Dictatorship Of The Proletariat Research Articles

Ideology and the Constitution: Freedom of National Development of Peoples

The paper examines the provisions of the first Constitution of the USSR, approved in its final version on January 31, 1924, from the point of view of Marxist‑Leninist ideology. The author concludes that the basic law found the necessary balance between centralization, republican autonomy, and the principles of socialist federalism. Many provisions of the document can be called ideological. On the one hand, the law‑maker of the first Soviet years blames the camp of capitalist countries for national hostility or colonial slavery, chauvinism or imperialist atrocities. On the other hand, the Soviet government, which was international in its class nature, was supposed to be entrusted with the high mission of uniting fraternal peoples and restoring the national economy by the forces of a single socialist family under the banner of the proletarian dictatorship. The state aimed to unite the workers of various political and economic systems around the globe under the auspices of the world socialist Soviets. Numerous research publications of prominent Bolsheviks on the problems of the national question, based on the fundamental works by K. Marx, F. Engels, K. Kautsky, acted as the theoretical basis for the declarative provisions of the first Constitution of the USSR. Based on the protocol documents of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (b), the author notes the significant role of Stalin’s personal administrative hobby in the development of historical and legal events. Nevertheless, the General Secretary of the party did not dare to go against the principles of democratic centralism or the International supported by Vladimir Lenin. The development of the terminology of the nation and the advantages of various ways of voluntary unification of peoples, the comparison of models of cultural‑national or regional autonomizations in the works of the Bolsheviks play a great role.

Проблемы войны и мира в философско-политической публицистике Ли Дачжао

The article is devoted to the study of the evolution of views on the problem of war and peace of a prominent Chinese educator and political figure, one of the first in the country to take the path of comprehending Marxism and playing a key role in its establishment in China. Having received a classical Con - fucian education, the future first Chinese Marxist and one of the founders of the Communist Party of China went through a difficult path of ideological evolution – from liberal democracy to revolutionary and further to Marxism. In this context, the main vector of changes in his views on the problems of war and peace was determined by a gradual transition from consistent anti-militarism to an understanding of the class essence of war. The turn that was determined in Li Dazhao’s views under the influence of the First World War was finally consolidated by the revolutionary events of 1917 in Russia. Considering war an inevitable companion of capitalism, which, under the conditions of imperialism, strives to extract maximum profit by erasing state borders and creating superempires, Li Dazhao ultimately came to the conclusion that the only way to combat militarism and prevent the threat of new wars of conquest is to change the existing system and establish new ones relations in the spheres of labor and property. At the same time, the main instrument of these changes should be the proletarian state.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOVIETS FROM THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION TO THE ADOPTION OF THE USSR CONSTITUTION OF 1936

The article examines the history of the formation of representative power in Russia: the emergence and development of Soviets of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ deputies and the highest representative institution - the State Duma. The following shows the activities of the State Duma, the range of interests of their deputies, their attention to the problem of whether the Duma is a parliament or not. The process of formation of Soviets since February 1917 as an All-Russian representative authority is shown. The problem of correlation between the theory of Marxism and the practice of its application in the RSFSR is considered. It is shown that the Constitution of the RSFSR of 1918 never mentioned the classical formula of Marxism “dictatorship of the proletariat”, blurring it with the dictatorship of workers. However, during the Civil War, in order to retain power, there is a transition to the de facto dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party. The article draws attention to the moral and political level of the members of the CPSU (b), I. V. Stalin’s personnel policy in both party and Soviet organizations. The institute of purges of party and Soviet workers is considered as a way to get rid of both political opponents and embezzlers, thieves, drunkards, etc. of the public. The new Constitution of the USSR of 1936 was to ful ll the task of nally purging the state from the party dictatorship and ensuring the union of party members and non - party members

Creating the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’: early socialist literature on the Paris Commune in Britain and the United States

ABSTRACT School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, Faculty of Arts, Australia This article analyses the role of early radical and socialist texts in forming the understanding of the Paris Commune in Britain and the United States. The Commune, while a French event, came to be associated with socialists, radicals, and as a symbol of internationalism. Marx’s The Civil War in France established the interpretation of the Commune that would see it become a radical shibboleth. This article analyses articles by Edward Beesly, Lissagaray’s History of the Commune of 1871, E.B Bax’s Short History of the Commune, and Lenin’s State and Revolution to trace the influences of Marx’s interpretation. This analysis includes examination of the radical publishers in both Britain and the United States to explore how these texts were edited and changed, and how they were circulated to reach the intended working-class audience. The article’s core questions are where did this interpretation come from, how was it constructed, and how did it come to dominate the interpretation of the Commune. This is significant due to the Commune’s pre-eminence within socialist history and how it became an example of the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ for many future revolutionaries.

Breaking up the state and lopping off the parasites: Lenin’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as the state that is ceasing to be a state

This article examines the key features of the dictatorship of the proletariat as theorised by Lenin in the heat of Russia’s revolutionary process in 1917 and stresses its special character as a ‘state that is ceasing to be a state’. The dictatorship of the proletariat represented a new form of the class struggle, the turning of centralised coercive power against the few by the many, the dissolution of the centralised force of the state through its subjection to popular sovereignty, and the emancipation of the growing state from private relations of production through the ‘lopping off ’ of parasitic monopoly capitalists.

LENIN E A DEMOCRACIA

One of the most recurrent criticisms of Marxist political theory is the lack of reflection on the relationship between democracy and socialism. Even though the historical experiences of building socialism have not succeeded in putting socialist and proletarian democracy into practice, the discussion about its implementation can be found in important works by the precursors of Marxism, such as Marx and Lenin. The aim of this article is to review Lenin’s main reflections on bourgeois democracy and socialist democracy.

Reconstruction of the Biography of G. K. Ozhigov in the Context of the Revolutionary Events of 1905–1917 in Russia

Referring to regional material, this article actualizes the tradition of studying the biographies of historical figures in the context of an institutional concept, which makes it possible to describe and explain the controversial facts of political history of the new time in the era of mass social movements. The authors aim to reconstruct the later imperial period (until October 1917) of the life of Grigorii Kondratyevich Ozhigov, a representative of the national revolutionary cohort, who took an active part in the events that occurred in the Urals, Ukraine, the Baltics, Finland, and other areas of the former Russian Empire in the late twentieth century. Methodologically, the work relies on the modernization paradigm, the “new social history”, and related everyday discourse, including the anthropological approach, historical, and biographical methods. Since G. K. Ozhigov’s biography studied by a few Ural historians is replete with inaccuracies, the study is based on sources which have never been referred to previously, including official documents, periodicals, sources of personal origin, autobiographies, and memoirs by Ozhigov himself. The documents kept in the fund of the Ozhigov family of the Central State Archive of the Udmurt Republic are characterized by a complex nature. The study demonstrates that Ozhigov, who came from a peasant family, a worker of Izhevsk factories, managed to rise first to the interregional, and in 1917, to the all-Russian level, reaching the status of a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the first convocation. In the political sphere, he passed a difficult path of evolution from a militant of the Ural Lbovtsy partisans during the First Russian Revolution of 1905–1907, to a member of the RCP(b) and an active participant in the implementation of the project of the proletarian state.

«Мировая революция» в русском анархизме

The purpose of this article is to identify the specifics of the theory of the "world revolution" in the ideological and political heritage of Russian anarchism. Historical, comparative, hermeneutic methods of scientific research were actively used to write the article. The ideologists of Russian anarchism in their interpretation of the "world revolution" competed with Marxist doctrine, with its popular dialectical theory of socio-economic formations and class struggle, where the final stage of historical progress was to be the achievement of global communism. Rejecting the Marxist concept of "dictatorship of the proletariat", the Russian anarchists proceeded from an alternative methodology that emphasizes the primacy of natural, biological factors of social processes. According to anarchists, the basic factor of progress is the natural inclination of people to solidarity and mutual assistance. Hence the Russian anarchists opposed the natural nature of the evolution of mankind to any "forced" forms of social organization. This applied, first of all, to the institution of the state, regardless of its external form – communist, liberal-democratic, despotic. The basic parameters of the social ideal in the theory of Russian anarchism were the principles of anarchy and freedom, the building of social existence on the basis of self-organization, self-government and a global decentralized confederation structured "from the bottom up". The former territorial and political borders were abolished, nations were abolished. The anarchists saw the achievement of this ideal as an exclusively revolutionary way, gradually embracing all new countries, regions, continents. The article emphasizes the constant appeal of Russian anarchists to the arguments of universal morality - "freedom", "justice", "brotherhood", "justice", "equality" in justifying the need for a world anarchist revolution, which in practice turned into political abstractions with destructive consequences for societies. At the same time, the "secondary" ideology of Russian anarchism as an intellectual product is noted in relation to Marxism and natural science theories of the XVIII-XIX centuries, as well as the tendency of anarchists to utopian thinking, to speculative building of their global social ideal.

Proletarian Feedback: The Mirror of the Soviet Public Sphere

Abstract One glaring problem that faced the Bolsheviks upon seizing power was the absence of their vaunted class subject. The party had led a successful revolution in the name of the industrial worker, but once the dust settled after the civil war, reality exposed the proclaimed “dictatorship of the proletariat” to be little more than an empty slogan for propagandists. The proletariat was a historico-philosophical no-show. Its truancy had a number of reasons, both factual and theoretical. First, while proletarians had always been something of a rarity in the largely agrarian economy of imperial Russia, the industrial working class became even scarcer after the civil war had decimated the manufacturing capacity of Russia and ruralized the country once again. When the Bolsheviks finally took control, Russia's industrial output had fallen to thirty percent of prewar levels. Historians have consequently described the Bolsheviks as a “superstructure in need of a base”2 and a “vanguard of a nonexistent class.”3 Add to this, second, the fact that the physiognomy of the working class was changing in the 1920s as the forces of production shifted away from the methods of heavy manufacture typical of the second industrial revolution toward newer, automated technologies that relied less on physical exertion than on the scientific knowledge of engineers and managers. At least until Stalin's spectacular revival of older, “classical” forms of industry at the end of the decade—a return that seemed to be motivated less by economic exigency than by retrograde iconography—blast furnaces and factory workbenches were being replaced by telematic machinery and bureaucratic control centers. Third, according to revolutionary theory, in the phase of the transition to communism the proletariat was not even a class, strictly speaking, but the social force that abolishes class identity as such in order to establish for the first time in world history the conditions for a truly universal subject.4 The revolutionary class is, necessarily, the last class. Party philosophers could provide no substantialist definition of this “free dynamei (power, force),” as Marx called the proletariat, since this non-class had no concrete features of its own but was instead understood as an energy that dissolved the existing socioeconomic order.5 Paradoxically, then, the very success of the revolution “causes the concept of the proletariat to ‘disappear.’”6

Pancasila Democracy Between Concept and Practice: Is It Really Democracy?

Democracy is a political system that is currently used by almost all nations and countries in the world. The democratic political system is not only used by liberal countries which uphold freedom, but it turns out that the democratic political system is also used by communist-minded countries which uphold togetherness or collectivity. Communist countries call the democracy they use proletarian democracy or people's democracy. In contrast to our country, Indonesia, which adheres to the Pancasila democratic political system, where the values contained in democracy must be based on Pancasila values. In Pancasila democracy, apart from being based on Pancasila values, there are 10 pillars of democracy mandated by the nation's founding fathers (founding fathers). Principles or joints are the main truths which are used as the basis for thoughts, actions and so on. Then in the Pancasila democratic government system there are seven main pillars which form the foundation.

Specificity of the formation of modern social housing in Ukraine as a consequence of the russian invasion

The Soviet Union, among other states, was distinguished by the construction of housing at a great pace and volume, which was included in the programs of future social development for every 5 years. It was believed that the scale of Soviet construction should testify to the advantages of the Soviet system of government (and in fact the ruling political regime was formed by a one-party system) and the socialist system of management. Housing construction was carried out for the people under conditions of equality and equal distribution by state bodies of living space per person. The liberation of Ukraine from the Russian Communist Party dictate led to a prolonged Russian invasion of Ukrainian land due to the Russian Federation's inadmissibility of such "arbitrariness" on the part of Ukraine as choosing a pro-European path and democratization. With the acquisition of Independence in Ukraine, there was a reassessment of the values previously declared by the communist authorities, when the dictatorship of the proletariat and the hegemony of the poorest sections of the population were proclaimed. Mass housing construction, as an industry that had to serve as communist propaganda, actually met the minimum needs of the people. This is especially evident when comparing the Soviet heritage and the modern construction of social housing in other countries. The state of war in our country has given us an understanding that the problem of creating social housing is growing in our difficult conditions, covers a huge number of the population that lost their homes as a result of hostilities and takes various forms that need to be identified.

ИСТОРИКО-ГРАДОСТРОИТЕЛЬНЫЕ АСПЕКТЫ ПРЕОБРАЗОВАНИЯ РАБОЧИХ ОКРАИН ЛЕНИНГРАДА (НА ПРИМЕРЕ АНСАМБЛЯ ТРАКТОРНОЙ УЛИЦЫ)

Creating a comfortable living environment in St. Petersburg, taking into account the preservation of the valuable characteristics of historical buildings and the consistent development of the Leningrad architectural school, is one of the most important tasks that is currently being addressed. The result of a systematic approach to the formation of the structure of the new development of Leningrad was the creation of a complex of urban ensembles, based on the principles of architecture of the early 20th century and the traditions of St. Petersburg architecture, which combined peripheral areas with the center. Therefore, it is relevant to study the architectural and spatial features of the formation of the urban environment of Leningrad in the pre-war decade, primarily in the context of the synthesis of the use of techniques in accordance with the needs of the workers of the world's first proletarian state and the preservation of the successive nature of the ensemble development of new urban planning solutions.
 The object of the study is the ensemble of Traktornaya Street. (architects A. Gegello, A. Nikolsky, G. Simonov, 1925-1927)
 The methodological basis of the study is: historical and urban planning analysis, including the study of historical documents (maps), design decisions, generalization and evaluation of the results obtained.
 As a result of the study, the authors come to the conclusion that the architectural and spatial methods of formation and means of organizing an ensemble in the peripheral areas of the working outskirts (on the example of Traktornaya Street) demonstrate the creative method of architects of the 1920-1930s, as a synthesis of the latest experience in designing residential quarters for workers in the capitalist countries of the West, St. Petersburg-Leningrad, the requirements of a man of a new proletarian state, the urban context and the preservation of the traditions of St. Petersburg architecture

“Through the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in All Countries, Onward to the Complete Emancipation of Women!”: The Transnational Networks of the Communist Women’s Movement in the Early 1920s

The Communist Women’s Movement (CWM) emerged in 1920. Its goal was to bring women into Communist parties and train them as cadres and leaders so they could work to bring about Socialist transformation and women’s emancipation as an integral component of this transformation. Although a rich body of literature has studied women, gender, and Communism, the works on the CWM’s institutions and networks that use a transnational perspective to study them remain limited. This article seeks to contribute to studies on Communist women in a transnational perspective. It makes use of the CWM’s institutional documents from the early 1920s to shed light on the movement’s inauguration and delineate its ideas on women’s emancipation. This article researches such aspects of Communist women’s activities as gender division of labor, reproduction, and childcare; relationship with non-Communist feminists; and gender relations within the Communist movement.

In Community: Recovering Transnational Networks, International Movements, and Local Concerns

In Community: Recovering Transnational Networks, International Movements, and Local Concerns Jennifer J. Davis and Sandie Holguín How have women shaped communities to advance political objectives, cultivate shared interests, and protect vulnerable members? We profile nine expert responses to that broad question in the six research articles and three book reviews that comprise the Spring 2023 issue of the Journal of Women’s History. Research by Daria Dyakonova opens this issue, inviting readers to reflect on the collaborations across borders that mobilized communist and feminist movements in the 1920s. In “‘Through the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in all Countries, Onward to the Complete Emancipation of Women!’: The Transnational Networks of Communist Women’s Movements in the Early 1920s,” Dyakonova examines communist women’s efforts to pursue legislation and political practices that would promote gender equality. Relying on institutional documents produced by the Communist Women’s Movement (CWM) in the Soviet Union and across Europe, Dyakonova highlights the signal contribution these activists made to contemporary debates on women’s suffrage, gendered divisions of labor, reproductive care, childcare, gender relations within Communist party organizations, and relations with non-Communist feminists. In a 2020 interview, the historian Francisca de Haan observed that public memory of socialist women’s activism collapsed along with European state socialism even though “women in socialist countries had more rights and a better social status than women in many capitalist or Third World countries.”1 Dyakonova’s research represents a critical intervention, therefore, that weaves the story of Soviet women’s contributions to transnational communist and feminist movements into a broader conversation about the interwar period, which has focused more on western European and American women’s engagement with pacifist, anticolonial, and anti-vice movements.2 Dyakonova concludes that members of the CWM perceived their efforts to promote gender equality within socialist governments as essential in recruiting non-Party affiliated women to support “the revolutionary cause.” Jennifer Bond’s research moves our gaze from transnational communist networks across Europe to the international religious organization of the YWCA in China. In the article, “Inculcating a Gendered Christian Internationalism: The Chinese Student YWCA,” Bond contends that during the 1920s, the YWCA in Republican China gave female students access to new positions of responsibility and networks while the organization aimed to cultivate Chinese girls as members of a “gendered global Christian” [End Page 5] citizenry. Leadership within the student YWCAs enabled girls and young women to attend international conferences and partake in training opportunities that informed their later professional and political alliances. For this generation of women, to be Christian signified a commitment to internationalism, diplomacy, and egalitarianism. However, Bond observes, this identity proved to be remarkably flexible, accommodating a range of political regimes and international audiences. Chinese women adapted metaphors of a global “sisterhood” to navigate between local, national, and international concerns, while leveraging potential alliances with women outside of China. Following research insights published by scholars of internationalist feminisms, including Francisca de Haan and Leila Rupp, Bond documents how internationalist networks for women’s issues flourished in the years after the Great War, and how the women in these organizations conceptualized women’s issues beyond suffrage. Indeed, decades later, activists would make clear that women’s issues might include human rights abuses. Sara Kimble’s article, “Internationalist Women Against Nazi Atrocities in Occupied Europe, 1941–1947,” contextualizes the anti-atrocities campaign launched in 1942 by the members of the Liaison Committee of Women’s International Organisations (LCWIO). By examining the LCWIO records, Kimble finds that women refugees, including Wanda Grabińska and Emmy Freundlich, played particularly important roles in documenting Nazi atrocities including forced labor, mass starvation, systematic rape and sexual assault. Freundlich articulated a peculiar responsibility shared by refugees who had escaped the Nazi regime to testify to its horrors, “Women in occupied countries would have cause for deep reproach to their more fortunate sisters unless some repudiation of inhumanity… were made.” The anti-atrocity statement of 1942 was the first step in formalizing that repudiation: a woman-organized protest against the abuse of women. They build the case using evidence surreptitiously provided by dissidents within the occupied Polish government, citing international law, religious principles, property statutes, and family...

There is no capitalist conspiracy and the rich are not all‐powerful

There is no capitalist conspiracy and the rich are not all‐powerful

Минеральные Воды: столица Северо-Кавказского края – решение, оставшееся в проекте

The article is devoted to the discussion of the issue of the new administrative center of the North-Caucasus Region (NCR), formed in January 1934, after the separation of the Azov-Black Sea Region from it. The then leadership of the country decided to place the capital of the NCR in the city of Georgievsk, but as a result of further discussion, two months later – in Mineral Waters. At the same time, it was planned that before the construction of administrative buildings in the new center, the regional authorities were to be located in the resort city of Pyatigorsk. The author reveals the main reasons for making a decision in favor of Mineralnye Vody. This city as the center of the North-Caucasus Region had the following advantages: 1. Mineralnye Vody was the largest railway transport hub in the region. 2. The largest airport in the South of Russia was located there. 3. Industry was developing dynamically in the city, and the working class was the dominant population – this was important for the state of the «dictatorship of the proletariat». 4. Proximity to the resort town allowed the leadership of the region to live in Pyatigorsk, and work in Mineralnye Vody. The article provides some reasons why the central and regional authorities reconsidered the decision to build the administrative center of the North-Caucasus Region in Mineralnye Vody. Firstly, there was the need to invest significant financial resources in the construction of the center. Secondly, it was the reluctance of regional officials to leave the temporary center of the region, Pyatigorsk. Thirdly, the central authorities of the country continued to search for the optimal, from their point of view, administrative-territorial structure, which could once again change the decision on the regional center. A way out of this situation was found in the official consolidation of the status of the permanent center of the North-Caucasus Region for Pyatigorsk.

The Soviet-Polish armed conflict of 1918 - 1921 in the context of the process of formation of the Versailles system. An example of the clash of different principles of the political and legal constitution of states in Recent history

In the article, the authors seek to answer the question of how the Versailles system influenced the development of the Soviet-Polish conflict as a factor that constituted the process of state-building in a number of western regions of the former Russian Empire. The authors conclude that the Versailles system not only did not solve the problem of dividing borders in Eastern Europe, but also intensified the confrontation between Poland and the RSFSR. One of the main problems – the problem of Ukraine’s statehood – has not been solved within the framework of the Versailles system, this was largely the result of France’s tough pro-Polish position. The authors show that within the western territories of the former Russian Empire, there was a clash of different doctrines of state-building in the conditions of Modern times, these doctrines reflected the nationalism of Eastern European peoples, the concept of a Marxist proletarian state and the concept of Western democracy exported from the United States and Great Britain.

Peter Weiss and Others

Peter Weiss and Others

Communist Totalitarian Regime and the Status quo of the Catholic Church in the Context of Post-War Reality of Poland (1945−1956)

The fundamental purpose of this article is to present the specificity of the totalitarian communist regime to the status quo of the Catholic Church functioning in the Polish People's Republic in the early post-war period (1945−1956). Therefore, the analysis of the discussed issues allows one to expose the nature of the Stalinist system of repression described as the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” taking into account the tough and challenging situation of the Catholic Church, forced not only to fight for her survival but above all to preserve the Christian identity of the Polish nation. The reinterpretation of the Stalinist totalitarian system from the perspective of Christian personalistic praxeology discloses its unprecedentedly criminal nature. Moreover, the presentation of the fundamental assumptions of the totally anti-human and anti-Christian paradigm that characterizes the “dictatorship of the proletariat” makes it possible to interpret Stalinism in terms of not only defining but also legitimizing and even authenticating one of the most terrifying and degenerate forms of totalitarian systems of the 20th century. However, this is of crucial importance, specifically today when many emerging ideological trends often downplay the criminal nature of Stalinism and even treat the “totalitarian model” — particularly communism — as a “specific historical phenomenon” attempting to resolve many complex and multifarious socio-political, cultural and economic issues.

Between Exception and Normality: Schmittian Dictatorship and the Soviet Legal Order

AbstractThis article addresses Schmitt’s concept of sovereign dictatorship—a departure from the normal legal order aiming to bring about a new mode of legality—as applied to the Marxist, and then Soviet, “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Unlike Schmitt, Marx and Engels, as well as Soviet legal theorists, saw the space for law even while aiming to dispense with the legal form on the road to communism. This is best explained by Schmitt’s failure to recognize the importance of legal systems not only for controlling social conflict, but also for coordination, the need for which does not disappear in extraordinary circumstances.*This article was initially written as part of my LLM studies at Harvard Law School. I thank my supervisor, Professor Adrian Vermeule, for his guidance and advice, as well as other friends (and enemies) for motivating my project. I am also grateful to the Ratio Juris production team for their exceptionally thorough editing of my original text. Any mistakes remain my own.