A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

During the first five years of the Soviet regime over one million ordinary Russians joined the Bolshevik Party. Most of these were peasant sons, literate young men like Kanatchikov and Os'kin, who had left the village to work in industry or to join the army before 1917, and who in the process came to reject the 'dark' and 'backward' ways of the old peasant Russia. Some of them returned to their native villages and were recruited by the Bolsheviks as part of the emerging rural bureaucracy. For the most part, they were committed to a cultural revolution that would bring the village closer to the towns: peasant agriculture would be modernized; the trappings of modern civilization, such as schools, hospitals and electric light, would be brought to the countryside; and the Church's influence would be reduced. The albeit very gradual spread of Bolshevism in the countryside during the 1920s was based on this revolt by the younger peasants against the old — and still largely dominant — patriarchal village; and it was in many ways a continuation of the type of reforms which peasants like Semenov had been pioneering for the past thirty years. But the majority of these peasant sons, including Os'kin and Kanatchikov, were drawn into Bolshevism from outside the village — either through the army or through industry — and it was not so much the reform of the old peasant Russia as its abolition which attracted them to the party's cause. Their allegiance to Bolshevism was intimately linked with their own self-identity as 'proletarians', which in their eyes (and in the rhetoric of the party) meant first and foremost that they were not peasants. They saw Bolshevism as a force of progress, both for Russia and for themselves,

as a means of wiping out the brutal village world from which they had come and of replacing it with the urban culture of school and industry through which they themselves had risen to become a part of the official elite. Virtually the whole of the party's self-identity and ideology was to become based on the militant rhetoric of industrial progress, of overcoming drunkenness and superstition, and of getting Russia to catch up with the West.

This drive to overcome backwardness was the kernel of Stalin's 'revolution from above', the forcible drive towards industrialization during the first of the Five Year Plans (1928—32). As Stalin himself put it in an impassioned speech of 1931, Russia had been beaten throughout its history because it was backward, it had been beaten by the Mongol khans, the Swedish feudal lords, the Polish-Lithuanian pans, the Anglo-French capitalists, the Japanese and German imperialists: 'We are fifty to one hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must cover this distance in ten years. Either we do this, or they will crush us.' This great leap forward had a powerful appeal for all those lower-class Bolsheviks who as young men had run away from the backwardness of the Russian peasant world and who saw the revolution as a national revolt against this inheritance of poverty. By the 1920s the party rank and file had become dominated by these semi-educated types. Most of them had joined the party in the civil war and, in one form or another, owed their allegiance to Stalin's apparatus. They had little understanding of Marxist theory, and the arguments of Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin, the three great intellectuals of the party, about the NEP's finer strategies left most of them cold. The NEP in general seemed a retreat to them after the great advances of the civil war — and in this sense the failure of the NEP was rooted in the party's own political culture. One of Stalin's shock-workers recalls how the party's youth was frustrated with the NEP:

The Komsomols of my generation — those who met the October Revolution at the age of ten or younger — harboured a grudge against our fate. When we became politically conscious and joined the Komsomol, when we went to work in the factories, we lamented that there was nothing left for us to do because the spirit of the revolution had gone, because the harsh but romantic years of the civil war would not return, and because the older generation had left to us a boring mundane life without struggle or excitement.³

Stalin's revolution against the NEP promised a return to the 'heroic period' of the civil war when the Bolsheviks had conquered every fortress and pressed ahead on the road towards socialism without fear or compromise. It promised a resumption of the class war against the 'kulaks' and the 'bourgeois specialists', before whom the NEP had been in retreat, combined with a mili-

tant (if mendacious) rhetoric of proletarian hegemony.