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Model Home on Library Lane (1932)
Description: The exterior of an apartment building on Library Lane in the Proletarian District of Moscow. Examples of the new socialist way of life are contrasted to social laggards. A room kept in exemplary shape. A dirty room in the same building. Grown-ups and children climb the stairs carrying brooms. They nail the Order of the Bedbug to the door of the apartment. Soiuzkinozhurnal no. 33.

The Literacy Spartakiad (1929)
Description: Spartacus Games for Liquidating Illiteracy. Vladivostok. Six-thousand illiterate women are taken on by the Liquidation Squad. Sovkinozhurnal no. 14.

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Subject essay: Lewis Siegelbaum

On December 5, 1936 in connection with the proclamation of the new “Stalin” Constitution, the Kazakh and Kirghiz ASSRs were elevated in status to fully-fledged union republics. With the simultaneous sub-division of the Transcaucasian Federation into the three union republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, this brought the total number of union republics to eleven. These administrative changes along ethno-territorial lines represented the fruits of the Soviet nationality policy of korenizatsiia, and specifically, the training of a sufficient number of indigenous cadres to reliably promote the party’s line of “national in form, socialist in content.” Many indices pointed in the direction of cultural modernization. Literacy rates rose dramatically. For example, in Tajikistan the proportion of literate people between the ages of nine and 49 increased from just four percent in 1926 to nearly 83 percent by the end of the 1930s. Each of the republics nationalized long-dead writers, dispatched singing and dancing ensembles to tour the USSR, and otherwise exhibited the trappings of national cultures.

But not all was well in Central Asia. Collectivization had had a particularly devastating effect in Kazakhstan where flocks of sheep and goats, lacking fodder, suffered huge losses, and the predominantly pastoral Kazakhs faced either starvation or flight across the Chinese border. Little wonder that their numbers showed a decline of 20 percent between the censuses of 1926 and 1939. Elsewhere, the expansion of cotton cultivation was often at the expense of food crops and human consumption. The crackdown on religious practices that had begun in the late 1920s continued, and thousands of Muslim clerics fled to Afghanistan and Iran, accompanied by their families and disciples.

Politically, though the situation in Central Asia seemed stable in 1936. In Uzbekistan, power was shared between Faizulla Khodzhaev (1898-1938), a native of Bukhara and a former Jadadist who served as Chairman of the Uzbek Council of People’s Commissars, and the First Secretary of the Uzbek party organization, Akmal Ikramov (1898-1938). But stability — particularly when it involved employing the nomenklatura system to strengthen clan ties — was anathema to Stalin. Both Khodzhaev and Ikramov were removed from office in 1937, and wound up in 1938 as defendants in the last major show trial of the Great Purges. Tens of thousands of other party and state officials throughout Uzbekistan and the other Central Asian republics were also victims of the purges, which opened up opportunities for a new crop of Communists to assume office and favor their fellow clan members.

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Subject essay: James von Geldern

The ultimate goal of the socialist society was to create a new person, the New Soviet Person, whose entire consciousness was shaped by the socialist environment. This new person would be enlightened, unburdened by psychological complexes, unblinded by distinctions of nationality and gender. They would live simply but cleanly, and their work lives and home lives would be stitched together seamlessly. Although the socialist person would be created by new forms of culture, they would be recognizable by their healthy bodies as well.

The first twelve years of socialist construction saw the creation of institutions, practices and spaces that could accommodate such people. Some could even create them. Literacy programs flourished throughout the Soviet Union, bringing light to older people who had never benefited from education. They were aimed at the most benighted sectors of the population, the non-Slavic nationalities and women. New workplaces and living spaces were created, such as communal apartments that consigned cooking, eating and other formerly private activities to public spaces. New socialist rituals introduced young people and children to the socialist family, and weaned them from the church rituals that were once their only choice.

The state was often presumptuous in declaring that socialist consciousness had been created. The 1930 closing of the Zhenotdel (Women’s Section) was explained by the fact that its welfare activities were no longer needed. Social intervention could also be overbearing. In a collective society, privacy was obsolete, and no vice was beyond the judgment of the collective. This despite the fact that millions of Russians and other Soviet citizens still lived in squalor and poverty. For all the positive figures produced in reality and fiction, perhaps the most popular hero of 1929 was Ostap Bender, from Ilf and Petrov’s comic novel Twelve Chairs, an unreformed con man whose ability to “speak Soviet” helped his criminal career flourish.

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Subject essay: Lewis Siegelbaum

The sundering of economic relations between town and country during the civil war continued to threaten the viability of the Soviet state after the Reds had achieved military victory. With little food and other agricultural produce reaching the cities, the urban population had dwindled. Correspondingly, the production of manufactured goods such as clothing and farm implements which might have induced peasants to produce surpluses for urban consumption plummeted. The New Economic Policy inaugurated in 1921 was dedicated essentially to reestablishing this link (smychka) on the basis of market relations. The state would regulate the exchange of commodities, and, via the Land Code issued in 1922, provide a legal framework for peasants’ land use. The smychka also had an important cultural and educational dimensions which were represented by the establishment of reading huts (izbachi) and other measures to promote literacy, the circulation of silent films in the villages, and the dispatch of agronomists to promote scientific farming and educate peasants in the advantages of soviet power.

Like the blades of a pair of scissors, the terms of trade between town and country began to diverge in1923 in favor of the mainly state-run industrial economy and at the expense of rural consumers. Basically, the reason for the “scissors crisis” of that year was that while agricultural production had rebounded quickly from the devastating famine of 1921-22, industrial infrastructure was relatively slow to recover from civil war-era neglect and destruction. Thus, whereas textile production — essential to providing cloth to mass consumers — was only 26 percent of the pre-war level in 1922, agriculture reached 75 percent. The problem was exacerbated by the syndicates, government disposal agencies, that demanded high prices for the manufactured goods over which they exercised near monopolistic control, and the fact that the state, as principal purchaser of bread grain, sought to buy at low prices.

By October 1923 when the crisis reached its peak, industrial prices were 276 percent of 1913 levels, while agricultural prices were only 89 percent. Put another way, industrial prices were three times higher, relative to agricultural prices, than they had been before the war. At this point, the state took vigorous action to force down prices of manufactures. Costs were reduced by cutting staffs in industry and the trade networks, the network of consumer cooperatives was expanded, and industrial trusts were compelled to unload warehoused stocks before obtaining credits. As a result of these measures as well as the success of the newly established People’s Commissariat of Trade in making inroads into areas previously dependent on NEPmen, the scissors began to close. By April 1924 the agricultural price index had risen slightly to 92 (1913=100) and the industrial index had fallen to 131.

At this point, the issue became one of finding the optimum balance between industrial and agricultural prices. This fed into the state’s rationalization and economization campaigns in industry, and contributed to the struggle over workers’ employment, wages, and benefits.

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Subject essay: James von Geldern

Among the most important tasks that the Bolsheviks set themselves upon coming to power in 1917 was to emancipate Soviet citizens from the scourge (or as Karl Marx put it, the “opiate”) of religion. Along with the literacy campaign with which it was intimately connected, antireligious propaganda was a key component of the “cultural front” during the 1920s. A protracted affair, the struggle against religion was complicated by the difficulty of defining goals as much as working out how to achieve them.

The decree of January 20, 1918 that disestablished the Orthodox Church and consigned the clergy of all faiths to second-class citizenship (along with capitalists, merchants, former members of the police, criminals, and “imbeciles”) set the stage for years of bitter and often violent struggle that included the closing of many churches, the confiscation of church valuables, the arrest of the Patriarch Tikhon, and the execution of priests suspected of aiding the counter-revolutionary Whites. With the end of the civil war, the party and state shifted gears, launching a broad, systematic propaganda campaign that targeted popular religious belief. The Komsomol Christmas of January 6, 1923, replete with carnival-like processions of students and working-class youth dressing as clowns, singing the “Internationale,” and burning effigies of religious “cult” figures, was an early indication of the shift. But its mischief sufficiently outraged the sensibilities of believers and non-believers alike to provoke the party’s Central Committee to “recommend” that the forthcoming Komsomol Easter restrict itself to lectures, movies and plays. This less confrontational approach was endorsed by the Twelfth Party Congress (April 1923) which called for the training of anti-religious propagandists, the publication of scientific and popular literature on the origins and class nature of religion, and the improvement of political educational methods in rural-based reading rooms.

Bolshevik policies targeted at the Russian Orthodox Church were applied to non-Russian populations with mixed results. Jews and Catholics of the Ukrainian and Belorussian regions often saw little difference between Communists and tsarist authorities, who had been hostile to their churches for very different reasons. Bolshevik propaganda proved particularly inappropriate for the many communities of Islam located throughout the RSFSR and Central Asia. There were attempts to accommodate the special needs of that community, but they were few, and were overwhelmed by the forces of radicalization. By 1924 an Antireligious Commission had been set up by the Central Committee, and a newspaper, Bezbozhnik (The Godless) had begun to appear. In August 1924 the call by Emelian Iaroslavskii, a prominent Bolshevik, for a national organization of atheists was realized with the formation of a Society of Friends of the Newspaper Bezbozhnik. Less than a year later, in April 1925, a congress of Bezbozhnik correspondents and Society members met in Moscow to establish the All-Union League of the Godless under the leadership of Iaroslavskii. Aside from publishing newspapers and journals, the League sponsored museums of atheism, anti-religious exhibitions and lectures. The notion that exposure to rationalist explanations of natural phenomena, the wonders of applied science, and ethical, clean-living atheists would demystify religion guided the efforts of the League — at least until 1929 when it added “Militant” to its name in accordance with a more direct assault on religion reminiscent of the civil war years.

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Subject essay: James von Geldern

ROSTA, the Russian Telegraph Agency, came under new management in 1921, and promptly closed its windows. Established in September 1918 by the VTsIK from the old Petrograd Telegraph Agency, ROSTA carried the dual charge of gathering the news and propagating the party line to Russian citizens. Upon its founding in 1918 its first task was to find journalists willing to combine the two duties. When old Bolshevik and Proletkult leader Platon Kerzhentsev took charge in spring 1919, he radicalized the staff, demanding partisan reporting and forthright propaganda from his reporters.

ROSTA management sought help in untraditional places. The older press corps was hostile to the Bolsheviks; a new generation had yet to be trained. Though many of the Bolsheviks themselves were highly skilled journalists, they were busy governing. There was also a new audience for the press, much of it illiterate. Thus the proposal of avant-garde artists and writers to work for the agency was gladly accepted. From 1919 to 1921, ROSTA and its affiliates in Petrograd, Moscow, Odessa, and other smaller cities, turned out hundreds of the so-called ROSTA Windows, the fruits of the collaboration. Master poets, led by Vladimir Maiakovskii, and painters such as Mikhail Cheremnykh and Ivan Maliutin, took the headlines of the day and turned them into comic-book posters, based on the style of the traditional lubok (wood-cut) print. The primitive style of the art and verse harnessed by highly skilled artists made for powerful propaganda displayed throughout Russian cities.

ROSTA was a dream for avant-gardists who felt that they best expressed the spirit of the Revolution, and who wanted to break down the boundaries between art and life. They had an audience of milliions, and a style that could reach even the most illiterate. The atmosphere of the Civil War, in which good and evil were clearly delineated, and in which the Bolshevik message was as simple as possible, fit the artists’ needs. When Nikolai Smirnov, former editor of the railway journal GUDOK, took over in 1921, he faced a new post-war reality. The simple black-white judgments of the Civil War, and an audience for whom literacy was ever more important, inspired him to close the Windows and invest those funds in print journalism.

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Subject essay: Lewis Siegelbaum

Lenin and his closest comrades believed that one of the characteristic features of modern “bourgeois” states, a standing army, was undesirable and inappropriate for the Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic over which they presided. Thus, even as negotiations with the Central Powers were underway at Brest Litovsk, the old Imperial Russian Army was being dismantled. At the same time, however, it became apparent that the rag-tag Red Guard units and elements of the imperial army who had gone over the side of the Bolsheviks were quite inadequate to the task of defending the new government against external foes. Thus, on January 15, 1918 Sovnarkom decreed the formation of the Worker-Peasant Red Army, to consist of volunteers from among “the most class-conscious and organized elements of the toiling masses.”

The architect of the Red Army’s formation was Trotsky who was appointed People’s Commissar for the Army and Navy in March 1918 and remained in that position until 1925. Assisted by General M.D. Bonch-Bruevich, a former Imperial Guard officer who served as head of the new Soviet Supreme Military Council, Trotsky assiduously recruited and defended the use of former tsarist officers, euphemistically known as “military specialists.” While few officers identified with Soviet power, many were willing to lend their services in the defense of Russia against foreign (initially German and Austro-Hungarian) forces. The introduction of politically reliable military commissars in April 1918 helped both to ensure the loyalty of the military commanders and to overcome resistance from rank-and-file soldiers to their commands. Abandoning the principle of a volunteer army, the Soviet government also introduced in April universal military training (Vsevobuch). Local call-ups and later in the year a general mobilization of conscripts aged 18-25 followed. Despite draft evasions and defections to the emerging White armies, the Red Army contained about 700,000 soldiers by the end of 1918. A year later its strength stood at nearly three million.

During the civil war, the Red Army saw action on a wide variety of fronts, mostly in the south and east. Relying heavily on the Imperial Army’s arsenals of weapons and drawing on food supplies and horses from the interior, it vastly outnumbered its foes. The Red Army’s soldiers, overwhelmingly peasant in origin, received pay but more importantly, their families were guaranteed rations and assistance with farm work. This, plus literacy and political education classes, served to limit desertions and forge an esprit de corps that carried over into the years after the civil war. The army’s uniform, the long overcoat that overlapped at the front and the pointed cloth cap with red-star badge, were reminiscent of Muscovite-era warriors’ garb and proved to be among the civil war’s most enduring symbols.

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