The Oxford Handbook of The History of Communism (Part 3)

1. General Notes

   • Chapter 17 - Political and Economic Relations Between Communist States, by Balazs Szalontai (pg. 305)

     • Introduction (pg. 305)

       • "As Martin Mevius aptly remarked, it is a 'popular myth' that 'nationalism and communism are wholly antagonistic and mutually exclusive'" (pg. 305)

         • "communist parties presented themselves as heirs to national traditions and guardians of national interests" [Reappraising Communism and Nationalism | Nationalities Papers | Cambridge Core]

       • "from the beginning, communist foreign parties were torn between ideas of internationalism [(exporting ideology)] and nationalism [(legitimizing ideology)]" (pg. 305)

       • "the new borders of the post-1945 USSR were drawn partly in accordance with ethnic principles and partly on the basis of continuity with the tsarist empire" (pg. 306)

         • "the communist regimes created in neighboring countries were expected to subordinate their own national interests to Soviet ambitions" (pg. 306)

         • "such views were expressed not only in older publications inspired by theories of totalitarianism but also more recently by scholars…who called the Soviet bloc:" (pg. 306)

           • Revolutionary Empire (by Andrew Janos)

           • Totalitarian Empire (by Alexander Motyl)

           • Empire by Imposition (by Vojtech Mastny)

           • Empire by Coercion (by Laszlo Borhi)

       • "this chapter aims to broaden the scope of the aforesaid analyses by investigating the relations not only between the USSR and its Eastern European 'satellites' but also between other communist states" (pg. 306)

     • Export of Repression vs. Export of De-Stalinization (pg. 306)

       • "the repressive acts that communist regimes committed in controlled (but non-annexed) foreign states reflected the fact that communist ideology was based not on the idea of racial superiority/inferiority but on internationalist concepts" (pg. 306)

     • Inter-Party Control vs. Military Occupation (pg. 307)

       • "the communist system was Janus-faced. If it operated smoothly, it enabled the core state to act as an efficient informal empire" (pg. 307)

       • "but, if this system of inter-party influence did not function, the core state…often had no other option but to invade the peripheral country or accept its inability to engineer regime change" (pg. 308)

         • "the military option appeared feasible in come cases. Moscow permanently stationed divisions in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Afghanistan" (pg. 308)

     • State Sovereignty vs. Demographic Expansion (pg. 308)

       • "pro-natalist policies [purport]…that high demographic growth [is] an essential precondition of military power" (pg. 309)

       • "the connection between pro-natalist policies and national defense seems to have been strongest in the USSR (1936-1955)" (pg. 309)

         • "still, the evident readiness of Stalin and Mao to use massive population transfers for purposes of political control within their respective national boundaries raises the question as to why this method was not used to reinforce Soviet domination over Eastern Europe" (pg. 309)

         • "in 1944-1946, for instance, the Kremlin suddenly granted Soviet citizenship to 120,000 Russian and Central Asian exiles living in Xinjiang, presumably as a means of putting temporary pressure on the Guomindang government" (pg. 310)

     • Economic Domination vs. Economic Nationalism (pg. 310)

       • "the central role ascribed to industrialization in communist doctrine, combined with strategic concerns, meant that the Soviet policy of removing industrial plants from Eastern Europe was only a short-term measure. In the longer term, Stalinist Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria, all allocated more than 70% of industrial investment to heavy industry" (pg. 310)

       • "this plan, instead of reinforcing internationalist cooperation, provoked economic nationalism in those peripheral communist states that were unwilling to accept the role the core assigned to them" (pg. 311)

       • "the soviet model of integration…tended to perpetuate, rather than eliminate resource dependency in Albania, North Korea, Cuba, and Mongolia" (pg. 312)

     • Intra-Bloc Conflicts vs. Internationalist Brotherhood (pg. 312)

       • "the emergence of the bipolar order of the Cold War created new complications in the Kremlin's oscillations between nationalism and internationalism. On the one hand, in 1949-1954 Soviet diplomacy sought to torpedo West European plans for economic and political integration." (pg. 313)

       • "on the other hand, Moscow became increasingly impatient with those manifestations of nationalism that could destabilize its own 'outer empire'" (pg. 313)

     • Disloyal Hegemons vs. Ambitious Peripheral Leaders (pg. 314)

       • "from Moscow's perspective, the reluctance of a peripheral state to subordinate its own aspirations to Soviet global policy was a sign of narrow-minded nationalism, whereas from the viewpoint of the peripheral state, Soviet unwillingness to take the side of a communist ally against a non-bloc state often appeared as a betrayal of socialist internationalism" (pg. 314)

       • "the reluctance of a core communist state to support the nationalist aspirations of a peripheral one was far more likely to create tension than to inspire requests for incorporation" (pg. 314)

   • Chapter 18 - Averting Armageddon: The Communist Peace Movement (1948-1956), by Geoffrey Roberts (pg. 322)

     • "Soviet leaders, including Stalin, remained wedded to the view that war was inevitable [so long as] capitalism and imperialism existed. War could be postponed by the struggle for peace but it could not be prevented" (pg. 322)

     • The Emergence of the Communist Peace Movement (pg. 323)

       • "the initiative for the establishment of a new peace movement came from Polish and French communist intellectuals who in August 1948 organized a World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wroclaw" (pg. 323)

         • "the importance of the communist peace movement in the history of the Cold War was highlighted by Marshall D. Shulman in 'Stalin's Foreign Policy Reappraised' [where he] argued that Stalin began to step away from the Cold War in the late 1940's when he launched a series of 'peace offensives', the chief instrument being the communist-led peace movement" (pg. 323)

       • "before the congress, the leaders of the Soviet delegation…stated that the main aim was to ensure the movement involved as many people as possible, irrespective of national, political, and religious differences" (pg. 324)

         • "through this mechanism the peace movement influenced as well as echoed Soviet foreign policy" (pg. 324)

       • "in the 1950's, the struggle for peace became a major theme of the USSR's domestic as well as its foreign politics" (pg. 325)

     • The Petition Campaigns (pg. 326)

       • "the Stockholm Appeal was a petition calling for the prohibition of nuclear weapons" (pg. 326-327)

   • Chapter 19 - The Cult of Personality and Symbolic Politics, by Daniel Leese (pg. 339)

     • December 17, 2011 - Kim Jong Il passes away (pg. 339)

     • "the Kim dynasty cult…allows us to observe aspects of personality cults, such as the propagation of political myths, loyalty pledges, and the clustering of public space with leader images" (pg. 340)

     • Modern Personality Cults (pg. 341)

       • "Jan Plamper distinguishes 5 characteristics which set the modern leader cults apart from their traditional forerunners:" (pg. 341)

         • "first, they are secular cults and no longer draw on transcendental sources of legitimacy…but are deeply imbued with the notion of popular sovereignty" (pg. 341)

         • "second, they are 'children of mass politics' and target the entire population, not certain elites" (pg. 341)

         • "third, cults are disseminated by means of mass media, relying on a national network of news, radio, and film distribution that allows for…mass-manufactured cult symbols and standardized rhetoric" (pg. 342)

         • "fourth, the unrivaled distribution of the cult message necessitates a 'directed public sphere', precluding public criticism or alternatives" (pg. 342)

         • "finally, the modern personality cult…is an 'exclusively patricentric phenomenon', as opposed to some traditional cults" (pg. 342)

       • "modern personality cults clearly stem from 20th century party dictatorships of fascist, socialist, or Ba'ath ideological origins" (pg. 342)

       • "these cults of party leaders…are often deeply imbued with nationalism and tend to identify the fate of the nation with the fate of the party and its current leader" (pg. 342)

         • "patronage networks and sycophancy…develop naturally in a climate characterized by asymmetric communications patterns, and are further encouraged by political uncertainty and violence" (pg. 342)

       • "the most obvious goal behind the instigation of modern personality cults [is] to generate a unifying effect, the creation of a communicative space, which serve[s] to center loyalties and emotions in the persona of the leader" (pg. 342-343)

   • Chapter 20 - Communist Revolution and Political Terror, by Julia Strauss (pg. 355)

     • "the twin phenomena of terror and revolution are so intertwined that they go together like mother and child: it is close to impossible to imagine one without the other" (pg. 355)

     • "the Soviet Union's formative experience of civil war, forced collectivization, and ever wider waves of terror against presumptive internal enemies…established a template that other communist parties in power variously imitated, adjusted, reacted against, and occasionally amplified in the light of their own domestic and regional security circumstance" (pg. 356)

     • "there are no agreed-upon metrics for gauging terror, and delineating terror and its effects is a notoriously politicized business" (pg. 358)

   • Chapter 21 - Popular Opinion Under Communist Regimes, by Sheila Fitzpatrick (pg. 371)

     • The Classic Soviet Model (pg. 373)

       • "during the Second World War, recorded Soviet popular opinion featured the usual grumbling but also considerable patriotic sentiment, expressed in part as indignation at the Allies' slowness in opening a Second Front" (pg. 375)

   • Chapter 22 - Communism and Economic Modernization, by Mark Harrison (pg. 387)

     • "economic management at every level was politicized so that decisions were based on national priorities rather than profit or loss. Because these institutions worked imperfectly, all the countries under communist rule also made attempts at reform. In the European communist countries all such reforms failed" (pg. 387)

     • "the challenge presented by communism was military and cultural as well as economic, but both military power and cultural appeals were undermined by economic strength" (pg. 387)

     • Aims and Objectives (pg. 387)

       • "the measurable objective…was 'to catch up and overtake' the economically more advanced countries of the West" (pg. 388)

     • Belief (pg. 389)

       • "Stalin and other communist leaders believed that the decisive factor in the world was power, and that power was ultimately the power to dominate and coerce by superior force rather than the power to persuade…or engage cooperatively" (pg. 389)

         • "they defined international society by its distribution of power, and they saw the opportunity for Russia [being] more to contend for domination than to cooperate through exchange" (pg. 389)

     • Rise and Fall (pg. 390)

       • "the great test of Stalin's model of modernization came in WWII. In 20th century warfare the mass production of things such as guns, planes, and tanks and their delivery to the front line turned out to be a decisive factor. In WWII Soviet industry outproduced Germany and enabled the Red Army to outfight the Wehrmacht" (pg. 390)

         • "the Soviet rear remained stable, meaning that propensities to disloyalty were kept within tolerable limits and food was delivered to the Red Army and the war factories even when millions were starving to death" (pg. 390)

       • "national income is one way among many of measuring progress" (pg. 390-391)

         • "[however,] national income does not tell us whether a society's potential is efficiently utilized, how much has been diverted into military adventures or vanity projects, or how fairly the results are distributed" (pg. 392)

       • "under Stalin's 5-year plans the Soviet economy was struck by further shocks. Some were self-inflicted: the collectivization of agriculture, launched at the end of 1929, stripped the countryside of food and led to another famine in which millions died. Stalin had a million more executed in the Great Terror of 1937 to 1938" (pg. 392)

       • "after WWII the Soviet Union was joined by other states under communist rule [such as Czechoslovakia]…East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Albania" (pg. 392)

         • "communism was more likely to take hold in societies that were already poor and damaged" (pg. 393)

     • Institutions (pg. 395)

       • "of the common features of the communist economies, most important was the politicization of economic life. The state monopolized the industrial and residential capital stocks, the channels of business and private communications, and news and entertainment media." (pg. 395)

         • "the ruling party's monopoly of power was institutionalized by party structures that paralleled those of the state and the economy" (pg. 395)

         • "in the economy, the state became the dominant purchaser of output and channeled a large of it towards government-approved ('planned') projects of economic and military modernization" (pg. 395)

       • "usually the state largely monopolized agricultural land" (pg. 395)

       • "two institutions symbolize [the state monopolization]:" (pg. 395)

         • "the closing of national borders" (pg. 395)

         • "the widespread use of forced labor to punish disloyalty" (pg. 395)

       • "[however,] when the government fixed prices it also distributed consumer and producer surpluses (or deficits) accidentally across the economy, and this created natural incentives to vary production and consumption which the government then had to neutralize or override in order to enforce the distribution that matched its own preferences" (pg. 397)

         • "as a result, no factory was closed and no worker was laid off because an activity was badly managed, and no producer felt the compulsions that a competitive market provides to exert effort, economize on resources, and serve the final consumer efficiently" (pg. 397)

         • "these arrangements suffered in any comparison with market economies, where consumers and producers find each other competitively [and] interact directly in a decentralized way" (pg. 397)

     • Reforms (pg. 397)

       • "economic reforms were intended to address two gaps:" (pg. 397)

         • "the gap between socialist and capitalist achievements" (pg. 397)

         • "the gap between the actual achievements and true potential of the socialist economy" (pg. 397)

       • "the core issue of socialist economic reform was the possibility of nesting the advantages of decentralized markets within the structures of socialist state regulation" (pg. 398)

     • Other Outcomes (pg. 400)

       • "the economy was kept in a state of permanent mobilization, which meant that output and employment were pushed above the equilibrium level of a market economy" (pg. 400)

       • "the communist-led economies were [also] heavily militarized" (pg. 401)

         • "the burden of a large military establishment and extensive military industries on the economy was [a difficulty]" (pg. 401)

   • Chapter 23 - Collectivization and Famine, by Felix Wemheuer (pg. 407)

     • "there were famines in Russia in 1919-1920, in the wake of civil war; in the Soviet Union in 1931-1933 in the aftermath of collectivization; in the occupied and non-occupied areas after the German invasion of 1941, when the Nazis used hunger as a part of genocidal politics; and in 1946-1947 a famine affected half the grain-growing provinces as a consequence of wartime destruction, sever drought, and government ineptitude." (pg. 407)

       • "in China the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) caused the fourth major famine under a socialist regime" (pg. 407)

     • "this essay explores why famines occurred in state-socialist regimes and how far they can be seen as a consequence of the collectivization of agriculture" (pg. 407)

     • Marxism and the Peasantry (pg. 409)

       • "Marx and Engels also saw the peasantry as a potential ally of the proletariat in Europe…[however,] Marx and Engels never developed any detailed concept for the collectivization of agriculture" (pg. 410)

     • From Stalin's Collectivization to Famine (pg. 411)

       • "Joan Sokolovsky provides a useful framework for understanding the goals of collectivization in socialist regimes:" (pg. 411)

         • "she argues that it was, firstly, a model to bring class struggle to the countryside and mobilize the rural against the local elites; secondly, a model to establish state control over economic resources to promote industrialization; and, thirdly, a campaign for state formation by eliminating competing authority structures and bring the party apparatus to the villages" (pg. 411)

       • "central to [Stalin's] all-out collectivization was the policy of 'liquidating the kulaks as a class', which saw more than 1 million families (perhaps 5 to 6 million people) subjected to some form of dekulakization in 1930 and 1931" (pg. 412)

       • "in 1931, however, the Soviet Union was hit by a heavy drought" (pg. 412)

       • "[overall,] collectivization allowed the state to increase its control over grain production [in order] to squeeze a high 'tribute' from the peasantry to pay for the breakneck industrialization of the country" (pg. 413)

         • "collectivization also allowed the state to impose close political control over the peasantry" (pg. 413)

     • Mao's Leap into Famine (pg. 413)

       • "[in 1953,] the CCP decided as a solution to [the expanding urban population] to eliminate free markets and establish a state monopoly over grain trade. The state was now able to set the prices for purchase, which were much lower than the market prices. Peasants were highly dissatisfied with [the] fixed prices, but the state could [now] feed the urban workforce and keep wages low" (pg. 414)

       • "in summer 1958, the government launched the Great Leap Forward to transform the country into a modern industrial nation within just a few years" (pg. 414)

         • "the Great Leap Forward grew from a campaign to overtake Great Britain in steel production into a strategy for achieving communism in the immediate future" (pg. 414)

     • The Great Leap Famines in Historical Perspectives: A Revisionist Outlook (pg. 417)

       • "collectivization in Eastern Europe [following the Second World War] and in the early PRC did not result in famine. Why then did it…in the Soviet Union in 1931 and China in 1959?" (pg. 417)

         • "in the Soviet Union, most peasants were unwilling to join the cooperatives and they exercised enough control over the land to cause the regime critical problems of food supply" (pg. 417)

         • "in China…agricultural productivity was not rising fast enough to free up resources for industrial development, feed a growing urban population, increase the supply of raw materials for industry, or earn the foreign exchange needed to import capital goods" (pg. 417-418)

           • "[thus,] Mao Zedong decided to resolve these difficulties at a stroke through the creation of people's communes and, in so doing, make a leap into communism" (pg. 418)

       • "the Soviet Union in 1928 and China in 1958 were desperately poor and backward countries. In the 1950's, China was one of the poorest countries in the world" (pg. 418)

       • "the Soviet Union and China experienced urbanization whose rapidity was unparalleled in history" (pg. 418)

         • "in China, the urban population increased between 1957 and 1960 by over 19.5 million" (pg. 418)

         • "most of these people had to be fed by the state at the expense of the countryside" (pg. 418)

       • "during the high tide of the Great Leaps, Stalin and Mao were so obsessed with the need to modernize their economies in a short pace of time that they were not willing to slow down industrialization and urbanization" (pg. 418-419)

   • Chapter 24 - The Politics of Plenty: Consumerism in Communist Societies, by Paul Betts (pg. 424)

     • "the influx of bright and fetching Western goods of all kinds into Eastern Europe after the fall of communism became a central element in the broader tale of the great triumph of capitalism" (pg. 424)

     • "the triumphalism of the West was frequently accompanied by the shame of underdevelopment in the East" (pg. 424)

     • "communist regimes invariably come out badly in these consumption studies…as they are [portrayed] as rogue states of mismanagement, injustice, and tyranny [when held up] against the yardstick of American consumerism " (pg. 425)

     • "in these renditions, consumer goods stand in as the vessels…[of] liberty and choice, the deprivation of which inevitably spells the ruin of all states unable or unwilling to make good on promised provisioning" (pg. 425)

       • "the result [being] that consumer satisfaction is seen as the basis of political peace and social stability" (pg. 425)

     • "despite their differences, all socialist regimes were united in their view that modernization and consumer development must stay socialist in spirit and practice" (pg. 426)

     • "the death of Stalin in March 1953 witnessed significant changes across the Eastern Bloc, as socialist regimes endeavored to balance heavy and light industry so as to attend [to] mounting consumer demands" (pg. 426)

     • "the 1960's witnessed the beginning of the Great Leap Forward in 'consumer socialism'. By that time the so-called standard of living had become a key ideological battleground of Cold War rivalry, as each system used economic success as a means of showcasing political legitimacy" (pg. 427)

       • "the policy to modernize the socialist household characterized the 1960's, as the Soviet Union and its client states built their own version of the 'Cold War Kitchen' replete with consumer technology and creature comforts" (pg. 428)

       • "the move towards consumerism under socialism also saw the expanded consumption of high culture" (pg. 428)

       • "consumer prosperity was thus embraced as a key element of national pride for socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and beyond" (pg. 428)

     • "the identification of the home as a site of consumer re-education and social engineering was equally manifest in Eastern Europe. There too the much-touted 'standard of living' and the visual markers of material comfort played a decisive role in the larger Cold War struggle for ideological legitimacy" (pg. 429)

     • "by the end of the 1960's, the socialist state's growing preoccupation with consumerism found expression in a new guise: market research" (pg. 430)

     • "exposure to Western media, contacts with relatives on the other side of the Iron Curtain and pre-Wall visits to the West provided some sense of comparison, as people demanded higher standards for basic consumables" (pg. 431)

       • "the quality of goods was a perennial source of anger among citizens" (pg. 432)

     • "at first glance these broader consumer trends…[showed how] society was increasingly battling over distinctly 'bourgeois' notions of materialism, desire, and dreams of the good life" (pg. 434)

       • "Consumerism is thus identified as the battlefield where the East foolishly confronted the West, and lost its way, principles, and integrity as a result" (pg. 434)

   • Chapter 25 - The Life of a Communist Militant, by Marco Albeltaro (pg. 441)

     • "party life, as we understand it, is an ensemble of practices that derives from shared values that operate inside a political community to which a person belongs by choice rather than by birth" (pg. 441)

     • "it was a community of 'us' and 'them', of insiders and outsides" (pg. 441)

       • "from a more ideological standpoint, 'they' were the class enemy" (pg. 441)

     • "communism was a profoundly persuasive ideology that completely molded the life of its supporters" (pg. 442)

     • "bureaucratization was one of the negative consequences of power" (pg. 442)

       • "power does not necessarily corrupt people as individuals, though its corruptions are not easy to resist" - Eric Hobsbawm (pg. 442) 

     • "it was precisely Bolshevization that served to homogenize European communist parties in accordance with a single model, the two main pillars of which were centralization and the enforcement of democratic centralism" (pg. 443)

     • "in the period between 1924 and 1928 the membership of European communist parties fell by about a third" (pg. 443)

     • "the first task that militants in the major Western European parties had to face was not revolution, but the struggle against fascism" (pg. 443)

     • "why people chose to become communists is a complex questions. In the memoirs of militants we can identify at least two rationales:" (pg. 445)

       • 'A Life Choice', by Giorgio Amendola

       • 'Chosen by Life', by Paolo Robotti

     • "many individual stories, all differing from one another, can be categorized in terms of a threefold typology" (pg. 445)

       • "first were those who joined because of family tradition; then there were those who became communists after coming into contact with militants in the workplace; finally there were those who chose to join the party because they shared its ideological platform and its conception of the word and of history" (pg. 445)

     • "militants tended, consciously or unconsciously, to represent their individual experience through the interpretative grid of historical determinism: their adhesion to communism was presented as a natural response to class exploitation, a consequence of ideological demystification or a class-conscious appraisal of one's condition" (pg. 446)

     • "activism was [seen as] a measure of one's altruism and moral character, and militants were constantly called upon to put their energies at the service of the party" (pg. 446)

   • Chapter 26 - Rural Life, by Jeremy Brown (pg. 455)

     • "everyday life under communism was predominantly rural. Of the more than 1.3 billion people living in communist countries in 1975, approximately two-thirds were villagers" (pg. 455)

     • "this chapter focuses on work, family, and technology and explores how different land and labor arrangements, from communes where peasants earned work points to cash-earning private farms, shaped rural lives in communist societies from Albania to Vietnam" (pg. 456)

     • Working and Surviving in Collectivities (pg. 456)

       • "the most pressing question for communist leaders concerned about peasant problems was how to eradicate rural exploitation while also modernizing the countryside. Most communist regimes across the globe during the 20th century arrived at a single answer: the collectivization of agriculture" (pg. 456)

       • "when the tsarist regime fell in Russia in February 1917, many peasants seized land and became independent producers. The Bolsheviks endorsed these land seizures." (pg. 457)

         • "The New Economic Policy (NEP)…allowed farmers to work the land without having to hand over huge portions of [their] harvest to the state" (pg. 457)

         • "[however,] agriculture during the NEP years did not fuel the quick industrial development that Stalin had hoped for. Rapid, coercive collectivization was his solution" (pg. 457)

       • "between 1929 and 1932, one out of four peasants opted out of collective agriculture by seeking a wage-paying job in a city or on a state farm" (pg. 457)

       • "rural life in the Soviet Union changed considerably under Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. In the Soviet countryside of the 1950's and 1960's, compulsory grain deliveries were halted, state investment in the agricultural sector increased, and rural people received pension benefits and fixed wages instead of earning labor-days" (pg. 459)

       • "on Chinese communes, rural people toiled for work points. Team members were awarded points based on complex norms" (pg. 459)

         • "inequality was built into the Chinese system in another way: men earned an average of 10 points for a full day of work, while women received 6-8 points" (pg. 459)

         • "men and women, including female officials, saw this gap as natural. Farm work required strength, they explained, and men were stronger than women" (pg. 459-460)

     • Family and Sex (pg. 461)

       • "in many countries communism unintentionally reinforced family identities by basing bureaucratic structures and taxonomies on households (instead of on individuals)" (pg. 461)

       • "a family's state-assigned class status had a major impact on everyday life, subjecting millions of people marked as landlords, rich peasants, and counter-revolutionaries to episodic violence and daily discrimination" (pg. 461)

       • "China's one-child policy…was implemented in the early 1980's" (pg. 463)

         • "restricting Chinese families to one child became official policy after military scientists using cybernetic population models won a debate against demographic researchers who wanted to continue the voluntary birth control campaigns of the 1970's" (pg. 463)

   • Chapter 27 - Workers Under Communism: Romance and Reality, by Tuong Vu (pg. 471)

     • Introduction (pg. 471)

       • "workers are glorified in Marxist thought" (pg. 471)

       • "[however,] where workers were drawn into revolutionary movements against capitalism, their relation to the regime that claimed to represent their interests was fraught with tension" (pg. 471)

       • "as communist states matured, their relationship with workers settled into an uneasy mutual dependence. Workers depended on the state for employment…while the state enterprises counted on them to fulfill plans to modernize the economy" (pg. 471)

       • "the romance of workers being the masters of the socialist workplace increasingly contradicted the reality that trade unions were weak and subject to party control and legal rights to protest were non-existent" (pg. 471)

       • "this essay compares the experiences of workers under communism in the Soviet Union, Poland, and East Germany" (pg. 472)

     • The Making of Socialist Workforces (pg. 472)

       • "in the Soviet Union, the First World War and the turbulence of 1917 had disastrous effects on the economy" (pg. 472)

         • "the working class shrank" (pg. 472)

         • "the number of workers in Moscow fell from 190,000 in 1917 to only 81,000 by early 1921" (pg. 472-473)

       • "by the mid-1920's, economic recovery was under way but unemployment was rising as a result of the demobilization of the Red Army, rural migration to the cities, and government efforts to rationalize production" (pg. 473)

       • "the emergence of food shortages in the cities in 1927-1928…convinced Stalin that a mammoth effort to industrialize the country was necessary, which must be financed through the collectivization of agriculture" (pg. 473)

       • "the First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932), called for a 77% increase in industrial output…[which] attracted to the cities millions of peasant migrants who fled the collective farms" (pg. 473)

         • "about 23 million Soviet peasants moved to the cities during 1926-1939" (pg. 473)

   • Chapter 28 - Communism and Women, by Donna Harsch (pg. 488)

     • "This article discusses women and gender relations under communism, beginning in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, continuing through the Cold War era in Eastern Europe, and including Cuba and China today. It addresses communist gender theory, ideology, and discourse. Women’s role in politics and government is discussed. The article covers employment and education, the peasant and urban family, social policies, and socialist consumption. Under communism, the article argues, women, especially married mothers, broke through traditional resistance to women’s participation in paid, including skilled, labor. Their levels of education and employment increased dramatically in most communist states. Yet women did not attain economic equality with men in any communist society and their share of political power remained stunningly low." [Communism and Women - Oxford Handbooks]

   • Chapter 29 - Privilege and Inequality in Communist Society, by Donald Filtzer (pg. 505)

     • "Like capitalist societies, the Soviet Union and the Soviet-type societies of Eastern Europe showed a high degree of social stratification and inequality. By the 1960s the rapid upward mobility of worker and peasant children in the intelligentsia and Party hierarchy had noticeably slowed, and an inherited class structure emerged. Because privileges in the Soviet Union were only weakly monetarized, and wealth could not be accumulated or inherited, privileged groups perpetuated themselves mainly through the use of internal ‘connections’ and by ensuring their offspring preferential access to higher education through which they would secure elite positions. We also see important differentiations within the workforce: urban vs. rural workers; ‘core’ workers vs. migrants; and men vs. women. China prior to the reform movement displayed a similar overall picture, with, however, some radical differences. Under Mao the gap in living standards between Party officials and ordinary workers was much more narrow than in the USSR, while the Cultural Revolution blunted attempts to ensure the reproduction of social stratification via access to higher education." [Privilege and Inequality in Communist Society - Oxford Handbooks]

   • Chapter 30 - Nation-Making and National Conflict Under Communism, by Adrienne Edgar (pg. 522)

     • "how did communist leaders, given so little concrete guidance by the founders of their ideology, come to terms with [the national problem]?" (pg. 522)

       • "[the] solution to such an ideological dilemma is to reinterpret the ideas contained in the original texts, and this is precisely what Marx's early disciples did" (pg. 522)

     • "Lenin and his fellow Russian communists had recognized the power of nationalism and the need to incorporate it into the structure of any future communist state" (pg. 522)

     • "the end of the [First World] war…saw the break-up of empires and the emergence of a number of new nation-states…the Bolsheviks [thus] lived in a world in which nations and nationalism were inescapable realities" (pg. 523)

     • Marxism and the National Questions - The Ideology (pg. 524)

       • "national differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster" - Communist Manifesto, pg. 23 (pg. 524)

       • "Lenin urged the [Bolshevik] party to support the right of self-determination of all nations" (pg. 525)

         • "Lenin asked…Stalin, who later became the Bolsheviks' first commissar of nationalities, to write a pamphlet outlining the Bolshevik position on nationalities in 1913" (pg. 525) [Marxism and the National Question (marxists.org)]

         • "[Stalin's] definition of the nation shaped the views in the Soviet Union and other communist states for much of the 20th century" (pg. 525)

       • "Lenin was determined to win the support of colonized people" (pg. 525)

         • "Lenin believed that it was the exploitation of overseas colonies that was helping to prop up capitalism and delay the inevitable socialist revolution in Europe" (pg. 526)

     • Nations in the USSR - Marxist Ideas Put into Practice (pg. 526)

       • "one of the first acts of the new Bolshevik regime was to issue a decree promising self-determination to all the nations of the now defunct Russian Empire. This policy won the Bolsheviks critical support in non-Russian areas" (pg. 526)

         • "Bolshevik advocacy of self-determination won at least the passive support of national minorities in many regions and helped to bring victory for the Red forces" (pg. 526)

       • December 30, 1922 - Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formed (pg. 526)

       • "from the very beginning, the principle of nationality and the idea of self-determination were embodied in the structure of the Soviet state" (pg. 526)

       • "according to the Soviet Constitution of 1924, the union republics were sovereign and free to secede from the union. In reality, they were never permitted to exercise this right" (pg. 527) [Microsoft Word - USSR-Const-1924(abridge).doc (unlv.edu)]

         • "genuine sovereignty for the republics would have clashed with the principles of a centralized party-state, which was non-negotiable for the Bolshevik leadership" (pg. 527)

       • "the centerpiece of Soviet nationality policy in the 1920's was a policy known…as 'nativization'. This policy granted each nationality the right to use its own language and be administered by its own national elites on its own territory." (pg. 527)

         • "the pragmatic assumption behind this policy was that people would accept the Bolshevik message more easily" (pg. 527)

       • "the 1926 Soviet census identified 172 different Soviet peoples" (pg. 527)

       • "nativization might be viewed as the positive, constructive side of Soviet nationality policy, but it was accomplished by policies that were destructive and violent" (pg. 528)

         • "non-Russians who had dissenting ideas about their nations…were accused of 'bourgeois nationalism' and faced imprisonment or worse" (pg. 528)

     • The Return of the Russians (pg. 529)

       • "beginning in the mid-1930's, there was a shift in Soviet nationalist policy. The Stalinist state began to move away from the blanket condemnation of Russian nationalism and to describe to Russians as the 'leading nation' of the Soviet Union" (pg. 529)

       • "the Second World War reinforced these changes. Stalin recognized that love of the Russian motherland was a far more reliable motivating force than Marxism-Leninism for the peasant soldiers of the Red Army" (pg. 529)

       • "the rise of the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev as head of the Communist Party in 1985 ushered in a new era in the relationship between state and nations in the Soviet Union" (pg. 531)

         • "his policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), in particular, opened the door to serious challenges to Moscow's authority" (pg. 531)

     • Conclusion (pg. 535)

       • "self-determination, territorial autonomy, the right to linguistic and cultural development, [and] the right to be governed by one's own national elites…are the key concepts that have appeared over and over again wherever communist countries have sought to grapple with the problems of nationhood and nationalism" (pg. 535)