by S. A Smith
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A. Coikhbarg's view that the state would 'provide vastly better results than the private, individual, unscientific, and irrational approach of individually "loving" but ignorant parents'. Since the state did not have resources to take on the upbringing of children, parents continued to shoulder most of the responsibility, but their right to do so was conditional on performing their duties in accordance with the values of the revolution. 'If fathers persistently try to turn their children into narrow little property owners or mystics, then ... children have the ethical right to forsake them.'
One of the most horrendous problems facing the Bolsheviks was to deal with the mind-boggling number of orphaned and abandoned children who survived by begging, peddling, or stealing on city streets and in railway stations. The problem had emerged before the First World War, but escalated massively after 1914. By 1922, at least 7 million children, £ over three-quarters of them boys, had been abandoned. They formed a g distinct subculture with their gangs, hierarchies, turf, codes, rituals, and
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e slang. They were a major cause of the sharp rise in juvenile crime. The jg authorities looked sympathetically on young criminals as social victims, 1 court trials and custodial sentences for juveniles under 17 having been abolished in January 1918. Heroic efforts were made to settle abandoned children in homes and colonies, some of which were run as experimental labour communes based on 'self-government', and by the late 1920s, the number had fallen to around 200,000. By this stage, the failure of juvenile crime to disappear was causing the authorities to take a much less indulgent stance, leading jurists denouncing the 'putrid view that children should not be punished'.
By 1925 the Komsomol had 1.5 million members, which represented a mere 6% of eligible youngsters. From being an exclusively urban organization during the civil war, it struggled to build a rural base and by 1926, 60% of its members were peasants. In the countryside the Komsomol was very much associated with the clash between the generations, young men, and to a lesser extent young women, asserting
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themselves against their parents over such matters as church attendance. Parents bemoaned the conduct of their offspring: 'Kol'ka has stuck up a picture of Lenin in place of the icon and now goes to rallies, carrying banners and singing scurrilous songs.' In the towns, however, there is evidence that many Komsomol members disliked the ethos of NEP. During the civil war its members had exemplified the heroism, sacrifice, and combativitythat were the hallmarks of the time. Nowthe requisite qualities were 'smartness, discipline, training, and self-organization' and some youngsters appear to have had difficulty knuckling down to the prosaic tasks of economic and cultural construction. The tone of the Komsomol was very much set by young men, since their higher level of literacy, service in the army, experience of seasonal work, and their relative freedom from family obligations gave them a broader view of the world than that of most young women. The proportion of women in the Komsomol nevertheless rose to around one-fifth by the mid-ig20s - higher than in the party - but many young women were alienated by the endless routine of meetings, speeches, political education, and demonstrations, and turnover was high.
During NEP young people faced many difficulties, including unemployment, homelessness, and the payment of tuition fees. Official rhetoric cast youth in the role of revolutionary vanguard, but there was much anxiety expressed about the apparent loss of fervour among young people. In 1923 the student newspaper at Petrograd University claimed that only 10% of students actively supported the revolution; that 60% were 'non-party'; that 15% to 20% were 'clearly anti-Soviet'; and that 10% were totally apathetic. The perceived rise in 'hooliganism' seemed to signal a deep social malaise. The young women with red lipstick, bobbed hair, and high heels, and the young men with double-breasted jackets and Oxford bags fed fears that bourgeois decadance was on the increase. The 'epidemic' of suicides that followed that of the poet S. Esenin in December 1925 suggested that many young people had fallen prey to morbid individualism. Finally and paradoxically, the youngsters who turned to religious sects, such as Baptists, Adventists,
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and Evangelicals, out of attraction to their message of chastity, temperance, restraint, and hard work, often seemed to display a more serious orientation on the world - however sinful they viewed it -than many in the Komsomol. The vagaries of youth, in other words, seemed to strengthen the association of NEP with class aliens, bourgeois restoration, and moral degeneracy.
Cultural revolution
As children of the Enlightenment, the Bolsheviks believed that the dissemination of knowledge and rationality would liberate people from superstition and enhance their freedom and autonomy. Following their intelligentsia forebears, they sought to raise the level of 'culturedness' of a society perceived to be steeped in 'Asiatic' backwardness. 'Culturedness',forthe Bolsheviks, could signify anything from £ punctuality, to clean fingernails, to having a basic knowledge of biology, g to carrying out one's trade-union duties efficiently. The promiscuous e connotations of its antithesis, lack of culture', were neatly captured in a jg notice pinned on the wharf in Samara: 'Do not throw rubbish about, do 1 not strike a match near the oil pumps, do not spit sunflower seeds, and do not swear or use bad language.' In 1921, following victory on the military and political fronts, 'culture' was declared to be a 'third front' of revolutionary activity. In his last writings Lenin invoked the concept of 'cultural revolution' as vital to the transition to socialism, although his construal of what this revolution entailed proved to be rather modest, centring on the propagation of literacy and solid work habits among the people and the application of science and technology to social development.
The drive to increase literacy was something into which the Bolsheviks put much energy and imagination, aware that active participation in socialist society depended on being able to read. The danger of illiteracy was illustrated in a widely circulated poster that depicted a blindfolded peasant in bast shoes approaching the edge of a cliff with hands
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outstretched. During the civil war massive effort was focused on the soldiers of the Red Army, but, with NEP, funding for the liquidation of literacy' drive was drastically cut back. Even so, by the time of the 1926 census, 51% of the population was literate, compared with 23% in 1897. This was an impressive result, yet it concealed startling disparities. Two-thirds of men in the Soviet Union could read, but only 37% of women. In Turkmenistan 97% of the population was illiterate. Obviously, the educational level of those who went through crash literacy programmes was not high. When 64 soldiers were asked in 1923 to read an article in Pravda about the assassination of a Soviet ambassador, none could explain the title: The Impertinence of Killers'. Yet learning to read awoke a touching thirst for knowledge. 'Send me a list of books published on comets, stars, water, the earth, and sky.' And as the Bolsheviks well understood, becoming literate also stimulated a desire to learn the language of the new regime, to 'speak Bolshevik'. The efforts of peasants to master the categories that defined the new society were often comical.
We youth awakening from eternal hibernation and apathy, forming influence in our blood, brightly reflecting the good progresses and initiatives, step by step however slowly (are) moving away from old and rotten throw-backs.
The strange words and locutions of Bolshevik language had an almost magical power.
Other Bolsheviks entertained a more grandiose conception of cultural revolution than Lenin. Bukharin asserted that cultural revolution meant nothing less than a 'revolution in human characteristics, in habits, feelings, and desires, in way-of-life and culture'. From this perspective, its aim was nothing less than the creation of a 'new soviet person' through the total transformation of daily life. In the mid-i920s lively debates took place about the revolutionizing of daily life, which centred on the fraught issue of the relationship of the personal to the political.
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At a time when market forces were in the ascendant, when official polic
ies seemed to benefit 'class enemies', progress to socialism seemed peculiarly to depend on the behaviour of individuals. As Krupskaia told the Komsomol congress in 1924: 'Earlier it was perhaps not clear to us that the separation of private life and public life sooner or later leads to the betrayal of communism.' In this context, aspects of daily life as various as dress, hygiene, personal morality, leisure, and the correct use of Russian took on political significance. Was it acceptable for a communist to wear makeup or fashionable clothes? The answer was clearly no, since these things implied an individualistic concern with looking good. Yet the Bolsheviks never eschewed 'bourgeois' values in their entirety. The cultured Soviet citizen was expected to be punctual, efficient, orderly, and neat in appearance; too keen an interest in good manners, nice clothes, or tidy hair, however, could lay one open to the charge of being petty-bourgeois or'philistine'.
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g The project to bring about cultural revolution provoked strongest e resistance in relation to the major rites of passage - birth, marriage, and jg death. For centuries these had been marked by religious rituals that had 1 deep existential and cultural resonance. The Bolsheviks grappled to find secular substitutes. The dedication of newborn children, known as Octobering, appears to have been the most successful, albeit only among a small minority. A meeting of the Kremenchug woodturners' union organized a 'red baptism' in January 1924 of girl called 'Ninel' ('Lenin' spelt backwards) in a ceremony that began with an exaltation of 'conscience' and 'reason' against the 'absurd religious rituals which befog and oppress the working class'. Even among communists and Komsomolites, however, such rituals were not popular and many were expelled for having their children baptized or for getting married in church. In particular, the attempt to promote cremation as the rational, economical way of death met almost universal resistance. As late as the 1950s, fewer than half of funerals were secular. People missed the mystery, joy, and ebullience of traditional rituals and found the ersatz substitutes lacking in inward drama and a sense of transcendence.
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As an ambitious attempt at social engineering, 'cultural revolution' had a certain coercive element, yet one should be wary of glib generalization about the 'totalitarian' nature of the project, since this overlooks the fact that millions of young people wanted passionately to transform themselves. With the traditional way-of-life so obviously superannuated, many young peasants yearned to become 'cultured': 'Dressed in a cultured fashion I went to the cinema. I really wanted to visit the Park of Culture and Rest but I didn't have enough money.' By 1928 over 12% of letters sent to the Peasant Newspaper concerned the 'backwardness' of peasant life. Characteristically they began: 'lama dark peasant';'! write to you from a god-forsaken place'; 'Lying on a dark stove, I am thinking'. Such peasants were gripped by the desire to 'acquire political development and to understand the world', 'to have literature and leadership', lest they become surplus to requirements in the new order. And even the millions who did not warm to the soviet project nevertheless internalized its categories of 'cultured' and 'backward', 'revolutionary' and 'reactionary'.
The attack on religion
The early 1920s generally saw the regime relax its policies, but from 1922 to the death of Patriarch Tikhon in 1925 it launched a sustained assault on the Orthodox Church. In February 1922 the Bolsheviks ordered the Church to surrender its valuables to aid the victims of the famine. This provoked a sharp clash in Shuia, in which four were killed and ten injured. In private Lenin discarded the pretence that the seizures were intended to assist famine victims - 'we shall secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million rubles' - and ordered that the Shuia 'insurrectionists' be tried. Eight priests, two men, and one woman were duly executed and 25 imprisoned. In Petrograd, where popular agitation against the seizures had an anti-semitic character, Metropolitan Veniamin and three others were tried and executed. It has been claimed that there were 1,414 clashes with believers in 1922-3 in which over 7,000 priests, monks, and nuns disappeared, most apparently killed.
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In May 1922 the Orthodox Church succumbed to a damaging schism. A group of radical priests, known as Renovationists, came out in support of soviet power and forced the abdication of the'counter-revolutionary' Tikhon. They called a church council in 1923, which passed a series of reforms long under discussion that included the replacement of Church Slavonic with vernacular Russian, the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, and greater participation by the laity in services and diocesan administration. By 1925, two-thirds of parishes had formally affiliated to the Renovationists. Yet these 'rationalizing' reforms were not popular with a laity whose faith was intimately bound up with the observance of feast days and the cult of local saints and shrines. Moreover, the laity were in a position to impede their implementation since the revolution had strengthened their control of parish affairs; and the clergy, who were the chief supporters of the reforms, relied on them for financial support. In June 1923 the Bolsheviks withdrew support from the £ Renovationists after Tikhon expressed loyalty to the regime. Many of g the faithful questioned his act of accommodation, yet were
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e nevertheless delighted as Tikhon set out to destroy the Renovationists. jg In the immediate term, this merely deepened the schism, but by the 1 late 1920s the Renovationists were routed. By the time his successor, Metropolitan Sergei, pledged loyalty to the Soviets in May 1927, it was clear that the church was one organization that the regime was going to have to live with.
The policy adopted towards sectarians and Old Believers - those who broke away from the Orthodox Church in the second half of the 17th century after Patriarch Nikon (1605-81) introduced liturgical reforms -was more conciliatory, since the regime viewed them as politically more progressive, in view of the persecution which they had suffered under tsarism, their emphasis on hard work, sobriety, and strict moral standards, and their openness to forming agricultural communes. Old Believers and sectarians were thus allowed to publish journals, organize conferences, charities, and cooperatives. Even in the early 1920s, however, the OGPU kept a strict eye on them, pursuing a tactic of divide
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and rule. After 1926, as policy towards the Orthodox Church eased somewhat, policy towards the sects - as well as to Islam and Judaism -toughened. Only in 1929, however, with the onset of Stalin's 'revolution from above', did the regime unleash a full-scale onslaught on all forms of organized religion.
Despite its confrontation with Orthodoxy, the government viewed the battle against religion as a long-term matter of education and propaganda. In 1922 Emelian I a ros lavs ky founded a weekly newspaper to propagate atheism among the masses which, incidentally, counted the years from 1917. In 1925 he founded the League of Militant Godless to oppose the anti-religious zealots in the Komsomol, known as 'priest-eaters', who revelled in offending believers by such antics as burning icons and turning pigs loose in church. By contrast, the League favoured public debate with believers on topics such as whether the world was created in six days. Clergy inveighed against the godless as 'debauchers and libertines' and villagers, who now paid for the upkeep of schools, ensured that atheistic propaganda was kept out of the classroom. By 1930 the League claimed to have more than 2 million members; but its record of achievement was unimpressive. Religious observance was on the decline, especially in the cities, but this had more to do with the urbanization, army service, the culture of the radio and newspaper, and the increase in technology than with atheistic propaganda as such. In some ways the history of religion under NEP was less about the clash between church and state than about the clash between a modernizing culture, backed by the resources of the state, and the local communities whose identity was closely bound up with religion.
Despite its militant atheism, the Stalin faction did not scruple to buttress its legitimacy by sanctifying the dead Lenin, inscribing elements of popular religion into the official political culture. During his lifetime Lenin had been adulated but was never strictly the object of a cult.
His death, however, aroused popular anxiety expressed in rumours of foreign invasion, economic collapse, and a split in the party. The
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We residents of the I Mich settlement, being workers at the Hammer and Sickle, the Kursk railway workshops, the Russian Cable, and other nearby factories, turn to the Soviet with a practical request Our settlement is sited on land formerly belonging to the Vsekhsviatskii monastery, which passed to us as one of the gains of the October Revolution. But that gain has not been realized to the full. Having turned this lair of spongers into a workers' settlement we wish, in addition, to erect on the site of the church, that fortress of reaction, a model workers' community, a fortress to the new way-of-life, with comfortable housing, leisure facilities, and rational recreations. But difficulties arise from the slowness of certain soviet organs and from lack of finance. We thus request the Moscow Soviet to issue an instruction to allow for the speedy sale of church property. Declaration of 153 workers of the ll'ich settlement to the Moscow Soviet
