Russia and the USSR, 1855–1991

Autocracy and Dictatorship

Stephen J. Lee

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000092264
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

From a renowned name in A Level history publishing, this is a Questions and Analysis title on a major period in Russian History. With all three exam boards offering modules on this popular subject at A Level, this book is an absolute must-have.

Looking at the many different aspects of the period 1855–1991 that are covered in A Level history, Stephen J. Lee examines and compares:

• the ideologies of Tsarist autocracy and Soviet communism
• parties and opposition to these regimes
• the use of repression and terror
• agriculture
• industry
• the class structure
• the 1917 revolution
• the impact of the First and Second World Wars on Russia.

Key elements of this book include:

• each topic/issue forms a well-structured chapter: background; analysis; sources with questions; worked answers
• a prominent historiography section – an important element of the new A2 history assessment
• an incorporated A2 synoptic approach that teaches students to draw together their entire range of knowledge and skills to study one topic
• guidance on how to answer the recently-introduced synoptic questions.

Involving the importance of understanding the connections between the essential characteristics of historical study, this key title is the one-stop shop for all history teachers and students.

1

IDEOLOGIES AND REGIMES

ANALYSIS 1: WHAT WERE THE MAIN FEATURES OF THE IDEOLOGIES OF TSARIST AUTOCRACY AND SOVIET COMMUNISM?

During the century and a half since 1850 Russia experienced a wider range of political change than any other European state. Until 1906 the political system was based on autocracy, which survived, in theory if not in practice, until March 1917. Between October 1917 and the end of 1991 the official ideology was Marxism-Leninism, usually referred to as Communism. For a brief period, between March and October 1917, Russia experienced less extreme alternatives in the form of moderate socialism and liberal democracy. Both of these had opposed autocracy but, through their failure to achieve a permanent cooperation after its downfall, let in a system that was to dominate the twentieth century.

Tsarist autocracy

Within the context of Russia, autocracy meant the undiminished and undiluted exercise of the power of the sovereign. The Tsar was an absolute monarch in several senses. Political power came from God and its exercise owed nothing to any elected body; sovereignty was a trust, which was undivided and indivisible. On the other hand, the purpose of power was not the enhancement of the personal interest of the Tsar, since distorted autocracy was the worst form of tyranny. Instead, the Tsar carried a great burden – to uphold the social hierarchy and ensure the welfare of the people. The autocrat had the support of the Russian Orthodox Church, which established a special relationship with the Romanovs and a vital place within the political and social hierarchy.

The exercise of the autocratic power varied from Tsar to Tsar. The general pattern of Russian history was either dominance by strong rulers (such as Ivan III, Ivan the Terrible, Michael Romanov, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Alexander I) or by political vacuums and weak rulers (such as Peter II, Peter III and Paul). There was very little between the two extremes and the last three Tsars, Alexander II (1855–81), Alexander III (1881–94) and Nicholas II (1894–1914), were particularly conscious of this. They all emphasised their autocratic powers and had others, whether official mentors or strong-willed consorts, to provide constant reminders of their responsibilities.

Although Russian autocracy has not had any great political philosopher as such, there have been theorists who tried to elevate it to something more than merely the exercise of unrestrained power. The most important of these was Konstantin Pobedonostsev, a professor of civil law and, between 1880 and 1905, Procurator General of the Holy Synod. The latter post gave him control over the affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, to add to his secular powers to appoint ministers of state and to prepare imperial edicts concerning education, censorship and the protection of morals. He also had a strong personal influence as tutor and mentor to two future Tsars – Alexander III and Nicholas II. Pobedonostsev based his political thought on the supposition that man is by nature bad, lazy, vicious, selfish and ignorant. Russians he considered particularly flawed, as ‘inertness and laziness are generally characteristic of the Slavonic nature’. The vast majority of humanity is unable to reason, apart from a small proportion who were the ‘aristocracy of the intellect’.¹ The rest are influenced by three forces: the unconscious, land and history. Any attempt to understand these beyond an instinctive feeling threatens the social equilibrium and leads to the idolising of reason. In his Reflections of a Russian Statesman, he made clear his objections to all progressive trends. Among the falsest of political principles was that ‘all power issues from the people, and is based upon the national will – a principle which has unhappily become more firmly established since the time of the French Revolution’.² From this came ‘Parliamentarism’, which was ‘one of the greatest illustrations of human delusion’.³ Similarly pernicious were political parties, ‘the formation of ministries on parliamentary or party principles’, and the press – ‘one of the falsest institutions of our time’.⁴ These all combined to produce what Pobedonostsev considered the great evil of the nineteenth century – liberal democracy. Russia had to be protected from this trend by the maintenance of autocracy as the only valid form of government. To ensure this, Pobedonostsev exerted all the influence at his disposal on the last three Romanovs.

Of these, the least autocratic by inclination was Alexander II (1855–81), who sought to introduce changes to Russia’s economic and social structure; he was also prepared to make some modifications to local government. His view was very much that reform should be handed down from above – before it was seized from below. During the second half of his reign, however, he retreated into more reactionary policies, partly in response to the growth of Populist revolutionary movements. He was eventually assassinated in 1881 by People’s Will, an event that shaped the whole approach of Alexander III (1881–94) and made him particularly receptive to Pobedonostsev’s ideas and counsel. The reign saw the end of concessions and reform, and a significant increase in the use of police powers. Nicholas II (1894–1917) continued where Alexander III had left off, his inclination to autocracy under the triple influence of Pobedonostsev, his father’s memory and his wife’s determination. Nicholas articulated Pobedonostsev’s ideas and resisted demands for constitutional reform – at least until 1905.

By then, Russia had been through a recession and lost a war with Japan. The military base had been shaken, although not yet smashed. The result was an impossible compromise. A constitution was granted in 1905 that allowed for political parties and a legislature in the form of the Duma – but the Tsar was determined to reimpose the ‘autocratic power’. This time there was no Pobedonostsev to give autocracy a theoretical rationale. Instead, royal authority was irretrievably damaged by a combination of military defeat in the First World War and, in the absence of Nicholas at the front, the arbitrary use of autocratic power by Alexandra and Rasputin. The result was the alienation even of those sectors that had once supported the system – the bureaucracy and the nobility.

As both an ideology and an institution, autocracy died with the Revolution of March 1917. The Tsar was forced to abdicate and autocracy replaced by a brief experiment with liberal democracy and moderate socialism by the Provisional Government. These alternatives lasted only a few months until, in October 1917, they were replaced by the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, or Communism.

BASE, SUPERSTRUCTURE, THE DIALECTIC AND CLASS CONFLICT

Figure 1.

Soviet Communism

Marxism entered Russia during the 1880s, promoted by revolutionaries seeking an alternative to the Russian-based Populist groups. It was officially represented by the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) from 1898, although this divided into moderate and radical approaches – Menshevism and Bolshevism respectively. The latter, Marxism-Leninism or Communism, became the official ideology of Russia and the Soviet Union between 1918 and 1991. Communism has remained in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet state, but as one of a number of ideologies competing for power through a new multi-party process.

Marxism in whatever form derives ultimately from the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Despite the quantity and complexity of their writings, it is possible to identify three main constituents in their thought.

The first was a determinist conception of society and of the relationship between economic circumstances and political power. They maintained that the foundation, or base, of society was always the state of economic development reached by the ruling class. The superstructure consisted of the political, juridical and religious institutions by which the ruling class maintained its grip. Any meaningful change to these institutions could be achieved only by removing the economic base from which they sprang. This immediately invalidated the sort of piecemeal reform to the superstructure that was often proposed by regimes attempting to maintain their base intact.

The second component of Marxist theory was value and profit. The proletariat, Marx and Engels believed, were created and used by the bourgeoisie as wage labourers but were always paid far less than the real value of what they produced. The balance of the value therefore constituted profit, which was used as capital to exploit more wage labour. The proletariat, as a result, became ‘concentrated in greater masses’ and would seek to overcome their ‘misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation’.⁵

The way in which this change was expected to occur was the third main element of Marxist thought. This was the theory of class struggle, operating through a dialectical process. In their Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels argued: ‘The history of all human society, past and present, has been the history of class struggles.’ The basic pattern was dialectical: each thesis developed an antithesis and the resulting interaction produced a synthesis, which, as a new thesis, generated a further antithesis and hence revived conflict. Each economic system and class had created its own antithesis, which would inevitably interact with the thesis to form a new system. According to Engels, ‘from its origin the bourgeoisie has been saddled with its antithesis: that capitalists cannot exist without wage workers’.⁶ Thus, as the Communist Manifesto asserted: ‘What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’⁷

In order to effect this change it might well be necessary to resort to violence, since ‘force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one’. The alternative to bourgeois rule would initially be the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which would dismantle the capitalist superstructure and extend the powers of the state to cover credit, communication, education, land and the instruments of production. Eventually society and the economy would become fully collective and cooperative in the spirit of communism. This would mean that the coercive elements of the state could disappear, followed by political institutions themselves. Engels believed that: ‘The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then dies away of itself. … The state is not “abolished”, it withers away.’⁸ What would be left is the Marxist ideal – the ‘classless society’.

The actual method of bringing about the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the mid-nineteenth century was never clearly stated. Although, in the words of the Communist Manifesto, a ‘spectre haunted Europe’, it was still mainly a theoretical one. Marx and Engels assumed that the dialectical process, by which capitalism would be destroyed, would operate more rapidly in those countries that had already reached an advanced stage of capitalism than in those that were predominantly feudal. After all, the most developed countries would possess the largest and most discontented proletariats, who would be able to seize the initiative as the economic system entered its period of crisis. As Marx had predicted, Marxism developed most rapidly in Germany. What had not been foreseen was that there would be a major dispute over the interpretation of Marxist principles – between the radicals, who aimed for revolution sooner rather than later, and the moderates, who considered it necessary to work properly through the dialectic. This eventually produced in Germany a split between the revolutionary socialists (Communists, or KPD) and the evolutionary socialists (Social Democrats, or SPD). A similar pattern happened elsewhere in Europe.

While it was becoming apparent that western and central Europe would not, after all, be the centre of radical Marxism, a revolutionary impetus was growing in Russia. This was in the form of a new movement, Marxism-Leninism, or Bolshevism, the radical wing of the RSDLP formed in 1900. The split between the Bolsheviks and the more moderate Mensheviks in 1903 produced two contrasting interpretations of Marxism, of which Lenin’s ultimately proved the longer-lasting for the Russian situation. A prolific writer, Lenin’s works amount to over 20 volumes and seem to cover all the different aspects of revolutionary activity. These brought some major shifts to Marxist interpretation. Whereas Marx and Engels had looked to Germany as the most likely source of future change, Lenin believed that the first revolution could occur in a more backward country like Russia. He added the significant twist that capitalism was most immediately vulnerable at the weakest link in its chain, rather than where it was most highly developed. The war, he maintained, revealed capitalism in decline everywhere, but the process of overthrowing old regimes would actually begin in Russia.

To achieve this, the whole process of the dialectic would have to be speeded up. In his preparation for revolution in Russia, Lenin disagreed profoundly with the Mensheviks, who argued for a substantial period of parliamentary rule, which, in the long term, could be expected to evolve into a socialist system. Lenin, by contrast, argued that:

The peculiarity of the current moment in Russia consists in the transition from the first stage of the revolution, which gave power to the bourgeoisie as a result of the insufficient consciousness and organization of the proletariat, to the second stage, which should give the power into the hands of the proletariat.

Forcing the pace like this necessitated a tightly organised Party Central Committee, which c...