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The Revolution
In February 1917, a revolution finally overthrow the monarchy and
a provisional government led by Kerensky was established. After
10 years of forced exile abroad, Lenin returned by train to Petrograd
and planned the Bolshevik takeover. On 24 Oct. 1917, Lenin gave
the command from the Smolny Institute, headquarters of the Red Guard,
for the start of the October Revolution. The battleship Aurora sailed
up the Neva and fired a blank shot near the Hermitage that signaled
the famous beginning of what American writer John Reed termed "the
ten days that shook the world." Red Army troops stormed the
Winter Palace, and the Bolsheviks took control of the new Soviet
state. Trotsky, Lenin's main ally, wrote that without Lenin the
October Revolution would not have been won." Lenin then changed
the name "Bolshevik" to "Communist," and Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin was elected the first chairman of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. In 1918, Nicholas and his family were executed
in the Ural town of Sverdlovsk; that same year, Lenin moved the
capital of the Soviet Union to Moscow. When Lenin died in 1924,
the city of Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honor.
By the 1930s, membership in the Communist party grew to 3.5 million.
At its height, 19 million Soviets claimed Party membership, seven
percent of the total population. Membership was open to any citizen
who did not "exploit the labor of others," abided by the
Party's philosophy, and gave three percent of their monthly pay
as dues to the Party. Members were also required to attend several
meetings and lectures every month, provide volunteer work a few
times a year, and help with election campaigns. Of the 19 million,
one percent were apparatchiks, fulltime officials paid by the Party.
The Komsomol, or Communist Youth Organization, had 40 million members.
Twenty-five million younger schoolchildren once belonged to the
Young Pioneers. Eligibility for full Party membership began at age
18.
The Great Terror
The Secretary of the Communist Party who followed Lenin was Iosif
Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who adopted the last name of Stalin,
meaning "steel." Stalin ruled for almost 30 years, up
to his death in 1953. In 1928, Stalin initiated the first five-year
plan and collectivization of agriculture. Two years later, he began
industrialization of the cities. Collectivization, the grouping
of all farmlands under state control, proved such a radical departure
from the self-ownership rights given to the peasants after the revolution
that many chose to burn their crops rather than give up their land.
Along with the devastation caused by the revolution, civil war,
and WW I, a widespread famine swept the nation, eventually killing
10 million people.
The assassination in 1934 of Sergei Kirov, Leningrad Party Chief,
signaled the beginning of the Great Terror. Between 1935 and 1941
, Stalin persecuted anyone thought to be against him or the state.
Suspects were arrested and, without proper trial, shot or sent to
prison camps. Following Stalin's orders, the head of the secret
police, Lavrenti Beria, and his officers rounded up every suspect
of society: old Bolsheviks, new party members. Red Army corps, intellectuals,
and kulaks (prosperous peasants).
 Leningrad
party leader Andrei Zhdanov, in his campaign of Zhdanovshchina,
persecuted Leningrad's writers and artists in what is known as the
Leningrad Affair. Eventually the poets Mayakovsky and Yesenin committed
suicide. Zhdanov permitted only the art of Socialist Realism, which
he said "aided the process of ideological transformation in
the spirit of socialism." No one escaped the purges; even Zhdanov
fell from Stalin's grace and was executed in 1948. Of approximately
20 million that were arrested, seven million were immediately shot
and the others sent off to gulags for rehabilitation. The purges
and prisons are described in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago. Stalin wiped
out the whole ruling class of Bolsheviks. Half the delegates of
the 17th Party Congress were arrested during 1934-39, along with
90% of the military's generals. Within a few decades, the Soviet
Union lost an entire generation of its most courageous, creative,
and devoted citizens-the brains and soul of the nation.
Invasion
In 1941 Hitler invaded the USSR, which now had no more than a skeleton
army and a starving, terrorized population. The crippled country
battled against the invading German forces; World War II (The Great
Patriotic War, as it was caned in the USSR) lasted for four years.
Leningrad was surrounded and cut off from the outside world for
900 days. Today, a monument on the outskirts of Moscow (seen on
the way into town from the airport) shows how close the Germans
came to capturing the city. Every tenth inhabitant of the USSR was
killed-more than 20 million people. One must understand the turmoil
experienced by this generation to comprehend why the war continues
to play such a significant part in people's lives today.
Khrushev
Nikita Khrushchev succeeded Stalin in 1953. During the 20th Party
Congress in 1956, Khrushchev gave a secret speech, never published,
denouncing Stalin. In 1954, after Beria's fall, Khrushchev founded
the KGB, Committee for State Security, to establish party control
over the secret police. Under the de-Stalinization program, the
KGB didn't have the power to hold its own trials, and Party officials
were exempt from arrest. Khrushchev's new "thaw'' campaign
attempted to shed light on Stalin's atrocities and challenge the
Party's position. He opened up the prison camps and brought home
five million people. The political thaw was accompanied by an intellectual
and cultural one, with greater freedom of expression for artists
and writers. But at the same time, two-thirds of the Orthodox churches
and monasteries were closed down.
Khrushchev tried to undo the damage of collectivization by implementing
new reforms, but he caused havoc several times by again eradieting
the peasants' private plots and ordering the widespread planting
of maize.
In 1961, Khrushchev met with US President Kennedy. The same year,
the Soviets sent the first man, Yuri Gagarin, into space. Congress
also voted to remove Stalin's body from its place of honor alongside
Lenin in the Kremlin Mausoleum. Khrushchev began to rebuild Moscow,
finally, 15 years after the war. Large-scale housing projects (with
communal living residences), the Palace of Congresses, Kalinin Prospekt,
and the Russia, largest hotel in the world (with 6,000 rooms), were
constructed. He also turned the Kremlin buildings into a museum
that was opened to the public.
Because of his inconsistent policy changes, economic blunders, and
the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco, in 1964 the Party demanded Khrushchev's
resignation. His downfall was accelerated by his introduction of
Rule 25: No party official should have more than three terms or
15 years in office. The majority of Party members were ready to
hold their positions for life. Thus the first inner-Party coup toppled
a leader whose insightful ideas weren't realistically considered
or implemented until Gorbachev came to power.
Brezhnev
Khrushchev's successor, Leonid Brezhnev, was said to have plotted
the coup with the Party's ideologist, Mikhail Suslov. Brezhnev immediately
amended Rule 25. Thanks to the discovery of large gas and oil reserves
and the reinstatement of the peasants' private plots, the first
part of Brezhnev's term brought the largest boom to the economy
since the Revolution. The new detonate permitted Western trade,
and tourists, exchange students, and journalists were allowed to
enter the Soviet Union through Moscow.
But as wages nearly doubled for blue-collar, industrial, and farm
workers, they failed to increase for white-collar workers and professionals.
Consumer goods couldn't keep pace with increasing demands, and huge
waiting lines appeared for housing and cars. By the mid 1970s, poor
planning, mismanagement, and lack of incentive led to a crisis in
the economy. Rampant corruption also affected every facet of Soviet
society. (In 1988, Brezhnev's son-in-law, Yuri Churbanov, Minister
of the Interior, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for taking
bribes. Yuri's wife Galina had a lavish and scandalous affair with
circus manager Boris the Gypsy. Brezhnev himself had a huge collection
of antique foreign cars.) In 1968, the Soviet army entered Czechoslovakia.
In 1979, military spending was further increased when forces invaded
Afghanistan.
As people continued to grow disillusioned with their way of life,
alcohol consumption increased (it quadrupled in the period since
Khrushchev). Further repression stimulated the dissident and samizdat
movements. The dissident writers Sinyavsky and Daniel were arrested
in Moscow under Article 70 of the criminal code for "spreading
anti-Soviet propaganda."
An invalid for many of his last years in office, Leonid Brezhnev
died in 1982. The former head of the KGB (1967-82), Yuri Andropov
was appointed the new general secretary. He immediately employed
anticorruption tactics. An illness kept him away from the public
eye during his last six months in office. He died in February 1984.
Brezhnev's 72-year-old protege, Konstantin Chernenko, was selected
to replace Andropov. His prime minister was 79-year-old Nikolai
Tikhonov. His foreign minister was 74-year-old Andrei Gromyko, who
helped draft postwar agreements in Yalta with Stalin, Roosevelt,
and Churchill. Chernenko died one year later, in March 1985.
Gorbachev
On 11 March 1985, 54-year-old Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was
elected the new general secretary of the Communist Party. Following
in the footsteps of such past rulers as Ivan the Terrible, Peter
the Great, Stalin, and Brezhnev, Gorbachev inherited a stagnating
economy, an entrenched bureaucracy, and a population that had lived
in fear and mistrust of their previous leaders. Gorbachev's first
actions were to shut down the production and sale of vodka and to
ardently pursue Andropov's anticorruption campaign; one of the first
to go was Leningrad party boss Grigory Romanov.
On 25 Feb. 1986, the 27th Party Congress endorsed new party programs
and changes in the selection methods of officials and elected a
new central committee. No other Soviet leader in history had consolidated
power in the Politburo as quickly as Gorbachev. In 1986, he introduced
the radical reform policies of perestroika (restructuring), demokratizatsiya
(democratization) and glasnost (openness) that have now become household
words. Gorbachev emphasized that past reforms hadn't worked because
they didn't stress the "involvement of the people in modernizing
and restructuring the country." Perestroika implemented more
profit motives, quality controls, private ownership in agriculture,
decentralization, and multicandidate elections. Industry concentrated
on measures promoting quality over quantity; private businesses
and cooperatives were encouraged; farmers and individuals could
now lease land and housing from the government and keep the profits
made from selling produce grown on private plots: hundreds of ministries
and bureaucratic centers were disbanded. A law was passed that allowed
individuals to own small businesses and hire workers as long as
there was "no exploitation of man by man." In the campaign
for demokratizatsiya, open elections were held. Glasnost let truths
surface from the Stalin and Brezhnev years.
Integrating The Russian Character When Gorbachev came to power,
people were instilled with a lack of incentive and morale, and a
fear of expression that carried over from the difficulties of past
decades. An entire generation had led a two-faced life-one face
for the state and the other for themselves. For the first time in
decades, Gorbachev worked on integrating the Russian character.
Andrei Sakharov and other political prisoners were released from
internal exile. (After winning the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, Sakharov,
the physicist and human-rights activist ,was banished for nearly
seven years to the city of Corky. He died in Moscow on 14 Nov. 1989.)
One hundred Soviet dissidents from 20 cities were allowed to form
the "Democratic Club," an open political discussion group.
Glasnost swept like a tidal wave through all facets of Soviet life.
For the 40 million Russian Orthodox and people of other religious
beliefs, Gorbachev stated that "believers have the full right
to express their convictions with dignity." On 1 Dec. 1989,
Gorbachev became the first Soviet leader to set foot in the Vatican.
In a historic meeting with Pope John Paul II, Gorbachev promised
to open diplomatic relations with the Vatican and pledged that the
government soon would pass a law guaranteeing freedom of religion
for all believers. In one of his speeches in Rome, Gorbachev expressed:
"We need spiritual values; we need a revolution of the mind.
. . . No one should interfere in matters of the individual's conscience.
"Christians, Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, and others live in the
Soviet Union," he said. "All of them have a right to satisfy
their spiritual needs-this is the only way toward a new culture
and new politics that can meet the challenge of our time."
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