From Autocracy to Command Economy: What the Revolution Built

The idea

This unit runs from the last autocrat to the first command economy, and the anchor's line through it is that Russia never had the stage in between. Nicholas II ruled as his ancestors had; two wars broke him, the first answered with a Duma he did not mean and the second with bread riots he could not shoot. Lenin's party had been built for that moment on a theory that workers could not find socialism themselves, so a vanguard would bring it to them and a peasant country could skip capitalism. February made a republic without power; October took power without a republic and dispersed the assembly that might have made one. Peace at Brest-Litovsk cost a third of the country and won the civil war, which the anchor says cost ten million lives, mostly civilians. The Cheka policed the result. Then the retreat, the NEP, and the succession, which the general secretary won with appointments while the Testament that named him lay buried. What Stalin built was the thing the revolution had lacked: an industrial base, by collectivization that starved millions in Ukraine and by Five-Year Plans that met no quota and reached parity, and a state that purged its own purgers. Outside Russia the twenties tried to rebuild order on paper, at Locarno and in the Kellogg-Briand Pact, while Modernism took the old order apart in paint and prose and Freud explained why no one had been rational in the first place. Women won the vote and lost the jobs. Unit sixteen turns to the men who offered order without either.