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  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The Cambridge History of Russia
  • Volume 3: The Twentieth Century
  • Edited by Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Chicago and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
2006
Online ISBN:
9781139054096
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521811446
Subjects:
Area Studies, British History: General Interest, Twentieth Century European History, History, European Studies, Russian and East European History
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - British & European History
Series:
The Cambridge History of Russia
Information

Book description

The third volume of The Cambridge History of Russia provides an authoritative political, intellectual, social and cultural history of the trials and triumphs of Russia and the Soviet Union during the twentieth century. It encompasses not only the ethnically Russian part of the country but also the non-Russian peoples of the tsarist and Soviet multinational states and of the post-Soviet republics. Beginning with the revolutions of the early twentieth century, chapters move through the 1920s to the Stalinist 1930s, World War II, the post-Stalin years and the decline and collapse of the USSR. The contributors attempt to go beyond the divisions that marred the historiography of the USSR during the Cold War to look for new syntheses and understandings. The volume is also the first major undertaking by historians and political scientists to use the new primary and archival sources that have become available since the break-up of the USSR.

Reviews

'The essays in the volume together provide one of the most comprehensive accounts of Russia's most turbulent century and will stand the test of time.'

Source: Europe-Asia Studies

'The new Cambridge History of Russia is an outstanding scholarly resource, and a brilliant example of the capacities and constraints of its format. … this volume on the twentieth century, like its companion volumes, is an impressive and authoritative work. It can be savoured by experts, and its various introductory treatments can be strongly recommended to undergraduates and MA students.'

Source: The Slavonic and East European Review

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Contents

Page 1 of 2

Contents
  • 1 - Reading Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century: how the ‘West’ wrote its history of the USSR
    pp 5-64
  • View abstract

    Summary

    From its very beginnings the historiography of Russia in the twentieth century has been much more than an object of coolly detached scholarly contemplation. Many observers saw the USSR as the major enemy of Western civilisation, the principal threat to the stability of nations and empires, a scourge that sought to undermine the fundamental values of decent human societies. Through the inter-war years the Soviet Union offered many intellectuals a vision of a preferred future outside and beyond capitalism, but contained within the hope and faith in the USSR and communism were the seeds of disillusionment and despair. The image of an imperialist totalitarianism, spreading its red grip over the globe, was at one and the same time the product of Western anxieties and the producer of inflated fears. As the Cold War consensus of the 1950s gave way to a growing discomfort with American policy, the Soviet Union itself was evolving away from Stalinism.
  • 2 - Russia’s fin de siècle, 1900–1914
    pp 65-93
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The critical years from the turn of the century to the eve of the First World War were a time of uncertainty and crisis for Russia's old political, social and cultural order. The year 1904 saw the start of the Russo-Japanese war, a disastrous conflict sparked by Russia's expansion into China and Korea in the face of Japan's own regional desires, further fuelled by Russian over confidence and racist contempt for the Japanese. Marxists believed they possessed a more scientific and rationalistic understanding of society and history. Marxists tended to take an essentialist view of the proletariat: this was the class destined by the logic of history to emancipate humanity from injustice and oppression. The sense of crisis and opportunity that marked so much of the Russian fin de siècle was evident in the experience of being a non-Russian subject of Russian empire, as well as in state policy towards the nationalities problem.
  • 3 - The First World War, 1914–1918
    pp 94-113
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Russian Empire entered what became known as the First World War in the summer of 1914 as a Great Power on the Eurasian continent. During the first months of the war, the eastern front formed north-south from the East Prussian marshes to the Carpathian Mountains. The army's admission that 500,000 soldiers had deserted during the first year of war, most of them into German and Austrian prisoner-of-war camps, effectively surrendering to the enemy, raised alarm among the military and political elite. The wartime propaganda was one factor in the polarisation of large parts of the imperial population along ethnic or national lines. The war shaped a dramatic transformation of political life in the Russian Empire. Under the cover of the Russian occupation, several politically engaged hierarchs of the Orthodox Church, notably Archbishop Evlogii, launched a new campaign for the reconversion of the Galician population to its traditional Orthodox faith from its Greek-Catholic apostasy.
  • 4 - The revolutions of 1917–1918
    pp 114-139
  • View abstract

    Summary

    On 23 February 1917 thousands of female textile workers and housewives took to the streets of Petrograd to protest against the bread shortage and to mark International Women's Day. Their protest occurred against a background of industrial unrest and their demonstration quickly drew in workers. The leaders of the revolutionary parties were taken by surprise at the speed with which the protests gathered momentum, but experienced activists, who included Bolsheviks, anti-war Socialist Revolutionaries and non-aligned Social Democrats, gave direction to the movement in the working class districts. The two forces that brought down the monarchy, the movement of workers and soldiers and the middle-class parliamentary opposition, became institutionalised in the post-revolutionary political order. Liberty and democracy were the watchwords of the February Revolution. The political awareness of the peasantry was low, but historians often exaggerate the cultural and political isolation of the village. The Bolshevik seizure of power is often presented as a conspiratorial coup against a democratic government.
  • 5 - The Russian civil war, 1917–1922
    pp 140-167
  • View abstract

    Summary

    A generation ago, the nature of available sources as well as dominant paradigms in the historical profession led Western historians of the civil war to focus on military operations, allied intervention and politics at the top. The origins of the Russian civil war can be found in the desacralisation of the tsarist autocracy that took place in the years before the First World War. War, geopolitics and the prolonged crisis beginning in 1914 shaped the emerging Bolshevik party-state, which differed radically from the utopian views of the commune state that Lenin had formulated in 1917 in his State and Revolution. 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. Centring on procurement, Bolshevik economic practices alienated the peasantry and contributed to the famine of 1921-23.
  • 6 - Building a new state and society: NEP, 1921–1928
    pp 168-191
  • View abstract

    Summary

    As 1921 dawned, the Bolsheviks could proclaim themselves victors in the civil war and celebrate an accomplishment that would stand as one of the great triumphs in official lore for the rest of the Soviet era. The new economic policy (NEP) emerged neither as a single decree nor a planned progression but as a label pinned eventually on a series of measures that appeared over the course of several months beginning in the spring of 1921. Industrial production, both heavy and light, as well as foreign trade improved far above the abysmal levels of the civil war and the beginning of NEP. One thing that did carry over from the civil war was the Bolsheviks' view of a stratified rural society. The heart of NEP lay in a hope that peasants would produce a surplus through incentives rather than compulsion, and Lenin defended the legalisation of private trade as an important means for inducing the peasantry to boost production.
  • 7 - Stalinism, 1928–1940
    pp 192-216
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the late 1920s, the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, launched a series of 'socialist offensives', a revolution that transformed the country. By the time of Joseph Stalin's death in March 1953, the USSR had become an industrial, military and nuclear giant. This chapter describes the state and society that developed out of Stalin's revolution. The drive for socialist industrialisation was impressive, but it was only one aspect of Stalin's revolution, one front of the socialist offensive. The second major front of the socialist offensive was played out in the countryside in the campaigns to collectivise agriculture. Destruction of the private farm economy went hand in glove with a general assault on private trade and other market remnants of new economic policy (NEP). Stalinism grew out of a unique combination of circumstances - a weak governing state, an increasingly hostile international context and a series of unforeseen crises, both domestic and external.
  • 8 - Patriotic War, 1941–1945
    pp 217-242
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Standing squarely in the middle of the Soviet Union's timeline is the Great Patriotic War, the Russian name for the eastern front of the Second World War. During the nineteenth century international trade, lending and migration developed without much restriction. The Soviet Union was an active partner in the process that led to the opening of the 'eastern front' on 22 June 1941. Soviet war preparations began in the 1920s, long before Adolf Hitler's accession to power, at a time when France and Poland were seen as more likely antagonists. In June 1941 Hitler ordered his generals to destroy the Red Army and secure most of the Soviet territory in Europe. The main features of the Soviet system of government on the outbreak of war were Joseph Stalin's personal dictatorship, a centralised bureaucracy with overlapping party and state apparatuses, and a secret police with extensive powers to intervene in political, economic and military affairs.
  • 9 - Stalin and his circle
    pp 243-267
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Joseph Stalin's personality left a giant imprint on the Soviet system. This chapter describes Stalin's relations with his deputies and their evolution into four phases. The first phase begins by assessing the rise of the Stalinist faction from the end of 1923 to 1924, when a solid majority formed within the Politburo against Leon Trotsky, whose impetuous behaviour and poor political judgement stoked up widespread unease within the leadership. The consolidation of dictatorship from the 1920s to the late 1930s and the operation of the Stalinist dictatorship at its peak, following the Great Purges, is the subject of the second phase. The third phase examines Stalin and his entourage during the war years, a period of marked decentralisation. The fourth phase discusses Stalin's last years, as the decision-making structures of the post-Stalin era. Although an important staging post on the road to dictatorship, the leadership system of the early 1930s is best viewed as a phase of unconsolidated oligarchic rule.
  • 10 - The Khrushchev period, 1953–1964
    pp 268-291
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The year 1956 was pivotal in the Khrushchev period. Khrushchev was born on 15 April 1894 in the poor southern Russian village of Kalinovka, and his childhood there profoundly shaped his character. During the 1930s and 1940s, Khrushchev played a central role in Stalinism. His positive contributions included supervising construction of the Moscow metro, energising Ukrainian agriculture and industry after the Great Purges, and attempting to ameliorate the post-war famine which Joseph Stalin's draconian policies caused. Khrushchev's first priority was agriculture. Khrushchev's 1955 journey to Belgrade reflected a new, post-Stalinist formula for holding together the Soviet bloc: to tolerate a modicum of diversity and domestic autonomy, to emphasise ideological and political bonds and reinforce economic and political ties, and to weave all this together with Khrushchev's own personal involvement. Khrushchev's first major achievement was the Austrian State Treaty, signed in May 1955, under which Soviet occupation forces pulled out in return for an Austrian declaration of neutrality.
  • 11 - The Brezhnev era
    pp 292-315
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter describes the emergence of the Leonid Brezhnev leadership's 'orthodox Leninist' consensus from 1964 through the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. It examines the 'social contract' that emerged as the basis of social stability in the years of 'high Brezhnevism' from 1969 to 1976, noting the important role of détente in Brezhnev's political economy. The chapter discusses the decline of Brezhnevism from 1976 to 1982, both domestically and internationally. The Brezhnev era was somehow both a time of modernisation, stability and accomplishment and a time of decay, stagnation and corruption. The totalitarian model interpreted the Bolshevik revolution as a power grab by revolutionary extremists whose ultimate goal was total control over society. Nikita Khrushchev's strategy for building a socialist culture while rejecting Stalinist methods of coercion involved perpetual heroic campaigns designed to rekindle the revolutionary enthusiasm of ordinary Soviet citizens - the Virgin Lands campaign, the meat and milk campaign, the chemicals campaign and so on.
  • 12 - The Gorbachev era
    pp 316-351
  • View abstract

    Summary

    No period in peacetime in twentieth-century Russia saw such dramatic change as the years between 1985 and 1991. During this time Russia achieved a greater political freedom than it had ever enjoyed before. The Cold War ended definitively in 1989 when the Central and Eastern European states regained their sovereignty. One of the most important developments in the Soviet Union following Mikhail Gorbachev's selection as General Secretary was a change of political language. New concepts were introduced into Soviet political discourse and old ones shed the meanings they had been accorded hitherto by Soviet ideology. The most immediate stimulus to change in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Gorbachev era was the long-term decline in the rate of economic growth and the fact that the Soviet economy was not only lagging behind the most advanced Western countries but also was being overtaken by some of the newly industrialising countries in Asia.
  • 13 - The Russian Federation
    pp 352-380
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The immediate afterglow of the failed coup attempt in August 1991 must rank as one of the more optimistic periods in Russian history. In August 1991, Russian President Boris Yeltsin was the most popular figure in Russia. Yeltsin's priority was not the creation or consolidation of a new democratic political system. Rather, Yeltsin turned his attention to dismantling the command economy and creating a market economy. Yeltsin's greatest achievement as president was the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation and their allies, the Agrarian Party of Russia, won less than 20 per cent of the vote, while new 'centrist' groups combined for nearly a quarter of the vote. In early August, a multi-ethnic force headed by Chechen commander Shamil Basaev invaded the Russian republic of Dagestan, claiming Dagestan's liberation from Russian imperialism as their cause. Russian armed forces responded by launching a major counter-offensive against the Chechen-led 'liberation' movement.
  • 14 - Economic and demographic change: Russia’s age of economic extremes
    pp 381-410
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The enduring fascination with Russia's twentieth-century economic history has its roots in the politics of revolution. For the Bolshevik leadership, the events of 1917-18 presaged the foundation of a more equitable one that would hold out hope to millions of oppressed and impoverished people within and beyond Russia's borders. This chapter provides a way of thinking about the economic and demographic consequences of the ambitions expressed by successive political leaders in Russia. Historians have been relatively kind in their assessment of the tsarist regime great leap forward. The New Economic Policy (NEP) has had a good press from many Western observers, who associate it with an era of relative political freedom and cultural experimentation before the onset of Stalinism. The adoption of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928 marks an attempt to engineer rapid economic growth by means of concerted state intervention. The post-Communist governments set great store by a radical privatisation of enterprise.
  • 15 - Transforming peasants in the twentieth century: dilemmas of Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet development
    pp 411-439
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter intends to situate the peasant majority of the population as both agents and victims within the history of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, and to locate them on the shifting terrain of the post-Soviet era. Between 1906 and 1911, Prime Minister Stolypin's reforms invited peasant households to separate from the commune and establish themselves on enclosed, self-contained farms. The policy of War Communism emerged in response to a series of material disasters, each one sufficient to overwhelm and destroy a stable political order, much less a fragile hierarchy of soviets controlled at the top by a few hundred revolutionaries wholly without administrative experience. From the peasantry's perspective, the most notable feature of the post- Stalin era was the abandonment of mass murder and deportations as core instruments of state policy. During the Leonid Brezhnev years, the tension between socio-economic improvements and a command system of economic and political governance continued to mount.
  • 16 - Workers and industrialization
    pp 440-467
  • View abstract

    Summary

    For much of the twentieth century, labour historians conventionally employed the concept of the working class as an objective description of a distinct social group with measurable characteristics and factory workers as the core element within that class. Peasant labour migration assumed huge proportions in the late nineteenth century. Peasants travelled to and found work in the burgeoning metallurgical and coal-mining industries of the south. Joseph Stalin's great turn towards industrialisation, accompanied by the collectivisation of agriculture, provoked massive out-migration from the villages. Paternalism frequently crops up in both contemporary descriptions and historians' accounts of factory relations in pre-revolutionary Russia. Enterprise paternalism had little to do with the social backgrounds or 'party-mindedness' of managers. Having internalised Soviet propaganda's emphasis on the dignifying, self-realising dimensions of material labour, industrial workers tended to have greater respect for production than auxiliary workers regardless of skill level.
  • 17 - Women and the state
    pp 468-494
  • View abstract

    Summary

    By the early twentieth century, far-reaching changes had begun to challenge Russia's traditional gender hierarchies. Women had established a significant presence in public life by the early twentieth century. Nearly half a million women, mainly of peasant origin, laboured in Russia's factories, constituting almost 30 per cent of the industrial labour force. The Revolution of 1905 demonstrated that no organisation or individual could speak for women as a group. Undermined by political divisions, the women's movement lost membership and momentum in the post-1905 reaction. Women constituted some 15 per cent of the membership of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and 10 per cent of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party on the eve of the First World War. During 1917, the Bolshevik Party made only half-hearted efforts to attract women. The death of Joseph Stalin and the rise of Nikita Khrushchev brought a shift in Soviet state's relationship to the 'question of women'.
  • 18 - Non-Russians in the Soviet Union and after
    pp 495-521
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The constitutional structure of the Soviet Union and many elements of the early policies remained largely unchanged until 1991. The nineteenth century was the high-point of nation-building in Western Europe, and in Eastern Europe minorities began to articulate national demands. The Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 marked, for many national leaders, the end of any hope of autonomy or federalism within a democratic Russian state. In the 1960s and 1970s, a flourishing Ukrainian culture circulated in the form of samizdat underground publications, and in 1970 a nationalist journal, Ukrainian Herald, appeared secretly for the first time. Most non-Russians enjoyed a relatively privileged position in their republics, could use their mother tongue at school and in public and had controlled access to their national cultures. For many non-Russians, the introduction of market-style economic reforms led to particular hardship as it meant that relatively underdeveloped regions such as Central Asia and the Caucasus could no longer rely on unconditional central investment.
  • 19 - The western republics: Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Baltics
    pp 522-548
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Soviet west came to the attention of scholars during the late 1960s and early 1970s. During the late nineteenth century, Estonians and Latvians were overwhelmingly peasant peoples, albeit with the level of literacy that was one of the highest in Europe. The Revolution of 1905 escalated the political and cultural demands of Estonian activists. Eastern or Dnieper Ukraine, which was part of the Russian Empire, shared many characteristics with Lithuania and Belorussia. Bordering Dnieper Ukraine in the south-west was Bessarabia, which is currently known under its historical name of Moldova. Territorial changes at the end of the Second World War favoured the western republics. The post-war period saw a quick industrial expansion, particularly in the Baltics and eastern Ukraine. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Baltic republics demonstrated standards of living higher than elsewhere in the USSR, while the rest of the region was on a par with the European part of Russia.
  • 20 - Science, technology and modernity
    pp 549-578
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Science and technology occupy a central place in the history of all modern states, but their role is particularly significant in twentieth-century Russia. The Soviet Union made a massive effort to overtake the West in the development of technology. Science and technology were integral to the Soviet claim to offer a vision of modernity that was superior to that of Western capitalism. Although there was a significant group of conservative scientists and scholars in Russia, and a small number who supported the revolutionary parties, most scientists were liberal and reformist in their political outlook. Relations with the government remained tense after the Revolution of 1905. In 1918 the Bolsheviks established the Socialist Academy to encourage the development of Marxist social science. Radar development was resumed during the Second World War, and rocket development at the end of the war. Encouraged by success in nuclear weapons development and space flight, the post-Stalin leaders placed great hopes in science and technology.
  • 21 - Culture, 1900–1945
    pp 579-604
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Russian culture in the first two decades of the twentieth century came under influences that could be found in most European cultures. Russian culture was influenced by circumstances distinct from other cultures. The first was the intelligentsia, a self-defined class of educated people who sustained social and cultural life under the profoundly undemocratic conditions of tsarism. The second was the October Revolution, which separated Russia from European cultures after 1917, and fundamentally reconfigured the cultural life of the country. Moderate policies ensured that many modes of cultural expression received state support. In practice the Bolsheviks accepted the same cultural hierarchies that radical Leftists would make the primary target of October Revolution. Soviet culture suffered from a deep split between artists, administrators and audiences. Russian-Soviet culture was fundamentally different after fifty years of social and institutional change. An institutional framework based on the autocracy had given way to private and informal institutions, which were then swept away by the October Revolution.
  • 22 - The politics of culture, 1945–2000
    pp 605-635
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter tells a convoluted story, or rather stories, spanning five decades and a spectrum of leadership ranging from Joseph Stalin's absolute dictatorship to Valentin Rasputin's technocracy. It depicts a society where politics and culture have until quite recently been intimately, indeed inextricably, intertwined, and where the imperatives of one frequently conflicted with the essence of the other. Even in today's post-Soviet Russia, where artists grope to find a secure footing in the rubble of the old cultural landscape, the nexus of politics and culture has not entirely disappeared. Leonid Brezhnev's reign curtailed much of the dynamism characteristic of the Thaw, whose suppressed energies re-emerged during Gorbachev's five years of perestroika and glasnost'. Throughout the Thaw, and well into the Brezhnev years, the Second World War became a touchstone of Soviet culture, in part because it represented the single unifying experience of a history otherwise bloody with political and ideological divisions.
  • 23 - Comintern and Soviet foreign policy, 1919–1941
    pp 636-661
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Bolsheviks had been conducting a fierce campaign to spread the revolution among invading Allied troops since the autumn of 1918 under the Central Executive Committee's Department of Propaganda, which was then moved over into the Communist International (Comintern) on 25 March 1919. The failure of the Allied war of intervention, signalled by the British decision to pull out by the end of 1919, effectively ensured the survival of Bolshevik rule in Russia and the greater part of its former empire. The Janus faces of Soviet foreign policy emerged: on the one side the face of appeasement and statecraft, the policy of accommodation to the capitalist world; on the other the contrasting face of violence and revolution to uproot and supplant capitalism in its entirety. The legitimacy of the October Revolution in Russia never depended exclusively on what it could do for Russia. France was on the front line against Fascism in 1934.
  • 24 - Moscow’s foreign policy, 1945–2000: identities, institutions and interests
    pp 662-705
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores Moscow's relations with Eastern Europe, China, Western Europe, the decolonising world and the United States (US) since 1945 from the perspective of Soviet and Russian identity relations with these states. The re-establishment of an orthodox Stalinist identity for the Soviet Union took only eighteen months. From September 1945 to June 1947 uncertainty about Soviet identity was replaced by a strict binary: the New Soviet Man (NSM) and its dangerous deviant other. Stalinism itself was the primary institutional carrier of the NSM. Soviet foreign policy correlates with the evolution of Soviet identity at home. Soviet interests in Eastern Europe did not change from 1945 to 1953: regimes friendly to Moscow. But how Soviets understood what constituted friendly changed dramatically. Finally, the end of the Cold War with the West was associated with the new identity's acknowledgement of fallibility at home and abroad.
  • 25 - The Soviet Union and the road to communism
    pp 706-731
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The heart of the governing ideology of the Soviet Union was an image of itself as a traveller on the road to communism. This image was embedded in the narrative of class struggle and class mission created by Karl Marx and first embodied in a mass political movement by European Social Democracy. When the pioneers of Russian Social Democracy looked West in the 1890s, they saw a powerful, prestigious and yet still revolutionary movement. They saw mass worker parties, inspired by the Marxist class narrative that continued to advance despite the persecutions of such redoubtable enemies as Chancellor Bismarck. The man who gave canonical expression to the elaborated class narrative of Social Democracy was Karl Kautsky. The link between the class narrative and Bolshevik thinking about the peasantry is the scenario summarised by the phrase kto-kogo or 'who-whom'. Joseph Stalin presented the mass collectivisation of 1929-30 as the triumphal outcome of Vladimir Lenin's kto-kogo scenario.

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