Russian today
TachiYan
USSR_1_-11.pptxSoviet Economic Planning
Notable 19th century Tsars in Russia
Alexander I (1801 – 1825)
Stopped Napoleon’s invasion of Russia
Annexed parts of Poland and Finland to Russia
Nicholas I (1825 -1855)
Violently suppressed Polish and Hungarian revolutions
Alexander II (1855 – 81)
Emancipated serfs in Russia
Attempted to modernize Russia – Encourage Intellectual Elites
Built railroad network
Nicholas II (1894 – 1917) – last of Russian tsars
Most important goal was maintaining autocracy in tact for his son, Alexis
From Ivan the Great in 1465 to Nicholas II in 1917
Notion of freedom completely incompatible with autocracy
No form of opposition tolerated
In West
Rise and expansion of democracy made possible by existence of deeply rooted, enterprising, and dynamic bourgeois class
Class struggle between bourgeois (merchant manufacturers) and nobility establishment of Parliaments, democratic procedures, free enterprise
Bourgeois class brought about accumulation of capital and transformation of society
In Russia
No significant class of bourgeoisie – whose wealth derived from other sources than nobility (land)
Merchant and artisan class relatively small – economically unimportant
Why?
Why?
Industrialization was very late in Russia
No growth of urban-rural separation where urban class could develop its own autonomy from landlord nobility
Cities with high population centers were created by tsars for administrative & military concentrations, rather than for commercial purposes
Russian “middle class” largely state officials and professionals who owed existence to state function.
What factories that existed were owned by landlords who got their land from tsar. When feudalism abolished in 1860’s, glad to replace feudal relations with wage labor
Conclusion:
Russian industry did not repeat development of West but inserted itself into feudal model, where lords became factory owners and peasants wage earners
NO epoch of craft-guilds and independent merchants existed
Without this class, no challenge to hegemony of feudal (noble) privilege
When Industrialization did begin in Russia
Enormous factories were set up: comparison 1914
US: only 15% of firms hired > 1000 workers
Russia: 45% of firms hired > 1000 workers
This meant that capitalist class did not form gradually, from small shop owners to manufacturers, where accumulation of capital gradual process and INSTEAD – industrialization was abrupt in Russia
extreme concentration of industry meant no hierarchy of transitional layers in system: only landlord/industrialists tied to tsar OR 1st generation proletarians with strong ties to staring peasant parents and brothers
No layer in Russian society which corresponds to intellectuals like Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes or to a merchant class earning money independently of feudal privilege who would press for democracy
Peasantry – when “emancipated” in 1861
Had to pay for land if wanted to stay farming (impossible for most)
Millions carted off to work in landlords’ factories or in coal or gold mines where conditions were barbarian
Millions drafted into army
Working class: Concentration of labor in big factors chief factor in heightening class consciousness Relative youthfulness of workers – nothing to lose Deplorable working conditions labor strikes 1880’s – 1900’s
World War I
Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled by Emperor Franz Joseph
His nephew, Archduke Franz Ferdinand (next in line) was shot in 1914 by Gavrilo Princip, Serb, who protested Austro-Hungarian influence in Balkans
Emperor Franz Joseph declared war on Serbia. Germany joins them
Russians defend Serbia. France and England join Russians
Russia totally unprepared to fight the war:
Drafted millions of peasants
Started marching them into Germany with no arms or equipment
Russian soldiers slaughtered
March 1917 – troops in St. Petersburg mutinied
Nicholas II abdicates
Russian Duma took over – decided to increase troop size by forced conscription of more peasants
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin promised to withdraw Russia from WWI and initiate land reform and better working conditions in factories
Dec. 3, 1917 – Brest-Litovsk Treaty signed with Germany
War Communism – 1917 – 1921
Cheka marched into peasant villages and at gunpoint demanded grain, livestock
Nationalized industry – many capitalist/landlords had left Russia, so Bolsheviks took over factors and forced workers t remain
Trotsky as head of Red Army drafted civilians and forced them on work brigades to build railroad lines, dig coal, etc.
Consumer goods and food rationed
Results of War Communism
Bolsheviks able to destroy coalition of White Russian resistance to the revolution and establish its political dominance
Industrial and agricultural production drastically reduced
By early 1921 public discontent with the state of the economy had spread from the countryside to the cities, resulting in numerous strikes and protests that culminated in March of that year in the Kronshtadt Rebellion.
In response, the Bolsheviks had to adopt the New Econonic Policy and thus temporarily abandon their attempts to achieve a socialist state by government decree.
New Economic Policy (NEP) 1921 - 1928
“War Communism was thrust upon us by war and ruin. It was not, nor could it be, a policy that corresponded to the economic tasks of the proletariat. It was a temporary measure”
Policies of NEP
Tax replaced forced requisition of agricultural goods – paid in rubles
Farmers’ markets and small enterprises encouraged
State enterprises controlled the “commanding heights”
Foreign trade syndicates established to open export markets
Problems:
NEP-men
”Scissors Crisis” -
The problem was that industry was slower to recover from the Civil War than the peasant farms, whose bumper harvests of 1922 and 1923 deflated food prices. As the price of manufactures rose, the peasantry reduced its grain sales to the state depots.
Scissors Crisis - widening gap between industrial and agricultural prices which led to urban fears of a 'grain strike’. In Oct 1921, industrial prices were 290 % of their 1913 levels, whereas agricultural prices in the state sector were at only 89 %.
Transition to Command Economy and Central Planning
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin dies 1924
Joseph Stalin outmaneuvers his rivals for control of the Communist Party
Once in power, he collectivized farming and had potential enemies executed or sent to forced labor camps
Forced industrialization of the Soviet Union through the creation of administrative command economy : 1928 – 1940
Collectivization and famine in Ukraine
1922 – USSR annexes Ukraine
1929 - Massive waves of deadly deportations of Ukraine's most successful farmers (kurkuls, or kulaks, in Russian) as well as the deportations and executions of Ukraine's religious, intellectual and cultural leaders, culminating in the devastating forced famine
1932 and 1933, a catastrophic famine swept across the Soviet Union. It began in the chaos of collectivization, when millions of peasants were forced off their land and made to join state farms.
Exacerbated when the Soviet Politburo demanded not just grain, but all available food.
5. Collectivization and appropriation of agricultural goods to feed urban working class and be traded internationally for foreign exchange
Collectivization - 3 minute Youtube
At the height of the crisis, organized teams of policemen and local Party activists, motivated by hunger, fear, and a decade of hateful propaganda, entered peasant households and took everything edible: potatoes, beets, squash, beans, peas, and farm animals. At the same time, a cordon was drawn around the Ukrainian republic to prevent escape.
The result was a catastrophe: At least 5 million people perished of hunger all across the Soviet Union. Among them were nearly 4 million Ukrainians who died not because of neglect or crop failure, but because they had been deliberately deprived of food
Primitive accumulation in USSR
Primitive accumulation – original meaning
Marx's account of the historical processes of change in rural life of the fifteenth through eighteenth century in Britain and Ireland, through which peasants were forced off their land and the commons were enclosed. Marx believes that this separation of the peasantry from the land was a necessary condition for the development of capitalism, in that it created the conditions in which there was a pliable and abundant proletariat. This "free" proletariat was needed for the creation of the factory system and the development of manufacturing cities.
The process of primitive accumulation created the changes in social relations, property relations, and the accumulation of wealth that permitted the creation of the capital-labor relation and factory-based capitalism.
Stalin’s Implementation (Rationalization) of “socialist primitive accumulation”
State monopoly supplier of capital goods
Establishment of huge state-run “commanding heights” industries
Control of credit, prices, taxation, foreign trade for purpose of directing all resources to industrialization
Administered central planning
Collectivization of agriculture and establishment of Soviet farming in place of independent peasant farms
