HISB91 Lecture 12 – February 27

Soviet Communism

- The French revolution was important to the 19th century with its possibilities, liberty,
equality.
- The Russian revolution cast its shadow over the 20th century. We associate it with an
attempt to impose a totalitarian state. Yet it was an attempt to achieve a Utopia:
harmony, peace, without major differences in class. When the soviet imperial
achievement was collapsed, people said that the age of Utopia was over. The Utopian
dream ended in 1989. The attempt to produce a world of peace and harmony.
- The only disjunction that Lenin had after ceasing power. Get rid of private property,
greed, socialize everything. It was thought that everything would flow after that.
- Trotsky was the engineer of the revolution. Soviet Leadership had to improvise.
Freedom of opinion was suppressed for the cause. The Soviet state was a militarized
state during the revolution. Soviets had a system of medals to good workers in coal
mines. A military association.
- Civil war was 1918-1922: Reds (Trotsky Bolsheviks) vs. Whites. (counter-revolutionary)
- Widespread atrocities. You eliminated the enemy. All out war for heaven on earth. If
that’s the vision you don’t worry about deaths of thousands of people. In fact millions of
people died.
- Lenin had hoped that it would incite revolutions elsewhere. 1918 Lenin is pessimistic.
Unless we have support of the great nation, we’re doomed. Foreign intervention instead
of support. The Brits, the Japanese, the Americans, the French intervene for support for
the Whites. Logistical and advisory support.
- Widespread famine, harvest aren’t collected. Epidemics. Terrible losses of life.
- Grain harvest and industrial production down by about 80%
- The Whites won. Lenin improvises. He introduces a new economic policy—New
Economic Policy (NEP). Free market in agriculture. People can harvest and sell their
produce. Trade is legalized. Small private enterprises is encouraged. Foreign investment
is encouraged. Nobody is going to pour money though due the novelty of the system. A
carrot offer. On the political side controls are tight. Censorship is tight. Lenin said that
terror must be intensified, if Soviet aren’t going be on side, we’re going to force them to
be on side.
- Lenin dies in 1924. Power struggle between Trotsky, Stalin, Bukharin, and Zinoviev.
Trotsky was a great figure but old remain on the left. Lenin said don’t trust Stalin.
Genuine proletariat. Many of the other leaders lived abroad, were intelligent, absorbed
Western idealists.
- Trotsky – need the world revolution. Unless we’re supported from abroad, Russian
revolution is to be collapsed.
1
HISB91 Lecture 12 – February 27

- Bukharin and Zinoviev – “rightists” Let’s proceed with this combination a moderate kind
of socialism.
- Stalin – socialism in one country. We have to have genuine socialism without liberal
things. Burrocrats supported Stalin.
- 1929: Stalin victory and 2nd revolution. Drive peasants onto collective farms.
- Collectivization cost Russia 20 million lives. Breakneck Secret police, elements of the
Read army and students to drive the peasants onto collective farms. Kulaks didn’t’ want
to go and were hated the most because they made some money on their own. They
were shot.
- Some of the peasants are driven into the city to work for the industry.
- Great terror 1935-1939. Purges within the party. Bukharin executed. Cheka, then NKVD,
then KGB caught Trotsky in Mexico and drive an ice pick through his head.
- Only 44% of delegates to 1934 party congress survived to attend next congress in 1939.
56% disappeared.
- Of 139 central committee (the heart of the party) members 98 were shot. Many others
were executed. High army commanders shit.
- Head of the secret police disappears.
- Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak: During this terror “Only the dead smile”
- Arthur Koestler: Idealistic Communist wrote “Darkness at Noon” about the mindset.
How could the intelligent politically minded people allow to be ruled that way. How
could they do it? He goes into the psychology of the Bolsheviks. The psychological
brutality that was going on. Great Utopia turned into a monstrosity.
- Who ran this horror? Hard core Stalinists: Khrushev, Suslov, Kosygin, Brezhen, Antropov,
Chernenko
- The youth was ambitious. They are the ones who were responsible of this machinery of
death. Many of them would become powerful.
- Ribbentrop-Molotov (Hitler-Stalin) Pact – 23 August 1919. A friendship pact. Hitler was
the only European leader who Stalin implicitly trusted. A week before the outbreak of
war. Rocked the world. Thought the Soviet Union was something to support.
- Stalin allies himself with who was suppose to be his enemy.
- 1941 Hitler attacks the Soviet Union. Alliance between America and the Soviet Union an
unimaginable alliance.
- Stalin died in 1933. Brezhnev replaced him.
- Gorbachev. 1985: Everything began to crumble. The Soviet Union disintegrated. An
extraordinary experiment that goes as sour as nothing before.