Inside Lenin’s Government: Ideology, Power, and Practice in the Early Soviet State (original) (raw)
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European History Quarterly, 2002
The Soviet Union was created and destroyed amidst calls for 'democracy'. In State and Revolution, Lenin wrote of his revolutionary utopia: 'only in communist society. .. will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized', superseding the imperfect democracy of capitalist states. 1 Seventy years later, speaking at the January 1987 Central Committee plenum, Mikhail Gorbachev also announced that 'democratization' was to lie at the centre of his 'perestroika', a process that was to lead to the demise of the system Lenin created. 2 Indeed, throughout the intervening period, all Soviet leaders claimed that they were perfecting 'Soviet democracy'. Stalin, in his notorious 1936 constitution, declared the Soviet Union the most democratic country in the world, as did Brezhnev in his constitution of 1977. Stalin even claimed that his terror of 1936-8 was, at least in part, aimed at those who were suppressing democracy. Commentators on Soviet politics have been sharply divided over how seriously to take these claims. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was common for scholars to argue that Bolshevik theory and practice did contain democratic elements, although they differed on the nature of that democracy. For some, a semiliberal democratic Bolshevism did exist, represented by Nikolai Bukharin and Lenin in his later years, which was then destroyed by Stalinist statism. 3 Other commentators examined the nonpluralist participatory democracy of the Brezhnev era, arguing that it gave citizens some limited influence over particular areas of public life. 4 Yet in recent years it has been rare to take 'democracy' or political 'participation' in the Soviet Union seriously. 5 Lenin's ambitious claims for the democratic nature of the new state have been seen either as cynical posturing or as a naïve utopianism that provided no answers to the problem of over
The Russian Revolutions: the authoritarian cycle, 1918-1921. The foundations of Soviet socialism
Aarão Reis, Daniel , 2022
I start from the belief that the Russian revolutions should be studied in an integrated manner, especially taking their social contexts into account 2. These revolutions occurred in 1905, in 1917 (February and October), during the civil wars (1918-1921), and finally the Kronstadt Revolution in 1921. The first three revolutions are part of a first cycle-the democratic cycle (1905-1917) 3. A second cycle-the authoritarian cycle-was affirmed in the context of the civil wars, between 1918 and 1921, during which a new revolution occurred, whose victory was confirmed with the crushing of the insurrection of the sailors in Kronstadt in March 1921, a defeated fifth revolution, the final act of the civil wars. I argue that the authoritarian cycle laid the historical foundations of Soviet socialism, which remained until its final break-up in 1991, despite the reformist attempts of the New Economic Policy/NEP in the 1920s, de-Stalinization in the 1950s, and perestroika/glasnost in the 1980s. In other words, the cradle of Soviet socialism was not the October revolution, as the canonic interpretation preaches, but the process of a new revolution which occurred during the civil wars (1918-1921). This article deals with the authoritarian cycle. The text is divided into five sections: 1. The interregnum (Oct. 1917 to May-July 1918); 2 The civil wars (1918-1921), including the Kronstadt revolution; 3. The revolutionary dictatorship and war communism; 4. The revolution and international relations: from internationalism to national communism. 5. The metamorphoses of Soviet socialism.
Russia and the Bolsheviks: Obtaining Power in an Uncertain Era
Introduction: "In reality, this period inevitably is a period of an unprecedentedly violent class struggle in unprecedentedly acute forms, and, consequently, during this period the state must inevitably be a state that is democratic in a new way [...] and dictatorial in a new way.” The Russian Revolution of 1917 was not the first Russian Revolution, yet it is the most memorable because that is when the biggest changes occurred: Russia suddenly became a communist state as opposed to an imperial state, all thanks to the actions of the Bolsheviks. What is unclear, however, is the extent of the power that the Bolsheviks carried: did the Bolsheviks fight their way to power over every other potential contenders, or did they simply seize power at an opportune moment? The Bolsheviks came to power in a time when Russia was uncertain of what it wanted: the Tsar had just abdicated and the governments were arguing over a path to take, so the Bolsheviks picked up their power while the remainder of the country was still trying to decide on a path.
In the Beginning was Violence: Notes Toward an Early Soviet Governmentality
Brolly: Journal of Social Sciences , 2020
In this article, I will address the following theoretical and historical problems. I would assume that Lenin, during the pre-revolutionary period, thought that \ violence was necessary for seizing the state power but later on, after taking it, his utopian ideals about the temporal exercise of violence has been disappeared. Lenin's idea about the necessary and temporal application of violence as an element of revolutionary constituent power was far from realization because, in his first decrees, he attempted to vindicate the terror and violence within the legal body of the state. One of the most provocative hypotheses would be that Carl Schmitt, despite his negative attitude towards both liberalism and bolshevism could have been the perfect theoretical ally for Lenin. Lenin's dream about the abolition of violence and the state has become fiction in itself. If there is certain parallelism or convergence between the messianic deactivation of the law and the revolutionary effacement of the old order, one has to ask the question "What kind of law can be installed and exercised in the post-revolutionary state?" "What becomes the law after the revolutionary fulfilment and how is it possible to conceive the law without the state?" In addition, in the second part of the article, I will argue that Lenin's political strategy was a certain form of Foucault's theory of the governmental paradigm of power and, in fact, this was the foundation of the Soviet biopolitical machine.
Studia Politica Slovaca, 2020
This essay examines the suppression by the Bolsheviks in January 1918 of Russia's first democratically elected parliament, the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, and the various steps taken and arguments used by them during the preceding weeks to achieve this goal. Although Lenin and his Bolshevik party had never intended to tolerate the emergence of the Constituent Assembly as a competing political institution to their so-called Soviet democracy, they had to take care to present their repressive intervention as a rational and inevitable act from a revolutionary point of view. This crucial historical episode reveals the true character of the communist movement and communist ideology, which developed into one of the most dangerous threats to European democracy. There were several socialist parties in Russia who tried to fight the Bolsheviks and to present a democratic-socialist alternative, in particular the moderate ('Right') wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. The last section of this essay pays some additional attention to Viktor Chernov, a leader of the democratic group of Socialist-Revolutionaries and the President of the Constituent Assembly. In 1921 he fled to Czechoslovakia, where he lived until 1929.