Russia fundamentally changed between 1891 and 1932 when one looks at the cities and metropolitan areas. For the peasant in the countryside, the change was less significant, but also more greatly and persistently resisted. Although many cultural and intellectual landmarks and hallmarks were retained, and the Soviet people were still largely Russian people in their cultures, language and minds, the changes to the landscape were reflected in the popular life and mind. The stabilizing effect of logic, reason and atheism locked in certain artificially contrived ideas of nationality and ethnicity. In some respects, the change was to have a retarding effect upon the development of national culture as the Soviet sought to organize and homogenize the various ethnic components of Soviet society.
The old monarchy was removed and disposed of. This is arguable as a point of fundamental change because it can be said that the monarchy was displaced simply by a "Cult of Personality" with Lenin at its head. However, despite the apparent consistency of autocracy, as manifested in the leadership of Lenin and then Stalin, the mechanism of power exchange altered considerably. The Party may have replaced the royal family and tsarist bureaucracy in only a metaphorical sense, but the Party, at least in theory, if not always in practice, greatly increased the potential number of contenders for the ultimate leadership of Russia and eliminated the concept of hereditary rule.
Emancipation in a truer sense became the rule. With the inclusion of women in 1920, emancipation was extended to all, rather than to selected members of society during this period. One person, one vote became the rule. This counts, as a matter of popular perception, even if the only voting option was for or against the party. The effect of the perception of having a voice that could be heard forever changed the outlook of the people. The development of the unions and then the soviets within the factories and other workplaces gave people something of a voice in the conditions under which they worked, which had been a virtual impossibility in the years prior to the Bolshevist Revolution of 1917.
Direct participation in government and corresponding social mobility became possible for those willing to sell their soul (and family and friends) to the party. Upward social mobility through party participation becomes more possible in width and depth, than ever before. This mobility was broader based than the one experienced with the military, particularly the Army, during the Tsarist era due to its application to a broader segment of the populace. Then too, the upending effect of ongoing revolution provided the opportunities for one to have his or her moment where a single decision could alter the course of a previously obscure life.
In all of the foregoing, it appeared to the people that they at last had a voice within their government. On occasion, that voice was actually heard favorably. Naturally, when policy or directives were altered as a result of popular resistance or declaration, the Soviets took great pride in pronouncing its democracy and willingness to hear and deliver on the will of the people. Of course, in many ways, this was simply a political maneuver to maintain order and prevent counter-revolution, but the people became adjusted to the idea that their voice might be heard and acted upon.
It is in the period arising post-Revolution that the Industrial Revolution finally takes hold in Russia. Russia comes into the fold of modernity during this period, with its emphasis abruptly shifting from agricultural to industrial production. Under Stalin, this shift would be magnified as he sought to bring the Soviet Union to a position of industrial might comparable with the rest of the developed world. As in all things under his leadership, the Soviet Industrial Revolution was brutal and unconcerned with the needs, safety, or welfare of the individual. This move had two purposes. First, one couldn’t have a true socialist state without having a large proletariat, something that Russia did not possess prior to the Revolution, nor at the Soviet Union’s inception. Second, bringing industrial production up to competitive levels reduced the threat of being a socialist state surrounded by potential enemies while proving to the world that socialism could work. Though the prevalent production was still agricultural in 1932, the inexorable move to industrial production had been accomplished and would consume the Soviet Union in the following ten years.
Economically, things were changed as the Soviets experimented with various combinations of controlled and market economies. The end result of these experiments was an economy of equality in poverty. Famine and lack of basic resources were the rule during this time. Socialism failed to produce anything equivalent to its promise in terms of general prosperity. The net result was a deprivation that the worst of Tsarist policies had not matched. The bulk of the population suffered equally, if somewhat differently, from the unresponsiveness and lack of foresight of a ponderous bureaucratic system.
The tsarist slogan of “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality” gave way to Lenin’s “Bread, Peace, and Land” which proved even less fulfilled or fulfilling. The peasants were stripped of their family and communal lands in collectivization, a more “rational” approach to the problem of feeding the nation and fulfilling the requirements of socialist ideology. The process of collectivization reduced the amount of bread available, fostered a civil, class war in the countryside, and ruined much of the arable land then in use through mismanagement.
The peasants saw changes that were usually less substantial, but always more rigorously resisted, than the rest of the population. Though it might be argued that the switch from communal to collective farming was little more than a change in logistics designed to provide more for the working cities, the perception and the reality were far more brutal. Peasants resorted to exaggerated versions of long used tactics of flight, agitation, proclamation, demonstration, and outright revolt to prevent the destruction of the fabric of their lives and culture. Collectivization required the dislocation of families from land that was usually theirs through a system of heredity combined with allocation and compensation. The influence of the Church was reduced by socialist ideology and programs centered on logic and reason. Atheistic, linear thought processes were introduced and taught to the population, replacing the icons of the Church with those of the State. This in itself threatened peasant identity. Collectivization also eliminated most of the incentive system that traditionally kept farms productive. The peasants still worked the land, unlike those who had, voluntarily or not, gone to work in the industrial fields of the cities over the preceding decades. However, the way in which the peasants worked the land was completely altered in relation to the traditional peasant culture.
For women, in spite of emancipation, many things remained the same. Traditional views of the baba- a traditional endearment of women speaking to a mothering, nurturing, though generally incompetent outside of the home, role- retained most of their strength well into the 20thcentury. By 1930, women’s sections, formed to address the particular needs of the woman in soviet society and the workforce, were disbanded with the simple declaration that their work had been accomplished. Though considerations for maternity and family matters had been legislated as a result of the efforts of the women’s sections, enforcement was typically lax and ineffective. The Russian woman was seen as little more than a tool, or a reserve resource, to be called upon in the interests of socialism when needed and otherwise ignored.
Finally, the Soviets purported to espouse the promotion of the various cultures represented within the Soviet Union. This, however, was more of an artifice that locked into acceptable, rational, pro-Soviet imagery the ever-evolving panoply that is cultural identity and reality. The circuses and such that developed froze these misrepresentations into microcosms that could be directly established and altered at the whim of the Party leadership. These faux depictions were rarely accurate, had a glaring propaganda bent to their performance and retarded, by way of promulgating ethnic stereotypes, the true and independent development of cultural identity in post-revolutionary Russia.
Many could dispute the entirety of this analysis for valid reasons. The Soviet Union, as the Russian Empire before it, saw an ever-increasing gap in real and realized income for the wealthy and the poor. A class system of party loyalists as aristocrats and the common people as serf laborers began to arise in the years following. A middle class of minor party officials established itself, replacing the bourgeoisie. All too frequently, Party positions in the lower ranks became hereditary in that the current official had great influence in naming his successor. Callous disregard for the lives and welfare of the populace in the interest of the country or its leadership hallmarked both eras. However, many, if not most, of the parallels that can be drawn to the Tsarist era came into focus after the period in discussion.
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