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Post by dodger on Oct 15, 2013 8:35:51 GMT
Useful study of the class hatred of the British ruling class for the USSR, 10 May 2012
This Will Podmore review is from: Inside the Enigma: British Officials in Russia, 1900-39 (Hardcover)
This illuminating book reveals the sheer class hatred of successive cadres of British officials towards the Soviet Union.
The British Embassy backed the reactionary Stolypin, who was Prime Minister from 1906 to 1911.
In July 1917 the British Ambassador "contacted the [Russian] Foreign Minister to ask that the government should take advantage of the situation to crush the Bolsheviks once and for all." The Ambassador told the British Foreign Office, "normal conditions cannot be restored without bloodshed and the sooner we get it over the better."
The British Embassy was `involved in an extraordinary scheme, organised by Colonel Keyes and General Poole, to take control of a number of Russian banks in order to use them to channel funds to the counter-revolutionary movement in south Russia'. The Embassy was `responsible for channelling money to the nascent anti-Bolshevik forces in the south', led by General Kolchak.
The British Military Mission had to admit that Kolchak's troops `had undoubtedly been guilty of atrocities' against the civilian population.
The British government sent troops and armed, funded and propagandised to aid the counter-revolution. As E. H. Carr wrote, "it is no longer possible for any sane man to regard the campaigns of Kolchak, Yudenich, Denikin and Wrangel otherwise than as tragic blunders of colossal dimensions. They were monuments of folly in conception and of incompetence in execution; they cost, directly and indirectly, hundreds of thousands of lives; and, except in so far as they may have increased the bitterness of the Soviet rulers against the `white' Russians and the Allies who half-heartedly supported them, they did not deflect the course of history by a single hair's breadth."
The Whites lost `because no individual or group among them managed to attract any genuine measure of popular support'. As Hughes acknowledges, "the events of 1917 had transformed Russia for ever, making it difficult to impose order by force on a population that relished its new economic and political freedoms'.
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Post by dodger on Oct 16, 2013 13:15:08 GMT
Excellent study of Stalin's Marxism, March 3, 2004
By William Podmore
This review is from: The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth Century Revolutionary Patriotism (Hardcover)
This remarkable book studies the development of Stalin's thought, using the evidence of his private library, the books he studied and noted. These were overwhelmingly Marxist in origin; none were by orthodox or conservative Russian thinkers. Stalin used only Marxist sources, especially Marx and Lenin, and never referred to writers in the old Russian, Tsarist, autocratic tradition. The book shows how Stalin's thoughts and deeds were rooted in the revolutionary ideas of Marxism.
Stalin was a genuine and convinced Marxist, a moderniser, a Westerniser, who promoted huge advances in education, health and welfare. He accelerated industrialisation and collectivised agriculture, just as Marx and Engels had advocated. He used state centralisation, democratic centralism, to defeat feudal fragmentation and backwardness, as Marx and Engels had recommended to the Paris Commune of 1871. They supported the Commune as a dictatorship of the proletariat, not a parliamentary but a working body, executive and legislative at the same time. Stalin too always denounced the social democratic idea of a `peaceful transition to socialism' through `bourgeois parliamentarism'.
The Soviet revolution did destroy the old landowning and capitalist classes by collectivising agriculture and taking ownership of the country's industry. In response, those dying classes sharpened their struggle against emerging socialism in the 1930s, as Lenin had warned that they would, and they sought support both in the Party and from the enemy states surrounding the Soviet Union.
The idea of socialism in one country stems from the Communist Manifesto, which said that the working class of each country `must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie', and also from Lenin. Ever since August 1915, Lenin defended the principle of socialism in one country, asserting that capitalism's uneven development enabled the Russian working class to start to build socialism. By 1923, he was saying that the Soviet Union could create a `complete socialist society'.
The book's last two chapters both focus on Stalin's idea of revolutionary patriotism, directly descended from the Jacobins of the French Revolution. Stalin defended workers' nationalism, the concept that each nation's working class had to uphold the nation's democracy, its honour and its sovereignty.
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Post by dodger on Oct 16, 2013 23:10:13 GMT
Very useful collection on the revolution, 9 Oct 2012
This Will Podmore review is from: Soviet Union: A Documentary History Volume 1: 1917-1940 (Paperback)
This is an extremely useful collection of documents and comments. Edward Acton is Professor of History at the University of East Anglia.
He points out that the Russian Orthodox Church's "cathedrals and churches dominated the built landscape, its holy days shaped the calendar, its teaching was embedded in education, and its priests controlled the registration of births, deaths and marriages. Its ethos permeated family law, custom and a patriarchal order in which the status of women depended on that of their menfolk, and in which women were subordinate to men in terms of power, property, employment, pay and access to education."
But the new Bolshevik government reformed education, health care and the law. As Acton notes, "the Family Code of October 1918 formalized numerous reforms, notably making divorce (virtually unobtainable before the revolution) relatively easy; in 1920 hospital abortion was legalized; labour protection laws and efforts to provide maternity and nursery care, despite the impoverishment of the civil war years, were designed to remove obstacles to female employment."
He observes that the Whites "were never able to mobilize more than a fraction of the number of men who fought for the Reds. Indeed, in a sense the Bolsheviks were saved by the preference of the vast majority of the population, including most of their socialist critics, for the Reds over the Whites. ... any chance the Whites would attract popular support was ruled out by the social policies they adopted. Kolchak's government smashed workers' organizations and attempted to halt and reverse peasant land seizures offering no more than vague intimations of subsequent land reform."
Acton cites an order by General Rozanov, Kolchak's commander in Krasnoyarsk, western Siberia, issued on 27 March 1919, "Burn down villages that offer armed resistance to government troops; shoot all adult males; confiscate all property, horses, carts, grain and so forth for the treasury." General Budberg, who served in Kolchak's war ministry, wrote in his diary, "The lads do not seem to realize that if they rape, flog, rob, torture and kill indiscriminately and without restraint, they are thereby instilling such hatred for the government they represent that the swine in Moscow must be delighted at having such diligent, valuable and beneficial collaborators ..."
Acton cites a key document that refutes the fraudulent `Lenin testament'. In 1926 Lenin's sister Mariya stated, "In view of the systematic attacks on comrade Stalin by the opposition minority in the CC and the ceaseless assertions that Lenin had virtually completely broken with Stalin, I feel duty-bound to say a few words about Lenin's attitude to Stalin, because throughout the last stages of V.I.'s life I was with him.
"Vladimir Ilyich had an extraordinarily high opinion of Stalin, to such an extent that at the time of both the first and second strokes V.I. gave the most intimate jobs to Stalin, emphasizing that it was to Stalin he was speaking.
"At the worst times of his illness V.I. did not summon any member of the CC or want to see anybody - he called only Stalin. So the speculation that V.I.'s relations with Stalin were worse than those with other people is the direct opposite of the truth."
Of the 1937 purges, Acton writes, "A proposition currently finding renewed favour among historians is that the overarching motive behind them was preparation for war and an all-encompassing pre-emptive strike against any potential source of internal opposition liable to take advantage of military crisis."
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Post by dodger on Oct 16, 2013 23:21:15 GMT
A useful collection of documents, 29 Oct 2012
This William Podmore review is from: Soviet Union: A Documentary History Volume 2: 1939-1991 (Paperback)
This second volume of documents from Soviet history is, like the first, a useful collection. Edward Acton's editorial commentary contains some valuable insights.
In 1940, Hitler began to supply arms to Finland, and Finland allowed Nazi troops to be sent across Finland to attack Norway.
Acton observes, "The number of forced labourers was much lower than has often been suggested - early postwar guesstimates reached 20 million - but was nevertheless significant. At the outbreak of war, they totalled some three million or about 3.5 per cent of the working population."
He notes, "Stalingrad marked the turning point." Acton concedes that, "In retrospect, too, it appears that the Red Army was not in fact in a position to break through to Warsaw in time to save the uprising."
In the late 1940s, the Soviet people rebuilt their industry and agriculture, bringing huge tracts of land back into production, which enabled them to more than double agricultural output by 1985. Industrial output quadrupled by the mid-1970s. They built five huge new hydroelectric power stations which gave a major boost to the economy in the late 1950s.
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Post by dodger on Oct 16, 2013 23:29:39 GMT
Excellent study of educational reform in the Soviet Union, 30 Oct 2012
This Will Podmore review is from:
Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921-1934 (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies) (Paperback)
After a long struggle in the 1920s, the Soviet Union rejected the Leftist claims that schools, universities and polytechnics were survivals from a pre-modern mode of educational production, that teachers and lecturers were bourgeois or even feudal, and that culture was bourgeois.
Between 1927-28 and 1932-33 the number of teachers in rural schools more than doubled. Fitzpatrick pointed out, "The achievements of the First Five-Year Plan in increasing access to primary and junior secondary education were extremely impressive: total numbers in grades I-VII (including the preparatory year introduced before grade I) grew from 11 million in 1927/28 to 21 million in 1932/33, almost 8 million of the increase occurring in rural grades I-IV. It was officially, and apparently accurately, claimed that by 1931/32 95% of the 8-11 age group were already in primary school. In addition, about three million adolescents who had previously missed primary education were studying either in the normal primary schools or in special courses created according to the Central Committee's directive of 1930."
The number of pupils in Grades V-VII rose from 2.8 million in 1931-32 to 8.8 million in 1938-39. The number of pupils in Grades VIII-X (upper level secondary school) rose from 491,000 in 1935-36 to 2.4 million in 1940-41. The total number in secondary schools rose from 1.8 million in 1926-27 to 5.2 million in 1931-32, to 12.1 million in 1938-39.
Of the apprenticeship schools, Fitzpatrick wrote, "their expansion in the following years was remarkable. In 1928/29, there were 120,000 pupils in industrial and other apprenticeship schools (building, transport, forestry, sovkhoz and so on) and 152,000 in the mainly artisan trade schools. In 1931/32, after the merging of the apprenticeship and trade schools network, the numbers in `FZU [factory-apprenticeship school] and FZU-type schools' had reached over a million."
The number of teaching positions in higher education rose from 18,000 in 1927-28 to 57,000 in early 1933. Between 1927-28 and 1932-33 the number of students grew from 159,800 to 469,800.
On the government's programme of promoting workers, Fitzpatrick wrote, "Stalin's policy prevailed, and in retrospect it must surely be seen as a very bold and imaginative policy which did in fact serve to consolidate and legitimize the regime. At the very beginning of the industrialization drive, before there was any natural expansion of opportunity for upward social mobility, the regime demonstratively repudiated the `bourgeois' professionals and began to promote very large numbers of workers and peasants into the administrative and specialist elite."
She continued, "The policy and its objective - the creation of a new elite, or `proletarian intelligentsia' - were clearly stated in 1928. If one assumes that Stalin saw it as a breakthrough policy that would not be indefinitely continued, the objective was successfully reached. This was a major political achievement, and its impact on the nature of the Soviet regime and leadership was lasting."
She concluded, "For the vydvizhentsy [those promoted], industrialization was an heroic achievement - their own, Stalin's and that of Soviet power - and their promotion, linked with the industrialization drive, was a fulfillment of the promises of the revolution."
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Post by dodger on Oct 22, 2013 21:49:44 GMT
Fascinating study of the worldwide impact of the Soviet Union, 25 Sep 2009
This William Podmore review is from: The Soviet Impact on the Western World (Paperback)
This work studies the Soviet Union's impact on the western world. Chapter 1 looks at its political impact, Chapter 2 at its economic impact, Chapter 3 at its social impact, Chapter 4 at its impact on international relations, Chapter 5 at its ideological impact, and Chapter 6 takes some historical perspectives.
In Chapter 1, Carr notes that the Soviet Union charged that Western democracy is purely formal, that it ignores states' class contents, that it is just political, not extending to social and economic matters, that it is too tolerant of fascist opposition, and that it opposes involving the masses in the work of government. In sum, that parliamentary democracy is not so much democracy as plutocracy. He observes that in both the British and French revolutions, revolutionary dictatorships gave birth to bourgeois democracy.
In Chapter 2, he describes Soviet planning for national efficiency in production and for social justice in distribution. He writes, Keynes' "`comprehensive socialisation of investment' is the essence of planning." He notes, "the planning policies of the Soviet Union provide so many precedents for British practice during the second world war."
In Chapter 3, Carr describes the retreat from laissez-faire ideology. Soviet social philosophy combined material and moral appeals (especially to equality), on collective terms, pursuing social aims, and recognised equal social obligations as well as equal social rights.
In Chapter 4, Carr shows how its foreign trade monopoly enabled the Soviet Union to safeguard its vital national industries and protect its infant industries. He relates how its propaganda was aimed at the workers of the world. He describes its influence on political and diplomatic relations, its greater frankness and realism exposing the idealistic humbug of bourgeois diplomacy.
In Chapter 5, he describes Marxism-Leninism as a coherent and consistent set of principles, based on materialism, a revolt against all idealism, which held that spirit and ideas were the ultimate reality.
In Chapter 6, he shows how Soviet nationalism was progressive, `based not on racial or nationalist prejudices' (Stalin), not on the assumption of the superior rights of the white man. Finally, he argues that the revolution heralded the end of the West-East movement of European history, and the start of an East-West movement, not through armed aggression or military conquest, but by the peaceful influence of ideas.
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Post by dodger on Oct 23, 2013 4:01:42 GMT
Fine Marxist analysis, 7 July 2009
By William Podmore
This review is from: J.V. Stalin On the Opposition, 1921-27 (Paperback)
This is a comprehensive collection of Stalin's writings about the opposition to the Bolshevik party.
In speeches, articles and studies, he demolishes the inflated idealistic claims of the opposition's spokesmen, particularly Trotsky.
He refutes their lies about Lenin's views, especially their dishonest claims that Lenin favoured international, 'permanent' revolution.
All Trotskyists claim that every Marxist was for `international socialism', `international revolutions', until Stalin in 1924 suddenly adopted the `socialism in one country' approach. But on this key question, the Trotskyists suppressed what Lenin actually did and wrote.
Stalin cited what Lenin actually wrote and said on the subject.
In 1915, Lenin wrote, "Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country taken separately. The victorious proletariat of that country, having expropriated the capitalists and organised its own socialist production, would stand up against the rest of the world, the capitalist world." (The `United States of Europe Slogan', Collected Works, Vol. 18, p. 232.)
In 1918, Lenin wrote, "I know that there are, of course, sages who think they are very clever and even call themselves Socialists, who assert that power should not have been seized until the revolution had broken out in all countries. They do not suspect that by speaking in this way they are deserting the revolution and going over to the side of the bourgeoisie. To wait until the toiling classes bring about a revolution on an international scale means that everybody should stand stock-still in expectation. That is nonsense." (Speech delivered at a joint meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Moscow Soviet, 14th May 1918, Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 9.)
These statements proved that Lenin, not Stalin, originated the idea that workers would have to build socialism in one country.
The whole collection shows a fine Marxist at work, arguing for the interests of the Soviet working class, and against those who would have returned the Soviet Union to capitalism.
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Post by dodger on Oct 31, 2013 14:52:47 GMT
Very useful study of the great Soviet drive to industrialise the country, 6 Feb 2013
This Will Podmore review is from: Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928-1931 (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies) (Hardcover)
This is a very useful study of the Soviet working class in the early years of the great drive to industrialise the country.
Under the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, unemployment had been more than 10 per cent. From July 1927, the Soviet trade unions backed rapid industrialisation, to cut unemployment and raise living standards and production.
Kuromiya refutes the Trotskyist/CIA lie that Soviet industrialisation had no popular support, that it was entirely a revolution from above.
At production conferences in 1928-29, 83.4 per cent of suggestions made by workers were adopted, and 81.3 per cent were realised by management.
From 1929 on, the Soviet Union adopted shock movements and socialist competition, based on mass initiative, which played key roles in the industrialisation drive, promoting modernisation and implementing effective management. Teams of advanced workers competed to produce more, with higher productivity, cut costs and improve labour discipline.
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Post by dodger on Oct 31, 2013 16:13:23 GMT
Useful account of the Soviet economy from 1945 to 1991, 28 Jan 2013
This Will Podmore review is from: The Rise and Fall of the The Soviet Economy: An Economic History of the USSR 1945 - 1991 (The Postwar World) (Paperback)
This is a very informative study of the Soviet Union's economic performance from 1945 to 1991.
Philip Hanson notes, "Even the Western recalculations for this period [1946-50], in fact, show an impressive recovery of output. The estimates by Moorsteen and Powell, for GNP in 1937 prices, show the 1940 level being reached again by 1948 (an increase of a quarter in three years). They put the level in 1950 about one-fifth above the pre-war level, and the level in the year of Stalin's death very nearly 50 per cent above 1940."
He observes, "the origins of Soviet relative economic decline can be found in the liberalisation of the Soviet social order that followed the death of Stalin in 1953."
Soviet farm output was 61 per cent that of the USA in 1950 and grew to 86 per cent by 1973. The CIA estimated the USSR's growth, in 1970 prices, at 4.7 per cent a year from 1960 to 1964 and at 5.1 per cent a year from 1964 to 1973. It estimated the USSR's average growth in consumption at 3.2 per cent a year from 1960 to 1964, at 4.6 per cent a year from 1964 to 1973, and at 1.9 per cent a year from 1973 to 1982. "unemployment was not a problem. What unemployment there was amounted to about 0.5% of the workforce, and was almost entirely short-term and frictional."
Hanson sums up, "Soviet output, as assessed by the CIA using Western definitions and standards of measurement, increased in almost every year from 1946 to 1991. The exceptions are 1963, 1979, 1990 and 1991. ... Particularly bad harvests account for the 1963 and 1979 downturns. The output falls in 1990 and 1991 constitute the collapse as the system disintegrated." He rightly refers to Gorbachev's catastroika.
A planned economy needs both output targets and efficiency targets (for maximising the ratio of output to input). During World War Two, the US government used input/output tables to help it to direct material inputs to strategically vital lines of production.
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Post by dodger on Apr 7, 2014 5:57:02 GMT
A jewel of early cinema................
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Post by dodger on Jul 15, 2014 10:16:43 GMT
Climate Dependence and Food Problems in Russia, 1900-1990: The Interaction of Climate and Agricultural Policy and Their Effect on Food Problems
by Nikolai M. Dronin
Edition: Paperback
Price: £18.76
Reviewed by Will Podmore
Fine study of the difficulties faced by Russia's farmers, 14 July 2014
Nikolai Dronin and Edward Bellinger start this extremely useful book by noting, “When analysing the development of Soviet agriculture it should be borne in mind that Russia is comparatively poorly endowed in terms of agricultural land and climate and that, under any system of farming, agricultural productivity would be appreciably lower than, for example, that of the United States or Western Europe.”
Only 1.4 per cent of land suitable for cereal cultivation was in an area with the best combination of temperature and moisture, compared to 56 per cent in the USA. 80 per cent of the USSR’s cropland lay in a zone of risky agriculture, compared to 20 per cent in the USA. The growing season was far shorter, nowhere more than 200 days a year, than Western Europe’s 260 to 300 days.
There was a drought one year in three throughout the 20th century. “the weather between 1920 and 1924 was the worst in the first decades of the twentieth century.” There were large-scale droughts in 1920, 1921 and 1924. Of the 1930s, they note, “poor weather conditions predominated throughout the period.” The 1946 drought affected half the USSR’s agricultural land.
They write, “In the mid-1950s, Nikita Khrushchev launched a grandiose plan for the ploughing up of 42 million hectares of the ‘virgin lands’ in Kazakhstan and Western Siberia. The plan turned out to be a fiasco. None of the planned targets were achieved. The ‘virgin lands’ suffered from wind erosion and supported low, unstable, and economically unprofitable (for new grain sovkhoses [state farms]) cereal production.”
“The virgin lands campaign had brought neither the expected increases in grain harvests nor an abundance of fodder for the country.” They write of “a serious deterioration in the living standards of the Soviet people, caused by Khrushchev’s reforms.”
After Khrushchev was ousted, “There were also some improvements in agricultural practice in the steppe zone of the USSR. The exploitative nature of Khrushchev’s style of farming (Stalin, by contrast, was an advocate of grasslands, as it proved to be a substitute for chemical fertilizer), with its emphasis on grain and corn growing at the expense of soil conservation practices, was rejected. The bitter lessons of the virgin lands proved to the Soviet authorities that grain crops depleted the soil and actually promoted soil erosion, while grassland farming was soil conserving. … the practice of fallow-land crop rotation was re-established. The [Khrushchev] dogma ‘Fallow land is lost land; erosion is a fiction’ proved to be completely false.”
They observe, “Under Gorbachev (1985-1990), despite more and better harvests, shortages of the most necessary food items had become chronic and even more disappointing for Soviet people who were urging changes for the better.”
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