The Soviet Retreat From the Emancipative Ideas of 1917. By Arup Banerji

The Soviet retreat from the ideas of 1917: muffled tones of a nation of whisperers and diarists

The second decade of Soviet history, the 1930s, was volatile and consequential in ways that none of the other six were. The revolution that occurred then, explicitly designated as a revolution, and the third since February 1917, recast economy and society in ways that justify the use of adjectives like tectonic and paradigmatic. Unlike the first two revolutions, the apical character of agricultural, industrial and social change – directed by the Politburo `from above’ – rendered this revolution a semantic mystery: where was popular participation in support of the regime, as against its strength in opposition?

It was certainly dialectical. If the thesis was erecting socialism, declared done in 1936, its antithesis lay in the offensive against capitalism that formed the thrust of Stalin’s speech on the twelfth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. It was an economically premature decision because the possibilities of industrial and agricultural growth based on production plans calibrated to market trends were still immense. It was a politically disingenuous decision because the leadership around Stalin stigmatised the opposition for being gradualists - supporting the economic capitalism that NEP, itself a retreat from the dirigisme of the Civil War, embodied. 

Either way, the new directions were expansive and regressive. The foundations were set for the USSR becoming globally emancipative, but domestically restrictive; and for a mounting dissonance between economic growth and political repression to set in. This anomaly persisted until the revolution, aged seventy in the eighties, confronted economic stagnation (or retardation, for some), manifest in income cleavages, nomenklatura (bureaucratic) privilege, a restless and fettered civil society, national restiveness in the Soviet republics, and scarce consumer necessities.  The reformers around Gorbachev responded with an earnest intent to restore redress and equity but not revolution – perestroika and glasnost’. Their exertions served, ironically, to hasten the quadruple demise, those of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, the KGB and the command economy. During the Gorbachev period (1985-91), it was the NEP that evoked the most nostalgia and the third revolution that provoked the most anguish.

In 1946, the émigré sociologist Nicholas Timasheff described the Stalinist age as The Great Retreat. In a book thus titled he wanted to locate the convulsive transformations of the 1930s in the context of a regime which was socially conservative, in the sense of having retreated from many of the emancipative ideas of 1917. Life was better only for the very few. A generation was being asked to sacrifice its comfort for the benefit of its children and grandchildren. Hunger, violence and chaos were widespread. Wage differentials had been sharply widened. The lives of women deteriorated as they entered the workforce in large numbers but they had less free time and found the opportunities for political, social and economic advancement limited.

The Constitution of the USSR in 1936 had proclaimed the attainment of socialism in Article One – this had been the goal set in 1917, if not in 1898 - promising, in Article Twelve, to take `from each according to his (sic) ability (but reward) each according to the work performed.’ This attainment was red in redolence but not in the actual advent of a just and classless society. A gulf between rhetoric and reality opened and it animates impassioned polemic, historically and currently.

Rhetoric met reality in the utterly singular Soviet triumph in the Second World War. It was this victory that catalysed decolonisation and Soviet military and moral aid to revolutionary and national liberation movements, even as the inner empire in Eastern Europe was bound into submission by Comecon and the Warsaw Pact. 

This military triumph left the deepest imprint in the popular imagination, the most compelling advertisement for socialism and the socialist camp. From the moment of its inception until the Western allies opened the second front in Normandy in June 1944, the Soviet forces never faced less than 90% of Germany’s front line fighting strength on land. Soviet citizens were faced with a war of extermination: four million lives were lost to starvation, of whom three million were prisoners of war and a million were residents of besieged cities. The assault on Jews began in the USSR, in the Ukraine, in the immediate wake of the German invasion in June 1941, six months before it was declared as the Final Solution. The bulk of the damage inflicted on German forces - 80% of their battle casualties - was in the eastern campaign, and it was here that the overwhelming weight of the Wehrmacht was concentrated until 1944. The USSR then proceeded to steadfastly maintain about half a century of global challenge to American hegemony.

The collectivisation of agriculture; rapid planned industrialisation; the purges and the terror; and, social engineering related to the family, marriage and divorce, and attempts to regulate the way history was to be taught, will be the aspects of the Soviet Thirties under consideration. .As novelties, they were of deeper resonance and enduring consequence than those effected in 1917 This was so in the extinction of peasant family farms and the closure of private trade outlets – thereby ostensibly achieving a “socialised” agriculture and trade – and in the shift from an economy guided by market prices to the command economy directed by plan targets. When Timothy Snyder argued that `The Soviet Union was most lethal when the Soviet Union was not at war’, (Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, 2010, 391), he implied that it was most lethal when it was at war informally and domestically, when it was at war during a formal peace. The revolutionary character of this assault is the quintessential core of the third revolution....

In the mid - 1930s, the Soviet state adopted pro-family and pro-natal stances, outlawing abortion in 1936 (except in cases involving a very serious health or life risk), rewarding mothers of many children, stigmatising irresponsible fathers and husbands and reinforcing the authority of parents vis-a-vis the school and the Komsomol. This change seems to have primarily been a response to falling birth-rates. As part of a return to traditional family relations, marriage became ceremonially glamorous and registration offices were smartened up. Large families were promised allowances. Divorce was made both more expensive and more difficult, becoming from 1944 contingent on court proceedings leading to a sudden fall in the divorce rate. The family was strengthened under male control, and illegitimacy was stigmatised by excluding children from unregistered marriages from inheriting property. Homosexuality was branded as sodomy and criminalised.

The revolution of 1917 sealed the working careers of numerous historians. A fifth of all historians in Russia perished. By the Civil War, the Bolsheviks could boast of only one historian of real professional standing, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovskii (1868 - 1932). Besides him, the only other Marxist historian was N. A. Rozhkov, and he had been a Menshevik Minister in the Provisional Government. An extraordinarily coarse public campaign was launched against non-Marxist historiography from 1928. Purges of historians began in late 1929 and over the course of 1931 more than 100 historians were arrested, some executed and others compelled to emigrate while their work went out of circulation. By autumn 1933 the turmoil in the Soviet world of history exceeded that in any other academic field. Kirov helped to organise a purge in the Academy of Sciences in 1929. 130 Historian - Academicians were ” liquidated” during just that one year... download the essay:

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The Bolshevik Heritage. By Dilip Simeon