Historical study of political aspects of the land tenure system in the USSR and intergroup relations between rural worker societies (communes) and political party organisations (rural soviets) leading to the onset of the collective economy in agriculture. Bibliography pp. 239 to 247, references and statistical tables.
The Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) party gained an overall majority in the election to the Russian Constituent Assembly, which was dissolved by the Bolsheviks in January 1918. The SRs derived the bulk of their electoral support from the peasantry, and the gulf between the predominantly urban Bolshevik party and the rural masses was to create immense problems for the Soviet government in the 1920s, culminating in the horrors of forced collectivization. The SRs offered an alternative vision of the Russian peasant's path to socialism. They were closer to the peasantry than any other revolutionary party, and more aware of the problems involved in implementing a socialist transformation of Russian agriculture. In this study the author traces the development of SR agrarian policy in the party's formative years, from the period of disillusionment which followed the failure of the Populist 'movement to the people' of the 1870s, through the revolutionary years 1905-7, to the subsequent reaction under Stolypin.
Sukhanov stood at the centre of the Russian revolution as a founding member and ideologist of the Petrograd Soviet and as fearless editor of the leading opposition newspaper. His seven-volume eyewitness memoir of the major events of the Russian revolution is peopled by such leading figures as Lenin, Trotsky, Martov, Chernov, Tsereteli and many more. In the 1920s he stood out in courageous opposition to those of his fellow economists who prepared the Communist Party for Stalin's brutal collectivization. Found guilty at the farcical Menshevik show-trial of 1931 and subsequently victim of a trumped-up charge of spying for Germany, he was shot in 1940 and only rehabilitated in 1992. His fate epitomizes the tragedy of those Russian intellectuals who sought an accommodation with the Communist dictatorship and were destroyed by it.
During the events described in The Socialist Offensive the collective farms achieved a commanding position in the Soviet countryside. They were planned as giant, fully socialist enterprises, modelled on the state-owned factories, and employing wage labour. By the summer of 1930 the collective-farm compromise had been introduced. Collective farmers were permitted to retain a personal household plot and their own animals; and a free market continued side by side with state planning. This system continued throughout the Stalin period important features of it remain in the Soviet Union today. The emergence of the collective farm in 1929-30, discussed in detail in the present volume, was thus a crucial stage in the formation of the Soviet system.
Many political regimes today draw such legitimacy as they have from a revolution: the destruction of an existing political elite and its replacement by a different group or groups drawn from inside the same society. A large part of the ideological dispute in world politics has come in consequence to turn on an interpretation of the character of revolutions as political and social events. It is extremely difficult to separate ideological assessments of the desirability or otherwise of what has occured in revolutions from causal explanations of why these revolutions occurred, and both major traditions in the analysis of revolutionary phenomena have been damaged by their failure to distinguish clearly between explanation and assessment. In examining eight major revolutions of the twentieth century, John Dunn helps readers to remedy this state of affairs by thinking for themselves.
By the summer of 1929 Soviet industrialisation was well under way, but agriculture was in a profound crisis: in 1928 and 1929 grain to feed the towns was wrested from the peasants by force, and the twenty-five million individual peasant households lost the stimulus to extend or even to maintain their production. In the autumn of 1929 the Soviet Politburo, led by Stalin, launched its desperate effort to win the battle for agriculture by forcible collectivisation and by large-scale mechanisation. Simultaneously hundreds of thousands of kulaks (richer peasants) and recalcitrant peasants were expelled from their villages. This book tells the story of these events, as momentous in their impact on Russian history at the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, and of the temporary retreat from collectivisation in the spring of 1930 in the face of peasant resistance. The crisis in the Communist Party which resulted from this upheaval, in the months preceding the XVI party congress in June 1930, is described in detail for the first time.
This book presents the first comprehensive collection in English of peasant writings during the early years of the Bolshevik regime. Drawn entirely from Russian archival sources, it presents more than 150 previously unpublished letters addressed to newspapers, government officials, and Communist Party leaders. The letters and accompanying commentary result in a unique history of the Soviet peasantry's engagement and struggle with a powerful state, enabling readers to hear the voice of a social class that throughout history has too often been rendered voiceless.
