Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin was General Secretary of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee. Stalin's
increasing control of the Party from 1928 onwards led to him becoming the de
facto party leader and the dictator of his country; a position which
enabled him to take full control of the Soviet Union and its people.
Under Stalin's leadership, the Soviet Union played a decisive role in the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War (1941-45) and went on to achieve the status of superpower. His crash programs of industrialization and collectivization in the 1930's, World War II casualties, along with his ongoing campaigns of political repression, are estimated to have cost the lives of 5 to 20 million people.
Introduction
Born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili,
he called himself Joseph Stalin, which meant "Man of Steel".
Stalin became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1922.
Following the death of Vladimir Lenin, he prevailed in a power struggle
over Leon Trotsky, who was expelled from the Communist Party and
deported from the Soviet Union.
In the 1930s Stalin initiated a Purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, which has become known as the Great Purge, an unprecedented
campaign of political repression, persecution and executions that reached its
peak in 1937.
Stalin's rule had long-lasting effects on
the features that characterized the Soviet state from the era of his rule to
its collapse in 1991. Stalin claimed his policies were based on Marxism-Leninism.
Now his political and economic system is referred to as Stalinism.
Stalin instituted his Five-Year Plans
in 1928 and collective farming at roughly the same time. The Soviet
Union was transformed from a predominantly peasant society to a major world
industrial power by the end of the 1930s.
Confiscations of grain and other food by
the Soviet authorities under his orders contributed to a famine between 1932
and 1934, especially in the key agricultural regions of the Soviet Union,
Ukraine, Kazakhstan and North Caucasus that resulted in millions of deaths.
Many peasants resisted collectivization and grain confiscations, but were
repressed, most notably well-off peasants deemed kulaks.
Bearing the brunt of the Nazis' attacks
(around 75% of Hitler’s forces), the Soviet Union under Stalin helped to the
defeat of Nazi Germany during World War II (known in the USSR as the Great
Patriotic War). After the
war, Stalin established the USSR as one of the two major superpowers in
the world, a position it maintained for nearly four decades following his death
in 1953.
Stalin's rule, reinforced by a cult of
personality, fought real and alleged opponents mainly through the security
apparatus, such as the NKVD. Millions of people were killed through
famines, executions, deportations, and in the Gulag. Nikita Khrushchev,
Stalin's eventual successor, denounced Stalin's rule and the cult of
personality in 1956, initiating the process of "de-Stalinization".
Stalin adhered to Vladimir Lenin's
doctrine of a strong centralist party of professional revolutionaries. In the
period after the Revolution of 1905, Stalin led "fighting squads"
in bank robberies to raise funds for the Bolshevik Party. His practical
experience made him useful to the party, and gained him a place on its Central
Committee in January 1912.
Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Mikhail Kalinin meeting in 1919 . All three of them were "Old Bolsheviks"; members of the Bolshevik party before the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Rise to power
In 1913 Stalin was co-opted to the
Bolshevik Central Committee. In 1917 Stalin was editor of Pravda,
the official Communist newspaper, while Lenin and much of the Bolshevik
leadership were in exile. Following the February Revolution, Stalin and
the editorial board took a position in favor of supporting Kerensky's
provisional government and, it is alleged, went to the extent of declining to
publish Lenin's articles arguing for the provisional government to be
overthrown.
According to many accounts, Stalin only
played a minor role in the revolution of November 7. The following summary of Trotsky's
Role in 1917 was given by Stalin in Pravda, November 6 1918:
|
“ |
All practical work in connection with the organisation
of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky,
the President of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that
the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the
rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient
manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was
organised. |
” |
Note: Although this passage was quoted in Stalin's book The
October Revolution issued in 1934, it was expunged in Stalin's Works
released in 1949.
Stalin gained considerable political
power because of his popularity within the Bolshevik party. This took
the dying Lenin by surprise, and in his last writings he famously called for
the removal of Stalin. After Lenin's death, Stalin abandoned the traditional
Bolshevik emphasis on international revolution in favor of a policy of building
"Socialism in One Country", in contrast to Trotsky's theory of
Permanent Revolution.
In the struggle for leadership one thing
was evident: whoever ended up ruling the party had to be considered very loyal
to Lenin. Stalin organized Lenin's funeral and made a speech professing undying
loyalty to Lenin, in almost religious terms. He undermined Trotsky, who
was sick at the time, possibly by misleading him about the date of the funeral.
Thus although Trotsky was Lenin’s associate throughout the early days of the
Soviet regime, he lost ground to Stalin. Stalin made great play of the fact
that Trotsky had joined the Bolsheviks just before the revolution, and
publicized Trotsky's pre-revolutionary disagreements with Lenin. Another event
that helped Stalin's rise was the fact that Trotsky came out against
publication of Lenin's Testament in which he pointed out the strengths and
weaknesses of Stalin and Trotsky and the other main players, and suggested that
he be succeeded by a small group of people.
An important feature of Stalin’s rise to
power is the way that he manipulated his opponents and played them off against
each other. Stalin formed a "troika" of himself,
Zinoviev, and Kamenev against Trotsky. When Trotsky had been eliminated, Stalin
then joined Bukharin and Rykov against Zinoviev and Kamenev.
Stalin gained popular appeal from his
presentation as a 'man of the people' from the poorer classes. The Russian
people were tired from the world war and the civil war, and Stalin's policy of
concentrating in building "Socialism in One Country" was seen
as an optimistic antidote to war.
Stalin took great advantage of the ban on
factionalism which meant that no group could openly go against the policies of
the leader of the party because that meant creation of an opposition. However, Stalin
did not achieve absolute power until the Great Purge of 1936–38.
Stalin and changes in
Soviet society
A. Industrialization
Industrialization or the Industrial
Revolution is a process of social and economic change whereby a human
society is transformed from a pre-industrial (an economy where the amount of capital
accumulated per capita is low) to an industrial state. It is a part of wider
modernisation process
The Russian Civil War and wartime
communism had a devastating effect on the country's economy. Industrial
output in 1922 was 13% of that in 1914. A recovery followed under the New
Economic Policy, which allowed a degree of market flexibility within the
context of socialism. Under Stalin's direction, this was replaced by a system
of centrally ordained "Five-Year Plans" in the late 1920s.
These called for a highly ambitious program of state-guided crash
industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture. Stalin's
government paid for industrialization in the “Five Year Plans” by not
allowing Soviet citizens to spend money, and by stealing wealth from the kulaks.
As a result of Stalin’s Plans, worker's wages dropped to one-tenth of what they
had been before. There was also use of the unpaid labor of both common
and political prisoners in labor camps and the frequent "mobilization"
of communists and Komsomol members for various construction projects. In
spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first two Five-Year Plans achieved
rapid industrialization from a very low economic base. Some suggest that
the Five-Year Plan substantially helped to modernize the previously
backward Soviet economy. New products were developed, and the scale and
efficiency with which existing products were made also greatly increased.
B. Collectivization
Stalin's regime moved to force collectivization
of agriculture. This was intended to increase agricultural output
from large-scale mechanized farms, to bring the peasantry under more direct
political control, and to make tax collection more efficient. Collectivization
meant drastic social changes; people lost control of their land and its
produce. Collectivization also meant a drastic drop in living standards
for many peasants, and it faced violent reaction among the peasantry.
In the first years of collectivization,
agricultural production actually dropped. Stalin blamed
this unanticipated failure on kulaks (rich peasants), who resisted
collectivization. Therefore those defined as "kulaks,"
"kulak helpers," and later "ex-kulaks" were to be shot,
placed into Gulag labor camps, or deported to remote areas of the country,
depending on the charge.
There were massive famines because of
Stalin’s collectivization plans. These famines, some argue, were not
the result of crop failures; rather, it was the excessive demands of the state,
ruthlessly enforced, that cost the lives of as many as five million Ukrainian
peasants. Stalin refused to release large grain reserves that could have
alleviated the famine (and at the same time exporting grain abroad); he was
convinced that the Ukrainian peasants had hidden grain away, and strictly
enforced draconian new collective-farm theft laws in response. The death
toll from famine in the Soviet Union at this time is estimated at between five
and ten million people. The worst crop failure of late tsarist Russia (prior to
Communism) in 1892, caused 375,000 to 400,000 deaths.
The Ukrainian famine (1932-1933),
or Holodomor, was one of the largest national catastrophes with direct
loss of human life in the range of millions (estimates vary).
A child left to starve by Stalin's man made famine
1932-1933.
The Soviet government intended to
eradicate Ukrainian identity, culture, language, and people. Although the
famine affected other regions of the U.S.S.R., its main goal was the
elimination of the Ukrainian nation. Most modern scholars agree that the
famine was caused by the policies of the government of the Soviet Union under
Stalin, rather than by natural reasons, and Holodomor is sometimes referred to
as the Ukrainian Genocide.
Purges and deportations
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Stalin, as head of the Politburo, took
near-absolute power in the 1930s with a Great Purge of the party, which he
said was needed as an attempt to expel 'opportunists' and
'counter-revolutionary infiltrators'. Those targeted by the purge were often
expelled from the party; however, more severe measures ranged from banishment
to the Gulag labor camps, to execution. Stalin killed,
starved, or worked to death anyone who he percieved to be an enemy or an
opponent. No segment of society was left untouched during the purges. Anyone
accused of "anti-Soviet activities" could be killed or banished to
the Gulag. People would inform on others arbitrarily, to attempt to redeem
themselves, or to gain small retributions. The flimsiest pretexts were often
enough to brand someone an "Enemy of the People," starting the cycle
of public persecution and abuse, often proceeding to interrogation, torture and
deportation, if not death. Millions of people were literally arrested and
killed for nothing.
Shortly before, during and immediately
after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge
scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. It is
estimated that between 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3 million were deported to
Siberia and the Central Asian republics. Separatism, resistance to Soviet
rule and collaboration with the invading Germans were cited as the official
reasons for the deportations, rightly or wrongly. Historian Allan Bullock
explains:
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“ |
Many no doubt had collaborated with the
occupying forces... but many had done so not out of disloyalty but from the
instinct to survive when abandoned to their fate by the retreating Soviet
armies. The individual circumstances were of no interest to Stalin... After
the brief Nazi occupation of the Caucasus was over... the entire population
of five of the small highland peoples of the North Caucasus, as well as the
Crimean Tatars - more than a million souls - (were deported) without notice
or any opportunity to take their possessions. There were certainly
collaborators among these peoples, but most of those had fled with the
Germans. The majority of those left were old folk, women, and children; their
men were away fighting at the front, where the Chechens and Ingushes alone
produced thirty-six Heroes of the Soviet Union. |
” |
During Stalin's rule, all sorts of ethnic groups were deported completely or
partially. Large numbers of Kulaks, regardless of their nationality,
were resettled to Siberia and Central Asia. Deportations took place in
appalling conditions, often by cattle truck, and hundreds of thousands of
deportees died en route. Those who survived were forced to work without
pay in the labour camps. Many of the deportees died of hunger or other
conditions.
Number of victims
Early researchers of the number of people
murdered by Stalin's regime placed the figure between 3 million and 60 million people.
But with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, “evidence” from the
Soviet archives finally became available. The government archives record that
about 800,000 prisoners were executed (for either political or criminal
offences) under Stalin, while another 1.7 million died of privation or other
causes in the Gulags and some 389,000 perished during kulak resettlement - a
total of about 3 million victims. However, many historians do not believe
these numbers, since the Soviets constantly lied about, distorted, and changed
official records and statistics to suit their own purposes. Thus, while
some archival researchers have posited the number of victims of Stalin's
repressions to be no more than about 4 million in total, others believe the
number to be considerably higher. Regardless, it appears that a minimum of
around 10 million surplus deaths (4 million by repression and 6 million from
famine) are attributable to the regime, with a number of recent books
suggesting a probable figure of somewhere between 15 to 20 million. Adding 6-8
million famine victims would yield a figure of between 15 and 17 million
victims. Others, however, continue to maintain that their earlier much higher
estimates are correct.
Religion
A caricature of "Stalin a great friend of religion", when churches were allowed to be opened during World War II.
Stalin's role in the fortunes of the Russian
Orthodox Church is complex. Continuous persecution in the 1930s
resulted in its near-extinction. Over 100,000 priests, nuns, and monks were
shot during the purges of 1937-38. During World War II, however, the Church
was allowed a revival as a patriotic organization.
World War II
Molotov and Stalin.
After the failure of Soviet and Franco-British
talks on a mutual defense pact in Moscow, Stalin began to negotiate a non-aggression
pact with Hitler's Nazi Germany. This pact was called the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact. Stalin thought that the Second World War would be the best
opportunity to weaken both the Western nations and Nazi Germany, and to make
Germany suitable for "Sovietization".
Stalin (in background to the right) looks on as Molotov
signs the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Officially the Pact meant that the Soviets and the
Germans had promised not to attack each other. However, the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact had a "secret" annex according to which Central Europe would be
conquered and divided between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Stalin
and Hitler both attacked and conquered various countries according to the terms
of this pact.
In June 1941, Hitler broke the pact and
invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. Although
expecting war with Germany, Stalin may not have expected an invasion to come so
soon — and the Soviet Union was relatively unprepared for this invasion.
Even though Stalin received intelligence warnings of a German attack, he sought to avoid any obvious defensive preparation which might further provoke the Germans, in the hope of buying time to modernize and strengthen his military forces. In the initial hours after the German attack commenced, Stalin hesitated, wanting to ensure that the German attack was sanctioned by Hitler, rather than the unauthorized action of a rogue general.
The Germans initially made huge advances,
capturing and killing millions of Soviet troops. The Soviet Red Army
put up fierce resistance during the war's early stages, but they were plagued
by an ineffective defense doctrine against the better-equipped, well-trained
and experienced German forces. Stalin feared that Hitler would use
disgruntled Soviet citizens to fight his regime, particularly people imprisoned
in the Gulags. He thus ordered the NKVD to take care of the situation. They
responded by executing hundreds of thousands (perhaps more) of prisoners
throughout the western parts of the Soviet Union. Many others were simply
deported east.
Hitler's experts had expected eight weeks
of war, and early indications appeared to support their predictions. However,
the invading German forces were eventually driven back in December 1941 near
Moscow.
The Big Three: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference.
Stalin met in several conferences with Churchill and/or Roosevelt in
Moscow, Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam to plan military strategy. His shortcomings
as strategist are frequently noted regarding massive Soviet loss of life and
early Soviet defeats. An example of it is the summer offensive of 1942, which
led to even more losses by the Red Army and recapture of initiative by the
Germans. Stalin eventually recognized his lack of know-how and relied on his
professional generals to conduct the war.
Under Stalin, any Soviet military
commander who allowed retreat without permission from above was subject to
military tribunal. The Soviet soldiers who surrendered were declared traitors;
however most of those who survived the brutality of German captivity were
mobilized again as they were freed. Between 5% and 10% of them were sent to
gulags.
Time magazine (1943-01-04). Time had previously named Stalin
Man of the Year for the year 1939.
In the war's opening stages, the retreating Red Army also sought to deny
resources to the enemy through a scorched earth policy of destroying the
infrastructure and food supplies of areas before the Germans could seize them.
Unfortunately, this, along with abuse by German troops, caused inconceivable
starvation and suffering among the civilian population that were left behind.
According to recent figures, of an
estimated four million POW's taken by the Russians, including Germans,
Japanese, Hungarians, Romanians and others, some 580,000 never returned,
presumably victims of privation or the Gulags, compared with 3.5 million Soviet
POW that died in German camps out of the 5.6 million taken. Returning Soviet
soldiers who had surrendered were viewed with suspicion and some were killed.
The Soviet Union suffered the second highest
number of civilian losses (20 million) yet the highest number of military
losses (at least 8,668,400 Red Army personnel, including around 2 million dead
in Nazi captivity) in World War II. The Nazis considered Slavs in the
Soviet Union to be "sub-human", and made them the target of genocide.
This concept of Slavic inferiority was also the reason why Hitler did not
accept into his army many Soviet citizens who wanted to fight the regime until
1944, when the war was lost for Germany.
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky was a
Ukrainian-born Jewish Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He was a renowned
public speaker, and an influential politician in the early days of the Soviet
Union. After leading the failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the
policies and rise of Joseph Stalin, Trotsky was expelled from the Communist
Party and deported from the Soviet Union in the Great Purge. He was
eventually assassinated in Mexico by a secret agent working for Stalin.
Trotsky was born with the name Leon
Davidovich Bronstein. He became involved in revolutionary activities in 1896
when he was introduced to Marxism. He helped organize the South Russian
Workers' Union, and using the name 'Lvov', he wrote and printed leaflets and
proclamations, distributed revolutionary pamphlets and popularized socialist
ideas among industrial workers and revolutionary students. Bronstein was caught
and imprisoned in Siberia for his revolutionary activity. He escaped in 1902
and changed his name to Trotsky.
Trotsky moved to London where he met Vladimir Lenin, and worked for
a revolutionary newspaper called Iskra, which was designed to
promote communism. Trotsky soon became one of the paper's leading authors.
Trotsky spent much of his time between 1904 and 1917 trying to reconcile
different groups within the party, which resulted in many clashes with Lenin
and other prominent party members. During these years Trotsky began developing
his theory of permanent revolution.
Trotsky secretly returned to Russia in
February 1905. Trotsky and other Soviet leaders were put on trial in 1906 on
charges of supporting an armed rebellion against the Czar. In January 1907,
Trotsky escaped en route to deportation to Siberia. In October 1908, he started a bi-weekly Russian language Social
Democratic paper aimed at Russian workers called Pravda ("The
Truth"), which was smuggled into Russia. Trotsky continued publishing Pravda
until it finally folded in April 1912.
Trotsky and other communists disagreed
with Lenin’s use of "expropriations" -- armed robberies of banks and
other companies by Bolshevik groups to procure money for the Party.
In January 1912, the majority of the Bolshevik faction led by Lenin
expelled their opponents from the party. Trotsky tried to re-unite the party,
but failed.
World War I (1914-1917) and the Russian Revolution of 1917
Lenin and Trotsky advocated different
internationalist anti-war positions. Trotsky wrote against the war, adopting
the slogan: "peace without indemnities or annexations, peace without
conquerors or conquered". He didn't go quite as far as Lenin, who
advocated Russia's defeat in the war. In September 1916, Trotsky was deported
from France to Spain, and then to the USA for his anti-war activities. Trotsky
was living in New York City when the February Revolution of 1917
overthrew Czar Nicholas II.
Upon returning to Russia, Trotsky sided
with Lenin when the Bolshevik Central Committee discussed staging an armed
uprising and he led the efforts to overthrow the Provisional Government headed
by Aleksandr Kerensky. After the success of the uprising, Trotsky led the
efforts to repel a counter-attack by Cossaks. Allied with Lenin, he
successfully defeated attempts by other Bolshevik Central Committee members to
share power with other socialist parties. By the end of 1917, Trotsky was
unquestionably the second man in the Bolshevik Party after Lenin. The rivalry
between Lenin and Trotsky did much to destroy them both.
After the Russian Revolution
After the Bolsheviks came to power,
Trotsky became the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Trotsky's managerial
and organisation-building skills with the Soviet military were soon tested. The
Bolsheviks were suddenly faced with the loss of most of the country's
territory, an increasingly well organized resistance by Russian anti-Communist
forces (usually referred to as the White Army after their best known
component) and widespread defection by the military experts that Trotsky relied
on.
Trotsky and the Soviet government
responded with a full-fledged mobilization, which increased the size of the Red
Army from less than 300,000 in May 1918 to one million in October 1918, and an
introduction of political commissars into the Red Army. The latter were
responsible for ensuring the loyalty of military experts (who were mostly
former officers in the imperial army) and co-signing their orders.
Facing military defeats in mid-1918,
Trotsky introduced increasingly severe penalties for desertion,
insubordination, and retreat. These reprisals included the death penalty for
deserters and traitors, as well as using former officers' families as hostages
against possible defections. Trotsky also threatened to execute unit commanders
and commissars whose units either deserted or retreated without permission.
Trotsky continued to insist that former
officers should be used as military experts within the Red Army and, in the
summer of 1918, was able to convince Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership not
only to continue the policy in the face of mass defections, but also to give
these experts more direct operational control of the military. In this he
differed sharply from Stalin. Stalin's stubborn opposition to Trotsky's
military policies foreshadowed a continuing acute conflict between the two
Bolsheviks over the policies and direction of the Soviet Union, culminating 10
years later in Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union (and then in his
assassination).
In the meantime, by October 1919 the
Soviet government found itself in the worst crisis of the Civil War.
Trotsky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his actions in
Petrograd. Trotsky spent the winter of 1919-1920 in the Urals region trying to
get its economy going again. Based on his experiences there, he proposed
abandoning the policies of War Communism, which included confiscating
grain from peasants, and partially restoring the grain market. Lenin, however,
was still committed to the system of War Communism at the time and the proposal
was rejected. It wasn't until the spring of 1921 that economic collapse and
uprisings would force Lenin and the rest of the Bolshevik leadership to abandon
War Communism in favor of the New Economic Policy.
In late 1921, Lenin's health
deteriorated. Taking advantage of Lenin’s illness, Stalin formed a troika
(triumvirate) with two other leading communists to ensure that Trotsky,
publicly the number two man in the country at the time and Lenin's heir, would
not succeed Lenin. In the fall of 1922, Lenin's relationship with Stalin
deteriorated over Stalin's handling of the issue of merging Soviet republics
into one federal state, the USSR. At
the time of Lenin’s death in 1924, Trotsky was himself recovering from illness
far away from Moscow. Stalin informed him by telegraph of Lenin’s death, but
gave him the wrong information about the date for the funeral. After missing
the funeral, Trotsky was cut off from all power by Stalin.
In 1927, Trotsky was expelled from the
Communist Party and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. After Trotsky's
expulsion from the country, his exiled followers (Trotskyists) began to
surrender to Stalin; by doing so, they "admitted their mistakes" and
were reinstated in the Communist Party. However, almost all of them were
murdered in the Great Purges just a few years later.
In August 1936, the first Moscow show
trial was staged in front of an international audience. During the
trial, most of them prominent Old Bolsheviks, confessed to having plotted with
Trotsky to kill Stalin and other members of the Soviet leadership. The
court found everybody guilty and sentenced the defendants to death, Trotsky in
absentia. The second show trial was filled with even more alleged
conspiracies and crimes linked to Trotsky. In 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in
his home by a Stalinist agent, Ramón Mercader, who drove the pick of an ice axe
into Trotsky's skull.
Contributions to theory
Trotsky’s political ideas differed in many respects from those of Stalin.
Unlike Stalin, Trotsky rejected the idea that communism should be established
only in one country; instead, he wanted “permanent revolution" all
around the world in order to spread communism everywhere.
Karl Marx
Karl Marx is most famous for
his analysis of history, summed up in the opening line of the introduction to
the Communist Manifesto (1848): "The history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Marx
believed that capitalism would be replaced by socialism which in
turn would bring communism. Marx is often called the father of
communism. Sometimes, he argued that his analysis of capitalism revealed
that capitalism was destined to end because of unsolvable problems within it:
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“ |
The development of Modern Industry, therefore,
cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie
produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces,
above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the
proletariat are equally inevitable. |
” |
|
|
— (The Communist
Manifesto) |
|
Other times, he argued that capitalism would end through the organized
actions of an international working class. Marx’s ideas began to exert a major
influence on workers' movements shortly after his death. This influence was
given added impetus by the victory of the Marxist Bolsheviks in the Russian
October Revolution. The relation of Marx to "Marxism" is a
point of controversy.
Karl Marx (along with Friedrich Engels)
envisioned the transformation of the world into a peaceful, equitable place in
which everyone lived in harmony. They thought that this could only occur if
everyone – the rich and the poor, the landowners/businessmen and the
landless/wage-earners -- eventually became part of a single class, the
industrual working class, which they renamed the proletariat. They
thought that other people who talked of fixing the world were dreamers for
assuming that society’s problems could be solved through reason. For Marx and
Engels, real social harmony and equality – the goals of true socialism
-- could only be created if the working man triumphed over the wealthy people
of the world who got rich off of his work. The proletariat, as the “universal
class,” was the future hope of all humanity in Marx’s view; the troubles
that working people experience every day would lead to the destruction of the
current system.
Marx’s emphasis on the importance of
helping the working class makes it sound like, for him, poverty, equality, and
living standards were most important; but this isn’t true. For instance, he
thought that an enforced increase in wages would be nothing more than better
pay for slaves! It wouldn’t make work any more meaningful. What really mattered
to Marx was the problem of alienation. A capitalist, market
system like ours, where we are free to buy and sell what we like for
profit, alienates us from finding meaning in most of our lives. Marx thought
that the capitalist system makes us think backwards about work. In his view, work ought to be precious to
us; it ought to make us feel great; it ought to be an expression of our
creative powers, and it should be our highest activity. Instead, in a
capitalist system, we work not because work itself is a good thing, but because
we have to in order to survive, and in order to make money so we can buy
buy things. We become greedy and
materialistic. We become acquisitive, storing up our purchasing power. As
workers, we lose control over what we produce. We don’t enjoy the “fruits of
our labour,” which are bought and sold on the market, and the profits go to the
boss, not to us. But Marx suggests that even the bosses --property owners and
businessmen -- are equally dehumanized and alienated, even if they don’t suffer
the hardships faced by the proetariat or working class. The social
alienation between owners –Marx calls them the bourgoisie -- and the
workers creates further tension and hatred between the two groups. Marx writes
about how the inequality between these two groups affects each:
Labour certainly produces marvels for the rich but it produces privation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity fore the worker. It replaces labour by machinery, but it casts some of the workers back into a barbarous kind of work and turns the others into machines. It produces intelligence, but also stupidity and cretinism for the workers.
Marx saw the problems of alienation not only in the world of work during
his day; he also thought all of human history could be explained in terms of
this class conflict between the rich few (the bourgeoisie) and the
working many (the proletariat). Because of the inequalities he saw in
the capitialist system, he was certain, not only that capitalism should
be eradicated, but that it would destroy itself through its own internal
contradicitons. Essentially, he thought that the workers of the world would
wise-up and stand united against the bourgeoisie, and that they would take
control of the means of production (all the factories, the businesses,
and the land) away from the bosses and run it communally, sharing out all the
benefits equally among themselves.
Marx and Engels called their doctrine scientific
socialism because they thought that socialism (and ultimately, communism)
was not only the right way to go, but also that their ideas about how a
revolution was coming were bound to happen. Most of their writings analyze the
capitalist or market system looking for what will trigger its self-destruction.
They think that the class-divided market society will, once the working class
become fed-up, give way to a classless society. The workers will take
over all the businesses, and there will be no private property. Everyone will
own everything. With the collective ownership of property, there would
no longer be any real difference between proletarians and bourgeoisie. All
class distinctions will disappear. There will be no more greed, because nobody
will own anything, and it won’t be possible to own anything. Marx thought a
perfect, equal society could be created.
How did Marx think that capitalism would
self-destruct? He was pretty certain that there would be a polarization of
society. That is to say: there would be a huge number of poor,
working-class people, and only a very small number of wealthy owners, or bourgeoisie. The large working class created
by the free-market system would be, who would be the “gravedigger” of the
system. The proletariat would be doomed to poverty, whereas the bourgeoisie
would only become a richer and smaller class. The working class, led by
socialists like Marx, would eventually take over the State and use it to
abolish capitalism. Indeed, when the proletariat masses come to power, they
would find that most of the bourgeoisie were already gone; this is because the
market process would have generated ever larger industrial monopolies; little
owners would have been swallowed up by bigger ones, and those bigger ones by
even bigger and wealthier ones, until only a few giant firms would have
survived the rigours of competition. However, without many
competitors, the market would not work, even on its own terms. The new
Proletarisan State would simply have to take over these monopolies from their
bourgeois owners and set them to work under central planning.
Marx thought the rising up of the working
class would probably happen when unemployment with all its attendant distress
was high among the proletariat; capitalism would destroy itself in a great
crash. Marx was absolutely certain that socialism would overcome capitalism
sometime in the near future. But he didn’t think it was automatic; rather,
he thought it also required a deliberate political struggle. He
proposed (and helped to bring about) the representation of the working class by
organized political parties. He saw two means by which the workers’
party could come to power: evolution or revolution. In constitutional
states with a parliamentry system, he thought that the workers might
struggle to make sure everyone would be allowed to vote, not just those who owned
land. Once the vote was achieved for all, Marx was pretty sure that
socialists could expect to be elected to power, for the proletariat would
be a majority of the electorate; in other words, socialism would be a
natural outgrowth of democracy.
He also thought that socialism might
sometimes require revolution rather than evolution. He proposed a
revolutionary seizure of power, particulary where constitutionalism and the
rule of law did not exist. Such an uprising would produce a workers’
government, the dictatorship of the proletariat. In a situation like
civil war, the proletarian dictatorship would have to ignore the niceties of
the rule of law, at least until its power was secure. Unlike the evolutionary
means where socialist governments could simply be voted into power by the
people, this second approach, where there is no democracy, would involve
violence and bloodshed. These two approaches, united in Marx, would eventually
split into the two mutually antagonistic movements known as socialism
and communism.
What would life be like in a harmonious
communist State after the revolution? Marx gives a rough idea of what he
expects to happen after the workers come to power. There would have to be a
period during which the State would control all property and plan the whole
economy. Even if the State were able to become master of the economy, and
if it could conduct everything through central planning, full equality between
all people would take a long time to achieve. There would have to be an period
during which equality simply meant “equal pay for equal work.” All
workers would be employed by the state, and ownership of property would no
longer allow the wealthy to escape labour; but some would work more effectivey
and diligently than others, and they would be rewarded for doing so. Beyond
this stage, Marx’s thoughts on the future become pretty wishy-washy. The
state would lose its coercive character; that is, it wouldn’t need to use force
to make people behave properly, since all greed would have been wiped out with
the eradication of private property. This only makes sense if we accept
the premise that human quarrels are fundamentally caused by privtate property;
a classless society would therefore not need a state to maintain civil peace.
It was also Marx’s view that the State was always the tool that one class used
to dominate others, so by definition a classless society swould be a
stateless society. The state would “wither away.” People would learn
to live without the need for any kind of government. Once the state was no
longer needed, people wouldn’t need to be paid for their work. The idea of “equal
work for equal pay” would give way to a nobler form of equality in the
words, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
At this advanced stage of development, alienation will have ended. Work
would become a freely creative activity performed for its own sake, not to be
bought and sold. People would express themselves in all directions, utilizing their creativity.
Vladimir Lenin
Lenin’s dad died when he was a young boy;
his eldest brother was arrested and hanged for participating in a terrorist
bomb plot threatening the life of the Czar, and his sister was also banished
because of her association. This event radicalized Lenin, and his official
Soviet biographies describe it as central to the revolutionary track of his
life. As Lenin became interested in Marxism, he was involved in student
protests and was subsequently arrested. He was then expelled from Kazan
University for his political ideas, but he continued to study independently,
however. Lenin moved to St. Petersburg in 1893, where he became increasingly
involved in revolutionary propaganda efforts, joining the local Marxist group.
He co-founded the newspaper Iskra. Lenin was active in politics
and, in 1903, led the Bolshevik faction of the Marxist Russian Social
Democratic Labour Party.
When the First World War began in
1914, Lenin opposed Russia’s involvement. He believed that the peasants were
fighting the battle of the bourgeoisie for them, and he adopted the stance that
what he described as an "imperialist war" ought to be turned
into a civil war between the classes. He looked at the war, and thought it was
the result of western imperialism; that is, he thought that the rich
European countries were simply fighting for territories in which to markt their
own goods on the grounds that their own home markets had become saturated.
The 1917 February Revolution in Russia and the overthrow of Czar Nicholas
II caught Lenin by surprise. He realized that he must return to Russia as soon
as possible, but this was problematic, since the First World War would make
travel home very difficult and dangerous. He managed to return to Petrograd in
October, inspiring the October Revolution with the slogan "All
Power to the Soviets!" Lenin directed the overthrow of the Provisional
Government, marking the beginning of Soviet rule.
In 1917, Lenin was
elected as the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars by the Russian
Congress of Soviets. His first concern was to take Russia out of the First
World War. In 1918, Lenin removed Russia from World War I by agreeing to
the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, under which Russia lost significant territories
in Europe.
After the Bolsheviks lost the elections
for the Russian Constituent Assembly, they used the Red Guards to shut down the
first session of the Assembly. This marked the beginning of the steady
elimination from political life of all factions and parties whose views did not
correspond to the position taken by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
To protect the newly-established Bolshevik government from
counterrevolutionaries and other political opponents, the Bolsheviks created a secret
police, the Cheka. Censorship was quickly imposed, and it was up
to the Cheka to confiscate the literature of dissident workers.
Lenin and the Red Terror
After a botched assassination attempt
against Lenin, Stalin, in a telegram to Lenin, argued that a policy of
"open and systematic mass terror" be instigated against "those
responsible". Lenin and the other Bolsheviks agreed; they instructed the
Cheka to commence a "Red Terror." Between 1918-21 up to
200,000 were executed.
By September 1921, there were more than 70,000 people sent to forced labour
camps due to the Red Terror. Lenin had always been an advocate of "mass
terror against enemies of the revolution" and was open about his view
that the proletarian state was a system of organized violence against the
capitalist establishment. The terror, while encouraged by the Bolsheviks,
had its roots in a popular anger against the privileged. When other Bolshevik
leaders tried to curb the "excesses" of the Cheka in late 1918 during
the Terror, it was Lenin who defended it. Lenin remained an advocate of mass
terror.
Russian Communist Party and civil war
In 1919, Lenin and other Bolshevik
leaders met with revolutionary socialists from around the world and formed the Communist
International. Members of the Communist International, including Lenin and
the Bolsheviks themselves, broke off from the broader socialist movement. From
that point onwards, they would become known as communists. In Russia, the
Bolshevik Party was renamed the "Russian Communist Party.”
Meanwhile, the civil war raged across
Russia. A wide variety of political movements and their supporters took
up arms to support or overthrow the Soviet government. Although many
different factions were involved in the civil war, the two main forces were the
Red Army (communists) and the White Army (traditionalists). Foreign
powers such as France, Britain, the United States and Japan also intervened in
this war (on behalf of the White Army), though their impact was peripheral at
best. Eventually, the more organizationally proficient Red Army, led by
Leon Trotsky, won the civil war, defeating the White Russian forces and their
allies in 1920. Smaller battles continued for several more years, however. The
civil war has been described as one "unprecedented for its savagery,"
with mass executions and other atrocities committed by both sides. Between
battles, executions, famine and epidemics, many millions would perish.
Lenin was a harsh critic of imperialism. In 1917 he
declared the unconditional right of self-determination and separation for
national minorities and oppressed nations. However, when the Russian Civil
War was won he used military force to assimilate the newly independent states
of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. He argued that the
inclusion of those countries into the newly emerging Soviet government would
shelter them from capitalist imperial ambitions.
During the civil war, as an attempt to
maintain food supply to the cities and the army in the conditions of economic
collapse, the Bolsheviks adopted the policy of war communism. That
involved "requisitioning" supplies from the peasantry for little or
nothing in exchange. This led the peasants to drastically reduce their
crop production. The resulting conflicts began with the Cheka and the army
shooting hostages, and ended with a second full-scale civil war against the
peasantry, including the use of poison gas, death camps, and deportations. In
1920, Lenin ordered increased emphasis on the food requisitioning from the
peasantry, at the same time as the Cheka gave detailed reports about the large
scale famine. The long war and a drought in 1921 also contributed to the
famine. Estimates on the deaths from this famine are between 3 and 10 million.
The long years of war, the Bolshevik
policy of war communism, the Russian famine of 1921, and the encirclement of
hostile governments took their toll on Russia, however, and much of the country
lay in ruins. There were many peasant uprisings. In 1921, Lenin replaced the
policy of War Communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP), in an
attempt to rebuild industry and especially agriculture. The new policy was
based on a recognition of political and economic realities, though it was
intended merely as a tactical retreat from the socialist ideal. The whole
policy was later reversed by Stalin.
Lenin’s final days, his death, and mummification
Lenin's health had been severely damaged by the strains of revolution and
war. The assassination attempt earlier in his life also added to his health
problems. The bullet was still lodged in his neck, too close to his spine for
medical techniques of the time to remove. In May 1922, Lenin had his first
stroke. Of Stalin, who had been the Communist Party's general secretary
since April 1922, Lenin said that he had "unlimited authority
concentrated in his hands" and suggested that "comrades think about a
way of removing Stalin from that post." Lenin died in 1924. The city of
Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honor three days after Lenin's
death. This remained the name of the city until the collapse and liquidation of
the Soviet Union in 1991, when it reverted to its original name, St
Petersburg. His body was embalmed and placed on permanent exhibition in the
Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow. Lenin’s character was
elevated over time to the point of near religious reverence. By the 1980s,
every major city in the Soviet Union had a statue of Lenin in its central
square, either a Lenin street or a Lenin Square near the center, and often 20
or more smaller statues and busts throughout its territory.
The Difference Between Marxism and Leninism
The Russian Empire was ruled
autocratically by the Czar; the absence of a parliament and constitution
there made it impossible to bring about socialist reforms through democratic
means. The Russian Social Democratic Party was forced to work illegally,
secretively, and conspiratorially. Because conditions were so different in
Russia from those in western Europe where members of socialist parties had been
elected to parliaments by free votes, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the leader
of the Bolsheviks, was led by these conditions to create a new style and
a new threory of party leadership. Before Lenin, Karl Marx had expected that
the revolution would occur all-of-a-sudden from the spontaneous class
consciousness of the workers; the proletariat – or working class – would just
get fed up with the rich bourgeoisie owners and take over in a revolution.
However, in Russia Lenin faced a backward country and a small working class. He
was certain that any idea of revolution would’t rise from the poor workers; he
himself would have to lead the charge. This seemingly minor difference
implied a new approach to the problems of party organization. The party had
to be firmly controlled from the top because the leadership could not rely on
the workers’ sponatneity. Lenin’s theory of the disciplined party – democratic
centralism – moulded the party into an effective revolutionary weapon that
was especially suited to survival in the autocratic Russian setting.
Lenin’s socialist ideas are different
from Marx in another way as well: Marx always thought that the socialist
revolution would be a world revolution.
Marx thought that the European nations would drag their empires with them into
socialism. Because he emphasized Europe, Marx thought the the revoultion would
occur soon because capitalism, which was fated to put an end to itself, was well-advanced
on that continent. Marx certainly expected that the world-wide proletariat
would have victory over the few bourgeoisie within his own lifetime. But when
the First World War broke out, Marx had already been dead for thirty years and
the socialists still had not come to power anywhere!
Lenin didn’t take this as evidence that
Marx was wrong and that the whole idea that communism was inevitable was
stupid. Rather, he decided that the “advanced nations” had managed to postpone
the revolution by conquering huge colonial empires. Where Marx thought that
the capitalist countries of Europe would over-produce themselves into
bankruptcy, Lenin believed that they had escaped this problem by finding
markets for their products in other countries held in their economic power, who
would have to buy their goods. However, Lenin was sure that this
“imperialst solution” could only be temporary because the world was finite and
now totally subdivided. Sooner or later, the problems of capitalist
competitiveness would cause the system to self-destruct. Lenin thought that
World War I showed that the imperialists had begun to qualrrel with each other.
He believed that the socialist revolution would arise not from a business
crash, as Marx had been inclined to
believe, but out of the turnoil of war. Lenin thus broadened the scope
of socialism from a European to a global movement, and in doing so
bolstered his own revolutionary optimism. “Capitalism,” he wrote, “has grown
into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation
of the overwhelming population of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’
contries.”
World War I marked the end of the Second
International – the international socialist organization headed by Engels.
Although socialists had prided themselves on their internationalism, everyone
felt obligated to fight on behalf of their own country. Most of the workers in
the combatant states supported the war effort, effectively pitting the
International against itself. The successful socialist revolution in Russia was
welcomed by socialists all around the world.
In February 1917, the Czar was toppled and a constitutional democracy
created. However, in October of the same year, the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin,
seized control of the state through insurrections of armed workers in St.
Petersburg and Moscow. The Bolsheviks then created a dictatorship of the
proletariat in which their party played the dominant role. They outlawed
political oppostion – even socialist opposition. These events were an
agonizing test for the socialists of Western Europe, who had yearned for a
revolution for generations. Now they were witnessing a sucessful one, and they
were appalled by its undemocratice aspects.
The eventual result of the Russian Revolution was an
irreparable split in the world socialist movement. Those who approved of Lenin and his methods formed
communist parties in every country and gathered themselves in the Third
International, or Comintern (short for “Communist International”).
The official ideology of these parties was now Marxism as modified by Lenin,
or Marxist-Leninism. In practice, the Comintern soon became an
extension of the Soviet state for foreign policy purposes. It was dissolved in
1943 by Stalin as a gesture of cooperation with the Allies during WWII.
The individual communist parties continued to be closely tied to Moscow, but
the organizational emphasis shifted to Soviet satellite states. In 1947 there
were bound together into the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau),
which in 1956 was in turn replaced by the Warsaw Treaty Organization.
The latter was dissolved in 1991 as part of the general decommunizaiton of
Eastern Europe.
The Russian Revolution of 1917
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a series of political and social
upheavals in Russia, involving first the overthrow of the czarist autocracy,
and then the overthrow of the liberal and moderate-socialist Provisional
Government, resulting in the establishment of Soviet power under the
control of the Bolshevik party. This eventually led to the establishment of
the Soviet Union, which lasted until its dissolution in 1991.
The Russian Revolution of 1917
centers around two primary events: the February Revolution and the October
Revolution. The February Revolution, which removed Tsar (also spelled
Czar) Nicholas II from power, developed spontaneously out of a series of
increasingly violent demonstrations and riots on the streets of Petrograd
(present-day St. Petersburg), during a time when the tsar was away from the
capital visiting troops on the World War I front.
Though
the February Revolution was a popular uprising, it did not
necessarily express the wishes of the majority of the Russian population, as
the event was primarily limited to the city of Petrograd. However, most of
those who took power after the February Revolution, in the Provisional
Government (the temporary government that replaced the tsar) and in
the Petrograd Soviet (an influential local council representing workers and
soldiers in Petrograd), generally favored rule that was at least partially
democratic.
The October
Revolution (also called the Bolshevik Revolution) overturned the
interim Provisional Government and established the Soviet Union. The
October Revolution was a much more deliberate event, orchestrated by a small
group of people. The Bolsheviks, who led this coup, prepared their coup in
only six months. They were generally viewed as an extremist group and had very
little popular support when they began serious efforts in April 1917.
By October, the Bolsheviks’ popular base was much larger; though still a
minority within the country as a whole, they had built up a majority of support
within Petrograd and other urban centres.
After October, the Bolsheviks
realized that they could not maintain power in an election-based system without
sharing power with other parties and compromising their principles. As a
result, they formally abandoned the democratic process in January 1918
and declared themselves the representatives of a dictatorship of the
proletariat. In response, the Russian Civil War broke out in the
summer of that year and would last well into 1920.
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War lasted from
1917 to 1921. It began immediately after the collapse of the Russian
provisional government and the Bolshevik takeover of Petrograd, rapidly
intensifying after Lenin's dissolution of the Russian Constituent Assembly and
the Trotsky-negotiated signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
Although the war was multi-sided and
included foreign forces from several countries, the main hostilities took
place between Communist forces, known as the Red Army, and
loosely-allied anti-Bolshevik forces, known as the White Army.
The most intense years of fighting took place from 1918 to 1920. The
Communists won after four years of intense fighting, and the result was the
country in ruins and the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922.
Following the fall of Czar Nicholas II
of Russia and the turbulent Russian Revolution throughout 1917, a
socialist-leaning Provisional Government was established. In October
another revolution occurred in which the Red Guard, armed groups of
workers and deserting soldiers directed by the Bolshevik Party, seized control
of Saint Petersburg (then known as Petrograd) and began an immediate armed
takeover of cities and villages throughout the former Russian Empire. In
January 1918, Lenin had the Constituent Assembly violently dissolved, proclaiming
the Soviets as the new government of Russia.
The Bolsheviks decided to immediately
make peace with the German Empire and the Central Powers, as they
had promised the Russian people prior to the Revolution. Leon Trotsky,
representing the Bolsheviks, refused at first to sign the treaty while
continuing to observe a unilateral cease fire, following the policy of "No
fighting, but no peace treaty". In view of this, the Germans began an all
out advance on the Eastern Front, encountering no resistance. Signing a formal
peace treaty was the only option in the eyes of the Bolsheviks, because the
Russian army was demobilized and the newly formed Red Guard were
incapable of stopping the advance. They also understood that the impending
counterrevolutionary resistance was more dangerous than the concessions of
the treaty, which Lenin viewed as temporary in the light of aspirations for a
world revolution. The Soviets acceded to a peace treaty and the formal
agreement, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, was signed in 1918.
In the wake of the October Revolution,
the old Russian army had been demobilized and the volunteer based Red
Guard was the Bolsheviks' main military arm. In January, Trotsky headed its
reorganization into the "Workers' and Peasants' Red Army," in order
to create a more professional fighting force. He instituted a forceful
conscription program, frequently resorting to repressive tactics, and used
former Tsarist officers as "military specialists". The Bolsheviks
banned all non-Bolshevik political activity around the same time, even other
socialist groups, when it became clear that the Bolsheviks could not hold a
majority of the seats in any democratically elected governing body outside of
St. Petersburg and Moscow. While resistance to the Red Guard began on the
very next day after the Bolshevik coup, the Brest-Litovsk treaty and the
political ban became a catalyst for the formation of anti-Bolshevik groups both
inside and outside Russia, pushing them into action against the new regime.
A loose confederation of anti-Bolshevik
forces aligned against the Communist government. Their military forces became
known as the White movement (sometimes referred to as the "White
Army"), and they controlled significant parts of the former Russian
empire for most of the war. The Western Allies, upset at the withdrawal of
Russia from the war effort and worried about a possible Russo-German alliance,
also expressed their dismay at the Bolsheviks. Winston Churchill
declared that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle". In
addition, there was a concern, shared by many Central Powers as well, that the
socialist revolutionary ideas would spread to the West. Hence, many of these
countries expressed their support for the Whites, occasionally providing
troops and supplies. In addition, volunteers from Italy and Poland also joined
the Whites.
The majority of the fighting ended in 1920 with the defeat of the White
Army.
Aftermath of the Civil War
The results of the civil war were
momentous. Russia had been at war for seven years, during which time some
20,000,000 of its people had lost their lives (to go with the 3,000,000
surrendered to Poland). The civil war had taken an estimated 15,000,000 of
them, including at least 1,000,000 soldiers of the Russian Red Army and more
than 500,000 White soldiers who died in battle. 50,000 Russian Communists were
killed by the counter-revolutionary Whites, and 250,000 civillians were wiped
out by the Cheka (secret police). At the end of the Civil War, Soviet Russia
was exhausted and near ruin. The droughts of 1920 and 1921, as well as the 1921
famine, worsened the disaster still further. Disease had reached pandemic
proportions, with 3,000,000 dying of typhus alone in 1920. Millions more were
also killed by widespread starvation, wholesale massacres by both sides, and
even pogroms against Jews in Ukraine and southern Russia. The economic loss to
Soviet Russia was 50 billion rubles, or 35 billion in current U.S. Dollars. The
industrial production value descended to one seventh of the value of 1913, and
agriculture to one third. The economy had been devasted.
The Hammer and Sickle
The symbol as it appeared on the Soviet flag
The hammer and sickle is a symbol used to represent communism
and communist political parties. It features a hammer superimposed on a
sickle, or vice versa. The two tools are symbols of the peasantry and
the industrial proletariat; placing them together symbolises the unity
between agricultural and industrial workers.
It is best known from having been incorporated into the red flag of the
Soviet Union, along with the Red Star. It has also been used in other flags and
emblems.
The Soviet Flag
Worker and Kolkhoz Woman
The hammer and sickle was originally a
hammer crossed over a plough, with the same meaning (unity of peasants and
workers) as the more well known hammer and sickle. The hammer and sickle,
though in use since 1917/18, was not the official symbol until 1922, before
which the original hammer and plough insignia was used by the Red Army and the
Red Guard on uniforms, medals, caps, etc.
Some anthropologists have argued that the
symbol, like others used in the Soviet Union, was actually a Russian
Orthodox symbol that was used by the Communist Party to fill the religious needs
that Communism was replacing as a new state "religion." The
symbol can be seen as a permutation of the Russian Orthodox two-barred cross.
Russian Orthodox Cross
Proletariat
The proletariat (from Latin proles, offspring) is a term used to identify
a lower social class; a member of such a class is proletarian. Originally it
was identified as those people who had no wealth other than their sons; the
term was initially used in a derogatory sense, until Karl Marx used it
as a sociological term to refer to the working class.
The Proletariat in Marxist theory
In Marxist theory, the proletariat is
that class of society which does not have ownership of the means of production. Proletarians
are wage-workers. Marxism sees the proletariat and bourgeoisie
(capitalist class) as occupying conflicting positions, since (for
example) factory workers automatically wish wages to be as high as possible,
while owners and their proxies wish for wages (costs) to be as low as possible.
According to Marxism, capitalism
is a system based on the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie
(the "capitalists", who own and control the means of
production). This exploitation takes place as follows: the workers, who
own no means of production of their own, must seek jobs in order to live. They
get hired by a capitalist and work for him, producing some sort of goods or
services. These goods or services then become the property of the capitalist,
who sells them and gets a certain amount of money in exchange. One part of
the wealth produced is used to pay the workers' wages, while the other part
(surplus value) is split between the capitalist's private takings (profit), and
the money used to pay rent, buy supplies and renew the forces of production. Thus
the capitalist can earn money (profit) from the work of his employees without
actually doing any work, or in excess of his own work. Marxists argue
that new wealth is created through work; therefore, if someone gains wealth that
he did not work for, then someone else works and does not receive the full
wealth created by his work. In other words, that "someone else" is
exploited. Thus, Marxists argue that capitalists make a profit by exploiting
workers.
Marx himself argued that it was the goal
of the proletariat itself to displace the capitalist system with socialism,
changing the social relationships underpinning the class system and then
developing into a communist society in which: "..the free development of
each is the condition for the free development of all" (Communist
Manifesto).
Communism
Communism is an ideology that seeks to
establish a classless, stateless social organization based on common ownership
of the means of production. It can be considered a branch of the broader
socialist movement.
Karl Marx held that society
could not be transformed from the capitalist mode of production to the
advanced communist mode of production all at once, but required a transitional
period which Marx described as the revolutionary dictatorship of the
proletariat, the first stage of communism. The communist society Marx
envisioned emerging from capitalism has never been implemented, and it remains
theoretical; Marx, in fact, commented very little on what communist society
would actually look like.
In the late 19th century, Marxist
theories motivated socialist parties across Europe, although their policies
later developed along the lines of "reforming" capitalism, rather than
overthrowing it. One exception was the Russian Social Democratic Labour
Party. One branch of this party, commonly known as the Bolsheviks
and headed by Vladimir Lenin, succeeded in taking control of the country
after the toppling of the Provisional Government in the Russian
Revolution of 1917. In 1918, this party changed its name to the Communist
Party, thus establishing the contemporary distinction between communism and
other trends of socialism.
Communism grew out of the socialist movement of 19th century Europe. As the
Industrial Revolution advanced, socialist critics blamed capitalism
for the misery of the proletariat—a new class of poor, urban factory workers
who labored under often-hazardous conditions. Foremost among these critics
were the German philosopher Karl Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels.
Marxism
Like other socialists, Marx and Engels
sought an end to capitalism and the systems which they perceived to be
responsible for the exploitation of workers. But whereas earlier socialists
often favored longer-term social reform, Marx and Engels believed that
popular revolution was all but inevitable, and the only path to socialism.
According to the Marxist argument for
communism, the main characteristic of human life in class society is alienation;
and communism is desirable because it entails the full realization of human
freedom. Marx believed that communism allowed people to do what they want,
but also put humans in such conditions and such relations with one another that
they would not wish to exploit, or have any need to.
Marxism holds that a process of class conflict and
revolutionary struggle will result in victory for the proletariat and the
establishment of a communist society in which private ownership is abolished
over time and the means of production and subsistence belong to the community. Marx himself
wrote little about life under communism, giving only the most general
indication as to what constituted a communist society. It is clear that it
entails abundance in which there is little limit to the projects that humans
may undertake. In the popular slogan that was adopted by the communist
movement, communism was envisioned as a world in which each gave according
to their abilities, and received according to their needs.
Leninism
In Russia, the 1917 October Revolution was the first time any party
with an avowedly Marxist orientation, in this case the Bolshevik
Party, seized state power. The assumption of state power by the Bolsheviks
generated a great deal of practical and theoretical debate within the Marxist
movement. Marx believed that socialism and communism would be built upon
foundations laid by the most advanced capitalist development. Russia, however,
was one of the poorest countries in Europe with an enormous, largely illiterate
peasantry and a minority of industrial workers. The Bolsheviks successful
rise to power was based upon the slogans "peace, bread, and land" and
"All power to the Soviets," slogans which tapped the massive public
desire for an end to Russian involvement in the First World War, the peasants'
demand for land reform, and popular support for the Soviets.
The usage of the terms
"communism" and "socialism" shifted after 1917, when the Bolsheviks
changed their name to the Communist Party and installed a single-party
regime devoted to the implementation of socialist policies under Leninism.
The Second International had dissolved in 1916 over national divisions,
as the separate national parties that composed it did not maintain a unified
front against the war, instead generally supporting their respective nation's
role. Lenin thus created the Third International (Comintern) in 1919.
Henceforth, the term "Communism" was applied to the objective
of the parties founded under the umbrella of the Comintern. Their
program called for the uniting of workers of the world for revolution, which
would be followed by the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat as
well as the development of a socialist economy. Ultimately, if their
program held, there would develop a harmonious classless society, with the
withering away of the state.
During the Russian Civil War
(1918-1922), the Bolsheviks nationalized all productive property and
imposed a policy of "war communism," which put factories and railroads
under strict government control, collected and rationed food, and introduced
some bourgeois management of industry. After three years of war, Lenin declared
the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, which was to give a "limited
place for a limited time to capitalism." The NEP lasted until 1928,
when Joseph Stalin's personal fight for leadership, and the introduction
of the first Five Year Plan spelled the end of it. Following the
Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks formed in 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR), or Soviet Union, from the former Russian Empire.
Marxism-Leninism
Marxist-Leninism is a version of
socialism, with some important modifications, adopted by the Soviet Union under
Stalin. It shaped the Soviet Union and influenced Communist Parties worldwide. It
was heralded as a possibility of building communism through a massive program
of industrialization and collectivization. The rapid
development of industry, and above all the victory of the Soviet Union
in the Second World War, maintained that vision throughout the world. The
Communist Party of the Soviet Union adopted the Marxist-Leninist theory of
"socialism in one country" and claimed that, due to the
"aggravation of class struggle under socialism," it was possible,
even necessary, to build socialism alone in one country, the USSR. This line
was challenged by Leon Trotsky, whose theory of "permanent
revolution" stressed the necessity of world revolution.
The NKVD (Secret
Police)
The NKVD or People's
Commisariat for Internal Affairs was the leading secret police
organization of the Soviet Union that was responsible for political
repressions during Stalinism. It ran the Gulag system of forced labor;
itdeported Russian populations and peasants labeled as "Kulaks"
to unpopulated regions of the country; it guarded state borders and conducted espionage;
it executed political assassinations abroad and was responsible for
subversion of foreign governments, and enforcing Stalinist policy within
Communist movements in other countries.
Although the NKVD performed the function
of state security, the name of the organization today is associated
primarily with its criminal activities: political repressions and assassinations,
military crimes, violations of the rights of Soviet and foreign
citizens, and violation of the law.
Repressions and executions
The NKVD arrested, exiled, tortured, or
killed anyone accused of being an “enemy of the people.” Millions were
rounded up and sent to gulag camps and hundreds of thousands were executed
by the NKVD. Formally, most of these people were convicted by NKVD troikas
("triplets") - special courts martial. Evidential standards were very
low; a tip off by an anonymous informer was considered sufficient grounds for
arrest. Usage of "physical means of persuasion" (torture) was
sanctioned by a special decree of the state, which opened the door to numerous
abuses, documented in recollections of victims and members of the NKVD itself.
Hundreds of mass graves resulting from such operations were later discovered
throughout the country. Documented evidence exists that the NKVD committed mass
extrajudicial executions, guided by secret "plans". Those plans
established the number and proportion of victims (officially "public
enemies") in a given region (e.g. the quotas for clergy, former nobles
etc., regardless of identity). The families of the repressed, including
children, were also automatically repressed.
The purges were organized in a
number of waves according to the decisions of the Politburo of the Communist
Party. Distinctive and permanent purging campaigns were conducted against non-Russian
nationalities. Despite this, it is important to note that Russians still
formed the majority of NKVD victims. NKVD agents became not only
executioners, but also one of the largest groups of victims. The majority
of 1930s agency staff (hundreds of thousands), including all commanders, were
executed.
The NKVD organized overseas assassinations of ex-Soviet citizens and
foreigners who were regarded as enemies of the USSR by Joseph Stalin. Leon
Trotsky was killed by the NKVD.