The Russian Revolution and Europe in the 1920s

This is Unit Fifteen of Western Civilization Two, part two of two: the modernist mind, women after the war, four procedures, and what the revolution built. Part one ended with a riot at the Rite of Spring. This part finishes the twenties, and it pays off the unit's governing idea: Russia went from the last autocrat to the first command economy with no capitalism in between, a state built by plan, famine and purge, while the rest of Europe rebuilt order on paper and took the old order apart in paint, prose and psychoanalysis. Joyce spent a novel on one day; Freud explained why no one had been rational in the first place; women won the vote and lost the jobs. Then the methods: Russia on one line through two wars and two revolutions, Lenin read for the seed of one-party rule, February set against October under four heads, and a modernist work sorted by what it does to its subject. By the end you will be able to describe the modernist mind. To describe women after the war. To sequence Russia and compare its revolutions. To read Lenin and classify a work. And to state the capstone.

Four entries on the mind: the novelists who followed thought rather than event, Freud's talking cure, his three-part map, and what he made of politics and women.

The mind, not the moral.

WC2 1424 Woolf, Proust, Kafka, Joyce: The Inner Life

Modernist writers put inner life over plot. Joyce's Ulysses spent a novel on one Dublin day, incredibly difficult in the anchor's word. Woolf, a feminist, and Proust traced consciousness. Kafka's Metamorphosis gave an insect worried about getting to work. The point was the same as the painters': the mind, not the moral, in a stream of consciousness. Anchor-only.

Talking about it relieved it.

WC2 1425 Freud: The Darwin of the Mind, Hysteria, the Talking Cure

Freud, a Viennese Jewish physician, read the mind as evolved for a hostile psychic environment: unconscious drives against social pressure. Hysteria he traced to trauma, usually sexual. Talking about it relieved it: psychoanalysis. His Interpretation of Dreams read dreams as the mind's cravings. The Darwin of the mind is the anchor's phrase, and now largely rejected empirically is its judgment.

No one is fully self-controlled.

WC2 1426 Id, Ego, Superego

The id holds the drives: eros, pleasure, and thanatos, the death drive. The superego is social pressure internalized as shame. The ego, the conscious mind, works the reality principle between them. Repressed desire returns as slips, dreams and defenses, and later unhappiness; the unconscious is the iceberg's bulk. No one is fully self-controlled. Anchor-only.

A caution for politics, stereotypes for women.

WC2 1427 Freud on Politics, and Freud on Women

If no one is rational, the Enlightenment's dream of rational politics was a caution: nations could follow the death drive, a theory of nineteen fourteen. He fled the Nazi takeover of Austria in nineteen thirty-eight. On women he reproduced old stereotypes, penis envy and less evolved. The anchor's judgment on his gender views is attributed.

Two entries on women after the war: the New Woman and the reversal that followed her, and the vote won across the twenties with its restrictions.

The vote kept, the jobs lost.

WC2 1428 What the War Changed for Women: The New Woman and the Reversal

The durable changes were jobs, practical clothing, bobbed hair and the vote. The New Woman worked, lived alone, drank, danced; the flapper, knee-length skirts and jazz, was her American type. Then the reversal: exclusion from male jobs and universities, unequal pay, with anti-discrimination law another half-century away, the anchor says. The witness has the New Woman and the flapper.

Won by war service, the anchor's link.

WC2 1429 Suffrage Won Across the 1920s

Most European countries and the United States gave women the vote through the twenties, often with restrictions: Britain's property-owning women over thirty in nineteen eighteen, the age limit falling to twenty-one in twenty-eight, Germany the same year as Britain, the United States in twenty. France waited until forty-four. Won by war service is the link the anchor draws.

Four procedures: twenty Russian years on one line, Lenin's chapter read for its three consequences, February against October under four heads, and a modernist work sorted by what it does to its subject.

War, revolution, concession; war, revolution, seizure.

WC2 1430 Sequencing Russia, 1904 to 1924

Twenty years, and the order carries the argument. Nineteen-oh-four: war with Japan. Oh-five: Bloody Sunday in January, defeat by September, the October Manifesto and a Duma. Fourteen: war with Germany; fifteen the tsar to the front; sixteen Rasputin murdered. Seventeen: February's bread protests and abdication, April's Theses, October's seizure. Eighteen: the Constituent Assembly dispersed in January, Brest-Litovsk in March, the tsar's family shot in July, civil war. Twenty-one: the NEP. Twenty-two: the USSR founded, Lenin's first stroke. Twenty-four: Lenin dies. The pattern: each war produced a revolution within a year, the first survived by concession, the second not; and the party that won the second did so by promising the war's end. Name the year for each event before checking. Dates are on the witness where the anchor lacks them; the Assembly's dispersal is the standard record.

Socialism from without.

WC2 1431 Reading Lenin: The Vanguard

Read chapter two of What Is To Be Done? at the Marxists Internet Archive. Lenin argues that socialist consciousness cannot arise from the workers' own struggle. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation. Socialist theory, he says, would have to be brought to them from without, by intellectuals. Three consequences follow, and the anchor's summary rests on them. First, a party of professional revolutionaries must lead, not follow, the workers. Second, worship of spontaneity strengthens bourgeois ideology, so the party must instruct. Third, since consciousness comes from outside the class, a peasant country can be led past the capitalist stage Marx thought necessary. Read it as the seed of one-party rule: whoever holds the consciousness holds the right to lead. Quoted within two sentences from the archive's translation; the anchor summarizes.

Spontaneous against the tsar; planned against the republic.

WC2 1432 Comparing February and October

Four heads sort the two revolutions of nineteen seventeen. Who: February was a spontaneous rising of women workers, strikers and mutinous soldiers with no party in charge; October was a planned seizure by one party through the Petrograd Soviet and its Red Guards. Against whom: February against the tsar; October against the Provisional Government that February had made. Result: February produced dual power, a government without police beside soviets without a majority; October produced one power, then a dispersed assembly and a one-party state. Program: February wanted bread and the tsar gone and kept the war; October promised peace, land and bread and signed Brest-Litovsk. The trap: October did not overthrow the tsar, who had been gone eight months. Practice by placing six items: the abdication, the April Theses, the Winter Palace, Kerensky, the Constituent Assembly, the Cheka. The anchor's seized the Duma is corrected on the witness.

Praise the machine; break the object; paint the feeling; follow the mind.

WC2 1433 Classifying a Modernist Work: Futurist, Cubist, Expressionist, Stream of Consciousness

The tell is what the work does to its subject. Futurist: the subject is speed, machines, violence and the future, and the work praises them; Marinetti's racing car, the gunshot play, the radio tower. Cubist: the subject is a still object or figure seen from several angles at once, broken into planes; Picasso and Braque. Expressionist: the subject is a feeling, painted in color that is not the object's, so the sky can be red and the horse blue; Kandinsky, Marc, and, in Vienna, Schiele's self-portraits. Stream of consciousness: the subject is a mind in time, the prose following thought rather than event; Joyce's one Dublin day, Woolf, Proust. Two cautions. Klimt's gold belongs to Vienna's Secession, decorative before Expressionist. And Futurism is the one of the four with a politics; it ended in fascism. Practice on The Rite of Spring, which fits none and belongs with Schoenberg. The labels are the anchor's; the art witness supplies Klimt, Cubism and Expressionism.

One capstone entry: from the last autocrat to the first command economy, with no stage in between.

No capitalism in between.

WC2 1434 From Autocracy to Command Economy: What the Revolution Built

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 the Second 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. No capitalism in between; a state built by plan, famine and purge. The totals are contested and attributed. Unit sixteen turns to the men who offered order without either.

Look at what you can now do. You can describe the novelists following thought, Freud's talking cure and his three-part mind, and his caution for politics beside his stereotypes for women. You can describe the New Woman, the reversal, and the vote won with restrictions across the twenties. You can sequence Russia as war, revolution, concession, then war, revolution, seizure, and set February against October by who, against whom, result and program. You can read Lenin for socialism from without and its three consequences, and sort a work by praising the machine, breaking the object, painting the feeling or following the mind. And you can state the capstone: no capitalism in between, a state built by plan, famine and purge, which is this unit's one idea. Unit sixteen turns to the men who offered order without either.