New Society? Flashcards
NS - social structure
- Joining the party after 1917 was like joining the nobility. It brought preferment to bureaucratic posts, an elite status and privileges, and a personal share in the party-state. The ethos of the party dominated every aspect of public life in Soviet Russia, just as the ethos of the aristocracy had dominated public life in tsarist Russia.
- by the end of the civil war, it was also deemed that party members needed higher salaries and special rations, subsidized housing in apartments and hotels, access to exclusive shops and hospitals, private dachas, chauffeured cars, first-class railway travel and holidays abroad
Five thousand Bolsheviks and their families lived in the Kremlin and the special party hotels, such as the National and the Metropole, in the centre of Moscow. The Kremlin’s domestic quarters had over 2,000 service staff - Its domestic budget in 1920, when all these services were declared free, was higher than that spent on social welfare for the whole of Moscow.
NS - corruption
- Bribe-taking, thefts and the sale of public property were endemic within the party.
- , the corruption was the result of the unbridled exercise of power.
- Soviets being transformed from revolutionary bodies, in which the assembly was the supreme power and controlled the work of the executives, into bureaucratic organs of the party-state where all real power lay with the Bolsheviks in the executives and the assembly had no control over them.
- The Bolsheviks engaged in widespread ballot-rigging and intimidation of the opposition. Voting at Soviet and trade union congresses was nearly always done by an open show of hands so that to vote against the Bolsheviks was to invite harassment from the Cheka, whose presence was always strongly felt at election meetings.
NS - bureaucracy
- Whereas the tsarist state had left much in the hands of private and public institutions, such as the zemstvos and the charities, the Soviet regime abolished all of these and assumed direct responsibility for the activities which they had performed. The result was the bureaucratization of virtually every aspect of life
- 1920, there were five times more state officials than industrial workers
From 1917 to 1921 the number of government employees more than quadrupled, from 576,000 to 2.4 million. By 1921, there were twice as many bureaucrats as workers in Russia. They were the social base of the regime. This was not a Dictatorship of the Proletariat but a Dictatorship of the Bureaucracy. - Lower down the scale, at factory level, the bureaucracy proved just as ineffective. For every 100 factory workers there were 16 factory officials by 1920
- by 1921 it was also ten times bigger than the tsarist state. There was some continuity of the personnel, especially in the central organs of the state. Over half the bureaucrats in the Moscow offices of the commissariats in August 1918 had worked in some branch of the administration before October 1917.
- As for the workers, in whose name the regime had been founded, they represented a very small proportion of those who entered the Soviet bureaucracy: certainly no more than 10 per cent (based on those with blue-collar occupations before 1917). Even in the management of industry workers made up less than one-third of officials
NS - corruption in appotinment
- Joining the party was the surest way to gain promotion through the ranks of the Soviet bureaucracy: fewer than one in five Bolshevik members actually worked in a factory or a farm by the end of 1919. The top official posts were always given to Bolsheviks, often regardless of their skills or expertise. The Ukrainian Timber Administration, for example, was headed by a first-year medical student,
- Lunacharsky filled the Commissariat of Enlightenment with his own friends and associates. Even Lenin gave several Sovnarkom posts to his oldest friends and relatives:Krupskaya was appointed Deputy Commissar for Education; Anna Ul’ianova, Lenin’s sister, was placed in charge of child welfare; while her husband, Mark Elizarov, was made People’s Commissar of Railways
NS - nationalities
Tenth Party Congress of March 1921, which introduced the NEP, also passed a resolution calling on the party to foster national cultures. Korenizatsiia (indigenization) was the thrust of Bolshevik policy in the 1920s.
- Between 1923 and 1926 the proportion of Kiev’s population which was Ukrainian increased from 27 per cent to 42 per cen
- The Ukrainian language, which the tsarist rulers had dismissed as a farmyard dialect, was now recognized as an essential tool for effective propaganda in the countryside and the recruitment of a native elite. During the 1920s it spread its domain into schools and offices, street names and shop signs, Soviet documents and ensignia, party congresses, newspapers and journals.
- More Ukrainian children learned to read their native language in the 1920s than in the whole of the nineteenth century
NS - people’s living conditions (children)
- By 1922 there were an estimated seven million children living rough in stations, derelict houses, building sites, rubbish dumps, cellars, sewers and other squalid holes.
- A survey of 1920 found that 88 per cent of the girls had engaged at some time in prostitution, while similar figures were found among the boys. Some of the girls were as young as seven
Despite widespread calls to limit the children to six hours of labour, and to make employers provide two hours of schooling, the authorities chose not to intervene, claiming it was ‘better to have the children working than living from crime on the streets’, with the result that many minors ended up by working twelve or fourteen hours every day
NS - cultural growth
- Bogdanov headed the Proletkult organization, set up in 1917 to develop proletarian culture. Through its factory clubs and studios, which by 1919 had 80,000 members, it organized amateur theatres, choirs, bands, art classes, creative writing workshops and sporting events for the workers.
Proletkult’s basic premise was that the working class should spontaneously develop its own culture; yet here were the intelligentsia doing it for them. the pioneers of the intelligentsia’s own imagined socialist culture.
NS - women
- As the Commissar for Social Welfare Kollontai tried to create the conditions for this new sexual harmony.
- Efforts were made to combat prostitution and to increase the state provision of child-care, although little progress could be made in either field during the civil war.
- Kollontai’s subordinates set up a ‘Bureau of Free Love’ in Vladimir and issued a proclamation requiring all the unmarried women between the ages of eighteen and fifty to register with it for the selection of their sexual mates. The proclamation declared all women over eighteen to be ‘state property’ and gave men the right to choose a registered woman, even without her consent, for breeding ‘in the interests of the state’.
- Even the women themselves were suspicious of the idea of sexual liberation, especially in the countryside, where patriarchal attitudes died hard. Many women were afraid that communal nurseries would take away their children and make them orphans of the state
- By the early 1920s the divorce rate in Russia had become by far the highest in Europe — twenty-six times higher than in bourgeois Europe.
- Working-class women strongly disapproved of the liberal sexuality preached by Kollontai,
NS - religion
- On 26 February 1922 a decree was sent out to the local Soviets instructing them to remove from the churches all precious items, including those used for religious worship. The decree claimed that their sale was necessary to help the famine victims; but little of the money raised was used for this purpose
7,100 clergy were killed, including nearly 3,500 nuns, but only a handful of Soviet troops. - Overall, 800 synagogues were closed down by the Communists between 1921 and 1925
- The Bolshevik persecution of religion did little to weaken the hold of this ‘opiate’ on the minds of the population. Although the 1920s witnessed a decline of religion, especially among the rural youth who went to school or left the countryside for the city,
this probably had less to do with the Bolsheviks’ efforts than with the secularizing tendencies of modern life. It had been happening in any case for decades. In fact, if anything, the oppressive measures of the Bolsheviks had precisely the opposite effect — of rallying the believers around their religion. Despite the separation of Church and state, the local clergy continued to be supported by the voluntary donations of their parishioners as well as by fees and grants of land from the peasant communes.
Octobered babies and Red Weddings failed to supplant their religious equivalents (which also happened to be more fun). People continued to bury their dead rather than cremate them, despite the shortages of coffins and graves and the free state provision of cremations,
NS - compromised beliefs - letter of 22
March 1922
From Kollontai, Shlyapnikov and others
To Comintern
- 40% worker and 60% non-proletarian
- apply all kinds of repressive measures against the expression of these opinions within the party.
- ignore our congresses’ decisions about laying the foundations of worker democracy
- Bureaucracy’s tutelage and pressure has gone so far, that party members are threatened with exclusion and other repressive measures if they elect whom they want instead of those whom the higher-ups want.
NS - historiography
Perfect: ‘The revolutionary regime had brought not only turmoil, suffering and nightmares, but also hope, opportunity and utopian dreams.’
Rosenberg: Soviet policies were ‘essentially a radical extension, rather than a break with the past.’
Perfect: ‘For all of the revolutionary rhetoric, much of the old world remained in the new society.’
NS - Figes
- Instead of being a constructive cultural force the revolution had virtually destroyed the whole of Russian civilization; instead of human liberation it had merely brought human enslavement; and instead of the spiritual improvement of humanity it had led to degradation.
NS - modernization
There were other signs of rural civilization in the 1920s.
- Hospitals, theatres, cinemas and libraries began to appear in the countryside. The period of the NEP witnessed a whole range of agronomic improvements which amounted to nothing less than an agricultural revolution. - The narrow and intermingled arable strips that had made communal farming so inefficient were rearranged or broadened on nearly a hundred million hectares of allotment land.
- Multi-field crop rotations such as those of Western Europe were introduced on nearly one-fifth of all communal land.
- Chemical fertilizers, graded seed and advanced tools were used by the peasants in growing numbers. Dairy farming was modernized; and many peasants turned to market crops, such as vegetables, flax and sugar beet, which before the revolution had been grown exclusively by the commercial farms of the gentry
NS - education
y 1926, 51 per cent of the Soviet population was considered literate (compared with 43 per cent in 1917, and 35 per cent in 1907
NS - hist
Volkogonov: “Lenin apparently never asked himself why, before 1921, the Bolsheviks were incapable of giving the people anything but chaos, civil war, hunger and terror. The fact is, the Bolsheviks had achieved their goal: the Party had power”.
Pipes: “So unnatural were the new conditions, they so outraged common sense and decency, that the vast majority of the population viewed the regime responsible for them as a terrible and inexplicable cataclysm which could not be resisted but had to be endured until it would vanish as suddenly and as inextricably as it had come”.
Service: “Despite all the problems, the Soviet regime retained a vision of political, economic and cultural betterment. Many former army conscripts and would-be university students responded enthusiastically. Many parents, too, could remember the social oppressiveness of the pre-revolutionary tsarist regime and gave a welcome to the Bolshevik party’s projects for literacy, numeracy, cultural awareness and administrative facility”.
Volkogonov: “…despite the fact that millions of honest people, led by the ‘vanguard of the revolution’, laboured for it, the utopia remained a fairy-tale”.
