Figure 2.2 Nikolai Mikhailov, “There Is No Room in Our Collective Farm for Priests and Kulaks.” 1930.
Source: Hoover Institution Archives.
Countryside, to bridge the gap between city and countryside in culture, in short, to better incorporate peasants into Soviet society. But the destruction of peasant traditions also impoverished Soviet culture while often failing to replace traditional culture with modern practices. Even in 1945 many collective farms lacked electricity, sewers, running water, and other basic elements of modern life. At the same time collective farmers did not have the right to move away from the kolkhoz - their internal passports (required to register for lodging or work) were held by the collective farm chairman.16
“Civil Society” and Intelligentsia
In the Russian language the word obshchestvo - “society” - typically excludes peasants. That is, “society” referred to educated, upper - or middle-class people. It also excluded the meshchanstvo, a term that officially referred to poor townspeople but that in Russian carries very negative connotations of ignorance and vulgarity. Only with widespread education, it was thought, would peasants and ill-educated townspeople gradually join “society.” Because of the extreme poverty and high illiteracy among the peasant masses, developing “civil society” rarely included them. The term “civil society” suggests and presupposes the free exchange of ideas and the creation of a civil sphere separate from the state. In Russia the state was far more present in middle-class lives than, say, in Britain or Germany. Censorship was considerably more strict; German and English literatures have no parallels to famous Russian authors like Dostoevsky and Chernyshevsky who were arrested for political crimes and sent to Siberia. Also unlike western and central Europe, in the Russian Empire associations (even charities and the like) were strictly regulated and monitored by the state; no political parties (even archconservative monarchist ones) were permitted until 1905. And yet a kind of “civil society” did nonetheless develop in Russia despite these restrictive conditions.17
One word that Russian has given to world languages - aside from “vodka” - is intelligentsia. In its original nineteenth-century meaning the word not only implied a certain degree of education (though this might not be from formal training) but also a critical political stance. Members of the intelligentsia - inteligenty (the “g” is hard, as in German) - aimed to use their education and talents to help Russia and the less-fortunate masses, but seldom in tandem with the Russian state. On the contrary, the intelligentsia generally regarded the autocratic Russian state and the tsar’s bureaucracy as hindering the proper development of the country. In great part the Russian state had itself to blame for the alienation between this important class and itself. The state seldom valued individual initiative positively, as the frequent strife between elected zemstva and the bureaucracy showed. Rather than attempting to harness this social force, the tsarist state harassed and persecuted it. When at long last in 1905 the government began to make cautious concessions to the intelligentsia, generations of suspicion made cooperation between “society” and “state” (e. g., the Duma and Stolypin) very difficult.
In many ways the intelligentsia may be regarded as the quintessence of the “middle class,” a term that deserves some discussion here. The original meaning of this none-too-precise term was to designate all those falling somewhere between the upper (noble, landowning) and lower (peasants, manual labors) classes. In the modern world middle-class people define themselves by their education and occupation, not by their birth or ancestry. But the middle class also includes merchants, traders, and to some extent artisans. In Russia the middle class was relatively weak but grew significantly in the generations after 1861. Not all members of the middle class belonged to the intelligentsia, but all inteligenty were middle-class people in the sense of defining themselves by their profession or role within society. Thus even the many members of the intelligentsia of noble birth, like novelist Lev Tolstoy, can be seen as upholding middle-class ideals of social utility. The intelligentsia did not, however, regard itself as representing middle-class values alone: it felt that it represented the conscience of the nation, responsible for improving the lives of all classes of Russians, including industrial workers and peasants.18
Both before 1917 and later, some (mainly conservative) commentators accused the intelligentsia of being overly theoretical and doctrinaire. Because inteligenty were not allowed any part in governing Russia, it has been argued, they tended to support extreme positions, even refusing to condemn the use of terrorist methods by far left parties. 1 9 In the context of late nineteenth-century Russia, however, such criticism is unhistorical and misses the point. While the intelligentsia was generally liberal or mildly socialist in its political stance, the government tended to lump these moderate views together with those of the extreme left. For that reason, it made sense for the liberal intelligentsia to support the left - at least until the government started to differentiate between liberals and radical socialists, which was beginning to happen only after 1905.
Who belonged to the intelligentsia? No adequate sociological answer may be given because this “class” was as much a state of mind as a concrete grouping of people with similar incomes, education, or politics. Still, some generalizations can be made. Most inteligenty were educated, “self-made” men and women. Typical for middle-class people, they derived their identity less from the situation of their birth (as a prince or baron might) than from what they did. But belonging to the intelligentsia also implied a sincere desire to work for the good of the nation, to use one’s training less for self-enrichment than for the common good. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, journalists, and agronomists each in their own ways represented typical intelligentsia professions.20
In carrying out their professions, these men (and also, though less frequently, women) also helped develop civil society in Russia. For example, zemstva delegates and workers, despite the prohibition on communicating with other zemstva, did secretly consult with their colleagues on practical matters. As in other countries, Russian professionals attempted to form their own associations to spread scientific knowledge. The Russian Bar Association was formed in the midst of the legal reform of the 1860s, and the government grudgingly allowed medical doctors, engineers, and others to meet to discuss professional matters. Inevitably the “professional” became mixed with the political; in particular as many professionals felt - as good members of the intelligentsia - that one of their highest professional goals was to improve life and culture in Russia.21
Another aspect of civil society is the press. Censorship complicated but did not prevent the development of a lively, informative, and at times even cautiously liberal press in Russia. In this development the so-called fat journals played a certain role (journals of a certain thickness were not subject to preliminary censorship). In such journals as Vestnik Evropy (European Messenger), Otechestvennye zapiski (Fatherland Notes), and Russkoe bogatstvo (Russian Wealth) one could learn about recent elections in the United States, read serialized novels by Russian and foreign authors, catch up on events throughout Russia and around the world, and even take in discussions and analysis of burning topical questions such as antisemitism, different forms of parliamentary democracy, and socialism. Russian writers became adept at “Aesopian language” to get around censorship, for example, by criticizing policies or events in foreign countries that had clear parallels in Russia, such as antisemitism in Germany or Austria. By the early twentieth century, and especially after censorship was made less severe after 1905, inhabitants of Russia’s cities could choose from a number of daily newspapers, often in a variety of languages and representing a diversity of views. Some of these papers specialized in scandalous stories and recounting crimes, while others concentrated on more highbrow matters of international politics and high culture.22
For all its positive aspects, the Russian intelligentsia also exhibited various negative traits. Typically for nineteenth-century liberalism, it was an elitist ideology that was only potentially and “in the long run” democratic. In his memoirs, the metal worker Semyon Kanatchikov wrote slightingly of the upper-class (for him) inteligenty who invited workers to their gatherings but then treated them like curiosities. While inteligenty supported universal suffrage, they were shocked when workers and peasants did not always support “progressive” parties like the Kadets. On the other hand, when the intelligentsia came to power in February 1917, its sincere commitment to free speech and open political debate (by amnestying all political prisoners and ending censorship) certainly made it easier for a nonliberal and antidemocratic party like the Bolsheviks to gain power.
The classic Russian intelligentsia was shaken up and in many cases swept away by the October 1917 revolution.23 But Lenin himself displayed many qualities of the inteligenty: selfless, a bit humorless, dogmatic, dedicated to the cause and heedless of his own professional or economic advancement. Like many members of the intelligentsia (indeed, more than most), Lenin was quite cut off from everyday life and troubles in Russia - after all, he had spent nearly his entire adult life in western Europe. Lenin’s concept of an elite and totally dedicated party (as opposed to a broader mass organization) can also be seen as an extreme development of intelligentsia elitism. Lenin’s concept of revolution was always for the common man, but seldom through him. Many inteligenty rejected the Bolshevik revolution as a betrayal of their liberal traditions, but others supported the communists as a group dedicated to transforming Russia into an egalitarian, just, and modern state.
Members of the intelligentsia were among the thousands of Russians who emigrated in the years after 1917. Among them were historian Pavel Miliukov, Nobel-prize winning author Ivan Bunin, and composer Igor Stravinsky. Russian daily newspapers, journals, and books were published in dozens of cities from Berlin and Paris to San Francisco and Shanghai (see chapter 6 , “World,” pp. 194-6). The emigration of thousands of educated specialists who allowed this spreading of Russian culture around the globe presented a huge problem for Lenin and the communists who needed to create a new educated class within Soviet Russia.
For the communists, creating a new educated class was both a challenge and an opportunity. The old liberal ideas of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia had, after all, little place in the brash young socialist state. On a practical level, however, the communists needed the specialist knowledge of the pre-revolutionary educated class in order to train a new Soviet intelligentsia. Universities were opened to (generally less-qualified) working-class students, much to the disgust of more traditional professors. Special workers’ universities were opened up along with night courses so that working people could get more specialized training. A new group began to emerge, the “technical intelligentsia,” often more narrowly educated (typically as industrial managers or engineers) than the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia and far more devoted to the Soviet status quo.24 At the same time, as Daniel Beer has recently shown, the pre-revolutionary discourses of “degeneracy” could in many cases be harnessed to the communist project of reforming Soviet society by purging it of retrograde and reactionary elements.25
Inevitably the Soviet intelligentsia differed very significantly from its prerevolutionary counterpart. The critical attitude toward the state was replaced by partiinost’, or party spirit - almost a complete reversal in attitude. Since the Soviet state defined itself as the protector of worker and peasant interests, the intelligentsia no longer had to fill that role. Instead the educated middle class was urged to use its professional training to strengthen the Soviet state. At the same time the skepticism of the old-fashioned intelligentsia did not entirely die out but disappeared from public view. Under Soviet power any overt attempt to carve out a “civil society” detached from the state was tantamount to political crime. All organizations from soccer teams to gardening associations were integrated into the Soviet state, censorship was considerably harsher than in tsarist times, and the penalty for appearing to challenge state norms became far more serious. For all of these reasons, the Soviet middle class was better integrated into state structures but also largely deprived of the autonomy that liberal theorists usually ascribe to civil society.
The ideal of the Soviet middle class changed significantly from the 1920s to 1945. As literary scholar Vera Dunham pointed out, by the 1940s middle-class values such as a cozy home, traditional gender roles, attractive clothing, and the like began to make their appearance in Soviet novels.26 The proper female communist of the 1920s might resemble Dasha of Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement, whose dedication to the revolution precluded family life (even leading indirectly to her daughter’s death). A generation later heroines did not abandon their communist (public) duties but also created a soft, warm, protective “nest” for their husbands and families. Women also continued to be expected to work outside the home and contribute to the family’s budget while carrying out nearly all household chores, including the raising of children. Dunham argues that the pre-revolutionary petit-bourgeois attitude of the meshchanstvo had by the 1940s been transformed into a no less vulgar and materialistic Soviet counterpart.
It is not by chance that most of Dunham’s examples involve Soviet women rather than men. The Bolsheviks aimed to revolutionize social relations not only in the economic sphere but also at home. Gender roles were to be completely reexamined, family life reconstructed, women and men were to work together as partners to build communism. While no communist leader disagreed on the principle of equality between the sexes, very serious controversy raged over practical application of this principle to life. The communists knew very well how little support they enjoyed among the socially conservative peasantry and were loath to exacerbate relations further over gender issues. In any case the Bolshevik leaders themselves considered the heterosexual family a norm upon which to build socialism and shied away from utopian projects that foresaw the communal raising of children. Transforming a patriarchal peasant society into a socialist community where gender roles would not determine profession or dignity would be an uphill battle.
For Russian peasants, as in many traditional cultures, nature dictated that women take a subordinate role to men. The peasant commune was made up of households headed by an adult male, and in the pre-reform period taxes were levied according to “souls,” that is, male serfs. Girl babies were often considered a disappointment by their father (though welcomed as a helpmate by their mother); women were nearly always valued for their labor potential rather than intelligence or even beauty. The most important virtues for a peasant woman were docility and obedience. A young wife needed such characteristics especially during the first years of marriage when she resided with her husband’s parents. The figure of the overbearing mother-in-law and the lascivious father-in-law were unfortunately not simply stereotypes. On the other hand, peasant women were not entirely without rights. They retained control over their dowry and in extreme cases could return to their parents’ home. Single women, however, had no place in peasant society and were regarded with pity or suspicion. One way out for these women was to join a convent: in the later nineteenth century, the number of women of peasant origin to take the cloth increased significantly.27
In the half-century between serf emancipation and World War I many thousands of young Russians - both men and women - flocked to the cities. Women worked as servants, in the textile industry, and, inevitably, as prostitutes. As in all European countries, the greatest number of peasant girls coming to the city obtained employment as servants, cleaning and cooking for middle - class and wealthier Russians. Domestic work had the advantage of providing room and board (though often little more in the way of renumeration), while appearing respectable. But the hard work, constant surveillance, and pitiful pay of domestic service meant that after a few years in the city many young women looked for factory work. In particular textile factories employed young women and, while pay was low and working conditions dangerous, such jobs gave women a degree of freedom unmatched either on the countryside or in domestic service. Whether as a servant or as a factory worker, employment was nearly always terminated when a woman married or at latest upon signs of pregnancy.
In Russia prostitution was a legal, though hardly respectable, profession. Women wishing to carry on this trade were required to register with the police, undergo a medical examination, and carry the notorious “yellow ticket” marking them as prostitutes. Besides “official” prostitution - some 34,000 women were registered in 1900 - many thousands more plied the trade illegally. For middle-class reformers (and writers like Dostoevsky and Chernyshevsky) the figure of the prostitute became metaphorical for the ills of late imperial Russia.28 In a society where paid employment for single women was limited (and even less available after marriage), prostitution was a logical if unsavory social phenomenon.
The expanding middle class did offer new opportunities for women. While no Russian university officially admitted women, in some cities parallel courses existed for female auditors. Of these the Bestuzhev courses in St Petersburg and the Guerrier courses in Moscow (both set up in the 1870s) were the most famous. In this way young women could obtain training to be teachers, doctors, engineers, pharmacists, lawyers, and dentists.29 Many other young women from the Russian Empire went abroad (especially to Switzerland) to obtain a university education. Among them perhaps the most famous is the Polish scientist Maria Sklodowska, better known as “Mme. Curie” and the first women to be awarded the Nobel prize in Physics (1903) and the first person to obtain a second Nobel prize (this time in chemistry, 1911). Born in Warsaw four years after the Polish January Uprising of 1863, Maria had no chance of obtaining an education in her native tongue.
Like many other young women from the Russian Empire, she sought to advance her education in western Europe. Her desire for a higher education was far from unique; Curie’s genius and spectacular achievements in science would later make her stand out. The figure of the earnest and dedicated young woman seeking education became common in late-nineteenth century Russian journalism and literature, partly as a figure of fun but also with respect for her sincere wish to improve herself and to help her fellow (wo)men.
Gender equality formed an element of intelligentsia faith, all the more so on the left reaches of that group. Indeed the most famous description of radical “new people” (to quote the book’s subtitle) of the late imperial period, in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What Is to Be Done?, portrayed as its main protagonist an energetic and unconventional young woman. Vera Pavlovna escapes from her oppressive petit-bourgeois family with the help of a fellow (male) radical, enters into a fictitious marriage with him (even radicals had to consider respectability), and sets up a sewing cooperative to rescue prostitutes. Vera is sincere, tough, and hard working - though in the end she falls for the ultimate radical, Rakhmetov.30
Real women played important roles in illegal organizations, including in the assassination of Alexander II, for which Gesia Gelfman and Sofiia Perovskaia were condemned to death. The attempted murder by Vera Zasulich of the commander of the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1877 led to a public trial at which Zasulich was acquitted by the sympathetic jury despite Zasulich’s open confession. While female participation in the radical movement probably did not exceed 15-20 percent (judging from arrest records), names like Vera Figner, Ekaterina Breshkovskaia, Maria Spiridonova, Elena Stasova, and of course Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaia, all played visible and important roles. Thousands of less famous women also joined the ranks of the radicals and dedicated their lives to ending oppression and tsarist authority in Russia.31
While few members of the middle-class intelligentsia would have denied equal rights to women, radicals often dismissed the women’s emancipation movement as bourgeois and detracting from the more important revolutionary movement. There was also the tactical issue of whether to press for specific women’s rights when all subjects of the tsar lacked basic civil and political rights. Radicals and liberals agreed that divorce had to be made simpler (before 1917, it was very difficult to get a legal divorce in Russia) and women’s rights in the family (especially for legal separation) needed to be strengthened. But in the Duma period (190617) even Pavel Miliukov, head of the left liberal Kadet party, in order not to alienate more traditionally minded voters refused to endorse the vote for women (despite his wife’s public urging).32
During World War I, women played an important role in the war effort. Aristocratic and middle-class women were prominent in charitable organizations, raising funds to help soldiers and their often impoverished families, and in nursing. Both Tsarina Alexandra and Lenin’s sister, Maria Ulianova, worked as nurses during the conflict. Probably the most remarkable contribution to the war effort from Russia’s women, however, was their active engagement as soldiers. At first, as in all European countries, women were banned from active combat units. This did not, however, stop dedicated women like Maria Bochkareva from dressing up like men and enlisting. Bochkareva was given special permission by the tsar to enlist and after being twice wounded and three times decorated won the respect of her fellow soldiers. In 1917 the Provisional Government, desperate to stem desertions and prop up morale, called on Bochkareva to form the Women’s Battalion of Death. The main government motivation was to shame male soldiers through the example of fighting women, but the several female units formed in the Russian army in 1917 performed quite well in battle. Unfortunately for both the women soldiers and the Provisional Government, most male soldiers were angered and outraged rather than shamed at the prospect of being “out-soldiered” by mere women. Despite the bravery of these female warriors, the Provisional Government was swept away by the Bolsheviks and the Red Army never created similar female fighting units. The unfortunate Bochkareva was executed by a Cheka firing squad (for supporting the white military leader, Admiral Kolchak) in May 1920.33
Once the Bolsheviks came to power, the “woman question” did not top their agenda. After all, Russia was in the middle of a war, basic necessities of life were in short supply, and the revolution itself appeared under threat. None of the most important Bolshevik leaders was a woman, though Lenin’s wife had published a work entitled The Woman Worker in 1899. The “woman’s section” or Zhenotdel of the Communist Party was only set up in 1919 and throughout its short history (it was closed down in 1930) was never entirely taken seriously by party higher-ups, who even mocked it by calling it the Babotdel (“baba” being a somewhat derogatory term for a peasant woman). Certain aspects of the “woman question” were “solved” already in 1917: women received the vote, divorce was made much easier to obtain, and the principle of equality of sexes was embraced. But old practices die hard and Bolshevik feminists (they would have rejected the word as “bourgeois”) like Alexandra Kollontai and Inessa Armand suffered from the sexism of their communist colleagues, the suspicion being that pushing for specific women’s issue was “separatism” that detracted from larger revolutionary issues, and the correlation in most Russian radicals’ minds of “women’s matters” with the arch-traditional, religious peasant baba.34
Still, in the 1920s radicals like Kollontai were active in propagandizing the ideal of breaking down old gender and sexual restrictions. Kollontai ’s “Winged Eros” advocated a free and romantic sexuality that shocked such party fathers as Lenin. In general, like most other intelligentsia males, communists found discussions of sexuality uncomfortable and preferred to stress the need for healthy families in a socialist state. For all the communist rhetoric about gender equality (not a term they would have used), women continued to be regarded as mothers and helpmates to their husbands. There were even special congresses of the wives of shock workers where these dynamic women spoke not so much about their own production but how they spurred their husbands on to overfulfill their plan and become Stakhanovites. And at the apex of the Communist Party, the Politburo, one saw only male faces.35
Activists like Kollontai tried to bring more women into the party (membership was overwhelmingly urban and male) but found that even Communist Party members - in particular in rural and non-Russian regions - did not always look fondly upon the prospect of their wives as communist activists. Male opposition to communist “feminism” in rural areas was buttressed by working-class women’s dislike for new family law that by making divorce easier had the practical effect of leaving them to raise the offspring of such broken unions unaided by the father. In Muslim regions like Azerbaijan and central Asia, communist efforts to give women a more public role (in central Asia this often involved campaigns against wearing the veil and other traditional female garb) led not infrequently to violence, even murder.36
In the 1930s, as we have seen, more traditional models of family life were embraced. At the same time women played a growing role in public life. By the 1930s the idea of women working outside the home and holding responsible positions as teachers, doctors, and (less frequently) engineers or plant directors was gaining acceptance. The labor shortages of the first Five-Year Plans brought increasing numbers of women into the paid workforce. Educational opportunities for young women also expanded and already in 1927 nearly one-third (28 percent) of students in higher education were women. On the other hand, while women increasingly worked outside the home, men rarely helped with “women’s work”: housework, shopping, and raising children. Thus the “double burden” of working a full shift in office or factory, then returning home to cook, clean, and care for children, became a typical aspect of Soviet reality for women.
Like other European states, the USSR was vitally concerned with birthrates and offered substantial bonuses and other benefits to encourage families to have children. Healthy families were important not just to produce a new generation of soldiers and workers (though of course this was one consideration), but also as the fundamental basis of the socialist state. Soviet posters encouraged mothers to keep a clean house, breast-feed their babies, and wash the infants frequently. One slogan proclaimed, “Cleanliness - guarantor of health!” Since it was assumed that women would spend much more time with children than men would, special efforts were made to instruct young women in the basic ideas of Marxism-Leninism and to show motherhood itself as a vital contribution to building the
Soviet state. But the difficulty of life in the USSR in the 1920s and early 1930s, especially in cities, made many young women opt for having fewer children or none at all. In large cities abortions outnumbered live births in the early 1930s, to the great consternation of Soviet leaders. A decree of June 1936 banned abortions except for medical reasons. Despite the lack of other forms of birth control, Soviet birth rates did not increase dramatically, indicating that citizens found other ways of avoiding or terminating unwanted pregnancies.37
During World War II, Soviet women were not drafted into combat units like men, but nonetheless played a vital role in the defense of the motherland. The most famous poster of the conflict showed a maternal woman holding a copy of the oath taken by soldiers and gesturing toward the caption “The Motherland Calls.” Women worked as truck drivers, physicians, and nurses. They were also active in partisan units as well as in more traditional roles as nurses and drivers. At home, women had to work longer shifts and, on the countryside, essentially take over all jobs to make up for the absent male kolkhozniks. And some exceptional women did play a role in combat operations. Though only revealed much later, hundreds of exceptional women also flew combat missions during the war, including Marina Raskova who died when forced to make a crash landing in early 1943. Before her death at the age of 30 Rakova had flown hundreds of missions.
Bureaucrats and Society, Tsarist and Soviet
The intelligentsia defined itself in opposition to the tsarist state and in particular against “the bureaucracy.” The traditional opposition of “society” (enlightened, selfless, progressive) and “bureaucracy” (rigid, authoritarian, corrupt, reactionary) was a cherished myth of pre-revolutionary Russia and, like most myths, not entirely without justification. As any reader of Russian literature of the nineteenth century (especially Gogol and Dostoevsky) will recall, corruption was a common enough phenomenon, as were mindless paperwork and a petty - authoritarian slavishness to rank. Still, while no one would deny that corruption was a problem in the Russian bureaucracy, many tsarist bureaucrats, or chinovniki, saw themselves as patriotic and even progressive Russians wanting to reform the system “from inside.” To take just a few famous examples, there were the Miliutin brothers (Nikolai and Dmitry) active during the 1860s and in particular important in shaping the military reform; and Sergei Witte, who gained a degree in mathematics, worked as a railroad administrator and eventually became Finance Minister and Prime Minister during the upheavals of 1905. Furthermore as engineers, physicians, and economists were called into government service, the boundary between “society” and “bureaucracy” became more difficult to determine.
Soviet historian Petr Zaionchkovsky and his American colleague Daniel Orlovsky pointed out some time ago that the image of the corrupt bureaucrat is a stereotype needing revision.39 By the final decades of the nineteenth century it became increasingly common for chinovniki - in particular at the higher ranks - to have university degrees. Most bureaucrats of the higher ranks were of noble origin but increasingly did not come from wealthy families. Indeed even among men (all chinovniki were by definition male) of the higher ranks, by the late nineteenth century a majority owned no landed estates. At the lower reaches of the bureaucracy it was almost impossible to raise a family on the salaries paid for clerks and other lowly office workers. Still, working in an office gave one social prestige and respectability, even if it often meant penury. Finally there was always the possibility of advancement - and of supplementing one’s pay with bribes.40
The state employed an increasingly large number of people who, while not traditionally thought of as “bureaucrats,” also derived their income from public sources. Among such positions were engineers for building roads and railways, telegraph clerks and delivery boys, typists (typewriters began to be widely used around the 1880s), teachers, university professors, and all sorts of jobs connected with the expanding railroads. Aside from state employment, there were also new jobs offered by the zemstva on the countryside and by the city governments. The frictions between zemstva employees (the so-called Third Element) and tsarist bureaucracy should not blind us to the fact that in many cases employees of the zemstva, such as teachers and physicians, lived very similar lives and held similar views to individuals in similar professions employed directly by the tsarist state. After all, obtaining one’s income from the state does not necessarily make an individual support the existing government.
The increasing fluidity between educated society and the tsarist bureaucracy is shown by the career of Sergei Witte. Born to a noble but not wealthy family, Witte studied at the newly founded (1865) Novorossiiskii University in Odessa. He then made a very successful career as a railroad entrepreneur and administrator in the southwestern region of the Russian Empire (now in Ukraine). Witte was a practical man, but in no way a reactionary. His business dealings in the ethnically mixed southwestern provinces had brought him into contact with numerous national groups, especially Jews and Poles, and while he was not free of his age’s prejudices, he despised “zoological” nationalism and even married a woman of Jewish background.
It was probably inevitable that the successful director of a private railroad line would be asked to participate in government decisions about encouraging economic development, but Witte came to the tsar’s attention in a unique way. Both Tsar Alexander III and Witte were blunt men, and Alexander was impressed that the railroad director dared to point out to him the dangers of running the imperial train at high speeds (as the tsar loved to do) towards the imperial vacation palace on the Crimea. In 1888 Witte’s prediction came true when Alexander III’s train was involved in a serious wreck, and the tsar had occasion to recall the blunt administrator’s words that it was preferable to sacrifice speed than the life of the tsar. While Alexander had not heeded Witte’s original warning, the tsar did respect the man who had dared to challenge him - and turned out to be correct. Witte came to head the state railroad agency, then the Ministry of Finance, and finally Ministry of Finances, where he presided over Russia’s industrializing boom of the 1890s and first years of the twentieth century. Under Nicholas II, as we have seen, Witte even achieved the status of prime minister before being dismissed by that tsar. Witte’s career demonstrates both the possibilities and limitations for educated professions in the tsarist bureaucracy. While professional competence and energy could propel a talented individual to a top position, ultimately one’s fate depended upon the tsar’s whim.41
Another case of the connections between “society” and “bureaucracy” involves a far more famous individual than Witte, namely Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov, better known as Lenin. Lenin’s father, Ilya Nikolaevich Ulianov, served as a teacher and ultimately school inspector in the southeastern province of Simbirsk, on the Volga river. Ilya Nikolaevich was a successful provincial educational bureaucrat but simultaneously a progressive member of the intelligentsia. Lenin’s father was so successful in his position that he rose to a rank giving him the status of hereditary nobleman. It is a historical irony that this progressive state employee was father to two sons whose lives were intimately connected with the revolutionary movement. Alexander, his eldest son, was executed in 1887 for involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate Alexander III; the historical role of V. Lenin is only too well known. Just as the career of Sergei Witte demonstrates the possibility of “crossing the line” from the private business world to government bureaucracy, the Ulianov family shows that progressive bureaucrats, intelligentsia ideals, and revolution could coexist within a single family.
Revolutionaries like Lenin always defined themselves in opposition to the tsarist bureaucracy. Upon coming to power, however, the Bolsheviks quickly discovered that a modern state needs a bureaucracy to function. While the highest officials were sacked after the October 1917 revolution, nearly all other functionaries kept their jobs. Recent studies have shown that more than half of officials in the Soviet Commissariats of Agriculture and Food Supply had been serving in the same or similar posts before 1917. Even in the army, though most officers had sided with the Whites, “repentant” officers were generally welcomed into the new Red Army (though kept under close watch). Among the most famous officers to be absorbed into the Red Army leadership were General Aleksei Brusilov and Mikhail Tukhachevsky who served as a young lieutenant in World War I, was captured by the Germans, escaped to Russia just before the Bolshevik revolution, and rose rapidly in the Red Army, being promoted to the highest rank of Marshall of the Soviet Union in 1935 at the age of 42. Many tsarist bureaucrats remained at their posts - usually with slightly different job titles - well into the 1920s and even longer. At the same time the Communist Party’s own membership - and bureaucracy - expanded greatly even during the chaotic Civil War years.
The word “bureaucracy” was a highly negative one for the new communist leadership, denoting inefficiency, petty power struggles, and even counterrevolution. But any modern state needs its army of civil servants to carry out orders, and the Soviet state was no different. Indeed the very fact that the communists took on cultural, social, and economic tasks that most modern states would leave to the private sector meant that the Soviet bureaucracy inevitably became enormous. Even during the NEP years, when government expenditures had to be slashed, despite numerous campaigns to reduce the bureaucracy, it actually grew in size. While the party demanded a slimmer bureaucracy, at the same time it required constant surveillance and allowed little room for personal initiative. The result was ever-increasing demands for documentation, reports, passes, testimonies - all the mind-numbing paperwork that would be familiar to any resident or visitor to the USSR to the very end and that in many ways continues in twenty-first-century Russia. On the other hand all these bits of paper - bumazhki, in Russian - that had to be filled out, stamped, and examined, provided employment for millions and, in many cases, the ability to exert petty-bureaucratic power over the hapless applicants. After he had been forced out of the USSR Trotsky would repeatedly criticize the Stalinist regime’s massive bureaucracy, but in the Civil War period and early 1920s he too had been instrumental in creating this system.
Initially, large differentials in the salaries of government employees and especially party bureaucrats were to be avoided. The “party norm” set down that the salary of a communist official, no matter what position she or he held, should not exceed that of a qualified worker. After all, Lenin had recently written (in State and Revolution’ 1918) that under communism even cooks (i. e., nonskilled citizens) would have to participate in the running of the state. By setting down the rule that even high officials in the communist government would not be paid more than ordinary workers, the Bolsheviks wanted to emphasize their solidarity with the working class. But very quickly this rule was ignored or side-stepped. In any case during the time of the War Communism and Civil War, payment in food and other goods was far more important than salaries in a depreciating and even worthless currency. Rather than higher wages, party workers often received specific rations or access to goods not generally available. One of the demands of the Kronstadt Rebels in early 1921, after all, was the elimination of such privileges. In the NEP period, efforts were made to reduce the number of administrative employees (in particular to cut budgets), though with indifferent results.
In the 1930s pay differentials among workers and high officials grew wider and the very idea of egalitarianism was denounced by Stalin, who explicitly defended higher wages for more qualified workers. While Stalin did not openly call for higher wages for high party officials, in fact by the late 1920s (and in many cases much earlier) members of the party elite were living far better than average Soviet workers. Even in the 1920s, middle-level administrators were being paid more than workers - which encouraged the latter to abandon the workbench in favor of the less dangerous, more prestigious, and better paying office.
Already in the 1920s one can see the beginnings of what the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas later called “the new class.”''2 This new “Soviet bourgeoisie” was made up of specialists, high administrators, and upper party officials. The term nomenklatura, popularized only much later, after World War II, describes this group that clearly already existed in embryonic form from the later 1920s. Nomenklatura refers to two separate phenomena: on the one hand to the practice of appointing only Communist Party members to certain positions (from ambassadorships to heads of research institutes to directors of factories), and on the other to the actual holders of such privileged positions. The nomenklatura (used in the second, sociological, sense) became the privileged elite of the USSR. They enjoyed high salaries (by Soviet standards) and, more importantly, access to specific stores and other privileges (foreign travel, exclusive vacation resorts on the Black Sea, goods and services available without long waits in line) not available to the average Soviet citizen.43 The construction (1928-31) of an enormous and quite opulent apartment building on the banks of the Moscow river - later made famous in Yuri Trifonov’s novel The House on the Embankment - symbolized the increasing divorce between the Soviet elite and everyday people. While members of this elite were hit hard by the purges of the late 1930s, the privileges themselves continued until the very end of the USSR.
In the USSR, where everyone worked for the state, it makes little sense to speak of “government employees.” But a new kind of bureaucracy did develop under Soviet rule, the so-called apparat, or Communist Party apparatus, whose employees came to be known as apparatchiki. Being an apparatchik meant full-time employment as a party bureaucrat, perhaps overseeing party propaganda, or the young communists (Komsomol), or any number of diverse party offices. Apparatchiki were by definition party members, but most party members held jobs outside the apparat. Not all apparatchiki were members of the nomenklatura, though the most important positions would fall into that category. The growth of the apparat was important not just as a drain on government resources but also because it created a kind of state within a state, sheltering party apparatchiki from new ideas or criticism. Indeed one may interpret the purges of the late 1930s as Stalin’s attempt to shake up this group. At the same time it needs to be noted that the most radical reformer in Soviet history, Mikhail Gorbachev, was the epitome of an apparatchik, having spent his entire professional life working in
Communist Party offices. His reform’s failure may be attributed to the shelter - and blinders - that this kind of professional life provided.
Edges of Society: Criminality, Social and Sexual “Deviance”
Like all societies, the Russian Empire and USSR had their “deviant” members. It should be stressed that as used here, “deviance” is not a moral category but a sociological label applied to individuals falling outside the acceptable norms of a given society. For example, in the twenty-first century few would categorize homosexuals as “deviant,” much less criminal, but in both the Russian Empire and (after 1934) USSR homosexual behavior (between males, in any case) was a criminal offense. In general both before and after 1917, societal norms in Russia-USSR were considerably less permissive than most twenty-first - century European or North American societies. Young people were expected to respect elders, women needed to defer to men, state and police authority could seldom be challenged by citizens.
Throughout this period, it was expected that practically everyone would marry and, if possible, bear children. The few exceptions to this rule were usually religiously sanctioned; that is, Catholic priests or Orthodox monk and nuns. But Orthodox parish clergy, rabbis, and Muslim clerics all married and had families. Thus the heterosexual family was considered the norm and any other form of sexuality a deviation. Sexual relations before marriage were not, however, unusual nor particularly condemned. If a pregnancy resulted, however, the couple was expected to marry. Failure to do so brought dishonor to both individuals though, of course, the young man could deny his involvement. The frequency of extramarital affairs is impossible to gauge with any precision, but it is clear that they were far from rare, though rates of illegitimacy were lower in Russia than in western Europe (the rates reflect, of course, babies born to unwed mothers, not conceived by unmarried women). A sexual double standard predominated by which men were expected to have occasional “flings” outside marriage, but the same behavior for women was severely condemned. Two literary sources reflect this attitude: Anna Karenina’s life is destroyed by her love for Count Vronsky. On a less dramatic note, in Chekhov’s exquisite short story “The Lady with the Little Dog” Dmitry Dmitrich has clearly engaged in numerous extramarital affairs before meeting Anna Sergeevna, who equally clearly has never before cheated on her husband.
Prostitution, though disdained and censured by religious and civil authorities, was both legal and common in the pre-revolutionary era. Even on the countryside the practice of granting sexual favors in return for payment was not unheard-of, though of course the young lady in question would often have a difficult time finding a husband in her community. In the cities there were brothels, licensed prostitutes (registered with the police and carrying a “yellow ticket”), and illegal streetwalkers. As in many other European countries, frequenting prostitutes was widely tolerated as a necessary outlet for excess male sexual drive, even for married men (another form of the prevalent sexual double standard). And in the cities many young male workers came from the countryside without family (or before marrying) and had no other sexual outlets.
With the revolution, prostitution was outlawed in Russia but continued to exist on the margins of society. During the NEP (the 1920s), the disparity of income between most workers and the free-spending nepmen meant that many women and girls were forced to supplement their incomes through different forms of prostitution. The authorities did not extend a great deal of energy in the 1920s in eradicating prostitution, placing their emphasis instead on educating the populace on healthy sexuality, including avoiding venereal diseases. The 1920s were a period of unprecedented sexual freedom for many but with the usual unintended consequences - unwanted pregnancies, spread of disease, and the disruption of traditional family structures. While contraceptive devices and abortions had been completely banned in pre-revolutionary Russia, after 1917 both were - in principle - available, though in fact Soviet industry was not capable of producing much in the way of contraceptives either in the 1920s or later. Abortions were a different matter. While broadly condemned (more as a health than moral issue), without practical alternatives the number of abortions carried out annually rose in the 1920s, already exceeding the number of live births by 1922 and with over 12 times as many abortions as live births in 1929. With the turn to more traditional values after Stalin had consolidated power, abortions were outlawed in 1936 (this prohibition would only be lifted after Stalin’s death, in 1955).44
In the Russian Empire, homosexuality was seen as a sinful act that deserved punishment. Few were ready to address the issue openly or even to admit that it existed. Despite this widespread silence, however, there is evidence that a man who sought homosexual sex in St Petersburg and Moscow (at least) could find it in bathhouses and other specific spots, known to homosexuals, young males wishing to earn money, and the police. In the memoirs of Russian homosexuals, nearly all of middle-class or wealthy backgrounds, bathhouse attendants, young soldiers, and carriage drivers figure among prospective partners. But homosexual behavior was generally considered a mainly upper-class perversion and finds next to no mention in the (admittedly scanty) sources we have on Russian peasants. Mikhail Artsybashov’s novel Sanin (published 1907) dealt frankly with the topic of homosexuality (and other “deviant” behaviors), making the book a succes de scandale. Ironically one of the best-known homosexuals of the post-reform period was the arch-reactionary Prince Vladimir Petrovich Meshchersky whose sexual proclivities did not prevent him from being a visitor to the imperial palace under
Alexander III. Because women had less access to the public sphere - a respectable woman could hardly go alone to a restaurant, much less to a bathhouse - we have far less evidence of female homosexuality (the word “lesbianism” was almost never used at the time).
After the revolution homosexuality ceased, at least for a time, to be a crime but continued to be considered deviant behavior that could be treated by psychological and other methods. However, homosexuals continued to be persecuted both on a social level and by actual statute in different parts of the USSR. Even this limited toleration came to an end in the mid-1930s with sodomy being recriminalized in 1933-4, subject to a five-year prison sentence. But once again the recriminalization of homosexual behavior applied, strictly speaking, to men alone. Apparently the Stalinist rulers of the USSR did not consider female homosexuality to be a threat to the social and political order - or simply could not conceive of such a thing.45
If homosexuals were relegated to the “edges” of both Russian and Soviet society, criminals were quite literally a society apart. Russia was only beginning to develop a modern penitentiary system in the post-reform period; before that time, minor misdemeanors were dealt with by flogging, while more serious crimes were punished by exile to Siberia. Compared with other European countries, the death penalty was rarely carried out in Russia, with the exception of very serious political crimes. Instead exile in Siberia removed convicts from European Russia, where they would often found families and live out the rest of their lives. The Great Reforms also brought an abolition of the “barbaric” (from a liberal European point of view) practice of flogging, though it appears that for many poor Russians, physical chastisement was preferable to a prison term, which often left the convict’s family destitute.46
With the large influx of peasants to cities in the final decades of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, crime rates rose in Russian cities. Respectable people increasingly complained about “hooligans” (the English word became part of the Russian language) who preyed on middle-class people. After the revolution of 1905 both the “public” and government were convinced that the public order was threatened by street crime. In many official reports the connection between revolutionary activities and banditry was made directly. The usual solutions proposed were more surveillance and stricter punishment, but the Russian Empire’s chronic lack of funds frustrated any significant reform.47
World History
