Concise Russian history for a traveler

Soviet and post-Soviet Russia

The New Economic Policy (NEP) was inaugurated at the 10th Party Congress in March 1921. The key sectors of the economy – heavy industry, communications, and transport – remained in state hands, but light and consumer-goods industries were open to the entrepreneur. The monetary reform of 1923 brought an end to forced requisitioning. The economy was back to its 1913 level by the mid-1920s. All Communist Party members agreed that the goal was socialism, and this meant the dominance of the industrial economy.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Soviet Russia gave way to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) in 1922. As before, Moscow was the capital and dominated the union. Lenin’s death in 1924 set off a succession struggle that lasted until the end of the decade. Josef Stalin, who had become general secretary of the party in 1922, used the party as a power base. The economic debate was won by those who favored rapid industrialization and forced collectivization. Stalin, a Georgian, surprisingly turned

out to be a great Russian nationalist. During the 1930s and ’40s he promoted Russian history, Russian language, and Russian national and cultural heroes. This policy was to have disastrous long-term onsequences for Russians, because they were seen as imperialists bent on Russifying the locals.

The Russians, however, suffered as much as anyone else during the purges and repression that characterized Stalin’s reign. Stalin also vandalized Russian cultural monuments and destroyed many fine examples of Russian architecture. He was personally responsible for the destruction of some of Moscow’s finest cathedrals. It was as if Stalin were trying to expunge Russia’s past and to build a new Russia in his own image.

Victory over Germany during the World War II precipitated an upsurge of Russian national pride. The advent of the Cold War led to Stalin tightening his grip on his sphere of influence in eastern and southeastern Europe. Russian was imposed as the main foreign language, and Russian economic experience was copied.

The Bolsheviks had always been mindful of minorities on their frontiers, and the first deportation of non-Russian minorities to Siberia and Central Asia began in the 1920s.