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1. Nicholas II, 1894-1917 – The Last of the Czars
A The Industrial Revolution i Russia went through a remarkable industrial expansion be- tween 1890 and 1904. Serge Witte, who was first Minister of Communications and then Minister of Finance from 1892 to 1903, believed that the Czarist regime of Russia could only survive on the basis of industrial expansion which could make full use of Russia's natural resources. He borrowed heavily from abroad, particularly from France, to launch his programme of economic expansion. ii As with Britain's Industrial Revolution, good communications, particularly railways, were essential, and Witte was responsible for a great programme of railway building financed by the state. This included the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway (1891-1905) and by 1905 Russia had nearly forty thousand miles of railways of which some two-thirds were owned by the state. iii Russian coal and iron industries were helped by the railway expansion and were encouraged to supply as much of the rails and equipment as possible. Discoveries of oil in Trans-caucasia, the development of textile manufactures in Moscow and in Poland and the growth of shipbuilding on the Black Seawere further examples of the new industrial expansion. In the last fifteen years of the century total industrial output nearly trebled. By 1900, between two and a half and three million worker were employed in industry compared with the half million of 1880. iv What Russia and Witte needed was sufficient time to get through the difficult period of transition which affected every European country in the early years of its industrial revolution. Heavy borrowing from abroad meant heavier taxes at home to pay the interest. This was just one more burden for the peasants who, though relieved of the poll-tax, were continually and heavily in arrears with their taxes while living in the poverty of insanitary huts on a diet of bread and potatoes. A million peasants a year went as seasonal workers into the Ukraine or moved into the cities seeking work in the new industry. The town workers suffered from low wages resulting from the influx of landless, unemployed peasants, and from harsh working conditions and long hours.
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B The Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5 i Rivalry between Japan and Russia had been bitter since the war between Japan and China in 1894-5. The complete Japanese victory in this war made Japan an equal and vital rival along-side the European powers, Britain, Russia, France and Germany, in the struggle to acquire influence and territory on the Chinese mainland. ii Whereas the other European powers were mainly interested in developing trade through control over ports and islands on the Chinese coast, Russia and Japan were the two powers by their geographical position best placed to establish control over large areas of the Chinese mainland. iii It was Russia, backed by Germany and France, who forced the Japanese in 1895 to give up some of the richest spoils of the victory over China, namely Port Arthur and the Liao-Tung peninsula. Russia now posed as the protector of China, obtained vital financial and railway concessions and made a secret treaty of alliance with the Pekin government (1896). Russian influence spread into the whole of Manchuria and in 1898 Russia obtained a twenty-five-year lease of Port Arthur and Talienwan. The Japanese position in Korea was threatened by the Russian advance in Manchuria and they made their alliance with England in 1902 as a safeguard against the war with Russia they expected might come. iv In Russia, Witte was opposed to a war which he knew would endanger his whole economic programme. He was overthrown in 1903 and the Czar was dominated by advisers contemptuous of the Japanese and eager to advance into China by outright territorial annexation. Negotiations were carried on between Japan and Russia over Manchuria from August 1903 to February 1904 when war broke out. v The Japanese fleet torpedoed the Russian fleet at Port Arthur and their armed forces cleared Korea of Russian troops. Another Japanese army landed on the Liao-Tung peninsula, cut off Port Arthur from Russian help and drove the Russians back to Mukden, leaving a third Japanese force to attack Port Arthur which fell on January 1, 1905. Two Japanese armies now joined to crush the Russian forces at Mukden (March 1905). vi The Russian Baltic fleet which had sailed from Europe in October 1904 and had fired on a flotilla of British fishing smacks off the Dogger bank (October 21) was crushed by the Japanese fleet in the straits of Tsushima (May 1905) when it finally reached Japanese waters. & vii The war ended with the Treaty of Portsmouth (New Hampshire, August 1905), the U.S.A. having acted as mediator between the two nations. Japan gained the island of Sakhalin and Port Arthur. Korea was recognized as a Japanese sphere of influence. Though both powers agreed to evacuate Manchuria, Russia held on to her mastery of Northern Manchuria.
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C Events leading to the First Duma (Parliament), 1904-6 ii Russian defeats in the war brought discontent in town and countryside to a head. In July 1904, Plehve, the Minister of the Interior, was assassinated. In November 1904, represen-tatives of the Zemstva called for a freely elected, represen-tative National Assembly. The fall of Port Arthur led to a great demonstration in front of the Winter Palace in Moscow (January 1905). The troops opened fire on the crowd and this led to a wave of strikes and violence. Many police officials were shot and the Governor-General of Moscow, uncle of the Czar, was killed by a bomb. In March 1905, the Czar agreed to set up a National Assembly but it was to be purely advisory and elected on a narrow franchise. ii This disappointment provoked further violence. The crew of the Battleship Potemkin mutinied (June 1905) and seized the ship, finally seeking refuge in a Rumanian port. The peasants rose in the provinces and expelled landowners from their estates. In October 1905, a general strike in St. Petersburg brought the city to a standstill. ii The government of St. Petersburg was taken over by a worker's council or Soviet in which Trotsky was the leading figure. The Soviet brought together the various revolutionary groups in-cluding the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. The former tried to exert control through industrial activity and the formation of Trade Unions; the latter were a more extreme group who preached armed revolt and tried to work on the discontent of the peasants iv By the October Manifesto (1905) the government promised a Duma or National Parliament with real legislative power and based on a franchise including professional and working classes. In the face of this concession the rebels lost their unity and the government crushed the revolt in town and countryside.
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D The Dumas (National Parliaments), 1906-17 i England needed centuries to work out a stable Parliamentary system. France was still struggling a hundred years after the Revolution to build a secure and effective system of government Russia had only eleven years to practise Parliamentary government before the experiment crashed in war and revolution. ii The first Duma lasted from May to July 1906. Its four hundred members were predominantly progressive with a large liberal and labour representation. Demands were put forward that the Czar's ministers should be responsible to the Duma and that the Duma should have full control over law making and finance. The demands were refused and the Duma dissolved. Nearly half of its members withdrew over the Russian border to Finland and called on the Russian people to resist, but the mass of the people were not interested in constitutional technicalities. iii Stolypin, the new Russian chief Minister, adopted a policy of ruthless order on the one hand and of agrarian reform on the other. He was prepared to work with the Duma but his manipulation of elections only made the second Duma (March- June 1907) more difficult to deal with. The Social Democratic party gained over fifty seats. Unable to get support for his agrarian reforms or a promise to end terrorism, Stolypin charged the Social Democrats with disloyalty to the state and dissolved the Duma. iv Before the Third Duma (1907-12) the electproal laws were altered to the the major influence to the landowners. Stolypin gained support for his agrarian reforms. The peasants were given individual ownership of their lands and, to ease the shortage of land, crown and state lands were transferred to the Peasant Land Bank for sale to peasant buyers. Migration to the new lands opened up in Siberia was strongly encouraged. v The Fourth Duma was very similar in composition to the third. It did, however, suggest minor administrative reforms and make some criticism of the central government, but the Russian Parliaments had neither the time to gain control of the government nor to sink real roots down among the people. The peasants were interested only in land. The town workers thought of economic control, of economic and social levelling. Relatively few outside the educated minority had any strong abiding interest in political liberty or individual rights as such. vi The Czar himself and his immediate advisers, with the exception of Witte who was dismissed and Stolypin who was assassinated in 1911, were never prepared to make any real political com- promise. They also failed to give full support to industrial development or to the building up of satisfied peasant land-owners. These two policies, the policies of Witte and of Stolypin, were the only means of saving Czarist rule, and for both of them, time and the avoidance of war were essential. The blindness of the Czarist regime to the imperious necessity of taking time by the forelock caused the Reform movement to develop into a Revolution (1917) which destroyed not only the monarchy but the structure of Russian society itself.
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2. Revolution in Russia, 1917
A The Background of Revolt i Two revolutions occurred in Russia in 1917. The first broke out on March 8 and the second on November 7. The Russians, going by the old-style Russian calendar, date them towards the end of February and the end of October and therefore call them the February and October revolutions. ii Russian losses in the First World War were very heavy and much of the country was overrun by the enemy, including large food growing areas. The long strain of war and defeat caused the breakdown of transport and supplies including arms and ammunition. Food was short both at home and at the front. The government was discredited and its authority weakened. iii The disasters and hardships of the war brought the old social and economic problems of Russia to the fore once again. Russia was still a predominantly rural country. The peasants' most bitter problem, the shortage of land, was made worse by the growth of population in the pre-war years and by the dislocation of war. Large numbers of landless and unemployed rural workers flocked to the urban centres, both before and during the war, to swell the discontent in town and factory, or were swept into the army as unwilling soldiers, while their poverty-stricken families eyed with envy the widespread estates of the large landowners. iv In the towns since the end of the nineteenth century, the factory worker had been suffering the usual hardships of the early stages of an `Industrial Revolution'. Low wages, depressed by the influx of unemployed peasants, were coupled with long hours and harsh working conditions, and strikes had been the prelude to revolution in St. Petersburg as far back as 1905. There was an unusually high proportion of large factories in Russia employing over one thousand workers, so that the concentration of discontent on a large scale led more easily to the organization of the worker, in trade unions, in Soviets or workers' councils and in revolt. To discontented land-hungry peasants and ill-fed factory workers, the war added the mutinous remnants of what had been a great army, soldiers who were too weary to fight, soldiers who had neither arms or ammunition to fight with, soldiers who wanted peace, not war.
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B The March (February) Revolution, 1917 i On March 8, 1917, the women textile workers in Petrograd (previously called St. Petersburg) came out on strike demanding food. Other workers joined the strike and with students added demands for the overthrow of the government. Some regiments of the local garrison supported the discontented workers. The Czar tried in vain to find loyal troops to put down the rising and he abdicated on March 15. ii A new provisional government was formed of liberal, middle class ministers. Kerensky, who was Minister of Justice, then Minister of War finally became Prime Minister and head of the new government, which at first enjoyed considerable support. The Petrograd Soviet made up of workers' and soldiers' deputies, elected in factories, workshops and barracks, gave it their backing. Soviets were elected in all the large towns. They were `popular parliaments' but they excluded the middle class and the aristocracy and as they came more under the control of the Bolsheviks led by Lenin and Trotsky they began to challenge the authority of the provisional government. iii Kerensky's government, with its headquarters in the Winter Palace of Petrograd, was made up of liberals and moderate socialists. Though they held office and the trappings of government they were challenged by the army officers and by the aristocracy who opposed the revolution as well as by the workers who had made the revolution. Like many middle class liberal governments, failure to set up a strong, permanent government and mistakes in policy caused their support to melt away.
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C Events Leading to the 'October' (November) Revolt, 1917 i Kerensky and his government decided to continue the war with renewed vigour, but further defeats in July made the war still more unpopular. The peasants, disappointed by Kerensky in their hunger for land, began to seize the large estates, many of whose owners had fled to the towns on the outbreak of revolution. The 'Agrarian Terror' brought further discredit to the Provisional government which was now under strong attack from both left and right-wing forces. ii On March 12, Stalin had arrived in Petrograd to be joined by Lenin in April, and by Trotsky a month later. A new Central Committee of the Bolshevik party was set up in April and this committee had behind it the support of 76,000 key men in industry, transport and the army. The Bolsheviks were challenged by the Mensheviks, moderate socialists, who supported the provisional government and saw a period of democratic rule as a basic stage of the revolution. Lenin and Trotsky wanted to jump straight into a dictatorship of the workers which would remove the middle class and their socialist supporters. Even the Bolsheviks themselves were divided on the point as to whether another revolt should be immediately rushed through. A rising of the rank and file, which the leaders did not really want, was crushed. Lenin had to go into hiding but the defeat of the July rising was not a serious setback. iii In August 1917, Kerensky asked General Kornilov to send reliable troops to the capital to crush the Bolsheviks. The General wanted to rid the country not only of Bolsheviks but of Socialists, Liberals and Kerensky's government as well. He withdrew his allegiance from the government and ordered his troops to march on Petrograd. Kerensky had now to ask the Bolsheviks for help. All socialist forces united against Kornilov whose 'counter-revolution' was crushed, but the Bolsheviks came out of the affair as the real defenders of the March revolution. They now outnumbered the moderate Mensheviks in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets. iv Trotsky who had been imprisoned following the July rising was released and became President of the Petrograd Soviet. The war continued to go badly and a suggestion by Kerensky to remove the government from Petrograd to Moscow allowed the Bolsheviks to take on the role of defenders of the capital. They set up a Military Revolutionary Committee in Petrograd and organized their supporters in military formations. In October 1917, the Bolshevik Central Committee voted for revolution against Kerensky and his government
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i Kerensky's government decided to strike back and closed the newspaper offices run by Stalin in Petrograd. 'A piece of official sealing wax on the door of the Bolshevik editorial room as a military measure - this was not much. But what a superb signal for battle!' (Trotsky - History of the Russian Revolution, quoted by Deutscher). All strategic points, bridges, railway stations and post offices were occupied without a shot by troops under Trotsky's command. It was all rather unreal. Even the bombardment of the Winter Palace, the seat of the Provisional government, was carried out with dud shells from the rebel cruiser Aurora. The revolt occurred on the night of November 6-7, or, as the Russians date it, October 24-25. ii The day after the seizure of the capital by the Bolsheviks an all-Russian Congress of Soviets gave full authority to a Council of People's Commissars with Lenin:as its President and Trotsky in charge of foreign affairs. Kerensky sent General Krasnov to recapture Petrograd but the Kronstadt naval base stood firm for the Communists. General Krasnov had to retreat and Kerensky went into exile. iii The Bolsheviks captured the Russian captial of Petrograd with surprising ease. The traditional Czarist government had broken down and Kerensky's government never obtained a real grip on the country. Russian governments had always depended on the army to crush revolution. The best troops were dead. The raw country levies were more interested in the redistribution of the land than in defending Kerensky's government. The Bolsheviks were well organized and well led. Trotsky and Stalin had been leaders of strikes, demonstrations and revolt for many years while Lenin provided the programme which the masses had been waiting for. Peace for the soldiers, land for the peasants, and political and economic control for the town worker in the dictatorship of the proletariat, this was indeed a popular policy in all senses.
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E Lenin - Leader of Revolution, 1870-1924 i Born of middle class parents, Lenin had studied at St. Petersburg University. He became a Socialist leader and was exiled to Siberia in 1897. He left Russia and lived abroad for somes years until his dramatic journey in a sealed train across Europe from Switzerland in 1917 brought him back to Petrograd. He quickly became the accepted leader of the Bolsheviks and a key figure in shaping their policy. It was Lenin who decided that 'We don't need any bourgeois democracy. We don't need any government except the Soviet of workers', soldiers' and farmhands' deputies' (Lenin, quoted by Lipson). ii Lenin lost no time in making the most of the Bolshevik victory. As President of the Council of People's Commissars and with the power of the Russian Soviets behind him, he ended the war by making the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. He cancelled the landlords' rights of ownership to their land and handed their estates over to the peasants without compensation. The old Czarist machinery of government was wiped out and replaced by workers' councils. The Czar and his family were killed.
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3. The Civil War in Russia, 1918-21
A The Cost of Bolshevik Revolt i Russia paid the real cost of the Bolshevik revolt in three years of savage civil war. Landlord, noble, officer, merchant, middle class, all the groups who opposed Lenin's decrees and Bol-shevik terror, united with support from England and France to resist the revolutionary forces. 'White Russia', under General Denikin in the south and Admiral Kolchak in Siberia, put its forces in the field against 'Red Russia', so that terror, famine and destruction were spread through the land. ii The Bolsheviks won the final victory. The support of the peasants and the great size of the country helped them to hold on in the early stages when they were at their weakest. The build-up of the Red Army by Trotsky with a fighting spirit simi-lar to that of the armies of the French revolution, the cruelty of the White troops which only conjured up the worst memories of the Czarist regime, the presence of foreign troops fighting for the White Russians which gave the Bolsheviks the role of patriots, and the horrors of the Civil War on both sides which brought foreign intervention to an end : these were the factors which gave the Bolsheviks the final mastery.
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4. Post-war Reconstruction under Lenin, 1921-24
A The New Economic Policy i During the period of the Civil War the state had taken over industry and prohibited private trade. The banks were closed and people used commodity cards, like ration cards, to obtain food, housing and transport. The peasants bore the worst burden since their crops were forcibly requisitioned though they still held on to their land. Food output, industrial production and the general prosperity of the country declined in an alarming manner. Lenin therefore decided to ease the stringency of 'war communism' and introduced his New Economic Policy in 1921. ii The new policy brought back some of the features of private enterprise. Banking and credit were restored together with the use of money for rent and wages. Retail trade revived and the peasants were allowed to sell part of their grain on the open market instead of handing it all over to the government. The state continued to control banks, mines, forests, railways and the heavy industries, iron and steel and engineering.
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5. The Rise of Stalin
A Trotsky and Stalin - Early Years to 1922 i The death of Lenin, in 1924, led to a long struggle for power between Stalin and Trotsky which was not settled until Trotsky had been expelled from Russia and Stalin came out as master in 1929. The clash between them was not only a clash of personalities but also a basic difference of approach to the organization and policy of Russia. ii Leon Trotsky was a key figure in the Russian Socialist and Bolshevik movement. Born in 1877, he played a leading part in the revolution of 1905 as chairman of the Soviet of St. Petersburg. He was exiled to Siberia but escaped and met Stalin for the first time in 1907 at the London Congress of Russian Socialists. He returned to Russia in May 1917 to join the Bolsheviks in Petrograd and became the head of the Revolutionary Military Committee and the chief organizer of the Bolshevik forces in the 'October Revolution' of 1917. He was the Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the first Soviet government, the Council of the People's Commissars of 1917. Throughout the Civil War and up to 1925 he remained head of the Red Army. iii Joseph Djugashvili, later famous as Joseph Stalin, was born at Gori, a town in Georgia in 1879. His father was a shoemaker, his mother a washerwoman. He attended the church school at God and then won a scholarship to the theological seminary at Tiflis where the family had moved. He was expelled from the seminary in 1899, probably because he had joined a secret socialist organization in the town. iv Because of his part in the May Day demonstrations at Tiflis, in 1901, he lost his job as a clerk and began to write for a socialist newspaper. He went 'underground' to escape arrest but continued to have a hand in agitation, strikes and demonstrations. He moved to Saturn where he continued to spread socialist propaganda from a secret printing press. His type was laid out in cigarette and match-boxes and on strips of paper. He was arrested in 1902 under the name of Koba, but got back to Tiflis in 1904 and became the leader of socialism in the Caucasian province. v His main role was that of writer, organizer, propagandist and administrator. He represented the Caucasian Bolsheviks at the National Bolshevik Conference in Finland, in 1905, where he met Lenin and was present at further conferences at Stockholm (1906) and London (1907) where he met Trotsky. He worked in Baku from 1907 to 1910 and was sent into exile from 1910 to 1911. He became a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee and issued the first copy of Pravda in 1912. He was exiled to Siberia in 1913 but escaped to work for his party again. He now used for the first time the name Stalin, the 'man of steel'. He went on assignments for the Bolshevik party to Cracow and Vienna but was then betrayed by a fellow-revolutionary, arrested at a harmless musical matinee and exiled to Siberia for the next four years. vi In March 1917, he was released and went to Petrograd. He was made a member of the new Bolshevik Central Committee set up in April. He was very much overshadowed by Trotsky in the October rising and in the Civil War, though in the latter period he was one of the five men, with Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev and Bukharin who formed the Politbureau, the real government of the country. It was after the Civil War and during the period of Lenin's illness (1922-4) that he rapidly moved to power. In 1922 he became the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party. As General Secretary it was Stalin's task to prepare the agenda for the Politbureau, to transmit its decisions to the lower ranks in the party, and his work brought him into contact with many thousands of party officials and functionaries.
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B The Clash on Policy - World Revolution or State Socialism i According to Marxist doctrine, which was the basis of Bolshevik thinking and principles, the revolt in Russia should be followed by the collapse of the other capitalist states of Europe and the Russian revolution would therefore be the prelude to 'World Revolution' and the revolt of the workers everywhere. To encourage revolutionary movements in other countries the Bolsheviks set up the Third (Communist) International Working Men's Association or Comintern in 1919. In spite of postwar problems the other European nations kept their capitalist economy and their democratic traditions. Russia became isolated in Europe, however, because of the fear which the policy of 'World Revolution' created among her neighbours. ii Trotsky was the leading advocate of the policy of 'World Revolution' since he maintained that a single Communist state would be too weak to survive, surrounded by capitalist enemies. Stalin, however, believed in the build-up of socialism in one country and stressed that priority should be given to the socialization of Russia and to the strengthening of her economy under the tight control of the Communist party. iii The death of Lenin, in 1924, left the leadership of the Communist party open, and the rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky moved to a climax. The Communist party feared Trotsky as the Napoleon of the Russian Revolution, as the personal dictator, the individualist in a movement that was sacredly collective. Ironically enough, Stalin, the man no one thought of, stole the part. As General Secretary he gradually destroyed all opposition to his personal rule. Trotsky lost his post as Commissar of the Red Army in 1925, was expelled from the Politbureau in 1926, driven out of the Communist party in December 1927, and exiled from Russia in 1929.
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6. Stalin's policy for Agriculture and Industry, 1929-39
A The Collective Farms i There were two agricultural revolutions in Soviet Russia. The first in 1918 took the land from the large landholders and handed it over to the peasants to be divided into smallholdings. The second revolution, brought in by Stalin in 1929, substituted collective farms for individual holdings. ii The peasant had suffered during the Civil War and even in the post-war years he found that his corn brought little reward because corn prices were very low when compared with the price of manufactured goods. The peasants therefore cut down their production of grain. In addition farming was less productive on the smallholdings compared with the crops grown on the large estates. In 1929, there was a shortage of grain and therefore of bread in the towns. The bigger farmers, the Kulaks, took advantage of the shortage to push up the prices of their grain. Stalin was faced with discontent and famine in the towns whose factory workers were the backbone of the Communist movement. iii Stalin's solution was to get rid of the Kulaks, the more prosperous farmers, to bring together smallholdings into large collective farms and to force the peasant to bring his cattle, his implements and his labour into the common pool of the collective farm. The economies of large-scale farming, mechanization, scientific methods and therefore increased food produc-tion were the advantages looked for in the collective farm. The poorer peasants still working with a wooden plough might welcome the opportunity of using the implements and tending the cattle confiscated from the Kulaks. The larger farmers, the more prosperous peasants, fought the change, killed off their cattle, left their fields untitled and brought in as little as pos-sible of their property to the collective farm. iv In 1929 and 1930, the policy of collectivization was enforced ruthlessly and by 1932 over half of all holdings had been integrated into collective farms. In the first stages nearly all the farmer's belongings were declared collective property, and he lived on a wage just like a farm labourer. In the middle thirties the members shared in the profits of the collective farm on the basis of their working contribution and they were allowed to own privately small plots of land, poultry and some cattle. Each collective farm had to deliver to the state an agreed amount of the total produce. The farms were run by a management committee supervised by the local Communist party. v Within ten years the collective farms were producing significant results. Grain crops were thirty to forty million tons higher than under individual fanning. Industry had begun to supply the tractors and combine harvesters to give Russian farming a high degree of mechanization. Large numbers of men and women had been trained to drive tractors and to manage collective farms. All opposition had been crushed and two million Kulaks, deprived of their property and debarred from the new collective farms, had been deported to Siberia or found themselves in forced labour camps.
When he embarked on his agricultural changes in 1929, Stalin found himself desperately short not only of agricultural machinery and tractors, of the petrol to drive them and of electrical power, but also of the plants, factories and power stations to produce them. In his Five-Year Plans for Russian industry he achieved a remarkable expansion of industrial production. The first Five-Year Plan concentrated on increasing the output of coal, iron and steel, the basis of modern industry. Exports were stepped up to obtain vital raw materials and consumption goods for the home market were cut down. Steel plants, factories for producing tractors and agricultural machinery, new,hydro-electric works, new railways and mines and the development of a chemical industry were all features of the ten years between 1929 and 1939. By the latter date, Russia was still behind her capitalist rivals, Germany and the U.S.A., in the production of coal, iron, steel and electrical power, but the gap between them had been narrowed significantly.
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7. The Government of Soviet Russia
A Political and Economic Control i The major problem facing the Communist leaders was how to control and administer a vast country of the size of Russia, which was a mixture of many races, religions and languages. The Constitution of 1924, which was mainly the work of Stalin, was the first real attempt to deal with the problem and it gave to Russia the name by which we know it today, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The union consisted of four republics: Russia, Transcaucasia, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia. ii The central government in Moscow controlled the military affairs, the foreign policy, foreign trade, communications and the political police in all the republics. This was done through a Commissar or Minister for each department and through a Council of Commissars similar to the British Cabinet. The local affairs of each republic such as education, justice, agriculture, local finance and labour were run locally though action had to be co-ordinated with the overall plan or policy laid down in Moscow. iii The Republics carried the title of Soviet because the whole Communist movement was based on the Workers' or Peasants' Councils or Soviets which were organized on a local basis, a provincial level and a national stage in the all-Russia Congress of Soviets. iv The name Socialist given to the republics indicated a national economy completely controlled from the centre and planned by the central government in Moscow. As a peacetime feature this was, in fact, a unique characteristic of the new Communist state. Finance, foreign trade, heavy industry, transport, mines and agriculture were all owned and eventually run by the state through the central government and the Communist party. v The turbulent history of Soviet Russia, a revolution, civil war, drastic social and economic change, and a Second World War, all packed into twenty-five years, has tended to put the real political power more and more into the hands of one political party, the Communist party, and into the hands of one political leader. Lenin was the accepted leader from 1917 to 1924, and Stalin established his personal ascendancy over all his rivals by 1929. As General Secretary of the Communist party he dominated the Central Committee of the party, and more important still was master of the Politbureau, a small group of party leaders who continued under Stalin's control to guide the basic policy of Russia. Between 1936 and 1938 he confirmed his personal supremacy by a series of purges and public trials. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, the last of the 'Old Bolsheviks', were put to death, together with seven leading generals. vi These facts must be remembered when one examines the Soviet Constitution of 1936. Law-making was put into the hands of a Supreme Soviet which had two parts, a popularly elected Soviet of the Union, and a Council of Nationalities representing the various republics on a state basis. The Supreme Soviet chose the Council of Commissars of which Stalin was the chairman. Voting for members of the Soviet of the Union was by secret ballot and each citizen, worker or peasant, had equal rights. There was, however, no opposition party. In Stalin's own words, 'In the U.S.S.R. there is ground for only one party.' The only point of an election was to choose one of a number of Communist party members put forward. Real power still lay in the Party, through its Central Committee, through the Politbureau and above all, in the hands of the General Secretary of the Party, Joseph Stalin, who stood supreme at the top of the pyramid of power.
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