Aug 24, 2018
Today we’re going to run through the very first implementation
of Communism on a mass scale. Our last few Furious Friday episodes
are a lead up to this. If you didn’t catch those episodes, it’s not
the end of the world but if you did manage to have a listen it will
provide a bit of context to this episode.
Russia – 1917 under Vladimir Lenin & the Bolsheviks (Spoiler
alert! It didn’t end well!)
Firstly, it’s important to understand Russian History, pre-1917,
as a prelude to the events that occurred.
- 1861 - Tsar Alexander II passes the Emancipation Edict,
ending serfdom
in Russia
- Alexander II was a pretty good guy (as far as leaders through
history go)
- Sold Alaska to the USA 1867 for $200m in today’s dollars.
- Favoured an economic system similar to that in other European
countries;
- Capitalism and free trade.
- Promote development and to encourage the ownership of private
property, free competition, entrepreneurship, and hired labour
- Most Serfs were free (a third of the Russian population)
- They had rights (marriage, ownership of property, freedom)
- 80% of the population were peasants, substance farmers.
Peasants were to receive land from landlords (though they had to
pay for this eventually with money, or working it off through
labour obligations)
- Landlords were paid 75% from the government upfront, and the
peasants paid it off over time. This was abolished later on, so the
full payments never really came through to the land owners.
- Changing the system so significantly is a very complex
problem to solve. However, by all metrics it seemed to be working
well as far as increasing the prosperity of the
population.
- The land ownership changed hands significantly
- Previously there were the Gentry class – A social class whose
land ownership provided their incomes (Mr Darcy from Pride and
Prejudice).
- Land ownership by the Gentry class fell from 80% to 50% as the
mobility of wealth under a freer society increased.
- Serf land ownership rose - 5% to 20%
- Substantial rise in the amount of production of
grain
- Surprise, surprise! When people are allowed to keep what they
produce, and are incentivized, there is an increase in goods
produced.
- Rise in the number of hired laborers
- Rise in technology needs - machinery
- Remember: This was set up to be a free market economy –
Efficiencies started to happen!
- Those who were more entrepreneurial could do more than just
farm land as well
- 1890s - Industrial development
- A large increase in the size of the urban middle classand
of the working class. This saw the emergence of the Kulaks,
who were essentially the wealthy peasants
- By this time the second generation were entering adulthood.
There was a 35% chance that their parents had been slaves.
- This gave rise to a more dynamic political atmosphere - the one
downside of freedom
- Previously there was no hope of rising up, peasants were
peasants. But, with freedom comes choice, and with choice comes
wealth…
- You either chose to own something/keep what you earn, chose to
work where you want
- Inequality is created. But this is then used as a tool to
mobilise the masses – to create an equal outcome – where everything
was utopia and everyone has the same amount of wealth
- During this period is when Vladimir Lenin was born –
1870 to be exact
- Wealthy middle-class family. His father was a serf who was
freed, did well and became wealthy
- I’ll skip forward through Lenin’s life to 1917 when things pick
back up –
- Spent most of time between being expelled from University,
exiled in Siberia, then living in Munich, Geneva and London, or
holidaying in French or Italian Villas
- WW1 was going on around this time
- Unrest is growing. The First Revolution: Disaffected soldiers
from the city's garrison joined bread rioters and industrial
strikers on the streets.
- More and more troops deserted the front lines and with loyal
troops away at the front things fell into chaos, leading to
the overthrow of the Tsar. In all, over 1,300 people were killed
during the protests of February 1917
- Didn’t solve the fight for power
Enter, The Bolsheviks – A second revolution
- Bolsheviks - majority faction of the Russian Social Democratic
Party, which seized power in the October revolution of 1917
- Lenin came back to Russia in October 1917 – From Finland
(wasn’t even there until the end)
1918 - Russian Soviet Federated Socialist
Republic
Lenin gets to work on the new Government
- The first was a Decree on Land, which declared that
the landed estates of the aristocracy and the Orthodox
Church should be nationalised and redistributed to peasants by
local governments.
- Decree on the Press that closed many opposition media outlets
deemed counter-revolutionary
- The courts were replaced by a two-tier
system: Revolutionary Tribunals to deal with
counter-revolutionary crimes, and People's Courts to
deal with civil and other criminal offences. They were instructed
to ignore pre-existing laws, and base their rulings on the
Sovnarkom decrees and a "socialist sense of justice"
- Decree limiting work for everyone in Russia to 8 hours per
day.
- Issued the Decree on Popular Education that stipulated that the
government would guarantee free, secular education for all children
in Russia
- Embracing the equality of the sexes, laws were introduced that
helped to emancipate women, by giving them economic autonomy from
their husbands and removing restrictions on divorce
- Decree on Workers' Control, which called on the workers of each
enterprise to establish an elected committee to monitor their
enterprise's management (gangs of workers controlling the company
they were working for)
- Issued an order requisitioning the country's gold, and
nationalised the banks, which Lenin saw as a major step toward
socialism
- Nationalised foreign trade, establishing a state monopoly on
imports and exports
- It decreed nationalisation of public utilities, railways,
engineering, textiles, metallurgy, and mining, although often these
were state-owned in name only
1918 - Many cities in western Russia faced chronic food
shortages and famine.
What happens to a controlled economy?
- Price controls, for one. Things that are price pegged below
cost fall into shortage
- To supplement - A booming “black market” supplemented
the official state-sanctioned economy
- Lenin called on speculators, black marketeers
and looters to be shot. (So, the food shortage gets
worse)
- Lenin blamed this on the Kulaks - wealthier peasants (his
father’s class) - allegedly ‘hoarded the grain’
- Armed detachments were ordered to be established to confiscate
grain from Kulaks for distribution in the cities
- Resulted in vast social disorder and violence - armed
detachments clashed with peasant groups – Roaming gangs
- Bolsheviks’ Red Terror policy - a system of repression -
sometimes described as an attempt to eliminate the entire
bourgeoisie – 50,000 to 140,000 range of those who died (mass
murder)
Mass murder doesn’t look good, plus there needs to be
workers
- 1919 - Establishment of concentration camps, later the
government agency, Gulag.
- AleksandrSolzhenitsyn (Gulag Archipelago)… we’ll come
back to this in the next episode.
- By the end of 1920, 84 camps, 50,000 prisoners; 1923, 315
camps, 70,000 inmates.
- This was the early days for these slave labour From
July 1922, all intellectuals deemed to be opposing the Bolshevik
government were exiled to inhospitable regions or deported from
Russia altogether; Lenin personally scrutinised the lists of those
to be dealt with in this manner. In May 1922, Lenin issued a decree
calling for the execution of anti-Bolshevik priests, causing
between 14,000 and 20,000 deaths
- Common pattern – Anyone who has differing opinions or offer
alternative hierarchy of beliefs
In 1920, the government brought in universal labour
conscription, ensuring that all citizens aged between 16 and 50 had
to work. This is in a time when life expectancy was around 35 years
old
- WW1 – Diseases and famine – most people didn’t know anything
but work and a short life
- Infighting within – few civil rebellions which were quickly
crushed by the Red Army
By 1921 – Lenin got sick and went to the Gorki Mansion to spend
his final years. In Lenin's absence, Stalin had begun consolidating
his power both by appointing his supporters to prominent
positions.
1922 – Stalin took over: Formation of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics – USSR
That was the short summary of the life and policies of Lenin.
From 1918 -1922, a body count of 3,284,000 (not including the 6.2m
killed in the civil wars in this time).
We’ll leave it here for now, next week we can run through the
later part of the USSR where things really ramp up under Stalin
The price of free is freedom – A
government that provide equality and free everything has complete
control over everything
Thanks for listening!