Russian revolution. A very short introduction

rose to around one-fifth by the mid-ig20s - higher than in the party - but many young women were alienated by the endless routine of meetings, speeches, political education, and demonstrations, and turnover was high.

During NEP young people faced many difficulties, including unemployment, homelessness, and the payment of tuition fees. Official rhetoric cast youth in the role of revolutionary vanguard, but there was much anxiety expressed about the apparent loss of fervour among young people. In 1923 the student newspaper at Petrograd University claimed that only 10% of students actively supported the revolution; that 60% were 'non-party'; that 15% to 20% were 'clearly anti-Soviet'; and that 10% were totally apathetic. The perceived rise in 'hooliganism' seemed to signal a deep social malaise. The young women with red lipstick, bobbed hair, and high heels, and the young men with double-breasted jackets and Oxford bags fed fears that bourgeois decadance was on the increase. The 'epidemic' of suicides that followed that of the poet S. Esenin in December 1925 suggested that many young people had fallen prey to morbid individualism. Finally and paradoxically, the youngsters who turned to religious sects, such as Baptists, Adventists,

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and Evangelicals, out of attraction to their message of chastity, temperance, restraint, and hard work, often seemed to display a more serious orientation on the world - however sinful they viewed it -than many in the Komsomol. The vagaries of youth, in other words, seemed to strengthen the association of NEP with class aliens, bourgeois restoration, and moral degeneracy.

Cultural revolution

As children of the Enlightenment, the Bolsheviks believed that the dissemination of knowledge and rationality would liberate people from superstition and enhance their freedom and autonomy. Following their intelligentsia forebears, they sought to raise the level of 'culturedness' of a society perceived to be steeped in 'Asiatic' backwardness. 'Culturedness',forthe Bolsheviks, could signify anything from ? punctuality, to clean fingernails, to having a basic knowledge of biology, g to carrying out one's trade-union duties efficiently. The promiscuous e connotations of its antithesis, lack of culture', were neatly captured in a jg notice pinned on the wharf in Samara: 'Do not throw rubbish about, do 1 not strike a match near the oil pumps, do not spit sunflower seeds, and do not swear or use bad language.' In 1921, following victory on the military and political fronts, 'culture' was declared to be a 'third front' of revolutionary activity. In his last writings Lenin invoked the concept of 'cultural revolution' as vital to the transition to socialism, although his construal of what this revolution entailed proved to be rather modest, centring on the propagation of literacy and solid work habits among the people and the application of science and technology to social development.

The drive to increase literacy was something into which the Bolsheviks put much energy and imagination, aware that active participation in socialist society depended on being able to read. The danger of illiteracy was illustrated in a widely circulated poster that depicted a blindfolded peasant in bast shoes approaching the edge of a cliff with hands

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outstretched. During the civil war massive effort was focused on the soldiers of the Red Army, but, with NEP, funding for the liquidation of literacy' drive was drastically cut back. Even so, by the time of the 1926 census, 51% of the population was literate, compared with 23% in 1897. This was an impressive result, yet it concealed startling disparities. Two-thirds of men in the Soviet Union could read, but only 37% of women. In Turkmenistan 97% of the population was illiterate. Obviously, the educational level of those who went through crash literacy programmes was not high. When 64 soldiers were asked in 1923 to read an article in Pravda about the assassination of a Soviet ambassador, none could explain the title: The Impertinence of Killers'. Yet learning to read awoke a touching thirst for knowledge. 'Send me a list of books published on comets, stars, water, the earth, and sky.' And as the Bolsheviks well understood, becoming literate also stimulated a desire to learn the language of the new regime, to 'speak Bolshevik'. The efforts of peasants to master the categories that defined the new society were often comical.

We youth awakening from eternal hibernation and apathy, forming influence in our blood, brightly reflecting the good progresses and initiatives, step by step however slowly (are) moving away from old and rotten throw- backs.

The strange words and locutions of Bolshevik language had an almost magical power.

Other Bolsheviks entertained a more grandiose conception of cultural revolution than Lenin. Bukharin asserted that cultural revolution meant nothing less than a 'revolution in human characteristics, in habits, feelings, and desires, in way-of-life and culture'. From this perspective, its aim was nothing less than the creation of a 'new soviet person' through the total transformation of daily life. In the mid-i920s lively debates took place about the revolutionizing of daily life, which centred on the fraught issue of the relationship of the personal to the political.

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At a time when market forces were in the ascendant, when official policies seemed to benefit 'class enemies', progress to socialism seemed peculiarly to depend on the behaviour of individuals. As Krupskaia told the Komsomol congress in 1924: 'Earlier it was perhaps not clear to us that the separation of private life and public life sooner or later leads to the betrayal of communism.' In this context, aspects of daily life as various as dress, hygiene, personal morality, leisure, and the correct use of Russian took on political significance. Was it acceptable for a communist to wear makeup or fashionable clothes? The answer was clearly no, since these things implied an individualistic concern with looking good. Yet the Bolsheviks never eschewed 'bourgeois' values in their entirety. The cultured Soviet citizen was expected to be punctual, efficient, orderly, and neat in appearance; too keen an interest in good manners, nice clothes, or tidy hair, however, could lay one open to the charge of being petty-bourgeois or'philistine'.

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g The project to bring about cultural revolution provoked strongest e resistance in relation to the major rites of passage - birth, marriage, and jg death. For centuries these had been marked by religious rituals that had 1 deep existential and cultural resonance. The Bolsheviks grappled to find secular substitutes. The dedication of newborn children, known as Octobering, appears to have been the most successful, albeit only among a small minority. A meeting of the Kremenchug woodturners' union organized a 'red baptism' in January 1924 of girl called 'Ninel' ('Lenin' spelt backwards) in a ceremony that began with an exaltation of 'conscience' and 'reason' against the 'absurd religious rituals which befog and oppress the working class'. Even among communists and Komsomolites, however, such rituals were not popular and many were expelled for having their children baptized or for getting married in church. In particular, the attempt to promote cremation as the rational, economical way of death met almost universal resistance. As late as the 1950s, fewer than half of funerals were secular. People missed the mystery, joy, and ebullience of traditional rituals and found the ersatz substitutes lacking in inward drama and a sense of transcendence.

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As an ambitious attempt at social engineering, 'cultural revolution' had a certain coercive element, yet one should be wary of glib generalization about the 'totalitarian' nature of the project, since this overlooks the fact that millions of young people wanted passionately to transform themselves. With the traditional way-of-life so obviously superannuated, many young peasants yearned to become 'cultured': 'Dressed in a cultured fashion I went to the cinema. I really wanted to visit the Park of Culture and Rest but I didn't have enough money.' By 1928 over 12% of letters sent to the Peasant Newspaper concerned the 'backwardness' of peasant life.