Abstract
The Bolshevist views on socialism, particularly on democracy but also in many other respects, differed from what other Russian socialists and social democrats, especially the Mensheviks, had considered to be fundamental. There is an obvious risk in using ideological concepts that mean different things to different people as guidelines. Even since the breakdown of the Soviet communist regime, historians have argued about how best to characterise the system that emerged in the 1930s and existed in various forms until 1991. Ironically, if one uses the terms ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’ without qualification to describe the economic and social conditions in the USSR, this usage matches the terminology that Stalin announced from the mid-1920s and onwards. Thereafter, it was taboo to question whether socialism — as previously understood in Europe — could be established in a country like Soviet Russia. The criterion for the ‘socialist direction’ of the development, as established in the party, solely concerned property relations. As more and more enterprises in industry, agriculture and elsewhere fell into state or cooperative ownership, the official line was that socialism had triumphed over private capitalism. Stalin’s claim that socialism was established in 1936 in connection with the adoption of the new constitution can be questioned from several different aspects.
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Notes
See Anton Karlgren, Stalin: Bolsjevismens väg från leninism till stalinism, Stockholm: P.A. Norstedt & Söners 1942. Karlgren (1882–1973) was professor of Slavic languages in Copenhagen and later editor at the Stockholm newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
In France, Marxism has fascinated several generations of intellectuals, mainly due to the strong position of the French Communist Party in the working class. Intellectuals eagerly adopted the official Soviet self-image and the myths surrounding the ‘construction of Socialism’ in Russia. A typical hagiography is the history of Soviet Russia as presented by Louis Aragon in Histoire de l’URSS (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions 1962). As more ‘revelations’ were made by Khrushchev and others regarding the USSR, French ex-party members tried to formulate their new attitudes to Soviet history. Jean Elleinstein wrote an officially accepted textbook on ‘socialism in one country’, Le socialisme dans un pays. Histoire de l’U.R.S.S. (Tome 2) (Paris: Editions Sociales 1973). Some years later, Elleinstein tried to formulate his own explanation of Stalinism, Le Phénomène stalinien (Paris: Grasset 1975). However, this attempt exposed him to severe criticism from the Communist Party. Elleinstein later wrote biographies of Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin, without adding anything substantial in terms of knowledge.
Among numerous Western and Russian works on how Lenin and the Bolsheviks envisioned the prospects for their revolution in 1921 is Moshe Lewin’s Lenin’s Last Struggle (1967, new edition with a new foreword by the author, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press 2005).
Among those who maintained the opinion that the Bolsheviks were led by a utopian vision were two Soviet historians who were in exile in the 1980s, Michel Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: the History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, (New York: Summit Books 1986). Lenin was allegedly ‘fettered’ by this utopian vision in 1917 (pp. 41–58), and finally, the regime that emerged in the late 1930s was described by Heller and Nekrich as ‘the socialist totalitarian state’ (p. 263).
This is based on N.P. Korolëv, ‘K.V. Ryndin i protsess industrializatsii v Cheliabinskoi oblasti’, in Industrializatsiia v SSSR: Uroki istorii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 109–113; idem ‘K voprosu o deiatelnosti K.V. Ryndina kak partiinogo rukovoditelia sovetskogo gosudarstva’, in Iuzhnyj Ural v sudbde Rossii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 174–178.
E. Arfon Rees, State Control in Soviet Russia: The Rise and Fall of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, 1920–1934, London: Macmillan 1987.
Compare R.W. Davies, Oleg V. Khlevniuk & E.A. Rees, The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931–1936, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2003, pp. 272–273. This English edition contains 182 of the original 867 letters in the Russian edition of Stalin-Kaganovich. Perepiska, 1931–1936 (Moscow: Rosspen 2002). The letters exchanged between Stalin and Kaganovich were written when one of them was on a month-long holiday by the Black Sea. Their correspondence sheds light on many economic and foreign policy problems and how the leaders argued over repressive measures and laws. Their letters have added to the knowledge of the decision-making process at the highest level of the Soviet Union.
See also Stephen G. Wheatcroft, ‘From Team-Stalin to Degenerate Tyranny’, in E. Arfon Rees (ed.) The Nature of Stalin’s Dictatorship: The Politburo, 1924–1953 (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2004), pp. 79–107.
On the atheist, anti-religious campaigns and, from another perspective, enlightenment in the Soviet Union between the wars, which were directed against all religions — the Russian Orthodox as well as Roman Catholic and Judaism and Buddhism — see William B. Husband, ‘Godless Atheists’: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932, DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press 2000, pp. 36–100,
and Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1998. On the mockery of religion, the societies of atheist propaganda and the closing of churches in the late 1920s,
see Paul Gabel, And God Created Lenin: Marxism vs. Religion in Russia, 1917–1929, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books 2006.
See ZZ Veprev & ZZ Liutov, Gosudarstvennaia bezopasnost: Tri veka na Iuzhnom Urale, Cheliabinsk: Iuzhno-Uralskoe Knizhnoe Izdatelstvo 2002, pp. 278–279.
For the dominant views on town planning in the 1920s, see Anatole Kopp, Ville et révolution: Architecture et urbanisme soviétiques des annés vingt, Paris: Anthropos, 1967; idem, Changer la vie, changer la ville: De la vie nouvelle aux problèmes urbains. U.R.P.P. 1917 –1932, Paris: UEG, 1975.
For other interpretations of Stalinist architecture, see Harald Bodenschatz & Christiane Post (eds), Städtebau im Schatten Stalins: Die internationale Such nach der sozialististischen Stadt in der Sowjetunion 1929–1935, Berlin: Braun 2004.
See Evgeniia Gershkovich & Evgenii Korneev, Vysokii stalinskii stil’, Moscow 2005;
Alessandra Latour, Birth of a Metropolis: Moscow 1930–1955. Recollections and Images, Moscow: Iskusstvo-XX vek 2005. For an interpretation of the epoch’s art in the paradigm of totalitarianism,
see Igor Golomstock, Arte totalitaria nell’URSS di Stalin, nella Germania di Hitler, nell’Italia di Mussolini, Milan: Leonardo 1990 (translation from Russian, Totalitarnoe iskusstvo, Moscow: Gallart, 1994).
Nikolai Miliutin, Sotsgorod. Problema stroitel’stva sotsialisticheskikh gorodov. Osnovnye voproys ratsional’noi planirovki i stroitel’stva naselënnykh mest SSSR, Moscow 1930.
See Jean-Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR. Theories and Projects for Moscow, 1928–1936. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1992. Naum Gabo was one of more than ten foreign architects who were invited to compete for the Palace of Soviets, see the catalogue Naum Gabo and the Competition for the Palace of Soviets, Moscow 1931–1933, Berlin & Moscow 1993, pp. 197–201.
V.I. Isaev, ‘Sotsial’nye problemy formirovaniia Uralo-Kuznetskogo kom-pleksa’, in Ural i Sibir’ v stalinskoi politike, Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf 2002, pp. 126–137.
E.V. Konysheva, ‘A. K. Burov i Cheliabinskaia arkhitektura rubezha 20-kh–30-kh gg.’, Biulleten’ arkhitektury, 2000, No. 5; Marina Salmina, Istoriia Iuzhnogo Urala XX-nachalo XXI veka, Cheliabinsk: Vzgliad 2004, pp. 93–94.
On women in Soviet industry in the inter-war period, compare Wendy Z. Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002;
Melanie Ilic (ed.), Women in the Stalin Era, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2001.
A.P. Cherednichenko, (ed.), Cheliabinskskii Gosudarstvennyi Pedagogicheskii Universitet, Cheliabinsk: Izdatel’stvo ChGPU 1999, pp. 14–64.
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© 2011 Lennart Samuelson
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Samuelson, L. (2011). The Industrial City As a Socialist Vision and Soviet Reality. In: Tankograd. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230316669_3
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