Russian History Review

David Shearer

"In the wake of collectivization and with the approval of Stalin, the civil police was subsumed by the newly formed NKVD, directed by the former leaders of the OGPU, the Soviet political police. Stalin's centralizing "revolution from above" sought to impose control through repression, enabling the leader to both impose order and reconstruct Soviet society. 2 At the same time, collectivization and rapid industrialization had resulted in disorder and migration to a massive degree, further compounding the chaos already wrought by a decade of war. For both of these reasons, Stalin needed a civil police force to monitor the population. Unlike other European states, however, the Soviet civil police was not only decentralized, but virtually absent for the majority of citizens. Because the Soviet Union did not have a local police force to co-opt when centralizing its network, the OGPU took on the role of civil policing. Under Genrikh Yagoda, the OGPU leader and subsequent head of the NKVD, the OGPU had slowly taken over the job of civil policing over the course of Stalin's reign. The broad host of activities undertaken by the OGPU and later NKVD was essential in for Stalin's centralization of the Soviet state. The OGPU took work ranging from countering local petty crime to monitoring minority populations. Additionally, the militarization of policing and introduction of state-level passportization allowed Stalin to usurp local power structures and place control in his own hands. It would be through police repression that the Stalinist state would impose order and effect change upon the Soviet population." "As [the author] argues, the scope of Great Purge was in large part due to the fear caused by the danger of war towards the end of the 1930s. All of the structures had already been in place before the event: the centralization of the police under the NKVD, the politicization of the civil police, and the passportization of the citizens. The leadership of the Soviet Union, furthermore, already had good reason to fear for the stability of their rule. Not only was there potential for their ethnic minorities in the borderlands to provide assistance to the enemy, but there were countless internal enemies who had legitimate grievances against the Communists themselves. Stalin's condoning of a purge of such a scope can be viewed as a prophylaxis, as [the author] calls it, or an action to prevent a future disease. If the Soviet Union was, as many would agree at the time, filled with disloyal internal enemies, the Great Purge was means to preempt the betrayal which would inevitably occur.

Nicholas Riasanovsky

Alexander I as at first period of half-hearted reforms, but despite repeated promises never gave Russia constitution. Hope and optimism of liberal society faded over time. Nicholas I as refusing to establish a constitution, preferred to work from outside bureaucracy. "Official Nationality" as 'Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality in precisely that order.' The French Revolution posed new problems for thinking Russians and for the autocracy itself. Russia's failure to keep in step with the West became a critical problem which, in turn, "made the issue of political and social reform in the empire of the tsars more pressing." The Decembrist Revolt was the ultimate response of the most advanced segment of Russian educated opinion to the government's failure to implement such reforms. [The author] sees that as the final expression of the Enlightenment in Russia, "the best and most far-reaching response made, within the framework of the Enlightenment, by the Russian educated public to the needs of Russia." The educated elite and the autocracy began to "part ways" after the French Revolution inspired the Decemberists to rise up in failed rebellion. The nobility's loss of faith in the state as a vehicle toward liberal reforms meant the emergence of the Russian intelligentsia. Ultimately, three trends characterize the intelligentsia during the reign of Nicholas I: a romantic idealism that began to radicalize the intelligentsia, ideological fragmentation as different schools of thought entered into direct competition, and the reactionary pushback of the state. Radical thinkers like Herzen, Bakunin, Belinsky, and members of the Petrashevtsky were variously exiled, imprisoned, and sentenced to hard labor for their actions and beliefs. A general pattern of hostility towards the intelligentsia endured until Nicholas I's death in 1855. Contrast Decemberists with Slavophiles and Westernizers of the 1840s - former belonged to rationalist Enlightenment with careers in military as part of state, distant from peasantry. By contrast, Slavophiles and Westerners were private men. Although they held onto the noble ideal of service, service was no longer directed towards the state, but towards the narod as a whole. Furthermore, the philosophical milieu in which they lived had shifted from rationalist Enlightenment to German Idealism, which was in many ways a rejection of the former. Their differences lie in an ideological generation gap. "A Parting of Ways"

David Hoffmann

Family Values: In 1917, family seen by feminists as mode of oppression, want centralized, state run child care. By 1930, divorce made more difficult, abortion outlawed because party leaders feared the break up of the family would distract "from the building of socialism." These policies were similar to those enacted throughout Europe at the time. Despite the return to policies from before the revolution, the Stalinist family actually very different from pre-revolution family. Women now had a double load of work and motherhood, and the gov't made special attempts to control women's bodies in order to maximize fertility and protect children -- women can't do heavy lifting jobs. "Stalinist Values"

Abraham Ascher

The central argument of the book, which I find generally convincing, is that the revolution is a tale of missed opportunities by the government to accept and implement liberal reforms in a timely fashion. The outlook of the tsar and his advisers blocked the possibility for reform: they lacked "vision and boldness" (p. 207), and they suffered from "intransigence and narrow-mindedness" (p. 342). Although they are the villains of the story, they are nonetheless portrayed as victims of their own limited perspective and their unwillingness to relinquish prerogatives. If there are heroes here, they are the liberals who attempted in vain to steer Russia toward constitutional monarchy. Their efforts were undermined by the government on the one hand and by radical parties and lower-class groups on the other Eschewing interpretations that focus on impersonal forces or structures, he emphasizes the decisive role of human agency. This is a book about how people shaped history by virtue of their ideas, beliefs, and allegiances. To be sure, they were affected by overarching economic, social, and cultural changes brought about, in large measure, by the government's program of modernization. But those changes were significant, in [author's] view, precisely because they influenced the way people apprehended the world. Nicholas dedicated to absolutism, even though appointed first a minister (Goremykin) who was amenable to reform. Subsequent ministers, especially V. K. Plehve, were similarly absolutist. Plehve committed to repression, stomped down on Finnish autonomy, didn't want to give any group a say in gov't. Had a hard time distinguishing between socialists and others opposed to a lesser extent to the Gov't. Witte, architect of industrialization and still influential in Gov't during 1905 another example of actor who wanted to introduce profound change to Russia without seriously considering the consequences thereof. Lack of bureaucratic centralization, or even directives, on how governors were supposed to deal with local unrest and report it. Led to chaos and wide variety of different responses to it when it cropped up. Statute of 1881 gave ability to place into effect measures for increased security - even before revolution widely used, by March 1906 60 of 78 provinces had some level invoked. Police badly organized, insufficient in number. Not helped by the Tsar's seeming callousness and lack of attention, and his habit of issuing promises and plans of reform right after reaffirming autocracy. Encouragement of petitions by government in fact allowed even more criticism, organization, and meetings to come together, creating a second wave of liberal criticism. Called for limitations on autocracy and showed a shift to the left. Though in end not a fundamental change, concerted and highly successful assault on authority from mid-1904 to late 1905. De-facto enhancement of freedom of the press, which reported actively and vividly while keeping an eye on what restrictions still technically in effect. Pro-Government mobs and peasant gangs (some known as Black Hundreds) engaged in violence against anyone looking well-educated. Lots of pogroms. Police massively ineffective, or joined in disturbances of public order. Mob law, assassinations of public officials, not a good time for law and order. Labor unrest the most potent form of popular defiance of the Government, even as strikes and labor organizations were technically illegal. Over early 1905 increasingly politicized in demands and expectations. Became more disciplined, SD and SR had more prominence in articulation and management of these movements. However, workers didn't have hegemony over the revolution, and these political influences only remained incipient. Attained a wide range of improvements, though some not particularly significant. Professional unions, and a "Union of Unions", indicative of much higher professional and worker organization Beginning of appearance of proto-Soviets, representing all workers in a certain geographical area or city. No real pattern to peasant unrest, but quite a bit of it - probably mostly spontaneous. Still had positive viewpoint on Tsar, however, so didn't really take a 'revolutionary' tone. By 1906 openly voted for representatives to Duma who were directly anti-authoritarian. Militancy caught Government by surprise Russia was able to retain an elected legislature and a panel of political parties that could speak for their own various social and economic interests. The revolutionaries in 1905 failed to achieve their major goal of completely dismantling the autocratic regime, but the old order did not come out of the conflict undamaged. The autocracy had been significantly weakened by the events of 1905, and by the time the next devastating revolution arose in 1917 the ruling class would be powerless to maintain its control. "The Revolution of 1905"

Joshua Sanborn

"On the eve of the February Revolution, then, the Russian Empire was thoroughly unsettled, as millions of depressed, desocialized migrants struggled desperately to survive among a native population itself stricken socially and economically by the loss of its healthy men and plagued by goods shortages and runaway inflation. All of the tsar's subjects, migrant or not, found themselves targeted by military and civilian officials increasingly emboldened and adept at massive population planning, in which the highest government organ in the land could seriously discuss the displacement of millions of people and expect to pull it off in a short period of time." "In the Russian Empire alone, more young farmers, workers, and clerks migrated from their homes to military units in the west of the Empire over a two-week period in the summer of 1914 (3,915,000) than had gone from Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belorussia, Latvia, and Russia to North America in the entire wave of massive emigration from Eastern Europe in 1880-1914 (3,715,000). These figures do not include the 1.4 million men who were already serving tours of duty in the Russian army or the thousands of officer wives, nurses, doctors, and other auxiliary forces that streamed westward at the outset of the war. By the end of the war, the total number of men mobilized into the active army was 14,923,000, a number that again exceeds the roughly 5,000,000 internal migrants (pereselentsy) who pulled up stakes in the last two decades of imperial rule" High command's attitude towards civilians, early in the war, bred complications - "when push came to shove, combat planners treated civilian populations as complications that needed to be minimized. Houses were hiding places for the enemy, fields were potential fodder, and individuals were dangerous as potential spies and expensive as potential charity cases. Civilians were, in short, a Clausewitzian friction that introduced chance, disruption, and disorder into a conceptual and physical space that military men spent their lives trying to control in one way or another." Economic disaster, desocialization of military, violence as an increasingly normal part of day to day life that was accepted. Increasing drafts of previously insulated ethnic groups and populations into the Imperial war machine. "Unsettling the Empire: Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Russia during World War I"

Eric Lohr

"The rapid increases in production by the urban defence industry led to a massive influx of peasants to the cities, increasing the urban population by as much as 6 million by 1917. The institutions and infrastructure of the cities, which could barely cope with the rapid growth of the pre-war years, were simply overwhelmed." Tons of women in workplace, "The proportion of women in industry rose from 27 per cent in 1914 to 43 per cent in 1917" Tsar gave ground on allowing "special councils with officials, private entrepreneurs and Duma deputies to deal with the economic crisis and co-ordinate national responses to the war effort" In addition concession to "allowing the All-Russian Union of Zemstvo and Municipal Councils (Zemgor) to form. Zemgor took on such tasks as caring for the welfare and needs of the massive wave of refugees that appeared in internal provinces and providing aid and nursing for convalescent soldiers." Big deal in administration - "They also worked in close cooperation with some of the more progressive branches of the administration such as the food supply administration of the Ministry of Agriculture, assuming what one historian has called 'parastatal' functions. In some measure, liberal society was simply taking over the state" "War and revolution, 1914-1917"

William Bruce Lincoln

"[The author's] latest book is intended to provide the "long-needed synthesis of the Great Reform era" of the third quarter of the nineteenth century and to place this period in the context of the history of imperial Russia." His focus is on the legislative history of the reforms and the bureaucratic politics that engendered them. The reforming bureaucrats as well as moderates and revolutionaries within Russian society operated with a set of concepts and terms such as glasnost' (public debate of political and social issues and policy options), zakonnost' (lawful rule and functioning of government and the bureaucracy), and proizvol (autocratic arbitrariness), which defined their agenda and aspirations for the future evolution of Russian state and society. In particular, this political vocabulary circumscribed the limits and content of intrabureaucratic struggles over the course of state policy throughout this period. [The author] is acutely aware that such generalized and often nebulous ideas embodied a range of denotations and connotations depending on the context and the speaker, and he makes some provocative observations on how their meaning varied over time. In his view the architects of the Great Reforms sought to achieve two contradictory goals-preserve autocracy and create a new civil society. Thus, they employed an artificial policy of glasnost' that circumscribed the topics for public discussion and, on Alexander II's orders, coopted leading public figures into the government to reduce opposition to the reforms. Likewise, these officials viewed zakonnost' as a moral force to be imposed on Russia to bring change in a gradual, orderly fashion. [He] argues persuasively that Alexander III's counterreforms, with their emphasis on autocratic control, adhered to a similar view of zakonnost' and were designed to correct the inadequacies of the Great Reforms rather than obliterate the reform institutions. Unfortunately, by century's end Russia needed a different concept of zakonnost' to protect civil order and property rights, thus facilitating the social and economic transformation already underway. Leading representatives of society recognized this and assailed autocracy for acting arbitrarily rather than according to law. "The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia"

Sheila Fitzpatrick

"[The author] chooses to anchor her analysis of collectivization very much in pre-revolutionary Russian history. For her the figure for collectivization is the return to serfdom of "Stalin's peasants." [The author] offers the first large-scale study of collectivization and its impact upon the peasantry since the opening of the archives in the late 1980s. She sees the Potemkin village at the center of official discourse about the post-collectivization peasantry, a village meant to signify the close personal relationship and intimacy between the leader and his people. But she means this only in an ironic sense, since her evidence shows enormous peasant hostility to the regime and its policies. [the author] tells a story of resistance and accommodation instead, much like the relationship between colonial subjects and their oppressors conceived by those working in subaltern studies. Along the way she also maps the structure of the collectivized village, its administration, and the relationship of the collective farm to party and state institutions." [The author] provides the first clear guide to the structure, social com position, and power grid of the collective farm. But peasant life and culture, local politics, and agricultural practices are somehow not central to the book. They appear only insofar as they relate to apparent peasant attitudes toward the regime. Adoption of the model of peasants as "sub-alterns" cannot mask this fact. The purges, she provocatively argues, had far less impact on the countryside than on the cities, and were likely to be remembered less than the famine or collectivization; however, she acknowledges that there is no reliable way to specify that impact. Here the sources are limiting, for [the author] is unable to chronicle decision-making and local implementation, or even local response to official decrees and signals. Instead of an analysis of Stalinism as "civilization" in the country side, or a deep interpretation of power relations in practice, we get a kaleidoscopic and highly anecdotal or "representational" series of exam ples, largely drawn from peasant letters to newspapers and other institutions. villages were plenty divided, factious—not necessarily in solidarity; e.g. economic resentment of neighbors better off, but there was also : rising peasant literacy; regime encouraged writing of petitions and surprisingly the regime was actually response; these would often include denunciations of officeholders by saying they had links to kulaks. "Stalin's Peasants"

Nove and Millar

-Survival of the regime required the harshness that was seen throughout collectivization (from the perspective of Stalin and his regime, given the aims of the regime) -Seemed a sound decision for the Bolsheviks to make the peasants do something "for their own good" as they were seen as backwards and outmoded in their thinking -Collectivization and its brutalities were exacerbated by the sense of isolation, danger, and *NEED FOR SPEED* as perceived by Stalin -First Five Year Plan was a race ran too fast -the felt need for speed really was genuine -the Stalinist approach occurred because it was the only way to get the peasants into the collective farms in order to jumpstart this cycle of fiscal exploitation -There is no evidence to suggest that the peasants would have withdrawn from the market even if the terms of trade had been turned against them -no evidence that the terms of trade even had to be turned against them -collectivization was NOT necessary for the industrialization drive, and it wasn't optimal either -it was a disaster just like a hurricane or any other natural disaster -economically, no one benefitted from collectivization, including those that promoted rapid development "A Debate on Collectivization"

Mark Steinberg

A number of themes recur in both the documents and the historical introductions. Above all was the desire for freedom, but with an insistence that the freedom be exercised morally. This proviso, however, often combined with lower-class mistrust of elites to lead many people to favor freedom for the masses alone and not for the bourgeoisie. Accordingly, many people called for a strong government capable of defending that freedom and felt increasingly alienated from the Provisional Government when it showed itself incapable of doing so. The lower classes' desire for a strong government thus often coexisted and contrasted with a wish to control their own lives. The desire for freedom continued after the Bolshevik seizure of power, expressing itself most notably in popular anger at the forcible dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. At the same time, lower-class voices were far from unanimous, differing over such issues as continuation of the war, the degree to which the lower classes should demand power locally, and identification of who precisely were the friends and the enemies of freedom and of the revolution. Lower-class rhetoric, especially among workers, was often bookish and bombastic and at the same time ungrammatical. Often lower-class writers would misstate words, although in an understandable way (much like Warren Harding's inadvertent invention of the word "normalcy" in the 1920 American presidential campaign). The slight bump in morale the Provisional Government initially triggered actually may have made things worse—they were expected to cause fundamental changes, but failed horribly, letting peasants and soldiers down. Fed up, and out of options, Russians began looking for other solutions, for other options that might grant them the relief they needed. "Voices of Revolution, 1917"

Moshe Lewin

Arg: Countering Trotsky, [the author] argues "it is not true that the concentration of power that reached its apogee with the Stalinist regime was the result of the ideas and splits of 1903-1904. It is in the history of a later period, in the events that followed the Revolution and the way in which they molded theory, that its origin is to be found. Neither the theory of "war communism" nor the diametrically opposite notions on which the NEP was based have any connection with pre-Revolutionary preoccupations and theories." It is trying to salvage a political system that had gone autocratic because the Civil War necessitated the centralization of power. He attempted to toe the fine line between avoiding dictatorship and keeping enemies at bay. This led to policy which is seemingly contradictory. For the sake of the former, Lenin rejected nationalism, fought against bureaucracy, and attempted to remove Stalin from power; yet, it was Lenin who argued for Party unity at the Tenth Party Congress. [The author] argues citing evidence gathered largely from Lenin's Testament, dictated while lying on his sickbed. Also vital was the agrarian revolution of 1918, as seizure of land by peasants made many small-holding farms. The strain and decomposition of the ordeals made the extensive use of administrative and coercive actions seem natural - the revolutionary masses were being progressively eased out as meaningful partners in power. The coercive measures initially devised mainly for the bourgeoisie were later applied to other groups, and the militarization drive was all consuming. As even groups on the side of the revolution shifted away caused the state to want to use ever-present vigilance. "Because of the destruction of so many previous cultural, political, and economic advances, the country and the new state became more open and vulnerable to some of the more archaic features of the Russian historico-political tradition and less open to the deployment of its forward-looking and progressive features." "Civil War; Dynamics and Legacy" "Lenin's Last Struggle, The Dictatorship in the Void"

Terry Martin

Distinctly positive, proactive, indeed affirmative, steps the Soviet Union took to promote the development of national minorities. Two positions: one led by Bukharin and Piatakov believing the withering away of national identity was central to Marxist theory, other led by Lenin and Stalin believed they would alienate national minorities, and therefore hurt the revolutionary cause. Identifies three premises through which Lenin and Stalin addressed the nationalities question. First, the Marxist premise highlighted the danger of nationalism in its ability to create national alliances above class alliances. By granting national minorities the right to self-determination, the government could undermine the power of nationalist aims. Without the cause of nationalism to unite these groups, class divisions could arise, leading naturally to support for the Soviet state. Second, the modernization premise held that national consciousness was an essential step in the evolution of history, which had to persist for a substantial amount of time before ushering in a global communist society. Finally, the colonial premise held that Great Russians had for centuries acted as colonizers and exploiters of the Empire's minorities. This was known as Great Russian, or Great power, chauvinism, a tendency that the Soviet government had inherited from its imperial forebears, and which Lenin strove to eliminate. -Created not a few national republic but tens of thousands of national territories -Lenin taking a far more cautious approach, recognizing that revolution wasn't complete and the time wasn't ready as opposed to Bukharin and Piatakov who assumed an internationalism-believed national consciousness was a necessary phase to reach internationalism but didn't want to hurry it as he did before (potentially constituting an acknowledgement of error on Lenin's part "An Affirmative Action Empire"

Peter Holquist

Focusing on the Don Territory, he examines the politics of food supply, surveillance and violence, and how the pressures of war led Reds and Whites to do similar things. Russians on opposing sides during their civil war behaved much like each other and not unlike Europeans. What distinguished the Bolsheviks was that they kept doing during peacetime what other European leaders did only during wartime. The author thankfully avoids neologisms except for "parastatal complex." He prefers this term to "civil society" because Russia's voluntary civilian organizations were not institutionalized in law nor as independent of the state as were their counterparts further west. [The author] perceives a remarkable continuity running through the entire period of World War I, the Revolutions, and the Civil War period. In case after case, successive regimes utilized the work of predecessors and built on existing institutions. Even the revolutions of February and October, 1917, failed to produce the expected discontinuities. Moreover, ideology plays a considerably diminished role in [the author's] story. Both Whites and Reds operating on the Don resorted to often similar policies, and these were frequently drawn from those pursued by the wartime tsarist regime and the ill-fated Provisional Government. Particularly valuable is [the author's] identification of the statist and anti-commercial prejudices of the educated. In light of this, we should not regard rivalry between state and society, but between those in government and those outside over how best to use the state, as the key theme in modern Russian history. He discusses the impact of these biases on policies and how they predisposed professors and professionals who did not agree with Bolshevism to support the Bolsheviks. Within this context, he reminds us that many Bolshevik policies had their roots in war-time tsarist practice and that often the same people did the same things before and after October. [The author] agrees with those who see the years 1914 through to 1922 as a distinct period in European history from the perspective of national state-building and violence, and considers it the proper context for Russian events. The Russian revolution was not only a Russian story but a European story, because the war changed Russia and its empire, much as it had changed all the other belligerents. "Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921"

Jeffrey Rossman

Focusing primarily on textile workers in the important Ivanovo Industrial Region (IIR) of Soviet Russia during the industrialization drive of the First Five-Year Plan (FFYP, 1928-1932), the author details individual and collective acts of resistance to Joseph Stalin's "revolution from above." Working-class resistance included mass demonstrations, bread riots, strikes, slowdowns, individual acts of industrial sabotage, distribution of subversive literature, acts of violence against authorities or property, and subversive speeches at factory assemblies (p. 8). [The author] argues that there existed a "social contract" between workers and the state; that is to argue against the idea of an oppressive state exploiting docile workers. Workers were willing to endure sacrifices to build socialism, but only to a certain extent. Workers were aware of not only the divergence between the Soviet "worker's paradise" and their actual reality, but also that other workers in Moscow and St. Petersburg had things better off than they. Strikes were framed in Marxist terms by defining in- and out-groups of who was and was not a worker; perhaps this is an example of "speaking Bolshevik". Ultimately, the state was forced to compromise with workers' demands, even if not to the fullest extent. "Workers Resistance Under Stalin"

Hans Rogger

For populists, the narod meant the peasants: They were to be the political actors who would bring about revolution and social transformation. The role of the intelligentsia was thus rather limited in scope; populists were charged with "going to the people" and educating the peasants about their political power, and then precipitating a political moment—usually one of political terror, such as an assassination—that the narod could seize, and use to bring about revolution. Russian populism and social democracy differed significantly in their platforms and views of Russian society. Populists placed their faith in the inherently revolutionary peasantry, while social democrats believed it the duty of radical intellectuals to raise the consciousness of the working class themselves. Populists looked to spontaneous insurgency and terror as productive of political transformation, while social democrats believed in a highly-disciplined party (though the extent of this centralism was contested). In short, social democrats believed that they could make the Russian people revolutionary—and populists believed they already were. Conflicts within the Duma multiplied over educational matters, foreign affairs, persecution of labor unions, and the budget. Though he had originally hailed Stolypin as Russia's savior, by 1911 Third Duma president Guchkov resigned in protest against Stolypin's increasingly violent and reactionary treatment of the legislature, claiming he had lost his faith in the possibility of peaceful evolution. After Stolypin's death in September 1911, political contest between the government and its critics in the Duma started to grow more troublesome. The tsar diminished the power of Stolypin's successor Kokovtsov by separating the office of premier from the office of the minister of interior, and following Kokovstsov he appointed the apathetic Goremykin, who had no interest or ability to lead a cabinet of ambitious men. Ministers refused to appear before the Duma for months on end and tried to cut back its rights of budgetary control, legislative initiative, and immunity for statements made from its podium. Yet for all its restlessness, the Duma's basic composition remained unchanged. The right third of the house, which received increased subsidies from the tsar, was on the government's side. The left was oppositionist, and the center was wavering and unpredictable. When the Fourth Duma was elected in 1912, it was dominated by men of privilege and property and not likely to lead an assault on the tsarist regime. Even the oppositionists in the left wing were still divided on how to respond to signs of renewed rebelliousness amongst urban workers and students. This uncertainty was reflected in the many divisions that took place within the Duma parties and their failure to create a unified opposition. "Russia in the Age of Modernization and Revolution"

Paul Avrich

Instead of promoting the equality the socialist system claimed to espouse, grain requisitions were exploitative in much the same way as the tsarist system that preceded them. They "rekindled the age-old struggle between the rural population and the urban-based state authority." Instead of advancing Russian society or communism, the requisition policies which made up the backbone of war communism were actually a return to the past. The Bolshevik grain requisitions were incredibly unpopular with peasants, and although Lenin was sympathetic to the peasants' complaints, he understood the problems the large and recalcitrant peasantry posed to a dictatorship of the proletariat. At the 8th Party Congress in 1920, Lenin said that "'so long as we are living in a country of small peasants,' ... 'capitalism in Russia shall have a stronger economic base than communism." In March 1921 the sailors of Kronstadt, the naval fortress in the Gulf of Finland, rose in revolt against the Bolshevik government, which they themselves had helped into power. Under the slogan of "free soviets,'' they established a revolutionary commune that survived for sixteen days, until an army came across the ice to crush it. After a savage struggle, the rebels were subdued. [The author] vividly describes the uprising and examines it in the context of the development of the Soviet state. "To accomplish this, Kronstadt must be set within a broader context of political and social events, for the revolt was part of a larger crisis marking the transition from War Communism to the New Economic Policy, a crisis which Lenin regarded as the gravest he had faced since coming to power. It is necessary, moreover, to relate the rising to the long tradition of spontaneous rebellion in Kronstadt itself and in Russia as a whole. Such an approach, one hopes, will shed some interesting light on the attitudes and behavior of the insurgents." It is important, above all, to examine the conflicting motives of the insurgents and their Bolshevik adversaries. The sailors, on the one hand, were revolutionary zealots, and like zealots throughout history they longed to recapture a past era before the purity of their ideals had been defiled by the exigencies of power. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, having emerged victorious from a bloody Civil War, were not prepared to tolerate any new challenge to their authority. Throughout the conflict each side behaved in accordance with its own particular goals and aspirations. "Kronstadt, 1921"

Gregory Freeze

Much of the historiography of Russia focuses on the four soslovie, or estates: the nobility, clergy, townspeople, and the peasantry. But our ideas of soslovie were adopted in the 19th and 20th centuries, and are often wrong. Actually, soslovie emerged after Peter the Great, and was originally used to describe legal estates and bodies--it included prior definitions like chin. It only acquired its full meaning in the 19th century, when it developed a slightly pejorative meaning of "caste." The changing meaning suggests that the system was changing as well, maturing instead of dissolving. [The author] argues sosloviaa were not artificial creations of the state developed in order to better control society, and that in fact the government often sought to weaken them by incorporating groups like the Jews. He also argues that the sosloviaa were remained strong through the Great Reforms, and that the state remained devoted to them after 1870--some sosloviaa developed into the proletariat, others into the radical intelligentsia.

Martin Malia

NEP true socialism, continuation of "state capitalism" of pre-war Communism? Originally seen as harsh necessity and retreat, but by 1924 with it stabilizing the system and the splits within the party came to be increasingly accepted as the straight path. NEP became "ostensible issue" that was turned against Trotsky. Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924 sealed the deal. "at the beginning of 1924, Soviet Russia had developed a novel form of mixed economy. Agriculture, services, and petty commerce were abandoned to private peasants a new entrepreneurial class of "nepmen". "By 1924 Russia enjoyed a genuine, if modest, prosperity for the first time since 1913." "The Soviet Tragedy, Chapter 5, The Road Not Taken: NEP, 1921-1928"

Peter Holquist

Policy of mass violence, Soviet state as a gardening state since Civil War. The institution of labor camps became part of this larger conception, as a space where those who "could be redeemed through collective labor" were 'filtered' from those who had to be purged, such as the twenty-five thousand who were executed in the eighteen months following the end of the Civil War. Scientific, The enemies of the state were both quantifiable, understandable, and trackable - one could find their pictures enumerated in books pulled from passports and could know who were irredeemable and who were to be treated with 'leniency' based on NKVD proclamation. However, the enemies of the state were also more numerous than the state could quantify, could be party members, Bolsheviks. Herein lies the tragedy - as though it was justified on the grounds of being a scientific policy, the terror took the form of both a targeted removal of all the enemies of the state and a mass arrest of even the innocent until ever expanding quotas were filled. "State Violence as Technique"

Alfred Rieber

Reforms in Russia tended to be initiated from the top and move down, however arbitrary nature of power and rule made it hard for reforms to stick without being re-covered up. Peasantry as unable to produce leaders of its own. In Imperial Russia, social structures other than the tsar tended to be weak, and susceptible to change from social pressures. There were three main strands of culture spread from the elites to the masses: the imperial idea, the belief that Russia had to be a multicultural power; the ethic of social service, and the commitment to industrialization. By the end of the imperial period there was growing fragmentation in Russian society, everything was falling apart due to "uneven and irregular development" throughout Russia, and old forms of society and government prevented new unification along class lines. "Sedimentary society" refers to the fact that although the state tried to organize new social groups, the new ones did not completely eliminate the older conditions--successive social forms were layered on top of one another. "The Sedimentary Society"

Daniel Field

Russian peasants believed that the tsar was their benefactor and intercessor; this view is one of 'naive monarchism' within the historiography. [The author] suggests that the peasants' relationship with the tsar is slightly more complicated, and lays out various examples of peasant resistance. Peasant uprisings increased in response to the uprising, but decreased by the end of the decade. "Rebels in the Name of the Tsar"

Tom Kemp

Serfdom part of structure of backwardsness, including compulsory labor services barschina. Abolition more marked by lack of change precipitated by it, very little economic change as majority of peasants still had insufficient lands, former serf-owners retained land and social power. Penetration of capitalist relations into countryside long and drawn out. Industrial development and investment mostly driven by state, favoring St. Petersberg - built railroads, etc. Majority of Russians still lived at fringes of market economy. Stolypin reform driven by continued fear of peasants, idea of increasingly localized violence that had ability to expand in scope as seen in 1905. Peasants taking full title weakened old communal order, and associated with what was before then a move to urban areas of population at large. Especially from late 1880s to 1900, again from 1909 - even though great spurt of industrialization ended by 1901, with failure of private capital to take over where state left off. After 1905 more industrial growth driven by state, especially of railroads, especially of mining and metallurgical areas. "Industrialization in Nineteenth-Century Europe"

Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov

Serious difficulties of transition to Urbanite - religion, ties to community and family, illiteracy, and conflict with foremen at jobs. Until 1917 passport will still stay "peasant" on it. Until mid-1880s gov't still saw peasants in factories as just peasants, and only after that started addressing specific issues of workers (child labor, safety inspections, etc - but still quite limited). However, even so, pushed out of village to go make money! Just not producing enough to maintain living standards. Spread within workplace, and cultivation thereof, a long and drawn out process with much care taken and sharing of information has to overcome severe access and knowledge hurdles. Through 'circles'. However, undereducated and educated kind of have troubles interacting - women also pushed to corners. Replication of traditional social roles and hierarchies within revolutionary groups, with 'students' leading. "A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia"

Gail Lapidus

Soviet leaders tried to use laws in attempt to remake Russian society, an attempt to give it new foundations. Plus, because of lack of resources: "government by proclamation' was the least costly of mechanisms for social change," but gave symbolic element of commitment, but this form of reform was not that effective at replacing old norms, except among party elite. They created the Zhenotdel as "female auxiliary" to the Party, but its members weren't really fully members of the Party, and the Zhenotdel struggled in rural, more conservative areas, because Bolsheviks associated with radical beliefs about sexuality. After reforms, when Stalin takes power, things reverse course. Stalin sees women as backward and as epitomizing "the ignorance and conservatism of Russian life" 80. He was worried feminists/women would damage youth development of socialist/communist spirit, so he shifts focus away from emancipation and onto what they have to do. Stalin wants to mobilize women into the workforce, thinks this will bring about equality. Stalinist policy reinforced "differentiation and complementarity" between genders rather than total equality. Women were largely excluded from political life, and used only as figureheads "Women in Soviet Society"

Getty and Naumov

Stalin's rise ably assisted by control of the levers of personnel assignment. NEP necessary concession to rebuild shattered economy, and divides in the party papered over by 10th party congress. Stalin's appeal also came from more interest in practicalities of party, constant appeals to unity in face of oppositionists, and presentation of self as unpretentious but calm man of "golden mean". Bolsheviks, "despite their enforced monopoly on the press, political organizing, ad violence, found themselves a small minority floating in a hostile sea of peasants. As late at 1927 [...] only one-half of one percent of the rural population were Communists." In Party itself "By mid-1924 only 25 percent of secretaries of district party committies had been in the party before 1917; the figure of those running provinces was only 49 percent. One in forty party members was illiterate, and one in four had fewer than four years of schooling. Some new party members had to ask what the Politburo was." Stalin sat on all three subcommittees that carried out day to day work between sitting of full body - Politburo, Orgburo, and Secretariat. 90% of personnel appointments from Orgburo recommendations with top leaders rubber stamping. "Certainly the CC staff responded to Stalin's and Molotov's instructions and political tastes, but the image of Stalin personally and politically deciding each appointment is not accurate." Strong commitment to discipline, centralization of personnel choice, and organizational line were things that had little to do with Stalin's personal influence - originally from "anti-Stalin oppositionists". "it was a logicial response to the interaction of party traditions and goals in a difficult environment." Early proponents included Zinoviev, Trotsky, Sapronov. Much information came through official party channels "Stalin loyalists controlled," lending to a "one-sided picture of the issues and dynamics behind political struggles in Moscow" for people like Yezhov in "far off Kirgizia". Especially since presented "in terms of principled positions" on agriculture, industry, foreign policy, so on, even as "changed their principled positions constantly". "Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin's 'Iron Fist'"

Terrence Emmons

State had two main reasons for emancipation: Economic development and political and economic stability. It was understood by Alexander II that defeat in Crimea was due to "economic backwardness," and they believed that eliminating serfdom would overcome this. And peasant unrest during the Crimean War scared the gov't, showed how effectively peasantry could disrupt war efforts. Alexander said it was due to "the deterioration of relations between the peasants and their gentry masters." Peasants (except household serfs) freed in communities, but had to live under same system for two years, and allow estates to draw up land division according to rules. Peasants had to stay on their lots paying their dues for at least nine years after the proclamation. Peasants get bad land, and need to compensate property owners for it. Ends up benefiting state as government leverages debts landowners already owe it and giving bonds as way to peasants to owe state. "The Peasant and Emancipation"

Ronald Suny

Studying the Soviet Union is not quite like studying any other country in the world. While historians within the Soviet Union are compelled to portray their nation's past with the requisite degree of heroism and inexorable progress, in the West their colleagues face serious limitations of access to sources, the absence of basic works on aspects of Soviet history, and a variety of personal and political biases that inevitably influence the outcome of their research. Soviet historians write under the "guidance" of a political orthodoxy dictated by the party and colored in the language of Marxism-Leninism. Their Western counterparts attempt a cool objectivity, usually by dismissing the relevance of Marxism as an analytical tool and cloaking themselves in an ostensibly "value-free" social science. International rivalries, conflicting social values, and the more mundane exigencies of forging a professional career in a competitive marketplace determine the political and cultural contexts in which histories of the USSR are written. Nevertheless, many historians on both sides of the barricades seek freedom from bias, and in recent years more and more interesting work has appeared on Russia's history, both in the West and in the Soviet Union, which prompts a reconsideration of significant parts of that experience. After nearly seventy years of studying 1917, is it possible to come to some consensus on the contours and meaning of the 1917 Revolution? (No, he doesn't answer this question.) By the fall, change was seen as necessary and almost inevitable. [The author] lays out four main paths which Russia could follow: the first was to continue the Provisional Government; the second to pursue a government only of the upper classes, which was favored by the Kadets; the third a multiparty socialist republic, where moderate socialists would coexist with the Bolsheviks, and the propertied would be excluded; and the fourth was simply the Bolsheviks. But two of these solutions were clearly not viable for peasants and soldiers—the Provisional Government had already proved its ineptitude, and rule by the upper classes would be little different from the tsarist regime. While the third solution had benefits, and was supported by many peasants and soldiers, the reluctance of Mensheviks and other moderate socialists to exclude the upper classes from their vision of the Russian socialist nation left many poor Russians fed up. "Revisiting the Old Story"

David Macey

The Stolypin agrarian reforms of 1906-1914 were a series of reforms to the agricultural sector instituted by Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. The main goals of the reform were twofold: there were the economic goals, and then there were the political goals. The economic reforms addressed the post-emancipation agrarian problem and were designed to raise agricultural productivity through changes in peasant land organization, such as large-scale individual farming, agricultural cooperatives, and affordable lines of credit. The political reforms addressed the threat to noble landownership that had emerged during the revolution of 1905 with the peasantry's demand for an additional allotment of land and sought to develop a consciousness of private property amongst the peasantry as a way of protecting noble property rights. The conflicts that arose from the Stolypin reforms were not conflicts between systems of property ownership or systems of agriculture. Rather, these conflicts came out of competing interests within the peasantry. Most of the contentious issues were in regards to claiming the titles of land and the separation of small groups of peasants to khutora or the formation of khutora on peasant land bank land. Eighty per cent of peasant land still remained in communal strips, and most was still cultivated under the three-field system and remained short of capital, cattle, and draft animals. The reforms were not given enough time, the number of peasants that were affected was too small, and the predicted gains were too far away in the future to affect the opinion of most peasants or solidify their attachment to private property. The Stolypin reforms were the greatest effort ever undertaken by the government to the effect of peasant society, yet in the long run they still did not and could not result in the cultivation of a group of efficient private-property producers. "Government Actions and Peasant Reactions During the Stolypin Reforms"

Charles Timberlake

The Tsarist government sought to conceal the emergence of new social classes in order to maintain the same social stability of the pre-industrialization period, while at the same time it continued to promote development. The government tried to assimilate the emerging middle class into the existing social system by extending ranks and privileges that rewarded upward social mobility through bureaucratic service to the Tsar and hard work in commerce and industry. The Tsarist government's need for specialists grew after the industrialization of the 1880's. To meet this need, the government made new higher education institutes and admitted more students to the universities. As the diversity of the middle class increased, so too did job designations of zemstvo personnel. This was especially true in the provinces where zemstvo was the major employer of specialists in the area. These zemstvo specialists developed a group identity shaped by their zemstvo service, and some organized with other zemstvo specialists in their profession. Over 90,000 specialists were distributed among the thirty-four zemstvo provinces, which amounted to more than 2,000 people per province working in industry, trade, and civil service. This led to the formation of a "provincial" middle class. The Russian middle class was meticulously shrouded by the Tsarist bureaucracy in such a way as to prevent any kind of recognition of itself or separation from the established social structure. In addition to this, differences in beliefs about the estate system, politics, and in the types of work conducted by professionals in cities and those in the provinces exacerbated the already tenuous connections between the middle groups. The middle class was only barely emerging by the time the Bolshevik Revolution came around, at which point the institutions and connections that had been slowly developing into a middle class identity were promptly destroyed. "The middle classes in late Tsarist Russia."

David Moon

The defeat of Russia in 1856 by France and Great Britain in the Crimean War exposed not only the weakness of the Russian armed forces, but also the inability of the country to raise a well-armed professional army along the lines of the French and British armies. If Russia was to remain a viable European power, the only way out for the government of Alexander II was to abolish serfdom as a means to modernize the Russian armed forces. The Statutes of 19 February 1861 did not abolish serfdom in one fell swoop, but rather set out a graduated process of three stages - a two-year transition period, an indeterminate period of "temporary obligation," and a forty-nine-year redemption period. The Statutes provided for regional and practical considerations in an attempt to balance the unequal interests of the government, noble estate owners, and the serf. For most peasants, the Statutes did not lead to an immediate improvement in their lives. In 1861 , the government was in no position to extend financial assistance to the freed serfs. Its finances were seriously constrained by the banking crisis of 1859. The freed serfs would have to bear the full cost of any compensation to estate owners. In terms of the sizes of their land allotments and the dues or payments they owed for them, the former serfs were worse off during the early years after the emancipation and better off during the later years of redemption. The impact of the Statutes on the nobility was not entirely negative. Many noble landowners adapted successfully to the changing circumstances. Some sold their estates and moved to the cities. Others rented out part or all of their land to peasants. Nevertheless, a considerable number struggled to understand and accept the changes. Several educated nobles took up the cause of the peasants and their interests to criticize the reforms and autocracy. In time, the Statutes failed to develop a viable social and economic order in rural Russia. [The author] argues that the peasant revolutions of 1905-1907 and 1917-1918 were the results of this failure to address the "peasant question." The extreme reluctance of the tsar and his government to share power and work effectively with representatives of the population to tackle the wide range of social and economic problems inside the empire basically put an end to tsarism in Russia. Why 1861? Things may have been bad but not as bad as originally thought. The Russian economy before emancipation not as bad as laid out by Soviet historians, but it was lagging behind the rest of Europe. There was lots of peasant unrest before emancipation, but the numbers were exaggerated by the Soviets--plays into ideas of class struggle. There was increasing criticism of serfdom on humanitarian grounds by Russian intellectuals, especially Herzen and Tugenev, but not all intellectuals opposed and "humanitarian churchmen and radical intellectuals did not make a direct contribution to reforming or abolishing serfdom in Russia." "The Abolition of Serfdom"

Joseph Bradley

The development of civil society in tsarist Russia is highly contested, and [the author] says there is no "grammar" of civil society in Russian historiography. Despite the fact that the state was supposedly powerful, there was civic life in imperial Russia, especially in cities, in the form of voluntary associations. These associations developed science, promoted national heritage, and advocated for social reform. The core of civil society was growing in imperial Russia, though maybe it was not as big as in Western Europe. These associations "not only gave civil society meaning, they made an essential contribution to the process by which Russian subjects were becoming citizens" "Although historians have rightly identifled certain major national crises-the famine of 1891-1892, events leading up to the Revolution of 1905, for example-as galvanizing public action in a spirit of opposition to the government, the organizational framework for such public assertiveness was already in place. Overcoming the fear of the authorities, and convening "parliaments," as meetings were often called in the press, associations such as the Free Economic Society and the Russian Technical Society gained in esteem, authority, and trust among the educated population, gains that came at the government's expense." By the time constitutionalism emerged as a general idea was opposed vigorously by autocracy, so revolutionary action became one of the one ways to express desire for change and dissatisfaction with regime as existed. "Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia"

Robert Tucker

The goal of this book is to provide an understanding of Stalin's life and mind pre-1929. One of the big points is that the rule of Lenin made the Bolshevik Party a leader centered movement. Stalin saw Lenin as a revolutionary hero and really wanted to become Lenin's successor in terms of glory, intellectual prowess, and respect rather than just the next leader of the Soviet union. [The author] sort of paints Stalin as a really strong politician. Stalin had secondary status during the war, but had a strong network of party members loyal to him. Striving to become Lenin's successor is also part of what guided Stalin's strategy during the 1920s. In this decade, Stalin constantly tried to make all of his ideas and speeches be seen as interpretations of Lenin's ideas. In reality he had his own ideological theories. One notable thing was Stalin's Russian Chauvinism. He loudly repudiated his Georgian heritage and violently repressed his countrymen's independence after the Civil War. The book ends in 1929 by showing Stalin's egotism and paranoia, two defining problems for the 1930s. [The author] argues that Stalin demanded his subordinates to flatter him all of the time, but that because of the flattery Stalin started to feel like everyone was lying to him.

Mark von Hagen

Triggered unprecedented industrialization mobilization, increase in powers of state. "On 16 July 1914, wide swaths of the Russian Empire were placed under martial law; this included not only the front-line regions and a broad band of territory behind the lines. It also included the two capitals, Moscow and Petrograd," with "virtually unlimited authority to overturn the decision of local civilian governments". However, parastatal complex ended up overwhelming areas where state failed to act adequately. "The Duma, which had already had its powers trimmed in Nicholas's determination to roll back the concessions he had made under pressure in 1905, suffered further limitations with the war and had virtually no power to influence the course of the war. Several wartime finance measures, especially the imposition of taxes, were passed by special enactments of the government, without consulting the Duma" Ethnic policies as result of becoming site of military administration, approached civil war in Kazakh regions, among others. "The First World War, 1914-1918"

Marc Raeff

Two major themes dominate history from Peter The Great till 1917-westernization (or modernization) and revolutionary ferment. The reforms of Peter the Great in the 18th century set into motion the rise of the radical Russian intelligentsia. Peter the Great made state service mandatory for all of the nobility. At first the nobles hated it, but eventually service became seen as the best way to advance and the only way to find a purpose in life (living on rural estates was very boring). "A particular merit of these articles and of the present book is their emphasis on the importance of service for the Russian nobleman. [The author] correctly points out that' historians have exaggerated the resistance' of Russian nobles to obligatory state service following the'death of Peter' the Great, and shows convincingly that service to the state represented the one meaningful way of life for the Russian nobility both before and after obligatory service was abolished in 1762." State service often meant going to the West or Russia's western provinces in order to pick up western culture. This isolated the nobility from the serfs only spoke Russian or who were just generally perceived as uncultured. Going to western Europe also disappointed the nobility because they felt they were unable to apply all of the liberal ideas that they were learning to the autocratic Russian state. Nobility and state had different aims re:westernization, nobility which became intelligentsia wanted to use these western ideas to improve the country whereas state was doing it to preserve its authority both within and without Empire. "Origins of the Russian Intelligensia"

Stephen Cohen

War communism had ideological component, but was just "defense of the revolution." NEP as distinctly unlike Stalin's order, but Stalin did not dare challenge until 1928-1929 as had achieved widespread legitimacy by end 1924. Variations in Stalinism, from "truly revolutionary" early 1930s to rigid conservatism of post-WWII. Worth analyzing which aspects imposed from above and which had authentic roots - don't forget the huge class of people who weren't "little Stalins" but gained upwards mobility in the face of Stalin's system. "Bolshevism and Stalinism"

William Bruce Lincoln

While most countries had spread their industrialization over a century or more, Russia attempted to industrialize its profoundly backward society at breakneck speed. [The author] argues that Russia's efforts to create a middle class and a disciplined workforce while maintaining its autocratic, land-owning aristocracy eventually led to revolt. The revolutionary groups ranged from urban nihilists, for whom political terrorism was an end in itself, to idealistic youths who took to the countryside in hope of activating the Russian peasantry. The most important of the revolutionary groups in terms of Russian history were, however, those such as the Bolsheviks that transformed urban discontent into political action. The conservative groups were composed primarily of the traditional landed elite, the emerging industrial elite, and the defenders of the autocracy within the government. In between were the few, such as Prime Minister Petyr Stolypin and czarist adviser Sergei Witte, who sought a modus vivendi between the two extremes. To maintain the monarchy while establishing political institutions to mediate the ever mounting pressure of popular demands was the challenge that confronted these Russian statesmen. The absence of a stabilizing middle class between these two poles created a vacuum in which the political support essential to a peaceful transition to constitutional monarchy-the fate of almost all of Europe's other autocracies-was missing. In addition, traditions and institutions did not exist in Russia to mediate the conflict between revolutionaries and defenders of the status quo, and industrialization was rapid, so the resulting disturbances were intense. In [the author's] words, "Great changes came at a dizzying pace upon a people who were sadly unprepared to meet them." The Duma was ineffective, [the author] implies, because of the Russians' ignorance of the ways of parliamentary government, an ignorance wrought by a political culture in which the lubricants of parliamentary government- negotiation, bargaining, compromise, and tolerance-were virtually absent. Without a viable Duma, Russia's internal conflict was left to play itself out in a politically closed society, thus precluding a political solution. Despite the failure of the Duma and the persisting social tension, the years between 1910 and 1913 saw a relative calm set in over Russia, according to Lincoln. Strikes continued to abound, but the ruthless suppression of strike leaders and subversive political organizations by the Okrhana, the czar's secret police, kept them from snowballing into a general upheaval. "In War's Dark Shadow"

Stephen Kotkin

[The author] describes a Marxist version of eighteenth-century enlightenment utopias come to life in Russia. The Utopian state's project was to build socialism or to negate and create the opposite of capitalism by destroying all features of the capitalist mode of production, real or imagined. [The author] attempts to move beyond debates over totalitarianism, the roles of Lenin and Stalin, the degree of social support for the regime, and the other stale categories and problems of Soviet historiography to a multilayered examination of power and daily life based on the dynamics of society, culture, and language. Learning to speak and think and be Bolshevik is what constitutes Stalinist "civilization." Similarly, he shows how social identities came to be shaped by public adherence to new state-formulated rituals and vocabularies which allowed the state to appropriate much of the basis for social solidarity and "to render opposition impossible." Socialist competition, shock work, and Stakhanovism are all revealed as forces shaping new working-class identities. There was alienation and atomization, of course, but there was also "positive integration" into a "larger political community" via simultaneous dependency and social benefits. The explanation of the purges in Magnitogorsk in the late 1930s is especially strong. [The author] outlines the meaning of the Communist party and its single historical mission or "truth," the project of sovietism as negation or destruction of capitalism. The analysis is sprinkled with religious metaphors, for the party was the leader in a "theocracy," the motor force in a new society marked already by deep conspiratorial traditions and the sense of being surrounded by capitalist enemies set on destroying socialism. The languages of conspiracy and inquisition were particularly important circumstances, as were the culture of the party and the obsessive search for class enemies. But the purges also required very clear signals from Stalin and his immediate bloc in the leadership; a well-entrenched police with its own culture, mission, and resources; and the campaign-driven and coercive nature of Soviet industrialization. Again, the orders come from above, yet social participation and even enthusiasm contribute from below. After this piece it is no longer possible to offer the evil Stalin or other monodimensional explanations (internal bureaucratic wars, center-periphery conflicts) as sufficient explanation for the purges?or for that matter much else in Soviet history. The analogies to inquisition practice in late medieval Eu rope are particularly suggestive as the need for confessions, witnesses, the naming of networks and co-conspirators, and the entire theater of the trials are shown to flow from the theocratic nature of Soviet power and its ideological project. "Magnetic Mountain"

John Thompson

[This author argues] that the revolution was brought on directly by Russia's involvement in World War I. The unpopular war greatly limited the ability of the provisional government to attend to the economic crisis within the Empire, and in doing so aided the Bolshevik's rise to power with the support of the working class. While first hopeful that the provisional government would be able to solve the crisis, the industrial working class soon grew resentful of the provisional government. By the summer of 1917, it became increasingly clear to workers that their demands and interests aligned most closely with the Bolsheviks, the only significant party not to enter the provisional government. The Bolshevik's victory thus depended upon the economic conditions of the working class, their increasing popularity of the party's platform, and its distinction from the provisional government. In the aftermath of the crisis in May, the moderate socialists (SRs and Mensheviks), still wielding a large following, decided to join the provisional government, effectively forming a coalition government. They justified this on the grounds that (1) doing so would strengthen popular support for the war (2) the government would collapse without their popularity (3) the revolution had to be as democratic as possible during its bourgeois-democratic phase. This decision proved fatal: within the popular mind of workers, it fundamentally linked the moderate socialists with the actions of the provisional government. This also left the Bolsheviks free of responsibility, "able to castigate both the government and the moderate socialists and to attune their program to the people's needs" The summer of 1917 constituted a major shift in the consciousness of the working class that demonstrates the fruition of these trends. The Bolsheviks had planned a June 23 popular demonstration in Petrograd. Even as the moderate socialists took over the event, banning Bolshevik activity and then holding a mass demonstration of their own, Bolshevik ideology and slogans far outnumber Menshevik and SR views: "The moderate socialists' demonstration had turned into a triumphal procession in support of the Bolsheviks" with banners proclaiming, "All Power to the Soviets!" This turning point showed the growing resentment against the Provisional government, and the growing popularity of the Bolsheviks within the urban lower class as the revolution neared crisis. By the summer, these demands also included an end to the war and their own self-government and self-determination in the workplace through the Soviet. Though the revolution was not inevitable, it seems that the Bolsheviks had attained significant clout among the working class. "Revolutionary Russia"

J. Arch Getty

describes this through the eyes of top officials in the Soviet Union during the 30s, who remained "fearful and apprehensive about any and all opposition to their policies." Here the hardwired facts of ideological certainty made any appearance of criticism and dissent tantamount to an attempt to destroy the state - even the most pointed criticisms were answered by a search for solutions that "avoided self-questioning." 1This, mixed with a consciousness of "how little real day to day influence [the state] had out in the countryside," made it easy to place blame for faults upon categorizable elements of society that were engaged in anti-Soviet activity. Within this framework, brutalities and extermination became an "ultimate expression of loyalty to the socialist drive and its administrative embodiments," and fundamental to a policy of defending the state and lashing out at the perceived internal enemies of Bolshevism. Their "nomenklatura discipline [...] overrode all other considerations," as "there was never any dissent [from them] in 1937 and 1938." 25 In fact, "there seems to have been a broad elite consensus at various stages on the need for repression of particular groups [..] At several key junctures Central Committee advocated repressive measures that defied and went beyond those prescribed by Stalin's closest henchmen." "Afraid of Their Shadows"