The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union

Richard Sakwa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134806010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Through sources and documents, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union by Richard Sakwa places the Soviet experience in historical and comparative context. The author introduces each source in this volume fully and provides commentary and analysis.
Using eye-witness accounts, official documents and new materials which have just come to light, Richard Sakwa gives an historical overview of the Soviet Union from the revolution of 1906 to the fall of the regime.

1
Russia and the rise of Bolshevism

The roots of Soviet communism lie both in Russia itself and abroad, in particularthe development of the Marxist brand of revolutionary socialism. The last decades of the nineteenth century were marked by accumulating pressure for change countered by ever-increasing resistance to reform by the tsarist authorities. The legacy of serfdom and the unresolved problem of redemption payments, the growing social contradictions as an immiserated working class came into existence, and the blockage on reforms from above, all conspired to undermine chances for an evolutionary outcome to Russia’s social and political crisis. The critical figure in the synthesis of Western revolutionary theory with the realities of Russia was Vladimir ll’ich Ul’yanov (Lenin). His views on the role of the party and other issues were challenged at every step, yet they ultimately triumphed not so much because they were ‘right’ in any absolute sense, but because of his leadership skiljs, the failure of the alternatives to win adequate support and the depth of Russia’s crisis exacerbated by war.

Marx and the Russian Road

The question exercising a generation of radicals in late nineteenth-century Russia was whether the country could avoid following the Western path and instead use its own traditions, above all the peasant rural commune (mir, also called the obshchino) to move straight from feudalism (however decayed) to socialism. The Populists believed that Russia could avoid the misery of the Western developmental path and move straight into communism from feudalism without an intervening stage of capitalist exploitation. Reflecting these concerns and hopes, Vera Zasulich, a Populist who would later become a Menshevik, wrote to Marx asking him his opinion of the question.

Document 1.1 Vera Zasulich’s Letter to Marx

16 Feb. 1881,
Genève,
Rue de Lausanne, no. 49,

L’imprimerie polonaise.

Honoured Citizen,

You are not unaware that your Capital enjoys great popularity in Russia. Although the edition has been confiscated, the few remaining copies are read and re-read by the mass of more or less educated people in our country; serious men are studying it. What you probably do not realise is the role which your Capital plays in our discussions on the agrarian question in Russia and our rural commune. You know better than anyone how urgent this question is in Russia. You know what Chernyshevskii thought of it. Our progressive literature— Otechestvennye Zapiski, for example—continues to develop his ideas. But in my view, it is a life-and-death question above all for our socialist party. In one way or another, even the personal fate of our revolutionary socialists depends upon your answer to the question. For there are only two possibilities. Either the rural commune, freed of exorbitant tax demands, payment to the nobility and arbitrary administration, is capable of developing in a socialist direction, that is, gradually organising its production and distribution on a collectivist basis. In that case, the revolutionary socialist must devote all his strength to the liberation and development of the commune.

If, however, the commune is destined to perish, all that remains for the socialist, as such, is more or less ill-founded calculations as to how many decades it will take for the Russian peasant’s land to pass into the hands of the bourgeoisie, and how many centuries it will take for capitalism in Russia to reach something like the level of development already attained in Western Europe. Their task will then be to conduct propaganda solely among the urban workers, while these workers will be continually drowned in the peasant mass which, following the dissolution of the commune, will be thrown on to the streets of the large towns in search of a wage.

Nowadays, we often hear it said that the rural commune is an archaic form condemned to perish by history, scientific socialism and, in short, everything above debate. Those who preach such a view call themselves your disciples par excellence: ‘Marksists’. Their strongest argument is often: ‘Marx said so.’

‘But how do you derive that from Capital?’ others object. ‘He does not discuss the agrarian question, and says nothing about Russia.’

‘He would have said as much if he had discussed our country,’ your disciples retort with perhaps a little too much temerity. So you will understand, Citizen, how interested we are in Your opinion. You would be doing us a very great favour if you were to set forth Your ideas on the possible fate of our rural commune, and on the theory that it is historically necessary for every country in the world to pass through all the phases of capitalist production.

In the name of my friends, I take the liberty to ask You, Citizen, to do us this favour.

If time does not allow you to set forth Your ideas in a fairly detailed manner, then at least be so kind as to do this in the form of a letter that you would allow us to translate and publish in Russia.

With respectful greetings,
Vera Zassoulich

Source: Teodor Shanin (ed.), Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and ‘the Peripheries of Capitalism’ (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983),, pp.

Document 1.2 Marx’s Reply to Zasulich

Marx took up the challenge and prepared his answer carefully, rejecting four drafts before daring to send his reply, fully aware of the momentous nature of the question. Marx had towards the end of his life, indeed, learnt Russian to allow him to pursue the study of the agrarian question in a country that increasingly exercised his imagination.

8 March 1881
41,Maitland Park Road, London N.W.

Dear Citizen,

A nervous complaint which has periodically affected me for the last ten years has prevented me from answering sooner your letter of 16 February. I regret that I am unable to give you a concise account for publication of the question which you did me the honour of raising. Some months ago, I already promised a text on the same subject to the St. Petersburg Committee [of the People’s Will organisation]. Still, I hope that a few lines will suffice to leave you in no doubt about the way in which my so-called theory has been misunderstood.

In analysing the genesis of capitalist production, I said:

At the heart of the capitalist system is a complete separation of…the producer from the means of production…the expropriation of the agricultumlproduceris the basis of the whole process. Only in England has it been accomplished in a radical manner…But all the other countries of Western Europe are following the same course.

(Capital, French edition, P.315.)

The ‘historical inevitability’ of this course is therefore expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe. The reason for this restriction is indicated in Ch. XXXII: ‘Private property, founded upon personal labour…is supplanted by capitalist private property, which rests on exploitation of the labour of others, on wage-labour.’ (Loc. cit., p. 340.)

In the Western case, then, oneform of private property is transformed into another form of private property. In the case of the Russian peasants, however, their communal property would have to be transformed into private property.

The analysis in Capital therefore provides no reasons either for or against the vitality of the Russian commune. But the special study I have made of it, including a search for original source material, has convinced me that the commune is the fiilcrum for social regeneration in Russia. But in order that it might fimction as such, the harmful influences assailing it on all sides must first be eliminated, and it must then be assured the normal conditions for spontaneous development.

I have the honour, dear Citizen, to remain
Yours sincerely,
Karl Marx

Source: Shanin (ed.), Late Marx and the Russian Road, pp.

Document 1.3 Later Thoughts

Marx’s extremely guarded response was repeated in his preface of 21 January 1882 to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, also prepared by Zasulich.

The Communist Manifesto had as its object the proclamation of the inevitably impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face to face with the rapidly developing capitalist swindle and bourgeois landed property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though gready undermined, yet a form of the primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership? Or on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?

The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian revolution should become the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West also, so that both complement each other, dien the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, ‘Preface to the Russian Edition of 1882’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto,, edited by David McLellan (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992),p.

Zasulich herself, as a member of the Land and Liberty Populist faction, in 1878 shot and wounded General F.F. Trepov, the governor of St Petersburg. Hailed as a martyr to the democratic cause, she was acquitted by a sympathetic jury. This wave of terror culminated in the assassination of Alexander II on 1 March 1881, when the seventh attempt on his life succeeded in blowing up his carriage as he was driving through St Petersburg.

The Emergence of Bolshevism

Marxism had been gaining strength in Russia, and was adopted by a group of socalled ‘Legal Marxists’ to support the view that capitalism should develop in Russia before there could be any talk of a socialist alternative. Marx’s Capital itself was published in Russia in 1872, its first foreign publication, fifteen years after it came out in England. It was only on 1–3 March 1898, however, that a group of nine men met in a founding ‘congress’ in Minsk to establish the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP).

Document 1.4 Manifesto of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP)

The manifesto was drawn up by Peter Struve, a Legal Marxist who not long after repudiated Marxism altogether. The manifesto adapted Marxism to Russian circumstances and stressed the role that the working class would have to play.

The working class everywhere becomes more demanding the more it is given, and the Russian proletariat will do the same. In the past it has obtained something only when it made the demand, and in the future it will get only what it demands as well.

And what does the Russian working class not need? It is totally deprived of that which its foreign comrades enjoy freely and peacefully: a share in the state administration, freedom of speech and the press, freedom of assembly and of association—in a word, all the instruments and means with which the western European and American proletariat improve their position and at the same time battle for their ultimate liberation, against private property and capitalism—for socialism. Political liberty is as necessary to the Russian proletariat as clean air is for healthy breathing. It is the basic condition of its free development and of success in the struggle for partial improvements and final liberation.

But only the Russian proletariat itself can win the political liberty which it needs.

The further east one goes in Europe, the more cowardly, mean, and politically weak is the bourgeoisie, and the greater are the cultural and political tasks confronting the proletariat. The Russian working class must and will bear on its own sturdy shoulders the cause of winning political freedom. This is an essential, but only an initial step in discharging the great historical mission of the proletariat—creating a social order in which there will be no exploitation of man by man. The Russian proletariat will throw off the yoke of autocracy, and thus with greater energy will continue the struggle against capitalism and the bourgeoisie for the complete victory of socialism.

Source: ‘Manifesto of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party’ (RSDLP)’, in Ralph Carter Elwood (ed.), Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union., vol. 1, The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party 1898-October 1917 (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1974), p.35

The position stated in this extract is essential for understanding the evolution of Lenin’s thinking later. While the working-class movement in Western Europe and America had a range of instruments to pursue its interests, the Russian movement had still to fight for basic political freedoms. The argument that the Russian bourgeoisie was less able and less interested in achieving for itself those freedoms that its counterpart in the West had achieved meant that the Russian working class had to fight not only for its own freedom but for the middle class as well. If that was the case, then why give up part of its achievement to allow the bourgeoisie to consolidate its rule over the proletariat? Thus the origins of Leninism lie in this analysis. By 1902 Lenin was ready to draw out the organisational consequences.

Document 1.5 Lenin—What is to be Done?

While Marx had allowed that it might be possible for Russia to skip stages, Lenin, on the basis of his studies of the agrarian situation in the 1890s in his The Development of Capitalism in Russia (written in 1896–9) and many other works on the agrarian question, insisted that capitalism had already destroyed the old communal economy and thus, he argued, this short cut into the future no longer existed. Lenin went into exile in 1900, joining some of the older Marxists, including Georgii Plekhanov (the ‘father’ of Russian Social Democracy), in Geneva. While working here on the RSDWP paper Iskra (The Spark) Lenin formulated what were to become the organisational principles of Russian communism based on the idea of a tightly organised party of professional revolutionaries. These ideas were developed in his What Is To Be Done?, a polemic against the ‘Economists’, Marxists (like the Legal Marxists) who assumed thatthe revolution would emerge spontaneously out ofthe development of a polarised class society and therefore focused on the economic struggle of workers and not on the establishment of a separate revolutionary organisation.

Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This thought cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with a support for the narrowest forms of practical activity…Our party is only in process of formation, its features are only just becoming discernible, and it is yet far from having dealt with other trends of revolutionary thought, which threaten to divert the movement from the correct path…The national tasks of Russian Social Democracy are such as...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Glossary of Russian Terms and Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Russia and the Rise of Bolshevism
• 2. 1917: From Revolution to Revolution
• 3. The Birth of the Soviet State, 1917–1921
• 4. The Paths Diverge, 1921–1929
• 5. Building Socialism, 1929–1939
• 6. The Road to Berlin, 1939–1945
• 7. The Cold Peace, 1945–1953
• 8. Khrushchev and Reform, 1953–1964
• 9. Brezhnev and Stagnation, 1964–1985
• 10. Crisis and Fall of the Soviet System, 1985– 1991
• Guide to Further Reading
• Bibliography