To be sure, the cultural frame that defined the parameters of Bolshevik civil-war practices was rooted in centuries of autocracy characterised by Russia's frail representative institutions; low levels of popular participation in political life; centralisation; a bureaucratic, authoritarian government with broad powers; and highly personalised political attachments.[153] Yet political culture does absorb new influences from historical experience. The conditions of the 1914-21 period endowed civic practices with exaggerated, even grotesque features. Some historians ground the party elite's maximalism in the circumstances of the First World War, which created a new political type prone to apply military methods to civilian life. The attitudes and skills the new leaders acquired during a period of destruction, violence, social unrest, hunger and shortages of all kinds made them enemies of compromise who believed that anything that served the proletariat was moral. Such beliefs fed corruption, abuses of power and arbitrary behaviour, as well as a system of privileges that kept the party afloat often in a sea of indifference and hostility from the people whose support they lost.[154] Moreover, in promoting the use of violence in public life, the civil war affected the political attitudes not only of Bolsheviks: a synchronous birth of 'strong power' forms of government emerged among both Reds and Whites, producing chrezvychaishchina, or forms of government based on mass terror, which left a deep mark on the country's political culture.[155] Although Russia's vulnerable democratic traditions continued to coexist with Soviet power, the civil-war experience reduced the likelihood that the democratic strains in Russian public life would supplant the authoritarian ones.
The civil war widened access to the political elite for members of all revolutionary parties, young adults, women, national minorities and the poorly educated, creating not a workers' party, but a plebeian one, run mainly by intellectuals. Throughout the conflict, workers made up roughly 40 per cent of the party's membership and the peasantry 20 per cent. Officials and members of the intelligentsia accounted for the rest, and perhaps for this reason the party remained better educated than the population at large. Approximately 1.5 million people enrolled in the party between 1917 and 1920, but fewer than half a million members were left by 1922.[156] Moreover, at this time the overwhelming majority of party members had joined it in 1919-20.[157] Civil-war circumstances had propelled recent converts into positions of prominence, but Old Bolsheviks monopolised the political leadership, which also contained a larger percentage of minority nationalities than among the rank and file.
Dramatising their differences from non-Communists, the Bolsheviks cast themselves as disciplined, hard, selfless, dedicated, committed, honest and sober. The gulf existing between Bolshevik self-representation and individual party members' personal attributes was so large, however, that party diehards mistrusted the rank and file. Party leader L. B. Krasin, for instance, opined that 90 per cent of the party's members were 'unscrupulous time-servers'.[158]Appreciating the powerful role of cultural constraints, the party enrolled thousands of young recruits on probation, maintaining a revolving-door policy and expelling members who compromised it. The most serious attempts to flush the party of undesirable elements tookplace in the spring of 1919, when 46.8 per cent of the party's total membership was excluded. During the purge of 1920, 28.6 per cent ofthe party's members were expelled, and in 1921,24.8 per cent.[159]
One of the most widespread problems that purging the party sought to remedy was corruption. Blaming it for the Whites' success, the party made corruption a class issue by depicting it as a 'dirty' form of class relationships inherited from old Russia, as bourgeois specialists and former tsarist bureaucrats obtained administrative positions - and rations - 'simply by applying for party membership the day before applying for the job itself'.[160] Indeed, in 1918, necessity forced the Bolsheviks to co-opt into the emerging state apparatus individuals whose political views were often inimical to Bolshevism: the Bolsheviks needed their class enemy not only to run the machinery of state but also to blame when its (mal)functioning provoked mass discontent. The process of 'othering' the bourgeoisie likewise had practical limitations because the vicissitudes of class war could be turned on and off during this time of terrible shortages with a bribe or valuable personal contact.
The consequences of the Bolsheviks' arbitrary policies proved difficult to eradicate. When the party in April I9I9 broadened the activities of the State Control Commission to do something about the problem of corruption, the commission found malfeasance, theft, speculation and other forms of corruption in virtually all Soviet institutions. As part of a national campaign to curb abuses of power, restore discipline, cut down on red tape, revive industry and overcome growing worker alienation from the party by involving workers in participatory practices, the party replaced the State Control Commission in 1920 with the Workers'-Peasants' Inspectorate (Rabkrin). But it too failed to remedy the problem because of the billiard-ball interaction of circumstances, ideologically fuelled initiatives, rivalries, misunderstandings, deep cultural patterns and the unbelievably awful functioning of essentially all institutions and organisations.
Revolution and culture
Bolshevik cultural policies underscore the complex interaction between the empowering environment of revolution, utopian stirrings of Communists and intellectuals alike, Russian cultural practices and the larger contemporary arena of Western and even American culture.[161] Bent on retaining power and the symbols of legitimacy, the Bolsheviks disagreed over how best to implement new cultural practices, which they saw as essential to the success of their revolution. Like the French Revolutionaries, they sought to create a new national will through revolutionary ideology. Although some party members opposed the complete destruction of the cultural past and instead sought to 'proletarianise' it by making it more accessible, others promoted efforts to sweep away old cultural forms.
The institution most identified with cultural revolution was Proletkul't, organised in October 1918. An acronym for proletarian cultural-educational organisations, Proletkul't aimed to awaken independent creative activity among the proletariat. Without a common vision of what 'proletarian culture' was or ought to be, cultural activists showed that their struggle 'was just as contestuous as the efforts to change the political and economic foundations of Soviet society'.[162] Their efforts reveal that an intelligentsia divided among itself, but mostly ill-disposed toward a marketplace in culture, played the leading role in promoting proletarian culture, and for this reason had limited success.[163]
In its hurried drive to reconstitute society, the Soviet government abolished titles, private property and ranks. It fashioned a new language, social hierarchies (and divisions), rituals and festivals, myths, revolutionary morality and revolutionary justice. It emancipated women by promulgating a radical family code in 1918. It separated Church and state. It modernised the alphabet, introduced calendar reform, and sought to make revolution itself a tradition. Revolutionary songs, party newspapers, slogans, pamphlets, brochures, elections and festivals acquired new meaning. For instance, Bolshevik festivals left little room for spontaneity and popular initiative. Revolutionaries also sought to obscure the past by making it difficult to observe traditional holidays, especially religious ones.
153
Stephen White, 'The USSR: Patterns of Autocracy and Industrialization', in Archie Brown and Jack Gray (eds.),
154
E. G. Gimpel'son, 'Sovetskie upravlentsy: Politicheskii i nravstvennyi oblik (19171920 gg.)',
155
See GennadijBordjugov, 'Chrezvychainye mery i "Chrezvychaishchina" v Sovetskoi respublike i drugikh gosudarstvennykh obrazovaniiakh na territorii Rossii v 19181920 gg.',
156
Jonathan R. Adelman, 'The Development of the Soviet Party Apparat in the Civil War: Center, Localities, and Nationality Areas',
157
T. H. Rigby, 'The Soviet Political Elite',
160
Robert Service,
161
Katerina Clark,
162
Lynn Mally,
163
James R. Von Geldern,