The Communist Utopia

Communism also promised a shining future and a modern, technological culture. As the Bolsheviks met powerful resistance, however, they became ever more ruthless and authoritarian. In the early 1920s, peasant bands called Green Armies revolted against the Bolshevik policy of war communism that confiscated their crops. Industrial production stood at only 13 percent of prewar levels, and millions of refugees clogged the cities and roamed the countryside. In the early spring of 1921, workers in Petrograd and sailors at the naval base at Kronstadt revolted, protesting the privileged standard of living that Bolshevik supervisors enjoyed. They called for “soviets without Communists”—that is, a worker state without elite leaders.

The Bolsheviks had many of the rebels shot, but the Kronstadt revolt pushed Lenin to institute reform. His New Economic Policy (NEP) returned parts of the economy to capitalist methods that allowed peasants to sell their grain and others to trade consumer goods freely. Although the state still controlled large industries and banking, the NEP encouraged people to produce and even, in the spirited slogan of one official, “get rich.” As a result, consumer goods and more food became available; some peasants and merchants prospered. The rise of these wealthy “NEPmen,” who bought and furnished splendid homes, broke the Bolshevik promise of a classless utopia.

Further protests erupted within Communist ranks. At the 1921 party congress, a group called the Worker Opposition objected to the party’s takeover of economic control from worker organizations and pointed out that the NEP was not a proletarian program for workers. In response, Lenin suppressed the Worker Opposition and set up procedures for purging opponents—a policy that would become a deadly feature of Communist rule. Bolshevik leaders also worked to make the Communist revolution a cultural reality in people’s lives and thinking. The Communist Party set up classes to improve the literacy rate—which had been only 40 percent on the eve of World War I. To create social equality between the sexes, which had been part of the Marxist vision of the future, the state made birth control, abortion, and divorce readily available. As commissar for public welfare, Aleksandra Kollontai (1872–1952) promoted birth-control education for adults and day care for children of working parents. To encourage literacy, she wrote simply worded novels about love and work in the new socialist state for ordinary readers.

The bureaucracy swelled to promote modern ways, and hygiene and efficiency became watchwords, as they were in the rest of Europe. Agencies such as the Zhenotdel (“Women’s Bureau”) taught women about sanitary housekeeping, while efficiency experts aimed to replace backwardness with American-style technological modernity. The short-lived government agency Proletkult tried to develop proletarian culture through such undertakings as workers’ universities, a workers’ theater, and workers’ publishing. Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote verse praising his Communist passport and essays promoting toothbrushing, while composers punctuated their music with the sound of train or factory whistles. As with war communism, many resisted attempts to change everyday life and culture. In Islamic regions of central Asia, incorporated from the old Russian Empire into the new Communist one, Bolsheviks urged Muslim women to remove their veils and generally to become more “modern,” but Muslims often attacked both Zhenotdel workers and women who followed their advice.

Lenin suffered a debilitating stroke in the spring of 1922, and amid ongoing cultural experimentation and factional fighting, this architect of the Bolshevik Revolution died in January 1924. The party congress changed the name of Petrograd to Leningrad and elevated the deceased leader into a secular god. Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), who served in the powerful post of general secretary of the Communist Party, was the chief mourner at Lenin’s funeral, using the occasion to hand out good jobs. He advertised his role in joining Russian and non-Russian regions into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1923. Concerned with Stalin’s influence and ruthlessness, Lenin in his last will and testament had asked that “the comrades find a way to remove Stalin.” Stalin, however, prevented Lenin’s will from being publicized and discredited his chief rival, Trotsky, as an unpatriotic internationalist. Simultaneously, Stalin organized the Lenin cult, which included the public display of Lenin’s embalmed corpse—still on view today. By 1929, Stalin had achieved virtually complete control of the USSR.