Encyclopedia of Russian History

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control of factories, peasant land reform, and peace

with the Central Powers.

Russia then became the world’s first socialist

state, led by a single party, the Bolsheviks, renamed

the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), or (RKP

(b)) in 1918, then the Communist Party of the So-

viet Union (CPSU) in 1924. Lenin quickly created

his own police state and arrested, tried, and exiled

old political enemies, especially Mensheviks, Kadets,

and Social Revolutionaries. Many ordinary citizens

died in war, civil war, famine, and terror as a new

party ruled in their name.

After the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, the RSDWP

became essentially two parties. The Bolsheviks led

Russia down a separate path to civil war, indus-

trial growth, collectivization of agriculture, and to-

talitarianism. The Mensheviks became exile critics

of a revolution they helped create and barely sur-

vived. In 1991, the RSDWP’s greatest achievement,

the Soviet Union, collapsed.

See also: BOLSHEVISM; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; LENIN,

VLADIMIR ILICH; MENSHEVIKS; OCTOBER REVOLUTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ascher, Abraham. (1972). Pavel Axelrod and the Develop-

ment of Menshevism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-

versity Press.

Liebich, Andre. (1997). From the Other Shore: Russian So-

cial Democracy after 1921. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

Service, Robert. (2000). Lenin: A Biography. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press.

Williams, Robert C. (1986). The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin

and His Critics, 1904–1914. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press.

OBERT

C. W

ILLIAMS

SOCIALISM

Broadly speaking, socialism is the ideology of col-

lective ownership of the means of production and

the joint distribution of goods. There were two

principal currents in Russian socialism. One held

that the peasants, who comprised more than 80

percent of the population, would be the driving

force in the creation of the new society; and the

other assigned that role to the industrial proletariat.

The first current was initially advocated by Alexan-

der Herzen (1812–1870), who had been a supporter

of the Decembrists and left Russia for the West in

1847 to escape persecution. The failure of the Rev-

olutions of 1848, which he attributed to the con-

servatism and attachment to private property of

most Europeans, disappointed him deeply. He con-

cluded that the chances for socialism were much

better in his native country because the peasant

commune had accustomed the Russian people to

communal life and egalitarianism. The Russian

peasant, Herzen contended, “has no morality save

that which flows instinctively, naturally, from his

communism.” These ideas came to be known as

narodnichestvo, which literally means “populism”

but is perhaps better translated as “Russian social-

ism.” Taken up by such thinkers and activists as

Mikhail A. Bakunin (a radical anarchist), Nikolai K.

Mikhailovsky, and Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky, the

populists gained a substantial following among the

intelligentsia by the 1860s and 1870s. Although all

populists agreed that Russia could by-pass capital-

ism in its evolution toward socialism, there was

considerable disagreement over the means to

achieve the final goal. Toward the end of his life,

Herzen believed that socialism could be attained by

peaceful means. Peter I. Lavrov was another strong

advocate of peaceful methods; from the 1860s

until his death in 1900 he argued that it was the

obligation of intellectuals to educate the people po-

litically and thus prepare them to undertake their

own liberation. Chernyshevsky, on the other hand,

did not believe that force could be avoided.

The failed attempt by the populist DmitryV.

Karakozov to assassinate Alexander II in 1866 and

the ensuring repression prompted many revolu-

tionary intellectuals to opt for peaceful tactics.

Early in the 1870s, idealistic young narodniki

launched the Go to the People movement; hundreds

of them moved to the countryside and lived with

the peasants in order to teach them to read and

write as well as the rudiments of modern technol-

ogy. But the ultimate goal of the populists was to

prepare the masses for the revolution. Many peas-

ants were baffled by the visitors and feared they

were trying to lead them astray. Some peasants

even turned them in to the police, who in the mid-

1870s arrested many of the populists, bringing the

well-intentioned project to a close. But the ideas of

the populists remained alive and were incorporated

by the largest socialist movement in Russia, the So-

cialist Revolutionary Party (SRs), founded in 1902.

The SRs advocated the transfer of all land to peas-

ant communes or local associations, which in turn

would assign it on an egalitarian basis to all who

wished to earn their living by farming. Industry

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would be similarly socialized. Although the Social-

ist Revolutionaries insisted that the final goal, so-

cialism, must be achieved by means of persuasion,

they tolerated the “Combat Organization,” an in-

dependent organ of the party that carried out

dozens of political assassinations. Political terror,

many believed, was necessary to bring about the

dismantling of the autocratic regime.

In the meantime, in the late 1870s, a small

group of intellectuals led by Georgy V. Plekhanov

founded a Marxist movement in the name of the

industrial working class, and this represented the

second major current in Russian socialism. The

Marxists contended that Russia’s development

would be similar to trends in Central and Western

Europe. The country would be industrialized, and

would undergo a bourgeois revolution during

which the autocratic system would be replaced by

a constitutional order dominated by a middle class

committed to capitalism. Eventually, when indus-

trialization had reached maturity and the prole-

tariat had become a powerful force, it would stage

a second, socialist revolution. In 1898, the Russian

Marxists founded the Russian Social Democratic

Workers Party, which five years later split into two

factions.

The split occurred over the seemingly minor

question of how to define a party member, but it

soon turned out that the differences between the

Bolsheviks (majoritarians) led by Vladimir I. Lenin

and the Mensheviks (minoritarians) led by Yuli O.

Martov and Paul B. Axelrod touched on funda-

mental issues. Lenin, in keeping with views he had

expressed in 1902 in What Is to Be Done?, favored

a highly centralized, elitist, hierarchically organized

political party, whereas the Mensheviks stressed the

necessity and desirability of broad working-class

participation in the movement’s affairs and in the

coming revolutionary events. In short order, it also

became evident that while both factions subscribed

to a revolutionary course, the Mensheviks tended

to adopt more moderate tactics than did the Bol-

sheviks.

On November 7, 1917, after the country had

endured three years of war that caused untold dev-

astation and loss of life and eight months of revo-

lutionary turbulence, the Bolsheviks overthrew the

Provisional Government, which consisted of mod-

erates committed to democracy and had been

formed when the tsarist regime collapsed earlier

that year, in March. Then, on November 8, one day

after the Bolsheviks had formed a new government,

Lenin sought to placate the peasants, still the vast

majority of the population, by adopting the SR land

program. He ordered the abrogation of the prop-

erty rights of the nobility and placed land in the rural

regions at the disposal of land committees and dis-

trict soviets of peasants’ deputies for distribution

to the peasants. But the Bolsheviks also remained

faithful to their own program by introducing

workers’ control in industry and in commercial and

agricultural enterprises, abolishing distinctions and

special privileges based on class, eliminating titles

in the army, and outlawing inequality in wages.

Lenin was convinced that the economically more

advanced countries of Europe with large proletar-

ian populations would soon follow Russia’s exam-

ple in adopting socialism.

When this did not happen, his successor, Josef

V. Stalin, in 1924 formulated the doctrine of “so-

cialism in one country,” according to which Rus-

sia was strong enough economically to reach the

final goal of socialism by itself. Four years later,

the Soviet government launched a second revolu-

tion by forcing the peasants into collectives and

speeding up the process of industrialization. Much

more so than ever before, the major economic de-

cisions were now made by officials in Moscow.

Then, in 1936, Stalin formally declared that the

goal of socialism had in fact been attained. This

claim was disputed by Leon D. Trotsky, the man

he had defeated in the struggle over the leadership

of the country after Lenin’s death in 1924. Trot-

sky maintained that socialism could triumph only

on a worldwide basis. Stalinist socialism remained

the regnant ideology of the country until 1991, al-

though many Stalinist methods of rule were grad-

ually abandoned following Stalin’s death in 1953.

See also: BOLSHEVIKS; HERZEN, ALEXANDER IVANOVICH;

LENIN, VLADIMIR ILLICH; MARXISM; MENSHEVIKS;

POPULISM; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY; SO-

CIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY; SOCIALIST REVOLUTION-

ARIES; STALIN, JOSEPH VISSARIONOVICH; TROTSKY,

LEON DAVIDOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baron, Samuel H. (1963). Plekhanov: The Father of Russian

Marxism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Haimson, Leopold H. (1955). The Russian Marxists and

the Origins of Bolshevism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

Lampert, Evgenii. (1965). Sons against Fathers: Studies in

Russian Radicalism and Revolution. Oxford: Claren-

don Press.

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Malia, Martin. (1961). Alexander Herzen and the Birth of

Russian Socialism, 1812–1855. Cambridge, MA: Har-

vard University Press.

Venturi, Franco. (1960). Roots of Revolution: A History of

the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Cen-

tury Russia. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Walicki, Andrzej. (1995). Marxism and the Leap to the

Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Commu-

nist Utopia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Woehrlin, William F. (1971). Chernishevskii: The Man and

the Journalist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.

Wolfe, Bertram D. (1948). Three Who Made a Revolution:

A Biographical Study. New York: Dial Press.

BRAHAM

SCHER

SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY

The question of whether socialism could be built in

the USSR provoked a great ideological and political

debate in the Soviet Union that lasted from 1924

to 1927. In response to Leon Trotsky, who, on the

basis of his theory of “permanent revolution,” be-

lieved that “the genuine rise of socialist economy

in Russia will become possible only after the vic-

tory of the proletariat in the most important coun-

tries of Europe,” Josef Stalin first propounded his

doctrine of “socialism in one country” in a news-

paper article of December 1922. The difference be-

tween the two theories was based on a distinction

between the processes of making a socialist revo-

lution and a socialist economy. Every Bolshevik be-

lieved that the revolution that had proved

victorious in October 1917 was a socialist revolu-

tion, but according to party doctrine it was im-

possible to build a socialist economy in a lone

backward country, even though it was now clear

that the foundations of a socialist economy were

being laid. Stalin did not deny the importance of

the international revolution or its likelihood in the

near future because of the crisis in capitalism. But

seizing on a few scattered passages of Lenin, in-

cluding, from the last speech Lenin ever made, the

quote, “NEP [New Economic Policy] Russia will be-

come socialist Russia,” Stalin argued that because

the “dictatorship of the proletariat” had been es-

tablished in Russia through the peculiar conditions

of the 1917 revolution—the alliance of the prole-

tariat and the peasantry—the complete organiza-

tion of a socialist economy in the USSR was

possible, as part of the process of building social-

ism. He qualified this by saying that “for the final

victory of socialism, for the organization of So-

cialist production, the efforts of one country, par-

ticularly of a peasant country like Russia, are

insufficient” (Problems of Leninism, 1926), and,

moreover, that the victory of socialism could not

be considered secure while the USSR was encircled

by hostile capitalist powers.

Stalin developed the theory over the next two

years, particularly in Problems of Leninism (1926). It

was a very effective formula. Politically it was used

as a stick with which to beat Trotsky, the Left,

Leningrad, and United Oppositions: Stalin con-

demned his critics for lack of faith in the possibility

of building socialism in the Soviet Union. Econom-

ically it was used as a basis for the industrialization

of the USSR through the Five-Year Plans and the col-

lectivization of agriculture, and it came to mean the

opposite of NEP. It provided a slogan expressive of

Bolshevik self-confidence after victory in the civil

war and the establishment of the new regime, and

in contrast to “permanent revolution” held out the

prospect of stability. Its appeal lay partly in its

reawakening of national pride in the self-sufficiency

of the Russian revolution of 1917 and in the po-

tential and destiny of the Russian people to become

the progenitor of a new civilization. Through “so-

cialism in one country” Stalin established himself as

an ideologue, and the theory became the supreme

test of loyalty in the Stalinist party and state.

See also: NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; STALIN, JOSEF VISSAR-

IONOVICH; TROTSKY, LEON DAVIDOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carr, Edward Hallett. (1970). A History of Soviet Russia:

Socialism in One Country, 1924–1926, Vol. 2. Har-

mondsworth, UK: Pelican.

Deutscher, Isaac. (1966). Stalin: A Political Biography.

Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican.

Stalin, Josef Vissarionovich. (1959). Works, Vol. 8: 1926,

January–November. Moscow: Foreign Language Pub-

lishing House.

EREK

ATSON

SOCIALIST REALISM

On April 23, 1932, the Party Central Committee of

the USSR adopted socialist realism (SR) as the offi-

cial artistic mandate for Soviet literature (de facto

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for art, music, film, and architecture as well), a

practice that, theoretically, governed the produc-

tion of any work of art until the demise of the

Soviet Union in 1991. While most frequently as-

sociated with literature (especially since the adop-

tion of SR occurred practically simultaneously with

the dissolution of all literary groups and their sub-

jugation into one Union of Writers), socialist real-

ism provided the guidelines according to which any

artist should craft his work.

Yet the very concept of socialist realism prob-

lematizes the process of definition. Over the course

of its implementation socialist realism’s practition-

ers and critics have referred to it as a method, doc-

trine, framework, or style. Precisely the inability to

definitively label it points to its inherent contradic-

tions. Indeed, the best label for socialist realism

could well be critic Yevgeny Dobrenko’s term—an

aesthetic system. This moniker implies that social-

ist realism dictated far more than the form of an

artistic work; in addition, socialist realism strove

to control how an artist worked and how an

audience received and perceived any work of art.

Just as events in the Soviet Union unfolded, so, too,

did socialist realism adjust to the new demands of

changing times. Consequently, socialist realism

was realized as a totalizing system that would in-

culcate Soviet citizens into the new ideological sys-

tem, the result of the Bolshevik revolution, and the

emergence of Stalinism.

Andrei Zhdanov, then Leningrad Party boss

and frequent spokesman for Party policy, delin-

eated the program of SR at the First Congress of

Soviet Writers in 1934. Increasingly critics identify

the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky as the true insti-

gator behind the movement given his active role in

establishing journals (such as Nashi Dostizheniya

[Our Achievements]) and literary series (such as

The History of Factories and Plants), as well as his

editorship of volumes such as The History of the Con-

struction of the Stalin White Sea–Baltic Canal. Indeed

many of Gorky’s polemical and didactic articles of

the time delineate how writers were called to doc-

ument, applaud, and encourage the building of the

new Soviet state, especially vis-à-vis the first two

Five-Year Plans, even though Gorky himself pro-

duced no original works of literature during this

final period of his career. In addition, as had been

proposed most vociferously by RAPP (the Russian

Association of Proletarian Writers) in the 1920s,

common workers should emerge as the chief ar-

biters of artistic production. It was believed that if

properly trained, any worker could become a So-

viet writer or artist, especially because, ideologically

speaking, only workers had the appropriate class

pedigree.

Not surprisingly, although attempts were made

to reforge (a common metaphor of the early 1930s)

workers into masterful artists, much of this activ-

ity was in vain. As readers in the early 1930s were

quick to point out, badly written or executed SR

art was neither appealing nor inspiring. Indeed, re-

cently some critics have noted that the reading and

viewing public of the early 1930s played a much

larger role in determining what kind of art would

be produced, thanks to their active response to any

artistic production that did not meet with their aes-

thetic sensibilities or did not conform to their con-

ception of a typical work of Soviet art. This did not

imply, however, that subsequent works of social-

ist realist art had uniformly high quality and were

superior works of art; most were not.

Hence, mounting pressure was applied to

members of the various artistic establishments to

embrace the new aesthetic model of socialist real-

ism. In the literary arena some writers, most

notably Mikhail Bulgakov, Osip Mandelshtam,

Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Anna Akhmatova to name

but a few, consistently resisted the pressure to pro-

duce Party-mandated art; consequently they found

it essentially impossible to have their work pub-

lished. Others such as Mikhail Zoshchenko, Viktor

Shklovsky, and Valentin Katayev attempted to find

a compromise position that enabled them to con-

tinue to be published while maintaining a modicum

of personal artistic style and integrity. Yet others,

among them Alexander Fadeyev, Alexei Tolstoy and

Vera Inber, subscribed completely to the Party

mandate by producing literary works that strove

to comply as closely as possible with socialist re-

alism. Here, too, the issue of artistic quality

emerged as a concern.

Yet the outline above should not suggest that

the divisions among artists were black and white

categories that did not allow for subversions of the

socialist realist canon or deviations from the “Party

line” within an artist’s oeuvre. Consequently, it is

not uncommon to find musical comedies in the

1930s, which, while celebrating the heightened

class consciousness and loyalty of Soviet citizens,

also featured musical production numbers, slap-

stick comedy, and lighthearted romance (e.g.,

Volga, Volga, The Jolly Fellows, Circus). In addition,

in literature the early “canonical” works of social-

ist realism, which were posited as models for fu-

ture works, predated the adoption of the socialist

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realist aesthetic. These include Gorky’s novel Mat

(Mother, 1906), Fyodor Gladkov’s post-Civil war

story Tsement (Cement,1925), Dmitry Furmanov’s

Civil War epic Chapayev (1923), and Alexander

Fadeyev’s Bolshevik drama Razgrom (The Rout,

1927) all of which presented the struggle for so-

cialism from authors who understood how to pre-

sent Soviet reality in its revolutionary development.

As these examples illustrate, in literature the so-

cialist realist genre of choice was the novel. Simi-

larly, in music the symphony reigned supreme,

while in tactile art, sculpture, and architecture mas-

sive, grandiloquent, and neoclassical exemplars

managed to concretize the physical manifestations

of socialist realism.

Indeed, in one respect socialist realism’s lineage

harkened back to the nineteenth century since its

foundation rested on the aesthetic principles of re-

alism and its purported ability to truthfully depict

life as it was happening. Moreover, the populist

movements of the second half of the nineteenth

century, which greatly appealed to Bolshevik ide-

ologists, including Vladimir Lenin, provided the

prototypes not only for the appropriate psycho-

logical makeup of a character. In addition, these

populist models served to situate socialist realist

aesthetics in a revolutionary context that ap-

plauded the development of socialism.

In addition, some critics have traced socialist re-

alism’s genealogy through early twentieth-century

Russian symbolism, a development that thereby

enabled the Russian artistic and political avant-

garde movements to share the notion of a perfect

future life. The artistic avant-garde drew on the

work of the Russian symbolist philosopher Vladimir

Soloviev as the basis of its doctrine, while the po-

litical avant-garde followed Marxist ideology on its

path to create a new Soviet society. Both avant-

garde projects shared many of the same ideas,

metaphors, and terminology in describing the “new

world” they hoped to create. For example, while

Soloviev espoused the idea that art was an instru-

ment for creating the future, Marxists maintained

that art was an instrument for transforming life,

a process that, by its very nature, would create new

men and women. Indeed, the Left Front Futurist

theorist Nikolai Chuzhak links Solovievian sym-

bolist principles with Marxist ideology, thereby

creating a Marxist aesthetic that blended the theur-

gic impulse of Solovievian thinking with Marxist

dialectics. Chuzhak labels this end product “ultra-

realism,” a construct that “would express the di-

alectical collision between ‘what is’ and ‘what will

be’” (Gutkin, 1999, p. 46). According to this inter-

pretation, the artistic and political avant-garde

movements already had sown the seeds of social-

ist realism long before its actual adoption.

Similarly, the critic Boris Groys has argued,

among other notions, that socialist realism was

more avant-garde than the avant-garde itself.

Whereas the avant-garde provided numerous the-

oretical models, mandates, and pronouncements

for how the future world should be, they were nei-

ther willing nor able to completely replace or even

destroy the traditions that preceded and produced

them. In fact this futuristic vision could never fully

be realized, precisely because the avant-garde sought

to construct it on the existing cultural structure.

Conversely, socialist realism was, according to

Groys, able to achieve that which the avant-garde

never could—to reject traditional cultural struc-

tures and in their place to construct a new system

of artistic production that reflected the new soci-

ety that was supposedly being created in the So-

viet Union.

Critics such as Herman Ermolaev and C.

Vaughan James have argued that the basis for so-

cialist realism rests firmly on Communist Party

ideology and its desire to control cultural produc-

tion to serve its ideological and propagandistic

needs. Finally, the writer and literary critic Andrei

Sinyavsky has proposed that the aesthetic system

after which socialist realism was modeled harkened

back not to nineteenth-century realism, but rather

to the neoclassicism of the late eighteenth century.

As Sinyavsky notes, the necessity to produce state-

mandated art; the directive to applaud the glory,

power, and vision of the State, especially vis-à-vis

its own citizens and other cultures; the proclivity

to build, write, paint, or compose works of art that

were massive in structure, grandiose in their praise,

and fraught with visions of how life should be, not

as it actually was—these elements paralleled the de-

mands put to socialist realism.

Clearly the development and historical precedents

in Russian cultural history for socialist realism are

richer and more complicated than originally thought.

In fact, even the proposed elements that had to be

included in an artistic production to make it truly

socialist realist were reconfigured and reemphasized

as this aesthetic system continued through succes-

sive eras in the development of the Soviet Union.

Initially a number of characteristics were re-

quired of a work of socialist realism. First, it had

to depict Soviet life not as it was, but as it should

be. Hence, any work of socialist realist art would

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exemplify for its reader or viewer a behavior, event,

or image that captured an “ideal” rather than re-

ality. As stated in Literaturnaya gazeta (September

3, 1934), “Socialist realism, being the basic method

of Soviet literature and literary criticism, demands

from the artist the truthful, historically concrete

depiction of reality in its revolutionary develop-

ment. At the same time, truthfulness and histori-

cal concreteness of the artistic depiction of reality

must be combined with the task of ideologically re-

molding and educating the working people in the

spirit of socialism.” While this statement specifi-

cally refers to literature, the parameters it sets forth

were applicable to any artistic production.

In essence, any work of socialist realism should

depict the bright future that Soviet public rhetoric

continually promised its citizens, provided that they

followed the socialist realist model. The epitome of

this model was the “new Soviet man/woman” who

through his or her Party-mindedness, intensive la-

bor, class identity, and singlemindedness achieved

great feats that resulted in a happy ending and that

glorified the Soviet Union, thereby demonstrating

the correctness of its ideology. In literature these

new Soviet men and women were created by Soviet

writers, the “engineers of human souls,” as Josef

Stalin called them. Hence, almost from its inception

Socialist realism was redolent with industrial meta-

phors and images. Writers, indeed all artists, were

engineers charged with “reforging” or reconstruct-

ing characters, images, words, and deeds into man-

ifestations of Party policy and Soviet power.

Originally a work of socialist realism should

contain four key elements. The first was ideinost—

the work must be anchored in and resonate with

Soviet ideology, i.e. Marxism-Leninism. Second, the

work must convey klassovost—class-conscious-

ness. The socialist realist heroes and heroines must

personify their class heritage. Preferably they were

to be members of the working class or, more

rarely, enlightened peasants or intellectuals, who

embraced the new ideology and demonstrated

through their lives and work their allegiance to

their class, and, ultimately, to the Soviet Union.

Third, a socialist realist work must contain

partynost—Party-mindedness. This meant that the

firm, guiding hand of the Communist Party of the

USSR constantly exerted its presence in a work of

socialist realism, either in the character of an ideal

Party member in a work of literature, or through

the visual or aural presentation of a theme or mo-

tif that exuded strength, decisiveness, and grandios-

ity. Finally, works of socialist realism should have

narodnost—the content of a work of art should

represent the interests and viewpoint of the people

(narod) rendered in an intelligible, approachable

manner.

Throughout the 1930s the aforementioned

guidelines were strictly applied to artistic produc-

tion. Whereas in the early 1930s collective heroism

and collective labor (consonant with the goals of the

first two five-year plans) were glorified and pro-

moted, in the latter half of the 1930s up to the ad-

vent of World War II, individual heroes, from Stalin

to polar explorers, from collective farm workers to

Stakhanovites, were extolled. As the war years un-

folded, the official enforcement of socialist realist

imperatives lessened but definitely did not disappear.

The slight flexibility, afforded writers in particular,

to depict the brutality of battle during World War

II (but not any mistakes of Stalin or his military

commanders) was counterbalanced by the heroic

music, art work, and films that understandably

lauded the honest heroism displayed by common

Soviet citizens in the face of the war.

Nonetheless, when the war concluded, a redou-

bling of efforts to enforce strict principles of social-

ist realism emerged. Primary responsibility for this

enforcement fell, once again, to Andrei Zhdanov,

then chair of the Central Committee of the Com-

munist Party of the Soviet Union. Zhdanov’s most

virulent wrath fell on poet Anna Akhmatova and

writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose work Zhdanov

aggressively attacked in the press. Consequently, the

canonical elements of socialist realism reemerged and

prevailed until the so-called Thaw in the late 1950s.

This period (1953–1963) witnessed another

lessening of the paradigmatic strictures that de-

fined socialist realism. During this period relatively

greater flexibility marked artistic endeavors. In

particular, literary works were permitted to ex-

plore previously untouchable topics—the Soviet

concentration camps, the difficulties of life in the

countryside, the trauma of the post-war years—

in a more humanely artistic, less formulaic way.

This did not mean that Party supervision of artis-

tic production diminished completely, nor were all

works of literature written at this time permitted

to be published (e.g., Lidia Chukovskaya’s Sofia

Petrovna, Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle). Rather, a

slight lessening of the controls enabled some artists

to produce works that stretched the boundaries of

socialist realism.

This short-lived easing of control over artistic

production ended with a further tightening of the

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parameters that defined socialist realism. While these

parameters never approached the strictness of the

early years of Soviet power, they persisted nonethe-

less. Ironically during this ensuing period—called

Stagnation (1964–1985)—a number of interesting,

original films, works of literature, art, and music

appeared either through official channels or

through the burgeoning artistic underground. This

underground phenomenon permitted a host of of-

ficially censored or unacceptable works to be cir-

culated among appreciative audiences through

samizdat (self-publication) or tamizdat (publication

abroad). Consequently, with each passing year, the

hold that the socialist realist aesthetic exerted on

Soviet culture gradually lessened until it dissolved

into the period of glasnost in the mid-1980s.

Nonetheless, the village and urban prose move-

ments of the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated that

socialist realism’s elasticity was greater than one

might have imagined. Indeed, the traditional view

that the artistic value of any work of socialist re-

alism was compromised by virtue of the fact that

it was Party-mandated, has lost some of its ur-

gency. While not all works of socialist realism de-

serve attention and appreciation, many do. When

coupled with the non–socialist realist works of this

period, most notably Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The

Master and Margarita, we are left with a rich, var-

iegated artistic legacy.

Moreover, the fundamental fact that socialist

realism changed with the ideological and political

demands of a particular time period argues for an

inherent organicity that infused the system since

its inception. Our understanding and, perhaps, even

appreciation of socialist realism has grown thanks

not only to the post-glasnost flood of archival texts

and documents, but also thanks to the broader vi-

sion that hindsight provides.

See also: BULGAKOV, MIKHAIL AFANASIEVICH; GORKY,

MAXIM; MOTION PICTURES; RUSSIAN ASSOCIATION

OF PROLETARIAN WRITERS; SAMIZDAT; SILVER AGE;

SOLOVIEV, VLADIMIR SERGEYEVICH; THAW, THE;

ZHDANOV, ANDREI ALEXANDROVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brooks, Jeffrey. (1994). “Socialist Realism in Pravda:

Read All About It.” Slavic Review 53(4):973–991.

Carleton, Greg. (1994). “Genre in Socialist Realism.” Slavic

Review 53(4):992–1009.

Clark, Katerina. (1978). “Little Heroes and Big Deeds: Lit-

erature Responds to the First Five-Year Plan.” In Cul-

tural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, ed. Sheila Fitz-

patrick. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Clark, Katerina. (1985). The Soviet Novel: History as Rit-

ual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dobrenko, Evgeny. (1997). The Making of the Soviet

Reader. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Dobrenko, Evgeny. (2001). The Making of the Soviet

Writer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Ermolaev, Herman. (1963). Soviet Literary Theories,

1917–1934: The Genesis of Socialist Realism. Univer-

sity of California Publications in Modern Philology,

no. 69. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Golomshtock, Igor. (1990). Totalitarian Art in the Soviet

Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the People’s

Republic of China, tr. Robert Chandler. London:

Collins Harvill.

Groys, Boris. (1992). The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-

Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, tr. Charles

Rougle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gunther, Hans, ed. (1990). The Culture of the Stalin Pe-

riod. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Gutkin, Irina. (1999). The Cultural Origins of the Socialist

Realist Aesthetic, 1890–1934. Evanston, IL: North-

western University Press.

James, C. Vaughan. (1973). Soviet Socialist Realism: Ori-

gins and Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Lahusen, Thomas. (1997). How Life Writes the Book: Real

Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Lahusen, Thomas, and Dobrenko, Evgeny, eds. (1997).

Socialist Realism without Shores. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

Reid, Susan E. (2001). “Socialist Realism in the Stalinist

Terror: The Industry of Socialism Art Exhibition,

1935–1941.” Russian Review 60:153–184.

Robin, Regine. (1992). Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aes-

thetic, tr. Catherine Porter. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press.

Tertz, Abram [Andrei Sinyavsky]. (1982). The Trial Be-

gins and On Socialist Realism, tr. Max Hayward and

George Dennis. Berkeley: University of California

Press.

YNTHIA

A. R

UDER

SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES

The Russian Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party

arose between 1900 and 1902. Industrial growth,

peasant unrest, and the rise of the Marxist Social

Democratic movement spurred an array of leaders

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

from the earlier populist movement, as well as new

figures, to create a party that adapted the older

movement’s traditions to the new realities. Social-

ist Revolutionary ideology, organizational base,

and personnel therefore reflected, but was not iden-

tical to nineteenth-century, Russian populism. The

prime mover was Victor Chernov, the educated

grandson of a serf. Chernov hailed from the Volga

region, the new party’s first bastion. Chernov’s

neo-populist theory maintained that industrializa-

tion had created a sizable proletariat and that the

peasants had become a revolutionary class. In the

SR view, a coalition of the radical intelligentsia, the

industrial proletariat, and the peasants would make

the coming revolution, whereas Russia’s middle

class would remain quiescent. Consequently, the

revolution would be socialist, hence the party’s ti-

tle. This complex of views gave birth to a program

aimed at propagandizing and recruiting workers,

peasants, and intelligentsia. In addition, the SRs uti-

lized terrorism to destabilize, rather then over-

throw, the existing regime. The actual revolution,

they insisted, would result from hard organiza-

tional work and a popular uprising.

During the early 1900s, the party laid down a

network of peasant-oriented organizations and in

the cities challenged the Social Democrats among

the proletariat. The SR Party won over some of the

Social Democrats’ following through its popular

terror program and appeal to both peasants and

urban workers and as a result of splits within So-

cial Democracy. By the 1905–1907 Revolution, the

latter party still had an edge among the proletariat,

but the SRs operated virtually unchallenged among

the peasants. The SRs’ special attention to arming

workers and peasants allowed them to play a lively

role in armed struggles in Moscow, Saratov, and

elsewhere during 1905. However, as Chernov later

admitted, none of the socialists proved capable of

uniting the opposition to overthrow the regime.

Beginning in 1908, the Stolypin repression dam-

aged all socialist organizations and destroyed SR-

oriented national peasant, railroad, and teachers’

unions. Debates and splits characterized party life,

as the party put the terror program into abeyance.

Furthermore, the revelation that party leader Evno

Azev was a police spy further demoralized party

cadres. Yet the party survived and plunged into the

nascent labor movement. This tactic brought the

SRs to virtual parity with the Social Democrats in

many industrial areas and provided them with the

means to become fully involved in the post-1912

revival of the revolutionary movement.

The outbreak of the war in 1914 gave the regime

its last opportunity to suppress the radical move-

ment. Like the Social Democrats, the SRs split over

the war issue. Leftists, known variously as Left SRs

or SR-Internationalists, opposed the war, whereas

Right SRs supported the government’s war effort.

By 1916 the government’s ability to control the rev-

olutionary movement waned. SR organizations op-

posed the war and propagandized revolution, often

in coordination with Social Democrats. The Febru-

ary 1917 Revolution reflected protracted, sustained

revolutionary activity, not least by SRs, who were

also the revolution’s prime early beneficiaries. After

tsarism’s fall, the SRs strove to reunite the party’s

left, right, and center in order to dominate the new

revolution. Moderate SRs and Mensheviks, in al-

liance with the liberals, soon led the Provisional Gov-

ernment, which the SR Alexander Kerensky headed

after July. Still, the dedication of the moderate so-

cialist-liberal coalition to pursuing the war gave am-

munition to the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, who

began to call for soviet, socialist power. Leftist SRs

gradually moved away from the moderate leader-

ship, which by then included Chernov and other for-

mer radicals. By the fall of 1917, the SR-Mensheviks’

cooperation with the liberals discredited those par-

ties in the eyes of many workers and soldiers, who

supported the Bolsheviks and other leftists. During

the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks removed the

Provisional Government from power in the name of

the soviets. Deprived of the reins of government, the

SRs’ residual support from the peasantry held them

in good stead in the November 1917 Constituent

Assembly elections, a success that proved untrans-

latable into political power. After the Soviet govern-

ment dismissed the Constituent Assembly in early

January 1918, many SR delegates, including Cher-

nov, formed a government in Samara that sought

legitimacy in association with the Constitutional As-

sembly. This government, like other SR-oriented

governments in Arkhangelsk and Siberia, failed to

stand up to Red and White military forces, in part

owing to the shift of peasant support to the Left SRs,

now a separate party.

By late 1918 the SR Party had once again be-

come an underground resistance movement, in this

case against the communists, a status that party

leaders managed to sustain until 1922. Massive ar-

rests and the famous SR trials of that year effec-

tively ended the party’s existence inside Soviet

Russia. Chernov and many leaders escaped and lived

in the European and North American emigration but

had no real influence from abroad. Although the SR

approach had initially won the party a huge back-

SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

ing during 1917, its combined worker, peasant, and

intelligentsia program proved too broad to exercise

power. Likewise, Chernov’s post-October 1917

“third way,” which hoped to unite democratic ele-

ments of the population between the two extremes

of Bolshevism and the reactionary Whites failed, to

catch hold in the chaos of civil war.

See also: BOLSHEVISM; CHERNOV, VIKTOR MIKHAILOVICH;

CIVIL WAR OF 1917–1922; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION;

LEFT SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; MENSHEVIKS; OC-

TOBER REVOLUTION; POPULISM; PROVISIONAL GOV-

ERNMENT; REVOLUTION OF 1905; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC

WORKERS PARTY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hildermeier, Manfred. (2000). The Russian Socialist Rev-

olutionary Party before the First World War. New

York: St. Martin’s Press.

Melancon, Michael. (1990). The Socialist Revolutionaries

and the Russian Anti-War Movement, 1914–1917.

Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Perrie, Maureen. (1976). The Agrarian Policies of the Rus-

sian Socialist Revolutionary Party from its Origins

through the Revolution of 1905–1907. Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press.

Radkey, Oliver. (1958). The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism:

Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolu-

tionaries, February–October 1917. New York: Colum-

bia University Press.

Rice, Christopher. (1988). Russian Workers and the So-

cialist Revolutionary Party through the Revolution of

1905–1907. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.

ICHAEL

ELANCON

SOKOLOVSKY, VASILY DANILOVICH

(1897–1968), marshal of the Soviet Union (1946),

military commander, and theoretician.

Native of the Hrodna region, from a peasant

family, Vasily Sokolovky entered the Red Army in

February 1918 and studied in a short course for

commanders. During the Civil War, he served with

cavalry units. He later was transferred to central

Asia and was attached to the Turkestan Military Dis-

trict and commanded units in Samarkand and Fer-

gana, which were engaged in fighting against the

Basmashi guerrillas. In 1921 he graduated from the

military academy. Between 1922 and 1930, he

served as chief of staff of a division and corps, and

from 1930 to 1935 as commander of a division and

chief of staff of the Volga, Ural, and Moscow Mili-

tary Districts. He joined the Communist Party in

1931. Sokolovsky was fortunate not to come under

suspicion during the Great Terror. In May 1940 he

received the rank of lieutenant general. In February

1941 he was appointed as deputy chief of staff of

the Red Army. In the beginning of the war, after

Stalin ordered the arrest and execution of the lead-

ership of the shattered West Front, Sokolovsky was

appointed chief of staff of this front (July 1941–

January 1942 and May 1942–February 1943).

Along with these appointments, he was also the

chief of staff of the Western Theater (July–October

1941 and May 1942). After the Battle of Moscow,

the West Front, under Georgy Zhukov and Ivan

Konev, failed in repeated attempts to break through

the enemy lines, suffering massive losses for little

gain, except for preventing the German units from

being deployed elsewhere. Sokolovsky was involved

in all these battles, and in February 1943, he was

appointed commander of the West Front. His tenure

in this position was marked by a lack of success even

in sectors where the Red Army enjoyed a 10-1 su-

periority over the enemy. Sokolovsky was removed

from command in April 1944 and replaced by Ivan

Chernyakhovsky, and it was under his leadership

that the West Front, now renamed the Third Be-

lorussian Front, managed to roll over the enemy

lines. During the great summer offensive of 1944,

Sokolovsky returned to staff positions. He was at-

tached to the First Ukrainian Front in April 1945

and took part in the Berlin Operation. Despite a

rather undistinguished record during the war,

Sokolovsky’s star rose in the postwar years. In 1945

he was Deputy Commander of the Soviet forces in

Germany, and after Zhukov’s departure in 1946, the

commander. In 1945 he also received the title of hero

of the Soviet Union, a rarity for a staff officer. In

1946 Sokolovsky was elected to the Supreme Soviet.

From 1946 to 1949 he was a member of the Allied

Control Commission. In March 1946 he was the

first deputy minister of the armed forces (from Feb-

ruary 1950, war minister). In June 1952, he headed

the General Staff and continued to hold the posi-

tion after Stalin’s death until April 1960. He was

also the first deputy war minister (from 1953,

minister of defense). In 1952 he was elected to the

Central Committee, but was demoted to candidate

member in 1961. He was removed from active

command in June 1960 and was attached to the

Red Army inspectorate. He is buried at the Krem-

lin Wall. Sokolovsky’s fame rests mainly on his

views on military strategy, published first in 1963,

which have been studied in depth by Western strate-

gists as the “Bible” of Soviet military doctrine.

SOKOLOVSKY, VASILY DANILOVICH

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

See also: MILITARY ART; MILITARY DOCTRINE; MILITARY,

SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; WORLD WAR II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sokolovskii, V. D. (1963). Soviet Military Strategy. En-

glewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

ICHAEL

ARRISH

SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT

In the summer of 1980, Poland experienced labor

unrest on an unprecedented scale. Faced with na-

tionwide strikes, the ruling Communist Party was

forced to sanction, for the first time in a Soviet-

bloc country, the creation of independent trade

unions, free of state control.

The emergence of the Solidarity trade union

movement was viewed with acute anxiety by the

leaders of Poland’s neighboring socialist states, the

USSR in particular. How, given that the living and

working conditions of Soviet workers were at least

as bad as those of their Polish counterparts, could

the development of similar labor unrest be fore-

stalled in the USSR? The rise of Solidarity accord-

ingly contributed to a far-reaching debate over

political and economic reform in the USSR. The de-

bate was even more significant since it occurred at

a moment when the Soviet leadership was facing

a major generational shift and concomitant power

struggle. The aging leadership of Leonid Brezhnev

had allowed social and economic problems to ac-

cumulate to such an extent that the USSR was ex-

periencing stagnation in economic growth. This

threatened the informal social contract between

leaders and rank-and-file workers.

In the early months of the Polish crisis (late

1980 and early 1981), after deciding against an in-

vasion, the Brezhnev leadership adopted a series of

stopgap measures to ward off the danger of con-

tagion. For example, the jamming of Western ra-

dio broadcasts was resumed, while government

financial priorities were revised to put increased

emphasis on consumption.

By the time martial law was declared in Poland

in December 1981 it was clear that the danger of

spillover to the USSR—if it ever existed—had been

averted. Apart from a few isolated strikes and scat-

tered leafleting in the USSR’s western republics, the

Polish events evoked little sympathy among Soviet

workers, who were inclined to believe that the USSR

was subsidising its Warsaw Pact allies anyway.

Faced with a continuing slowdown in the rate of

economic growth, which was leading to stagna-

tion, if not actual reduction, of popular living stan-

dards, the Soviet leadership abandoned carrots for

sticks. This was exemplified by the brief leadership

of Yuri Andropov (1982–1983), who launched a

massive campaign to raise workplace discipline and

crack down on crime, corruption, and alcoholism,

with only limited results.

The Polish events continued to reverberate

when, in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader

of the Soviet communist party. Gorbachev publicly

identified himself with reformist Soviet academics

who argued that the Polish crisis was attributable

not simply to the mistakes of Poland’s leaders but

to a general weakness afflicting all single-party,

planned economies of the Soviet type. Members of

the reformist camp used the Polish example to press

for radical reforms of the Soviet political and eco-

nomic system. The Polish experience can accord-

ingly be said to have acted as a catalyst to

Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost (openness) and per-

estroika (restructuring).

Gorbachev’s efforts to persuade Soviet workers

and managers to take responsibility for the qual-

ity of their work, in return for enhanced rewards,

met first with apathy, then with hostility and re-

sistance. Gradually he adopted more radical mea-

sures, culminating in his efforts to strip the

communist party of its monopoly on power. In at-

tacking the party, however, Gorbachev was at-

tacking the mainspring of the Soviet system. The

result was the collapse of the USSR itself.

See also: GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; LABOR;

POLAND; TRADE UNIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrew, Christopher, and Mitrokhin, Vasili. (1999). The

Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West.

London. London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press.

Teague, Elizabeth. (1988). Solidarity and the Soviet

Worker: The Impact of the Polish Events of 1980 on So-

viet Internal Politics. London: Croom Helm.

LIZABETH

EAGUE

SOLOVIEV, VLADIMIR SERGEYEVICH

(1853–1900), philosopher, theologian, journalist,

poet, literary critic.

SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT

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