While Marxist ideas and categories shaped Communist policies, the Soviet state cannot be divorced from the historical conjuncture in which it arose—a moment of total war.
In the s, Soviet state violence became even more pervasive, as Joseph Stalin sought to prepare the Soviet Union for the next war. Wartime practices such as grain requisitions and deportations were used to collectivize agriculture. The Soviet planned economy, essentially a wartime economy, marshaled labor and raw materials for enormous industrial projects that modernized the country.
During the Second World War , the Stalinist leadership relied on these same institutions of state violence and control to mobilize vast human and material resources for the war effort. Both Stalinist industrialization and victory over Nazi Germany, however, were obtained at tremendous cost.
During the s, several million Soviet citizens died due to famines, deportations, and executions. An estimated 27 million more died during the Second World War. Even after the war, the Stalinist government continued large-scale deportations and incarcerations of its own citizens.
Children dig up potatoes on a collective farm near Udachne villiage, Donec'k oblast, left , and collective farmers from the Moscow suburbs handing over tanks manufactured on their money to Soviet servicemen, December right. Everything for Victory.
By , Communist rule had ended and the Soviet Union disintegrated. The October Revolution shaped the twentieth-century world arguably more than any other single event. It brought to power a new regime, one that ruled in the name of the working class and that established a non-capitalist, state-run economy. This regime carried out a brutal industrialization drive that enabled the Soviet Union to play the leading role in defeating Nazi Germany and winning World War II.
And the existence of the Soviet Union also led to the Cold War , the superpower confrontation with the United States that dominated world affairs for the entire postwar era. And the Soviet system that resulted from it, while socialist in some respects, was characterized by institutions of government control and state violence. A century after the October Revolution, we can see that above all else the Soviet state reflected the era of mass warfare in which it arose.
Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Stanton Foundation. Skip to main content. The Ohio State University. Department of History. Home Topics Africa. In particular, Putin played down the major upheavals of the twentieth century, from the collapse of Russian statehood, in , to the collapse of the Soviet Union, in Instead, he tried to create a more expansive view of history, minimizing the turmoil of revolutionary Russia.
We have a single, uninterrupted history spanning over a thousand years. As long as one pledges allegiance to the regime and shares its anti-Western and anti-liberal stance, one can be a Communist or a monarchist, an admirer of Stalin or Brezhnev or a worshipper of Nicholas II.
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, one of the four parliamentary parties, has just launched week-long celebrations of the revolution anniversary in Moscow and St. A reliquary of the new martyrs has been travelling around Russia in commemoration of the anniversary. They easily dismiss their past and present differences as minor, and cordially greet each other. Both are utterly loyal to one figure: Vladimir Putin. By Mikhail Iossel. By Masha Lipman. The Daily The best of The New Yorker , every day, in your in-box, plus occasional alerts when we publish major stories.
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Birds and the bees. By thirteen days, if I remember rightly. So the revolution on the night of the 6th-7th of November, , would be the 24thth October in their money.
Western Europe made the switch back in the 18th century and lost 11 days due to the adjustment , whereas Russia only came in line after the Bolshevic Revolution. As a consequence, they advanced their calender such that the events of October were recalculated as having occurred in November according to the new calender.
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