Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

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288 james m. diehl

nostalgia for the past. The war had showed the folly of planning ahead and deferring

gratiﬁcation, and the postwar “lost generation” lived for the day, seeking to escape

both the war and an uncertain present through hedonistic excess.

But it was impossible to escape the war. Its destructive consequences were revealed

daily in the fragmented postwar societies, the stagnant economies, and the broken

bodies of the war-disabled on whose bodies the horrors of the war were indelibly

inscribed. Above all it was the silent presence of the dead, the truly lost generation,

which weighed upon postwar Europe. Their loss and sacriﬁce were commemorated

both ofﬁcially and privately. Ofﬁcial observations of Armistice Day and/or Memorial

Day were introduced. Tombs dedicated to Unknown Soldiers were built. Personal

shrines were constructed and bereaved families made pilgrimages to battlefront

gravesites. Séances were held by distraught parents, hoping to make contact with lost

sons on “the other side.”

While ofﬁcial commemorative activity sought to create a uniform memory of the

war, its meaning remained contested. This was reﬂected in postwar literature. After

years of digesting their experiences, novels and autobiographies by participants in the

war began to appear. Some, such as Ernst Jünger, celebrated the war, but most

deplored its folly and waste. Were the soldiers heroes or victims? How were they to

be portrayed in graveyard statuary and courthouse monuments? The debate was most

intense in those countries which had been defeated. Germany never built a national

monument as a result of division over where it should be and what it should represent

and there were struggles everywhere, on both the national and local level, over how

the war dead were to be honored and depicted.

Memories of World War I obsessed Europeans in the interwar years, but the lessons

that were drawn from it diverged sharply. Most wanted to avoid another war at all

costs. This desire went far beyond traditional paciﬁst circles. Even those, primarily

conservatives, who had romanticized war in 1914, now realized its cost in an age of

mass politics: the warfare state led inevitably to the welfare state and a further erosion

of the wealth and power of traditional elites. Democratic regimes, reﬂecting this

broad consensus, pursued peaceful policies, even appeasement. In contrast, fascists

and fascist regimes gloriﬁed war. The fascist lesson of World War I was not to avoid

war, but to prepare to wage it more effectively. This had domestic and international

consequences. For fascists, the militarized wartime organization of society during

World War I became the model for their political movements and for future society.

Militarized fascist movements were mobilized to defeat domestic, “internal” enemies,

and the militarized societies of fascist regimes prepared their nations for confrontation

with “external” enemies and the overthrow of the postwar international order.

Twenty years after the end of the Great War, the “war to end war,” the seeds sown

during that conﬂict sprouted with a terrible vengeance, plunging the world into a

new, even more bloody and destructive war.

NOTES

1 Elie Halévy,

The Era of Tyrannies (New York: Doubleday, 1965), p. 222.

2 See Jean-Jacques Becker,

The Great War and the French People (Providence RI:

Berg, 1993); Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in

Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

demobilization and discontent 289

3 See Michael C. C. Adams, The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World

War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Eric J. Leed, “Class and

Disillusionment in World War I,” Journal of Modern History 50/4 (1978): 680–99.

4 See Allan K. Wildman,

The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 2 vols (Princeton NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1980, 1987).

5 See Leonard V. Smith,

Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth

Infantry during World War I (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

6 See Arno J. Mayer,

Political Origins of the New Diplomacy (New York: Random

House, 1970).

7 See John Horne, “Introduction: Mobilizing for ‘Total War,’ 1914–1918,” in

State, Society

and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, John Horne, ed. (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–17.

8 Although the Spanish Civil War came to an end in March 1939, elsewhere the

interwar civil wars continued after September 1939 as wars within a war: in the

west, this took the form of collaboration versus resistance; in the east, it was played

out between contending factions within resistance movements. Cf. Paul Preston, “The

Great Civil War: European Politics, 1914–1945,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of

Modern Europe, T. C. W. Blanning, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998),

pp. 148–81.

9 See Gerald D. Feldman,

The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German

Inﬂation, 1914–1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Benjamin F. Martin,

France and the Après Guerre, 1918–1924 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University

Press, 1999).

10 See Gail Braybon, “Women, War, and Work,” in

The Oxford Illustrated History of the First

World War, Hew Strachan, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 149–62.

11 See Sandra M. Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women and the Great

War,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, Margaret Randolph Higonnet

et al., eds (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 197–226.

12 See Joanna Bourke,

Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without

Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1994); Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender

in Interwar Britain (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

13 See Robert Soucy,

French Fascism: The First Wave, 1923–1933 (New Haven CT: Yale

University Press, 1986) and French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–1939 (New Haven

CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and

Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

14 See Eric J. Leed,

No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1979).

15 See Hans-Heinrich Nolte, “Stalinism as Total Social War,” in

The Shadows of Total War,

Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, eds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),

pp. 295–311; Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth

Century Russia (New York: Viking, 2001) and “War, Death, and Remembrance in Soviet

Russia,” in War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, Jay Winter and Emmanuel

Sivan, eds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 61–83.

16 See Stephen R. Ward, “Great Britain: Land Fit for Heroes Lost,” in

The War Generation:

Veterans of the First World War, Stephen R. Ward, ed. (Port Washington NY: Kennikat,

1975), pp. 10–37.

17 See Andrew Rothstein,

The Soldiers’ Strikes of 1919 (London: Macmillan, 1980); Graham

Wootton, The Politics of Inﬂuence: British Ex-Servicemen, Cabinet Decisions, and Cultural

Change, 1917–57 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963).

290 james m. diehl

18 See Robert Soucy, “France: Veterans’ Politics between the Wars,” in Ward, The War

Generation, pp. 59–103; Antoine Prost, In the Wake of War: “Les Anciens Combattants”

and French Society, 1914–1939 (Providence RI: Berg, 1992).

19 On the fascist leagues, see the works by Soucy cited in note 13.

20 On Italy, see Jonathan Dunnage,

Twentieth-Century Italy: A Social History (London:

Longman, 2002); Paul Corner and Giovanna Proacacci, “The Italian Experience of ‘Total’

Mobilization, 1915–1920,” in Horne, State, Society and Mobilization, pp. 223–40; and

Giovanna Procacci, “A ‘Latecomer’ in War: The Case of Italy,” in Authority, Identity and

the Social History of the Great War, Frans Coetzee and Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee, eds

(Providence RI: Berghahn, 1995), pp. 3–27.

21 See Michael A. Ledeen, “Italy: War as a Style of Life,” in Ward,

The War Generation, pp.

104–34.

22 See James M. Diehl, “Germany: Veterans’ Politics under Three Flags,” in Ward,

The War

Generation, pp. 135–86; Richard Bessel, “The Great War in German Memory: The

Soldiers of the First World War, Demobilization, and Weimar Political Culture,” German

History 6/1 (1988): 20–34.

23 See Michael Geyer, “Ein Vorbot des Wohlfahrsstaates. Die Kriegsopferversorgung in

Frankreich, Deutschland und Grossbritannien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieges,” Geschichte

und Gesllschaaft 9/2 (1983): 230–77; Robert W. Whalen, Bitter Wounds: German Victims

of the Great War, 1914–1939 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1984).

24 See James M. Diehl,

Paramilitary Politics in Weimar Germany (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1978).

25 Ibid, ch. 7; Karl Rohe,

Das Reichsbanner Schwartz Rot Gold: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte

und Struktur der politischen Kampfverbände zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf:

Droste, 1966); Kurt G. P. Schuster, Der Rote Frontkämpferbund 1924–1929: Beiträge zur

Geschichte und Organisationsstruktur eines politischen Kampfbundes (Düsseldorf: Droste,

1975).

26 See George L. Mosse,

Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1990); Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the

Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Doubleday, 1989).

27 See Paul Fussell,

The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press,

1975).

28 See Richard Bessel,

Germany after the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1993). The phrase “World of Yesterday” is Zweig’s. See guide to further reading.

29 See Jay Winter,

Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural

History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Adrian Gregory, The Silence of

Memory: Armistice Day, 1919–1946 (Providence RI: Berg, 1994).

30 See Mosse,

Fallen Soldiers; Winter, Sites of Memory; Sean A. Forner, “War Commemoration

and the Republic in Crisis: Weimar Germany and the Neue Wache,” Central European

History 35/4 (2002): 513–49; Daniel J. Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar

France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and “Bodies and Names: The

Emergence of Commemoration in Interwar France,” American Historical Review 103/2

(April 1998): 443–66.

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

Derek H. Aldcroft, From Versailles to Wall Street, 1919–1929 (Berkeley: University of California

Press; London: Allen Lane, 1977). A clear account of postwar economic problems.

Volker Berghahn, Der Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten, 1918–1935 (Düsseldorf: Droste,

1966). History of the largest and most dynamic of the anti-Weimar veterans’

organizations.

demobilization and discontent 291

Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). An interesting, if ﬂawed, attempt to explain

why German veterans were hostile to the state, while British veterans remained loyal to it,

even though beneﬁts were more generous in Germany than in England.

Victoria DeGrazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1992). Has much to say not only about women in fascist Italy, but in

interwar Europe in general.

David, A. Gerber, ed., Disabled Veterans in History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

2000). Useful survey of a long-neglected problem.

Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That (New York: Doubleday, 1957). Graphic descriptions of

trench warfare as well as instructive accounts of Graves’s life before and after the war.

Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1973). Describes the origins of the Depression and the socioeconomic consequences

of the various remedies employed to end it.

Rudy Koshar, ed., Splintered Classes: Politics and the Lower Middle Classes in Interwar Europe

(New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990). Provides new insights by challenging old

stereotypes.

Gregory M. Luebbert, Liberalism, Fascism, or Social Democracy: Social Classes and the Political

Origins of Regimes in Interwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). A useful

and overlooked analysis of why democracy succeeded or failed in the interwar years.

Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in

the Decade after World War I (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). A sophisti-

cated analysis of how bourgeois conservative social and political forces contained the postwar

leftist surge.

Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

1995). A comprehensive survey.

Raymond J. Sontag, A Broken World, 1919–1939 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). A classic

gem that still shines.

David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First Word War as Political Tragedy (New York: Basic Books,

2004). A detailed and up-to-date synthesis of the war and its aftermath.

Jay M. Winter, The Experience of World War I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Lavishly illustrated, brief, but thorough, account of the war and its consequences.

Stefan Zweig, World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

1964). An excellent account by a perceptive contemporary observer of the impact of the

war on European society.

Chapter Nineteen

The Socialist Experiment

William J. Chase

When the Russian Communist Party held its Eighth Congress in March 1919, the

fate of the party and the new Soviet republic was anything but certain. The party,

commonly known as the Bolsheviks, had come to power in October 1917 proclaim-

ing a new type of government, a Soviet government of workers and peasants, devoted

to ending Russian participation in World War I and to creating a socialist society.

Those goals angered many Russians and many European governments. Within

months, civil war and foreign interventions turned Russia once again into a battle-

ground. The treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the civil war, and the government’s early policies

led to a hemorrhaging of the nation’s wealth. The party that met in March 1919

governed (if that is the appropriate verb) a Russia that was but a fraction of its former

size and was besieged by foreign and domestic armies.

Yet there was also cause for optimism and optimists abounded within the party.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the Soviet republic still existed. The end of

World War I meant the collapse of old empires and the rise of new nation-states, the

political deﬁnition of which remained uncertain. The hopes the Bolsheviks had for

other socialist revolutions were not unfounded in 1919. Just as the Eighth Congress

opened, a Soviet republic was proclaimed in Hungary. Although it lasted only eight

months, it exempliﬁed the revolutionary unrest that swept through sections of

Europe. Sympathy and support abroad for the new socialist experiment were

substantial. That same month, the Communist International (Comintern) was

founded in Moscow. Its creation marked a decisive break with moderate socialist

parties in Europe and elsewhere, and Russia’s intentions to promote revolutions

abroad. Communist parties, the members of which had belonged to socialist parties,

came into being throughout Europe and elsewhere. Some were large and inﬂuential,

some not, but all forced their governments to confront issues raised by the

Soviet experiment. Between 1918 and 1923, communist-led uprisings in

Germany, Austria, and Bulgaria threatened fragile governments. European govern-

ments refused to recognize the new Soviet sate. Fascist and nationalist parties in

Europe gained support by offering themselves as defenders against “Bolshevik”

revolution at home.

After 1917, Europe and the world closely watched the Soviet socialist experiment.

Governments treated it as a pariah state because it offered a stark political alternative

to liberal democracy and fascism. Some applauded its efforts to build a new world.

Others watched carefully and reserved judgment, fascinated by its bold social experi-

ments yet dismayed by restrictions on political freedom. Few Europeans were agnos-

tic about the socialist experiment.

The “Program of the Communist Party of Russia,” which the Eighth Congress

adopted, conveyed succinctly what attracted or scared people.

The program outlined

the party’s vision of the kind of socialist society it intended to construct and some

of the means by which it envisioned doing so. It also provides themes that enable us

to appreciate the means, ends, and dynamics of the socialist experiment that unfolded

in the USSR during the interwar years.

Like all revolutions, the October Revolution

sought to destroy the old order and to construct a new one, although the dimensions

of the destruction and construction exceeded those of all previous revolutions. Not

everyone viewed the processes of destruction and construction in the same ways.

Conﬂicts over differing revolutionary agendas, differing visions of what the revolution

promised, and different visions of socialism fragmented the party and society, and

extended into Europe.

While scholars tend to focus on the Communist Party because it formulated policy

and its members staffed important state ofﬁces, the Soviet state was charged with

defending the revolution and implementing the party’s program. As Marxists, the

Bolsheviks believed that all governments represented the ruling class and imple-

mented policies that served its interests. The revolution had not changed that cor-

nerstone of Bolshevik thought. Guided by party policy, the state was the driving force

in the destruction of the old order, the process of socialist construction, and the

realization of the socialist experiment.

Central to the new regime’s identity was its understanding of those it viewed as

enemies. There were many enemies, real and perceived: some were foreign, some

were domestic; some took up arms against the new state, some used economic or

political means to destroy socialism. Whatever their means, these enemies threatened

the socialist experiment and made it imperative for party members and their sup-

porters to be vigilant. The civil war and foreign intervention by European, US, and

Japanese troops legitimized the view that “capitalist encirclement” threatened the

USSR. Their fear of war is understandable. Less obvious, but no less important, is

that many party members and Soviet citizens broadly interpreted politics in terms of

enemies.

Appreciating the importance of these four overarching themes – destruction

and construction; competing revolutionary agendas; the transformative role of the

state; and fear of war, enemies, and capitalist encirclement – makes it easier to

understand the dynamics that deﬁned the world’s ﬁrst socialist experiment,

and its relationship to Europe. Using the party program to structure our

exploration enables us to focus and organize our discussion, and to judge the experi-

ment on its own terms. We must also impose a chronological framework so as to

give temporal deﬁnition to this unfolding experiment. This essay examines three

periods: the Civil War years (1918–21); the years of the New Economic Policy

(NEP, 1921–8); and the Stalin years (1928–41, although Stalin ruled until his death

in 1953).

the socialist experiment 293

294 william j. chase

The Experiment Outlined

When the Bolsheviks came to power in October 1917, they set out to destroy root

and branch the Romanov autocracy and its social base, as well as the “bourgeois”

Provisional Government that had replaced the tsar in February 1917. They announced

their intention to create a new form of government: a revolutionary democracy based

on the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. Known variously as Soviet or

proletarian democracy, it was based on Marx’s belief that hitherto all governments

had been dictatorships of that minority class. Proletarian democracy was to be “a

higher type of democracy”

because workers and peasants, the majority, would rule.

Declaring the principles of the new government and bringing them to life were

distinct realities. The party’s call for “All power to the Soviets” in October 1917

hastened the collapse of central governmental power and fueled the assertion of

local power. According to the party’s program, this was how it should be because

the “Soviet State realizes . . . local self-government, without any sort of authority

imposed from above.” Yet ﬁghting a war without “any sort of authority imposed

from above” proved impossible. The government increasingly asserted central direc-

tion of the economy and, in many cases, local ofﬁcials pleaded for help from the

central government. The state’s need to mobilize scarce resources for the Red Army

and to keep the economy going overwhelmed the dreams of a decentralized political

system. Although the ideal remained alive, when the party adopted its program in

1919, the centralization of power was well advanced. Still, the central government

had a difﬁcult time of governing at the local level. Holding power and wielding it

effectively are different realities.

The contrast between the program’s idealistic vision and political reality was not

conﬁned to issues of democracy and state power. The Bolsheviks embraced a vision

of socialism different from that held by many socialists of the time. Most European

socialists believed that a socialist government required electoral legitimacy and that

a socialist society could only exist in an economically developed and democratic

society. The Bolsheviks, the self-proclaimed vanguard of the proletariat, rejected this

view. Their program announced “a pitiless struggle against that bourgeois perversion

of socialism which is dominant in the leading social democratic and socialist parties.”

They rejected the label socialist and embraced the label communist. They broke with

moderate socialist parties and urged their supporters to do the same, to form com-

munist parties, and to join the Comintern.

The Bolsheviks enacted policies designed to destroy Russia’s social and economic

order and the principles on which it was based. They abolished private ownership of

land and productive property; they authorized peasants to conﬁscate and redistribute

the lands of the aristocracy and church; they empowered local soviets (locally elected

councils) to conﬁscate and redistribute the housing of the former elite; they national-

ized key sectors of the industrial economy; they declared the legal equality of all

people regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity (although they denied legal rights to

the former “exploiting classes”); and they abolished the existing military and judicial

systems. These early proclamations sought to destroy the former elite’s bases of power

so as to construct a new socialist order ruled by the dictatorship of the proletariat

and the peasantry and based on the principles of egalitarianism and decentralized

power. The ideals underlying these proclamations infused the party program, which

the socialist experiment 295

was militantly idealistic. Consider, for example, the call to abolish a market-based

system for the distribution of goods and to replace it with a system of “consumers’

communes” that would create “an apparatus for mass distribution more perfect than

any known to the history of capitalism” and would be administered “in the commu-

nist spirit.”

European governments were horriﬁed.

The Bolsheviks envisioned the use of state power to destroy the old order and to

construct a socialist society deﬁned by local power and infused by the “communist

spirit.” It was a vision of socialism unlike any other and one which, by 1919, did not

always conform to reality. It was also a vision that inﬂamed many Russians who

organized anti-soviet armies and many foreign governments who supported them. It

was a vision that split the European left and working class. It was a vision that opened

a Pandora’s box.

The Experiment in the Civil War Years (1918–1921)

Following the October 1917 decree nationalizing land, peasants moved quickly to

conﬁscate the former elite’s property. The Bolsheviks initially viewed this destructive

urge as a progressive force. Many peasant communities used the processes of land

conﬁscation and redistribution to reinvigorate the village commune, where traditional

agricultural practices, such as the three-ﬁeld system, strip farming, and periodic redis-

tribution of land, were common. The new government’s food policy also contributed

to the revival of communes. By mid-1918, the country faced a food crisis. Given

rampant inﬂation and dire shortages of consumer goods, peasants withheld their

produce. Faced with desperate urban food shortages, the government ordered the

requisitioning of peasant produce, angering peasants and driving a wedge between

them and the government that ruled in their name. By late 1920, peasant armies

ruled vast tracts of land and the food crisis deepened, threatening the government

at the moment of its victory in the civil war. Communes, which envisioned local

control as central to socialism, often organized this resistance. In early 1921 the party

relented. It ended requisitioning and legalized rural trade, quickly calming an angry

peasantry.

The party had failed to achieve its goals of organizing “large-scale socialist agri-

culture,” promoting scientiﬁc and cooperative agricultural methods, and crushing

the resistance of “rich peasants” to state policy – but it had deepened peasant suspi-

cions of centralized state power. The Bolsheviks continued to believe that building

socialism on the foundations of medieval agricultural practices was impossible. The

struggle between the government’s and the peasantry’s conﬂicting revolutionary

agendas put both sides on notice that the other threatened to block the realization

of their dreams. During the 1920s the government and peasants coexisted, although

the issue of how to modernize agriculture went unresolved.

The government’s decrees abolishing private property and nationalizing key eco-

nomic resources hastened economic collapse just when the civil war demanded

increased production. Destroying the old order threatened the defense of the embry-

onic new order. Factories offer a microcosm of the confusion and contradictions that

arose from efforts to realize competing revolutionary agendas. Workers and Bolsheviks

alike wanted to raise workers’ standard of living, shorten their workday, improve

working conditions, and give them greater inﬂuence over the workplace. The program

296 william j. chase

envisioned the economy being coordinated by a “general government design” and

the centralization of production, with the trade unions administering the “whole

economic life of the country” so as to assert “effective popular control over the results

of production.”

Like many Europeans of their generation, the Bolsheviks viewed

science and rationality as crowning human achievements, and industrialization and

rational administration as social panaceas – so long, of course, as they were adminis-

tered according to the proper class values. Here, too, the destructive and constructive

agendas came into conﬂict.

In 1917 the Bolsheviks made workers’ control a central plank of their platform.

Following the October Revolution, many workers moved quickly to enact that

promise. But there was sharp disagreement over what workers’ control meant. Many

Bolsheviks and workers believed that workers should control factories and allow

factory committees and trade unions to run enterprises. Others argued that control

should initially take the form of worker oversight of and participation in factory

administration alongside knowledgeable personnel, even if those personnel were

“bourgeois specialists.” For Lenin, the party’s founder and leader until his death in

1924, workers’ control committees were schools of communism where workers

would learn how to administer properly a socialized enterprise.

The nationalization of enterprises and workers’ demands for control led many

owners and administrators to abandon the factories, leaving them in the hands of

workers who had no administrative experience.

Modern industrial enterprises are

complex and workers’ inexperience and lack of knowledge exacerbated problems

created by economic collapse. Workers’ ignorance of accounting, sources of credit

and raw materials, technical and engineering issues, and wholesale networks resulted

in diminishing production and revenue that undermined efforts to raise wages and

assert control. To reverse the situation, workers often demanded that the state nation-

alize their enterprise, but the state had few resources and fewer solutions. The

program called for the “universal increase in the productive forces of the coun-

try . . . by all available means.”

But the available means were few. To increase pro-

duction, party leaders asserted central control over the economy, demanded greater

work discipline, and tied wages to output. “Bourgeois” technical specialists returned

to factories to direct a sullen workforce. When such efforts failed, the party and its

social base found themselves at odds. By late 1920, widespread worker unrest swept

the country, and debate raged over what roles trade unions and workers should have

in administering the nation’s economy. Some cited the party program’s call for unions

to direct “the work of administration in the whole economic life of the economy.”

Others argued for militarizing labor and making unions focus on industrial produc-

tion. In 1921 a compromise was reached. Unions would focus on protecting workers

and on increasing their productivity and labor discipline. The state, guided by party

policies, would administer the economy.

Equality infused the socialist vision – and the Soviet government was the ﬁrst state

to outlaw ethnic and racial inequality. But how to deal with nationalist aspirations

within the former tsarist empire confounded many. As Marxists, Bolsheviks under-

stood the world in class terms. Their program announced that “primary importance

is the policy of uniting the proletarians and semi-proletarians of various nationalities

in a joint revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the landlords and the bour-

geoisie.” Class, not ethnicity, was the essential characteristic. Yet they were often

the socialist experiment 297

realists. They accepted the declarations of independence by Finns, Estonians, Latvians,

and Lithuanians in 1918, although in areas such as Georgia party leaders struggled

to keep lands within the new Soviet federation. Establishing a federation of ethnic

or national groups seemed to most Bolsheviks to be the appropriate, democratic

way to address the legitimate concerns of the Russian Empire’s former subjects.

Soviet leaders acknowledged that Great Russian chauvinism had alienated many non-

Russians. Hence the program deemed it “essential to annul any and every privilege

of any national group [read: Russians], to secure complete national equality, and to

recognize that colonies and oppressed nationalities have a full right to secede.” The

new Soviet state was a union of socialist republics deﬁned along national lines. The

party called for the “utmost consideration” of the “survival of national sentiment”

as the surest way to ensure a “durable and amicable union between the diverse

national elements of the international proletariat.”

Republics, autonomous regions,

even districts organized on an ethnic basis, came into being. But ﬁnding ways for

class values to replace nationalist values proved illusive. The Bolsheviks’ innovative

approach to ethnicity intrigued or alarmed many in Europe, where issues of class and

nationality were also ﬂashpoints.

Education was central to the socialist experiment’s long-term success. As Marxists,

Bolshevik leaders viewed educational institutions as venues where the ruling class

inculcated students with its political, social, and cultural values. The program was

quite explicit: schools must contribute to the “complete abolition of the division of

society into classes” and to “the communist regeneration of society.” Toward this

end, it announced its intention to provide free, compulsory, secular education for all

children (to age 17), to provide students with free school materials including school

clothing and footwear, to create a network of crèches and kindergartens to prepare

children for school, to train teachers “permeated with the ideas of communism,” to

provide “easy access to the universities for all who may desire it,” especially workers,

and to organize citizens to “participate actively in the spread of enlightenment.”

Local soviets and party committees organized members to participate in anti-illiteracy

campaigns by going to villages and neighborhoods to teach children and adults how

to read. Creating an educated population and inculcating socialist values were essen-

tial to enabling workers and peasants to achieve positions of power and responsibility.

Social promotion was essential if the proletariat was to become the ruling class. Only

when educated and trained workers and peasants staffed the ofﬁces of government,

commerce, industry, and culture would the destruction of the old elite’s power be

complete.

Many did so during the civil war years.

The platform of 1919 envisioned a new political order, “a higher type of democ-

racy” in which “local self-government, without any sort of authority imposed from

above,” would rule. That did not happen. Defense against the military onslaughts of

domestic and foreign enemies justiﬁed a centralized state. The new Soviet govern-

ment had promised to build the foundations for a socialism of abundance, to improve

the working and living conditions of workers and peasants. That did not happen.

The economic collapse triggered by revolutionary policies, civil war, and foreign

interventions brought the economy to a near standstill, and pitted many workers and

peasants against the government that ruled in their name. So total was the collapse

of 1918–21 that reality made a mockery of everyone’s vision of socialism, of each

group’s revolutionary agenda. It was as if they had to start all over.