Abstract
The history of the Soviet Union is unique in that it began in 1917 with a major revolution that eventually changed the mode of production, and ended in 1991 in another major revolution that is again changing the mode of production. For a major country, this is an amazing history, offering a very clear case of social evolution. To analyze this evolution, one needs a framework and a theory. Here, a Marxian approach is used, though it is very much restructured away from the alleged Marxism that was official in the Soviet Union. Society is divided into the economic structure and the social structure. The social structure comprises all ideas and noneconomic institutions, while the economic structure includes the relations of production (class relationships in the economic process) and the forces of production (land, labor, capital, and technology). The revolution of 1917 The first Soviet revolution took place in 1917. It resulted from the weakness and inadequacy of tsarist political-economic institutions to meet either economic or military needs. Tsarist Russia was an underdeveloped capitalist country, with a mostly very poor, illiterate, rural population - with many remnants of feudalism and a fairly absolute monarch. These class relations and political institutions held back the progress of the forces of production, so that Russia was far behind other large capitalist countries. Under German assault, tsarist institutions proved inadequate and were overthrown by a bourgeois-democratic revo
Published Version
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