication of illiteracy, the evils of anti-Semitism, and even the improvement of personal hygiene.

  State and Church of course remained foes. In this regard, the Russian Orthodox Church was vulnerable, for it entered the revolutionary era divided and demoralized. Its leadership was ill-prepared to resist the surrender of sacrosanct valuables to the state, ostensibly for famine relief in 1921–2. The fact that liberal offshoots of the main Church were often more accommodating to state power undercut Orthodoxy further, as did the rising number of conversions to other denominations, especially the Baptist Church. Moreover, official disapproval by no means halted illegal assaults on churches and clergy; local soviets utilized existing laws to confiscate places of worship for use as workers’ clubs, cinemas, and libraries. Finally, as NEP came to an end, the state enacted a new law on religious associations in 1929 that restricted religious activity only to registered congregations, banned all religious instruction and proselytizing, and presaged the still more brutal assault on the Church soon to come.

  To what degree did this mixture of repression and education produce the desired result? On the one hand, Church and state sources of the period both reported a sharp decline of religiosity in the cities, especially among the young. There was also no shortage of testimony from the countryside that prerevolutionary peasant anticlericalism had grown into religious indifference during NEP, among village males in particular. Frequently, the mock processions staged by the Komsomol to parody Easter and Christmas worship bitterly split villages along generational lines. On the other hand, the Church and state regarded peasant women as consistently devout. And in the realm of religion-as-social-ritual, some who ceased observing (including party members) nevertheless hedged their bets by baptizing their children or undergoing a second, church wedding. Soviet attempts to raise labour productivity by eliminating the numerous rural religious holidays were unqualified failures, while at the same time traditional apocalyptic formulas—including the coming of the Antichrist—entered the world of peasant rumour when the threat of collectivization grew. In the end, it is not possible to quantify the level of religious belief in the 1920s since the 1926 census contained no query about it, but in 1937 57 per cent of the population still identified themselves as believers (45 per cent of those in their twenties, but 78 per cent of those in their fifties). In sum, formal religion loosened its hold on Soviet society during NEP, especially among the younger and urban segments. Since this drop was both incomplete and not accompanied by the eradication of Russian belief in supernatural intervention in human affairs, however, the official state position by 1929 was that the most important anti-religious work still lay ahead.

  All dimensions of the new world view converged in high and popular art. As NEP opened, the revolutionary society was already embroiled in controversy over how best to reconstruct culture. Could a proletarian culture evolve organically, or must the new society first master bourgeois elements and build further? Opinions differed. Revolutionary intellectuals in an aggressive institution called ‘Proletkult’ (Proletarian Cultural-Educational Institutions) wanted to create an entirely new culture to operate independently of government institutions (especially Narkompros), and to receive extensive state support. In addition, artists working both inside and outside the Proletkult championed a number of movements—Futurism, Constructivism, Objectivism, Acmeism, Cubism, and others—rooted in pre-revolutionary radical expression that was now liberated. And among the intelligentsia that comprised much of the party leadership, many agreed with Lenin and Trotsky that Soviet society must make bourgeois aesthetics the basis of proletarian culture. In 1921–9, all these views reached the public.

  It was no coincidence that in a country battling against illiteracy, the Bolsheviks placed special emphasis on the visual arts. The party had been an innovator in the political applications of poster art in its rise to power, and it continued to rely on this powerful means for influencing mass attitudes. The revolutionaries placed strong faith in other visual media as well. The cinematic and thematic innovations of directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Dovzhenko, and Vsevelod Pudovkin put the Soviets in the front rank of world film in the 1920s. They and others combined the art of political persuasion with imagery and techniques unprecedented in the medium. Frequently they succeeded too well, however, and their sophisticated presentations baffled their intended audience, who in the 1920s continued to prefer escapist American and German adventure films to those designed for their edification.

  Painting and sculpture entered the process in a related way. Simply put, pre-revolutionary experimental artists such as Kazimir Malevich and Vasilii Kandinskii viewed art as an essentially spiritual activity free of ideological or other restraints, and they and like-minded others continued to produce prolifically during the 1920s. But their view collided with the conception of art advanced by the likes of Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko—that the artist was essentially an engineer in the service of proletarian society, that his art must not only be beautiful, but useful. Acting on slogans like ‘art into life’ and ‘art is as dangerous as religion as an escapist activity’, these Constructivists produced works that not only celebrated the mechanistic, materialist world-view, but demonstrated how to implement it. Such thinking inspired art, not all of it strictly Constructivist, that ranged from the idealization of ordinary objects to a more noble representation of labourers.

  The artistic currents also influenced architecture. One did not have to be a communist to envision a future world of skyscrapers and rationally designed, utilitarian working and living spaces. In the first half of the 1920s, economic scarcity largely limited innovation to the realm of conceptualization, but the ideas were imaginative and diverse—garden cities, symmetrical urban utopias, and high-rise apartment dwellings. After 1925, however, it became possible actually to carry out designs that fostered additional creativity. Everything from the redesign of household furniture to workers’ clubs and massive public buildings became the object of architectural scrutiny, and the Soviet pavilion was by far the most radical at the 1925 Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts.

  NEP influenced the non-visual arts as well. In music, important emigrations weakened the ranks of classical composers, despite the emergence of Dmitrii Shostakovich in the mid-1920s. In popular culture, while Nepmen supported pre-revolutionary forms, jazz made its first inroads, but met with a mixed review from the party. In literature, the situation was different. A variety of poets and satirists—Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Esenin, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelshtam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Mikhail Zoshchenko—evoked every emotion, from shocking society out of its bourgeois complacency to scoring the foibles of the new regime. Fedor Gladkov’s Cement was the first proletarian novel, but many others soon delved into the revolutionary experience. New works recounted heroic events and employed the genre of science fiction to put forward utopian and dystopian visions.

  By the late 1920s, however, eclecticism in the arts came under as much fire as did gradualism in other spheres. Militants in the Komsomol, Institute of Red Professors, and a number of organizations such as RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) grew impatient and pressed for a more rapid adoption of proletarian values. Youthful exuberance, idealism, an
d the results of protracted exposure to state propaganda inspired confrontations over a correct social politics and led to the removal of gradualists and the former bourgeoisie from positions of influence. In short, the pre-conditions of Stalinism that had emerged in politics and economics converged with a predisposition towards cultural revolution. At the end of the decade, the strategy of creating a new world-view shifted from inculcation to imposition.

  Conclusion

  NEP, a period of experimentation, taught valuable lessons. When the Bolsheviks came to power, they understood more clearly what they opposed than how to implement a singular conception of the future. And while the decade of the 1920s produced a wide range of innovation, it also tapped a strong reservoir of traditionalism. By the mid 1920s experimentation was under fire from within. Revolutionary ardour in politics, economics, and society did not diminish, but life itself forced a serious reassessment of what was both possible and desirable. By 1928–9, therefore, Bolshevik rule had given rise to widespread sentiment for realizing the promise of the proletarian revolution more rapidly, and it had also spawned a backlash against the results of ill-conceived programmes. Ironically, these sentiments were as much complementary as conflicting. And both would play a central role in the Stalinist upheavals about to begin.

  11. Building Stalinism 1929–1941