How far should I go back in Russian History in order to understand Communist Russia?
Upvote:0
I would say that Russian Communism can be explained by the autocracy of the later Czars, Peter the Great, or even Ivan the Terrible. That is, with regard to the idea of centralized authority and the "command and control" methods of these rulers.
The Okrana, or Russian secret police goes back to the Tsarist rulers of the 19th century. Ivan the Terrible created the streltsy, or "Guards" arm, that doubled as police.
Upvote:1
There is a strain of historical thought that some of the features of Russian/Soviet state are strongly influenced by Mongol conquest and rule by the Horde.
So if you agree with that line of thought, you need to go back to 13th century.
Upvote:5
No, it is not needed. I think you better should read the history of Marxism and about the Great French Revolution. If you want to deepen in history, you can start from the Commune of Rome (1144).
Upvote:5
For me at least, this question may be re-phrased thus: To what extent were the contours of the Communist regime in Russia determined by Russian national peculiarities?
Scholars like Richard Pipes hold that the Soviet regime was a development of some sort of immanent Russian matrix. Here is a wiki summary:
Pipes is known for arguing that the origins of the Soviet Union can be traced to the separate path taken by 15th century Muscovy, in a Russian version of the Sonderweg thesis. In Pipes' opinion, Muscovy differed from every state in Europe in that it had no concept of private property, and that everything was regarded as the property of the Grand Duke/Tsar. In Pipes' view, this separate path undertaken by Russia (possibly under Mongol influence) ensured that Russia would be an autocratic state with values fundamentally dissimilar from those of Western civilization. Pipes has argued that this "patrimonialism" of Imperial Russia started to break down when Russian leaders attempted to modernize in the 19th century, without seeking to change the basic "patrimonial" structure of Russian society.
There are also more nuanced versions of this argument. However, it is far from universally accepted and I personally am not quite convinced by it for this reason: other Communist regimes like in China or Cambodia have acted similarly, without the "immanent Russian matrix" so there must be more (or less!) to it. In fact, just by reading 1984 you can learn most of what you need about how any police state works (of course, 1984 is what in science one would call an "ideal case" - a model that real states only approximate to some degree, and thank God for that!).
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