Russian revolution. A very short introduction

by S. A Smith

  In an effort to master this threatening environment, the Bolsheviks classified society into 'exploiters/disenfranchised' - mainly, kulaks, nepmen, spetsy- and 'toilers', who comprised a hegemonic proletariat, the poor peasants and the less reliable middle peasants. Exploiters were deprived of the vote, penalized in terms of taxation, access to higher education and to housing, and barred from membership of the Komsomol or party. By 1927-8 the proportion of those deprived of the vote had risen to 7.7% in the towns and 3.5% in the countryside. From 1928 military service was made compulsory for all male toilers aged 19 to 40, but 'non-toilers' were not entrusted to defend the motherland, receiving a 'white ticket' and being required instead to enrol in the home guard and pay a large military tax. Compulsory military service thus reinforced a definition of citizenship in class as well as gendered terms. In practice class labels were applied fairly arbitrarily. Local Soviets

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  16. Anti-capitalist demonstration, 1920s

  might disenf ranchize middle and even poor peasants for hiring nurses or workers during harvest time on the grounds that this rendered them

  exploiters. Members of religious sects or parish councils might be consigned to the ranks of the kulaks.

  Insofar as the social structure was constituted in part by political mechanisms, the Bolshevik taxonomy bore a distinct resemblance to the tsarist system of social estates, rights and duties being ascribed to groups on the basis of their place in the politico-juridical order. Because

  one's categorization had material consequences for one's life chances -after 1928 the disenf ranch ized did not qualify for rations and were likely to be expelled from state housing - it made real claims on one's social identity. The many who appealed against disenf ranchisement invariably made the point that they were workers and that any lapse into 'non-toiling activity' - i.e. trade - had been due to pressure of

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  circumstances. 'I took up trade not for profit but to support my family.' Their appeals, moreover, attest to the regime's having a certain legitimacy, since even those who felt themselves unjustly treated appear to have believed that disenfranchizement was a legitimate means for weeding out of the system of distribution those who had become rich at the people's expense. Bolshevik ideologywas thus far more than imposed illusion, despite the many contradictions between it and the lived experience of ordinary citizens.

  All my life since the age of eight, when I was left a total orphan, I have striven to earn a crust of bread by doing the hard work of a domestic servant Absolutely alone, illiterate, I have from my earliest childhood dragged out a pitiful existence as a worker. In 1917 I came as a refugee from Lithuania. Of course, I experienced what only someone without a single kopeck to their name endures. With great difficulty I got a job as a servant and remained there until 1919. Then I joined a Jewish kindergarten on the technical side. I lost my job when it shut down. Having barely a single acquaintance in Moscow, being completely alone and still not having mastered Russian, I was completely unable to find a permanent position. The labour exchange found temporary work for me several times. I worked as a day labourer, but to supplement my income I sold sunflower seeds and other bits and pieces for a time. When I began to earn more as a day labourer I gave up this trade. My health is now so broken that I can scarcely do the smallest amount of work and now suddenly I am put on a level with the bourgeoisie, with exploiters who have no understanding of such a dark proletarian life as mine.

  Woman appealing against her loss of voting rights

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  Designing a welfare state

  In addition to categorizing the population, the Soviet state sought to refashion it through education, health care, housing, urban planning, and social work. In its commitment to improve the welfare of its people, it may be seen as an authoritarian variant of the welfare states that were emerging in Europe in this period. Healthcare was an area where the Bolshevik record was particularly impressive, although marred by inequality. War and revolution had led to a drastic deterioration in health standards, evinced by the fact that the average height of male conscripts fell from 1.69 metres in 1908 to 1.66 metres in 1924. During the first decade of Bolshevik power, health facilities, personnel, and services improved, as did their management. Perhaps the most striking index of this was the sharp fall in the death rate. Overall, however, the quantity and quality of health services remained low and the peasantry £ seriously disadvantaged. The ratio of doctors to population rose g significantly, yet in 1926 there was still only one doctor for every 18,900 e of the rural population. Central to the policy of the health commissariat jg was a programme of preventive medicine - obligatory vaccination 1 against smallpox was introduced - and health education. 'Sanitary-enlightenment' propaganda developed rapidly to combat disease and popular ignorance; campaigns such as that in the Red Army to 'Help the Country with a Toothbrush'were designed to convey the message that making one's life healthy was a sign of 'consciousness'. Another dimension of the drive to enhance the productive and reproductive power of socialist society lay in the official promotion of sport, something that had no parallel under the ancien regime. Trade unions and the Komsomol promoted team sports, although some saw these as 'bourgeois'- since they were competitive-favouring all-round fitness for the masses instead. Following party intervention in 1925, the emphasis was put on sport as a means of promoting health and fitness, clean living, rationality, group identification, and military training.

  The Bolsheviks promised free primary and secondary education within a

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  coeducational and comprehensive school system. Building on progressive educational theories influential in late-imperial Russia, Lunacharsky, Commissar of Enlightenment, and Krupskaia, Lenin's wife, promoted polytechnicism - the idea of an all-round education without vocational specialization - and the'unified labour school' where pupils took part in vocational training as a way of familiarizing them with the world of work. Entrance examinations, grading, homework, and punishment were all abolished. Relations between the government and teachers got off to a bad start when teachers went on strike, and throughout the civil war most teachers remained hostile to principles of progressive, child-centred education. Significant strides were made in extending education: by 1926-7 eight out of ten children aged 8 to 11 were in school, compared with 49% in 1915. As against that, expenditure per pupil remained well below the pre-war level and as late as 1926 teachers earned less than half what they had earned in 1913. In a context where levels of educational achievement were still very low, the Komsomol and trade unions pressed for greater specialization and more vocational education. This was resisted by the commissariat of education untihg26when it went some way to reinstate a more traditional curriculum. This was not sufficient to palliate critics, however, and in 1929 Lunacharsky was removed.

  In 1918 a 'revolutionary housing repartition' was proclaimed under the slogan 'Peace to the Hovels, War to the Palaces'. Workers were moved from their 'cots' and 'corners' and placed in the apartments of the wealthy. So-called 'nobs" (barskie) apartments, with their interconnecting rooms, high ceilings, huge stoves, kitchens, and lavatories, generally proved unsuitable for what were later known as kommunalki, or communal apartments where each family had a separate room but shared a kitchen, lavatory, and corridor. This made for much friction among their inhabitants. As Woland says in M. A. Bulgakov's novel, Master and Margarita: 'People are people. It's just the housing question that spoils them.' With NEP, 'housing repartition' was

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  17. Children's demonstration

  ended and most property was returned to its former owners. In 1922 rents were reintroduced, but consumed a small proportion of the budget of working-class families (under 9% in 1928-9). From the mid-19205, the resumption of migration to the cities put intense pressure on the housing stock. In 1926 the official allocation of living space per adult was only 4.9 square metres for workers, 6.9 for employees, and 6.1 for others. Anyone having in excess of that was likely t
o be asked to 'self-corn press' (samouplotnit'sia), i.e. to make room for others. With the onset of the First Five-Year Plan the regime returned to a policy of allocating housing on class principles.

  With NEP, the attempt to distribute goods and services through the state was abandoned. The easing of supplies that resulted was widely welcomed, but the fact that many goods were beyond the pockets of ordinary folk caused much resentment. From 1926 restrictions on 'speculation' were stepped up, but the state's inability to substitute for private trade led to the emergence of the queue as a characteristic feature of Soviet life. Goods were in eternally short supply - defitsitnyi, meaning 'in deficit', was one of many new words that entered the Soviet lexicon - but members of the nomenklatura had access to special shops. Citizens became versed in the arts of getting hold of scarce commodities and services via the back door, cultivating large networks of'connections'. According to a rhyming jingle byV. V. Mayakovsky, the citizen was ideally set up who had: 'a fiancee in a trust, a godparent in GUM, and a brother in a commissariat' (nevesta vtreste, кит vCUM, bratvnarkomat), GUM being Moscow's leading department store.

  Family and gender relations

  The Bolsheviks came to power with a radical programme for the liberation of women and transformation of the family. Their reforming zeal was evidenced in the comprehensive Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship, ratified in October 1918, which equalized women's legal status with men's, allowed both spouses to retain the right totheir

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  own property and earnings, granted children born outside wedlock the same rights as those born within, and made divorce available upon request. In Bolshevik theory the key to women's liberation lay in taking women out of the confines of the family and bringing them into the sphere of wage work. There they would gain economic independence and develop class consciousness. For this to happen, however, it was recognized that the state would need to take over the tasks of child care and household labour, described by Lenin as 'the most unproductive, the most savage, and the most arduous work a woman can do'. During the first years, women were summoned to set aside their responsibilities to husbands and children and to become fighters on behalf of oppressed humanity. Efrosiniia Marakulina, a peasant who became an instructor in Viatka province, was an archetypal 'new woman': 'She forgot her family, her children, the household. With enthusiasm she threw herself into the new business of enlightening her £ dark, downtrodden sisters.' Not surprisingly, those who became 'new

  g women' were few. For most women the chaos of the civil war saw them

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  e struggling to survive, their lack of interest in the revolutionary drama

  jg reinforcing the stereotypical image of the woman as baba - 'dark',

  1 'backward', and in thrall to husband and priest.

  It was to combat such 'backwardness' that a Women's Bureau was established in 1919 by Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai. They insisted that working women must be mobilized around projects of direct concern to them, such as literacy classes, creches, collective dining rooms, and consumer cooperatives. During the 1920s the Bureau, which was permanently under-funded, undertook a range of campaigns against wage and hiring discrimination, sexual harassment, layoffs of women, alcoholism, and wife-battering. The assertive feminism that it occasionally encouraged made many men in the party leadership edgy. On 1 March 1927, for example, a conference of working women in Irkutsk passed a resolution declaring that'it is necessary to fight for the liberation of women and to struggle against men.' In 1927 the Bureau launched an aggressive campaign in Central Asia against

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  the veil, bride price, polygamy, and female segregation. Some 800 women were killed by outraged menfolk, protesting that Bolsheviks were 'turning women into harlots'. This was the excuse that some in the leadership had been looking for. The Bureau was accused of 'heavy-handed bungling', the prelude to its dissolution in 1930.

  The Bolsheviks challenged the patriarchal concept that men had a Cod-given right to rule over women, what Lenin called'rooting out the "old master right of the man"' but they generally showed far less interest in challenging male than female gender roles. The revolution reconfigured rather than unseated the dominant masculine norm, substituting for the patriarchal model of masculinity a fraternal model in which young men were defined through comradeship and a commitment to the struggle. Within the revolutionary script production took priority over reproduction, so left little space for women whose identities were largely defined by family and motherhood. In pictorial representations of revolution, moreover, women were largely absent. Totemic workers, peasants, and Red Army soldiers were generally men, covertly bolstering the assumption that revolution was men's business. In the course of the 1920s, patriarchal norms quickly gained ascendancy within the party-state, so that gender was one of the first areas in which a 'return of the repressed' became visible.

  Many Bolsheviks believed that the family, as an institution based on private property, would be abolished under communism, with the state taking responsibility for the care of children and for domestic labour. In the event, underthe blows of war, flight, hunger, and disease, the family began to abolish itself as spouses separated, children were cast adrift, and casual sexual relationships flourished. As a result, the economic position of many women, left to support families without the assistance of menfolk, deteriorated. For poor and vulnerable women, the stability provided by the family came to seem positively desirable and this was one factor behind the rise in the marriage rate during the 1920s: by 1926 the rate was over a third higher than in 1913. With NEP, cuts in state

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  subsidy led to the closure of the public dining halls, creches, and communal laundries that had been a feature of War Communism, leaving women once again responsible for looking after children, cooking, cleaning, and sewing. These trends, together with the rise in female unemployment, shaped responses to the public debate on the new Family Code of 1926. This simplified divorce procedure, but introduced stricter rules on alimony, making men rather than the state responsible forthe upkeep of children. It signalled a shift in thinking towards a view that the family would have to serve as the basic institution of social welfare for a very long time. This chimed with a rising sense that the mounting problems of illegitimacy, abandoned children, hooliganism, and juvenile crime were linked to the breakdown of the family.

  If the 1920s saw a strengthening of a more conservative attitude £ towards the family and marriage, one should not infer that the

  g revolution had had little impact in this area. Within less than a decade,

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  e European Russia had the highest divorce rate in the world, divorce being

  jg widespread even in rural communities. Similarly, if there was a boom in

  1 the birth rate from its nadir of 1922, the long-term trend was towards a

  decline in the birth rate, especially in the towns, as levels of female

  education and employment rose and as marriage was delayed. In 1920

  Russia became the first country to legalize abortion, a measure

  motivated by concern that in the prevailing conditions society could not

  support children properly, rather than by recognition of a woman's right

  to choose. By the late 1920s, the number of abortions in cities surpassed

  the number of births, and the typical woman having a termination was

  married with at least one child.

  In the maelstrom of civil war sexual taboos were swept aside. A few in the party saw 'sexual revolution' as intrinsic to the wider social revolution. Kollontai, first Commissar of Social Welfare, demanded 'freedom for winged Eros', by which she meant that women should have the right to autonomy and fulfilment in personal relations. She was

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  widely assumed, however, to be advocating sexual promiscuity. The mainstream of the party looked askance on such thinking, Lenin, in particular, deploring 'hypertrophy in sexual matters'. Fr
om the early 1920s exhortations to sublimate sexual energy into constructive activity came thick and fast. The 'psychoneurologist' A. B. Zalkind averred that the 'proletariat at the stage of socialist accumulation is a thrifty, niggardly class and it is not in its interests to allow creative energy to seep into sexual channels'. Such thinking, coloured by contemporary interest in eugenics, put sexuality at the heart of a strategy of social engineering designed to enhance the reproductive and productive capacity of the new society. By the late 1920s, the shift away from permissive attitudes was marked: by 1929 'hardened' prostitutes, once seen as social victims, were being sent to labour camps for wilfully refusing to play their role in production. This increasing emphasis on the danger of sexual anarchy reflected Bolshevik fear that their orderly project risked being engulfed by the libidinal energies of the body and the elemental forces of nature.

  Youth: a wavering vanguard

  In 1926 the under-twenties made up just over half the rural population. The Bolsheviks looked on children as bearers of the socialist future and concentrated scarce resources on their welfare and education. The notion of childhood as a time of innocence had taken root in late-imperial Russia, and the Bolsheviks built upon the optimism implicit in this idealization. The drastic fall in infant mortality - the scourge of ancien regime Russia - and the decline in family size, served to intensify the emotional investment of parents in their child. The Women's Bureau campaigned to improve childcare and discourage practices such as corporal punishment. New limitations on child labour, combined with the lengthening of schooling, delayed entry into adulthood. The Bolsheviks believed that children belonged first and foremost to society, but there was no consensus as to where the line should be drawn between parental and state responsibilities. Not all shared