Communism
The Russian Revolution of 1917 went through an initial phase in which the Duma, Russia’s elected legislature, set up a Provisional Government along representative democratic lines. However, the extent of the Provisional Government’s actual representativeness was problematic, as the Russian electoral system that had elected the Duma was anything but one man, one vote. Instead, it gave more weight to the votes of Russia’s middle and upper classes, and significantly discounted the votes of the lower class peasants and workers – the overwhelming majority of Russians.
It mattered little during Tsardom, when the Duma was mostly powerless. However, after the Tsar was overthrown and the Duma sought to govern Russia, there was a jarring disconnect between the elected representatives of the Duma and the Russian masses. The biggest disconnect was that the Duma wanted to continue fighting WWI, while the peasants and workers wanted an immediate exit from the war, and radical reforms – particularly land redistribution, and worker control of the factories.
The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, exploited that tension, and launched a second revolution in October of 1917 that overthrew the Provisional Government and the Duma, and instituted communism. While some parts of the Russian Empire broke off and formed independent states, such as Poland and Finland, most were gathered into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
The new regime then fought and won a civil war against a collection of opponents, ranging from liberal democrats and democratic socialists, to reactionary Tsarist loyalists. To secure its hold on power and keep the population under control, a brutal political secret police, the Cheka was founded. The Cheka went through various iterations in subsequent years, such as the NKVD and KGB, and exists to this day with different acronyms in Putin’s Russia.
Lenin started off with an economic system of wartime communism that forcibly took produce from peasants, but when that proved disastrous, he replaced it with a softer communism that allowed for limited free market enterprise. After Lenin’s death in 1924 he was succeeded by Stalin, who launched a series of Five Year Plans that collectivized agriculture and put the USSR on a path of rapid forced industrialization. Stalin, a paranoid monster in the mold of Ivan the Terrible, brutally crushed all opposition, and transformed the USSR into a totalitarian police state.
Tens of millions ended up in Stalin’s gulags, and millions either perished from his poorly thought-out economic policies, or were executed by his police services. A silver lining was that the forced industrialization enabled the USSR to withstand the Nazi onslaught in 1941, and furnished copious weapons and munitions to win WW2.
The USSR emerged from WW2 as a superpower, second only to the US in global reach and influence. In the subsequent Cold War between the communist and capitalist blocks, the USSR had some early showpiece successes, such as launching the world’s first satellite, then first human, into space. By the 1970s, however, it was clear that communism simply could not compete with America’s capitalist bloc, and the USSR steadily fell behind the West, economically, militarily, and culturally. Last ditch efforts by Gorbachev to reform the system in the 1980s failed. The Soviet Union’s Eastern European client states broke off in 1989 and embraced capitalism, and the Soviet experiment came to an end in 1991, when it was finally dissolved.
Russia emerged as the successor of the USSR – which in practice, had simply been the Russian Empire clothed in communist garb. Russia returned to pursue her own path, stamped by the long centuries of constant oppression, such as a perverse Russian pride in the ability to endure the unendurable and tolerate the intolerable. It can be glimpsed in Russian proverbs resignedly accepting the inevitability of injustice, and trying to make the best of it, such as “When they beat you, say thank you for the lesson“.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Sources & Further Reading
Encyclopedia Britannica – Ivan IV
Encyclopedia Britannica – Rurik
History TV – Catherine the Great
Lumen Learning – The Time of Troubles
Massie, Robert K. – Peter the Great: His Life and World (1980)
New World Encyclopedia – Kievan Rus
New World Encyclopedia – Nicholas I of Russia
Ranker – Every Government System Russia Has Tried, From its Early History to Vladimir Putin
