Children of the Bolshevik Revolution

In her sympathetic and poignant anthology of voices on the Soviet past, Second-Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets (2017), Svetlana Alexievich, the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, reveals, time and again, the power of a revolutionary vision: the sense of purpose and meaning that it could, and did, instil in many. The October Revolution promised a new dawn, a ‘red dawn’. It promised a new approach to politics and a new approach to life. It promised new ways, new potentials: a new future. As one of Alexievich’s interviewees longingly reflected: ‘We loved the future. The people of the future. We’d argue about when the future was going to come.’

The October Revolution was billed as a radical break with the past, a past of exploitation, misery and impasse. The Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace – and with it, political power – during the early hours of 25 October 1917. The ruthlessness of the party-state regime that emerged is well documented. Historians have detailed the terror and violence that the Bolsheviks were willing to unleash in pursuit of their goals. But the Bolsheviks also galvanised hopes and dreams that had been gaining momentum throughout 1917. They benefited from the cycle of raised hopes, dashed expectations and radicalisation that defined 1917: a year that witnessed the downfall of tsarist rule, the emergence of new freedoms under a temporary parliamentary government, renewed limitations on those freedoms, government failure to pull out of an unpopular war, the threat of a military coup and, from some quarters, a sense of political and ideological entrenchment.

In this environment, the Bolshevik slogans ‘Peace, Land, Bread!’ and ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ signified change and captured a moment. A new social and political order was on the horizon.

October 1917 offered an escape from the inherited world; the tired, the oppressed and the radicalised had a chance to embrace a utopian future. Not ‘utopia’ as it is commonly understood today, or as the Bolsheviks themselves occasionally used the term: a flight of fancy or an imagined land of perfection. Rather, it was ‘utopia’ as the genre or practice of questioning the established order of things, what the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) called the ‘determined negation of that which merely is’ in the name of ‘what should be’, as a radical challenge to conventional thinking about what is possible and impossible. It offered the prospect of living differently and redrawing the boundaries of life, as a vision of a ‘leap forward’ into an alternative future. This is, in large part, why the Soviet Union continued to be held up as an alternative historic path throughout the 20th century, even after its earliest ideals had clearly been corrupted by unconscionable methods and personalities. At one time or another it seemed to offer an alternative to the injustices and hierarchies of the old imperial order, to the cruelties and inequality of modern capitalism, even to the spectre of American hegemony.

To those on the streets in October 1917, modern socialist visions offered an attractive alternative to the immediate hardships and restrictions of tsarist autocracy, as well as the deep-rooted social castes (sosloviia), institutions, bureaucracy and culture that sustained it. October was the rejection of monarchy, nobility, the church, private ownership and worker exploitation in favour of a new system based around proletarian interests. As the Bolsheviks came to power, factory workers were emboldened to reject the most obvious symbols of exploitation: their bosses. There were numerous cases, as the historian Stephen Smith has shown, where unpopular managers and foremen were carted out of the factory doors in a wheelbarrow and unceremoniously dumped on the ground: left to be taken to what Trotsky called ‘the trash heap of history’.

Some workers went on to form factory committees, replacing symbols of old authority and implementing the rhetoric of ‘workers’ control’. Red banners started to adorn the streets, proclaiming freedom from the past and hope in the new. At home, at work, sat around the samovar, or gathered around the newsstand, citizens of the newly formed Soviet republic found themselves discussing the possibilities of socialist enfranchisement. Among them, in various locations and across varying demographics, ‘the people of the future’ were being born.

A new way of life

One section of society was particularly susceptible to the promise of a new future. As everywhere, youths in the new Soviet republic had a natural proclivity to reject the old – the way of their parents. The Bolsheviks were well aware of this. ‘Young people belong to the future’, they proclaimed. Soviet youth literature, often in the style of advice literature, promoted the idea that individuals and everyday life could be rationally redesigned both to reflect and foster socialism. The New Soviet World was to be populated by New Man and New Woman. More specifically, a ‘new way of life’ (novyi byt) was to fundamentally reshape culture and society. And Soviet youths were to be the vanguard of this new way. It was a mission that many young would-be revolutionaries picked up willingly.

A self-conscious youth vanguardism came to manifest itself in a number of interesting ways: most notably in the way some young revolutionary enthusiasts chose to live.

In the months following the Bolshevik seizure of power, there were reports that some youths had spontaneously decided to commandeer old ‘bourgeois apartments’ in a fit of revolutionary zeal. The Bolsheviks had issued decrees legalising the requisition of homes belonging to the former elite and sanctioning the ‘resettlement’ of empty dwellings. This process was supposed to be overseen by local Bolshevik authorities, which were to compile lists of houses within the area of their jurisdiction and to pursue a system of planned redistribution. In reality, the inadequate infrastructure of the new state was such that the authorities allowed local activists to carry out these tasks. As so often happens with the breakdown of established power, space opened up for new ways of doing things. And so, first in the reclaimed houses of Petrograd, activist youths took the opportunity to declare the formation of something new, daring and utopian: the ‘domestic commune’ (bytovaia kommuna).

These were small, cohabitative units in which young radicals sought to experiment with ideology and establish living examples of socialism. Earnings and money were placed in a common pot and shared equally; all possessions, including underwear and clothing, became common to all; and each inhabitant vowed to live in a comradely and collective fashion. This was socialism in one apartment.

The act of seizing property was itself a revolutionary gesture. And some commune groups went further, choosing to tear down internal walls because they were a symbol of ‘bourgeois individualism’. But in all cases, the formation of a domestic commune was more than just a cathartic rejection of the old inhabitants and their lifestyle. It was also about what could be built from the foundations of these residences. It was in these settings that young activists came to grips with this thing called socialism, and it was here that they got to experiment with the new way of life.

By the end of 1918, young activists such as Nikolai Aleksandrovich Filimonov started to experiment with commune living in the newly requisitioned Soviet institutes of higher education. Taking advantage of the educational opportunities increasingly afforded to those with working-class credentials, Nikolai enrolled at the Petrograd Peter the Great Polytechnical Institute and, in the simple confines of a dormitory room, he declared the formation of a ‘commune’.

In this cramped space, with its exposed wooden floor, Nikolai and two friends agreed to enact a system of socialism. In the corner of the room sat a small metal tin, the common pot into which each inhabitant paid their stipend and earnings: all activities and equipment would be funded from this kitty. On the wall hung a noticeboard with a rota written on it, divvying up domestic tasks equally. As a further sign of comradely unity, linen, socks and underwear were shared out of a common basket. In the middle of the room sat a table, which served as a space for sharing collective meals, group meetings and general discussion. The beds were pushed to the periphery of the room, up against the walls, serving as extra seating when the commune’s neighbours and fellow students were invited over to debate the merits of revolution.

From a few hundred activists engaged in communal living between 1918 and 1919, numbers began to rise. Across the early-to-mid 1920s reports suggest that thousands of young activists were inspired to replicate such forms of living, mainly in the cities of central European Russia. By the end of the 1920s the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) estimated that 50,000 people were engaged in commune life, rising still further with the unrolling of the First Five-Year Plan, as young workers were encouraged to move to the cities and establish collective working teams to advance industrial production.

What was happening? The domestic commune was becoming a revolutionary meme: an imitable idea or practice that was seen to carry with it the essential characteristics of a future socialist world. It became a means by which young activists could display their revolutionary exploits and credentials. This was a space that made them feel connected to the changes taking place around them and to the promised future. Crucially, the youth press was only too keen to run articles on these examples of socialist practice. A cyclical relationship was established whereby young activists sought to implement the revolutionary ideas they read about in the press. The press, in turn, reported on these initiatives as proof that socialism was taking root. Some publications declared that these formations were the ‘new shoots’ of voluntary activism that Lenin had said would take socialism forward.

When Stepan Afanas’evich Balezin entered the Social Education Institute (soon to be absorbed into the Herzen University) in Petrograd in 1923, the commune meme was already becoming well established. Born into a poor rural family in 1903, Balezin’s parish-sponsored schooling was interrupted by war and revolution. A precocious revolutionary spirit, after 1917 Balezin participated in local Komsomol activities, before joining the Red Army as an agitator and propagandist. Come 1923, he was very eager to make the most of the new opportunities afforded him – service to the Komsomol opened the doors of higher education. But not all was as he had expected. Upon entering university, Balezin discovered that some professors were ‘openly hostile’ to the new type of students entering these establishments. He was also alarmed at how inept the local Komsomol body seemed to be. The Bolshevik project was still in its infancy within these institutes.

Revolutionary energies

Fortunately for Balezin, he was introduced to the domestic communes of the student dormitory, which filled him with hope, provided him with an outlet for his revolutionary energies and came to affect the rest of his time in higher education. In the communes he saw groups of students coming together and discussing revolution, collectivism and internationalism, while also invoking the reformation of domestic norms and habits. The communes, he noticed, would eat, drink, work and play as a unit. They undertook collective trips to the theatre, cinema and the Hermitage. Some spoke of listening to stormy recitals of the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. They even petitioned other students and university staff to fulfil revolution within the university and in their daily lives. Balezin was inspired.

Within a year, he had organised his own group, which came to be known as the Everyday Housing Commune (Zhilishchno-Bytovaia Kommuna, or ZhBK). He united with a team of budding activists in what the Herzen student newspaper came to call a ‘room-commune’, a cohabitative commune within the confines of a dormitory room.

The commune even acted as a relief team during the 1924 flood of Petrograd, helping to salvage materials and food stocks from the damaged basements in Nevsky Prospekt. Thereafter, Balezin’s ambitions for the commune only expanded. He pulled together other young activists and began to commandeer neighbouring dormitory rooms, expanding into what the newspaper called a ‘floor-commune’. Here they pressed ahead, trying to implement the revolutionary concepts they had been reading about in the press.

They re-purposed the available space in an overt attempt to facilitate the new way of life, dedicating certain rooms to set collective activities. They established their own ‘workers’ club’ – a space for collective reading, enlightenment and suitably socialist leisure time. They created their own collective canteen, replacing the private kitchen, where, it was said, old habits and morals were passed down the generations just like recipes are passed from mothers to daughters. They even discussed one day forming a ‘dormitory-commune’, taking over the whole building and establishing a general collective facility.

They also embraced ideas associated with the ‘Scientific Organisation of Labour’, which was a system of time-discipline and daily regulation influenced by the industrial efficiency theories of the American engineer and manufactory consultant, Frederick Winslow Taylor. Leading Bolshevik thinkers, such as Platon Mikhailovich Kerzhentsev, advocated extending Taylor’s ideas – Taylorism – beyond the factory, offering a more complete view of human management. Kerzhentsev established the ‘League of Time’, a body that promoted time management and rational reorganisation in factories, schools and universities. Balezin and the commune picked up these ideas and set a strict timetable by which the daily routine of members would be regulated. They even went so far as to write a diary, monitoring how each member used their time, before then attempting to use this data to design a more effective daily routine for the group. The old, irrational way of doing things was being rejected. Daily life was being elevated to a science.

Spreading the word

Balezin and ZhBK were eager to press the university authorities and agitate for change. Self-drawn caricatures from the commune present one member, Bal’tsev, as an earnest young figure petitioning the rector to build more socialist facilities within the dormitories. And, around 1924, a group of female student activists joined ZhBK and formed what they called a ‘Women’s Poster Army’ (Plakatzhenarmiia), creating colourful banners and propaganda material to be plastered across the dormitory and institute. For these young citizens of socialism, the commune was seen as a space and a base for revolutionary ideals. Commune life was supposed to mould them into exemplary socialists – a vanguard that could then press for change in the wider setting.

Similarly, two former students desperate to extend collective living beyond the walls of higher education went on to form a commune in central Moscow. Contemplating his final year of study and what awaited him upon graduation, an activist named Andrei wrote to a friend suggesting that they set up a commune in which ‘everything would be common’. ‘Your money would be my money and my money yours’, he wrote. In the winter of 1924, Andrei and his friend, along with eight other enthusiasts, managed to set up camp in an apartment above a noisy Chinese laundry on Mokrinksii Lane, in Moscow’s Kitai-Gorod district.

Here they agreed upon a ‘founding agreement’ (ustav) that expressly rejected the ‘old family regime’. Like ZhBK, they were determined to embrace a modern socialist aesthetic. They established their own timetable and formed a number of internal ‘committees’ to maintain order. There was a ‘finance committee’ to oversee the budget, a ‘housekeeping committee’ to monitor the cleaning, a ‘clothing committee’ in charge of laundry and shoes, a ‘hygiene committee’ to regulate personal grooming and washing and a ‘political committee’ to orchestrate external agitation activities. With ten inhabitants, each ‘committee’ was composed of only two members. But to say ‘committee’ was to speak the language of socialist modernity, science and rational management. These ‘committees’ were a token activist aspiration. Both their structure and remit replicated what these young activists imagined socialism to be.

The Mokrinskii Lane commune also discussed and experimented with other indicators of socialism, including sexual equality and non-possessive, open relationships. The issue of children was raised at one of the weekly discussions, whereupon it was decided that it was best to use contraception and do all they could to avoid pregnancy for the time being. But, theoretically at least, it was agreed that if children were conceived they should be considered the offspring of the group and the biological parents would have to forego privileged parental oversight. These experiments did not always turn out the way the commune intended. Indeed, after a few months, the commune decided that relations between inhabitants should not be entered into lightly, lest personal divisions and animosity set in. Nonetheless, the group continued to challenge what were considered the tired norms and cultural hangovers of the past.

This was all part of a struggle for new morals, ethics and customs, which, across the 1920s, was increasingly being referred to in the press as a ‘cultural revolution’. Leading Bolsheviks, such as Alexandra Kollontai, had long been pushing for a ‘cultural revolution’ in the form of the eradication of private kitchens and the emancipation of women from the role of ‘hostess’. Replacing private kitchens with municipal canteens in every city and workplace, Kollontai insisted, would provide better nutrition, release women into the workforce and foster a fairer social order. Trotsky drew even more attention to the concept of ‘cultural revolution’ with the publication of his widely read Questions of Everyday Life (1923), which proclaimed that standards of behaviour and new social norms were of crucial importance to the long-term health of the new revolutionary state. In 1927, Nikolai Bukharin buttressed this by declaring that the ‘manner of life’ was still a central site for building the revolution and forging a new socialist future.

Shaking off the shackles

This ‘cultural revolution’ was something immediate and accessible for the young activists who formed the domestic communes: a struggle into which they could channel their revolutionary energies and prove their futurist qualifications.

In their attempt to shake off the shackles of tradition, the commune became a space where they could embrace the most outlandish ideas from socialist ideology. They enacted Kollontai’s vision of the collective canteen within their own homes. Groups such as ZhBK even formed canteens that were open to the public. With varying degrees of success, communes challenged gender norms and assumptions about relationships. By producing their own Taylorist timetables, establishing their own ‘founding agreements’ and constantly holding collective discussions on how they lived or could live, many attempted to discover a socialist code of behaviour. They imagined that they could lead the way for the rest of society in this regard. They also imagined that a new ‘scientific approach’ to life was the key to unlocking the future. The aesthetic of socialist life was to be rational, disciplined and utilitarian.

It was no coincidence that, as the discourse on ‘cultural revolution’ became more clearly defined and started to expand, so the commune meme and the number of communes began to expand, too. Where some students and young enthusiasts struggled to come to terms with impenetrable revolutionary tomes, such as Marx’s Das Kapital, the concept of a ‘cultural revolution’ and the formation of a ‘new way of life’ seemed attainable. This helped make socialist ideology tangible. Keen figures such as Balezin, Bal’tsev and Andrei were positioning themselves as stalwarts of a new culture and a new socialist future. To such aspiring revolutionaries, the component parts of cultural revolution were not abstract theories but blueprints for the future.

The commune activists were not alone in their optimism. The October Revolution stimulated a range of social and cultural activism across the opening decade of the new Soviet state. The Proletarian Cultural-Education Association (Proletkult), for instance, was a semi-autonomous movement of local groups, workers’ clubs and revolutionary societies that sought to promote working-class artists and poets, as well as a new working-class aesthetic in art more generally. The movement reached its peak in 1920, with 84,000 active members. A swathe of other popular revolutionary developments and participatory activities took hold across the early Soviet state, including a practice known as ‘Octobering’ or ‘red christening’, which aimed to undermine the rituals of the Orthodox Church by baptising people in the name of revolution. Organised by local Komsomol groups, participants were often given suitably revolutionary names, such as Lenin, Pravda, Krasnyi (Red), Marx/Marxina and Engels/Engelina.

Even the Komsomol, subsequently to become a professionalised and centralised branch of the party-state apparatus, flourished in the immediate aftermath of 1917 because it provided a space for a volunteerist spirit and a good deal of activist initiative. Lenin astutely observed that the mass participation necessary to push forward the revolution was not possible without a degree of activist initiative. This remained the case through to the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan, where there is a case to be made that many of the practical means of implementing rapid industrialisation and establishing new working methods on the ground can be linked to activist initiative. The formation of ‘worker brigades’, which practised collective methods of labour and productivity competition, was one such sporadic formation that soon became co-opted by the party leadership.

In all of these endeavours, the October Revolution and the broader Bolshevik project managed both to frame and fire the imagination. Across its opening decade, this new state relied on volunteerism, youth mobilisation and utopian visions of the future, as well as the suppression of opposition. In this sense, the revolution was participatory as well as coercive. The emotional energy of the revolution remained an important cornerstone of the Soviet state. It brought grand ideological visions to life and infused the everyday with a sense of utopian adventure. Those that formed the domestic communes, just like those that participated in Proletkult or Komsomol initiatives, were actively identifying themselves as ‘the people of the future’. Much like the people Svetlana Alexievich interviewed over 70 years on from October, they saw themselves as the vanguard of an alternative future, now lost.

Andy Willimott is Lecturer in Modern Russian/Soviet History at the University of Reading.