The Penguin History of Modern Russia

Communist Party, the trade unions and the communist youth organization known as the Komsomol. Special attention was paid to increasing the number of Bolsheviks by means of a ‘Lenin Enrolment’ in 1924 and an ‘October Enrolment’ in 1927. As a result the membership rose from 625,000 in 1921 to 1,678,000 at the end of the decade;³⁴ and by that time, too, ten million workers belonged to trade unions.³⁵ A large subsidy was given to the expansion of popular education. Recreational facilities also underwent improvement. Sports clubs were opened in all cities and national teams were formed for football, gymnastics and athletics (in 1912 the Olympic squad had been so neglected that the ferry-boat to Stockholm left without many of its members). Whereas tsarism had struggled to prevent people from belonging to organizations, Bolshevism gave them intense encouragement to join.

The Bolshevik leaders were learning from recent precedents of the German Social-Democratic Party before the Great War and the Italian fascists in the 1920s. Governments of all industrial countries were experimenting with novel techniques of persuasion. Cinemas and radio stations were drawn into the service of the state; and rulers made use of youth movements such as the Boy Scouts. All this was emulated in the USSR. The Bolsheviks had the additional advantage that the practical constraints on their freedom of action were smaller even than in Italy where a degree of autonomy from state control was preserved by several non-fascist organizations, especially by the Catholic Church, after Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922.

Yet most Soviet citizens had scant knowledge of Marxism-Leninism in general and the party’s current policies. Bolshevik propagandists acknowledged their lack of success,³⁶ and felt that a prerequisite for any basic improvement was the attainment of universal literacy. Teachers inherited from the Imperial regime were induced to return to their jobs. When the Red Cavalry rode across the borderlands in the Polish-Soviet War, commissars tied flash-cards to the backs of the cavalrymen at the front of the file and got the rest to recite the Cyrillic alphabet. This kind of commitment produced a rise in literacy from two in five males between the ages of nine and forty-nine years in 1897 to slightly over seven out of ten in 1927.³⁷ The exhilaration of learning, common to working-class people in other societies undergoing industrialization, was evident in day-schools and night classes across the country.

Despite all the problems, the Soviet regime retained a vision of political, economic and cultural betterment. Many former army conscripts and would-be university students responded enthusiastically. Many of their parents, too, could remember the social oppressiveness of the pre-revolutionary tsarist regime and gave a welcome to the Bolshevik party’s projects for literacy, numeracy, cultural awareness and administrative facility.

This positive reception could be found not only among rank-and-file communists but also more broadly amidst the working class and the peasantry. And experiments with new sorts of living and working were not uncommon. Apartment blocks in many cities were run by committees elected by their inhabitants, and several factories subsidized cultural evenings for their workers. A Moscow orchestra declared itself a democratic collective and played without a conductor. At the end of the Civil War, painters and poets resumed their normal activity and tried to produce works that could be understood not only by the educated few but by the whole society. The Bolshevik central leaders often wished that their supporters in the professions and in the arts would show less interest in experimentation and expend more energy on the basic academic education and industrial and administrative training of the working class. But the utopian mood was not dispelled: the NEP did not put an end to social and cultural innovation.³⁸

For politically ambitious youngsters, furthermore, there were courses leading on to higher education. The new Sverdlov University in Moscow was the pinnacle of a system of ‘agitation and propaganda’ which at lower levels involved not only party schools but also special ‘workers’ faculties’ (rabfaki). Committed to dictatorship of the proletariat, the Politburo wished to put a working-class communist generation in place before the current veteran revolutionaries retired. (Few of them would in fact reach retirement age, because of Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s.) Workers and peasants were encouraged, too, to write for newspapers; this initiative, which came mainly from Bukharin, was meant to highlight the many petty abuses of power while strengthening the contact between the party and the working class. Bukharin had a zest for educational progress. He gathered around himself a group of young socialist intellectuals and established an Institute of Red Professors. In 1920 he had shown the way for his proteges by co-authoring a textbook with Yevgeni Preobrazhenski, The ABC of Communism.

Thus the tenets of Bolshevism were disseminated to everyone willing to read them.³⁹ The Soviet proletariat was advertised as the vanguard of world socialism, as the embodiment of the great social virtues, as the class destined to remake history for all time. Posters depicted factory labourers wielding hammers and looking out to a horizon suffused by a red dawn. On everything from newspaper mastheads to household crockery the slogan was repeated: ‘Workers of the world, unite!’

Bolshevik leaders, unlike tsars, strove to identify themselves with ordinary people. Lenin and head of state Mikhail Kalinin were renowned for having the common touch. As it happens, Kalinin — who came from a family of poor peasants in Tver province — had an eye for young middle-class ballerinas. But such information did not appear in Pravda: central party leaders tried to present themselves as ordinary blokes with unflamboyant tastes. This was very obvious even in the way they clothed themselves. Perhaps it was Stalin who best expressed the party’s mood in the 1920s by wearing a simple, grey tunic: he thereby managed to look not only non-bourgeois but also a modest but militant member of a political collective. The etiquette and material tastes of the pre-revolutionary rich were repudiated. Any interest in fine clothes, furniture or interior decor was treated as downright reactionary. A roughness of comportment, speech and dress was fostered.

In fact these leaders were emphasizing what appealed to them in working-class culture and discarding the rest. Much as they extolled the virtues of the industrial worker, they also wanted to reform him or her. Ever since 1902, when Lenin had written his booklet What Is To Be Done?, Bolshevik theory had stressed that the working class would not become socialist by its own devices. The party had to explain and indoctrinate and guide.

The authorities emphasized the need not only for literacy and numeracy but also for punctuality, conscientiousness at work and personal hygiene. The desirability of individual self-improvement was stressed; but so, too, was the goal of getting citizens to subordinate their personal interests to those of the general good as defined by the party. A transformation in social attitudes was deemed crucial. This would involve breaking people’s adherence to the way they thought and acted not only in public life but also within the intimacy of the family, where attitudes of a ‘reactionary’ nature were inculcated and consolidated. Official spokesmen urged wives to refuse to give automatic obedience to husbands, and children were encouraged to challenge the authority of their fathers and mothers. Communal kitchens and factory cafeterias were established so that domestic chores might not get in the way of fulfilment of public duties. Divorce and abortion were available on demand.⁴⁰

Social inhibitions indeed became looser in the 1920s. Yet the Great War and the Civil War played a more decisive role in this process than Bolshevik propaganda. For the popular suspicion of the regime remained acute. A particular source of grievance was the fact that it took until the late 1920s for average wages to be raised to the average amount paid before 1914. This was unimpressive to a generation of the working class which had felt exploited by their employers under Nicholas II. Strikes were frequent under the NEP. The exact number of workers who laid down tools is as yet unascertained, but undoubtedly it was more than the 20,100 claimed by governmental statisticians for 1927.⁴¹

Not that the Politburo was greatly disconcerted by the labour movement. Conflicts tended to be small in scale and short in duration; the raging conflicts of 1920–21 did not recur. The long-standing policy of favouring skilled workers for promotion to administrative posts in politics and industry had the effect of removing many of those who might have made the labour movement more troublesome; and although wages were no higher than before 1914, the state had at least increased rudimentary provision for health care and unemployment benefit.⁴² Above all, the party and the trade unions had offices in all factories and were usually able to see off trouble before it got out of hand; and the resolution of disputes was facilitated by arbitration commissions located in the workplace. The OGPU, too, inserted itself into the process. Once a strike had been brought to an end, the Chekists would advise the management about whom to sack in due course so that industrial conflict might not recur. Sometimes strike leaders were quietly arrested.

Obviously the party leaders could not be complacent about the situation. They could never be entirely sure that a little outbreak of discontent in some factory or other would not explode into a protest movement such as had overwhelmed the monarchy in February 1917. Through the 1920s the Politburo was fumbling for ways to understand the working class in whose name it ruled the USSR.