Unit 13 (Part 1) Soviet Russia: Utopian Dreams and Dystopian Realities (1917–1953)

Lead-in:

I. Explain the notions of “utopia” and “dystopia”. How are these notions related to the Soviet period in Russian history?

II. Read the text to get the general understanding of it and explain the words in bold:

During 1917 Russia underwent two revolutionary shifts in power, one entirely negating the other. The first, in March, brought Russia to the threshold of a genuine parliamentary regime; the second, in November, pushed the country into the clutches of a one-party dictatorship, the chaos of civil war, and, ultimately, into the black hole of Communist totalitarianism.

In early March a spontaneous upheaval broke out that almost immediately attracted millions of Russians into its ranks and within a week brought down the autocracy. Power fell to the leading elements of the country’s moderate and progressive-minded elite – liberal nobles, civic-minded businessmen, and prominent members of the professions. These groups, who for decades had been at the forefront of creating civil society in Russia, quickly organized what they called the Provisional Government.

Russia’s new leaders were tied together by an important common thread: they were people of property from Russia’s middle and upper classes, and they all therefore had something to lose, quite possibly everything, if events careened entirely out of control. All hoped their country would continue in the capitalist-parliamentary path of the West that it seemed to have been following since the Great Reforms. They considered the overthrow of the czar the end of the revolution, the place where it had to stop. Indeed, however much they despised Nicholas personally, many of them had not wanted to abolish the monarchy but favored a genuine constitutional monarchy on the British model.

While they understood the need for more reforms and were prepared to offer some response to the needs and demands of the lower classes, the people in charge after the events of March 1917 were against further drastic change; additional reforms would be enacted gradually and only after order and discipline had been restored. Over a period of several months they were joined in the Provisional Government by socialists of various stripes – SRs, Mensheviks, and others with varying degrees of commitment to political pluralism, democracy, and socialism. But not even these socialists, whatever their ultimate goals, were ready for radical change beyond what had been accomplished in March and the succeeding few months.

In November, after continual disorder, power was seized in a military coup by a small militant group committed to the premise that the process of change had merely just begun. Its members rejected both capitalism and parliamentary democracy, the latter seen as nothing but the tool of the class they most hated, the middle class, or bourgeoisie. They wanted to remake society entirely. As Marxists they looked to the establishment of a new society based on the abolition of private property in favor of public ownership of the country’s productive wealth and on cooperation instead of competition. In these goals this group was not fundamentally different from some of the other socialists who after March joined Russia’s new government and cooperated with liberals and moderates. The key difference is that this group was not willing to wait to achieve its goals. To that end it was determined to set up a dictatorship and rule alone. This group was the Bolshevik Party, and its indispensable leader was Vladimir Lenin. Its success in seizing and holding power set the course for the next seven decades of Russian history.