FORTRESS SOCIALISM
Nobody in 1917 considered the revolution in Russia unexpected. The Russian nobility had long been haunted by the specter of serf peasants revolting to avenge their near-slave condition. A modern proletarian revolution had been awaited ever since the European upheavals of 1848. This fear/hope was fed by strikes of industrial workers met with Cossack cavalry charges. No less significant was the growth of the famous modernist intelligentsia, the middle strata of educated specialists who felt stymied by the old aristocratic bureaucracy and the generalized backwardness of their country. The intelligentsia saw itself as the guiding force of epochal renovation. This sense of lofty mission translated into a spate of subversive strategies, from creating a world-class literature to volunteer charitable activism and throwing bombs at the oppressors.
Nevertheless, the empire kept on muddling through and even registered impressive industrial growth mainly because for almost half a century it had luckily avoided losing wars, a typical trigger of revolutions. The tipping points—as observed in many other revolutions—arrived with the costly and morally embarrassing military defeats in 1905 and again in 1917. The soldiers rebelled against their commanders while the police disintegrated. The collapse of state coercion released all the long-repressed specters of rebellion: furious peasant revolts in the countryside; the now armed worker militancy in big cities; the intelligentsia enthusiastically organizing a panoply of political parties and nationalist movements that soon became independent governments in the ethnically non-Russian provinces.
It is not too surprising that the Bolsheviks seized power amidst this breakdown of state order. It is truly surprising that they were still in power a few years later. How did they do it? The Bolsheviks before 1917 were a small insurrectionist current of intelligentsia. The conditions of illegality and persecution engendered among them strict internal discipline, conspiratorial secrecy, and vigilance against the ever-present police spies. Unlike their Chinese counterparts, the Bolsheviks were not guerrillas and had virtually no presence outside the big towns. This supported their prejudiced view of peasants as an uneducated mass to be marched into a better future. And, of course, the almost religious devotion of the Bolsheviks to the cause followed the eschatological vision of Karl Marx. But Marxism also carried a powerful scientific side. This made the Bolsheviks a peculiarly rationalist kind of ideological visionaries enamored with modern science and industry. From the outset, these anticapitalist and anti-imperialist Marxist revolutionaries were prepared to take up the weapons of their enemies: German military organization, state industrial planning, and the production lines of Henry Ford.
The Bolshevik party in power first grew its own secret police: the infamous Cheka, which absorbed scores of revolutionary terrorists. This ensured the internal political monopoly of the fledgling state. Next the party created its own Red Army. Forging an army amidst civil war and foreign military interventions more than safeguarded the Bolshevik state; it essentially became the Bolshevik state. The spirited and disciplined party-in-arms also proved eminently adapted for organizing all sorts of rear support and moral boosters: making the collapsing industries run, requisitioning food from peasants, but also, in the Enlightenment élan of intelligentsia, opening museums, theaters, literacy courses, and universities.
One key aspect of Bolshevik state-building, however, was unprecedented for a polyglot empire: national republics constituting the Soviet Union. The multisided civil war was won by forging political and military alliances across the dividing lines of nationality, race, and religion. In a critical episode during 1919, the counterrevolutionary White Army of General Anton Denikin was hit from the rear by Muslim Chechen fighters who had allied with the Bolsheviks in the belief that Marxism was also a form of jihad. The Caucasus Muslim rebels might have seemed politically naïve. Yet the Bolsheviks earnestly meant development for the non-Russian periphery, albeit on their own terms. The Leninist nationality policy institutionalized the national republics where native cadres could enjoy promotion preferences and considerable resources to build the institutions of modern ethnic cultures: the same schools and universities, museums, film studios, opera and ballet but specifically destined for the non-Russian nationalities.
The Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War cannot be reduced to creating state order out of chaos, although in itself this was an inordinate achievement. The lesson was rather in forging the extensive structures that harnessed and directed the emotional energies of the millions touched by revolution. These masses of young men and women suddenly saw their life chances dramatically expanded by the technical education and promotions available within the new Soviet institutions. The opportunities for social mobility grew exponentially once the furiously massive construction of new industries and towns was launched in the early 1930s. For all their brutal daily austerity, political terror, and inhuman workloads, the industrialization and Second World War also produced a mass constituency of patriotic Soviet citizens with new identities and lifestyles generated by a vast modernistic state. The demolition of old communities, churches, and extended patriarchal families released millions of younger men and women into the wider modern society. On a wholly different scale, the effect resembled the eighteenth-century westernization of Peter the Great (who was lionized in Soviet novels and films). The Petrine absolutism succeeded in its own epoch by multiplying the ranks of nobility and endowing the new elite with ample service opportunities, ideological confidence, and Westernized lifestyles. In the Soviet era the children of peasants, both Russian and ethnically non-Russian, could learn to operate modern machinery, move into state-built apartments with running water and electricity, acquire new Soviet-made watches and radios, and lunch in workplace canteens on industrially produced hot dogs, canned peas, mayonnaise salad, and ice cream (these originally American imports soon became regarded as dearly native). State-led industrialization created a perennially overheated economy of pervasive shortages including the shortage of skilled labor. The Soviet Union in effect became a giant factory and therefore it had to become a gigantic company town, too, where the state as sole employer provided social welfare from cradle to grave.
Directing the transformations were party cadres from the special appointment rosters called nomenklatura. Eventually the name nomenklatura would become a pejorative for stolid bureaucrats. Its first generations, however, were the battle-hardened youthful commissars and emergency managers full of revolutionary charisma and “can-do” spirit. They believed that incredible historical fortune—and Lenin’s genius—had advanced them into the vanguard of humanity’s progress. Losing their political power even temporarily, like in an electoral democracy, was tantamount to betraying the march of history. The Bolshevik revolutionary atrocities and their Enlightenment enthusiasm appeared to many commentators and historians impossible to reconcile on moral grounds. Both aspects of communism are incontrovertible facts; it is the perceived contradiction that is an ideological illusion. The Russian revolution imposed a comparatively thin layer of radical intelligentsia over a huge predominantly peasant country. These activists of epochal change ardently believed in electricity and universal progress, but they had also learned in the recent civil war to trust the victorious Party and rely on the cherished Mauser handguns. In short, Russian revolutionaries won their battles by becoming an unprecedented charismatic bureaucracy. These militant developmentalists fused the ideological, political, military, and economic institutions of the twentieth century into a single dictatorial structure. Its summit amounted to a high pedestal.