Tsarist and Communist Russia

9 Key excerpts on "Tsarist and Communist Russia"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Russia and the USSR, 1855–1991

  Autocracy and Dictatorship

  • Stephen J. Lee(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  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.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Economic Policy Making And Business Culture: Why Is Russia So Different?

  Why is Russia so Different?

  • David A Dyker(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • ICP

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 COMMUNISM The Revolution While Marxist revolutionary organisations, notably the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the Russian Social-Democratic Party, were active and important in Russia from the early 1900s onwards, they never commanded wide support in what was still a predominantly peasant country. But the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, did enjoy substantial support among the factory workers of St. Petersburg and Moscow, many of whom worked in giant plants created in Russia’s first wave of industrialisation in the period 1890–1914, thus being easy to organise from a political point of view. The first revolution of 1917, the February Revolution, was essentially a recognition that the Tsarist administration had simply collapsed under the pressure of repeated defeats by Germany in World War I. There was little violence, and a liberal provisional gov-ernment dominated by the Cadet Party was soon installed. Simultaneously, however, a ‘Council ( soviet ) of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’ was set up in Petrograd, as St. Petersburg had been patriotically renamed on the outbreak of war. The Petrograd Soviet was dominated by left-wing intellectuals rather than workers and deputies, and right from the start it contested the right of the government to govern without reference to itself. The resultant 41 42 Economic Policy-Making and Business Culture system of ‘dual power’ was a recipe for weak administration. The government was particularly feeble in relation to two key issues. Russia had already been effectively defeated by Germany, but the provisional government wanted to stay in the war to show solidarity with the democratic powers of the West. And in the countryside the peasants had started to take the law into their own hands, grabbing landowner land and sometimes killing the landowners. While recog-nising the need for land reform, the government took the view that such a reform could not be promulgated until there had been a Constituent Assembly.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Destruction of the Soviet Union

  A Study in Globalization

  • D. Lockwood(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The Tsarist autocracy, beholden to the landowners and the state bureau- cracy, had proved incapable of modernizing agriculture, unwilling to allow the development of the bourgeoisie, and determined not to reform itself. Tsarism – together with the economic structure which it held in place – was the most important fetter on the development of Russia’s productive forces. Russia, then, stood at the beginning of the twentieth century with a level of economic development and a political system which both made possible and necessary a revolution that would create the polit- ical conditions to facilitate the development of capitalism. 24 Until 1917, this was the ABC for Russian Marxists. Lenin pointed out in 1900: The entire history of Russian socialism has led to the condition in which the most urgent task is the struggle against the autocratic government and the achievement of political liberty. 25 At the 1903 Congress of the Russian Social Democrats (where the Bolshevik/Menshevik split took place), the capitalist (or as they put it ‘bourgeois’) nature of the revolution to come was so taken for granted that it was not raised for discussion. 26 In the Party Programme, adopted in that year and not changed until 1919, the Party declared ‘as its immediate political task the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy and its replacement by a democratic republic’. 27 Not even the events of 1905, and the huge working-class movement that arose in that year, could divert the Russian Marxists from the tasks which the level of Russian economic development decreed. The Menshevik leader, Martov, explained: Only a truly revolutionary program can bring unity and order to the process of awakening these elemental forces. And this program, which can only be a program of comprehensive, well-rounded and 60 The Destruction of the Soviet Union consistent development of the bourgeois revolution, will be supplied by the socialist proletariat ...

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Russia and the World

  New State-of-Play on the International Stage

  • L. Cooper(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Those rather modest aims were necessary in view of Rus- sia's backwardness and the fact that a bourgeois revolution had not yet taken place {Komunisticheskaya partia, 1953, p. 324), Even as late as April 1917 the Bolsheviks contemplated a relatively long period of socialisation because '. .. the Russian proletariat acting in one of the most backward countries of Europe, among a mass of small-peasantry, cannot aim for the immediate realisation of socialist transformation' (ibid., p. 351). Another reason was the uncertainty about the degree of support the Bolsheviks could ex- pect. They thought that '. .. it is necessary to proceed with utmost care in order to convince the overwhelming majority of the popu- lation of the correctness of the policy' (ibid., p. 352). On the level of the Party, the question of organisational struc- ture presented fewer difficulties because of a revolutionary tradi- tion, and thanks to Lenin who, already before the Revolution, formulated a blue-print of the party organisation as a vanguard of the proletariat (Lenin, passim.). He also introduced the principle of democratic centralism which, in the long run, contributed to the 10 Russia and the World domination of the Party over the state apparatus and secured the self-perpetuation of its leading role by virtually eliminating the possibility of the emergence of an effective opposition. From an historical perspective it can be seen that power, that is absolute power, is rooted in Russian psychology. Historically and traditionally, the Russians have always required authority and the power of the state had always been approved by the population. The tsar was accepted as the divine ruler not on account of his special abilities, but of the power he represented. The sources of Soviet totalitarianism lie in Russian history. A major feature of the pre-revolutionary political culture, was the Byzantine-Russian absolutist heritage, some elements of which could be observed all along Russia's history.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Managing Firms and Families

  Work and Values in a Russian City

  • Daria Tereshina(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • LIT Verlag

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 The Political Economy of Russia: Historical Overview Early Capitalist Developments in Tsarist Russia On the eve of the First World War, Russia was primarily an agrarian peasant country. Agriculture was responsible for over half the national income and three-quarters of all employment. Over 90 percent of the sown area was cultivated by some 20 million peasant households, the remainder consisting of landowners’ estates (Davies 1998: 10). The distribution of property was under the control of the tsar and nobility. The peasants received a small amount of land after their emancipation in 1861, but they did not own land individually. The land was collective property, administered and distributed by the peasant commune (mir, obshchina) according to the strip method. The peasant commune was a self-governing territorial community and the main legal owner of the land held by its households. It granted its households strips of arable land (nadel), which were regularly redistributed according to egalitarian principles. The communal system of land redivision remained the dominant form of land use in tsarist Russia. The commune assured some collective security and welfare, such as caring for orphans and the aged, and it also served the state in its capacity as an administrative device for tax collection and local policing (Shanin 1985). Peasant emancipation in 1861 paved the way for the rapid development of Russian capitalism. An economic boom in the 1880s was driven by an extensive programme of state-supported railway construction, harshly protectionist state policies and increases in exports of Russia’s grain (Gatrell 1982; Shanin 1985; Davies 1998; Gregory 2014). At the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of economic structures co-existed in Russia: foreign-owned oligopolies in big industries, freely competing firms producing consumer goods, landowners’ estates, small-scale artisan units and individual peasant micro-economies.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Society and History

  Essays in Honor of Karl August Wittfogel

  • G. L. Ulman(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  This specific description of the revolutionary transformation of the Russian state and society from feudalism through a brief bourgeois-capitalist interlude to Socialism parallels the general pattern of societal development posited by the Marxists as a uni-versal process, observable in Western Europe and applicable to all societies in the rest of the world. The general assertion has been advanced in the formulations of historical materialism since the 1930's that mankind as a whole has passed through four formations, primitive-communal, slaveholding, feudal, and capitalist and is, since 1917, in the process of transition to communism, the first phase of which is called socialism. These same formulations specifically describe the Russian revolutionary experience to be a part of that process. 312 However, both as a general theory of societal development and as a specific description of Russian social transformation since the nineteenth century, this scheme has been unambiguously propounded as a universal law only since the 1930's. Previously there had been considerable doubt among Marxists, includ-ing Marx himself, about the unilinear character of societal development, and there had been considerable certainty, among Marx and some of his Western disciples, but especially among the Russian Marxists, that Russian social conditions and revolutionary prospects did not parallel those of Western European societies. This has created the problem of reconciling the formal statements of Marxism-Leninism and Soviet thought regarding historical development and Russia's place in it with the much fuller statements of Marx and the early Russian Marxists on that question. Whether or not early or later Marxist and Soviet descriptions of the historical process reflect reality, we must know what these descriptions are or were.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Rethinking Soviet Communism

  • Peter Shearman(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  As Trotsky pointed out, Russia at the turn of the twentieth century comprised all stages of human development (Trotsky, 1922). Russian industry utilized the most sophisticated and tech-nologically advanced machinery in the world, more concentrated than anywhere in Europe. Russia was the world’s largest country and had the world’s fifth largest economy. However, Russian agriculture was backward, and Russia was largely a peasant society. Russia had advanced forms of capi-talist production, yet the bulk of the population was made up of illiterate peasants working on the land, most of whom were practically destitute. With no legal institutions through which any of these aggrieved groups could seek to have their interests considered, unconstitutional action was the only means at their disposal. However, there was one important development dur-ing the course of 1905 that provided the Russian people with a forum to articulate their political goals: the establishment of the St. Petersburg Soviet. Soviets were created not by communist rev-olutionaries, but by striking workers as vehicles through which The Rise and Demise of Soviet Communism 33 to make demands on their employers. The first such Soviet was actually founded in a textile factory in Nizhny Novgorod, but it was the Soviet in the Empire’s capital that became important as the main coordinating body for the workers’ strikes. Trotsky (then a Menshevik) took on the leadership of the St. Petersburg Soviet, and later, when he joined forces with Lenin, the rallying cry in October 1917 was ‘All Power to the Soviets’. The Bolsheviks rec-ognized the power and potential of organized labour taking the lead through the Soviets, whilst also coming better to appreciate the revolutionary potential of the peasants. It was in the late 1890s when small numbers of Russian Marxists formed the RSDLP, with Lenin becoming one its lead-ing figures.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Voice of the People

  • C. J. Storella, C. J. Storella, A.K. Sokolov(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  The February Revolution, fueled by the world war’s endless bloodletting and the hardships it imposed on the home front, released all the social and CHAPTER 1 Revolution and War Communism Forward flies our locomotive. The Commune is the only stop. We have no other objective, Our rifles firmly in our grasp. — Our Locomotive, a civil war song 28 Revolution and War Communism political resentments that had built up in the years since the “first” Rus-sian revolution in 1905 and in a week’s time succeeded in bringing down the 304-year-old Romanov dynasty. In the revolution’s wake, bourgeois, proletarian, and peasant Russia united briefly, drawn together by the euphoria that had attended the tsar’s abdication. In the capital and revolutionary center, Petrograd, with the consent of workers’ and soldiers’ councils, or soviets, a Provisional Government consisting primar-ily of liberal members of Russia’s parliament assumed state power. For a moment, the liberal dream of a supra-class solution to Russia’s prob-lems seemed at hand. Quickly, however, the fissures that crisscrossed the empire’s social structure ruptured. Unfulfilled peasant demands for land, the continued casualties and sacrifices demanded by the Russian war ef-fort, fears of a counterrevolution, and food and supply shortages in the cities—especially in “Red” Petrograd—reignited class animosities. By the fall, the lower classes, no longer trusting the “bourgeois” and moderate- socialist ministers at the head of the Provisional Government to safeguard the revolution, looked to the soviets as the only legitimate and democratic revolutionary authority. 2 Among the important political parties in the Petrograd soviet, only the Bolsheviks—an audacious faction of Marxist militants committed to worldwide socialist revolution—viewed the deteriorating situation as an opportunity.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Accidental Occidental

  Economics and Culture of Transition in Mitteleuropa, the Baltic and the Balkan Area

  • Lajos Bokros(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Central European University Press

    (Publisher)

  Communism as an Economic and Societal System in the Twentieth Century 27 several outstanding figures of revolutionary culture, like that of Yesenin in 1925 and Mayakovsky in 1930. That year was really a turning point in many respects. It witnessed the formal abolition of all what had so far remained of private printing. Voronsky, the literary theorist, Deborin, the philosopher, and many others were forced to recant and repent publicly. Their followers were also expelled from official life. All aesthetic and artistic ferment, which was so characteristic to the twenties, died out be-tween 1930 and 1932. Finally, this was the time when the state was restored and rebuilt in practice not only to an extent previously unknown and unprecedented as a totalitarian creature without limits, but also as a sacrosanct and heretofore fundamental pillar of communist ideology . Earlier references made by Lenin and others to the disappearance of the state were ignored, put into brackets or left out to dry. Within the state and the party or parallel with it, a monster was cre-ated: the secret police and the system of forced labor camps . After the assassination of Kirov, a potential rival to Stalin, on December 1, 1934, state orchestrated terror and repression engulfed the whole society. 40 And then the moment of grace arrived. World War II was an immense tragedy to the peoples of the Soviet Union. But it was a blessing for the Stalinist system . Without the Great Patriotic War, as the German– Russian conflict came to be known in Soviet parlance, Soviet Commu-nism may not have survived for so long and, definitely, could not have extended its rule to a still larger part of the globe. new purges of the thirties, and fanatical proletarian advocates of Revolutionary egalitarianism were denounced as ‘levelers’ and left deviationists.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book