Page 342 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

russian-soviet empire 1643

empires, while in the east, a vibrant Japan filled the vac- above that of the workers’ councils (soviets) in whose
uum created by a retreating China. Victory against name they governed. During the ensuing Civil War
Napoleon in 1812–1815 established Russia as the main (1918–1921), the Bolshevik base corresponded to the
guardian of political reaction in Europe, but exposure to old Muscovite core (with the capital reestablished in
the ideas of the French Revolution infected its own elite Moscow), and their eventual victory resulted not in
with a dissident spirit. The humiliating defeats of the worldwide revolution but in the reconquest of the czarist
Crimean War (1855) and the Russo-Japanese War (1905) empire (minus Finland, Poland, and the Baltic states).
exacerbated social discontent, as did the rapid industri- Subsequently, the Bolsheviks focused their attention on
alization program pursued under Nicholas II at the turn Asia and proclaimed Soviet Russia as the global leader of
of the twentieth century. The paradox of Russia as both the anticolonialist struggle. In the same spirit, in 1922,
backward and a colonial power widened its identity cri- they established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,
sis.The Westernizer–Slavophile debate ultimately resulted which recognized the formal sovereignty of the non-
in what some regard as a revolutionary synthesis and oth- Russian republics (including the Ukraine, Belorussia,
ers as a dead end. Transcaucasia, and Turkestan), and promoted their cul-
tural autonomy by suppressing overt Russian national-
Communist Rule ism. At the same time, central control was cemented by
Czarism succumbed to the combined pressures of the reconfiguring the Bolsheviks as the All-Union Commu-
First World War and urban unrest in 1917, but the nist Party, and the world’s first “affirmative action empire”
empire was reconstituted by the Bolshevik Party, which came into being (Martin 2001).
came to power in the October Revolution later that The Communist Party’s monopoly on power, coupled
year. As Marxists, the Bolsheviks were dedicated to the with the country’s economic collapse following seven
replacement of the world capitalist system with proletar- years of war, its international isolation as a socialist
ian democracy, but the practice of “democratic centralism” state, and the Marxist antipathy to market economics
favored by their leader Lenin (Vladimir IlyichUl·ya·nov) contributed to the USSR turning into a continuation of
(1870–1924) promoted the Party’s control over and the Russian empire. Under Joseph Stalin (1879–1953),
who emerged as Lenin’s successor by the late 1920s,
the pursuit of “socialism in one country” denoted gain-
ing complete control of the domestic economy follow-
ing the collectivization of the peasantry, establishing
Marxism-Leninism as the guiding ideology of all social
and cultural life, constructing a cult of personality, and
prosecuting mass purges and population transfers.The
autarkic imperative of Stalin’s USSR resembled that of
seventeenth-century Muscovy, and authors who char-
acterize the former as a totalitarian state explicitly

This drawing from the late 1800s depicts
a Russian peasant family. Although Russia
was urbanized and industrialized, the idea
of the Russian peasant was a common one
throughout Europe.