Lenin admitted that the Constituent Assembly was, in theory, the highest expression of bourgeois democracy, but in the circumstances its composition would lead directly to counter-revolution and the restoration of some form of the old regime. By the end of the fifth five-year plan (1951–55), socialist industry was producing almost three-fourths of the social product of the USSR. The Russian Revolution was undeniably the most radical ever. Find more similar words at wordhippo.com! Nineteenth-century working class Russians were factory workers, sailors and certified artisans. The defeat of the revolution of 1905 initially threw the country into a period of deep reaction driven by counter-revolution. On Feb. 27–28, 1917, the toiling masses, inspired by the Bolsheviks, overthrew the autocracy. In Russia, as in other countries, the proletariat (preproletariat) began to take shape in feudal society. Blog. The Bolsheviks were the only party calling for the overthrow of tsarism. The means of production were expropriated from the bourgeoisie by the working class and turned into socialist public property. Boxer is described as a hardworking, but naive and ignorant cart horse in George Orwell 's 1945 novel Animal Farm. In 1905, 2,863,000 workers took part in strikes. During the period of socialist construction the working class assumed a stronger political role in society. The period of developed socialism and the building of a communist society. If socialist revolution was to be secured in the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, formally established in 1922) or begun to be realized over the longer run, it had to undertake the socio-economic prerequisites of socialism — at minimum, the industrialization of the economy so as to produce a working-class majority. The practice of having one workman operate several machines at a time became widespread, and new forms of competition emerged, including frontline brigades; patriotic movements of those who overfulfilled the production plans by factors of two, three, five, and ten; and movements for progressive organization and technology in production. In the spring of 1919 communist subbotniki (voluntary, unpaid work on Saturdays), which Lenin termed “a great beginning” (ibid., vol. The autocracy did not allow freely contested elections to a parliament with the ability to legislate, nor legal political parties, nor minimal formal liberties of speech, assembly and press. Founded in 1895 by Lenin, the League was the embryo of a proletarian party in Russia. The liberal nobles, capitalists and professionals were in opposition and in any case lacked the capital, skills and will to do so. The legal Bolshevik newspapers Zvezda and Pravda played an important role in the political education of the Russian proletariat and in rallying the majority of class-conscious workers around the Bolshevik Party. A. G. Stakhanov, a miner, launched a movement of worker-innovators in production (the Stakhanovite movement). Almost overnight a situation called “dual power” emerged. Policies that led to the soviets losing their independence would result in transforming Russia from a commune state to one with ruled by a centralized bureaucracy. Independent working class revolutionary organizations were founded in the 1870’s, including the Union of Workers of South Russia (Odessa, 1875) and the Union of Workers of North Russia (1878). During all stages of the development of the USSR the cohesive foundation for Soviet society was the alliance of the working class and the peasantry. The mobilized masses had become increasingly combative and turned toward revolution as the Russian empire crumbled, unleashing all the political and economic difficulties of military defeat. Between February and October of 1917, the Bolshevik Party ballooned from 25,000 to 350,000 members. 40, p. 296). In 1897, 40 percent of the workers were literate, and in the leading branches of industry, up to 74 percent. During the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union (1941–45) the Soviet working class, guided by the Communist Party, accomplished a great feat of labor and ensured economic victory over the enemy. The characteristics of Russia’s economic development, especially the combination of developed capitalist relations with widespread embryonic forms of capitalism, impeded the growth of class consciousness among the proletariat but resulted in the development of closer ties in Russia than in any other country between the working class and its vanguard and the millions of peasants. Revolution in Germany in the early 1930s or Spain in the middle 1930s could have been possible, saving the Russian revolution and sparing the world from the nightmare to come. The Russian Revolution. A party stratum developed among the workers. The movement toward revolution by the working class was facilitated, perhaps paradoxically, by the underdeveloped nature of Russian society compared to the West. The Left SRs and Left Communists argued against the “peace of shame,” as they called the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Owing to changes in the position of classes and social groups, the working class is growing closer to the kolkhoz peasantry and the intelligentsia in social status, the conditions and character of labor, standard of living, education, and culture. By the end of the Civil War, famine and epidemic had taken hold; the economy was in ruins. In the early 1800s, Russian leaders developed trading relationships with other European nations, exporting large amounts of grain and timber. At the beginning of 1973,66 percent of the workers had a complete or incomplete secondary or higher education (in 1939,8.4 percent, and in 1959, 38.6 percent). Leaders like Lenin and Trotsky understood the problem and saw it could only be overcome if the revolution spread to countries where capitalism was developed and workers were closer to being a majority. It has also been revealed that the strength of the proletariat in the process of history is immeasurably greater than its share of the total population” (ibid., vol. The solidarity of the proletariat was promoted by the growing concentration of production at the end of the 19th century, when the 458 largest enterprises employed more than 1,155,000 people. The 1950’s were marked by the enhancement of the leading position of the working class in society. Class Structure in 19th Century Russia Overview of Russia in the 19th Century European Class Structure before and during the 19th Century Ruled by Tsar Alexander I from 1801-1825 Russo-Turkish war, Russo-Swedish war, & Napoleon invades Russia. But the victory would have been that of the Red Army, not the Polish workers. In short, Lenin called for the overthrow of the provisional government and its replacement with a communist form of government led by the working class. At the opposite pole were the workers’ councils, and specifically the Petrograd Soviet, directly representing the radical revolutionizing working class. The fierce resistance of the overthrown classes made it necessary for the working class to mobilize its best cadres into the Red Army. They expressed the aspirations of the workers and potential for power. According to Lenin, the Revolution of 1905–07 was unusual because it was bourgeois democratic in its tasks but proletarian in its motive forces and means of struggle. In Germany, the main hope, the revolutionary possibility breathed its last in 1923. During the 1890s and early 1900s, bad living and working conditions, high taxes, and land hunger gave … Russian workers developed their politics, their leaderships, and their power to fight the employers and the state at the same time. The working class of the relatively new industrial centers went through waves of discontent from 1900 to the offset of the revolution. These insurrectionary general strikes, with council power, were inspired by the Russian Revolution and aimed to extend it to Europe, the Americas and beyond. From 1918-1920 revolutionary crises rocked Europe’s capitals. The tragedy of the defeated revolutionary insurrections in Europe was that it threw the Russian revolutionary leadership back on its own resources, in domestic circumstances of political isolation that were decreasingly favorable for pushing the revolution forward. In the first six months of the war, 1,523 industrial enterprises, including 1,360 large, primarily military enterprises, were evacuated from the western regions to the eastern regions of the country. Lenin, Evgeny Preobrazhensky. Within three weeks Lenin had a majority in the party, and the program was for power, a democratic proletarian and peasant soviet republic, with the hegemony of the working class at its center.(2). The Morozov strike of 1885 (in present-day Orekhovo-Zue-vo), an important landmark in the development of the proletarian movement, was followed by major strikes in the Central Industrial Region and by the intensification of the workers’ struggle in St. Petersburg, the Ukraine, and the Baltic region. 18, 26, 27), were widely introduced. As a result of measures adopted by the party, by 1950 there were 40.4 million factory workers and office employees in the national economy, or 6.5 million more than the prewar figure. The working-class movement, which was led by the Bolsheviks, grew stronger (270,000 workers participated in strikes at the beginning of 1917); the army fell apart; and peasant disturbances increased. Between 1928 and 1940 the number of workers, including junior service personnel, increased by a factor of 2.7 in the USSR as a whole, 2.6 in the RSFSR, 6.4 in the Uzbek SSR, 3.6 in the Kazakh SSR, 4.3 in the Kirghiz SSR, and 3.4 in the Tadzhik SSR. The center of the world revolutionary movement shifted to Russia. The Bolsheviks, as Marxists, understood that there could be no socialism without democracy. The corresponding figure for the people’s commissariats of the defense industry was 565 percent. The other component of the dual power system was the Provisional Government, the agency of rule by the bourgeoisie and landlords. Unless new elections were called, the assembly, dominated by Right SRs who opposed the soviets, should not be allowed to continue. The working class declined considerably as a result of the collapse of the economy, famine, the closing of factories, and the departure of experienced workers for the front and for the requisitioning detachments. The tactical and strategic skill of Lenin and Trotsky was crucial to the victorious revolution, but they were only first among comrades, their leadership and that of the Bolsheviks based on the effectiveness of their activity. In the early months, direct democracy prevailed. Fanya Dora Kaplan, who shot Lenin, said she did it because he was responsible for dispersing the Constituent Assembly. Fyodor Dostoevsky is born in 1821. Lenin noted that in the fall of 1905 “it [the Bolshevik Party] became the party of the millions of the proletariat” (ibid., vol. In 1937 there were 17.5 million workers, and in 1940, 19.7 million. The Sixth Congress of the RSDLP(B) adopted a line of armed uprising. The Narodniks (Populists) conducted revolutionary propaganda among the workers. By October 1917 workers made up 76.7 percent of the Bolsheviks’ Petrograd organization. What could be more dangerous than workers demanding control over their work and their lives? From the 1860’s to the early 1890’s the struggle of the proletariat against capitalist exploitation was primarily economic. The Bolsheviks, who played a central role in the February revolution, stuck to the Marxist orthodoxy to which they had committed themselves a decade earlier — the revolution would be “bourgeois democratic” (i.e. If it isn’t democratic, it isn’t socialism. In the 17th-18th centuries serfs constituted the majority of the laborers in the manufactories and mills in the Urals and in the cities of central and northern Russia. The working class has always been the most revolutionary, most organized, most unified, and most disciplined class, possessing political maturity and a collectivist psychology. Militant workers across the West saw the Russian working class as a model and appropriated this novel, profoundly democratic form of organization, the soviet, as a new tool in the arsenal of class struggle. The world’s leading capitalist regimes redoubled their efforts to destroy its inner life and dynamism, leaving it to decay of its own accord, even as they sustained permanent pressure on it from outside. But armed opposition also came from the bourgeois-liberal Kadets as well as factions of Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and even some anarchists. From the beginning of the Revolution of 1905–07 the Russian proletariat, led by the Bolshevik Party, emerged as the main force in the struggle against the autocracy, as the hegemon of the revolution, leading the peasantry and the semiproletarian masses of the city. Ironically, to counteract and preclude the “soviet threat,” Western capitalist regimes conceded to social democratic reforms fought for by organized labor — often socialists in the labor movement. 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