The Soviet Union

A Short History

Mark Edele

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119131199
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia moderna

An acclaimed historian explores the dynamic history of the twentieth century Soviet Union

In ten concise and compelling chapters, The Soviet Union covers the entire Soviet Union experience from the years 1904 to 1991 by putting the focus on three major themes: warfare, welfare, and empire. Throughout the book, Mark Edele—a noted expert on the topic—clearly demonstrates that the Soviet Union was more than simply "Russia." Instead, it was a multi-ethnic empire.

The author explains that there were many incarnations of Soviet society throughout its turbulent history, each one a representative of Soviet socialism. The text covers a wide range of topics: The end Romanov empire; The outbreak of World War I; The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917; The breakdown of the old empire and its re-constitution in the Civil War; The New Economic Policy; The rise of Stalin; The Soviet's role in World War II; Post war normalization; and Gorbachev's attempt to end the Cold War. The author also explores the challenges encountered by the successor states, their struggles with and against democracy, capitalism, authoritarianism, and war. This vital resource:

• Provides a concise overview of the history of the Soviet Union
• Includes information on the latest research that takes the broad view of the history of the Soviet Union and its place in world history
• Treats scholarly disagreements as part of the history of the influence of the Soviet Union on the course of the twentieth century
• Offers suggestion for further readings and a link to online primary sources

Written for students of twentieth century Russia, the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, and twentieth century World History, The Soviet Union: A Short History is a volume in the popular Wiley Short Histories series.

Part I
The First Age of Violence

1
Twilight of Empire (1904–1914)

For the lands that would form the Soviet Union, the twentieth century began in Asia. It began during the night of January, 26/27 (February, 8/9) 1904 when a group of Japanese torpedo boats attacked the Russian Pacific Fleet at Port Arthur (Lüshun). Russia had effectively annexed this Chinese warm‐water port in the late nineteenth century, to the chagrin of an increasingly self‐confident Japan that was also intent on expansion in China. Negotiations between the two imperialists had led nowhere. Now weapons did the talking.

In Petersburg, which had been the capital of the Russian Empire since Peter the Great (1672–1725) had built this city in the northern swamps, the reaction was mixed. Tsar Nicholas II (1868–1918) was taken aback, as no prior declaration of war had been received. Nevertheless, he was confident of victory against these Japanese “baboons.” Others looked forward to what surely would be a “victorious, little war” distracting the Tsar’s subjects from their many grievances.¹

The Late Tsarist Regime

Indeed, the Tsarist regime needed all the help it could get. In the nineteenth century, a once highly successful formula for expansion had turned from a motor of imperial growth to a brake on the further development of Russia’s power. The historical core of Russia, the Principality of Moscow, had not been a particularly well‐resourced or strategically well‐located place during its establishment in the late thirteenth century. It was surrounded by stronger competitors who threatened its independence. Its climate was harsh and its human resources scarce. And yet, this rural backwater rose from an insignificant trading outpost deep in the Eurasian woods to become the largest state in the world and one of the great powers of Europe. At the height of its might in the early nineteenth century, it would play a pivotal role in defeating Napoleon’s armies and redefine Europe in the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815.

It could do so, because its rulers – first the Rurikids, then the Romanovs – had mobilized the population into service classes harnessed to an increasingly strong state headed by an autocratic ruler. The service classes came in the form of legally defined estates (soslovie, pl.: sosloviia) on the one hand, and positions in a “table of ranks” on the other. The soslovie group defined a person’s relationship to the state: Peasants tilled the land, served the landlord, and paid taxes. Some of them would be forced to serve in the autocrat’s armies and die in never‐ending wars. Townspeople were engaged in trade or artisanal work in the towns, servicing the state’s servants in the urban military and administrative centers. They also paid taxes. The term dvoriane is sometimes translated as “nobles” or “gentry,” but this group had fewer rights and less freedom than their peers in Europe. They did not pay taxes, relied on the exploitation of the peasantry for their livelihoods, and staffed the empire’s bureaucracy and officer corps. Their internal hierarchy was legislated in the table of ranks, which defined a parallel structure for army and civil service. The highest ranks led to hereditary nobility, which served as a conduit for ambitious and talented commoners to enter state service at the highest levels. The role of the clergy, finally, was to pray, and also to serve as the Tsars’ ideologists manning the state church. The economic base of this warfare state was serfdom: peasants were bound to the land to support the service elite that ran the administration and the army. This peculiar form of resource mobilization for war and imperial expansion was invented by Ivan III (1440–1505) and perfected by Peter the Great (who introduced the table of ranks in 1722). It served the Romanovs well who ran this state since 1613 and grew it into the largest continuous land empire in the world.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, this once‐successful formula ran into trouble. Russia now faced competitors who had combined the exploitation of overseas empires with the new might of the dual revolutions that rocked Europe: The French Revolution provided a new model of military mobilization of entire nations, while the industrial revolution, emanating from England, added higher quantities of more lethal weaponry that could be transported more quickly over longer distances by the railways. An agricultural empire based on the exploitation of peasant serfs could not compete with these new, industrialized empires. This fact was driven home in the Crimean War (1853–1856). Only decades after its brilliant victory over Napoleon in 1812, Russia was defeated comprehensively by a coalition of France, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire.

The defeat jolted Alexander II (1818–1881) into action. The Great Reforms of the second half of the nineteenth century were meant to modernize Russia to keep it competitive in this new world of industry and mass politics. These reforms saw the end of serfdom in 1861, an introduction of local self‐government (zemstvo, 1864; town dumas 1870), judicial reform (1864), and universal military service (1874). Under the next two tsars, Alexander III (1845–1894) and Nicholas II (1868–1918), fast‐paced industrialization fundamentally altered the urban landscape from the 1890s onwards. Cities were growing creating over‐crowded working‐class districts adjacent to new factories billowing smoke. Literacy was on the rise and a growing number of cheap publications catered to this new, lower‐class reading public.

Meanwhile, the Russian monarchy was reluctant fully to enter this new age of industrial capitalism and mass society. The tsars continued to insist on the principle of uninhibited personal power that was above the law and beyond the functioning of a routinized bureaucracy. A maze of laws remained on the books, many no longer reflecting the needs of the economy and the growing urban society. They had to be circumvented constantly by imperial decree. This situation enhanced the authority of the tsar, who could make these exceptions, but it also put an incredible amount of negative power into the hands of civil servants at all levels who could refuse to forward an issue to the next level. Only requests that reached the ministers, who reported directly to the tsar, had a chance of being heard unless, that is, direct connections in the court itself could be mobilized. Administrative arbitrariness thus combined with unpredictability; bureaucratic inefficiency combined with corruption. The fact that every minister reported separately, and without consultation with his colleagues, to the sovereign encouraged competition between them, enabled the perpetuation of contradictory policies, and promoted back‐stabbing and intrigue. The political system was also top‐heavy and much of the country was under‐governed by the comparative standards of the time. Strikingly for a country known as a police state, there were fewer police per population than in the Great Britain or France. Russia was big, as the saying went, and the tsar far away.

Indeed, the empire was huge. The Tsars’ domains stretched from the Baltic and the Arctic Sea in the north to the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Caspian in the South, from the Bering and Okhotsk seas in the east to central Europe in the west. Its 8.7 million square miles covered parts of Europe and Asia, altogether nearly one‐sixth of the globe and more than 128 million inhabitants (125.6 million in its first census of 1897 plus 2.6 million in Finland), making it the third most populous country in the world (after China and India). And it included much more than just “Russian,”, or even eastern Slav areas. From the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century the Tsarist empire had gobbled up Poland, acquired Finland from Sweden and Bessarabia from the Ottoman Empire, subdued the Caucasus and Trans‐Caucasus, won Central Asia in the “Great Game” with Great Britain, and expanded into what used to be Chinese possessions in the far east. By 1904, it bordered Norway and Sweden in the north, in the west Germany and Austria‐Hungary, in the south the Ottoman Empire, Persia, Afghanistan and China, and in the south‐east it even had a small border with Korea. Japan was only a short stretch of water away from Russian Sakhalin. This was an enormous empire in which large distances and ever poor communications added to the problems of the political system.

To make things worse, the man, who since November 1894 ruled over this complex inefficiency, was not up to the task. With Nicholas II, the empire was stuck with a pathetic autocrat ruling within an archaic political system that he was unable and unwilling to adjust to the realities of industrial war and the emerging mass society. The last Tsar was a textbook example of the dangers of dynastic and autocratic rule. Mild mannered, soft spoken, and slim, he could never live up to the example of his loud, large, and self‐confident late father, Alexander III, against whom he constantly measured himself. In a meritocratic political system he would have never been put in charge. He would not have volunteered for a role he did not desire and nobody would have chosen a man for the top job who seemed to change his opinions the moment one advisor left and another one walked through the door. A strong sense of duty, however, kept him from the only reasonable course of action: to resign and go hunting, letting someone else handle the affairs of state. Even a better man, however, would have had his work cut out. What transpired after January 26, 1904, was not a “successful little war” of a European great power against some inferior Asiatics, as had been the hope of the Tsar’s more arrogant (and more racist) servants. Instead what Russia faced was a dress rehearsal for modern war leading to revolution.

The Russo‐Japanese War (1904–1905)

The fighting was terrible and in the course of the conflict some 400,000 of the Tsar’s subjects lost their lives. The Russian armed forces suffered defeat after defeat: Port Arthur fell in December 1904; the battle of Mukden was lost in February and March 1905; the Baltic Fleet, which had hurried around the world to relieve its Pacific sister, was annihilated in May. The empire was beaten at sea, but also on land. Both sides sent their soldiers into suicidal frontal attacks on entrenched positions defended by barbed wire enclosures and machine guns.

Contemporary descriptions of such battles are reminiscent of the killing fields at World War I’s Western Front, where German, French, British, and US troops would confront the terror of the modern battlefield. This similarity is significant. While older histories have seen the 1914 to 1918 war as the birth pangs of the twentieth century, more recently the 1904 to 1905 war has received more attention. As the history of the twentieth century becomes less and less Eurocentric, historians have started to understand the Russo‐Japanese war as the first major conflict of this terrible epoch: “World War Zero,” as one pithy formulation has it. In this foundational carnage, the Russian army faced defeat despite numerical superiority (as it would later, in World War). Incompetently led, poorly equipped, and suffering from the logistical problems of long lines of communication, the Tsar’s army bled and bled.²

The unbelievable carnage of this war; the humiliation of being beaten by an Asian foe, who, somewhat annoyingly, accepted all extant rules of war making (proving that there was nothing European about “civilized warfare”); and the clearly inept political and military leadership of this catastrophe all stirred opposition in Russian society. Critics of autocracy had multiplied since the middle of the nineteenth century; they were joined by others unhappy about their living conditions, their working lives, their access to land, or the sta...