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Russian History Assignment (1st Term)

– Shaurya V. Kuthiala

Q: Analyse the main developments in the Soviet State, economy and


society in the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP).
A: The period of the New Economic Policy ranged between the years 1921-28 in
the Union of Soviet Socialist Rupublics. However, a detailed study of this Policy
and its repercussions can only be carried out with some knowledge of the
events leading up to this period. The starting point is the October Revolution of
1917, when the Bolshevik Party seized power in an almost bloodless coup from
the Provisional Government, which had itself come into being with the fall of
tsarism in the February Revolution of 1917. The Provisional Government was
first led by Prince George Lvov and then by Alexander Kerensky as Prime
Ministers. However, this government was not able to make decisive decisions
regarding the military situation of Russia (during World War 1), holding of
democratic elections, the growing economic chaos and some other smaller
issues, which eventually led to another change of power at the Centre. Lenin
and the Bolsheviks first heavily criticized the government, and then took
advantage of the power vacuum that had emerged at the Centre, because the
Provisional Government’s authority was greatly undermined by the fact that it
had to share power with the Petrograd Soviet. With Trotsky’s careful planning,
the Bolshevik Red Guards occupied all key positions during the night of October
24-25 (by the old Julian Calender, which was being used in Russia at the time) in
the name of the Soviets, and later arrested all ministers of the Provisional
Government, except Kerensky, who managed to escape.
The takeover was not so smooth in other places like Moscow, where fighting
lasted for a week, and other cities were only brought to heel by the end of
November, but eventually a new government was established. However, at this
point the Bolsheviks lagged far behind the Social Revolutionaries (SRs) Party in
terms of mass support. When there was a sustained call for elections by various
opposition parties which quickly recovered from the shock of the Bolsheviks
seizing power, Lenin and Trotsky had no illusions as to the outcome. The Social
Revolutionaries were far ahead of the Bolsheviks in terms of popular support, as
was evident at the Second Congress of Soviets, which was essentially convened
soon after the takeover of power, in order to ratify the actions of the Bolsheviks.
At a point in the Congress, the Mensheviks and SRs walked out, leaving the
Bolsheviks in a majority. Lenin then took the stage to thunderous applause, and
the Congress could then ratify the takeover. This move legitimized the takeover
of power by the Bolsheviks in the name of the Soviets.
The results of the elections found the SRs as the single largest party, which had
about 40.4% of the votes. The Bolsheviks had only about 24% of the vote. As
such, when the Constituent Assembly met in January 1918, the SRs refused to
recognize the Bolshevik government, which was not willing to form a coalition
with any other Party or share power in any way. After a night of heated
speeches and refusals, Lenin sent in the Red Guards to disperse the Assembly,
which was not allowed to meet again. He simply argued that as the Bolsheviks
were already in power and knew what the workers really wanted, this dispersal
was justified. Over the next three years, however, the groups which had
supported the Bolsheviks because of Lenin suddenly changing the Bolsheviks’
political strategy, found that the Bolsheviks were not going to fulfill their
promises. With these groups turning hostile to the Bolsheviks, and a mixed bag
of SRs, Mensheviks, ex-tsarist officers, foreign governments (Britain, France,
USA etc.) and other groups which were against the new government, banding
together (the ‘Whites’), the country slipped into Civil War. In this Civil War, the
Bolsheviks were known as the ‘Reds.’
The Red Army was better organized, outnumbering the Whites greatly, and was
under the inspired leadership of Trotsky, who was appointed as the Commissar
for War. The Whites were a group of different backgrounds and ideologies, who
had simply banded together against the Bolsheviks to fight them. They were
not as cohesive as the Reds. Lenin took decisive measures, which he termed
later as ‘War Communism’ to fight the Whites. Under this, all factories were
nationalized, all private trade was banned and grain was seized at a fixed rate
(decided and paid by the government) from peasants to feed the towns and
troops. Lenin was also able to present the Reds as a nationalist government
fighting against foreigners. While there was much public hatred for war
communism and other measures, the Whites were even more unpopular
because of their foreign connections.
Under the circumstances, by the end of 1919 it was clear that the Reds were
going to win the Civil War. The task now at hand for Lenin and the Bolsheviks
(who now called themselves communists) was rebuilding the country, whose
economy had been shattered by the First World War and the Civil War.
The main political problem now for Lenin was disagreement and criticism from
inside the communist party. In March 1921, ‘factionalism’ was banned within
the party. This meant that discussions and debates on issues would be allowed,
for Lenin did not behave as a dictator, and persuaded rather than decreed, but
once a decision had been taken, all sections of the party would have to accept
it. Those who persisted in holding different views from the official party line
would be expelled from the Party. As such, during 1921, about one-third of the
party members were ‘purged’ (expelled) with the help of the ruthless secret
police, the Cheka.
Another political development of the time was the adoption of the first Soviet
Constitution by the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets. It was promulgated on
July 10, 1918. It created the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, or
RSFSR. Local soviets elected delegates to a provincial Congress of Soviets and
provincial congresses, in turn, elected the membership of the All-Russian
Congress of Soviets. This elected the Executive Committee, and the Council of
People’s Commissars. Elections were open, and organized on a class basis, with
industrial workers being especially heavily represented. The Communist Party,
particularly the Central Committee and Political Bureau (first headed by Lenin),
dominated the government apparatus and the same leading communists
occupied top positions in both Party and Government. On December 30, 1922, a
new Constitution brought the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into being.
The NEP was then introduced by Lenin, perhaps as a temporary solution to
Russia’s economic problems. The most notable communists (Lenin and Trotsky,
among others) admitted that capitalism existed in Russia, but had not
developed to the extent that Marxism allowed for before social conditions would
be ripe for a Socialist Revolution. In the context of this argument, we can
understand the reasons behind Lenin’s implementation of the NEP. War
communism had been very unpopular with the peasants. They saw no point in
working hard to produce more food, as it was simply taken away from them at
prices decided by the state. They had begun to produce only enough for their
own needs, which led to a severe shortage of food in the cities and towns. The
shortages were aggravated by droughts in 1920-21. Industry was almost at a
standstill after the war. Unrest began to manifest itself in the form of a serious
naval mutiny at Kronstadt, the celebrated island naval base in the Gulf of
Finland. Trotsky suppressed it quickly, but this convinced Lenin that some
drastic measures had to be taken. His answer to this was the NEP.
Riasonovsky terms the NEP as “a temporary retreat of Socialism.” It was a
period of relaxation of the economy in order to let the country recover from the
wars. An important detail to be noted is that the NEP only provided for
economic relaxation. The State retained full political control at the time. The
communists had fought tooth-and-nail for their victory, and were not going to
endanger it in any way. This can be contrasted with USSR under Mikhail
Gorbachev. At this time, in 1985 onwards, reform was required in two areas:
the communist party and government, and the economy. Gorbachev believed
that these reforms could only happen one at a time, and introduced the political
reforms first, without any real economic innovations. He introduced policies like
glasnost and perestroika, which backfired as it gave the people freedom without
the state being able to use force upon them effectively. This perhaps
accelerated, if was not amongst one of the most important causes for the
collapse of USSR.
Under the NEP, large and medium industries were entirely controlled by the
state through the policy of nationalization. Foreign trade and commerce, too,
was monopolized by the state. As such, coal, iron and steel, power, transport
and banking remained with the state. Often, however, old managers had to be
brought back, as well as some capitalist incentives like bonuses and piece-rates.
Private enterprise was allowed to a very limited extent. Plants employing fewer
than twenty workers were allowed, but there was no cap on the number of such
units that an individual could own. It must be noted, however, that during the
NEP the government demanded that state industries account for costs and pay
for themselves. Retail trade was opened to individuals in the course of this
policy as well. 75% of retail trade fell into private hands. A class of ‘Nepmen,’
or small businessmen allowed to operate by the new policy, emerged and then
increased as well.
One of the most important points of the NEP was the establishment of a definite
tax on agricultural produce, which could be paid in money or in kind. It was a
certain percentage of the produce that a peasant grew. The remaining grain
could be sold on the free market by the peasants. This was the incentive
provided to increase grain production within the country after the drastic effects
of war communism and droughts had nearly brought about a crisis. A limited
use of hired labour in agriculture was also allowed, which, in a sense, started
distinguishing between richer and poorer peasants, creating a sort of class
difference. The restricted lease of land to other individuals was also allowed.
However, Lenin probably first envisioned collective farms with full state control
to be the future of communist USSR, and the reforms here were perhaps only
meant to be temporary, till recovery was assured. The term Kulak came into
being, which referred to the wealthy peasants in the villages, who Kamenev and
Zinoviev disapproved of and saw as direct enemies of communism. The word
kulak means ‘fist,’ and came to designate a prosperous peasant, a man who
held on tightly to what was his. It also has connotations of exploitation and
greed attached to it. The Eleventh Party Congress declared as early as 1922
that no further “retreat” from Socialism could be tolerated. In 1924 and 1925,
the Government introduced certain measures to restrict the Nepmen, and in
1927 to limit the kulaks.
The currency system had just about completely collapsed by the time USSR
emerged out of the Civil War. The government revamped the entire economic
and currency system, which had fallen very low in value when compared with
other currencies. A new unit of currency, Chervonet, was also introduced, a
number of which made up a Rouble.
The NEP was moderately successful. The economy began to recover, and great
progress was made with the electrification of industry. When the NEP began to
be abandoned towards the end of 1927, the Russian peasant was probably
better off than at any time since 1914. Factory production in 1913 was 10,251
million roubles. It fell to 2,004 million roubles in 1921, and rose to 11,083
million roubles in 1926. Steel production in 1913 was 4,231,000 tons; 183,000
tons in 1921; and 3,141,000 tons in 1926. Grain harvest was 80.1 million tons
in 1913; 37.6 million tons in 1921; and 76.8 million tons in 1926. However,
there were disputes within the Party as to how far the NEP should be carried.
There existed the various views of the Left faction, the Right faction and the
Central faction within the communist party, who only grew more vocal after
Lenin’s death in January 1924. Lenin’s death intensified the struggle for power,
with the above-mentioned factions all fighting for supremacy. Ultimately, Stalin
emerged victorious.
The Left position was best developed by Trotsky, and maintained that without
world revolution, socialism in Russia was doomed. He was of the view that
socialist movements abroad had to be supported first, while socialism within
Russia should be developed as well. Trotsky was against the NEP, and also
criticized Stalin for his destruction of democracy within the Party. Gregory
Zinoviev and Leo Kamenev essentially shared Trotsky’s views as well. The Right
faction was led by Nicholas Bukharin, a prominent theoretician. He agreed with
the Left on the concept of Russia’s dependence on world revolution, but since
this was not imminent, the Party should not abandon the NEP and try to force
the pace towards socialism. The compromise of the NEP should be given a
chance to work. The Centrist viewpoint was represented by Stalin, who said that
in spite of the world revolution failing to materialize, socialism could be
successfully built within USSR, with its huge size, large population and
tremendous resources. Stalin’s approach, for the first time in history, gave the
Soviet Union the central position in Communist thought and planning.
Stalin’s superior control of the Party membership and his position as General
Secretary of the Party were hugely influential in his rise to power. Stalin posted
his followers to higher positions, and intrigued skillfully, first allying himself with
Kamenev and Zinoviev against Trotsky, whom they envied and viewed as their
main rival for Party leadership; then with the Right group against the Left.
When he felt sufficiently strong, he suppressed the Right as well. As it were,
one by one, Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev were voted off the Politburo,
replaced with Stalin’s own yes-men, and then expelled from the Party by 1927.
The next year Stalin felt that the kulaks were holding up agricultural progress
and decided that the NEP had to go. He then introduced his ‘Five Year Plans,’
which were initiated from 1928 onwards. It can thus be seen that Stalin alone
offered a sweeping programme and a majestic goal, which were to be achieved
by Soviet efforts alone. His view, of the three offered, was the most attractive
to Soviet Communists as well. Under these conditions, its not surprising that he
finally emerged supreme.
***
The February Revolution had swept away not just the monarchy, but an entire
civilization. Overnight, all the institutions of power collapsed – the Church, the
legal system, the power of the gentry over land, the authority of the officers in
the army and navy, deference for senior figures – so that the only real power in
the country passed into the hands of local revolutionary committees (the
Soviets) of the workers, peasants and soldiers. It was in their name that the
Bolsheviks seized power. Popularly seen as a war against privilege, the practical
ideology of the Russian Revolution owed less to Marx (who was barely known by
the semi-literate masses) and more to the egalitarian customs and utopian
yearnings of the peasantry. Long before it was written down by Marx, the
Russian people had lived by the idea that surplus wealth was immoral, all
property was theft and that manual labour was the only true source of value.
This striving for pravda (truth and social justice) gave the Revolution its quasi-
religious status in the popular consciousness: the war on private wealth was a
bloody purgatory on the way to a heaven on earth.
By giving institutional form to this crusade, the Bolsheviks were able to draw on
the revolutionary energies of those numerous elements among the poor who
derived satisfaction from seeing the rich and mighty destroyed, regardless of
whether or not such destruction brought about any improvement in their lot.
They rounded up the leisured classes and forced them to do jobs such as
clearing snow or rubbish from the streets. For the old intelligentsia, conditions
were particularly harsh. They were at the bottom of the Social pile as far as the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat was concerned. Most were conscripted by the
state for labour teams, but only a few had jobs. Even if they received food from
the state, it was the beggarly third-class ration, “just enough bread so as not to
forget the smell of it,” in the words of Zinoviev, the Party boss of Petrograd.
The provincial gentry were deprived of their estates, their manor houses burned
or confiscated by the peasant communes or the local Soviets, and the rich were
forced to share their apartments with the urban poor or to give up rooms to
their old domestic servants and their families. This was not only a war against
the Tsarist past, but was also a way to try to engineer a more collective way of
life. By forcing people to share communal flats, the Bolsheviks believed that
they could make them communistic in their basic thinking and behavior. Private
space and property would disappear, the patriarchal (bourgeois) family would be
replaced by communist fraternity and organization, and the life of the individual
would become immersed in the community. In the early years of the
Revolution, this included socializing of existing houses; families being assigned
to a single room, and sometimes even less; and shared kitchens and bathrooms
with other families. From the 1920s, new types of housing emerged. Radical
Soviet architects proposed the complete obliteration of the private sphere by
building ‘commune houses’ (dom kommuny), where all property, including
clothes and underwear, would be shared by the inhabitants, and where
domestic tasks like cooking and childcare would be assigned to teams on a
rotating basis, and where everybody would sleep in one big dormitory, divided
by gender, with private rooms set aside for sexual liaisons. Few of these houses
were ever built, although they loomed large in the utopian imagination and in
futuristic novels such as Zamyatin’s We (1920). Even the houses that were
built stopped slightly short of the full communal form, but the aim remained to
marshal architecture in a way that would induce the individual to move away
from private forms of domesticity to a more collective way of life.
It had always been the aim of the Marxists to create a new type of human being.
As Marxists, they believed that human nature was a product of historical
development, and could thus be transformed by a revolution in the way that
people lived. Lenin was greatly influenced by these ideas. Trotsky waxed lyrical
on the ‘real scientific possibility’ of reconstructing man. He said “Man is by no
means a finished or harmonious being. ...To produce a new ‘improved version’
of man – that is the future task of communism. ...Man must look at himself and
see himself as a raw material, or at best a semi-manufactured product, and say:
At last my dear homo sapiens, I will work on you.”
The artist was ‘the engineer of the human soul,’ and were represented by
various groups like the Constructivists, the Futurists, the artists aligned to the
Proletkult and the Left Front (LEF), Vsevolod Meyerhold in the theatre, and the
Kinok group and Eisenstein in cinema. They all broadly shared the communist
ideal and were all involved in their own revolutions against ‘bourgeois’ art. They
were convinced that the human mind could be trained to see the world in a
more socialistic way through new art forms.
The Constructivists detached themselves from the history of art, rejected easel
painting and other such artistic modes as individualistic and irrelevant to the
new society. They declared their commitment to the design and production of
practical objects which they believed could transform social life. They
subordinated the artistic element to functionality. Vladimir Tatlin, an artist of
this school, designed men’s spring coats to be light, yet able to retain heat,
although it was made out of undyed material and lacked decorative design.
The Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) movement was equally committed to the
idea of the artist fostering new forms of social life. “A new science, art,
literature, and morality is preparing a new human being with a new system of
emotions and beliefs,” wrote one of its founders, Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky, in
1918. On the extreme left wing of Proletkult, there was a strong iconoclastic
trend that reveled in the destruction of the old world. “It’s time for bullets to
pepper museums,” said Mayakovsky, the founder of LEF, who even dismissed
the classics as “old aesthetic junk.” However, one quandary presented itself to
the Proletkult. How was it possible to construct a new culture without learning
from the old? Did not the Proletariat have to first be educated in the arts and
sciences of the old civilization? If so educated, would they still remain
Proletarian? The more moderate members of the Proletkult were forced to
recognize that they could not build their new culture entirely from scratch.
Lenin had always been a conservative in artistic matters, and confessed to Klara
Zetkin, a German communist, that he could not understand or derive any
pleasure from works of modern art. His cultural politics was firmly based on the
Enlightenment ideals of the 19th century intelligentsia, and he took the view that
the Revolution’s task was to raise the working class to the level of the old elite
culture. He told Zetkin, “We must preserve the beautiful, take it as a model,
and use it as a starting point, even if it is ‘old.’ Why must we turn away from
the truly beautiful just because it is ‘old’? Why must we bow low in front of the
new, as if it were God, only because it is ‘new’?”
“For us, the most important of the arts is cinema,” Lenin is supposed to have
said. He valued film for its valuable propaganda role in a country where (in
1920) only two out of every five adults could read. The moving picture was a
vital weapon in the battle to extend the Party’s reach to the remote countryside,
where makeshift cinemas were established in requisitioned churches and village
halls. The Kinok group was formed in 1922 by the brilliant director Dziga Vertov,
his wife, the cine newsreel editor, Elizaveta Svilova, and his brother, Michael
Kaufman, a daring cameraman who had been with the Red Army in the Civil
War. All three were involved in making propaganda films for Soviet agitprop.
They took their camera to the streets to “see and show the world in the name of
the proletarian revolution,” to catch life as it ought to be. To engineer the
Soviet consciousness, they hit upon a new technique – montage. By intercutting
shots to create shocking contrasts and associations, montage aimed to
manipulate the audience’s reactions, directing them to the idea that the director
wanted them to reach. A single, neutral close-up of the actor Ivan Mozzukhin
with three different visual sequences: a bowl of steaming soup, a woman’s body
laid out in a coffin and a child at play were put forward to test the theory. The
audience saw hunger on Ivan’s face in the first sequence, grief in the second
and joy in the third, although the three shots of him were identical. With the
advent of sound, Eisenstein and Pudovkin proposed to use it ‘contrapuntally,’
contrasting sound with images as an added element of the montage. Also, the
scarcity of film compelled all the early Soviet directors to plan out scenes on
paper first (storyboarding).
The American engineer, F.W. Taylor, used ‘time and motion’ studies to divide
and automate the labour tasks of industry. Lenin was a huge fan of Taylorism.
Its premise that the worker was the least efficient part of the whole
manufacturing process accorded with his view of the Russian working class. He
saw Taylorism’s ‘scientific’ methods as a means of discipline that could remould
the worker and society along more controllable and regularized lines. Still,
perhaps the most radical exponent of the Taylorist idea was Aleksei Gastev, the
Bolshevik engineer and poet who envisaged the mechanization of virtually every
aspect of life in Soviet Russia, from methods of production to the thinking
patterns of the common man. As a proletarian poet, he conjured up the vision
of a future communist society in which man and machine merged. He was the
first to use the term ‘biomechanics’ in 1922. His aim, by his own admission, was
to turn the worker into a sort of ‘human robot,’ a word not coincidentally derived
from the Russian and Czech verb ‘to work,’ rabotat. Gastev saw bio-
mechanisation as an improvement on humanity. A ‘mechanized collectivism’
would ‘take the place of the individual personality in the psychology of the
proletariat.’ There would no longer be a need for emotions, and the human soul
would no longer be measured ‘by a shout or a smile, but by a pressure gauge or
speedometer.’ This was the Soviet paradise that Zamyatin satirized in his novel
We, which depicts a futuristic world of rationality and high technology, with
robot-like beings who are known by numbers instead of names and whose lives
are controlled in every way by the One State and its Big Brother-like ruler, the
Benefactor.
All art forms were geared to reflect and propound the communist ideals of the
Soviet state, which was firmly laying its foundations during the 1920s. The use
of the different forms, as well as the attention showered upon them by Lenin
showcases the important role that art had in helping the world’s first communist
state to survive both the pressures from the outside world, as well as those from
within the state and its citizens.
***
Therefore, as we can see, we must not be mislead by the name to only look at
the economic policies of the Soviet state during the time of the New Economic
Policy or the NEP. A detailed study of the various Political, Economic, Social and
Cultural developments of the time must be done, which then give a clear picture
of conditions, ideologies and future plans within the state. After a point,
however, the communists were unwilling to yield on the issue of how far to take
the NEP, and Lenin’s death perhaps greatly shortened the span of this policy.
Lenin perhaps meant to continue it for a while longer, and then finally abandon
it for full communism once that Soviet state was fully ready for it, but as things
stood, Stalin came to power and quickly ended the NEP. He established his own
Five Year Plans instead, which were within his interpretations of communism,
with no deviation from the Party line being allowed. Lenin was not a dictator,
and sought to persuade rather than decree, but Stalin had risen to the position
where he could decree if he felt it was necessary. Critics of Lenin saw him as a
ruthless dictator who paved the way for the even more ruthless and brutal
dictatorship of Stalin. If Lenin had lived for another twenty years, perhaps
communism would have turned out to be different through the use of Lenin’s
Policies, rather than the dictatorship of Stalin. Today, we know that Stalin
extensively helped shape the Soviet state and that his influence in changing the
system outlasted his death in 1953.

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