RUS Lecture 6

The Civil War was protracted and nasty, and the war with Poland was a close call, but by 1921 the Bolsheviks were now free to begin creating their Workers' Paradise. The Bolsheviks were now torn between nationalist and socialist concerns. Marx had preached the inevitability of world revolution, but it was starting to look as the revolution would be restricted to Russia for quite some time.At the same time, Lenin was very concerned that his new state reflect the "international" aspect of the world revolution, which led to the creation of various new "republics" within the new Bolshevik state, each with its own national culture and (when necessary) its newly designated national language. Lenin truly believed that the Bolshevik Revolution was just the first of a series of inevitable revolutions destined by History and Marx to spread rapidly all over the capitalist world.

The Commissar for Nationalities, Iosif Stalin, proposed the creation of a federation to be named the "Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic," but Lenin changed it to Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics. The difference was crucial. Each of the federated republics/regions was permitted to have its own language and culture, and their bureaucracies were largely native. Each retained the right (however unlikely it would be employed) to secede from the Soviet Union. But all effective power remained in the Kremlin; more precisely, in the hands of the All-Russian Communist Party. Similarly, the world Communist Parties which were to guide these inevitable revolutions were likewise guided by the Comintern (Communist International) which was basically a front for the All-Russian Communist Party. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" Lenin kept bawling about was in fact the dictatorship of Lenin.

After Lenin's premature death in 1924, the General Secretary Stalin competed with his bete noire, Lev Trotsky for ascendancy. Trotsky took the more orthodox Marxian tack of harping on the importance of building world revolution, while Stalin championed the approach of building socialism in one country - the Soviet Union. Stalin won the fight, exiled Trotsky in 1929, and had him assassinated in 1940.   On the international front, Stalin supported foreign Communist parties and tried to butt into whatever crises happened to present themselves. Still, the Soviet Union made no major attempts at physical expansion prior to the beginning of the Second World War.

Under Stalin's thumb, the Soviet Union built socialism through a crash program in building up heavy industry and a large military establishment. He also embarked on a reign of terror based on a culture of fear with a generous serving of cult o' personality. The constant struggle between decadent capitalism and resurgent socialism was an article of Marxist faith, exacerbated by an alleged Trotskyite fifth column within. There were even said to be pockets of ill will toward the Humble And Lovable Comrade Stalin, who lived in a modest Kremlin apartment and worked 18 hour days for the good of the state! Surely the home front had to be secured in the name of socialist progress... hence the Great Purges of 1934-1939, which included an extensive purge of the military.

The non-aggression pact with Germany in August 1939 emboldened Russia to pad its empire in rather traditional ways. In September 1939, Stalin joined with Nazi Germany (shades of Catherine The Great) in dividing Poland. On 30 November 1939 Stalin launched the [Russo Finnish War], supposedly (shades of Alexander I) to provide Leningrad with a buffer zone. It was an unmitigated disaster at first, but eventually the USSR prevailed by sheer mass of numbers in March 1940, gaining large territorial considerations. Finally, in August 1940, the "Baltic states" of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia were formally annexed as Soviet Socialist Republics.

Yet Stalin was living on borrowed time. On 22 June 1941 the Germans invaded Russia, starting what Russians still call the Great Patriotic War (Великая Отечественная Война). 12,000,000 Soviet servicemen and servicewomen lost their lives, and an estimated 16,000,000 civilians also died. As Alexander I's troops had done a century and a quarter before, the Red Army retreated and left behind only scorched earth for their would-be conquerors. Stalin also resorted to other initiatives such as appeals to nationalism and near-freedom of religion. When the war was over, though, he took drastic steps to preserve the physical and political integrity of the Soviet system. Reimposition of the prewar political culture ensured that there would be no Decembrist Revolt on his watch. One of his techniques included the deportation of entire nations (such as the Chechens) from their homeland to Nowhere Flats, Siberia.

In the west (that is, what we would call Eastern Europe), Stalin created a buffer zone of [satellite] states known either as the Warsaw Pact nations or the "Soviet Bloc." He refused to let these states receive American aid through the Marshall Plan, which brought prosperity back to Western Europe, imposing instead a patron-client relationship which brought great wealth into the Soviet Union in return for the putative benefits of Soviet-style communism. By the late 1940s, Europe was pretty well divided by an Iron Curtain allowing neither East nor West to get the upper hand without blowing up half of the known world. In 1949, [Mao Zedong] and the Chinese Communists had finally put an end to Chiang Kai-Shek's [Kuomintang] regime. Professing nominal obedience to Stalin and the Soviet Union, Mao had long resented Stalin's lukewarm support, and would not stay in the fold any more than the Yugoslavian [Josip Tito] did.