Across the Revolutionary Divide E-Book

Theodore R. Weeks

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell History of Russia
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 612

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Across the Revolutionary Divide: Russia and the USSR 1861-1945 offers a broad interpretive account of Russian history from the emancipation of the serfs to the end of World War II.

• Provides a coherent overview of Russia's development from 1861 through to 1945
• Reflects the latest scholarship by taking a thematic approach to Russian history and bridging the ‘revolutionary divide’ of 1917
• Covers political, economic, cultural, and everyday life issues during a period of major changes in Russian history
• Addresses throughout the diversity of national groups, cultures, and religions in the Russian Empire and USSR
• Shows how the radical policies adopted after 1917 both changed Russia and perpetuated an economic and political rigidity that continues to influence modern society

Leseprobe

Contents

Illustrations

Series Editor’s Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Why a New Russian History?

Main Events and Arguments

Why a Thematic Approach?

Two Snapshots: 1861 and 1945

1 Politics

The Great Reforms: 1861–1876

Government under Siege: 1876–1904

The Beginning of the End: 1904–1914

War and Revolution: 1914–1917

The Revolution’s First Decade: 1917–1927

Building Socialism: 1928–1939

World War II: 1939–1945

2 Society

The End of Soslovie

Peasants into Kolkhozniks

“Civil Society” and Intelligentsia

The “Woman Question”

Bureaucrats and Society, Tsarist and Soviet

Edges of Society: Criminality, Social and Sexual “Deviance”

Amusements, Free Time, Leisure

Conclusion

3 Nations

Nationalities in the Russian Empire

Imperial Expansion and Policy: 1863–1917

The Great Liberation: 1917 to ca. 1930

Contradictions of Soviet Nationality Policy to 1945

Russia’s “Jewish Question”: 1861–1945

Conclusion

4 Modernization

The What and Why of Modernization

Tsarist Modernization to 1900

Stresses of Modernization: 1900–1917

Bolsheviks as Modernizers

The Modernizing Decade: 1930s

Triumphs and Weaknesses of Modernization: The Acid Test of World War II

Conclusion

5 Belief

Russian Orthodoxy, Dissenters, and Sects

Society between Science and Faith

The Triumph of Socialism and the Persistence of “Outdated Beliefs”

Antireligious Campaigns

The Survival of Religion under Soviet Rule

Compromising with Religion: World War II

Conclusion

6 World

Russia in Europe

Russia as Empire

Anxiety about Remaining “on Top”: 1900–1917

USSR Confronts the World to 1935

Russia Abroad: Émigrés

The Threat Turns Real: 1935–1945

Conclusions

7 Culture

Tsarist Education: Strengths and Weaknesses

A Society in Upheaval? Russian Culture in the Late Nineteenth Century

Science and Technology

Peasant Culture Becoming Mass Culture: Liubok, Chapbooks, Press

Visual Arts Reflecting Social Change

Bolshevik Revolution in Culture

Socialist Realism

Conclusion

Conclusion

The Search for Modernity

Changing Identities

Culture and Ideologies

Technology and Everyday Life

Roads Not Taken, and Why

Timeline

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

The Blackwell History of Russia

General Editor: Simon M. Dixon

This series provides a provocative reinterpretation of fundamental questions in Russian history. Integrating the wave of new scholarship that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, it focuses on Russia’s development from the mid - seventeenth century to the present day, exploring the interplay of continuity and change. Volumes in the series demonstrate how new sources of information have reshaped traditional debates and present clear, stimulating overviews for students, scholars and general readers.

Published

Russia’s Age of Serfdom, 1649–1861

Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter

Across the Revolutionary Divide: Russia and the USSR, 1861–1945

Theodore R. Weeks

Forthcoming

The Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the present

Stephen Lovell

This edition first published 2011 © Theodore R. Weeks 2011

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weeks, Theodore R.

Across the revolutionary divide: Russia and the USSR, 1861–1945/Theodore R. Weeks.

p. cm. - (Blackwell history of Russia)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-6961-5 (hardcover: alk. paper)-ISBN 978-1-4051-6960-8 (pbk.: alk.

paper) 1. Russia-History-Alexander II, 1855–1881. 2. Russia-History-Alexander III,

1881–1894. 3. Russia-History-Nicholas II, 1894–1917. 4. Soviet Union-History-

1917–1936. 5. Soviet Union-History-1925-1953. 6. Soviet Union-History-1939-1945.

7. Social change-Russia-History. 8. Social change-Soviet Union-History. I. Title.

DK189.W44 2011 947.08-dc22

2010003197

To my students: Past, present, and future

Illustrations

Figure 1.1 Mikhail Cheremnykh and Victor Deni, “Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth of Scum.” Figure 1.2 Viktor Govorkov, “Stalin in the Kremlin Cares about Each One of Us.” Figure 2.1 Russian Peasantry before the Revolution: A Village Council ca.1902 – 10. Figure 2.2 Nikolai Mikhailov, “There Is No Room in Our Collective Farm for Priests and Kulaks.” Figure 2.3B ezprizornye (street orphans). Figure 3.1 V. Elkin, “Long Live the Fraternal Union and Great Friendship of the Nations of the USSR!” Figure 4.1 Konstantin Zotov, “Every Collective Farm Peasant or Individual Farmer Now Has the Opportunity to Live Like a Human Being.” Figure 4.2 The Moscow Metro, one of the grand construction projects of the Stalin period. Figure 5.1 Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Figure 5.2 “Drunkenness on Holidays: A Survival of Religious Prejudices.” Figure 6.1 Iraklii Toidze, “The Motherland Calls!” 1941. Figure 7.1 Ilya Repin, Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks toSultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire. Figure 7.2 Vasily Vereshchagin, An Allegory of the 1871 War. Figure 7.3 Aleksei Radkov, “The Illiterate Is Just as Blind. Disaster Awaits Him Everywhere.” Figure 7.4 Film poster for Sergei Eisenstein’s BattleshipPotemkin, 1925. Map 0.1 Russian Empire. Map 0.2 USSR in 1945. Map 1.1 USSR in 1923 (or post- Civil War but pre- 1945). Map 3.1 Expansion of Russian Empire, 1860s to 1914. Map 3.2 Russian Poland and the Jewish Pale of Settlement.

Series Editor’s Preface

The Blackwell History of Russia aims to present a wide readership with a fresh synthesis in which new approaches to Russian history stimulated by research in recently opened archives are integrated with fundamental information familiar to earlier generations. Whatever the period under review, new discoveries have thrown into question some persistent assumptions about the nature of Russian government and society. Censorship and surveillance remain important subjects for investigation. However, now that social activity in Russia is no longer instinctively conceived in terms of resistance to a repressive, centralized state, there is room not only to investigate the more normal contours of everyday life, but also to consider its kaleidoscopic variety in the thousands of provincial villages and towns that make up the multinational polity. Religion, gender, and culture (in its widest sense) are all more prominent in the writings of contemporary scholars than they were in the work of previous generations. Historians once preoccupied with pig-iron production are now more inclined to focus on pilgrimages, icon veneration, and incest. No longer so overwhelmingly materialist in their approach, they are more likely to take “the linguistic turn”; the changing meanings of imagery, ritual, and ceremonial are all being reinterpreted.

The challenge is to take account of “extra” dimensions of the subject such as these (the list could easily be extended), and, where appropriate, to allow them to reshape our understanding, without risking a descent into modishness and without neglecting fundamental questions of political economy. One way of squaring the circle is to adopt an unconventional chronological framework in which familiar subjects can be explored in less familiar contexts. Each of the three volumes in the series therefore crosses a significant caesura in Russian history. The first, examined by Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter in Russia’s Age of Serfdom, 1649-1861, is the physical and cultural move from Moscow to St Petersburg at the beginning of the eighteenth century; the last, explored by Stephen Lovell in The Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the present, is the collapse of the USSR in 1991. In this middle volume, Ted Weeks ranges “across the revolutionary divide” of the year 1917.

For much of the twentieth century, 1917 seemed to mark the most significant of historical ruptures and there are naturally good reasons for continuing to regard the revolutionary cataclysm as a fracture between radically different worlds. Autocracy and Marxism - Leninism were ideological poles apart; so were the aims of their respective proponents. Indeed, it is hard to exaggerate the ambition of the Bolsheviks who came to power in October to transform the world in which they lived. They attempted not only to supplant the monarchy and to extend the dictatorship of the proletariat far beyond Russia’s borders, but also to forge a new civilization, ultimately to be peopled by a different sort of human being: New Soviet Man and New Soviet Woman.

For all these reasons, it is no surprise that the Soviet and tsarist periods should have tended until recently to attract historians of different backgrounds, different temperaments, and different preoccupations. While some were fascinated by the decline of an increasingly inflexible tsarist regime, whose attempts to strengthen the Romanov dynasty paradoxically served only to make its own government more brittle, others were drawn to explain why a Bolshevik vision apparently so suffused with optimism should have corrupted within less than a generation into the horrors of the Stalinist Terror. Even basic logistics militated against scholarly efforts to “cross the revolutionary divide,” for while the Soviet government stored its principal papers in Moscow, the richest archival collections relating to the late -imperial period remained in Leningrad.

Nearly 20 years after the collapse of the USSR, however, 1917 no longer seems quite such a total rupture. After all, as governors of a sprawling multiethnic state, the Bolsheviks faced many of the same geopolitical challenges as their tsarist predecessors. How were they to balance the security of multinational Rossiia against ethnic and cultural Rus’? Some of the most fertile research of the last generation has been devoted to precisely this question and to related dilemmas of imperial expansion. Himself an acclaimed authority on the history of the Polish- Lithuanian borderlands both before and after 1917, Weeks draws on this literature to offer a brilliant analysis of the nationalities question in one of the most striking chapters of his new book. Continuities are no less striking when one turns to the economy. The last three tsars and the early Soviet leaders were all struggling to manage the politics of industrialization in an overwhelmingly agrarian empire. All of them ran up against the risk - averse peasantry’s stubborn attachment to the small-scale communal organization that had helped them to survive for centuries. Peasant obstinacy was to prove just as exasperating to Stalin at the end of the 1920s as it had to Stolypin between 1906 and 1911. Their solutions, of course, were radically different. Whereas Stolypin hoped to foster a new generation of prosperous (and politically loyal) farmers by encouraging the wealthiest peasants (“kulaks”), Stalin set out to annihilate them. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to suppose that the Bolsheviks had a monopoly on state violence. In many ways, the key turning point was not 1917, but, rather, World War I, described with characteristic prescience by Norman Stone in 1975 as “a first experiment in Stalinist tactics for modernization.” More recently, Peter Holquist has traced the development of a wartime consensus in favor of planning that stretched across the political spectrum, including among liberals in government who regarded themselves as a supra - class elite with the best interests of the state at heart. And just as liberal planners’commitment to forcible state intervention in the food supply chain during World War I marked the first stage in a continuum of state violence that stretched beyond 1917, so Daniel Beer has demonstrated the ways in which psychiatrists and other liberal intellectuals anticipated some of the controlling instincts of the Soviet regime by seeking to combat a perceived threat of moral degeneration well before 1917.

Not that violence and surveillance were the only tools at the state’s disposal. Russia has always derived much of its stability and flexibility from time - honored ways of doing things. The sorts of informal patronage network that had overlain the tsarist bureaucracy for centuries at both central and local levels soon wove their way into a powerful Soviet nomenklatura. Nor should we confine our interest in continuity to matters of geopolitics and the state. Most aspects of the distinctive form of Soviet consumer society that emerged in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War - tourism, the cinema and so on - had their origins in the commercial explosion of late-imperial Russia. Many of the reformist impulses in Russian Orthodoxy that emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century found expression only after the October Revolution, when the nascent Soviet regime tried to exploit them as a way of splitting the church. There is no need to stress the virtues of writing cultural history “across the revolutionary divide”: it is the only way to write about Russian modernism, itself part of a European cultural movement with deep roots before World War I.

In other words, while no one would sensibly seek to minimize the impact of the October Revolution, the lived experience of Stalin’s generation only partly confirms the impression of 1917 as a fundamental caesura. Drawing on recent writings which have enriched our understanding of the 1920s and 1930s as never before, Ted Weeks explores a vital period in Russian history, culminating in the “Great Patriotic War” that served as the ultimate test of the nascent Soviet regime.

Simon M. Dixon

School of Slavonic and East European Studies

University College London

Acknowledgments

Writing a textbook is truly a case, as medieval writers liked to say, of a “dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants.” Among the giants among Russian historians that I have known and learned from over the years are my Doktorväter, Nicholas Riasanovsky and the too-soon departed and sorely missed Reggie Zelnik. My wonderful colleagues in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, here at Southern Illinois University, and throughout the world, have also been important teachers. Probably most vital of all for a textbook writer is the interaction with students who are constantly reminding me to be clear, precise, and concise.

Many people helped improve this book. My sincere thanks to colleagues who took time from their busy schedules to read and critique chapters: Peter Blitsein, Chris Chulos, Adrienne Edgar, Brian Horowitz, Stephen Lovell, Kevin O’Connor, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, and Christine Worobec. Brad Woodworth, Pierre Holquist, and Clayton Black helped with specific queries. Chapter 5 is much improved after the thorough critique provided by the Midwest Russian Historians Workshop. My sincere gratitude to all of these people and all others whom I have neglected to mention specifically. All remaining weaknesses, errors, and infelicities are entirely mea culpa.

A Note on Calendars

Unlike most European countries, which had adopted the Gregorian calendar (“new style”: “n.s.”) by the eighteenth century, imperial Russia continued to use the Julian calendar (“old style”: “o.s.”) well into the twentieth century. This meant that the calendar used in Russia was 12 days behind in the nineteenth century, 13 days behind in the twentieth. Thus October 1, 1901, in Russia was October 14 in, say, London. This fact is important in understanding why this book speaks of the “October” (old style) Revolution whereas a general European history would speak of the “November” (new style). This confusion was cleared up when the Bolsheviks adopted the Gregorian calendar in February 1918.

Introduction

Why a New Russian History?

The Russia of today is an entirely different place than the one I read about in college textbooks and experienced as a college student in the 1980s. In the past generation Russia has gone from being, in the guise of the USSR, one of two superstates whose policies affected millions around the globe to a still powerful but insecure state no longer certain of its preeminence on the global scene. This enormous change took place almost literally overnight in the early 1990s and left millions of Russians baffled, frustrated, and angry. One cannot understand the politics and culture of the Russian Federation in the twenty-first century without a good grasp of the past–in particular of the crucial period between serf emancipation (1861) and victory in the second World War (1945). In that quite short period–essentially one long lifetime–Russia became a world power as it had never been before in history. Now, once again, Russia has returned more or less to its pre-World War I power status: important but not one of the two superpowers engaged in power projection around the globe. At the same time many Russians continue to feel that their country is not receiving proper respect in the world. The broad discrepancy between Russia’s actual military and economic power and the role that Russians think their country should play in world politics stems mainly from the memory of a powerful USSR–the country built in the years we will consider here.

Despite the transformations of the 1990s and the resulting reduction in Russian military might, Russia continues to aspire to a global role–to the great consternation of many of its European neighbors. With its large energy reserves, nuclear capabilities, and geographical sweep covering nearly half of the globe, Russia remains vitally important in world politics. One should also never forget that the Russian nuclear arsenal is still capable of ending all life on earth. So Russia continues to “matter,” just as Germany and Britain after 1945 remain significant in world politics, economy, and culture. Up to now, all histories of Russia written have consciously or unconsciously been histories of a world power. The challenge of a survey of Russian history in the twenty-first century is to present the history of a country whose importance can no longer be taken for granted.

Map 0.1 Russian Empire.

Source: based on map in Dominic Lieven, Empire, Yale University Press, 2000, “The Russian Empire at its Greatest Extent, 1914.”

The present-day importance of Russia derives from geographical, military, cultural, and historical factors. The largest country in the world from the seventeenth century to the present day, its borders stretch from the European Union to China, from the Middle East (Iran) to Korea, from the Black and Baltic Seas to the Pacific. The huge oil and natural gas reserves located on its territory allow Russia to exert serious–and often much resented–influence in Europe where many countries are overwhelmingly dependent on energy delivered from the east. With its nuclear arms and new-found assertiveness under President Vladimir Putin and his successors, Russia cannot be dismissed as “yesterday’s news.” Of course, for a historian, the news of yesterday is vitally significant, even more so, perhaps, for Russia more than any other present–day country. While Germans or Japanese no longer regard their countries as world powers (and, crucially, have no great desire to take on that role) and the British Empire has been transformed into the Commonwealth that has relinquished any pretensions of a geopolitical role, the Russian Federation and Russian citizens in the early twenty-first century often regard their country in terms of world political power. Thus Russia expects to be respected as a power of the first rank; neither government nor populace is yet content to accept a reduced role on the international scene in the way that former world powers like Great Britain, France, or Japan have. This view, which clashes with many aspects of post-1992 political reality, can only be understood through a sympathetic examination of Russia’s past experience.