Imperial Russian institutions compared to Soviet - any holdovers?

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grandsteed

Les catholiques de la contre-réforme
Aug 15, 2019
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I recently got in a brief discussion about the history of Russian government in which I was arguing that old Tsarist Russia and Soviet Union cannot be considered the same regime or an evolution. To me, (not having read much about the early Soviet years since the 80s when there was a strong anti-Soviet tilt here) it seems like the Soviets largely tore down the institutions of the old regime and replaced them. After this, I really wonder if there were any institutions that carried on practically untouched by the Revolution, and if they're enough to consider the two orders related at all in the rule of government.
 
Well, there is a reason they call it the Russian Revolution, and not the Russian Evolution.
 
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After this, I really wonder if there were any institutions that carried on practically untouched by the Revolution, and if they're enough to consider the two orders related at all in the rule of government.

I’m more precisely speaking about the rule of the government. I would say, the both, the Tsarist rule as well as the rule of the early Soviet Communist Party were basing on the same management style, the authoritarianism. Political plurality was rejected by the both administrations, neither there was democratic voting.

I often use to think, about the common Russian people opposing the Tsarist rule and joining the revolution for instance desiring better standards of living, but instead ending in a much worse situation because of the Communist Party.
 
I’m more precisely speaking about the rule of the government. I would say, the both, the Tsarist rule as well as the rule of the early Soviet Communist Party were basing on the same management style, the authoritarianism. Political plurality was rejected by the both administrations, neither there was democratic voting.

I often use to think, about the common Russian people opposing the Tsarist rule and joining the revolution for instance desiring better standards of living, but instead ending in a much worse situation because of the Communist Party.
Wait, you actually think Tsarist rule was better for the common people?
 
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Wait, you actually think Tsarist rule was better for the common people?

No, I, do not think so. Rather I think, if the purpose of the Russian revolution was to make people more equal, it really didn’t happen so.

Edit: And it’s really sad, the common people whom thought the Revolution would change the things…all their effort was for nothing more, but to face similarities of the Tsarist rule again, this time under the Bolshevik rule, ending to the Great Purge.
 
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For those millions which lost their lives during the Revolution and after, it was surely much better.

“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”


― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
 
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No, I, do not think so. Rather I think, if the purpose of the Russian revolution was to make people more equal, it really didn’t happen so.

Edit: And it’s really sad, the common people whom thought the Revolution would change the things…all their effort was for nothing more, but to face similarities of the Tsarist rule again, this time under the Bolshevik rule, ending to the Great Purge.

I mean, the literacy rate under communist rule increased massively compared to under the Tsarist regime, health improved with a large increase in life expectancy, birth rates rose, women got significantly more rights, and plenty of other things happened that improved life for the majority of the population. Compared to Tsarist rule, it was a big improvement. And before people start talking about the purges, the Ukraine famine, the deportation of ethnic groups - those things happened under Tsarist rule too.
 
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Yeah, this was my thinking as well. It's really hard to see how Revolution didn't make people more equal. I mean there was still repression and party elite were new nobility, but still there were massive improvements like housing etc.
 
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I mean, the literacy rate under communist rule increased massively compared to under the Tsarist regime, health improved with a large increase in life expectancy, birth rates rose, women got significantly more rights, and plenty of other things happened that improved life for the majority of the population. Compared to Tsarist rule, it was a big improvement. And before people start talking about the purges, the Ukraine famine, the deportation of ethnic groups - those things happened under Tsarist rule too.

You're a British, eh?
 

“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”


Said by whom?

Edit: Oh, Mark Twain it was.
 
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In answer to the OP, at least one enduring institution seems to have been the secret police.

Okhrana to Cheka and so on. Not only carried on, but greatly expanded and made much more efficient....

I've always found it ironic that Stalin himself escaped internal exile from Siberia multiple times despite having a long criminal record, including kidnapping children for ransom, extortion, robbery of banks and post, murder, etc.

Trotsky also escaped his Tsarist exile in Siberia.

I'm not sure of the statistics, but the impression one gets is that not many people escaped internal exile in Siberia (or anywhere else for that matter) under the Soviets.

Edit: I would also add the zemstvo (local councils). It's not hard to draw parallels between it as an institution and the later soviets. Both also shared the same fate of becoming essentially powerless in the face of central authority....
 
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I mean, the literacy rate under communist rule increased massively compared to under the Tsarist regime, health improved with a large increase in life expectancy, birth rates rose, women got significantly more rights, and plenty of other things happened that improved life for the majority of the population. Compared to Tsarist rule, it was a big improvement. And before people start talking about the purges, the Ukraine famine, the deportation of ethnic groups - those things happened under Tsarist rule too.

And they built railroad in India... sorry another topic.
Those thing would have happened anyway*, because it was the Zeitgeist. Ok due to need to read propaganda literacy rate increased a bit faster.

*signature of my great-great grandfather by the birth of his first child in 1894 was +++ in 1898 for the second was his name... you can't have illiterate factory workers because it is unproductive/dangerous
 
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And they built railroad in India... sorry another topic.
Those thing would have happened anyway*, because it was the Zeitgeist. Ok due to need to read propaganda literacy rate increased a bit faster.

*signature of my great-great grandfather by the birth of his first child in 1894 was +++ in 1898 for the second was his name... you can't have illiterate factory workers because it is unproductive/dangerous

Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

Tsarist Russia was a gigantic Third World mess of a country - huge, poor, stagnant, overpopulated, agrarian, commodity-dependent, technologically backwards, and highly unequal, held in the grip of a grasping Tsarist aristocratic elite that liked it that way. It was never going to industrialize. Even energetic and enlightened Tsarist regimes were not likely to produce miracles. At best, it's 20th Century trajectory would be akin to, say, Brazil or India.

That ruling elite had to be broken and overthrown, for Russians to have a chance. That it took the Soviets heaps of buckets of blood to put the economy on a different industrializing track should tell you quite a bit about the challenge that it was.

By the way, ex-Soviet countries (including all the -stans) still have the highest literacy rates in the world.
 
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Although in case of Finland and the Baltics the reason was the previous Swedish management, something that @Jopa79 would be keen to enlighten us.

I'm not sure, what are you proposing exactly, but if you wish, please share and focus your idea?
 
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I often use to think, about the common Russian people opposing the Tsarist rule and joining the revolution for instance desiring better standards of living, but instead ending in a much worse situation because of the Communist Party.
For those millions which lost their lives during the Revolution and after, it was surely much better.
The fact that in blind hostility towards the Russian Revolution some end up excusing the Tsarist regime, tells us much more about your own ideological persuasion than about the Revolution itself and the social progress brought by the Soviets to Russia. You can criticise the nomenklatura and gerontocracy, let alone the totalitarian abuses of Stalin, without upholding a regime as brutal and devastating as the one of the Romanov tsars. Furthermore, the problem of this reasoning is that you fail to see the successive ruptures and evolutions under Soviet rule. Seeing Stalin's dictature as already present in 1917 can only be described as teleology. No, the October Revolution was a major rupture, one which benefitted millions of Russians and in fact by snowball effect workers across the world. The struggle for spreading this revolution across borders was halted by reactionaries, but who knows what further progress humanity could have succeeded with if Germany, Italy and France had also seen successful revolutions? If it had been the Biennio rosso which succeeded rather than march on Rome? What we do know is the bloodshed that resulted from the catastrophic intervention of the Entente powers against the Soviets, so many lives which could have been spared.

To adress the original question directly, I would perhaps say that it is when attempting to canalise and control the worker council's that the Soviets reaffirmed some Tsarist methods.
 
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The fact that in blind hostility towards the Russian Revolution some end up excusing the Tsarist regime, tells us much more about your own ideological persuasion than about the Revolution itself and the social progress brought by the Soviets to Russia. You can criticise the nomenklatura and gerontocracy, let alone the totalitarian abuses of Stalin, without upholding a regime as brutal and devastating as the one of the Romanov tsars. Furthermore, the problem of this reasoning is that you fail to see the successive ruptures and evolutions under Soviet rule. Seeing Stalin's dictature as already present in 1917 can only be described as teleology. No, the October Revolution was a major rupture, one which benefitted millions of Russians and in fact by snowball effect workers across the world. The struggle for spreading this revolution across borders was halted by reactionaries, but who knows what further progress humanity could have succeeded with if Germany, Italy and France had also seen successful revolutions? If it had been the Biennio rosso which succeeded rather than march on Rome? What we do know is the bloodshed that resulted from the catastrophic intervention of the Entente powers against the Soviets, so many lives which could have been spared. I would perhaps say that it is when attempting to canalise and control the worker council's that the Soviets reaffirmed some Tsarist methods.

Your country should be neighboring country with the early Soviet Union. Then you can tell us again, how are your feelings.
 
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There is as far as I can tell very little institutional continuity. Czarist Russia was a mess and just awful in so many ways. By nature of geography the Soviets inherited certain imperial ambitions, but that is a different type of continuity. Had the revolutions spread we might have seen a number of Soviet vassal states (which is what was created when revolution succeeded outside Russia proper).

The fact that in blind hostility towards the Russian Revolution some end up excusing the Tsarist regime, tells us much more about your own ideological persuasion than about the Revolution itself and the social progress brought by the Soviets to Russia. You can criticise the nomenklatura and gerontocracy, let alone the totalitarian abuses of Stalin, without upholding a regime as brutal and devastating as the one of the Romanov tsars. Furthermore, the problem of this reasoning is that you fail to see the successive ruptures and evolutions under Soviet rule. Seeing Stalin's dictature as already present in 1917 can only be described as teleology. No, the October Revolution was a major rupture, one which benefitted millions of Russians and in fact by snowball effect workers across the world. The struggle for spreading this revolution across borders was halted by reactionaries, but who knows what further progress humanity could have succeeded with if Germany, Italy and France had also seen successful revolutions? If it had been the Biennio rosso which succeeded rather than march on Rome? What we do know is the bloodshed that resulted from the catastrophic intervention of the Entente powers against the Soviets, so many lives which could have been spared.

To adress the original question directly, I would perhaps say that it is when attempting to canalise and control the worker council's that the Soviets reaffirmed some Tsarist methods.

Imperial Russia was a disaster of a society, but the ineptitude also meant that it was less brutal than the more efficient USSR. The heavy handed methods employed by the communists improved many metrics for the population (literacy etc) but the human cost was at times horrific. And the planned economy caused problems both short- (shortages, general failure to meet demands and famines) and long term (stagnation and lack of innovation).

Western Europe is fortunate that reformists rather than revolutionaries won out on the left side of the political spectrum. The revolutionary vanguard parties created prison states whenever they got the chance.
 
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Yeah, this was my thinking as well. It's really hard to see how Revolution didn't make people more equal. I mean there was still repression and party elite were new nobility, but still there were massive improvements like housing etc.
An improvement in housing doesn't automatically make people more equal. That's not to say that people's situation didn't improve in many ways post-Revolution.