The Soviet Experiment, 1917-1927
History 408 / October 23, 2012
V. I. Lenin
(1870-1924)
Alexander Kerensky
(1881-1970)
“Dual Power” I:
the Provisional Government
Summer 1917: Kerensky rallies the army to a new offensive
Demonstration in St. Petersburg against the war
“Dual Power” II:
Soviets (Councils) of workers, soldiers, and peasants
Lenin after his
return
from Switzerland
to St. Petersburg
(1917)
The Putilov Works: a stronghold of Bolshevik support
The Winter Palace in St. Petersburg
Bolsheviks storm
the Winter Palace,
October 24-25, 1917
(November 7 by
Western calendars)
Leon Trotsky
(1879-1940)
Civil War:
“Red” soldiers strung up
by “White” officers
Civil War: recruiting Red Army volunteers
(lower right – “are you with us or with them?”)
Civil War: teaching economics to future party members
Allied forces intervene in the Civil War
(shown here in Vladivostok)
A sarcastic Bolshevik
view of the
League of Nations
“Capitalists of all
countries, unite!”
1924 pamphlet outlining
Lenin’s views on the
“New Economic Policy”
(introduced 1921)
The harvest of NEP:
Farmers’ collectives increase the urban food supply
“NEPmen” profit from semi-capitalist markets
The Comintern (founded 1919):
Trotsky’s program for global revolution
Cutting-edge artists support state goals:
(a) education and (b) the “construction of socialism”
Lenin:
Communism =
Soviet power +
Electrification”
“Are you helping to
liquidate illiteracy?”
(1925)
“Radio:
Out of a million wills,
we will create one will”
(1925)
Social experimentation: Alexandra Kollontai and the “Zhenotdel”
(Women’s Section of the Bolshevik Party, 1918-1930;
Kollontai dismissed in 1922)
“Every cook should learn to
run the government. – Lenin”
“Don’t sit at home in your
kitchen, head to the elections
for the Soviet!
Once working women remained
in the dark, but now in the
Soviet they decide things”
Constructivist architecture of the 1920s
More constructivism (architecture & photography)
Experimental film-making:
Dziga Vertov, Man With a
Movie Camera (1929)
Joseph Stalin
(1879-1953)
Stalin claims to be Lenin’s chosen successor
Mobilizing social envy in the countryside: poor and middling
peasants aroused against the “kulaks”