Suchergebnisse

This item is part of the Political & Rights Issues & Social Movements (PRISM) digital collection, a collaborative initiative between Florida Atlantic University and University of Central Florida in the Publication of Archival, Library & Museum Materials (PALMM).

The Bolsheviks considered the family to be a minor matter. TheABC of Communism, a popular exposition of Bolshevik Marxism published shortly after the October Revolution, detailed the economic and political institutions of Soviet Russia with only a passing reference to the public services that would emancipate women in the future society.1Its authors, Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, understood the revolutionary process chiefly as the by-product of economic development and expected socialism to come through the manipulation of economic mechanisms by central government, and in this they echoed the views of their party. The Bolshevik scenario did not preclude the 'participation of the masses' to use the vocabulary of the times. Individuals, women as well as men, were to enjoy unprecedented access to the political process, and as masters of the nation's resources would decide matters of state, each acting as part of the whole, or more exactly as part of a number of collectivities, first and foremost as members of the proletariat, but also as members of other groups including nationality, youth and women. While families in the past had played a crucial role in the creation and transmission of private property, with the overthrow of the exploitative capitalist system they would cease to function as providers of economic and psychological welfare. Instead the individual's social place and action would be determined by class and, to a lesser extent, by ethnicity, age and gender. Families belonged to the superstructure and were symptom rather than cause; they adapted to the needs of society, changing in response to the transformation of economic relations. Families, in other words, could look after themselves, and appropriate forms of private life would evolve without much outside intervention.

Through 1918 Russia's new Bolshevik rulers, amateurs at the business of governing, were exposed to bureaucratic lessons much faster than they could assimilate them. Administrative techniques and organizational models essential for the direction of an empire had to be hurriedly invented or borrowed and rushed into operation; numerous special arrangements had to be devised for those areas where military crises or nationalist and separatist movements demanded immediate attention. During the process of simultaneously ruling and learning, the Moscow center sometimes received sharp lessons from the peripheries of the empire. Leading figures of the Russian Communist Party were often compelled by circumstances and by the hot tempers and loud voices of their colleagues out in the hustings to listen and learn and adapt themselves to the pressures of facts as others saw them. Passionate theoretical debates gave way to quarrels about the most expedient, most efficient method of getting the work accomplished; and the reciprocal adjustments resulting from this conflict between the center and the men working in the peripheral areas established patterns of thought and habits of action that were to become permanent features of the Soviet administrative system.