6)Stalin:Soviet Society

1920, abortion under medical supervision allowed. Soviet state became first country to legalise abortion

1917. Either partner could terminate marriage. If one partner not present at divorce hearing, he or she was notified of the divorce by postcard.

• People’s Commissar for Social Welfare passed laws which:
• Guaranteed paid maternity leave for two months before and after birth;
• Allowed nursing mothers to work shorter hours and take time off to breastfeed;
• Excused women from heavy work or night work;
• Set up commission for the protection of mothers and infants, which made plans for maternity clinics, milk points and nurseries.

• “It was a macho world for all the talk of equality…The high-status proletarian was male, a metal worker or a blacksmith”
• “we carried out the resolution on marriage in such a manner that…The woman remains tied with chains to the destroyed family hearth.”

1919. Divorce rate 25x higher than Britain

There were reports of young men registering more than 15 short-lived marriages. One survey at the end of 20s indicated that 70% divorces initiated by men and only 7% by mutual consent.

two-thirds of marriages in Moscow. Half for the nation

7-9 million orphans

In 1922, idea of state provision for crèches, kitchens and laundries was costed, it added up to more than the entire national budget.

39%

1917, women formed 10% of party membership. 1928, 12.8% (156,000 women) were part of party.

At the party congress in 1918, only 5% of voting delegates were women and this percentage went down.

“he forbids me to attend because he is afraid I will become a real person – what he needs is a cook and mistress wife – in those very meetings where I have to slip in secretly, he…calls women to a more active role”

“when Kollontai and the women arrived, they found a sign on the door which read: ‘The meeting for women only has been cancelled; tomorrow there will be a meeting for men only’”

1919, party set up a women’s department, Zhenotdel, to make women active defenders of revolution through propaganda and agitation. It was abolished suddenly in 1930 on the grounds that it was no longer necessary.

• (1) family life in collectives, women didn't possess children, so they had no burden
• (2)focus on waged work. A woman's right in society should ‘always follow from her role in the economy and in production’
• (3) marriage based on love

168 members, 16 men.

Soviet law emphasized mutual responsibility of family members for financial welfare as the state lacked resources to provide social welfare. There was an increase in promiscuity, but surveys in 20s suggest the increase wasn’t as great as young men claimed. Majority held to traditional attitudes towards relationships, many dreamed of long-lasting love relationships. And such changes occurred in the cities, the majority in the countryside remained unaffected by the concept of the new woman and freer sexual relations.

Lenin thought that Kollontai’s views on sex were unMarxist and anti-social: “will the normal man…drink…out of a glass with a rim greasy from many lips?”

“Girls were as strict as ever their mothers and grandmothers had been”

Following October Revolution, Bolshevik government set up Commissariat of Popular Enlightenment (Ministry of education and culture) headed by Anatoly Lunacharsky.

Proletkult was the idea of Alexander Bogdanov, Lunacharsky’s brother in law. He set up studios, poetry circles, folk theatres and exhibitions so workers could make proletarian art.

By 1920, there were 400,000 Proletkult members, including 80,000 active in studios and clubs.

It seemed to be developing as an independent working class organization. Lenin had its regional and central offices shut down during 1921-2.

Lenin didn’t believe you could invent new proletarian culture, rather you should develop best models and traditions from existing culture from Marxist outlook.

He believed in geometric forms over realism and created Suprematism. He was regarded with suspicion and arrested in 1930.

Lissitsky’s poster “Beat the whites with the Red Wedge” expresses a political idea clearly and simply through geometric shapes.

• was a young poet, playwright and artist. He naturally welcomed the revolution as a Futurist.
• His play “The Mystery Bouffe” was a parody of the Biblical flood in which the unclean (proletariat) triumph over the Bourgeosie. His Satires ‘The Bedbug’ and ‘The Bath House’ attacked the smugness of petty leaders which exposed Communist bureaucracy, both plays were soon withdrawn.
• By 1930, he was disillustioned with Communists; emotionally volatile, unhappy in love and denied a visa to go abroad, he committed suicide in 1930.
• 1935, when Mayakovsky was safely dead, Stalin proclaimed him ‘the best and most gifted poet of our Soviet epoch’. Study of his work became compulsory in schools but his satires weren’t mentioned nor his interest in Futurism nor his suicide.

‘bourgeois anarchist individualism’.

‘rubbish, double-eyes stupidity and pretentiousness’

• Futurists like Mayakovsky and Malevich were fascinated by machines, and modern technology.
• Constructivists like Rodchenko, Tatlin and Lissitsky based art on worker and industrial technolohy, geometrical shapes.

By summer of 1918, agit-prop trains in action and equipped to spread political propaganda through films, plays and other media.

Early 20s, the Proletkino formed for production of political films in line with party ideology. 1925, Politburo’s decision not to intervene in form and style of arts allowed creativity for a short period.

Number of cinemas grew fast and 300m tickets sold in 1928, but cinemas mostly restricted to towns.

Eisenstein, he showed power of working together in his film of the Bolshevik revolution, October. However, Soviet audiences preferred Hollywood comedies to his sophisticated work.

“Cinema was, in theory, the ideal medium of propaganda, visual, technological, controllable…He[Lenin] recommended concentration of documentary film and newsreels, the making of short agitki on scientific topics and encouraged the use of cinemas on agit-trains.”

1928, first All-Union party Congress on Film Questions met and tighter control imposed. It ruled that films should be accessible to mass audience and emphasized socialist ideas along strict party lines.

• Best known soviet film director. His first film was Strike in 1924 with resistant workers who were oppressed. His radical new filming techniques built tension and produce dramatic climax. This is in “Battleship Potemkin” (1925) and contributed to international success. October, too, was more dramatic than reality.
• Film was criticized by party leadership. The first All-Union Party Congress on Film Questions ruled that Socialist Realism was the only acceptable style. 1929, his film on collectivization was excessively re-edited on Stalin’s orders and re-titled ‘the Old and the new’.
• Eisenstein was attacked during the Cultural revolution of 1928-31 and fell out of favour.

‘an instrument for the Communist transformation of society.’

John Dewey which stressed ‘learning by doing’Authority of teachers reduced and were designated as ‘school workers’; forbidden to discipline pupils or set homework and examinations. Some radicals wanted to do away with school.

Most teachers weren’t Communist (3.1% in primary schools, 5.5% in secondary schools)

introduction of NEP in 1921.

1923, numbers of schools and pupils barely half the totals of 2 years earlier.

• Schools didn’t have proper resources and teachers paid badly. There was a legacy of falling standards and failure of authority in many schools.
• 1925, a teacher received a fraction of an industrial worker’s pay.

nearly 50% still believed in god.

• Before revolution, illiteracy rate was 65%.
• So Bolsheviks had visual propaganda.

Dec 1919, the ‘liquidation of illiteracy’ was decreed for all citizens aged 8-50. Illiterates who refused to learn faced criminal prosecution. Tens of thousands of ‘liquidation points’ set up in cities and villages from 1920-6.

5m people in European Russia

the Pioneers for children under 15 and the Komsomol for those from 14-20s

“Electricity will take the place of God.”

• Jan 1918, Decree on the Separation of church and state.
• It declared that Church couldn’t own property. Priests and clerics were declared ‘servants of the bourgeoisie’, this meant they weren’t allowed to vote and didn’t receive ration cards.
• Patriarch Tikhon, head of the Orthodox Church, denounced Bolsheviks and called upon resistance by all spiritual means.

1921, union of the militant godless

Lenin used famine of 1921-2 to demand the Church to surrender its valuables for famine relief. Instructions went to local soviets to seize valuables. There was bitter resistance.

More than 8000 people killed; 28 bishops, 1215 priests.

• Christmas and Easter became Komsomol Christmas and Easter.
• Instead of baptisms, children were “Octobered” with new names such as Revolyutsiya and Ninel (Lenin spelt backwards).
• Red weddings conducted in front of Lenin’s portrait rather than an altar.

• campaign to split Church from within, backed by OGPU (replaced Cheka) hailed the revolution of October 1917 as a “Christian deed” and denied that the Communists persecuted the Church. The soviet government was declared to be alone in the world striving to realize ‘the ideal of the Kingdom of God’.
• Tikhon gave in frightened that Church would be split permanently. Orthodox church leadership gave no more trouble to communists.

55%. They continued to support priests with donations and carried out old religious practices.

• 1918. 2m members in 1927.
• Members were 14-28 years old.

1928-31

‘the most reliable and powerful organizing force of the construction’.

Soviet slogan: The future belongs to the Komsomols

“I saw that the older generation, worn out after years of the war…were no longer in a position to withstand difficulties involved in the construction of socialism.”

1917-23

80% Churches closed by 1930. 1 in 40 churhces were still functioning by the end of the 30s.

Number of active orthodox priests fell from 60,000 in the 20s to only 5665 by 1941.

• 1939, only 12 out of 168 bishops active in 1930 were still at liberty.
• More priests, mullahs and rabbis killed than during Civil war.

• Shulgin, a radical who headed education research institute put forward theory of ‘the withering away of the school’. He favoured project method where education focused on ‘socially useful work’.
• Shulgin believed schools should be directly linked to factories. This could lead to narrow education: at one school all children in upper years trained to be ‘poultry breeding technicians’ and in central Asia children aged 11-13 exploited as cotton pickers for weeks on end. But factory managers not happy about having untrained and undisciplined children getting in the way of production targets.

“the old dying order; the old type of relationship between adults and children…It must be driven out of the school, driven out”

• the central committee ordered to send 1000 party members to technical colleges to study for higher degrees.
• 150,000 workers and communists, nearly a quarter of all students in higher education.

Aleksandr Gersimov and Isaak Brodsky

• Before 1928 - Major artists association 1928 - Association of Artists of the Revolution'
• 1931 - Russian Association of Proletarian Artists

Boris Pasternak

RAPP (Russian Association of proletarian Writers)

An artistic brigade organized by the RAPP which sang the praises of industrialization and collectivization.

• Pavel Bytor wrote ‘We have no Soviet cinema’ in April 1929.
• Film-makers were accused for being unable to raise the cultural level of the masses. ‘Every film must be useful, intelligible and familiar to the millions – otherwise neither it nor the artist who made it are worth twopence’ (quoted by R. Taylor in 1988)

• May 1936
• Abortion outlawed except when there was a threat to the woman’s life and health, and for women with hereditary diseases
• Divorce made harder. Both parties required to attend divorce proceedings and fee for registering divorce raised to 50 roubles for the first, 150 for the second and 300 for subsequent divorces
• Child support payments fixed at a quarter of wages or salary for one child, a third for two, and 50-60% for three or more children
• Mothers with six children received cash payments of 2000 roubles a year – for five years, with additional payments for each child up to the eleventh.

1.5 million abortions a year

• births decreased from 2.1% in 1930 to 1.6% in 1934. (-0.5%)
• Abortions increased from 3.4% in 1930 to 4.2% in 1934. (+0.8%)

Birth rate rose from under 2.5% of population in 1935 to almost 3.1% in 1940.

‘Millions of girls saw their lives ruined by Don Juans in Communist garb, and millions of children had never known parental homes’.

April 1935 made violent crimes committed by juveniles aged from 12 punishable in the same way as adults, though archives show no examples of actual executions.

NKVD attempt to get children off the streets and into institutions. Parents could be fined for hooliganism of their children and risked having them placed in orphanages where parents had to pay for their maintenance.

‘Pavlik was simply turning towards the group[soviet community] of which he was fundamentally a member. With the years…it was towards the Father of the group that he turned, towards Stalin. ’

decree of April 1932

Vera Mukhina’s famous sculpture ‘Industrial worker and collective farm girl’ ‘A Collective Farm Feast’ painting by Alesandr Gerasimov, 1937

The term appears in 1932. 1934, the newly founded Union of Writers proclaimed Socialist Realism to be the ‘definitive Soviet artistic method’.

• He said: “A painting must be living and comprehensible. I have remembered these words of Comrade Stalin for ever.”
• 1934, director of All Russian Academy of Arts and became the first artist to be awarded the Order of Lenin.
• He had no great reputation outside the USSR, but died honoured by the Soviet state.

I. Golomstock states “To judge from art alone Soviet man passed his entire existence in the factories, on the fields of collective farms, at party meetings and demonstrations…”

Shostakovich’s opera ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtensk’

• Mid 1932
• Soviet Union of Writers. Maxim Gorky

Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak and the poet Anna Akhmatova (whose work was banned in 20s, she continued after Stalin’s death)

‘No great work of literature was published in the 1930s and all artistic figures went in fear of their lives’.

• reknown before 1917, a democratic socialist who criticized Bolsheviks. He left the country in 1921.
• But Stalin was desperately anxious for Gorky to return so he could demonstrate that the most celebrated living Russian author was an admirer of the system. Gorky returned and became a citizen in 1931. 1934, he was made the first president of the Soviet Writer’s Union, he was flattered – even the main street of Moscow was renamed after him, also his birthplace – but he was never to leave the Soviet Union again.
• By the end of his life, he regarded himself as under house arrest. Yagoda, head of the NKVD in 1936, confessed to having ordered Gorky’s death.

State committee for Cinematography

“does not give a sufficient amount of general knowledge…for entrance to the technicums and higher schools”.

‘must be based on strictly delineated and carefully worked out programmes and study plans’.

“look at the colourless, boring productions…In your efforts to eradicate formalism, you have destroyed art!”

May 1934

Non-Marxist history who was captured in Cultural Revolution for glorifying Monarchy through Peter the great and Ivan the Terrible. He was restored to his university chair in Moscow in May 1934

Nikolai Ostrovsky's hero in "how the steel was tempered" - Pavel Korchargin

600,000 seats a year

10,000

How the steel was tempered - by Nikolai Ostrovsky

40,000 books in Jan 1936

150,000 in 1939, with none in 1929

214 in 1936

Censors were quintessential ‘social engineers’, with the media serving as their instruments – or weapons

• Housing
• preferences in entertainment
• limited success in Behaviour campaigns
• opposition to stakhanovites
• leverage that workers had

10m peasants moved to the towns.

• 1939, a working class/peasant governing elite was achieved.
• e.g. Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Kosygin

• one-fifth of workers
• This left the great mass of workers who just accepted the regime for its social welfare policies.

‘a degree of skepticism, even a refusal to take the regime’s most serious pronouncements fully seriously, was the norm’.