The Soviet Union in Its Project and Reality: Philosophical-Historical Notes

ABSTRACT

Philosophical analysis of the Soviet Union as a phenomenon is relevant in light of the approaching centennial of its formation. The significance of this event derives from the Soviet Union’s enormous scale and historically, qualitatively unique formation that included many dozens of nations and nationalities. This formation replaced the equally enormous Russian Empire but arose not due to natural development but on its ruins, by the means of a European Marxism adapted to domestic conditions. Nowhere in the world have societies and states like the Soviet Union arisen spontaneously, while the Eastern European “people’s democracy” countries created after the Second World War repeatedly attempted to free themselves from the kinship and dominance of the Soviet Union and would disappear immediate with its collapse.

In this article, the question of what the Soviet Union was in its project and reality is discussed in the following contexts: Marxist solutions to Russia’s agrarian question and their subsequent internationalization to create a “world union of workers and peasants” (V.I. Lenin); analysis of the principle of forced labor as the primary means of creating the “socialist working man”; the formation of the Soviet Union as a “quasi-federal” community of peoples “national in form, socialist in content”; and the forced inclusion of Eastern European peoples in the emerging “world Soviet Union” as “payment” for their liberation from fascism. This article justifies the claim that without analysis of the essential role of these ideas and phenomena, one could hardly expect to gain a holistic understanding of the nature of the Soviet Union.

KEYWORDS:

• Soviet Union
• Soviet
• society
• state
• man
• agrarian question
• coercion
• nationality
• philosophy
• history

Notes

1. In philosophical terms, “the Soviet” is a system of closely intertwined philosophical, sociopolitical, and economic ideas, fantasies, and social practices. One part of the Soviet is the ideas and values consonant with the ideals of goodness, justice, and love. Another is of the opposite sort, the product of evil, hatred, and lies. Therefore, it is difficult to reach an unambiguous verdict in almost any kind of reasoning over this phenomenon, and just as difficult to accept, without reservations, the point of view of any one party in this debate. We should nevertheless make the attempt, taking into consideration the phenomenon’s duality, since it is this duality that characterizes both its particular qualities and its vital nature.

2. T. Martin, Imperiia “polozhitel’noi deiatel’nosti.” Natsii i natsionalizm v SSSR, 1923–1939 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2011), p. 26.

3. See, for example, the following works: V.P. Danilov, Istoriia krest’ianstva Rossii v XX veke. Izbrannye trudy: v 2-kh ch. (Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsiklopediia (ROSSPEN), 2011); T. Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism (Routledge, UK; Monthly Review, US, 1984); Neudobnyi klass: politicheskaia sotsiologiia krest’ianstva v razvivaiushchemsia obshchestve: Rossiia, 1910–1925 (Moscow: Delo, 2019); N.A. Ivnitskii, Golod 1932–1933 godov v SSSR (Moscow: Sobranie, 2009); V.P. Buldakov, Krasnaia smuta. Priroda i posledstviia revoliutsionnogo nasiliia (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010); Utopiia, agressiia, vlast’. Psikhosotsial’naia dinamika postrevoliutsionnogo vremeni. Rossiia 1920–1930 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2012).

4. F. Engel’s [Engels], “Posleslovie k rabote ‘O sotsial’nom voprose v Rossii,’” in K. Marks and F. Engel’s, Sochineniia, vol. 22 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1962), p. 438.

5. How the historical heritage makes itself felt among younger generations centuries later is a separate issue that cannot be unpacked with metaphors like “cultural code.”

6. V.I. Lenin, “Tri istochnika i tri sostavnykh chasti marksizma,” in V.I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 23 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1973), p. 43.

7. K. Marks [Marx], F. Engel’s, “Manifest kommunisticheskoi partii,” in Marks and Engel’s, Sochineniia, vol. 4 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1955), p. 438.

8. F. Engel’s, “Emigrantskaia literatura,” in Marks and Engel’s, Sochineniia, vol. 18 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1961), pp. 545–546.

9. K. Marks, “Pis’mo v redaktsiiu ‘Otechestvennykh zapisok,’” in Marks and Engel’s, Sochineniia, vol. 19 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1961), pp. 119–120.

10. V.V. Kabanov, Krest’ianskoe khoziastvo v usloviiakh “voennogo kommunizma” (Moscow: Nauka, 1988) and Krest’ianskaia obshchina i kooperatsiia Rossii XX veka (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 1997).

11. Buldakov, Krasnaia smuta. Priroda i posledstviia revoliutsionnogo nasiliia.

12. Many domestic writers, like Maxim Gorky in his works The Life of Matvei Kohzemiakin and The Three, testified to the fact that the Russian people were already receptive to an “each man for himself” struggle, especially at the beginning of the twentieth century.

13. “The formation of committees of the poor in the countryside,” Lenin wrote, “was a turning point … to a much more difficult, historically loftier [than the victory over landowners], and truly socialist task: both to introduce a conscious socialist struggle into the rural areas and to awaken the rural consciousness,” to establish, ultimately, a “socialist order.” Lenin said the “kombed” would grow into “fully empowered rural Soviets of deputies that will carry out the main principles of Soviet construction—the power of the working people—in the village; herein is the real guarantee that we have not limited our work in the way that usual bourgeois-democratic Western European countries have. Having abolished the monarchy and the medieval power of the landowners, we now move on to the cause of genuine socialist construction.” V.I. Lenin, “Rech’ na I-om Vserossiiskom s”ezde zemel’nykh otdelov, komitetov bednoty i kommun 11 dekabria 1918 g.,” in Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 37 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1969), pp. 354–355. To this end, Lenin and Ya.M. Sverdlov signed a June 11, 1918, Decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee organizing “kombeds” in villages in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic; their duty was to “assist local food authorities in the seizure of grain surpluses.” In practice, some twenty-five percent of the seized grain remained at their disposal. See Sobranie ukazanii i rasporiazhenii rabochego za krest’ianskogo pravitel’stva za 1917–1918 gg. (Moscow: Izdanie Upravleniia delami Sovnarkoma SSSR, 1942), p. 584.

14. F. Engel’s, “Rudol’fu Meieru, 19 iullia,” in Marks and Engel’s, Sochineniia, vol. 39 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1966), p. 88. (English translation: Engels to Rudolph Meyer, 19 July 1893, in Marx & Engels. Collected Works, Vol. 50: Letters 1892–1895, ed. I. Shikanyan, V. Kunina, and B. Tartakovsky (Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), p. 169.).

15. Engel’s, “Rudol’fu Meieru, 19 iullia,” pp. 88–89.

16. F. Engel’s, “Krest’ianskii vopros vo Frantsii i Germanii,” in Marks and Engel’s, Sochineniia, vol. 22 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1962), p. 521. (English translation: F. Engels, “The Peasant Question in France and Germany,” in Marx & Engels. Collected Works, Vol. 27: Engels 1890–95, ed. B. Tartakovsky and V. Smirnova (Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), pp. 496, 498.).

17. VKP(b) stood for Vsesoiuznaia Kommunisticheskaia Partiia (bol’shevikov), or the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), but these peasants read it as Vtoroe Krepostnoe Pravo (Bolsheviks).—Trans.

18. According to a Statement of the State Duma dated April 2, 2008, “In Memory of the Victims of the Famine of the 30s on the Territory of the Soviet Union”: “As a result of the famine caused by forced collectivization, many regions of the RSFSR (the Volga region, the Central-Chernozemnaia oblast, the Northern Caucasus, the Urals, Crimea, parts of Western Siberia), Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus suffered. In the years 1932–33, about seven million people died there from hunger and disease.” Postanovlenie GD FS RF ot 2.04.2008 no. 262-5 GD “O zaiavlenii gosudarstvennoi dumy federal’nogo sobraniia rossiiskoi federatsii “Pamiati zhertv goloda 30-kh godov na territorii SSSR” (available at https://duma.consultant.ru/page.aspx?955838).

19. M. Omarov, Rasstreliannaia step’. Istoriia Adaevskogo vosstaniia 1931 goda. Po materialam OGPU (Almaty: Gylym, 1994).

20. Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, vol. 1 (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1957), p. 322.

21. Ibid., p. 249.

22. L. Trotskii [Trotsky], “Perekhod k vseobshchei trudovoi povinnosti v sviazi s militsionnoi sistemoi,” in L. Trotskii, Sochineniia, Vol. 15: Khoziaistvennoe stroitel’stvo Sovetskoi respubliki (Epokhi voennogo kommunizma. 1919–1920 gg.) (Moscow; Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1927), p. 11.

23. Contemporaries were critical of the name “New Economic Policy” from the moment of its adoption: the “new” policy was merely a return to pre-revolutionary market policy.

24. L. Trotskii, “Organizatsiia truda” (Doklad na IX s”ezde RKP(b) i zakliuchitel’noe slovo),” in Trotskii, Sochineniia, vol. 15, p. 139.

25. Trotskii, “Organizatsiia truda,” p. 140.

26. S.A. Nikol’skii, “Rossiiskaia filosofiia istorii: opyt ponimaniia,” Filosofskii zhurnal, 2018, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 115–128.

27. Martin, Imperiia “polozhitel’noi deiatel’nosti,” p. 177.

28. Ibid., p. 24. (English original: T. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 12–13.).

29. Dvenadtsatyi s”ezd RKP(b): Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Politizdat, 1968), p. 613.

30. To function successfully, the dictatorship of the proletariat (of the party) had to be identified with the historically rooted great-power chauvinism that dominated in the Russian Empire. For the success of that dictatorship, it also required avoiding the historical comparison, a belittling of Russian national self-consciousness, and pursuing a policy of “affirmative action.” This is how the national structure of the former empire was ultimately preserved.

31. Martin, Imperiia “polozhitel’noi deiatel’nosti,” pp. 47–104.

32. “It is not out of the question that shootings on the streets of Budapest were a Soviet provocation aimed at justifying military intervention by Soviet troops.” Z. Mlynarzh [Mlynář], Moroz udaril iz Kremlia (Moscow: Respublika, 1992), p. 185.

33. Ibid., p. 4.

34. Ibid., p. 13.

35. Ibid.

36. “In the summer of 1955, Antonin Novotný began pursuing a hard line to complete collectivization of agriculture, and the millstones of police and judicial terror directed against peasants who did not want to join agricultural cooperatives were in full swing. In what was then Czechoslovakia, Stalin’s theory of an ‘aggravation of the class struggle’ en route to the successful path to socialism remained the officially professed ideology. After Stalin’s death, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia saw its task in progressively continuing and completing the work of the ‘leader of the world proletariat.’” Mlynarzh, Moroz udaril iz Kremlia, p. 29.

37. “The totalitarian system was an alien system imported from the outside (from the Soviet Union), while the domestic historical tradition gravitated toward a pluralistic, democratic society, at least over the last fifty years.” Mlynarzh, Moroz udaril iz Kremlia, p. 82.

38. Ibid., p. 259.