The Russia of today is an entirely different place than the one I read about in college textbooks and experienced as a college student in the 1980s. In the past generation Russia has gone from being, in the guise of the USSR, one of two superstates whose policies affected millions around the globe to a still powerful but insecure state no longer certain of its preeminence on the global scene. This enormous change took place almost literally overnight in the early 1990s and left millions of Russians baffled, frustrated, and angry. One cannot understand the politics and culture of the Russian Federation in the twenty-first century without a good grasp of the past - in particular of the crucial period between serf emancipation (1861) and victory in the second World War (1945). In that quite short period - essentially one long lifetime - Russia became a world power as it had never been before in history. Now, once again, Russia has returned more or less to its pre-World War I power status: important but not one of the two superpowers engaged in power projection around the globe. At the same time many Russians continue to feel that their country is not receiving proper respect in the world. The broad discrepancy between Russia’s actual military and economic power and the role that Russians think their country should play in world politics stems mainly from the memory of a powerful USSR - the country built in the years we will consider here.
Despite the transformations of the 1990s and the resulting reduction in Russian military might, Russia continues to aspire to a global role - to the great consternation of many of its European neighbors. With its large energy reserves, nuclear capabilities, and geographical sweep covering nearly half of the globe, Russia remains vitally important in world politics. One should also never forget that the
Map 0.1 Russian Empire.
Source: based on map in Dominic Lieven, Empire, Yale University Press, 2000, “The Russian Empire at its Greatest Extent, 1914.”
Russian nuclear arsenal is still capable of ending all life on earth. So Russia continues to “matter,” just as Germany and Britain after 1945 remain significant in world politics, economy, and culture. Up to now, all histories of Russia written have consciously or unconsciously been histories of a world power. The challenge of a survey of Russian history in the twenty-first century is to present the history of a country whose importance can no longer be taken for granted.
The present-day importance of Russia derives from geographical, military, cultural, and historical factors. The largest country in the world from the seventeenth century to the present day, its borders stretch from the European Union to China, from the Middle East (Iran) to Korea, from the Black and Baltic Seas to the Pacific. The huge oil and natural gas reserves located on its territory allow Russia to exert serious - and often much resented - influence in Europe where many countries are overwhelmingly dependent on energy delivered from the east. With its nuclear arms and new-found assertiveness under President Vladimir Putin and his successors, Russia cannot be dismissed as “yesterdays news.” Of course, for a historian, the news of yesterday is vitally significant, even more so, perhaps, for Russia more than any other present-day country. While Germans or Japanese no longer regard their countries as world powers (and, crucially, have no great desire to take on that role) and the British Empire has been transformed into the Commonwealth that has relinquished any pretensions of a geopolitical role, the Russian Federation and Russian citizens in the early twenty-first century often regard their country in terms of world political power. Thus Russia expects to be respected as a power of the first rank; neither government nor populace is yet content to accept a reduced role on the international scene in the way that former world powers like Great Britain, France, or Japan have. This view, which clashes with many aspects of post-1992 political reality, can only be understood through a sympathetic examination of Russia’s past experience.
In the early twenty-first century, with the USSR a fading memory, the triumph of the Bolshevik party in 1917 remains an important historical event, but only one among many. In the past decades western historians have attempted to look across and beyond the revolutionary year, pointing to continuities before and afterwards rather than stressing the total break with tradition that the creation of the world ’s first socialist state represented. This book will reflect that historiography. Nobody would deny the importance of the communist victory in October 1917 as a crucial event in world history. At the same time the Bolsheviks were building on an already-existing revolutionary tradition that dated from the Great Reforms of the 1860s and early 1870s. After the communist victory, moreover, Lenin and his party comrades had to deal with many of the same issues that had plagued pre-revolutionary Russian rulers: developing the economy, raising the education level, dealing with Russia’s multiethnic and multilingual population, defending Russia from internal and external threats, and justifying the revolution not just in practical but in moral terms. This volume’s narrative will be structured around some of these major themes.
The period covered in this book, from the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 to the victory over Hitler’s Germany in 1945, represents a critical and unique era in Russian history. Serf emancipation formed the cornerstone of the Great Reforms that aimed to modernize Russia, in effect, to preserve Russia’s great power status. The impressive industrial development of Russia that began approximately a generation after the Great Reforms appeared to prove that Russia was indeed successfully modernizing. But economic development could not prevent revolutions in 1905 and 1917, the final of which brought down the tsarist regime. The new communist government dedicated itself to creating an entirely new kind of state - modern, secular, socialist, and a model for the world. The social and economic convulsions of the 1930s shook the Soviet state to its foundations but also helped to pave the way to victory in 1945. Thus in a sense the defeat of Nazi Germany at the hands of the Red Army can be seen as the culmination of a modernizing process begun with the emancipation of serfs three generations earlier.
A common definition of history is “the study of change over time.” In this book we will certainly witness enormous changes as Russia went from being a politically conservative, peasant-dominated, religious country to the world’s first socialist state, officially atheist and dominated - at least in principle - by the industrial working class. Vastly more of the population lived in cities in 1945 than in 1861, and women occupied a far more prominent place in public life. Still, much remained of the past. Religion lived on in official and unofficial forms; women continued to raise children and carry out nearly all household work even while working outside the home; vodka still provided important tax revenues for the state as well as pleasure and pain for ordinary Russians. Certainly from 1861 to 1945 Russia became more modern: industrialized, literate, urban, secular.
We start in 1861 with the emancipation of the serfs, the most important act of the “Great Reforms” that would stretch into the 1870s. These reforms, as we will see, were a major step toward creating a modern Russia, at least on the social and economic planes. We end in 1945 with the Soviet victory against Nazi Germany not because the USSR was a truly modern and prosperous country by that date - the opposite was in many ways true - but because the peculiar path of modernization that had been followed since 1861 had proved itself in one vital respect successful: the USSR was able to take on a major military threat and emerge victorious. The role of World War II in legitimating the Soviet regime is so vital that this conflict will figure both here and in the next, final, volume of this history that will take the story up to our own days. Furthermore, in a sense the type of centrally planned, state-dominated modernization followed since 1917 reached its logical limits in the decade or two after 1945; the future economic difficulties of the USSR were thus a function of the structures set up in the first generation after 1917.
Major political developments will be treated in some detail in chapter 1, but a quick overview may be helpful. In 1861 Russia was ruled by an autocrat, without any parliament or even a cabinet of ministers, and its economic and social life was dominated by the institution of serfdom. The Great Reforms of 1861-76 abolished serfdom, set up institutions of limited local autonomy in cities and the countryside (the zemstva), modernized the legal system, and reformed the army. However, the Russian political system remained entirely dominated by the tsar, whose rule was unfettered by either a constitution or a legislature of any kind. Neither the peasantry nor educated society were satisfied with the reforms and this unhappiness - especially among young educated people - developed in a violent direction that culminated in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.
From 1881 until the end of the old regime in the midst of World War I, Russia’s rulers understood the need to modernize the empire to finance an army, but stubbornly assumed that they could do this without relinquishing autocratic authority. Without modernization, Russia would have fallen into the status of a second-rate power, something the Russian tsars refused to consider. Tsar Alexander III (reigned 1881-94) was relatively successful in allowing industrial development without conceding political reform. The failure of his unfortunate son, Nicholas II (reigned 1894-1917), can be seen in two revolutions, one in 1905 (which the tsarist regime survived, though after conceding a parliament, the Duma) and one in February 1917, which ended tsarist rule.
The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, took power in late 1917 and aimed at a complete transformation of Russia - and the world. Not only economic and political relations were to be transformed: social relations, spiritual beliefs, even the family and gender relations were to be completely changed. A new human being was to be created! The first years of communist rule coincided with a bloody civil war, which ended with a devastating famine in which millions perished. The shattering experience of the civil war convinced the communist leadership that some concession had to be made with the market and private property. During the 1920s this period of the “New Economic Policy” (NEP) saw economic recovery and cultural innovations, but no political liberalization. At decade’s end the NEP was eclipsed by a more radical - and more socialist - economic policy of the first Five Year Plan (for industrial growth) and agricultural collectivization (to neutralize the peasants as possible threats to Soviet power and to guarantee a reliable supply of grain to the industrial cities). This period of “socialist construction” which lasted at least until 1939 was brutal and inhumane, but also impressive: entire new industries and even new cities rose in the space of a decade. The 1930s also saw mass arrests, the so-called Great Terror, and enormous growth in the coercive labor camp system (the Gulag).
The feeling of insecurity engendered by the dislocations of the “Great Terror”
- thousands of military officers and the majority of the politburo were purged
- may have contributed to Stalins decision to sign a pact with Adolf Hitler in August 1939. Thus when the Nazi invasion of Poland set off World War II, the USSR was Hitler s ally (and quickly occupied the eastern half of Poland). The enormous ideological differences between the USSR and Nazi Germany made further conflict inevitable; the Nazi attack of 21/22 June 1941 should have come as no surprise to Stalin. Unfortunately Stalin had convinced himself that the Germans could not - yet - attack, a faulty judgment that would cost millions of Soviet lives. By fall 1941 German armies were on the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow and it appeared that the USSR’s last days had come. But appearances deceive: after four years of almost unbearable suffering the Red Army took Berlin. The Soviet Union, despite the huge devastation its western and southern territories had suffered, found its international prestige at an all-time high.
Such were some of the major events of this formative period in Russian history. Yet this quick sketch leaves out vast areas of human experience - family life, social identities, the ethnic diversity of Russia/USSR, urbanization, religion, foreign affairs, culture and education. Politics influences - in a sense provides the setting for - all of these things, but in a traditional history political events tend to overwhelm and “push out” social, cultural, and everyday developments. Here we will begin with a political overview and will then cover six other broad themes in separate chapters. In this way crucial issues like ethnic-national policy, everyday life, culture, and religious feeling can be considered in their own right rather than as a function of larger political trends.
In the past generation or two, professional historians and students have become increasingly impatient with traditional political narratives. Readers demand less emphasis on the inner workings of cabinets, diplomatic intrigue, and great men, and more focus on the lived experience of everyday people. This is not to say, obviously, that politics is entirely divorced from everyday life. For instance, censorship laws had a direct effect on literature and journalism. Laws in imperial Russia restricting the movement, educational opportunities, and professional rights of Jews influenced many younger Jews to oppose the old regime - sometimes violently. Marriage and divorce laws - utterly different before and after the October 1917 revolution - had profound consequences for family life, inheritance, and relations between the genders. Similarly the two World Wars had an enormous and devastating impact on culture, economics, and gender relations throughout Russia/USSR. Accordingly this book starts with the traditional theme of politics as a framework and context for the other chapters.
The themes we will cover are seven: Politics, Society, Nations, Modernization, Belief, World, and Culture. Politics is more or less self-explanatory: political events, wars, administrative and legal changes, revolutions, rulers. In the chapter on society we will consider how the Russians perceived their own social order and how both perceptions and social realities changed over the four generations of our study. In this context we will consider the term “intelligentsia” as the nucleus for a developing Russian civil society that would, eventually, include the entire nation. In 1861, to be sure, the vast majority of Russia’s population - the peasantry - still remained outside “society.” Thus an important part of our story examines how serfs became peasants and these later became collective farmers, while also tracing the path of millions of other peasants who left the countryside to become wage laborers in the growing cities.
Half of society is made up of women, but in the past they were rarely considered men’s intellectual or legal equals. The “Woman Question” was a fundamental social issue from the mid-nineteenth century into the Soviet period and challenged basic assumptions about society. If the peasantry and women often remained outside “society,” following the Russian use of the word, at least in the first part of our period, the state bureaucracy and the men (nearly all men) who worked in it were seen as society’s antithesis. In fact, of course, clerks and bureaucrats both formed part of society and - particularly in the Soviet period - helped mold the contours of a changing and newly developing social organism. Finally we will look at peripheral groups in society, including criminals, “deviants,” prostitutes, and homosexuals. These groups had little in common aside from the consternation they caused in “respectable” society both before and after the revolution.
The next chapter focuses on “nations” in Russian history. While the word “nation” in English is ambiguous, referring sometimes to a group of people and sometimes to a political entity (“our nation’s capital”), in Russian narod or natsiia can only be a group of people or ethnicity. Throughout the period of this textbook, ethnic Russians made up not quite half of the empire’s (or USSR’s) total population. What strategies were employed by tsarist and Soviet decision-makers to deal with such ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity? The great differences between so-called nationality policy before and after 1917 stem from the very different natures of the imperial and Soviet state. While imperial Russia could be very harsh in crushing rebellions and punishing rebel groups - including perceived “rebel nations” like the Poles - the empire was by its nature more likely to react than to act, was suspicious of change (even such a change as assimilation to Russian culture) while having no fundamental respect for ethnic or linguistic diversity. Thus Poles and Jews could be respected as the bearers of centuries-old cultures, while peasant or nomadic nations whose culture existed mainly in oral form (e. g., Ukrainians, Kyrgyz, Lithuanians) were not particularly esteemed.
Under Soviet rule, on the other hand, great efforts were expended to introduce alphabets, standardize languages, and to oblige each individual to adopt a single national identity (e. g., Russian, Uzbek, Jewish). One troubling nation for both imperial rulers and the Soviets were the Jews: Stalin initially denied them any status as a nation (in a pre-revolutionary theoretical work), but in the USSR Jews came to enjoy - if that is the word - the status of separate nation even as thousands of Jewish individuals migrated to the cities, brought their children up speaking Russian (not Yiddish), and abandoned the religious practices of their ancestors. Although official Judeophobia and legal restrictions of the imperial era were abolished in 1917, antisemitism did not die - despite Soviet laws forbidding it - and remained a powerful social force throughout the Soviet period.
Modernization forms the focus of chapter 4 . Here the main focus will be on economic development, industrialization, and urbanization. At the same time modernization also implies social transformation toward a mobile (both geographically and in class terms), flexible, and relatively homogenous society. Indeed Soviet society in 1945 was relatively - and that is a key word - more homogenous than Russian society in 1861. The industrial development of the generation or two before 1917 inadvertently helped put in place the preconditions for revolution by creating an industrial proletariat dissatisfied with long hours, dangerous work, and inadequate pay. Certainly the Bolsheviks wished to create a modern, prosperous, literate, and socialist country. To a great extent they succeeded. The gap between city and village remained important even in 1945, but education, improved transport, and new technologies such as the radio meant that Soviet citizens could perceive themselves as part of a greater whole by the 1930s in a way that subjects of the tsar could not 70 years earlier. Bolshevism (and Marxism) is all about modernity: we will weigh the positive and negative outcomes of the modernizing path taken in the generations between the rapid industrialization of the 1890s and the crash industrializing programs of the 1930s.
“Belief” is the title of chapter 5 . I use this term in a broad sense, including organized religions, ideologies, and dissenting “sects,” but also belief in the sense of “worldviews,” such as anarchism or Marxist communism. In the Russian Empire the “ruling role” of the Russian Orthodox Church was part of Russian law: both the tsar and his wife had to be of that denomination (though born into Lutheran families, the Danish and German wives of the last three tsars all converted to Orthodoxy before marriage). However, other religions from Islam to Buddhism to Catholicism were tolerated within the Russian Empire. Jews (and, to a lesser extent, all non-Christians) were subject to a number of legal restrictions, but were never forbidden to follow their religions. Besides religious beliefs, political convictions were important in the imperial period, with liberals and socialists (of different parties) putting forth different arguments about the proper future of the Russian state. After the Bolshevik revolution the range of permitted opinions became considerably narrower, with liberals (and of course conservatives) deprived of a public voice. Within a few years of 1917 even non-Bolshevik socialists found their freedom of expression tightly circumscribed. Religious beliefs were even more directly attacked by the communist rulers and yet continued to exist both in legal and underground forms. Despite these attacks of the 1920s and 1930s, during World War II the Soviet state did not hesitate to use religious (and Russian patriotic) themes to bolster the war effort.
For generations Russian intellectuals have pondered to what extent Russia is part of Europe. In chapter 6 Russia’s role in the world is examined. Here we consider foreign policy, national prestige on the international scene, but also “mentality”: is Russia unique in world history or must she follow the same historical path as other countries? The country’s unique geographical position, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Baltic Sea, meant that the bulk of Russian territory was actually located in Asia, while the centers of Russian culture were in Europe. Perhaps Russia’s geography meant that it had a special role to play in world history? More prosaically the Russian Empire was vitally concerned in preserving its great power status - this had been, after all, one of the main motivations behind the Great Reforms. Concern for international prestige also explains Russia’s plunge into war in late July 1914 when Austria-Hungary appeared to threaten its ally and fellow Orthodox state, Serbia.
After 1917 the USSR promoted another kind of historical uniqueness as the world ’s first socialist state and harbinger of world revolution. At the same time Russian emigre communities from Kharbin (China) to Berlin to Los Angeles preserved customs and culture of the old regime intelligentsia. Just as the “capitalist world” was getting accustomed to the continued existence of the USSR, the world economic crisis occurred and Hitler’s Nazi party in German threatened to end communism (and, indeed, liberalism) once and for all. World War II nearly caused the collapse of the Soviet state, but the USSR’s eventual triumph - at enormous cost - gave it a prestige and importance on the world stage never enjoyed by the Russian Empire.
The last theme covered in this book will be culture, from education and scientific achievements to painting, popular entertainment, propaganda, and literature. The strains and upheavals in Russian society are well documented in the classic novels of Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy. At the same time new technologies and growing literacy were encouraging the publication of adventure stories for peasants as well as the adornment of the walls of rural dwellings with brightly colored lithographs of popular myths or fairytales. Russian realist painting glorified history and revealed present injustices. Russian scientists such as psychologist Ivan Pavlov and chemist Dmitry Mendeleev became world-renowned for, respectively, drooling dogs and the periodic table of elements. Under Soviet rule many writers and artists emigrated, but many others continued their work in word, sound, and image to entertain and uplift their Soviet compatriots. Like everything else under communism, culture was to serve as a tool of revolution - informing, admonishing, and spreading enthusiasm for socialism. In the 1920s radical experiments were undertaken to “lift” proletarian culture and integrate it into Russian high culture. As the 1930s progressed, however, official views of culture became increasingly conservative, with poet Alexander Pushkin, composer Peter Tchaikovsky, and other old regime artists winning out over artistic experimentation. The Bolsheviks took culture seriously and used it in novel and exciting ways, from poster art to paintings to the so-called Agitprop (agitational propaganda) trains that brought music, visual arts, and speeches to the countryside.
To set the stage for what will follow, let us consider two moments in time: the Russia of January 1861, just before the serf emancipation, and the USSR of June 1945, just after the end of World War II. These two snapshots will allow us to gauge the enormous differences that had taken place over the course of a long lifetime or, to put it another way, four short generations. Looking at the starting and end point of our narrative will also give the reader a framework to “fill in” with more details from the chapters that follow.
At the beginning of 1861, Tsar Alexander II ruled over an empire stretching from Finland to Alaska (which would be sold to the USA in 1867), the largest country in the world. In this enormous expanse lived hundreds of different peoples, from Poles and Jews to pagan Udmurts, Buddhist Kalmyks, and Muslim Tatars and Kazakhs. All were ruled from the capital of St Petersburg, in the extreme west of the empire, a city barely one and a half centuries old, having been founded by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century on land taken from Sweden. But the tsar was always crowned in Moscow and traditional Russians looked upon St Petersburg with disdain and suspicion. The tsar ruled absolutely; there was no parliament of any kind and his word (in the form of an imperial order or ukaz) was literally law. At the same time laws and administrative practices differed hugely in various regions of the empire. The Finns had their own diet (legislature) and constitution, German elites dominated over Estonian and Latvian peasants in the Baltic provinces (today’s Estonia and Latvia), and in peripheral regions on the western, southern, and south-eastern frontiers, governors general ruled with a minimum of interference from the center.
Economically the empire rested on an agrarian economy supported by serfdom. Serfs made up nearly half of the Russian peasantry (44.5 percent of the total population around 1860) and generally lived in poverty. Their landlords, mainly of noble birth, were not much better off, often in debt to the government and without the means of incentives to modernize their estates. The primitive state of Russian agriculture was not just a problem for peasants and landlords: it also severely restricted the governments ability to finance state expenditures, especially for the military. Serfdom and the primitive agricultural economy based on it had to be reformed if the Russian Empire was to afford the military outlays necessary to remain a major power.
In general, industrialization had barely touched Russia by 1861. To be sure, a textile industry existed in central Russia but the lack of a modern railroad net made it impossible to sell these textiles widely, and much of the production was bought up by the government (for military uniforms). The first major Russian railroad, connecting Moscow and St Petersburg, had only been completed in 1851, and Russians had to wait until 1862 and the completion of the St Petersburg-Warsaw line to be linked by rail with the rest of Europe. Although telegraph lines had been constructed in Russia already in the late 1830s, many provincial towns lacked access to the telegraph decades later, considerably complicating administration. In per capita income, railroad lines, literacy, and many other measures of modernization Russia lagged behind western and central European countries. If Russia was to be a great power, it would have to catch up or at the very least not allow the rest of Europe to get even further ahead.
In 1861 most subjects of the tsar lived traditional and religious lives. Whether pagan, Catholic, Lutheran, Russian Orthodox, Jewish, or Muslim, behavior and everyday life were governed by religious practices and holidays. While Russian Orthodoxy enjoyed privileges as the official and “ruling” religion in the empire, other religions were tolerated and protected. To be sure, “tolerated” did not necessarily mean respected or treated equally. Since the 1830 Polish Insurrection at least, the Russian government had looked on the Catholic clergy as seditious, nationalist Poles just waiting for a chance to oppose or even rise up against Russian rule. Jews were viewed as economically pernicious and religiously retrograde; with extremely rare exceptions they were not allowed to reside outside the so-called Pale of Settlement, those territories taken by Russia during the Polish Partitions of the late eighteenth century. Muslims did not serve in the Russian army (unlike Jews), although some Muslim landholding nobles, especially among Tatars, enjoyed wealth and prestige. Nearly all Russians followed the traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church, though significant numbers - so - called Old Believers - were alienated from the official church and continued, despite persecution, to follow the rituals prevalent before the religious reform of the later seventeenth century. But all Orthodox believers shared a number of similar customs and practices, such as having an icon in the “red corner” of each room, fasting nearly half of the year (at different levels of severity), and celebrating Easter (Paskha) in the spring as the most significant religious holiday.
The situation in summer 1945 was on the surface radically different from that of eighty-four years earlier. Having just defeated Nazi Germany after four years of intense and bloody fighting, the population of the USSR was exhausted but also jubilant. Now more than any previous moment in history, the USSR dominated on the international scene, as one of the two “superpowers” with the United States. While the USSR no longer ruled over some territories held by the Russian Empire in 1861 - most notably Alaska to the far east and Finland to the far west - the territory of the USSR was far more tightly controlled than the Russian Empire had ever been. Railroads, telegraphs, telephone, surface roads, mechanized armed forces, and air transport meant that Stalin’s orders could be carried out far more efficiently than the tsar ’s could. The empire ’s ethnic and linguistic diversity was every bit as great in 1945 as under the tsar but now it was far more likely that non-Russians would know at least the rudiments of the Russian language. Besides “national languages” (e. g., Kazakh, Ukrainian, Georgian) Russian was taught throughout the USSR as the “common language” of all Soviet citizens. And for anyone wishing to rise to the top levels of a profession - and all the more so for ambitious party members - fluency in Russian was an absolute requirement.
On the international scene the USSR enjoyed prestige (and was feared) considerably more than Alexander Il’s Russia had been. The Soviet Red Army far exceeded in troop numbers any other country’s military force. To be sure, the Russian army in 1861 had also been the largest in Europe, but Stalin’s troops were much better equipped with modern weapons. Russian troops were stationed in Berlin and throughout Eastern Europe. While no one could say for sure what the next few years would bring, already in 1945 it was very clear that the USSR would not allow hostile governments to come to power in any countries it had liberated from the Nazis. To the east, Japan was in ruins and China was in the throes of a vicious civil war. To the south, the British Empire was in retreat from India and elsewhere and the USSR had every reason to think that the newly decolonized states would be pro-Soviet: after all, the USSR had consistently opposed capitalism and imperialism. So despite the devastation caused by the war, the Soviet leadership could look with optimism on the international scene. At the same time Moscow could not help but be troubled by the fact that the other superpower, the USA, possessed a thriving economy, large and well-equipped military forces, and the atomic bomb. Still, in summer 1945 the Americans were still - officially at least - allies of the Soviet Union and did not pose any immediate threat.
Economically the USSR in 1945 was vastly more developed than the Russia of 1861. Railroads connected east and west, north and south. Suburban trains
Map 0.2 USSR in 1945.
Source: based on map in Dominic Lieven, Empire, Yale University Press, 2000, “Republics and Autonomous Regions of the Soviet Union, 1970.”
Allowed millions of Soviet citizens to spend time in weekend cottages (so-called dachas) on the outskirts, while the Trans-Siberian line connected Moscow with Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean. To be sure, railroad lines in the west had been severely disrupted and damaged by the war, rolling stock was overburdened, and the military continued to dominate much of railroad transport in 1945. The world’s largest airline, Aeroflot, served all major cities and many points (especially in Siberia and the Far East) too remote to have railroad connections. Telegraph and telephone lines connected the country, though most Soviet citizens would have to wait several decades more to get a private telephone line in their homes.
Perhaps the most obvious change between 1861 and 1945 could be seen in the cities. Cities like Leningrad (formerly St Petersburg), Moscow, Kiev, and Tashkent had grown enormously over those decades. Even more impressive was the growth in smaller cities and the number of completely new industrial cities like the steel center Magnitogorsk. While most Soviet citizens continued to live in the countryside (only in the 1960s would the majority of Soviet citizens be urban dwellers), by 1945 over a third of the population lived in cities. And the countryside had also been transformed: gone were the landowner’s estate houses and peasant villages of 1861, replaced by collective farms. Still, while some modernization of agricultural methods had occurred over these generations, Soviet peasants - now known as kolkhozniki, collective farmers - remained much poorer, less educated, and more isolated (they could not leave the collective farm without special permission) than other Soviet citizens.
Society had also changed dramatically. Soviet power had educated vast numbers of engineers, technological experts, doctors, and teachers. Thus the educated middle class of 1945 was far larger than its counterpart of 1861. The industrial working class had also grown enormously. Some groups, on the other hand, had disappeared nearly completely: landowners had been expropriated decades before, no shopkeepers or capitalists remained - except perhaps as managers in the enterprises they once owned, and the clerical estate had shrunk radically. Tens of thousands of educated middle-class Russians - the flower of the intelligentsia - had fled or been forced out of the country in the first decade of Soviet power and a new, rawer but more numerous educated class had taken their place. Some members of the old intelligentsia had remained, like scientist Ivan Pavlov who had died not ten years earlier in Leningrad, but thousands of others now lived as emigres in Paris, San Francisco, and elsewhere.
Culturally the USSR had made enormous strides. By 1945 over 80 percent of Soviet citizens were literate, millions of books were published yearly in dozens of languages, and Soviet citizens could choose among thousands of periodicals (or would be able to, once wartime shortages ended, freeing up paper and journalists). Still, one cannot point to any novel of 1945 - or probably of the entire decade of the 1940s - that would be recognizable to western readers in the way that
Tolstoy’s major novels (e. g., Anna Karenina, War and Peace) were and are. Censorship had certainly existed under the tsars, but since the early 1930s Soviet censors not only prohibited certain topics; they also demanded that Soviet writers present reality in a positive, progressive way. Similarly in the visual and even musical arts, Soviet artists operated in a far more constricted intellectual climate than the artists of 1861. Experiments like atonal music or abstract art were simply not allowed. With the Soviet state as the sole employer, artists or writers whose works were not deemed suitable had to find another way of earning their living. On the other hand, the expansion of literacy and publications meant that Soviet citizens could enjoy translations of works of world literature (in Russian and dozens of other languages from Ukrainian to Kazakh, many of which had lacked a standard written form in 1861), educate themselves and their children about the world and the latest scientific discoveries, and keep abreast of developments around the world.
We have seen here some of the major transformations that occurred over the nine decades from 1861 to 1945 and have also noticed certain continuing problems and continuities. In the chapters that follow we will examine in more detail how these changes came about over time, who caused or suffered them, who won and who lost. It is a story at once exhilarating and melancholy, fascinating and repugnant, full of glorious deeds and terrible crimes, development and destruction. Let us embark.
World History
