Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

A

2

Civil War

Bolshevik political, economic, and social policies led to civil war and intervention by foreign powers. The motivations of the anti-Bolshevik forces were diverse and often muddled. In Siberia the Czechoslovak Legion—former World War I prisoners from the Austro-Hungarian army who were marching westward to join the Allied fight against Germany—came into armed conflict with local Bolshevik authorities. Allied forces, seeking initially to secure arms caches, occupied Murmansk and Arkhangel’sk, the principal cities of Russia’s far north. Japanese troops and an American expeditionary force landed in Vladivostok. Meanwhile, the Germans occupied Belorussia, Ukraine, and much of northern Caucasia. In addition, counterrevolutionary and therefore anti-Bolshevik forces known as the Whites occupied peripheral Russian lands. In the autumn of 1918 Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, at the head of a large White army in the east, proclaimed himself Russia’s “supreme ruler” and established his capital at Omsk in Siberia. Early in 1919 the Whites launched a three-pronged offensive with the aim of marching on Moscow. One White army under General Anton Denikin attacked from the south, another under General Nikolay Yudenich attacked from the west, and Kolchak’s army attacked from the east. Despite initial reverses, the Red Army, under Commissar of War Leon Trotsky, succeeded in repelling these campaigns by early 1920. In April of that year there was a new assault by the Polish army, with some help from White forces led by Baron Petr Wrangel. The Red Army counterattacked and fought the Poles to a standstill. The war officially ended in March 1921 with the Treaty of Rīga, by which Russia ceded western areas of Ukraine and Belorussia to Poland. With the evacuation of Japanese forces from Vladivostok in October 1922, civil war and foreign intervention were at an end, and the Soviet regime was no longer in immediate danger.

The Bolsheviks’ control over the state apparatus and over the geographic heartland of the country helps explain their triumph. They outdid all their adversaries in the use of violence, applied by the VeCheka (political police), the Red Army, and squads of party supporters in the countryside. The White armies were disunited and poorly led, and the governments of the intervening countries were tired of fighting and unwilling to incur the losses that would have been needed to suffocate the new regime.

A

3

Economic Imperatives

The Bolsheviks’ pursuit of a state-managed socialist economy, seen as the first step toward attaining communism, were embodied in the doctrinaire policies of War Communism. Implemented during the civil war, the austere measures of War Communism—such as seizing grain from the peasantry—contributed to widespread strikes and uprisings, while the economy was left completely exhausted. Even the sailors at the Kronshtadt naval base, known as ardent Bolshevik supporters, staged a revolt against the regime in March 1921. Trotsky and certain other leaders favored continuing the forced progress toward communism. Lenin, convinced that the revolution needed a “breathing space,” wanted a different course: demobilization of the Red Army, reduction of the requisitions of grain and produce from the peasants, and, for the time being, relaxation of controls over industry and trade. The Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), deferring to Lenin’s authority, adopted his New Economic Policy (NEP) at the Tenth Party Congress, also in March.

The NEP stimulated private initiative and quickly revived the economy. The Soviet Union achieved pre-World War I production levels in most sectors by 1926. This rebound prompted renewed debate about how to foster economic development on a socialist basis. Proponents of a continuation of the NEP said socialism should be built step by step, as economic development allowed. The NEP’s opponents, who were more vocal after 1926, maintained that it was entrenching private property and bourgeois (capitalist) elements and would never beget the savings needed for high-pace industrialization.

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A

4

Union Constitution and Recognition

The writ of the Soviet government ran at the beginning only in the RSFSR. Large tracts in Siberia and along its European periphery were held at one time or another by local nationalists, Communists, German forces, or the Whites. Lenin at first argued that relations with adjacent areas were not of decisive importance, since proletarian revolutions would soon occur there and in Western Europe as well. It was to this end that the Communist International, or Comintern, was founded in Moscow in March 1919 and instructed to split off uncompromisingly pro-Soviet parties from other socialist parties around the world (see International: The Third International). Although anti-Soviet uprisings did break out in several European countries, notably Germany and Hungary, they all fizzled out. The Soviets took a pragmatic approach to parts of the defunct Russian Empire that had taken advantage of the opportunity for secession offered in 1917. Whenever possible, they reasserted their domination, using a combination of military pacification and cooperation with local groups. When that was impractical, they reluctantly accepted the sovereignty of the nation in question. Peace treaties to this effect were signed in 1920 and 1921 with Finland, Poland, and the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

With armistices signed and the new sobriety about the prospects for world revolution, there was a searching discussion about what to do with parts of the former Russian Empire under direct or indirect Soviet control and inhabited, by and large, by ethnic non-Russians. Some, including Stalin (who was commissar of nationalities at the time), favored a unitary state in which there would be “autonomous” provinces for the minorities, with cultural rights. Lenin espoused a federal system in which the RSFSR would be only one of a number of republics, all of them possessing, on paper, equal legal and economic rights. Lenin prevailed, and in December 1922 agreement was reached between the RSFSR and the Ukrainian, Belorussian, and South Caucasus republics to establish the USSR. It took more than a year to work out concrete arrangements for the division of powers. The first constitution of the Soviet federation was ratified on January 31, 1924, a few days after Lenin’s premature death. The Communist Party itself was not federalized, and so functioned as a potent brake on decentralizing tendencies.

As the Soviet state moved to stabilize its political structures, the world powers, having initially attempted to ostracize it, entered into negotiations about the establishment of normal diplomatic and commercial relations. The breakthrough was the Treaty of Rapallo with Germany in April 1922. Diplomatic recognition soon came from other major powers, beginning with the United Kingdom in February 1924. The United States was the last major power to accord the Soviet government formal recognition, which it did in 1933.

B

Stalin Era

The lingering sickness and death of Lenin occasioned a bitter struggle for power. The principal antagonists, Trotsky and Stalin, both claimed to be the rightful executors of Lenin’s policies. In contrast to Trotsky, who was primarily a theorist and a military leader, Stalin, the party’s general secretary since 1922, was a clever and determined organizer. Through his mastery of the Communist Party apparatus, he succeeded in winning the support of a majority of delegates to party conferences and in consolidating his rule. Trotsky was expelled from the party in November 1927. He was exiled to Kazakhstan in 1928, and then banished from the Soviet Union the following year. In 1940 he was assassinated in Mexico by an agent of Stalin.

Having disposed of Trotsky, Stalin turned against his former allies in the struggle. These leaders, notably Nikolay Bukharin and Aleksey Rykov, were driven from the higher councils of the party. In 1929, as he celebrated his 50th birthday, Stalin was hailed as the supreme leader of the party and the country. Thereafter, the dictator relied solely on his control of the party and the police and on cronies he had elevated to power. Important among these were Vyacheslav Molotov, Grigory Ordzhonikidze, Lazar Kaganovich, and Valerian Kuybyshev.

B

1

Economic Transformation and Trauma

Stalin and the Soviet leadership renounced the NEP, and the measure of capitalism it permitted, in 1928. The inauguration of the first of the USSR’s Five-Year Plans that year began the era of the planned economy. Its basic aim was to harness all economic activity to the systematic development of heavy industry, thereby transforming the Soviet Union from an agrarian country into a leading industrial and military power and altering the very nature of society. Carrying the plan out, the Stalin government poured resources into the production of coal, iron, steel, railway equipment, and machine tools. Whole new cities, such as Magnitogorsk in the Urals, were built with the at times enthusiastic participation of young workers and intellectuals.

Economic transformation was accomplished at staggering human cost. Anyone who expressed reservations risked reprisals from the police. Ordinary newcomers to the cities often lived in wretched and unsanitary conditions. The collectivization of agriculture, a centerpiece of Stalin’s economic program, relied on brute force far more than on enthusiasm. In extensive sections of the Soviet Union—Ukraine, the Volga valley of the RSFSR, and Kazakhstan, in particular—starvation and epidemic disease were rampant from 1932 to 1935. By some estimates, between 5 million and 7 million peasants died in this state-made famine.