The Ideology of Communism in the USSR - Research Paper Example

Communism in USSR Table of Contents Introduction 3 Background 4 Industrialization 7 Impacts of communism 12 Conclusion 14 References 16 Brief Summary Communism was a rampant form of governance among many societies in the ancient Europe. That technique was based on the ideologies of Karl Max who had earlier advanced theories regarding caring for one another through equal opportunism in the society. However in the context of USSR communism was brought into practice as a mode of transforming the nation to be in line with the economic advancement that were witnesses across Europe since it adversely severed from the effects of the First World War. The essay is going to elaborate on a chronological turn of events that marked the communism era in USSR with its accompanying impacts. Introduction Communism is a way of a government that is totalitarian in nature, which rulers are dictators and have no respect for their subjects. In the USSR, communism started off in the 19th century due to the harsh conditions of life that were witnessed during that period, which made people agitate for a technique that would restore equality in the society. The concept of communism is founded on the ideology of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx from their numerous scholarly ideas that were widespread at this time. These ideas were embraced by people in the Soviet Union society in a bid to regain equality in a society that was experiencing numerous hardships present during the tsarist rule. It was believed that communism was the solution to the problems society was experiencing and thus it would create a new society with social and political equality of every individual (Courteous and Kramer, 2004). Communism is centered on the principle that people need one another in order for the society to achieve meaningful progress both socially and economically. The idea is based on the belief that, a society where people work equally, is bound to achieve greater success as opposed to a society where people are grouped according to social classes. However, despite there being equality among people, the social distinction that results from some people having more wealth than others arises because individuals leverage from their talents. In a communist society, the government is not supposed to interfere with the rights of persons and its influence on the general economy of the state should be limited. Moreover, in communism societies, governments collectively own property and no person is supposed to start any enterprise because governments run business monopolies in all sectors of the economy. Therefore, the state provides basic amenities to its people including decent education and health care services. However, matters dealing with media freedom does not exist in this kind of setting since the media is entirely owned by the state and thus, anything that is aired must be approved by the state (Sarker and Sunil, 2004). Background It had been a folly, of course, for Russia to involve itself a decade earlier in 1904-05, in the war against Japan because this alone brought the country to the very brink of a revolution. Further, it was a greater folly (and this might have been clear, one would think, to Russian statesmen at the time) to involve Russia in a far larger strains of participation in a major European war, even though, the war was not the only cause of the breakdown of the tsarist system in 1917. It may be fairly said, however, that without Russias involvement in the war the breakdown would not have happened during that period or taken the forms that it did and thus, a seizure of power by the Bolshevist faction, would have been improbable in the extreme (Evans and Alfred, 2003). The period to the middle of the year 1917, was characterized by war, exhaustion of army and society, the sudden collapse of the tsarist police force, and the program of land reform that lent itself so readily to demagogic exploitation made possible the successful seizure of power, first in the major cities, then throughout the country, by Lenin and his associates. Thus the rule of communist dictatorship the restraint under which it was destined to write throughout the life span not only of the generation then alive but of its children and grandchildren as well was fastened upon an unprepared and bewildered Russian society (Rieber, Alfred and Nelson, 1996).One hesitates, to summarize, what this development was to mean for Russia. No summary could be other than inadequate. But the effort must be made, for without it the communist epoch now coming to an end cannot be seen from a historical perspective (Sarker and Sunil, 2004). The revolution The regime of Joseph Lenin in its initial period of Soviet power was successful in physically destroying or driving out of the country, in fact of what would have been called, in the Marxist vocabulary of that day, the "bourgeois" intelligentsia. Stalin later completed the process by doing the same to most of the Marxist intelligentsia that remained. Thus Lenin and Stalin contrived, between the two of them, to eliminate a colossal of the rather formidable cultural community that had come into being in the final decades of Tsardom. With this loss there went, more important still, the loss of much of the very cultural continuity of which this generation was an indispensable part. It would never thereafter be possible to reunite completely the two frayed ends of this great chain of national development, now so brutally severed (Lorimer and Doug, 2007). Not content with these heavy blows to the countrys intellectual and cultural substance, Stalin, as soon as his power was consolidated in 1928, turned to the peasantry and proceeded to inflict upon this significant portion of the population (some 80 percent at that time) an even more terrible injury. In the Stolypin reforms, emphasis had wisely been placed on the support and encouragement of the most competent and successful segment of the farming population. Stalin, in his sweeping campaign of collectivization launched in 1929, did exactly the opposite. He set out to eliminate precisely this element (now referred to by the pejorative Russian term of "kulaks"), to eliminate it by ruthless confiscation of what little property most of its members possessed, by deportation of a high proportion of those and other peasant families, and by the punishment in many cases the execution of those who resisted. The results were just calamitous. A major famine was experienced in the agriculturally productive regions of the country and the loss, within a short time, of some two-thirds of the countrys livestock. Through these cruel and ill-considered measures, a blow was done to the Russian agriculture that set it back by decades, and from which it has not fully recovered to the present day (Sarker and Sunil, 2004). The collectivization campaign roughly coincided on time with the First Five Year Plan, the announcement of which in 1928-29 made so deep and so favorable an impression upon many well-meaning people in the West. Actually, the plan as announced, and later the claimed statistics on its completion, masked a ruthless and reckless program of military industrialization. This program did indeed provide certain essential components of a great military industry, but did so in an extremely hasty and wasteful manner, at vast expense in human deprivation and suffering, and with reckless abuse of the natural environment (Evans and Alfred, 2003). It was on the heels of these early Stalinist efforts at revolutionizing the Soviet economy that there was then unleashed upon Soviet society that was terrible with almost incomprehensible series of events known historically as "the purges." Beginning with an apparent effort on Stalins part to remove from office and destroy all those remnants from the Lenin leadership in whom he suspected even the slightest traces of resistance to his personal rule, these initial efforts, savage enough in themselves, soon grew into a massive wave of reprisals against a significant portion of those who at that time were taking any part in the governing of the country or who enjoyed any prominence as members of the cultural intelligentsia (Lorimer and Doug, 2007). So terrible were these measures, so arbitrary, indiscriminate and unpredictable was their application, that they culminated, in a deliberately induced mass frenzy of denunciation a frenzy overcoming millions of innocent but frightened people who had been encouraged to see in the reckless denunciation of others, the only possible assurance of their own immunity to arrest and punish. In the course of this hysteria, friend was set against friend, neighbor against neighbor, colleague against colleague, brother against brother, and child against parent, until most of Soviet society was reduced to a quivering mass of terror and panic. In this way a very considerable proportion among the social elite of the Soviet union thousands upon thousands of them were induced to destroy each other for the edification, perhaps even the enjoyment, of a single leader, and this, while lending themselves to the most extravagant demonstrations of admiration for and devotion to this same man. One searches the annals of modern civilization in vain for anything approaching, in cynicism if not in heartlessness, this appalling spectacle (David, Jenkins and Evans, 2008). Suffice it to say that when Stalin finally perceived that things had gone too far, when he realized that even his own interests were being endangered and finally began to take measures to dampen the terror and the slaughter, several million people were already either languishing or dying in the labor camps, and a further number, sometimes estimated in the neighborhood of a million, had been executed or had died of mistreatment. To which tragic count must be added those further millions who had themselves escaped persecution but who cared about the immediate victims-their parents, lovers, children or friends, and for whom much of the meaning of life went out with the knowledge, or the suspicion, of the sufferings of the latter. Bereavement, in short, had taken its toll on enthusiasm for life. Fear and uncertainty had shattered nerves, hopes and inner security (Riordan and James, 2001). Industrialization It was, then, on a shaken, severely depleted, socially and spiritually weakened Russian people that there fell, in the first years of the 1940s, the even greater strains of the Second World War. Russia, to be sure, did not become formally involved in that war as such until June 1941. But the interval had been in part taken up with the war with Finland, which alone had caused some hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties. And what was then to follow, after the German attack, was horror on a scale that put into shade all the sufferings of the previous decades: the sweeping destruction of physical installations-dwellings, other buildings, railways, everything in great parts of European Russia, and a loss of life the exact amount of which is not easy to determine but which must have run to close to thirty million souls. Thus, it is virtually impossible to envisage, behind these bare words and figures, the enormity of the suffering involved (Courteous and Kramer, 2004). There is much truth in this statement. Nothing can diminish Hitlers responsibility for bringing on what the Soviets have subsequently referred to (ignoring most of the other theatres of operation in Second World War) being referred as the Great Patriotic War. But it was not the whole truth. Stalin himself heightened in many ways the horrors of the struggle: by the cynicism of his deal with Hitler in 1939; by the subsequent treatment of Russians who had become prisoners of war in Germany; by his similar treatment of those civilians who had found themselves in territories that fell under German control; by the brutal deportation of entire subordinate nationalities suspected of harboring sympathies for the German invader; by the excesses of his own police in the occupied areas, of which even the appalling Katyn massacre of Polish officers was only a small part and by the liberties allowed to his own soldiers as they made their entry into Europe. More important still, one will never know what might have been the collaboration in the pre-war years between Russia and the Western powers in the confrontation with Hitler, had the regime with which those powers were faced on the Russian side been a normal, friendly and open one. Instead, to many in Europe, the Soviet state looked little if any more reliable and reassuring as a partner than did the Nazi regime (Gvosdev and Nikolas, 2007). It was an even wearier, even more decimated and ravaged Russian people that survived the trials and sacrifices of the war. And their miseries, as it turned out, were not yet at an end. War against a hated enemy had aroused elementary nationalistic feelings among the Russian people. So long as hostilities were in progress, Stalin had wisely (if presumably cynically) associated himself with those feelings. The people and the regime had thus, as it seemed, been brought together in the joint effort of resistance to the Nazi invasion. This had produced new expectations. Not unnaturally, there was hope in all quarters, as the war neared its end, that victory would be followed by a change in the habits and methods of the regime, a change that would make possible something resembling a healthy relationship between ruler and ruled, and would open up new possibilities for self-expression, cultural and political, on the part of a people long deprived of any at all (Rieber, Alfred and Nelson, 1996). However, Stalin soon made it clear that this was not to be. Government would continue as it had before. There would be no concessions to the Soviet consumer; there would only be more of the same ruthless effort of military industrialization, the same suppression of living standards, and the same familiar yoke of secret police control. Seldom, surely, has a more bitter disillusionment been brought to an entire people than this callous indifference on Stalins part to the needs of a sorely tried population just emerging from the sufferings of a great and terrible war (David, Jenkins and Evans, 2008). This, however, was the way things were to be. And the final years of Stalins life, from 1945 to 1953, wore their way much as the last pre-war years had done: the same tired litanies of the propaganda machine; the same secrecy and mystification about the doings of the Kremlin; the same material discomforts; and the same exactions of a police regime the ferocity of which seemed, if anything, to be heightened as an aging Stalin became increasingly aware of his dependence upon it for his personal security and for the preservation of his own power (Evans and Alfred, 2003). Conversely, even Stalins death, in 1953, brought about no sudden or drastic change in the situation. Stalinism, as a governing system, was by now far too deeply planted in Russian life to be removed or fundamentally changed in any short space of time. There was no organized alternative to it and no organized opposition. It took four more years before Khrushchev and his associates succeeded in removing from power even those in the leadership who had been most closely associated with Stalin in the worst excesses of his rule and who would have preferred to proceed with the previous regime’s totalitarian rule (Riordan and James, 2001). Nevertheless, Khrushchev himself did not last very long thereafter and in the ensuing years, down to the mid-1980s, the country was ruled by a number of mediocre men (Yuri Andropov, Mikhail Gorbachevs patron, was an exception). While they had no taste for the pathological excesses of Stalinist rule; which, as they correctly saw, had endangered everyone, themselves included, these men were heirs to the system that had made these excesses possible, and they saw no reason to change it. It represented, in their eyes, the only conceivable legitimation of their power and the only apparent assurance of its continuation. It was all they had and all they knew. The sort of systemic changes Gorbachev would eventually endeavour to bring about would have surpassed the reaches of their imaginations. And, after all, from their standpoint, the system appeared to work (Evans and Alfred, 2003). However, it did not work very well. The Soviet system involved the continuing necessity of suppressing a restless younger intelligentsia, increasingly open to the influences of the outside world in an age of electronic communication, and increasingly resentful of the remaining limitations on its ability to travel and to express itself. Beyond that, it rested upon an economy that, just at the time when the remainder of the industrialized world was recovering from the war and moving into the economic revolution of the computer age, was continuing to live in many respects in the conceptual and technological world of the nineteenth century, and was consequently becoming, on the international scene, increasingly uncompetitive (Courteous and Kramer, 2004). Finally, the ideology, as inherited from Lenin, was no longer really there to support this system. It remained as a lifeless orthodoxy, and Soviet leaders would continue on all ceremonial occasions to take recourse to its rituals and vocabulary. But it had been killed in the hearts of the people: murdered by the great abuses of earlier decades, murdered by the circumstances of the Great War for which Marxist doctrine offered no explanations, destroyed by the great disillusionment that followed that war. It began to become evident, in short, in those years of the 1970s and early 1980s, which time was running out on all that was left of the vast structure of power Lenin and Stalin, had created. Still able to command a feigned and reluctant obedience, it had lost all capacity to inspire and was no longer able to confront creatively the challenge of its own future. The first leader to perceive this, to read its implications and to give a dying system the coup de grace it deserved, was Gorbachev (David, Jenkins and Evans, 2008). One cannot end this review of the blows suffered by Russian society at the hands of its own rulers over the decades of communist power without being aware of the danger of a certain Manichaean extremism in the judging of those rulers and of those who tried faithfully to follow them. Nonetheless, to recognize the tragic consequences of its exercise of power is not to question the intellectual seriousness or the legitimacy or the idealism of the world socialist movement out of which, initially, communism arose (Riordan and James, 2001). Ones heart can go out, in fact, to those many well-meaning people in Russia and elsewhere who placed their faith and their enthusiasm in what they viewed as socialism and who saw in it a way of bringing Russia into the modern age without incurring what they had been taught to see the dark side of Western capitalism (Riordan and James, 2001). But it is impossible to review the history of communism-in-power in Russia without recognizing that the left extremist wing of the Russian revolutionary movement, as it seized power in 1917 and exercised it for so many years, was the captive of certain profound and dangerous misconceptions of a political philosophical nature, revolving around the relationships between means and ends, between personal and collective morality, between moderation and unrestrained extremism in the exercise of political power misconceptions that were destined to have the most dire effects on the nature of the authority it was assuming to itself. It was the Russian people who had to pay the price for these misconceptions, in the form of some of the most terrible passages in their nations long and tortured history. Seen in this way, the October Revolution of 1917 cannot be viewed otherwise than as a calamity of epochal dimensions for the peoples upon whom it was imposed (Rieber, Alfred and Nelson, 1996). Impacts of communism It would be easy to regard the communist decades as a tragic seventy-year interruption in the ordinary progress of a high country and to assume that, the interruption now being over, the state could pick up where things left off in 1917 and proceed as though the interruption had never occurred. The temptation to view things that way is heightened by the evidence that many of the problems the country now faces, as the dark communist hand withdraws, represent the unfinished business of 1917, existing much as it then did because so little of it was, in the interval, sensibly and efficiently addressed (Courteous and Kramer, 2004). But things are not quite like that. The people we now have before us in Russia, are not those who experienced the events of 1917; they are the children and grandchildren of the population of that time of those of them, at least, who survived enough of the horrors of the ensuing years to leave progeny at all. Moreover, these children and grandchildren are divided from their parents and grandparents by something more than just the typical generational change. The intervening events, primarily Stalinism and the carnage of the wartime battlefields, were decisive, each in its own way, in their legacy for future generations. Certain people were more likely than others to survive them; it is to these latter that the next generation was born. We have already noted the decimation of much of the pre-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia in the early years of communist power. This has had its effects; of those who saw something of Russia before that decimation was completed, this writer surely is not alone in noting a particular comparative brutalization in the faces one now encounters on the Moscow streets-a result, no doubt, of prolonged exposure to not only the exactions of a pitiless dictatorship but also the ferocious petty frictions of daily life in a shortage economy (Gvosdev and Nikolas, 2007). Nor may we ignore the social effects of all these upheavals. Political persecution and war left tragic gaps in the male parental population, particularly in the villages. Family structure was deeply destabilized, and with its stability there were forfeited those sources of inner personal security that only the family can provide. As so often before in the more violent passages of Russian history, it has been the broad and long-suffering back of the Russian woman, capable of bearing a great deal but also not without its limits, on which an inordinate share of the burdens of the maintenance of civilization has come to rest. The effects are painfully visible in a whole series of phenomena of that womans life: the weariness, the cynicism, the multitudinous abortions, the fatherless families (David, Jenkins and Evans, 2008). In addition, the governmental structure to which the Center of gravity of political power is now being transferred from what was formerly the partys political monopoly may adequately serve as the outward framework for a new and democratic form of political life, but only that. It will have to be filled in at many points with an entirely new body of methods, habits and eventually traditions of self-rule. For this, the minds of the younger generation are poorly prepared. It is rational to state that there was much more real understanding of the principles and necessities of democratic rule for the compromises, the restraints, the patience and the tolerance it demands in the Russia of 1910 than is the case today (Lorimer and Doug, 2007). Thus, faced with such attitudes it will not be easy to make quick progress in the systemic changes Gorbachev and others are trying to bring about. These are not the only handicaps of this sort, but they will perhaps prove the most recalcitrant and long lasting. For what will be required for their correction will be a long and persistent educational effort an effort for which, in many instances, and one that will presumably have to proceed in the face of much instability in Russian life. That the three Baltic states deserve their independence, and will eventually have it, seems beyond question. There are others that are demanding sovereign status but in whom the requisite experience and maturity of leadership, as well as other essential resources, have yet to be demonstrated. That notwithstanding, there are still other non-Russian entities where the demand for independence has not even been seriously raised and where the ability to bear the strains and responsibilities of an independent status is even more questionable. There is, in short, no uniformity in the needs and the qualifications that the respective Soviet peoples bring to any far reaching alteration in their relationship to the Russian Center. And no single model, not even one from the outside world, could possibly provide a useful response to all the problems such an alteration would present (Courteous and Kramer, 2004). Conclusion Very special, highly intricate, and full of dangerous pitfalls are those problems that present themselves in the case of the relationship between the Ukraine and Russia proper. Many Ukrainians can and do offer compelling reasons why their country should have at least a greatly changed if not fully independent status in the new era. But Ukrainians do not always speak with one voice. Some speak with a Polish voice, some with a Russian, and some with a more purely Ukrainian one. It will not be easy for them all to agree on how a future Ukraine is to be independently governed, or indeed, even on what its borders should be. So extensive is the interweaving of the Russian and Ukrainian economies that any significant detachment of the two governments would have to be accompanied by the widest possible arrangements for freedom of commercial and financial exchanges between them, if confusion and even hardship were to be avoided (Rieber, Alfred and Nelson, 1996). The relationships that have existed between the many non-Russian parts of this traditional multinational structure and the Russian Center have deep historical roots. Few would be prepared for the situation that would develop if all these ties were to be abruptly severed. The economic confusion would be enormous. Worse still is the growing evidence that certain of these non-Russian entities, if left suddenly to them, would either make war against each other or become subject to highly destructive civil conflicts within their own confines. Finally, there is the very serious problem that would be created by the fragmentation of responsibility for the nuclear weaponry now in Soviet hands (Evans and Alfred, 2003). Of the greatest importance in this connection would be the effect on international life of any complete breakup of the Russian/Soviet state. The abandonment of any general political Center for the peoples of the region would mean the removal from the international scene of one of those great powers whose interrelationships, with all their ups and downs, have constituted a central feature of the structure of international life for most of this century. Works Cited Courteous, Stéphane, and Mark Kramer. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge, Mass; London, England: Harvard University Press, 2004. Print. Evans, David, Jane Jenkins, and David Evans. Years of Russia, the USSR and the Collapse of Soviet Communism. London: Hodder Murray, 2008. Print. Riordan, James. Sport Under Communism: The U.S.S.R., Czechoslovakia, the G.D.R., China, Cuba. London: C. Hurst, 2001. Print. Gvosdev, Nikolas K. The Strange Death of Soviet Communism: A Postscript. Somerset, N.J: Transaction, 2007.Pdf. Sarker, Sunil K. The Rise and fall of Communism. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and distributors, 2004. Print. Lorimer, Doug. The Collapse of Communism in the USSR: Its Causes and Significance. Chippendale, N.S.W: Resistance Books, 2007. Print. Evans, Alfred B. Soviet Marxism-Leninism: The Decline of an Ideology. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2003. Print. Rieber, Alfred J, and Robert C. Nelson. A Study of the USSR and Communism: An Historical Approach. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1996. Print. Read More