sheila fitzpatrick, the russian revolution (1982)(3): revolution over by the 30's -- "the institutional and social structure and the cultural norms that were to last throughout the Stalin period had been established before the Great Purge, and did not change as a result of it. By the mid 1930s, Russia's new regime had already settled into its mould."
(8):
in sum -- "The way in which workers became 'masters' of Russian society after the October Revolution was not by an abolition of the old status hierarchy. It was by moving in very large numbers into the old masters' jobs."
(8):
key -- "...the essence of the special relationship between the party and the working class after 1917 was that the regime got 'cadres' (administrators and managers) from the working class, and workers got responsible, high-status jobs from the regime. The party's policies of workerrecruitment were part of this process... Although it took some time for the Bolshevik leaders... to realize it, the regime's commitemnt to the working class had much less to do with workers in situ than with working class upward mobility..."
Chapter 1, The Setting
(12): "in the villages, much of the traditional way of life remained... the mir would periodically redistribute the strips so that each househld had an equal share... of course the Emancipation had changed peasant life, but it had been framed with great caution so as to minimize the change and spread it over time... After the emancipation, they continued to work their own land, and sometimes worked for hire on their former masters' land, while making 'redemption' payments to the state to offset the lump sums that had been given the landowners as immediate compensation. The redemption payments were scheduled to last for forty-nine years... This meant that individual peasants were still bound to the village, though they were bound by the debt and the mir's collective responsibility instead of by serfdom."
(14): "The main reason for the close interconnection between the urban working class and the peasantry was that Russia's rapid industrialization was a very recent phenomenon."
(15):
key--"According to Marxist theory, a highly concentrated industrial proletariat in conditions of advanced capitalist production is likely to be revolutionary, whereas a pre-modern working class that retains strong ties to the peasantry is not. Thus the Russian working class had contradictory characteristics... Yet the empirical evidence of the period from the 1890s to 1914 suggests that in fact Russia's working class, despite its close links with the peasantry, was exceptionally militant and revolutionary... The strength of working-class revolutionary sentiment in Russia may be explained in a number of different ways. In the
first place, limited economic protest against employers -- what Lenin called trade unionism -- was very difficult under Russian conditions. The government had a large stake in Russia's native industry and in the protection of foreign investment... That meant that even economic strikes... were likely to turn political...
Although it was Lenin, a Russian Marxist, who said that by its own efforts the working class could develop only a trade union consciousness rather than a revolutionary one, Russia's own experience (in contrast to that of Western Europe) did not bear him out. In the
second place, the peasant component of Russia's working class probably made it more revolutionary rather than less. Russian peasants were not innately conservative small proprietors like, for example, their French counterparts. The Russian's peasantry's tradition of violent, anarchic against and landlords and officials... was manifest once again in the peasant uprisings of 1905 and 1906."
(17): "The Russian revolutionary movement of the second half of the nineteenth century, characterized by small-scale conspiratorial organization to fight the autocracy and thus liberaate the people, was largely a product of the intelligentsia's radical ideology and political disaffection."
(18-19): "in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, one of the central topics of discussion was Western European industrialization and its social and political consequences. One view was that capitalist industrialization had produced human degradation, impoverishment of the masses, and destruction of the social fabric in the west, and therefore ought to be avoided at all costs...
Populism was essentially the mainstream of Russian radical thought from the 1860s to the 1880s..."
(19): "In the early 1870s, the intelligentsia's idealization of the peasantry and frustration with its own situation and the prospects for political reform led to the spontaneous mass movement which best examplifies Populist aspirations -- the 'going to the people' of 1873-4.... The peasants were suspicious, regarding their uninvited guests as offspring of the nobility... The debacle produced deep disappointment... There was an upsurge of revolutionary terrorism in the late 1870s, motivated partly by the Populists' desire to avenge their imprisioned comrades and partly by the rather despearate hope that a well-placed blow might destroy the whole superstructure of autocratic Russia... [1881 assasination of Emperor Alexander II]"
(20): important--"It was in the 1880s, in the wake of the two Populist disasters, that the Marxists emerged as a distinct group within the Russian intelligentsia, repudiating the utopian idealism, terrorist tactics and peasant orientation that had previously characterized the revolutionary movement... Marxism in Russia -- as in China, India, and other developing countries -- had a meaning rather different from that which it had in the industrialized countries of Western Europe.
It was an ideology of modernization as well as an ideology of revolution..."
(22): "The Marxists made another important choice in the early controversy with the Populists over capitalism: they chose the urban working class as their base of support and Russia's main potential force for revolution. This distinguished them from the old tradition... (upheld by the Populists and later, from its formation in the early 1900s, by the Socialist -Revolutionary Party, with its one-sided love affair with the peasantry..."
(23): "Between 1898 and 1914, nevertheless, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party ceased to be a preserve of the intelligentsia and became in the literal sense a workers' movement. Its leaders still came from the intelligentsia, and spetn most of their time living outside Russia..."
(23): "The heresy of legal Marxism was nevertheless roundly denounced by Russian Social-Democratic leaders, especially by Lenin. Lenin's violent hostility to 'bourgeois liberalism' was somewhat illogical in Marxist terms... In revolutionary terms, however, Lenin's attitude was extremely rational..."
(25): "In the last prewar years, 1910-1914, the Mensheviks lost working-class support to the Bolsheviks as the workers' mood became more militant: they were perceived as a more 'respectable' party with closer links to the bourgeoisie, whereas the Bolsheviks were seen as more working-class as well as more revolutionary."
(28-29):
key--"Russia's landowning nobility learnt a lesson from the events of 1905-1906, namely that its interests lay with the autocracy and not with the liberals. But in urban terms, the 1905 revolution did not produce such clear consciousness of class polarization: even for most socialists, this was not a Russian 1848, revealing the treacherous nature of liberalism and the essential antagonism of bourgeoisise and proletariat.
The liberals--representing a profession rather than capitalist middle class -- had stood aside in October, but they had not joined the regime in an onslaught on the workers' revolution. Their attitude to the workers' and socialist movement remained much mroe benign than that of liberals in most European countries. The workers, for their part, seem to have perceived the liberals rather as a timorous ally than a treacherous one."
(29): "one thing that the 1905 Revolution did not change was the police regime that had come to maturity in the 1880s... [I]t meant that in many respects the political reforms were only a facade."
(30): "Neither Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks had got more than a toehold in the workers' revolution of 1905: the workers had not so much rejected as outpaced them, and this was a very sobering thought, particularly for Lenin."
(31): "The peasant revolts of 1905-7 had persuaded the government to abandon its earlier premiss that the mir was the best guarantee of rural stability. Its hopes now lay in the creation of a class of small iundependent farmers... The assumption was that the poor would sell up and go to the towns, while the prosperous would improve and expand their holdings and acquire the conservative petty0bourgeois mentality of, say, the French peasant farmer..."
(32): "...labour unrest dropped ddown sharply for some years after the savage crushing of the workers' revolutionary movement in the winter of 1905-1906, picking up again only around 1910. Large-scale strikes became increasingly common in the immediate prewar years, culminating in the Petrograd general strike of the summer of 1914, which was sufficiently serious for some observers to doubt that Russia could risk mobilizing its army for war...
In Russia, the Mensheviks were conscious of losing support as the workers became more violent and belligerent, and the Bolsheviks wer conscious of gaining it..." Chapter 2, 1917: the revolutions of February and OCtober
(34-35): "Yet within eight months the hopes and expectations of February lay in ruins. 'Dual power' proved an illusion, masking something very like a power vaccum. The popular revolution became more radical, while the elite revolution moved towards an anxious conservative stance in defence of property and law nad order..."
(35):
key--"The headlong passage from democratic February to Red October astonished victors and vanquished alike. For Russian liberals, the shock was traumatic. The revolution -- their revolution by right, ast hte history of WEstern Europe demonstrated and even right-thinking Marxists agreed -- had finally occured, only to be snatched from their grasp by sinister and incomprehensible forces. Mensheviks and other non-Bolsehvik Marxists were similarly outraged..."
(36):
key--"In the classic Western interpretation of the Bolshevik victory and subsequent evolution of Soviet power, the deus ex machina was the Bolsheviks' secret weapon of party organization and disciline... Yet there have always been problems in applying this general concept of the origins of Soviet totalitarianism to the specific historical situation unfolding between February and October 1917. In the
first place, the old undergorund Boslhevik Party was swamped by an influx of new members.. By the middle of 1917, it had become an open mass party, bearing little resemblance to the disciplined elite organization ... In the
second place, neither the party as a whole nor its leadership were united on the most basic policy questions in 1917..
It may well be that the Bolsheviks greatest strength in 1917 was not strict party organization and discipline... but rather that party's stance of intransigent radicalism on the extreme left of the political spectrum..."
(38): Feb revolution triggered by demonstration on International Women's Day
(40): "in the entire Tenth Army, only two officers refused to swear Alleigance to the Provisional Government..."
(40): "INdeed, from the very beginning there were reasons to doubt the effectiveness of the transfer of power. The most important reason was that the Provisional Governemtn had a competitor: the February Revolution had produced not one but two self-constituted authorities aspiring to a national role. The second was the Petrograd Soviet.... The Soviet was already in session in the =Tauride Palace when the formation of the Provisional Government was announced on 2 March..."
(41): "...
Order No. 1 was a revolutionary document and an assertion of the Petrograd Soviet's power. It called for democratization of the Army by the creation of elected soldiers' committees, reduction of officers' disciplinary powers and, most importantly, recognition of the Soviet's authority on all policy questions involving the armed forces... While Order No. 1 did not actually mandate the holding of elections to confirm officers in their positions, such elections were in fact being organized in the more unruly units...
It presaged the most unworkable form of dual power, that is, a situation in which the enlisted men in the armed forces recognized only the authority of the Petrograd Soviet, while the officer corps recognized only the authority of the Provisional Government."
(43): "Popular hostility to the 'bourgeois' Provisional Governemtn mounted in the late spring, as war weariness increased and the economic situation in the towns deteriorated. During the street demonstrations that occurred in July (the July Days), demostrators carried banners calling for 'All power to the soviets', which in effect meant the removal of power from the Provisional Governemtn.
Paradoxically -- though logically in terms of its commitment to the Governemnt -- the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet rejected the slogan of 'All power to the soviets'; and in fact the demonstration was directed at much against the existing Soviet leadership as against the Government itself..."
(44): Lenin and the April Theses--"no support should be given to the provisoinal government... The present Soviet leadeship, having succumbed to bourgeois influence, was useless (in one speech, Lenin borrowed Rosa Luxemburg's characterization of German Social Democracy and called it a 'stinking corpse')"
(45-46):
important--"The party's membership figures, shaky and perhaps exaggerated as they are, give some sense of its dimensions:
24,000 Bolshevik Party members at the time of the February Revolution (though this figure is particularly suspect...); more than
100,000 members by the end of April; and in October 1917 a total of
350,000 members, including 60,000 in Petrograd and the surrounding province, and 70,000 in Moscow and the adjacent Central Industrial Region..."
(49):
key--"..The evident vitality of the peasant mir in 1917 came as a shock to many people. The Marxists had been arguing since the 1880s that the mir had essentially disintegrated internally, surviving only because the state found it a useful instrument. ON paper, the effect of Stolypin's reforms had been to dissolve the mir in a high proportion of the villages of European Russia. Yet for all this, the mir was clearly a basic factor in Peasant thinking about the land in 1917..."
(50): of course--
liberals and land reform--"Despite the seriousness of the land problem and the reports of land seizures from the early summer of 1917, the Provisional Government procrastinated on the issue of land reform. The liberals were not on principle against expropriation of private lands, and generally seem to have regarded the peasants' demands as just. But any radical land reform would clearly pose formidable problems... The provisional governement's conclusion was that it would be best to shelve the problems until they could be properly resolved by the Constituent Assembly..."
(51): "In one sense, the July Days were a vindication of Lenin's intransigent stand since April, for they indicated strong popular sentiment against the Provisional Government... But in another sense, the July Days were a disaster for the Bolsheviks. Clearly Lenin and the Bolsheviks had been caught off balance... The whole affair damaged Bolshevik morale and Lenin's credibility as a revolutionary leader."
(52-53): "It seemed increasingly likely that the Provisional Government would fall one way or the other, but the question was, which? ...In August, the coup from the rightw as finally attempted by General Lavr Kornilov... The attempted coup failed largely because of the unreliability of the troops and the energetic actions of the Petrograd workers... Kerensky's standing had been further damaged by his handling of the Lornilove affair... The Executive Committe of the petrograd Soviet also emerged with little credit, since the resistance to Kornilov had been organized largely at the local union and factory level, and this contributed to an upsurge of support for the Bolsheviks which almost immediately enabled them to displace the Soviet's old Menshevik-SR leadership..."
(54): "From April to August, the Bolsheviks' slogan 'All power to the soviets' was essentially provocative... But the situation changed after the Kornilov affair, when the moderates lost control..."
(57-58): "As it turned out, a clear majority of the Congress delegates had come with a mandate to support transfer of all power to the soviets. But this was not an exclusively Bolshevik group (300 of the 670 delegates were Bolsheviks, which gave the party a dominant position but not a majority... At the Congress, the Bolsheviks called for the transfer of power to workers', soldeirs' and peasants' soviets throughout the country. As far as central power was concerned,
the logical implication was surely that the place of the old Provisional Government would be taken by the standing Central Executive Committee of the soviets, elected by the Congress and including representatives from a number of political parties. But this was not so. To the surprise of many delegates, it was announced that central governmental functions would be assumed by a new Council of People's Commissars, whose all-Bolshevik membership was read out to the Congress on 26 October by a spokesman for the Bolshevik party..."
(58): "Although the Bolsheviks' attitude to the soviets after October is open to different interpretations, it is perhaps fair to say that they had no objection in principle to the soviets exercising power at a local level, as long as the soviets were reliably Bolshevik..."
(59):
important--"Had the Bolsheviks a popular mandate to rule alone, or did they believe that they had one? In the elections for the Constituent Assembly (held, as scheduled before the October Coup, in November 1917), the Bolsheviks won 25 per cent of the popular vote. This put them second to the SRs, who won 40 percent of the vote (left SRs, who supported the Bolsheviks on the issue of the coup, were not differentiated in the voting lists). The Bolsheviks had expected to do better, and this is perhaps explicable if one examines the vote in more etail. The Bolsheviks took Petrograd and Moscow, and probably won in urban Russia as a whole... The SRs' overall victory was the result of winning the peasant vote in the villages. But there was a certain ambiguity in this. The peasants were probably single-issue voters, and the SR and Bolshevik programmes on the land were virtually identical. The SRs, howerver, were much better known to the peasantry, their traditional constituency..."
(63):
important intervention, push back point--"The Bolsheviks' dilemma -- most dramatically illustrated when the Red Army marched into Poland in 1920 and the workers of Warsaw resisted the 'Russian invasion' -- was that policies of proletarian internationalism in practice had a disconcerting similarity to the policies of old-style Russian imperialism."
(63): Civil War breaks out, mid-1918. "The Red (Bolshevik) victory in 1920 was therefore a proletarian triumph, but the bitterness of the struggle had indicated the strength and determination of the proletariat's class eenmies... The Civil War undoubtedly had an enormous impact on the Bolsheviks... It polarized the society, leaving lasting resentments and scars; and foreign intervention created a permanent Soviet fear of 'capitalist encirclement' which had elements of paranoia and xenophobia. the Civil War devastated the economy, bringing industry almost to a standstill and emptying the towns. This had political as well as economic and social implications, since it meant at least a temporary disintegration and dispersal of the industrial proletariat--the class in whose name the Bolsheviks had taken power..."
(64):
key--"It was in the context of civil war that the Bolsheviks had their first experience of ruling, and this undoubtedly shaped the party's subsequent development in many important respects. Over half a million Communists served in the Red Army at some time during the Civil War...
Of all members of the Bolshevik Party in 1927, 33 percent had joined in the years 1917-20, while only 1 percent had joined before 1917... For the cohort that had joined the party during the Civil War, the party was a fighting brotherhood in the most literal sense... In the judgment of one historian, the Civil War experience 'militarized the revolutionary political culture of the Bolshevik movement..."
(67): "Although the Bolsheviks' situation seemed desperate indeed in 1919,...their opponents also had formidable problems. In the first place, the White Armies operated largely independently of each other, without central direction or coordination. In the second place, the Whites' control over their territorial bases wsa even more tenuous than the Bolsheviks'.
(68): "The Bolsheviks' fighting force was the Red Army... The Red Army had to be built up from the beginning, since the disintegration of the old Russian Army had gone too far to be halted... [about 500,000 of total five million doing fighting]... Because of the shortage of trained military professionals, Trotsky and Lenin insisted on using officers from the old Tsarist Army, though this policy was much criticized in the Bolshevik Party, and the Military Opposition faction tried to get it reversed at two successive party congresses..."
(70):
important--"The Red Army and the Cheka both made important contributions to the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War... However, it would be inadequate to explaint hat victory simply in terms of military strength and terror... Active support and passive acceptance by the society must also be taken into account, and indeed these factors were probably curcial. The Reds had active support from the urban working class, with the Bolsehvik Party providing an organizational nucleus. The Whites had active support from the old middle and upper classes, with part of the Tsarist officer corps serving as the main organzing agent. But it was surely the peasantry, constituting the great majority of the population, that tipped the balance... As the civil War progressed, however, the Whites' difficulties with the Peasant conscripts became markedly greater than the Reds'."
(72): [War Communism] "IN the summer of 1918, the government issued a decree nationalizing all large-scale industry, and by the autumn of 1919 it was estimated that over 80 percent of such enterprises had in fact been nationalized... In November 1920, the governemtn nationalized even small-scale industry, at least on paper... A similar sequence led the Bolsheviks towards an almost complete prohibition on free trade and a virtually moneyless economy by the end of the Civil War. From their predecessors they inherited rationing in the towns (introduced in 1916) and a state monopoly on grain which in theory required the peasants to deliver their whole surplus..."
(72-73): "Factory organization was another touchy question. Were the factories to be run by the workers themselves..., or by managers appointed by the state, following the directions of central planing and co-ordinating agencies? The Bolsheviks favoured the second, but the effective outcome during War Communism was a compromise, with considerable variation from place to place. Some factories continued to be run by elected workers' committees. Others were run by an appointed director, often a Communist but sometimes the former manager..."
(74=75):
key--"For the Bolsheviks, still thinking in terms of the old Marxist debate with the Populists, the mir was a decaying institution, corrupted by the Tsarist state and undermined by emergent rural capitalism, lacking any potential for socialist development.
Moreover, the Bolsheviks believed, the 'first revolution' in the countryside--land seizures and egalitarian redistribution--was already being followed by a 'second revolution', a class war... For the peasants, on the other hand, the mir was perceived as at rue peasant institution, histrionically abused and exploited by the state, which had finally thrown of state authority and accomplished a peasant revolution."
(75):
int--"The Bolsheviks' real interest was large-scale agriculture, and only the political imperative of winning over the peasantry had led them to condone the breaking up of large estates that took place in 1917-1918. On some of the remaining state lands, they set up state farms--in effect, the socialists equivalent of large-scale capitalist agriculture, with appointed managers supervising the work of agricultural labourers who worked for wages..."
(77): 'sinister' excerpt from Bukharin and Preobrazhensky's
The ABC of Communism (1919).
(80-81):
governing, critical--"During the Civil War, most of the Bolsheviks' organizational talent went into the Red Army, the Food Commissariat, and the Cheka. Capable organizers... were continually being mobilized for the Red Army or sent on troubleshooting missions elsewhere. The old central government ministries (now People's Commissariats) were run by a small group of Bolsheviks... and staffed largely by officials who had earlier worked for the Tsarist and Provisional Governments... Authority at the centre was confusingly divided between the government (Council of People's Commissasrs), the soviets' Central Executive Commmittee and the Bolshevik Party's Central Committee, with its Secretariat and bureaux for organizational and political affairs, the Orguburo and the Politburo."
(81-82):
key--"The Bolsheviks also described their rule as 'soviet power.' But this was never a very accurate description, in the first place because the October Revolution was essentially a party coup, not a soviet one, and in the second place because the new central government (chosen by the Bolshevik Central Committee) had nothing to do with the soviets. The new government took over the various ministerial bureaucracies from the Provisional Government...
But the soviets did acquire a role at local level, where the old administrative machinery had completely collapsed. They (or more precisely their executive committees) became the local organs of the central government, creating their own bureaucratic departments of finance, education, agriculture, and so on. The administrative function gave point to the soviets' existence..."
(82): key--"At first, the central government (Council of People's Commissars) seemed the hub of the new political system.
But by the end of the Civil War, there were already signs that the Bolshevik Party's Central Committee and Politburo were tending to usurp the government's powers, while at local level the party committees were becoming dominant over the soviets; and this primacy of party over state organs became a permanent feature of the Soviet system..."
(82): "it would have been surprising if the Bolsheviks had shown liberal tendencies in power, given that anti-liberalism had previously been so important in the party's self-definition..."
(82): "The other basic characteristic of the Bolshevik Party was that it was working-class -- by its own self-image, by the nature oft its support in the society, and to a substantial degree in terms of party membership.
For this reason, the issue of the Bolsheviks' 'dictatorship of the proletariat' cannot be dismissed simply by saying that it was really a dictatorship of the party. It was the dictatorship of a more or less proletarian party, and that had consequences."
(83): "These principles were obviously not egalitarian. But the Bolsheviks never claimed to be egalitarian in the period of revolution and transition to socialism. From the Bolshevik standpoint, it was impossible to regard all citizens as equal when some of them were class enemies of the regime. thus the 1918 Constitution of the Russian Republic gave the vote to all 'toilers' (regardless of sex and nationality), but removed it from members of the exploiting classes and other identifiable enemies of Soviet power -- employers of hired labour, persons living on unearned income or from rent, kulaks, priests, former gendarmes and some other categories of Tsarist official, and officers in the White Armies..."
(84):
key theme of the argument, in this book at-large--"Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks had found ot by experience what they meant by 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. It was not a collective class dictatorship exercised by workers who remained in their old jobs at the factory bench. It was a dictatorship run by full-time 'cadres' or bosses, in which as many as possible of the new bosses were former proletarians."
Chapter 4, NEP and the Future of Revolution(85): "Deaths from hunger and epidemics in 1921-2 would exceed the combined total of casulaties in the First World War and Civil War. In addition, the emigration of about two million persons during the years of revolution and war had removed much of Russia's educated elite..."
(85-86): problems of demobilization and--"The fate of the core proletariat of industrial workers was equally alarming. Industrial closures, military consciption, promotion to administrative work and, above all, flight from the towns because of hunger had reduced the number of industiral workers from 3.6 million in 1917 to 1.5 million in 1920. A substantial proportion of these workers had returned to the villages... Lenin concluded that the lack of support from abroad [owing to failed revolution] made it imperative for the Bolsheviks to obtain support from Russia's peasantry..."
(86): March 1921, Kronstadt II -- The Kronstadt Rebellion occured while the Tenth Party Congress was in session..."
(87):
key--"The Kronstadt and Tambov revolts, both fuelled by economic as well as political greivances, drove home the need for a new economic policy to replace the policy of War Communism. The first step, taken inthe spring of 1921, was to end requisitioning of peasant produce... In the spring of 1921, Lenin was still strongly opposed to the legalization of trade, regarding it as a repudiation of Communist principles, but subsequently the spontaneous revivlal of private trade... presented the Bolshevik leadership with a fait accompli, which it accepted. These steps were the beginning of the New Economic Policy, known by the acronym NEP. It was an improvised response to desperate economic circumstances, undertaken initially with very little discussion and debate... The beneficial impact on the economy was swift and dramatic... Further economic changes followed... In industry, the drive for complete nationalization was abandoned..., though the state retained cotnrol of the economy's 'commanding heights', including large-scale industry and banking..."
(88-89): "But Lenin made it very clear that the relaxation (economic, cultural, social) should not extend into the political sphere..."
(89-91): discussion of democratic centralism -- impact of mass influx of new members, and attempt to retain old principles (evidence is the Comintern and the 21 conditions). importance of factions in early debates (like trade-union status), which Fitzpatrick sees as making many within party ranks nervous.
(92):
important, party unity--"Lenin therefore set out to destroy factions and factionalism within the Bolshevik Party... Lenin defeated Trotsky's faction and the Workers' Opposition in the vote on the trade union issue... Finally, in a surprise move which stunned the factional leaders, Lenin's group introduced and the Tenth Party Congress approved a resolution 'On party unity', which ordered the existing factions to disband and forbade any further factional activity within the party..."
(93):
key, Lenin-Stalin, for Fitzpatrick--"The practice of using such 'administrative methods' to reinforce unity in the leadership [sending dissidents, like the WO faction, away on assignments] was later greatly developed by Stalin, after he became General SEcretary of the party (that is, head of the Central Committee's Secretariat) in 1922; and scholars have often regarded it as the real death-knell of internal democracy within the Soviet Communist Party.
But it was a practice that originated with Lenin and arose out of the conflicts at the Tenth Party Congress..."
(94):
three organs of authority:
- a large central government bureaucracy whose roots in the provinces had crumbled.
- soviets, which had partly taken over the functions of local government in 1917.
- the Bolshevik Party itself--an institution whose previous function of preparing and carrying out a revolution was clearly inappropriate to the situation after October.
(94): "Although Lenin saw the danger that Communist values would be swamped by the old bureaucracy, he beleived that hte Communists had no alternative to working with it. They needed the technical expertise of the old bureaucracy -- not just administrative expertise, but also specialized knowledge..."
(95): "To most Communists it seemed obvious that if something important had to be done, it was best to do it through the party. Of course, the party's central apparat could not compete with the huge government bureaucracy on a day-to-day administrative level... But at local level, where the party committees and the soviets were both building from scratch, the situation was different. The party committee began to emerge as the dominant local authority after the Civil War, with the soviet falling into a secondary role...
Policy transmitted through the party chain of command... had a much better chance of being implemented than the mass of decrees and instructions that came down from the central government to the uncooperative and often chaotic soviets... The party committees.. were staffed by Communists who were obliged by party discipline to obey instructions from higher party organs. The party secretaries who headed the committees, though formally elected by their local party organizations, could in practice be removed and replaced by the Secretariat of the party's Central Committee. [the seeds]"
(96): in the context of Trotksy's objections to Stalin as general secretary--"in more general terms, however, it seems that most Communists simply did not regard the party apparat as a bureaucracy in the pejorative sense... When Communists said that they did not want a bureaucracy, they meant that they did not want an administrative structure that would not or could not respond to revolutionary commands."
(97): "in 1921, the industrial working class was in a shambles... But by 1924, economic revival had ceased some of the difficulties, and the working class was beginning to recover and grow...
By 1927, after three years of heavy working-class recruitment, the Communist Party had a total of over a million full members and candidates, of whom 39 percent were currently workers by occupation and 56 percent had been workers by occupation when they joined the party. ...For workers who joined the party in the first decade of Soviet power, the odds on subsequent promotion into administrative work (even excluding promotions after 1927) were at least 50:50."
(97): "In 1927, 49 percent of the Communists in responsible positions in the party apparat were former workers, whereas the corresponding figure for Communists in the government and soviet bureaucracy was 35 percent."
(98): "... a fierce though rather furtive succession struggle was in progress in
1923, with the triumvirate of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin pitted against Trotksy..."
(99-100):
key, battle at the 13th Congress (1923-4)--"...Stalin followed much the same strategy as Lenin had done.... Totsky's supporters campaigned as an opposition, while the party apparat was mobilized in support of 'the Central Committee majority', that is, the triumvirate. The 'Central Committe majority' won, though there were pockets of support for Trotksy in the party cells of the central government bureaucracy, the universities and the Red Army...
This was essentially a victory for the party machine--that is, a victory for Stalin, the General Secretary. The General Secretary was in a position to manipulate what one scholar has labelled a 'circular flow of power'. The Secretariat appointed the secretaries who headed local party organizations, and could also dismiss them if they showed undesirable factional leanings. The local party organizations elected delegates to the national party conferences and congresses, and it was increasingly common for the secretaries to be routineley elected... The national party congresses, in turn, elected the members of the party's Central Committee, Politbura, and Orgburo -- and, of course, the Secretariat. In short, the General SEcretary could not only punish political opponenets but also stack the congresses which confirmed his tenure in office."
(100):
1925, Stalin breaks with Zinoviev and Kamenev;
1927, opposition leaders expelled from party for breaking rule against faciotnalism
(101): "In a sense, the real issue in a conflict between a party machine and its challengers is the machine itself. Thus, whatever their original disagreements with the dominant faction, all the oppositions of the 1920s ended up with the same central grievance: the party had become 'bureaucratized', and Stalin had killed the tradition of internal party democracy... in the Testament of December 1922, Lenin did not propose reducing the powers of the party Secretariat. HE simply said that someone other than Stalin should be appointed General Secretary."
(103): "European Russia was actually less urbanized in the years immediately after the Civil War than it had been in 1987."
(103): "The introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921 was an admission that the Bolsheviks could perhaps do the work of the big capitalists, but for the time being could not get along without the small ones..."
(105):
imp--"...in
1925 Stalin made it clear that industrialization was now his isue and one of his highest priorities... The party's new orientation was expressed in Stalin's slogan 'Socialism in One Country'. What this meant was that Russia was preparing to industrialize, to become strong and powerful, and to create the preconditions of socialism by its own unaided efforts. National modernization, not international revolution, was the primary objective the Soviet Communist Party..."
(106):
key--Probrazhensky vs. Bukharin on accumulation: "Preobrazhensky... said that it would be necessary to exact 'tribute' from the peasantry to pay for industrialization, largely by turning the terms of trade against the ruralsector. Bukharin found this unacceptable in political terms, objecting that it was likely to alienate the peasants, and that the regime could not afford to risk breaking the worker-peasant alliance that Lenin had described as the political basis of NEP..."
(107): "As [Stalin] noted in 1927, the economic recovery of NEP (notable from 1924-5, my ed.)... had changed the balance of power between town and countryside in favour of the town. Stalin intended to industrialize, and if this meant a political confrontation with the countryside, Stalin though that 'the town' -- that is, the urban proletariat and the Soviet regime--would win."
(108):
key--"...many Soviet intellectuals of the older generation (after 1956) wrote memoirs of their youth in the 1920s in which NEP seemed almost like a golden age; and Western historians have often taken a similar view. But the virtues of NEP in retrospect... were not qualities that were much appreciated by Communist revolutionaries at the time. Communists of the 1920s were afraid of class enemies, intolerant of cultural pluralism and uneasy about the lack of unity in the party leadership and the loss of a sense of direction and purpose.
They wanted their revolution to transform the world, but it was very clear during NEP how much of the old world had survived... Workers (including Communist workers) were resentful of the privileges of 'bourgeois experts' and Soviet officials, the profits of sharp-dealing Nepmen, high unemployment and the perpetuation of inequality of opportunity and living standards."
Chapter 5, Stalin's Revolution(112): "... By the second half of the 1930s, when the threat of war with Germany and/or Japan became alarmingly real, the 'country-in-danger' mentality was already firmly embedded in Soviet political culture..."
(113):
key, crisis of 1927--"in the winter of 1927-8, the party leadership found itself divided on policy towards the peasantry, with Stalin on one side and a group later known as the Right Opposition on the other. The immediate problem was grain procurement. Despite a good harvest in the autumn of 1927, peasnat marketing and state procurement fell far below expectation... With the industrialization drive already in prospect, the question was whether the regime should run the political risk of squeezing the peasants harder, or take the economic consequences of buying them off. ....in practice the difference between [procurement price and manufactured goods price] had always been mitigated by the existence of a free market in grain, which kept state prices close to the market level. The state had not wanted confrontation with the peasantry, and had therefore made concessions when, as happened in the 'scissors crisis' of 1923-4, the discrepancy between agricultural and industrial prices became too great. In 1927, however, the impending industrialization drive changed the equation... Higher grain prices would reduce the funds available for industrial expansion, and perhaps make it impossible to fulfill the First Five-YEar Plan. Moreover... it seemed likely that the benefit from higher grain prices would go to 'kulaks'..." [All this discussed at the 15th Party Congress in 1927]
(114): for Stalin, "the short-term solution was coercion... the long-term solution... was to press forward with agricultural collectivization, which would ensure a reliable source of grain for the needs of the towns, the Red Army, and export, and would also break the kulaks' dominance in the grain market... Stalin's policy... was put into effect in the spring of 1928..."
(115): "A Right opposition to Stalin began to coalesce in the party leadership early in 1928... The essence of the Right's position was the the political framework... of NEP should remain unchanged... The Right opposed coercion of the peasantry... the Right responded with the suggestion that the First Five-Year Plan targets for industrial output and development should be kept 'realistic', that is, relatively low.... The Politburo's two major Rightists were Rykov... and Bukharin..."
(117): "Like previous oppositions to Stalin, the Right as defeated by the party machine which Stalin controlled. But, in contrast to the earlier leadership struggles, this one involved clear-cut issues of principle and policy..."
(118-123): discussion of First Five-Year Plan (1927-1932)
(124): "...despite intensive efforts to discredit kulaks and stimulate class antagonism within the peasantry, village unity seemed rather to have been reinforced by outside pressure than to be crumbling from within..."
(124): "The winter of 1929-30 was a time of frenzy, when the party's apocalyptic mood and wildly revolutionary rhetoric did indeed recall that of an earlier 'heroic period'..."
(126):
interesting, worth reading more about this--"To this manifest disaster [i.e., the initial drive], the regime reacted in two ways. In the first place, the OGPU (successor to the Cheka and the GPU) came in to arrest the expropriated kulaks and other troublemakers, and subsequently organized mass deportations to Siberia, the URal, and the North. In the second place, the party leadership backed a few steps away from extreme confrontation... in March, Stalin published the famous article entitled 'Dizzy with success', in which he blamed local authorities for exceeding their instructions... causing the proportion of peasant households officially collectivized throughout the USSR to drop from over half to under a quarter between 1 March and 1 June 1930."
(126): "Nevertheless, the collapse of the collectivization drive was only temporary... By 1932, according to official soviet figures, 62 percent of peasant households had been collectivized. By 1937, the figure had risen to 93 percent."
(126): very odd, this argument--"in some respects [in practice, presumably] it was actually a less radical reorganization of peasant life than that attempted in the Stolypin reforms of the late Tsarist period..."
(127): "The village mir was abolished in 1930, and the kolkhoz administration that took its place was headed by an appointed chairman... According to the estimate of Soviet historians,
over a million peasants were deported as kulaks in the years 1930-3, an average of about one household per village..."
(127): read the arch-getty, of course--"delivery quotas were very high -- up to
40 percent of the crops... The state's squeeze on the peasants put them at subsitence level, and in
1932-3 peasants in some key grain producing areas dropped below subsistence into famine... Some
millions of peasants are thought to have died in the faine, and there was a fresh wave of arrests..."
(128): "This [the reintroduction of internal passports] undoubtedly reinforced peasants' belief that collectivization was a second serdom... The regime had no such intention,... since its main objective during the 1930s was rapid industrialization, which meant a rapidly expanding urban labour force... In functional terms, the relationship between collectivization and the Soviet industrialization drive had much in common with that between the enclosure movement and Britain's industrial revolution more than a century earlier..."
(128-129): "During the First Five-Year Plan, no fewer than
nine million peasants left the villages and entered the urban and industrial labour force; and for the whole inter-census period 1926-1939 the number of permanent migrants was around
nineteen million. These were enormous figures, a demographic upheaval unprecedented in Russia's experience and, it has been claimed, in that of any other country over so short a period...
For every three peasants joining kolkhozy during the First Five-Year Plan, one peasant left the village to become a blue- or white-collar wage-earner elsewhere. The departures were as much a part of Stalin's revolution in the countryside as collectivization itself."
(129): "The struggle against class enemies was a major preoccupation of Communists during the First Five-Year Plan... At the same period, the international communist movement adopted a new belligerent policy of 'class against class'. These policies--all involving repudiation of a more conciliatory approach...--had their counterpart in the cultural and intellectual sphere... STrugle against the old intelligentsia, bourgeois cultural values, elitism, privilege and bureacratic routine constituted the phenomenon which contemporaries labelled 'Cultural Revolution'....
The Cultural Revolution was initiated by the party leadership--or, more precisely, Stalin's faction of the leadersihp--in the spring of 1928."
(132): hmm, a decisive challenge to the Right. to the Left? -- "In political terms, however, there was some real substance to the class aspect of the proletarian Cultural Revolution... During NEP, the party leaders had recognized that anti-intellectualism... was endemic in the working class...
But there was a kind of gentlemen's agreement within the NEP leadership not to appeal to working-class prejudices..."
(133-4):
key, upward mobility, one of Fitzpatrick's themes--"But there was also a second substantive class aspect to proletarian Cultural Revolution--the appeal to the ambition of young workers... to rise into the intelligentsia... The policy of promoting workers into administrative jobs and sending young workers to higher education was not new, but it had never been implemented with such urgency or on such a massive scale as during the Cultural Revolution... About 150,000 workers and Communists entered higher education during the First Five-Year Plan--among them Nikita Khruschev, Leonid Brezhnev..."
(134):
key--"the 150,000, later to become the core of the Stalinist elite after the Great Pruge of 1937-8, were young men... with a sense of purpose and, in the Calvinist meaning of the term, election. They were the chosen builders of socialism, sons of the working class whom the Revolution had rewarded and trusted with great responsibilities. The utopian, iconoclastic, and eccentric aspects of Cultural Revolution meant little to them... They were the beneficiaries of Cultural Revolution, not its enthusiasts; jand their personal commitment was not so much to the fighting party of the Civil War as to the industrializing party which, under Comrade Stalin's leadership, had broken with Russia's historic backwardness and accomplished its first Five-Year Plan..."
Chapter 6, The End of the Revolutionary Era(135): "...the Russian Revolution went through two bouts of fever, the first bout starting in 1917 and abating at the end of the Civil War, and the second occuring during the period of the First Five-Year Plan..."
(135): "...the return to normalcy was not so much the resumption of the old life as the beginning of a new one..."
(136):
important--"in the most prosaic terms of everyday life, Russia had been changed by the First Five-Year Plan upheavals in a way that it had not been changed by the earlier revolutionary experience of 1917-1920..."
(138): "The Communist Party -- one of whose functions was to provide cadres for the bureaucracies -- recruited new working-class and peasant members on an unprecedented scale, and equally energetically 'promoted' them into white-collar and administrative jobs or sent them off to school. The party's total membership increased from
1.3 million in
1928 to
3.6 million at the beginning of
1933; and in the years
1930-3 alone, more than
half a million Communists moved from manual to white-collar employment..."
(139): "Another institution that prospered during this period was the OGPU or secret police..."
(140): "After the frenzy and turmoil of the First Five-Year Plan, the Soviet Union entered a phase which had many Thermidorian characteristics.
Policies of consolidation and stabilization began to replace policies of upheaval..."
(140): "Socialism was the Bolsheviks' revolutionary goal, and in 1936 the new Soviet Constitution implied that it had been achieved... Of course the claims were untenable in many ways... But they embodied two judgments by Stalin and the Party leadership that deserve to be taken seriously. The first was that the revolution was over. The second was that some important revolutionary objectives had been realized... [economically-speaking, more specifically, with the First Five-Year Plan, heavy industrial base, demographic shift]"
(143): "As far as industry was concerned, the new approach could literally be called
managerial.... Stalin took up many, though not all, of these points in his famous 'Six Conditions' speech of 23 June 1931, which set the agenda for the 1930s and foreshadowed the 'post-revolutionary approach to industrialization. In this speech, he denounced vulgar egalitarianism in wages policy... Stalin sloughed off part of his own policy of class war and proletarian vigilance..."
(145): "The regime now governed the countryside in a sense that it had not done in the 1920s, when the villages had been left largely to their own devices because of the weakness of the rural administrative structure..."
(146): there was still mixed production on the collective farm, though (private plots remained, for things other than grain) --- "From
50 to 70 percent of total production of vegetables, fruit, milk, and meat came from the private plots in 1937..."
(147):
in sum--"With the 'great retreat' of the 1930s, the Stalinist party shed the iconoclasm and anti-bourgeois fervor of the Cultural Revolution and became, as it were, respectable... Authority was to be obeyed rather than challenged. Tradition was to be respected rather than flouted..."
(148):
well put--"
Among his colleagues in the party leadersihp, the newly-risen Khrushchevs, confident of their proletarian origins but afraid of behaving like peasants, were beginning to outnumber the Bukharins, who were confident of their culture but afraid of behaving like bourgeois intellectuals..."
(149): a new Soviet patriotism.
(150): "Motherhood and the virtues of family life were also extolled from the mid 1930s. Despite their reservations about sexual liberation, the Bolsheviks had legalized abortion and divorce shortly after the Revolution... In the Stalin era, divorce became more difficult to obtain, free marriage lost its legal status, and persons taking their family responsibilities lightly were harshly crticized... Homosexuality was made a criminal offesce; and in 1936, after long public discussion..., abortion was also outlawed..." [though Fitzpatrick also notes the influx of women into the labour force, and the fact of their full membership in the kolkhoz]
(151): "In the
1920s, many Communist officials clearly developed a taste for luxury and a sense of belonging to a privileged caste, but they were liable to be criticized for this and, at least in theory, a 'party maximum' kept most Communists' salaries from rising above the average wages of a skilled worker. In the
1930s ,however, privileges and a high standard of living became a normal and almost obligatory concomitant of elite status..."
(153):
in sum--"In the 1930s... a new political system was consolidated in the Soviet Union... Two [characteristics] have already been mentioned: the dropping of class-war ideology, and the emergence of a new, privileged elite of administrators and professionals. Another was Stalin's consolidation of a quasi-dictatorial role... Finally, there had been important changes in the role of the secret police and the extent of police repression, producing a large increase in the convict population in prisons and labour camps, and culminating in the monstrous and still baffling episode of the Great Purge of 1937-8."
(154):
key point of hers--"In historical terms, the Stalin era was the outcome of the Russian Revolution--not the intended, inevitable, or desirable outcome, no doubt, but the actual outcome, the only one that exists. Stalinism... represented a conclusion or settlement of the Russian Revolution. The question is, what kind of settlement? Which of the many different and contradictory revolutionary strains were incorporated?"
(155): "Stalin inherited from Lenin an elaborate structure of soviet and internal party democracy that was largely a sham. But the sham became more blatant under Stalin, both because the violations of democratic norms were greater and because Stalin (unlike Lenin) made extravagant and implausible claims about soviet and party democracy. [Stalin put ban on factions into effect, making them conspiracies; Stalin kept rank-and-file out of the loop]"
(156-157): "For two full years in 1937 and 1938, top Communist officials in every branch of the bureaucracy--government, party, industrial, military and finally even police--were being arrested as 'enemies of the people' and disappearing into prisons and labour camps. In the highest administrative and political strata, the casualty rate rose as high as 70 percent... Estimates of death by execution or in the camps in 1937-8 alone have run into millions, though a figure in the low hundreds of thosuands seems more plausible..."
(158): "'Bosses come and go,' Stalin said in October 1937, in one of his rare and enigmatic comments on the terror, which was then at its height. 'Only the people are eternal.'"
(159): "
The Great Purge shattered the cohorts of Communist leaders formed in the prerevolutionary underground, the Civil War and the period of collectivization and the First Five-Year Plan.... and this was surely part of Stalin's intention. But it seems likely that Stlain -- and for that matter, the majority of Russian citizens -- saw the cadres of the mid 1930s less in their old role as revolutionaries than in their current role as bosses. There is even some evidence that Stalin saw them as Soviet Boyars and himself as a latterday Ivan the Terrible... In the wake of the Great Purge, this group--the Brezhnev generation--was promoted extraordinarily rapidly into the highest echelon of the Soviet administration and political elite. In 1939, Stalin told the 18th Party Congress that now the Soviet regime had finally acquired the kind of intelligentsia it needed..."
(160):
key--"
The new cadres were from the people but no longer of it, for they had been upwardly mobile. They were beneficiaries of the Revolution, but by the same token disposed to be loyal to the regime and most unlikely to be revolutionary."
