They could respond immediately to workers’ initiatives and integrate large numbers rapidly into their ranks. The overwhelming evidence from a century of in-depth historical scholarship shows otherwise. The working class barely existed, the country was exhausted, in crisis, and the leadership faced chaos, circumstances that did not augur well for the democratic self-governance of the working class. The liberal nobles, capitalists and professionals were in opposition and in any case lacked the capital, skills and will to do so. There was now a fundamental conundrum. In the mid-1870’s skilled Russian workers made up an army of hired laborers in the Ukraine, the Baltic region, and Transcaucasia. A new type of worker emerged, characterized by creative labor, collectivism, literacy, technical knowledge, a high degree of organization and class consciousness, and eagerness to participate in mutual assistance in production and in political activity. It wasn’t viable. Within the Soviet Union and its bloc, the key was to prevent any form of democratic challenge to the statist economic status quo, in effect to promote the soviet version of neoliberal capitalism’s TINA (“There is No Alternative”), the bureaucratic authoritarian anti-democratic form they called Communism, tightly controlled from above. By 1973 the working class, including junior service personnel, included 67.7 million persons. The basis of Marx’s understanding of socialism, and in fact the common ideological patrimony of all the socialist forces in Russia — Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Left SRs — is the vision of a consciously regulated society of freely associated producers. Soviet women did not fail to master any special skill. In 1940, 8.3 million workers were employed in industry, 2.4 million in transportation, 1.9 million in construction, and 1.6 million in agriculture. They were published in the newspaper Pravda on April 7. Imperialism developed rapidly. Workers’ control was introduced at enterprises formerly owned by the capitalists. The contradictions facing the Bolsheviks in seeking to expand the Russian Revolution — to create the conditions that would ultimately allow them to consolidate working-class rule on a democratic basis — manifested themselves with force and clarity in the one instance where they attempted to provoke a soviet revolution through military intervention abroad. The Russian Revolution was undeniably the most radical ever. Sources include Victor Serge, Leon Trotsky, V.I. But left on its own, it would have been impossible for the Soviet Union to raise the resources internally without squeezing the population. The Russian legal code gave husbands almost unlimited power to make decisions within the family. It summarizes existing historiography about the topic and suggests the parameters of statistics and definitions of the working class. The working class was transformed from an oppressed, exploited class into the ruling class, and its vanguard, the Communist Party, became the ruling party. From the beginning of the 20th century a revolutionary situation developed in Russia as a result of an economic crisis, the defeat of tsarism in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, the upsurge in the revolutionary movement, and the development of the economic struggle of the Russian working class into a political struggle. Sept. 10, 2020. If it tried to stop the process before it had destroyed the material foundations of the old ruling classes, it would be crushed by domestic reaction.(1). Their popularity grew from the confidence they earned, as their words and actions were debated democratically in the soviets and discussed on the streets. Between 1960 and 1972 the number of workers in the USSR as a whole increased by 47 percent, with the biggest increases in the working class taking place in Armenia, Moldavia, and Tadzhikistan, where the number of workers more than doubled; in Lithuania, Azerbaijan, Kirghizia, and Uzbekistan, where there was an increase of 80 percent or more; and in Kazakhstan, Georgia, Byelorussia, and Turkmenia, where there was an increase of 59 percent. By the mid-1930’s, every tenth worker belonged to the party. The standard view in the West, central to discrediting the October Revolution, is that it was just a violent coup by the minority Bolshevik leadership who had manipulated their way to power, overturning a nascent democracy, mobilizing the working class behind them like soldiers following their officers. Factory committees were established at most enterprises, and a workers’ militia, the Red Guard, was formed. Learn more about the country, including its history. After turning back a Polish incursion into Russia (conveniently forgotten in conventional historical accounts), Lenin’s attempt to march on Warsaw in Poland in 1920, hoping to build a socialist bridge to Germany — where revolutionary ferment was still brewing after the defeat of 1918 — turned out to be deeply counterproductive. The Russian proletariat took shape as an all-Russian, international force counterposed to the great-power, chauvinistic division of the Russian state into the privileged Great Russians and the oppressed “foreigners.”. The capitalists were in essence anti-revolutionary. The movement toward revolution by the working class was facilitated, perhaps paradoxically, by the underdeveloped nature of Russian society compared to the West. Production propaganda and production conferences and commissions involved the masses of the workers in management activity. Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Armed; The Prophet Unarmed; The Prophet Outcast (three-volume political biography of Leon Trotsky). In 1917, two revolutions completely changed the fabric of Russia. The proletarian stage of the liberation movement, which began in the mid-1890’s, was characterized by a mass working-class movement linked with the theory of scientific socialism. Between July 1945 and March 1948, 8.5 million men were discharged from the Soviet Army, and a large proportion of them took jobs in industry. Latin America: A Conservative Restoration? Without any revolutionary practice, this new urban working class lacked revolutionary politics, and labored under conditions remote from socialist goals. However on 6 July the Left SRs began an insurrectional revolt in Moscow, proclaiming their intention to govern alone and to “reopen the war against German imperialism.” They were defeated and from then the Bolsheviks ruled alone. Alexander Rabinowitch:  Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July Uprising (1968). The legal Bolshevik newspapers Zvezda and Pravda played an important role in the political education of the Russian proletariat and in rallying the majority of class-conscious workers around the Bolshevik Party. He saw in the soviets the political form for realizing the direct, democratic rule of the producers. Then in October, a second Russian Revolution placed the Bolsheviks as the leaders of Russia, resulting in the creation of the world's first communist country. The working class of the relatively new industrial centers went through waves of discontent from 1900 to the offset of the revolution. Independent working class revolutionary organizations were founded in the 1870’s, including the Union of Workers of South Russia (Odessa, 1875) and the Union of Workers of North Russia (1878). The Stakhanovites broke outdated quotas, using the latest labor technology and the latest technical achievements. Henceforth democracy was equated with capitalist property relations and called “freedom,” while socialism became identified with stultifying bureaucracy, dictatorship, lack of liberty and terror. However since the bourgeoisie would oppose working-class power at every turn, the only way to insure workers’ democratic rule would be to abolish bourgeois property. Lenin viewed the insufficient political maturity and level of organization of the proletariat as the social reason for dual power. The weakness and insignificance of the “labor aristocracy” and the absence of narrow, shop-oriented and trade unionist traditions in the Russian working class were also conducive to the growth of revolutionary consciousness among the workers. The Bolshevik party democratically won majorities for their program in the soviets in the months leading to October, and on that basis assumed the leadership of the workers and urban society. By the beginning of June 1917, there were about 400 soviets and associations subordinate to them. The non-Communist Russian Provisional Government under Prince Georgy Lvov replaced the Tsar. By the second half of 1942 the Soviet Army was no longer experiencing any serious shortages in weapons, ammunition, and equipment, thanks to the working class and engineering and technical workers, who did without days off, not leaving the workshops for months. Had they allowed legal forms such as elections, the Bolsheviks sooner rather than later would have been voted out of office. 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