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Across the Revolutionary Divide: Russia and the USSR, 1861-1945 (Blackwell History of Russia) PDF

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Across the Revolutionary Divide The Blackwell History of Russia General Editor: Simon M. Dixon This series provides a provocative reinterpretation of fundamental questions in Russian history. Integrating the wave of new scholarship that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, it focuses on Russia’ s development from the mid- s eventeenth century to the present day, exploring the interplay of continuity and change. Volumes in the series demonstrate how new sources of information have reshaped traditional debates and present clear, stimulating overviews for students, scholars and general readers. Published Russia ’ s Age of Serfdom, 1649 – 1861 Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter Across the Revolutionary Divide: Russia and the USSR, 1861 – 1945 Theodore R. Weeks Forthcoming The Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the present Stephen Lovell Across the Revolutionary Divide Russia and the USSR, 1861–1945 Theodore R. Weeks A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication This edition fi rst published 2011 © Theodore R. Weeks 2011 Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientifi c, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Offi ce John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offi ces 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offi ces, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Theodore R. Weeks to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trade- marks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weeks, Theodore R. Across the revolutionary divide : Russia and the USSR, 1861–1945 / Theodore R. Weeks. p. cm. – (Blackwell history of Russia) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-6961-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)–ISBN 978-1-4051-6960-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Russia–History–Alexander II, 1855–1881. 2. Russia–History–Alexander III, 1881–1894. 3. Russia–History–Nicholas II, 1894–1917. 4. Soviet Union–History– 1917–1936. 5. Soviet Union–History–1925–1953. 6. Soviet Union–History–1939–1945. 7. Social change–Russia–History. 8. Social change–Soviet Union–History. I. Title. DK189.W44 2011 947.08–dc22 2010003197 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 10/12.5pt Minion by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed in Singapore 1 2011 To my students: Past, present, and future Contents Illustrations viii Series Editor’s Preface ix Acknowledgments xii Introduction 1 1. Politics 18 2. Society 53 3. Nations 87 4. Modernization 117 5. Belief 147 6. World 175 7. Culture 204 Conclusion 234 Timeline 248 Notes 252 Select Bibliography 269 Index 275 Illustrations Figure 1.1 Mikhail Cheremnykh and Victor Deni, “ Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth of Scum. ” 36 Figure 1.2 Viktor Govorkov, “ Stalin in the Kremlin Cares about Each One of Us. ” 48 F igure 2.1 R ussian Peasantry before the Revolution: A Village Council ca.1902 – 10. 58 Figure 2.2 Nikolai Mikhailov, “ There Is No Room in Our Collective Farm for Priests and Kulaks. ” 63 Figure 2.3 Bezprizornye (street orphans). 81 Figure 3.1 V. Elkin, “ Long Live the Fraternal Union and Great Friendship of the Nations of the USSR! ” 108 Figure 4.1 Konstantin Zotov, “ Every Collective Farm Peasant or Individual Farmer Now Has the Opportunity to Live Like a Human Being. ” 134 Figure 4.2 The Moscow Metro, one of the grand construction projects of the Stalin period. 137 Figure 5.1 Cathedral of Christ the Savior. 149 Figure 5.2 “ Drunkenness on Holidays: A Survival of Religious Prejudices. ” 165 Figure 6.1 Iraklii Toidze, “ The Motherland Calls! ” 1941. 200 Figure 7.1 Ilya Repin, Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire . 221 Figure 7.2 Vasily Vereshchagin, An Allegory of the 1871 War . 222 Figure 7.3 Aleksei Radkov, “ The Illiterate Is Just as Blind. Disaster Awaits Him Everywhere. ” 227 Figure 7.4 Film poster for Sergei Eisenstein ’ s B attleship Potemkin , 1925. 229 Map 0.1 Russian Empire. 2 Map 0.2 USSR in 1945. 14 Map 1.1 USSR in 1923 (or post - Civil War but pre - 1945). 42 Map 3.1 Expansion of Russian Empire, 1860s to 1914. 88 Map 3.2 Russian Poland and the Jewish Pale of Settlement. 95 Series Editor ’ s Preface T he Blackwell History of Russia aims to present a wide readership with a fresh synthesis in which new approaches to Russian history stimulated by research in recently opened archives are integrated with fundamental information familiar to earlier generations. Whatever the period under review, new discoveries have thrown into question some persistent assumptions about the nature of Russian government and society. Censorship and surveillance remain important subjects for investigation. However, now that social activity in Russia is no longer instinc- tively conceived in terms of resistance to a repressive, centralized state, there is room not only to investigate the more normal contours of everyday life, but also to consider its kaleidoscopic variety in the thousands of provincial villages and towns that make up the multinational polity. Religion, gender, and culture (in its widest sense) are all more prominent in the writings of contemporary scholars than they were in the work of previous generations. Historians once preoccupied with pig - iron production are now more inclined to focus on pilgrimages, icon veneration, and incest. No longer so overwhelmingly materialist in their approach, they are more likely to take “ the linguistic turn ” ; the changing meanings of imagery, ritual, and ceremonial are all being reinterpreted. T he challenge is to take account of “ e xtra” dimensions of the subject such as these (the list could easily be extended), and, where appropriate, to allow them to reshape our understanding, without risking a descent into modishness and without neglecting fundamental questions of political economy. One way of squaring the circle is to adopt an unconventional chronological framework in which familiar subjects can be explored in less familiar contexts. Each of the three volumes in the series therefore crosses a signifi cant caesura in Russian history. The fi rst, examined by Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter in R ussia ’ s Age of Serfdom, 1649 – 1861, is the physical and cultural move from Moscow to St Petersburg at x Series Editor’s Preface the beginning of the eighteenth century; the last, explored by Stephen Lovell in The Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the present , is the collapse of the USSR in 1991. In this middle volume, Ted Weeks ranges “ across the revolu- tionary divide ” of the year 1917. For much of the twentieth century, 1917 seemed to mark the most signifi cant of historical ruptures and there are naturally good reasons for continuing to regard the revolutionary cataclysm as a fracture between radically different worlds. Autocracy and Marxism - Leninism were ideological poles apart; so were the aims of their respective proponents. Indeed, it is hard to exaggerate the ambition of the Bolsheviks who came to power in October to transform the world in which they lived. They attempted not only to supplant the monarchy and to extend the dictatorship of the proletariat far beyond Russia ’ s borders, but also to forge a new civilization, ultimately to be peopled by a different sort of human being: New Soviet Man and New Soviet Woman. For all these reasons, it is no surprise that the Soviet and tsarist periods should have tended until recently to attract historians of different backgrounds, different temperaments, and different preoccupations. While some were fascinated by the decline of an increasingly infl exible tsarist regime, whose attempts to strengthen the Romanov dynasty paradoxically served only to make its own government more brittle, others were drawn to explain why a Bolshevik vision apparently so suffused with optimism should have corrupted within less than a generation into the horrors of the Stalinist Terror. Even basic logistics militated against scholarly efforts to “ c ross the revolutionary divide,” for while the Soviet government stored its principal papers in Moscow, the richest archival collections relating to the late - imperial period remained in Leningrad. N early 20 years after the collapse of the USSR, however, 1917 no longer seems quite such a total rupture. After all, as governors of a sprawling multiethnic state, the Bolsheviks faced many of the same geopolitical challenges as their tsarist predecessors. How were they to balance the security of multinational Rossiia against ethnic and cultural R us ’ ? Some of the most fertile research of the last generation has been devoted to precisely this question and to related dilemmas of imperial expansion. Himself an acclaimed authority on the history of the Polish - Lithuanian borderlands both before and after 1917, Weeks draws on this literature to offer a brilliant analysis of the nationalities question in one of the most striking chapters of his new book. Continuities are no less striking when one turns to the economy. The last three tsars and the early Soviet leaders were all struggling to manage the politics of industrialization in an overwhelmingly agrarian empire. All of them ran up against the risk - averse peasantry ’ s stubborn attachment to the small- s cale communal organization that had helped them to survive for centuries. Peasant obstinacy was to prove just as exasperating to Stalin at the end of the 1920s as it had to Stolypin between 1906 and 1911. Their solu-

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