eBook Russia After Lenin: Politics, Culture and Society, 1921-1929 (Education; 71) download

Vladimir Brovkin's brilliant work "Russia After Lenin: Politics, Culture & Society 1921-1929" clearly demonstrates that the propaganda claims made by the Bolsheviks were largely incongruous with the views held by a majority of Russians. The author demonstrates that Communist ideas were resisted most strongly by those whom the party was purported to be serving-the proletariat. Brovkin further shows that contrary to revisionist histories, Communism was established in Russia following a military coup led by the mearest fraction of society. Brovkin argues that Stalin's campaign of terrordeveloped directly from Lenin's notion of constant revolution and that this policy of terror was adopted in order to perpetuate the Communist Party's monopoly on political power. Brovkin's work is a must read for those who wish to gain a better understanding of how the Bolsheviks consolidated and maintained their dictatorial authority. "Russia After Lenin" is an outstanding book on politics and history that should be considered equal to the monumental books by Richard Pipes.

In this 1998 book, Professor Brovkin once again dissects Bolshevik Russia on his lab table, but the results of his autopsy reveal more about his methodology than the deceased. Brovkin reflects a dominant school in Western historiography of the Soviet era: along with Richard Pipes, Robert Conquest, and Anne Applebaum he represents the academic face of the cold war, as befits a NATO research fellow. If he is the same associate professor Vladimir N. Brovkin who flew into a violent red rage at a photo shop clerk in Beacon Hill, for not having his pictures developed the same day of dropoff, such warrior mentality is also well expressed in this monograph.

I give the book three stars in recognition of Professor Brovkin's painstaking research, a prodigious labor which must be recognized despite disagreements with the author. Yet throughout the book Brovkin delivers opinions which fly in the face of known and accepted fact. He is so captivated by a narrow focus on Bolshevik-bashing he often slights the context of his subject.

As an example of the first, Brovkin writes on p. 57: ". . . the real civil war was not between Reds and Whites but between the state and peasants." But the Reds and Whites involved certainly thought themselves engaged in a for-real all-out civil war, as well as all foreign observers and interventionists. While the violence between the Soviet state and the village was another civil war indeed, it no way replaces the status of the mainstream political war. Such rationale from a Russian Studies academic seems baffling; until one recalls that for Brovkin and his school the preferred concept of Soviet society is the cold war trope of "the Communist regime vs. the people." All else is a diversion, secondary at best: the facts of period opinion and blood on the ground are dialectically nullified in good Leninist fashion.

Though Brovkin's phraseology reflects his NATO credentials within cold war academia, his major thesis - that Stalin's "Great Break" of 1928-29 was a pre-emptive strike aimed at reversing the New Economic Policy, to save Bolshevism - is largely correct. The cultural, economic, and social pluralism emerging within NEP would have, in time, demanded political and ideological pluralism within and outside the Communist Party, eventually undermining its "historic task" of socialist revolution and its own reason for existence. Rather than surrender to this coming tide like Gorbachev, Stalin aggressively countermanded it. He could do so because the revolutionary momentum of 1917, for all the deformations Brovkin cites, had not yet settled into arteriosclerosis.

Brovkin recites at great length the widespread alienation, even violence, among peasants and workers, youth and intellectuals, Party members, religious believers, and "former people." In doing so he inadvertently justifies Stalinist paranoia and persecution of "wreckers" in Soviet society. He posits the Peasant Unions as "truly autonomous of any political party," but these were widely viewed by all as fronts for the outlawed Social Revolutionaries, who'd organized the same unions during the 1905 revolution. Bolshevik state intrusion into religious life was hardly unprecedented, as Tzarist religious policy demonstrates; religion as a bastion of "resistance to lawlessness and indecency" (p. 107) surely ignores the role of the clergy in instigating pogroms throughout Nicholas II's reign. Such social resistance was not "conservative," as he seems to maintain, but ran the entire political spectrum. Such division - as much as state ruthlessness - explains the failure of anti-Bolshevik dissent to coalesce into meaningful opposition.

I could take his examples to task page after page. But the central dilemma is that Brovkin doesn't seem to grasp Stalin's real political genius in rising to the top of the Bolshevik food chain. True enough, Stalin instigated an "affirmative action" program in the Party and state, a bloated cadre loyal to him who knew not Lenin, Bukharin, or Trotsky. But Stalin also exploited popular anti-Bolshevism by persecuting the Old Bolsheviks; pandering to nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism; pitting urban workers against peasants and NEPmen profiteering from private markets; and also encouraging an early "youth culture" of athletics and social competition. WW II showed the limits of anti-Bolshevik sentiment against a ruthless foreign enemy, and the power of the Communist Party under Stalin to mix and mobilize old Russian nationalism with new Soviet patriotism.

In Brovkin's subchapter on p. 179 - "Was There an NEP in Industry?" - he gloats that the main fault of the Soviet economic system was its "socialism," ie, state ownership. Managers were encouraged into irresponsibility knowing the state would not let them fail. "At no time," Brovkin writes, "did NEP operate under market conditions." Fast forward some ninety years. Free market western capitalism survives its latest crash only through massive government props, because its private institutions can't be allowed to fail. CEOs are encouraged in their wasteful, thriftless, and exorbitant behavior knowing that the state safety net is there to catch them - and thereby reducing Brovkin's smug analysis of "the Soviet failure" to academic dust. That this work is highly endorsed by the Wall Street Journal underscores the irony.

There is really no evidence that a pro-capitalist regime, as understood in the West, would have fared any better in the poor, war-ravaged Russia of 1917-20. The entire revolutionary thrust from 1905 on was opposed to this very conception. Lenin's NEP resembles strongly the late-Tzarist reforms of Pyotr Stolypin, who tried healing the fracture between state and society by limited social and economic concessions. What these did do was widen the rifts in Russian society, requiring extensive repression to make them "work" until swept away in 1917. NEP's "return to normalcy" was similarly swept away by Stalin, as Western normalcy was crushed by the Depression. And now we see the Yetsin era's reform capitalism from above being swept aside by Putin's "capitalist Stalinism." Russia after Lenin is thus part of the larger pendulum of reform and reaction in Russia and globally, rather than a convenient lesson of socialist "failure" or capitalist "success." The cartoon on p. 140 - a husband beating his wife to the shock of his neighbors - seems to epitomize this cyclical dilemma: Cossack vs. Jew; commissar vs. kulak; or professor vs. photo-shop clerk.