COMMUNISM

Eric D. Weitz

Communism and social democracy constituted the two major branches of the socialist movement in the twentieth century. Both were direct descendants of nineteenth-century socialism; their differing political and historical relationship to the Russian Revolution marked the essential division between them. Social Democrats were committed to liberal democratic forms of government, from which they imagined a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism would occur. Universally, they supported the February Revolution of 1917 that overthrew the tsarist regime in Russia. Almost universally, they condemned the October Revolution of 1917, by which the Bolsheviks came to power.

Led by Vladimir Ilich Lenin, the Bolsheviks were initially one faction of the Russian Social Democratic and Labor Party. In the first of a number of name changes, they became the Russian Communist Party (b) in March 1918 and the All-Union Communist Party (b) in 1925, the "b" in both cases standing for "Bolshevik," or "Majority," the name Lenin had dubbed his faction. In reality, the Bolsheviks had only briefly counted a majority within the Russian Social Democratic and Labor Party in the years before 1917. Their opponents, the Mensheviks, or "Minority," were, for the most part, typically social democratic in orientation. In contrast, the Bolsheviks came to believe that they could force-pace developments in Russia, bypassing the phase of liberal capitalism to institute socialism more or less immediately. Far less worried about liberal democratic norms, they were determined to maintain party control of the state as the decisive means of creating socialism. The party itself, accorded almost mystical authority by Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, was to be a disciplined body that would guide the revolution and mobilize the entire proletarian and peasant population for the cause of building socialism. The Bolsheviks' open advocacy of terror against perceived opponents of the revolution inspired the greatest hostility from Social Democrats, who viewed the inherently undemocratic and brutal measures of terror as a violation of the most cherished principles of socialism.

By according the state enormous power, communism created a new, twentieth-century model of state-society relations, one that would spread from Russia and the Soviet Union to other countries in Europe and beyond in the wake of World War II. To be sure, European states going back to the early modern era promoted economic development, regulated the family and gender relations, and repressed independent expression. Especially in central and eastern Europe, states had a decisive impact upon social history. But no state prior to the twentieth century had such all-encompassing determination to mold society in accord with its ideological commitments, nor did any have the technical means to regulate society on such a vast scale. In the nations under communist party rule, the "workers' and peasants' state" practiced a kind of internal colonialism. The communist state had a developmental and civilizing mission to fulfill, force-pacing industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture, forging nations out of disparate ethnic groups, and, not least, creating the new communist man and woman. To accomplish these dramatic tasks, the state became a gigantic apparatus, one that also violated the most basic democratic standards.

At the same time, the state, like the party, could never simply impose its programs and goals upon society. Especially in the Soviet Union, the effort to create a specifically communist modernity ran smack against the realities of an overwhelmingly peasant society marked also by enormous ethnic diversity. In the countries of central and eastern Europe, the communist states established after 1945 also faced large peasant populations and ethnic diversity, as well as more developed middle and working classes that were often quite hostile to communism. The entreaties and commands of the states were sometimes met with resistance or, more often, sullen apathy or noncompliance. In response, the state grew still larger, while all sorts of inefficiencies and compromises were carried into its institutions. Ultimately, the immobility and apathy of significant segments of their societies sapped the communist states of legitimacy, leaving them in wreckage all over Europe. Nonetheless, the workers' and peasants' states were able also to attract a good deal of popular support, precisely because they seemed to embody development and progress.

While the history of communism focuses heavily on state-society relations in the Soviet Union and later in its satellite states, there is also a powerful social history of communism in places like Germany, France, and Italy, where the party developed as a potent protest force. Social historians have worked to determine what types of workers and peasants were most likely to become communist. In some cases, as in the area of Bologna, Italy, communist strength owed much to regional traditions of dissent and not just to class issues. Communist movements went through various phases in wooing their constituency. Thus in France in the 1930s new attempts were made to attract young people and women by combining the communist message with social programs and even cosmetic and fashion advice. While communist trade unions were typically more intransigent than their socialist counterparts, many workers sought conventional incremental goals from the unions without much reference to revolutionary implications. Communist participation in coalition governments right after World War II was vital to the creation of welfare states in France and Italy. Communist-controlled city governments were often very effective in providing social programs. In sum, many communist voters were able to gain not only an outlet for profound social and political grievances but also a variety of practical services as well.

SOCIALIST VARIETIES

In the nineteenth century certain strands of socialism had promoted a vision of the autonomy of workers and their communities. The ideal here was of mostly small-scale communities that were self-governed and that organized production in a common, mutual fashion. This kind of socialism, sometimes called mutualism, had strong resonance in France, Italy, Spain, and Russia. This vision echoed aspects of other efforts to establish autonomous, communal societies in Europe in earlier periods, such as those of Anabaptists in the Reformation or the more radical groups active in the English revolutions of the seventeenth century. In the age of industrialization, these ideas found practical expression in the "houses of labor" that proliferated especially in France and Italy, which served as a kind of combined working-class hiring hall, recreational center, and site of political activism. The various forms of workers' mutual-aid societies, from burial funds to sports associations to early trade unions, were also focal points of autonomous organization, and their supporters were often opposed to any form of state intervention.

The major theorists of socialism and communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were notably vague in their prescriptions for the political organization of the future communist society. Yet for all their support of the large-scale features of industrialism, they too captured some of that vision of a world of self-organization in which the state, in their classic phrase, "withered away." Many socialists seemed to agree with that formulation. But Marx and Engels also coined another phrase, the "dictatorship of the proletariat," which would become even more renowned. Marx seems to have meant something quite democratic, almost a Rousseauean notion of the general will. Given his view that society would divide inevitably into two classes, a great majority of proletarians versus a tiny number of powerful capitalists, it is certainly fair to assume that he understood the dictatorship of the proletariat as a situation in which the vast majority of the population would deprive the tiny number of exploiters of their political rights in order to ensure the victory of the revolution. By maintaining power over and against these exploiters, a true democracy, one that ran through all the institutions of society, the economy, family, and polity, would at last emerge.

Other socialists in the nineteenth century had an even more favorable understanding of the state. In 1848 the French socialist Louis Blanc entered the revolutionary government and convinced it to establish national workshops, a kind of state-funded employment program. Some of the utopian socialists, like Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, advocated a prominent role for the state, even the capitalist state, in improving workers' lives and charting the path from capitalism to socialism. The German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle thought similarly. Through democratic participation, the state, over time, would evolve from its capitalist to a socialist nature.

The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) became the major voice of the statist tendency in the Second International, the association of socialist parties founded in 1889. As the largest socialist party before World War I, but also because it was, after all, German, the filial descendant of Marx and Engels, the SPD wielded great authority. Alongside its explicitly Marxist orientation, the SPD in its early years was greatly influenced by Lassalle's followers and their prostate position. The SPD grew significantly even in the 1880s, when many party activities were legally banned. It faced its first great ideological crisis in that same decade, when it found itself confronted with a state-run social welfare program pioneered by the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Germany was the first state to adopt the key elements of modern social welfare—accident insurance, health insurance, and old-age pensions. Bismarck viewed these measures as a way to ameliorate the difficult conditions of workers in the industrial age and to undermine the appeal of socialism by binding workers to the German state. Socialists could adopt a stance of ideological purity and spurn the social-welfare measures promoted by a semiauthoritarian, capitalist state, or they could work within the state in support of the programs. However minimal the benefits in the early years, however much they expanded the realm of state intervention in workers' lives, the social-welfare programs were immensely popular with workers. Despite their initial opposition, most socialists quickly became advocates and only fought with the state on the size and range of the programs. By the onset of World War I, many German socialists worked within the local administration of the social-welfare programs and had also come to demand state mediation of labor disputes. Practically, the SPD was increasingly entwined with the state, despite the ideological hostility expressed by certain wings of the party, especially its leading ideological lights, Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg. In general, an orientation in favor of the state had come to prevail in the Second International over more anarchist-leaning, small-scale, mutualist visions that rejected the state in toto.

In one of the great ironies of history, V. I. Lenin, on the eve of the Russian Revolution, returned to the antistate position in his famous tract "State and Revolution" (1917). Lenin authored a democratic, even anarchist-sounding treatise that emphasized the withering away of the state after the proletarian revolution. Lenin gave no strict time frame for this process, but it is safe to say that it would not take eons, perhaps a generation or two. Yet at about the same time, Lenin expressed great admiration for the German state in World War I, which he imagined to be a strong, stunning exemplar of rational efficiency. Lenin envisaged revolution as a combination of proletarian (or party) power and the organizational capacities of the German state. Lenin, in short, embodied the diverse strands of socialist thinking about the state.

REVOLUTION AND THE STATE

Lenin returned in April 1917 to a Russia in the midst of revolution. He immediately raised the slogan, "All Power to the Soviets," a call that also embodied the contradictory legacies of nineteenth-century socialism. The soviets (councils) were organized more or less spontaneously in factory meetings in which workers elected their own representatives. City soviets were then formed from the representatives of the various workplaces. The movement soon spread to the countryside and the military. "All Power to the Soviets" was seen as an arch-democratic demand, a kind of mutualism writ large, since the soviets were popularly elected, democratic organs. In Lenin's Marxian logic, soviets would necessarily adopt the "correct" position, even if it took some convincing from the Bolshevik Party. In the heady revolutionary days of 1917, Lenin saw no contradiction between democracy and revolution, a position that seemed to be confirmed when the tide of revolution brought Bolshevik majorities in key soviets in the major cities of Petrograd and Moscow and in a few key naval regiments.

When Lenin decided the time was ripe for moving the revolution beyond its initial liberal phase, he and his supporters made certain that their revolution would be seen as the work of the soviets, not the Bolshevik Party. Formally, the revolution was organized by the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, both headed by Leon Trotsky, who had moved his small group of Mensheviks into the Bolshevik Party just a few months before. For all intents and appearances, the revolution carried out on 7 November 1917 was a democratic affair of urban Russia. The program proclaimed by the new revolutionary government was highly democratic. It granted land to the village soviets, self-determination to the national minorities, and workers' control of industry. The government also called for an immediate end to World War I without any indemnities or territorial annexations and promised to convene a constitutional convention. As the new foreign minister, Trotsky opened the safe, read aloud the secret treaties the tsarist government had signed, and theatrically announced that the ministry would issue a few proclamations and then close shop. A minimalist state backed by self-organized workers' and peasants' communities seemed to be in place in Russia in the autumn of 1917.

But the Bolsheviks were immediately confronted with a set of intertwining dilemmas that dramatically posed the problem of the relationship between state and society under a revolutionary regime. With all the hubris of revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks presumed that they knew the correct course (even when there were shifts in specific policies) for Russia and expected workers and peasants to follow suit. But what would happen if workers did not choose to follow the course laid out by the party? Moreover, the revolution had basically been staged in Petrograd and Moscow. The Bolsheviks had taken power through an urban revolution combined with a peasant revolt. Politically, peasants were fickle, willing to support the Bolsheviks when they promised land but by no means committed to the overall political vision of a socialist revolution. How were the Bolsheviks to engineer a revolution in such a minimally developed society? To complicate matters further, the Bolsheviks had seized power in an empire with a dizzying array of ethnic and national groups. How could support be found for a socialist revolution amid this diversity, when ethnicity was often a more critical identity marker than class? In responding to these dilemmas, the Bolsheviks would find that they could not simply impose their ideology and institutions upon society.

The first breach in the putative democratic nature of the young Bolshevik state came very quickly. In January 1918, just a few months after the Bolshevik seizure of power, a constitutional convention convened in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks had won substantial representation in the elections but were still in a minority, while the populist, peasant-based Social Revolutionary Party had garnered the largest proportion of votes. The convention was summarily dismissed by the Bolshevik-controlled Red Guards.

The key event that would define the future development of the state was the civil war that erupted in the spring of 1918. The war was fought on many fronts and included intervention by armies of other European nations and the United States, which allied with the counterrevolutionary forces. The conflict drove home to the Bolsheviks just how tenuous their position was and how much they needed an effective state to remain in power. Building on Lenin's imagination of the German state as a highly efficient, well-oiled machine (never mind the fact that Germany lost World War I), the Bolsheviks proclaimed the policy of War Communism, in which the state seized control of the whole economy and sought to mobilize the entire society to the Bolshevik cause. For some Bolsheviks, notably Nikolai Bukharin, War Communism was not just an emergency policy but the very expression of the new socialist society, which had now abolished private ownership of the means of production. Yet War Communism was a ludicrous policy that failed miserably. The Russian state lacked the depth of its German counterpart, lacked its tradition of efficiency and competence. The Russian empire was sprawling, and it was far more difficult to direct hundreds of thousands of independent peasant landholdings than it was, in Germany, to issue orders to, say, four major firms of the steel industry or the six companies that dominated the chemical industry. Under War Communism, industrial production ground nearly to a halt, and peasants, faced with continual crop seizures, simply stopped sowing. For the first time, the Bolsheviks faced the tenacity of society, which was far greater, its malleability much less, than they had imagined.

War requires an army, and in the modern world armies are put into the field by states. The Bolsheviks had the nucleus of an army in the militias, the Red Guards, formed in the summer of 1917, who played a critical role in the execution of the revolution. But the Red Guards were somewhat unruly and hardly capable of fighting on the many fronts of the civil war. Lenin appointed Trotsky military commissar in March 1918, and it was he who displayed both organizational brilliance and ruthlessness in bringing to life the Red Army. Trotsky imposed a disciplinary regimen worthy of the Prussian kings or the Russian tsars but now combined with the ideological fervor of revolution. In creating an effective army, Trotsky contributed mightily to the emergence of a powerful state.

Still more chillingly, Trotsky created an army that practiced terror. The Bolsheviks were very open in their advocacy of terror, by which they understood the state's systematic application of extraordinary means of repression against opponents of the revolution. They published articles in newspapers extolling terror and openly debated Russian and Western socialists who were appalled at the level of violence in the Russian Revolution. Lenin issued a blistering attack on the German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky, while Trotsky displayed rhetorical brilliance and theoretical vacuity. He argued that the violence of the revolution served the higher goals of socialism and human freedom, while the violence of capitalism, no less endemic, only prolonged injustice.

The Red Army was not the only agency of terror. In December 1917 the Bolshevik state established the first of the many secret police agencies that would play such a profound role in Soviet life, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Fight Counterrevolution, known by its Russian acronym, Cheka. As the institutions of force within the state, the Red Army and the Cheka conducted arbitrary arrests and executions and seized as hostages the families of counterrevolutionaries. Perhaps most drastically, the Bolsheviks deported entire villages in the Don and Kuban Cossack regions. The villagers were accused en masse of counterrevolutionary activities. This dramatic display of state power was sometimes accompanied by a biological rhetoric that made Cossack peasants into pariahs, incapable ever of incorporation into the new society. These people could not be "civilized" into good socialists; instead, society had to be protected from them by their utter exclusion.

The Bolsheviks ultimately triumphed in the civil war, but it was a costly victory. The cities, so central to the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, had become denuded of their populations. Many of the Bolsheviks' most fervent supporters had been killed in the civil war. Peasants had stopped sowing; industry stopped producing. Famine was widespread. Fatefully, a strong element of militarism came to define Bolshevik culture. Many of the Bolshevik leaders adopted military dress. Iron discipline, already an ideal of Lenin, became ever more prized with the sense that the revolution was made by military might. The heroic male proletarian, who leaves the factory, rifle in hand, to defend the revolution, became an ideal that far surpassed the young woman who also fought for the revolution or labored in the factories. Revolutionary militarism meant a renewed and more fervent centering of masculine power within the institutions of party and state.

The disastrous situation at the end of the civil war forced the state to relax its grip on society. Right at the end of the civil war the Bolsheviks convened for their Tenth Congress. Surveying the devastation before him, Lenin made a strategically brilliant retreat: the state would retain control only of the "commanding heights" of the economy, banks and large-scale industry. Trade and small-scale industry would be afforded, if not exactly free rein, at least a wide range of liberties. Most importantly, the peasants would pay a fixed tax in kind and could then dispose freely of any surplus. To many Bolsheviks, this New Economic Policy (NEP) marked a restoration of capitalism and betrayal of the revolution. For others, it was a strategic retreat born of necessity. Still others, like Bukharin, who radically revised his previous support for War Communism, would come to see in NEP the possibilities for a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism.

The new policy came to pass along with one last great convulsion of the civil war, the revolt of sailors at Kronstadt in March 1921. The Kronstadt naval garrison had been a major supporter of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Now its sailors revolted against the suppression of democratic liberties and the desolate conditions in the countryside, from which many of the sailors hailed. "Soviets without Bolsheviks," their slogan went, invoking the democratic promise of 1917. It was an eery, sad comment on the entire course of events since October 1917. The Bolsheviks suppressed the revolt, with many of the delegates to the Tenth Congress joining the charge across the frozen Neva River, revolver in hand, to storm the garrison. The contradictions of the revolution—the state's claim to represent the will of the people, its suppression of their will when the people found the Bolshevik state woefully wanting—were laid bare.

BUILDING THE STATE, CREATING THE NEW MAN AND WOMAN

If there was ever a golden period in the Soviet Union, it was the 1920s. The state still exercised repression, but in comparison with what came before and would come afterward, its hand was relatively light. The range of free expression was fairly broad. The economy revived and artistic experimentation flourished. Yet two fundamental structural features emerged in the 1920s. First, the Soviet Union, a federated republic of socialist states, formally came into being at the end of 1922. (From this point it is convenient to speak of Soviets and Communists rather than Russians and Bolsheviks.) Issues of ethnic, national, and religious diversity were now built into the union as a central feature of its existence. Furthermore, the institutions of party and state became formalized. Names would change, reforms would occur, but the essential features of all communist parties and states for the entire twentieth century were firmly established in the 1920s. For the party, the leading organs were the Central Committee, Central Control Commission, and Politburo. For the state, the parallel institutions were the All-Union Congress of Soviets, the Central Executive Committee of the Congress, and the Presidium. The "leading role" of the party was firmly stated in many of the constitutions of Soviet-style states and, practically, by the fact that leading personnel occupied both party and state positions. While the party and state had, technically, discrete functions, the twentieth-century neologism of "party-state" accurately captures the effective intertwining of the two.

In the relative calm of the 1920s, the communist state also articulated more clearly programs designed to forge the new Soviet man and woman. "Forge," a term widely used at the time, conjures up the communist emphasis on the economy and state. Like the metal that emerges out of the blast furnace, the new man and woman would be "produced" through the application of human intelligence and skill. People could not be left to develop on their own but would be crafted by labor, in this case the labor of the workers' and peasants' state.

Propaganda and mobilization, but also repression, constituted the key techniques of this labor. The ideals of socialism were propagated everywhere in the Soviet Union in the 1920s—in schools, institutes, workplaces, academies, the army. A veritable explosion of print culture emerged in the 1920s, as leaflets, pamphlets, and books espousing the ideals of socialism and the campaigns of the Soviet state were disseminated throughout society. New media also expanded dramatically in this period, as the Soviets quickly adopted radio and film for its propaganda drives. Much of the artistic expressiveness of the 1920s, the creation of a variety of modernist genres, served also to disseminate socialist ideas.

But it was also through "practical work," through the mobilization of people in all sorts of campaigns, that the new Soviet man and woman were to be created. Mobilizing university students to teach literacy, urban workers to aid in the harvest, peasants to become involved in the organization of atheists, men to join the Red Army, women to volunteer in orphanages, committed Bolsheviks to work in the Cheka—these were all forms of activism through which men and women would learn the tenets of socialism and become solid citizens of the socialist state. They would reform themselves and those under their tutelage, a civilizing mission not totally unlike other reform efforts in the Western world in the modern period. The result would be ideologically schooled, self-disciplined people who worked selflessly for socialist development. For men, the ideal had profound militaristic connotations, conveyed by the Soviet posters of the period that invariably portrayed muscled men either producing or defending the revolution, hammer or rifle in hand. For women, the ideal was more disparate. Sometimes heroines of the revolution were depicted in fighting formation; other times they were shown as producers or as communist versions of the modern "new woman" of the 1920s—thin, athletic, active in society, and boundlessly happy. But in the 1920s, and still more in the 1930s, maternalist imagery was also prevalent, as if the socialist new woman could somehow combine all of these roles. For both men and women, socialist morality signified serious self-disciplining, a regularized, not promiscuous, sexuality, an aversion to drink and cigarettes and any other superfluous consumption beyond the strict necessities of life, and a devotion to work and politics. In 1936 the Soviet state adopted the pronatalist rhetoric and politics common to many Western countries, including a ban on abortions.

The image of the new socialist man and woman was not propagated only domestically. For all of its particularly Russian characteristics, the revolution and the Soviet Union were very much international phenomena. The Communist Party sought to influence workers and socialists all over Europe and beyond. The major agency for that task was the Communist International (or Comintern), founded in 1919 in Moscow. In the language of the day, the Comintern was to be the "general staff" of the worldwide revolution. Ultimately, the Comintern became the vehicle of Russian control over other national communist parties in Europe and beyond. But for many activists, the Comintern embodied the ideals of international proletarian solidarity against the exploitations and injustices of capitalism. Usually under the auspices of the Comintern, thousands and thousands of communists from around the world came to the Soviet Union and received political and military training in various academies and institutes.

It is impossible to gauge how successful was this vision of the socialist new man and woman that the state promoted in the Soviet Union. Certainly, repression was ever present, even in the 1920s, and ran in tandem with the more positive-sounding aspects of the socialist culture program. Only a minority of the population sought to emulate the ideal in toto. But the partisans of socialism comprised a critical minority. They were the activists in the socialist state, and without their services, the more drastic campaigns of the Stalin era could not have prevailed, nor could the Soviet Union have triumphed over the German invaders in the 1940s. After World War II, many of the foreign communists who had also been inspired by the ideals and had received training in the Soviet Union would play key roles in the communist movements in their home countries.

THE WAR AGAINST SOCIETY

On the economic terrain, grain supply remained a critical problem in the 1920s even though the peasants returned to sowing and harvesting. Moreover, the growing social differentiation in the countryside worried the communists. The real differences between a kulak, a wealthy peasant, and other agricultural toilers were usually quite minimal, but that did not stop the communists from expending great effort to classify and categorize the rural population. The kulak might have had a draft animal or two and hired labor to help out on his land. (Technically, the land was owned by the village soviet, then distributed to individual households.) While kulaks constituted perhaps 5 percent of the rural population, they accounted for around 40 percent of the marketed grain. They held therefore a critical position in the economy. Three times the kulaks went on a grain strike—that is, they refused to bring their grain to market, counting on the government to increase the price. In the meantime, Joseph Stalin had accumulated enormous powers through his control of the party organization and its political bodies. (Formally, his powers were based on his position as general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953, to which he added many other titles over the years, especially in World War II.) By the late 1920s, Stalin had prevailed in the intraparty factional conflicts. To Stalin and some other leading communists, peasant grain strikes threatened the authority of the state, the very existence of the revolution. He and his supporters had few scruples against deploying state power to rectify the situation.

The outcome was the massive deployment of force against the peasantry, first through grain requisitions that began at the very end of 1928, and then through the forced collectivization of peasant landholdings. These events, which extended into the mid-1930s, constituted the single greatest clash between state and society in the Soviet Union. It was a conflict between a state bent on economic development and human transformation and a vast, largely immobile rural population, wedded to private peasant landholdings and traditional ways of life, who resisted the state's drive to transform radically and unalterably conditions in agriculture. The state sent Red Army detachments into the countryside, along with elite groups of party workers, often idealistic youth. The definition of a kulak came to mean anyone who resisted the program of collectivization. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of peasants—the exact numbers remain disputed—were imprisoned or sent to labor camps in Siberia (known by their Russian acronym, the Gulag). Many died in transit or from the extremely harsh conditions of the Gulag. In the early 1930s the ineptness of state policies led to horrendous famine in the Ukraine and northern Caucasus. As many as 6 million people may have died from the ravages of hunger. While some scholars argue that the state deliberately promoted the famine in order to break peasant resistance and to suppress Ukrainian nationalism, it seems more likely that it resulted from indifference and ineptness, though the root cause certainly was the deployment of massive force against rural society.

Concomitant with forced collectivization, Stalin initiated the rapid, state-directed industrialization drive, embodied in the series of five-year plans, the first of which was launched in 1928. Economically, the program constituted a huge superexploitation of the still largely peasant society. Whatever resources the state extracted, it channeled into the heavy industrial sector, and the Soviet Union became an industrial powerhouse. Economic development, then, went hand in hand with the massive buildup of the state. Typical of the Stalin era and its emphasis on grand scale were such massive projects as the White Sea Canal, built with convict labor in appalling conditions, and Magnitogorsk, the gigantic steel complex that arose out of almost nothing. Designed to be a model Soviet city, Magnitogorsk eventually produced great amounts of steel, but the community surrounding it endured unpaved roads, crowded apartments that rapidly deteriorated, and inadequate plumbing.

The massive, state-directed efforts of collectivization and industrialization irrevocably transformed Soviet society. The population became immensely mobile—a "quicksand society," in the words of the historian Moshe Lewin—and more urbanized. The palpable presence of the state extended into virtually every geographic area however remote, into every family. Out of a population of around 170 million, 16 to 19 million peasants left their villages in the 1930s to enter the urban, industrial workforce. The number of cities with over 100,000 inhabitants rose in the 1930s from thirty-one to eighty-nine. The migrants were preponderantly young and male and often skilled; they left the village populations disproportionately older and female, trends that the ravages of World War II would only accentuate. Out of some 25 million individual peasant households, the state created 240,000 collective farms.

The state, then, won the battles for collectivization and industrialization, but at great cost. Despite very substantial economic growth in the 1930s and then again in the 1950s and 1960s, state-directed development built all sorts of inefficiencies into the economy. Clearly, the absence of adequate pricing mechanisms and the inattentiveness to markets caused structural inefficiencies. But so did the laggard, slothful work discipline typical of Soviet labor. Assured of employment and at least a minimal existence by the state, presented with few material incentives for hard labor, people worked slowly and inefficiently, if perhaps more humanely, as least by Western capitalist standards. Political repression ensured that peasants could not strike or rebel, but like their counterparts in so many parts of the world, they responded to the demands placed upon them with a baleful indifference. In contrast, they lavished great attention on their private plots, when these were made available to them alongside the collective farms, notably in the 1950s under Nikita Khrushchev. The slow, lumbering character of collective-farm and industrial labor somehow became replicated in the state, which for all its powers displayed many of these same attributes. Society was not infinitely malleable, and the very processes that made the state huge also made it hugely inefficient.

Along with collectivization and industrialization, the systematic exercise of political terror in the 1930s constituted the third element in the massive buildup of the state. To the extent that the terror had any rationality, its goal seems to have been the elimination of all possible political opposition, the full consolidation of Stalin's personal power in the party-state. If collectivization was a war against the peasantry, the Great Terror of 1936–1938 was a war against the party, but one that spilled over into the society at large. Terror, by its very nature, has an accelerating dynamic. In the infamous show trials, many of the leading figures of the revolution were deemed "enemies of the people" and subsequently executed. By 1938, only a handful of old Bolsheviks still sat in the Central Committee; fully 70 percent of the Central Committee members elected in 1934 were sent to the labor camps or executed. The officer corps of the Red Army was similarly affected, as were leading officials in the economic sector and in the Foreign Ministry. But all sorts of individuals, some with no political position whatsoever, found themselves denounced and subject to the arbitrary powers of the state. The system of labor camps expanded dramatically in this period and assumed an important role in the economy, particularly in extraction industries like mining and lumbering. More recent research in Soviet archives has shown that a significant movement in and out of the camps emerged—sentencing was not a one-way ticket. Still, thousands upon thousands of people languished in the Gulag, to be freed only in the 1950s, while many others died from the extremely harsh conditions.

Yet another form of oppression appeared in the 1930s, that of particular ethnic groups. In the 1920s, the Soviets state had first implemented the policy of korenizatsiia, or indigenization. In the Soviet view, articulated by Stalin in "Marxism and the National Question" (1913), the nation represented a particular stage of historical development but also had a certain timeless quality to it based on the cultural distinctions among peoples. Progress toward socialism could only come through the national form. Hence in the 1920s, through "indigenization," the Soviets promoted national languages and national elites. National soviets were established, and in a number of cases ethnic Russians were forcibly removed to give indigenous groups greater access to resources. Soviet scholars gave oral languages and dialects written form, and the state consolidated some tribes and ethnic groups and handed them a common language.

But a vital change came with the proclamation of the new constitution in 1936, which, in Stalinist eyes, gave legal form to the triumph of socialism. The nobility and the tsarist state, then the bourgeoisie, had been defeated. Class enemies as social groups no longer existed within the Soviet Union, just wayward individuals. And nations still existed. The very concept of essential nations that had underpinned the development of nationalities in the 1920s and early 1930s now also underpinned the attack on "suspect" nations. Over the course of the 1930s the objects of persecution shifted from class enemies to "enemies of the people," which slid easily into "enemy nations." As a result, beginning in the 1930s and accelerating during the war years, a variety of ethnic groups were deported in the most horrendous conditions from their historic areas of settlement, including Koreans, Chechens, Ingush, Greeks, Germans, and others. By categorizing and searching out all the members of the targeted groups, the Soviet state essentially racialized ethnicity and nationality even though the Soviets explicitly rejected the ideology of race. The state acted as if the qualities that made the members of a particular group dangerous were immutable and transgenerational, carried by every single individual necessarily and inevitably.

All told, around 3.5 million people were removed in these ethnic deportations. According to recent investigations, death rates from the exigencies of the deportations ranged from 9 percent for the Chechens to 46 percent for the Crimean Tatars. And in 1952–1953, it seems that plans were underway for the deportation of the Jewish community. Only Stalin's death in 1953 staved off this possibility.

The vast growth in the exercise of state terror and state repression from the late 1920s into the early 1950s meant that a profound element of fear and guilt crept into social relations, a characteristic best depicted in Russian literature, such as Anna Akhmatova's searing poem, "The Requiem," Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (1973–1975), Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales (1978), or Vasily Grossman's Forever Flowing (1970). The screeching sound of the "Black Marias," the secret police autos; the knock on the door at night; the denunciation by one's neighbors; the fearful and secretly joyous silence when a colleague suddenly disappeared, making an office or a promotion available to those who remained—these constituted part of the realities of social relations.

At the same time, the massive uprooting of society created not only a world of fear but also one of opportunities and of confidence in the developmental possibilities of the socialist future. The industrial and agrarian economies had insatiable needs for skilled workers and technicians, and those who could find themselves a spot in technical institutes or universities had unparalleled opportunities for upward mobility. The state deliberately favored children of peasant and working-class backgrounds, granting them unprecedented opportunities for education and advancement. At the same time, the downward mobility of the former privileged classes eased slightly. The 1936 constitution that proclaimed the victory of socialism formally abolished the lishentsy (disenfranchised) class. Now all Soviet citizens were considered equal, though social prejudices against those from formerly privileged classes remained quite strong.

The programs that began in the late 1920s, from collectivization to terror, conjured up waves of commitment, especially among youthful Soviet citizens. Stalinism represented for many of them the path out of backwardness, a mixture of nationalism and socialism that inspired pride in the country's development and in the prospects of "building socialism." Fear and terror there were, but they were not the only aspects of the Soviet reality of the 1930s.

WAR AND THE EXPANSION OF THE SOVIET-STYLE STATE

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 wrought great devastation, human and material, on Soviet soil. Close to 20 million Soviet citizens died in the course of World War II. The defense and then the rollback of German forces required immense sacrifices. Through all this, the basic institutions of state and society held their ground. Indeed, the repressive, even murderous, side of state policies in some ways accelerated—as the escalation of ethnic and national purges and the maintenance of the Gulag system indicate—even while the population rallied to the defense of the Soviet system against the foreign invaders. At the same time, building on the gender policies of the 1930s, a far more conservative tenor entered into Soviet life. A crass, essentialized Russian nationalism became more and more pronounced. The state did not even shy away from invoking its adversaries of the past, the church and the tsars, as a way of solidifying Russian nationalist sentiment in the struggle against the Germans.

At the end of the war the Red Army, having borne the brunt of the fighting for so many years, was successfully situated all across central and eastern Europe. Communist parties in France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, and elsewhere had played leading roles in the resistance against Nazi occupation. As a result, they emerged in 1945 as vibrant movements with a great deal of popular support. Indeed, communism reached its high point in Europe between 1943, the beginning of full-scale resistance, and 1956, the year of Khrushchev's speech condemning the crimes of Stalin and of the deployment of Soviet troops against the Hungarian uprising.

Communist parties participated in most Western European governments in the immediate postwar years. In Yugoslavia, a unique case, the party had come to power by playing the decisive role in the resistance. It fought successful military campaigns against both the German occupiers and Yugoslav conservatives and fascists and was able to retain power despite the hostility of the Soviets, who resented the independence of the Yugoslav communists. In the West, communists were quickly driven out of governments with the onset of the Cold War in 1947 and 1948. In France and Italy communists were still able to retain enormous influence in the trade unions and other associations of the labor movement as well as in local government, all of which enabled them to pressure successfully for higher wages and improved social benefits for their working-class constituencies. By the 1980s that influence was waning. Communist voting rates in France began to decline in that decade, causing the party to resort to tactics such as hostility to immigration. The Italian party, long more flexible than the French in its willingness to collaborate with other elements, also began to fade.

In Eastern Europe, in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the German Democratic Republic, the Soviets were able, in a few short years, to bring to power communist parties loyal to the Soviet Union. Scholars argue fiercely about whether this was the intent of the Soviets from the moment World War II began or whether they had more varied and flexible (or confused) policies that only became fixed and uniform in the context of the emergence of the Cold War between 1945 and 1949. Certainly, the great transformation of power relations within Europe, the utter devastation of Germany, and the surge between 1943 and 1948 of anti-Nazi resistance, mass worker protests, and Communist Party activism in so many countries created a fluid and unprecedented situation. The Baltic states (incorporated directly into the Soviet Union since 1939), Poland, and Bulgaria were probably slated for complete Communist Party control early on, while it is possible that more diverse political solutions would have been acceptable in some of the other countries, especially if a unified, neutral Germany had been established. "Third-way" social and political orders, somewhere between liberal capitalism and Soviet-style socialism, might have become a reality.

But the onset of the Cold War and Stalin's own deep paranoia drastically narrowed the political options by the end of the 1940s. In the Soviet bloc, a uniform pattern was created among the "people's democracies," as they came to be called. (The pattern included the GDR even though it never was called a "people's democracy." As the remains of a divided power and situated on the front lines of the Cold War, the GDR always had a peculiar status.) In all the countries, Communist Party power was secured through the usual mechanisms—an extensive security apparatus, state control over industry and agriculture, and party control over the state. This pattern persisted for the fifty years from the late 1940s onward. Moreover, the state, as in the Soviet Union, had a developmental function. It collectivized agriculture and promoted the development of industry, heavy industry in particular. Both processes occurred on a significant scale throughout the region in the late 1940s and 1950s. The social structure became transformed as people left farming and the villages for industry and the cities. Warsaw, Lodz, Bucharest, Pilsen, and many other cities grew significantly; social mobility intensified as the regimes favored the children of working-class and peasant backgrounds. The huge bureaucracies of communist states also offered avenues of mobility and a means of binding large segments of the population to the system. The state also exercised the heavy hand of repression, most drastically in the early 1950s.

The communist-ruled countries of Eastern Europe were, from the outset, more developed and complex than Soviet society of the 1930s. They had more significant industrial bases and more varied social structures. Over twenty years of experience with economic planning in the Soviet Union had laid bare many of the inefficiencies of strict central control. To varying degrees and in response to internal social pressures, the communist states experimented with slightly different models from the strict command model that persisted in the Soviet Union. The Poles gave up on collectivized agriculture; the Hungarians introduced market mechanisms in the 1960s. Only East Germany, loyal to the Soviet model to the end, carried out further nationalizations of remaining small businesses in the 1970s.

Economic development also helped create the demise of the very system that promoted it. By the late 1950s, communist states had made material improvements the mark of success of their own system. They promised their populations the consumer life on a scale comparable with the West, yet with the social protections afforded by communism. But the inefficiencies of centrally planned economies, no matter if they had some more flexibilities than the Soviets, could not compete with Western capitalist economies, especially in the more aggressive and competitive global markets in the last decades of the twentieth century. The dead weight of state repression prevented any serious reform efforts and continually antagonized substantial segments of the population. Key professional groups desired autonomy and consideration of their interests within the state. Gradually, new public spheres emerged. In the Soviet Union, the public sphere was largely composed of intellectuals who ran great risks of imprisonment in horrendous circumstances. In Poland, workers rebelled in 1956, 1968, and 1979–1980. Slowly and with difficulty, a common opposition was formed between workers and intellectuals, with significant support from the Catholic Church. In Czechoslovakia a significant reform movement developed within the ranks of the party, only to be crushed by Soviet intervention in 1968. Afterward, an opposition of intellectuals created an underground community that periodically surfaced with public pronouncements in favor of democratic liberties and curbs on state power.

Ultimately, the communist states faced the tenacity of their societies, the sullen resentments against the all-encompassing claims of the party-states and their attempts to infiltrate all dimensions of social relations. Society's self-distancing from the state deprived communism of all legitimacy, even among its own leaders, who by the 1980s seemed more like ossified powerholders than champions of the socialist cause. Within a few short years, by the early 1990s, the systems would all be gone, swept away by the party's inability to manage internal reform in the Soviet Union and by waves of popular protests. Societies took their revenge upon the states that sought to mold, regulate, and repress them. At the same time, these societies were very different from those that had first spawned the socialist and communist movements in the epoch of industrialization; they were more complex, more educated, more white-collar. With the exception of Poland and Romania, the key roles in the revolutions of 1989–1991 were played not by workers, the quintessential activists and protesters of the industrial age, but by students, intellectuals, and the technical intelligentsia. The demise of communism was symptomatic of the end of the classic epoch of industrialization and of the labor movement, socialist and communist, that emerged alongside it.

See alsoMarxism and Radical History (volume 1);Socialism (volume 3); and other articles in this section.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cohen, Stephen F. Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography,1888–1938. New York, 1973.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. SovietRussia in the 1930s. New York, 1999.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution. 2d ed. Oxford and New York, 1994.

Getty, J. Arch, and Roberta T. Manning, eds. Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives. Cambridge, U.K., 1993.

Goldman, Wendy Z. Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy andSocial Life, 1917–1936. Cambridge, U.K. 1993.

Hagen, Mark von. Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and theSoviet Socialist State, 1917–1930. Ithaca, N.Y., 1990.

Holquist, Peter. "'Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work': Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context." Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 415–450.

Koenker, Diane P., William G. Rosenberg, and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds. Party,State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History. Bloomington, Ind., 1989.

Konrad, George, and Ivan Szelenyi. The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. Translated by Andrew Arato and Richard E. Allen. New York, 1979.

Kornai, Janos. The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism. Princeton, N.J., 1992.

Lewin, Moshe. The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia. New York, 1985.

Lewin, Moshe. Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization. Translated by Irene Nove with John Biggart. London, 1968.

Martin, Terry. "The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing." Journal of Modern History 70(1998):813–861.

Naimark, Norman M. The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone ofOccupation, 1945–1949. Cambridge, Mass., 1995.

Siegelbaum, Lewis H. Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918–1929. Cambridge, U.K., 1992.

Skilling, H. Gordon. Czechoslovakia's Interrupted Revolution. Princeton, N.J., 1976.

Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford, Calif., 1993.

Tucker, Robert C., ed. Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation. New York, 1977.

Verdery, Katherine. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, N.J., 1996.

Weitz, Eric D. Creating German Communism, 1890–1990: From Popular Protests toSocialist State. Princeton, N.J., 1997.

Werth, Nicolas. "Un État contre son peuple: Violences, répressions, terreurs en Union sovietique." In Le livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur et répression. Edited by Stéphane Courtois. Paris, 1997. Pages 43–295.