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2. INTRODUCTION TO SOVIET HISTORY
PART 1, 1917-1941
CLASS PRESENTATIONS
• 10 minutes on a subject relating to the week’s theme
OR
• 5-10 minutes on a specialist subject of the presenter’s
choice
• Presentations can be individual or joint
• Contact me for advice or to look over your presentation
• Everybody should try to give one presentation over the
course of the year
LECTURES AND SEMINARS: TERM 1
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Date
SUBJECT
1
29 Sept
Introduction
2
6 Oct
Soviet History I
3
13 Oct
Soviet History II
4
20 Oct
Pre-revolutionary Precedents
5
27 Oct
Avant-Gardes in Poetry and Prose
6
3 Nov
READING WEEK
7
10 Nov
Avant-Gardes in Visual Culture
8
17 Nov
Avant-Gardes in Film and Music
9
24 Nov
From Avant-Garde to Socialist Realism
10 1 Dec
Socialist Realism
11 8 Dec
Case Study: The Stalin Cult
LECTURES AND SEMINARS: TERM 2
Date
SUBJECT
12
12 Jan
The Thaw
13
19 Jan
Khrushchev-era Film
14
26 Jan
‘Developed Socialism’ or Stagnation
15
2 Feb
Underground Literature
16
9 Feb
Underground Art: Sotsart, Moscow
Conceptualism
17
16 Feb
READING WEEK
18
23 Feb
Underground Music
19
2 Mar
Perestroika
20
9 Mar
Perestroika Film
21
16 Mar
Post-Socialism
22
23 Mar
Conclusions
SOVIET HISTORY TIMELINE
1914-1918
WORLD WAR I
Feb 1917
FEBRUARY REVOLUTION
Oct 1917
OCTOBER REVOLUTION
1918-1921
CIVIL WAR (WAR COMMUNISM)
1921-1927
NEW ECONOMIC POLICY (NEP)
1924
LENIN’S DEATH: BATTLE FOR SUCCESSION
c. 1927
STALIN’S DICTATORSHIP
1928-1932
THE ‘GREAT BREAK
1935
PURGE OF ‘LEFT OPPOSITION’
1936
NEW ‘STALIN’ CONSTITUTION
1937-38
GREAT TERROR
1939
MOLOTOV-RIBBENTROP PACT
June 1941
GERMANY INVADES RUSSIA
A PERIOD OF DILEMMAS, 1921-29
The State
• How to consolidate state power?
• Who is fit to lead?
Foreign Policy
• World revolution or ‘socialism in one country’?
Economics
• Private trade or centralization?
Society
• How to mould a new individual and a new society?
How did Soviet authorities attempt to mould
a new individual and a new society after the
Civil War?
• Education
•
Mass literacy campaigns
•
The ‘Complex Method’
• Public Health
•
Improvements in childcare
•
Anti alcohol campaigns
• Redefinition of the Family
•
Legalisation of abortion
•
Liberalisation of divorce laws
• Attacks on religion
• New forms of propaganda and indoctrination
TENSIONS IN SOVIET CULTURE
• Initiative v Control
• Entertainment v Education
• Utopia v Reality
• Revolution v Consolidation
• Experiment v Tradition
• Highbrow v Popular
KEY DILEMMAS OF NEP
• Power: institutions or individuals?
• Party: Ideological purity or strength in
numbers?
• Economy: capitalism or socialism?
• Society: Stability or radicalism?
• Geography: Centre or periphery?
CONSTRUCTING STALINISM, 1929-1941
• Five Year Plan and Collectivization
• What were they?
• Why were they carried out?
• What were the effects?
• Why might this be called a period of flux?
• Population movements
• ‘Cultural revolution’
• The Great Terror
• Rhetoric of the enemy (whether ethnic or class-based)
• What were the mechanisms of social cohesion in this period?
• Cult of the hero
• Hierarchy
• Mass participation and mass culture
MASS CONSTRUCTION CAMPAIGNS
CULT OF THE HERO
MASS PARTICIPATION RITUALS
CULTURAL REVOLUTION
•
Attack on ‘bourgeois specialists’
•
Battle within institutions over correct interpretation
of Marxism
•
Promotion of proletarian workers [vydvizhentsy] to
white-collar positions
THE SHAKHTY TRIAL (1928)
GREAT TERROR
Multiple interpretations:
• An event staged by Stalin (beginning with murder of Kirov) to
consolidate his rule
• The result of the failure to ‘renovate’ the Party
• Ezhov’s own agenda?
• Tension between two models of rule, autocratic v bureaucratic
Key questions:
• What was Stalin’s role? How involved was he?
• How much social support was there for the Terror?
• What were the broader structural/cultural factors that allowed it to
take place?
HOW WAS THIS CHAOS REFLECTED IN
THE ARTS?
• Tradition or experiment (revolution)?
• Proletarian or bourgeois?
• Russian or western?
• Agitation or ‘spiritualism’ (or art for art’s sake)?
• Control or creativity?
AGITATION V SPIRITUALISM
TRADITION VS REVOLUTION
[W]hy, out of nowhere, did the persecution of the opera
and ballet suddenly coalesce? Is this type of art really
incompatible with the Soviet order? Or are the auditoriums
ever empty? … If it is a matter of closing the theatre for
purposes of economy, then this consideration … does not
hold up under criticism either. For who would ever think, for
example, to shut down or destroy the Rumiantsev Museum
or the public library for the purposes of economy merely on
the grounds that few workers go there? The Bolshoi Theatre
without a doubt plays no less of an educative role for its
visitors than the public library does.
Mikhail Kalinin to the Central Committee, 12 January 1923
TRADITION V EXPERIMENT
The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear. Leftist
distortion in opera stems from the same source as Leftist
distortion in painting, poetry, teaching, and science. Pettybourgeois "innovations" lead to a break with real art, real
science and real literature. […]
The composer apparently never considered the problem of
what the Soviet audience looks for and expects in music. As
though deliberately, he scribbles down his music, confusing
all the sounds in such a way that his music would reach only
the effete "formalists" who had lost all their wholesome
taste. He ignored the demand of Soviet culture that all
coarseness and savagery be abolished from every corner of
Soviet life.
‘Muddle Instead of Music’, Pravda 28 January 1936
NEXT WEEK
• Freeze (ed.), Ch. 12, pp. 319-346.
• If you get a chance, please look at the website
‘Seventeen Moments in Soviet History’, and go to the
sections on 1956 and read ‘Khrushchev’s Secret Speech’,
the ‘Hungarian Crisis’ and the ‘International Youth
Festival’ and, under 1985, read ‘Perestroika and
Glasnost’, ‘Female Sexuality’ and ‘Meltdown in
Chernobyl’.
http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1956-2/
http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1985-2/