St. Petersburg Revisited

I recently discovered the wonderful website, New Books in Russia and Eurasia, at http://newbooksinrussianstudies.com.  Not being a professional historian, it's difficult for me to keep up with recent academic publications on Russian history, but Sean Guillory's myriad interviews help to make this much more possible.  I love the site and hope to listen to most of the interviews there over the next several months.  The site's host, also well-known for his wonderful blog, Sean's Russian Blog at http://seansrussiablog.org, deserves a great deal of credit for his well-informed and probing questions.

I began with an interview with Mark Steinberg about his book, Petersburg: Fin de Siecle.  Knowing that the author is one of the best-regarded historians of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Russian and Soviet history, I'm sure the book is even better than the interview.  The author's thesis is, apparently, that the city's population had similar fantasies and nightmares about modernity.  My one question is whether these fantasies and nightmares were all that different from those of urban citizens (or subjects) of any other European country at the time.  The interview doesn't suggest that there would be all that much difference between St. Petersburg, Berlin, or New York City for that matter.  The literature of modernity, from Baudelaire to Marx to Berman, suggests that almost every city was caught up in the same drama of masks, movement, and danger.

Perhaps it's enough to know how exactly St. Petersburg expressed the common themes of European modernity, but one does hope that this book helps readers to understand what made St. Petersburg so very special.  I can only add that I have almost no acquaintance with St. Petersburg.  I don't speak the language, never really met any of its current or former denizens, and have only visited there once, a year and a half ago.  And yet somehow this city seems more awe-inspiring, more important, than any other place I have ever been.  I stayed there for less than two weeks, often walking alone, and unfortunately never really speaking to Russians other than to ask directions or order food.  But the city invaded me, and I dare to think that I will never forget it.  In fact, I have the strong urge to get back there as soon as possible, and certainly to read anything and everything about it.  I take lousy pictures, but I've posted a few below in no particular order, as a reminder, mostly to myself, that this city can be compared to no other.  It's wonderful, and tragic, and splendid--and would have been all that even without October 1917.

Civil War, War Communism, NEP, and the 1920s

In the Civil War period, the Party put an end to its experiments with popular sovereignty at the local level.   The soviets lost their independence and influence, worker control of factories subsided, and an officer corps reemerged in a professionalized Red Army.  War Communism helped the Reds to win the Civil War, but extreme centralization decimated the Russian economy, leaving the cities barren and devoid of adequate food.  In this period of plague and famine, the harvest almost completely collapsed.  Peasants refused to plant for want of incentive, and many turned to open revolt against the Bolsheviks.  Peasants frequently attacked grain requisition teams sent from the cities.  Then came the Kronstadt Rebellion, in which radical sailors now turned against Bolshevism in favor of a free, collectivist, decentralized form of political organization, and the emergence of the Workers' Opposition movement, in which proletarian leaders advocated for a form of democratic centralism.  Then came a series of workers' strikes.

In response to these political challenges, Lenin wisely coupled political coercion with N.E.P., or the New Economic Policy of the 1920s.  During this period, the Party loosened the reigns on economic control and the economy quickly rebounded.  During the mid-1920s, trade revived, shops proliferated, cities grew, cafes and services sprang up everywhere, grain requisitions ended, and economic activity finally reached pre-war levels in 1926.  The Party's stated goal in this period was to control "the commanding heights" of industry, including banking and large-scale manufacturing and international trade, but leave the local merchant or small-time manufacturer relatively free of governmental interference.

Bukharin, "the Party's darling," advocated policies that were roughly commensurate with NEP assumptions, which favored market surpluses, the production of consumer goods, gradualism, and evolutionary socialism. According to Steinberg, Bukharin offered economic, political, and even ethical objections to more radical Leftist currents in the Party.  Bukharin wanted to avoid violent class struggle.  The goal was a "bloodless path to socialism."

Notwithstanding the economic successes of N.E.P., the country's new found freedom led to widespread discontent in the Party.  Old Bolsheviks were appalled at rampant crime, which Steinberg reminds us, orthodox Marxists could only attribute to the reemergence of capitalism.  The Bolsheviks also resented widespread prostitution, which they also believed resulted from exploitative economic relationships.  Party members generally believed that NEP had been a necessary evil, but it had to be overturned if the country ever hoped to become truly communist.  The majority of Bolsheviks believed that Russian backwardness needed to be forcefully overturned by an aggressive and intrusive state apparatus

Although Soviet institutions were affected by the violence of the Civil War, Bolshevik thinkers of the 1920s remained sincere about the transformation of society and they therefore pursued a wide variety of radical artistic projects and anticipatory social reforms.  These reforms included granting women equal legal rights, making divorce and abortion freely available, organizing communes, and vigorously attacking domestic abuse.  Steinberg even mentions Soviet "belt burying ceremonies" in which peasants publicly committed to end domestic abuse by turning the burial of peasant belts into a public ritual.  The Soviets didn't stop there.  In the 1920s the Party faithful and communist sympathizers launched a whole series of social projects, including campaigns to reduce swearing, drinking and fighting.  Steinberg even mentions one campaign to get Soviet citizens to eat with proper kitchen utensils.

Steinberg's overall take on the 1920s was that it was a time of experimentation, when the Party's overall direction had not been completely determined.  Could the Party contain any seeds of democracy?  How much discipline was required of Party members?  Could factions exist in the Party? How coercive should the socialist state be?  What was the right balance between the urban and rural economy?  In other areas of social life, debates about the communist future were even more speculative.  What did a liberated man look like?  What were the hallmarks of a newly free Russian society? The 1920s were an even more experimental time for the arts. The future seemed unlimited.  In this era, an avant garde still hoped to use aesthetic innovation to reflect social change and, more importantly, encourage it. Plans for a "Monument to the World's Suffering" would have made this edifice the tallest building in the world.  Musicians organized "an orchestra without a conductor" to express egalitarian principles in music.  One group attacked the convention of wearing clothing.  Others experimented with urban planning, factory production, and a hundred other things. In summary, Russian communism between War Communism and Stalinism remained surprisingly fluid, creative, and open-ended.

Steinberg on the Nature of Bolshevism

Who were the Bolsheviks and why did they outsmart, outplay, and outlast their socialist competitor parties? And why indeed was this small party able to prevail in the country's civil war?  According to Mark Steinberg, the Bolsheviks were a party that offered clear solutions to their beleaguered country, including strong, unified government and firm authoritarian solutions to complex problems.  They were also a party that offered wildly popular slogans to garner a great deal of popular support, including calls to create a bread monopoly to help the common people, plans to inaugurate worker councils to end exploitation at the factories, and a decree to institute land redistribution to improve the lot of the peasantry. The land redistribution was the Bolshevik's most popular program.  The 26 October 1917 Decree on land offered landowners no compensation.  Hired labor was ended.  Everyone who worked the land, not excluding former landowners, were entitled to a plot of land.

The Bolsheviks also originally offered all national minorities in the Russian Empire the right to self-determination.  Finland and Poland were granted total independence.  At first, government was decentralized and localized.  The Bolsheviks were anti-religious but they weren't above using the sacred language of resurrection to explicate their Marxist creed to the masses.  As Steinberg reminds us, they depicted their cause as a moral struggle to deliver the country from the greed, egoism, and moral turpitude of the ruling classes, who had, they said, repeatedly insulted the virtue and dignity of their fellow countrymen.  Bolsheviks were especially popular with rank-and-file soldiers, who were fed up with the tsarist officer class.

The Bolsheviks were a complex phenomenon but the Party embodied many of the trends in Russian Utopianism.  Even more than other Russian radical groups, the Bolsheviks were supremely self-confident about their abilities to learn to govern on the job.  Lenin had taught them that a tiny group of dedicated, heroic, professional revolutionaries could change the world.  The Bolsheviks had a touch of Nietzsche in them.  In Steinberg's words, they believed they could channel the creative energy of the lower classes, creating organizational miracles by their energy, daring, willpower, and general decisiveness.

Some analysts have argued that the Bolsheviks were cynics who used the vocabulary of the Enlightenment to obscure dark motives. Steinberg argues the contrary:  Bolsheviks were true-believers.  They believed in Utopia and were therefore willing to do almost anything to bring that Utopia about.  Censorship, dictatorship, authoritarianism, and almost anything else was permissible if it was in the service of radical social transformation.  Revolution, Lenin argue, was the most authoritarian phenomenon on earth. Everything was justified that served the goal of socialist liberation.  And the Soviet leadership used this logic to nationalize banks, create a master plan of economic regulation, and institute disciplinarian approaches even to factory governance and union management.

But of course the Bolsheviks didn't stop there.  They moved inexorably toward violent solutions of political problems.  By Steinberg's reckoning, at least 13,000 Russian were executed by the Cheka without trial between 1918 and 1920, including some who died for their social origins or political sympathies.

Steinberg and Applebees

I left my doctoral program in modern British history many years ago.  My decision to leave this program was a long and painful one.  I had logical reasons to quit, but just as many logical reasons to stay.  On the one hand, I was unhappy, profoundly unhappy, with life in Urbana, Illinois.  I hated living in Central Illinois, and doubted whether I had the capacity to conduct substantive research over a long period of time.  On the other hand, I had a master's degree in history already, and was poised to pass my preliminary exams, get my thesis proposal excepted, and get on with the business of overcoming the last real hurdle to earning my doctorate.  What should I do?

In the end, a friend helped me to make the decision by using a peculiar argument:  once I had passed my preliminary exams and gotten my proposal accepted by my doctoral committee, why shouldn't I move to Chicago to begin the process of research?  After all, if moving to Chicago distracted me from my goal of writing my dissertation, then I wouldn't have ended up finishing my dissertation anyhow, not even if I had stayed in Urbana.  I accepted the argument.  Truly, I was living in an intolerable state of indecision and couldn't handle Urbana any longer.  I needed to clear my mind and get to civilization as quickly as possible.

I sometimes suspect that my dread of Central Illinois stems from my profound and therefore unsettling familiarity with the place.  Although I hated to admit the fact, living in Urbana felt like home on some primordial level.  I had lived in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Montreal, but as a young boy, I was taught to love the heartland by both of my parents, each of who had spent plenty of time among farmers.  As a boy, I remember hearing my mom extoll the virtues of the smell of cow manure whenever we drove through open farmlands.  My dad too loved, and still loves, the farmlands.  When I asked him whether he wouldn't have preferred to live someplace with mountains or at least hills, he said matter of factly:  "Not at all.  I've always felt that this is the way land out to be.  Flat."

The realization that I was home came to me once when a friend and I walked into an Urbana diner and some stranger, guttural greeting unconsciously escaped my lips, something akin to what "howdy" must be like in the South.  My California friend turned to me and said:  "You're one of them.  You belong here."  And so I did. My ability to blend in with my Central Illinois surroundings did nothing to make me want to stay in town.  Even now, well over a decade later, I find myself unsettled by my Indiana surroundings, and unsettled precisely because I feel that I know my neighbors too well.  If I don't prick myself to keep from lapsing into a Midwest stupor, I could be content to spend every Friday night for the next forty years hanging out at the local Applebees.  These are my people.

But let me return to the narrative of leaving my doctoral program.  In a sense, I made the right decision.  Although I may never be able to explain the fact that I don't have a doctorate, I know I needed to leave Urbana in 1999.  Life in graduate school was too enfantalizing, and I was probably right to fear that graduation might well lead me to take a job in Nebraska in order to keep my frail academic career afloat in a difficult job market.  What's strange about my decision to end six years of graduate study with no terminal degree, is that I've never, ever been able to finalize the decision.

The year after I left my doctoral program, I hadn't quite made up my mind that I wasn't about to write my dissertation.  Two years after that, I was still pretending to be on the verge of returning to the dissertation in order to secure jobs from employers who wanted to hear that from prospective adjunct professors.  But even ten years later I bump into employers who want to hear about the dissertation I never wrote.  "What was the dissertation about?  Do you think you can go back to finish it?  Will you go back to finish it?"

These questions pop up over and over again.  In my last interview, I answered truthfully that my dissertation was supposed to be about the connection between British politics and literature in the Interwar period, especially with respect to the way the two discourses understood the way time works.  When the audience expressed an interest in the topic, I quickly explained that if I had had a better grasp of the topic, or could it explain it more clearly, than certainly I would have finished the project.  The audience didn't seem to mind the self-defeating sarcasm:  I got the job.

I got the job, but getting the job by talking about a dissertation that was now ten or more years old, made me think about how traumatized I was by graduate school.  Like my mother, perhaps, my dissertation never dies.  It's everywhere, even in this blog, which is of course some kind of retroactive attempt to right a wrong and write something wonderful that would warrant a doctorate, though the distance between this blog and doctoral level thesis research may be apparent to all of my readers.

In recent months, I'm thinking about this undead dissertation more than ever.  I've actually gone on to University of Illinois' website to explore the possibility of returning to the scene of the crime to complete my doctorate.  The idea sounds good at first, inexpensive and imminently logical.  And then a sick feeling sets in, and I can't think of anything more ludicrous than trying, once more, to make the same bad decision I made so many years ago.  Yet still I ponder the return of the prodigal son, the historian manque redeemed.

I am watching Mark Steinberg's lectures about Russian history this week. I never met Professor Steinberg when I was in Urbana, where he continues to teach.  I think he arrived only shortly before I left, and in any event I wasn't then a student of Russian history.  His lectures are excellent, part of the Teaching Company's scholarly lecture series.  I'm hearing the professor's takes on World War I.  The crisis obviously made some radical solution to Russia's problems extremely likely:  misery has a breaking point, and after that, workers, soldiers, and peasants are likely to listen to brutal proposals such as those of Lenin and Trotsky.

Steinberg's take on the Revolution puts the emphasis on ordinary people, which is where it should be.  Yes, Lenin was a brilliant theoretician and tactician.  But it's ordinary Russians, not Bolshevik captains, who really made radical alternatives to autocracy plausible.  Soldiers hated officers;  workers hated capitalists;  peasants hated landlords.  Steinberg places the emphasis on ordinary people again when it comes to Stalin's triumph in the mid-1920s.  Rank and file communists came to distrust the arrogance of Trotsky while favoring the gentle style of Bukharin and the non-flashy competence of Stalin.  And, with the temporary excesses of NEP, rank and file communists eventually accepted Stalin's radical solutions for the economy, borrowed from the Left Opposition, including rapid industrialization and collectivization.

In the end, Steinberg helps us to notice that ordinary people got what they wanted out of both the Revolution and Stalinism.  Although many suffered and died as a result of Soviet brutality, common people had asked for a government of action, mobility, class solidarity, severity toward the "exploiting classes," and power.  Steinberg is at pains to mention that Party members and others had many important choices to make in the 1920s.  This was, after all, a time of social, cultural, economic, and political experimentation.  On the other hand, Steinberg's narrative reinforces the notion that nothing good could come out of the Bolshevik Party's failure to incorporate any of the tenants of liberalism into its ethos.  Neither Trotsky nor Lenin nor Stalin had any reservations about using coercion, power, dictatorship, militarism, discipline, and indeed the methodologies of the Great War as well as the Civil War, to bring Russian out of its perceived backwardness.

It's hard to say how I will ever be able to wrap up my unresolved grief over leaving graduate school.  I can't help but think about returning to write a dissertation, or applying to some similar program to do the whole experience all over again, only this time with more discipline.  But when I think this way, I soon realize that it was graduate school that killed my life-long love of history.  This blog may be a substitute for real historical research, but it's also a tribute to a real love of history, which is, for me at least, undermined by making history into a career.

I'm getting married in two days.  And I can't help by notice that irony that I'm marrying an academic, and one who slaves away each night on some new grant proposal or academic paper.  It's funny that I am not pursuing this career myself.  I have lived under the shadow of the University of Chicago's campus, and am marrying a professor, but somehow I resist the notion that I am as at home in academia as I am at Applebees.