This chapter examines the role of oil in the early Soviet period, analysing the importance Lenin and Stalin attached to this commodity for domestic development and international trade.

The chapter traces attitudes of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Marxists toward paid domestic labor and domestic servants. Discursively connecting domestic service with slavery and serfdom, European and Russian radical thinkers saw it as antimodern. Following this line of thinking, the Bolsheviks emphasized the nonproductive nature of servants’ labor and placed them outside of “the modern proletariat.” Only after the active participation of domestic servants in the First Russian Revolution of 1905 did the party began to engage with what was then the largest female occupational group outside of agriculture. The chapter demonstrates that the Bolsheviks had given little thought to the place of paid domestic labor in the new society, anticipating its disappearance. Yet, it also shows that the key elements of the Bolsheviks’ approach to domestic service were present in their prerevolutionary thinking: ambiguity about the class status of servants, paternalistic attitudes toward them as the most backward members of the proletariat, and, most importantly, the vision of society in which housework was women’s work, whether it was paid or unpaid.

The outcome of the Great War shook to its foundations the idea of the Westphalian state, which existed primarily for itself and its own security. This chapter explores three alternatives to the Westphalian state, at the intersection of political and intellectual history. A ’Wilsonian imperium’ posited a world governed by a transnational community of liberal citizens that would regulate state behaviour. The state would remain an institutionalised locus of sovereignty, but all states would be guided by a common moral compass. At first, a ’Bolshevik imperium’ envisaged world revolution, which eventually would be able to dispense with the Westphalian state altogether. However, in the process of winning the civil war, the Bolsheviks began to turn the former imperial Russia into a unique species of imperial state, which never wholly renounced the ideological goals of the Bolshevik imperium. The successor state appeared to resemble the Westphalian state, in its fixation of borders and security. However, it rested on new and unstable foundations – the imperative to maximise and naturalse both ethnic and historical boundaries. In complementary ways, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt opened up a space in the theory of successor state sovereignty that could be occupied by the race, or Volk. No reimagining of state sovereignty after the Great War did more to disrupt and ultimately overthrow the interwar international system.

This chapter considers the Soviet conception and implementation of a highly distinctive scheme of social rights from its foundation in the 1920s through the 1960s to the 1980s. The state which ostensibly took those rights to their highest degree of realisation in the twentieth century presents a particularly instructive history, but one that destabilises and confounds received categories and trajectories. As heirs to the emancipatory ambitions of eighteenth-century Jacobins and nineteenth-century labour movements, the Bolsheviks pursued a highly distinctive mode of conceptualising and implementing social and economic protection. Fraught and contradictory, it encompassed sweeping labour protection and ruthless labour repression. Its unmatched scope and depth of social provision was marred by problematic enforcement, backstopping and justiciability, the state conceiving itself as having transcended both the market and social classes. The Soviet Constitution eschewed ‘class-abatement’ (which T. H. Marshall espoused) as the objective of social welfare, while also rejecting the notion that social rights should be actionable (contra the Weimar jurists’ ‘social rule of law’).