Discipline improved in the army, and it made an effective reappearance in schools and elsewhere. Ranks, titles, decorations, and other distinctions, whether bureaucratic, military, or academic, were restored and acquired vast importance. Even social manners made a comeback. Pomp and circumstance re-entered the stage. Uniforms blossomed everywhere, reminding observers of tsarist Russia. Generalissimo Stalin toasting his marshals at a gargantuan Kremlin reception presented a far different picture from Lenin in his worn-out coat haranguing workers in squares and factory yards. In a sense, the Soviet regime had arrived. Equally important changes took place, as we shall see, in education and culture, where the avant-garde and experimental approach of the early years gave place to rock-ribbed conservatism. Patriotism and historical tradition emerged again, although in a minor key and as aids, rather than rivals, to the fundamentally Marxist ideology.
Women and Feminism
Women constituted half, actually considerably more than half, the population of the Soviet Union, and they certainly contributed their share to its history. In a
very real sense they carried half, or more, of the burden of that history on their shoulders. The communist program included liberating women from oppression, discrimination, and drudgery as part of the liberation of humankind. The first decade or more after the October Revolution was full of promise for Soviet feminists, as well as of new departures in the position and activities of Soviet women, perhaps most notably and permanently so among the Islamic peoples of the country. But, for the Soviet leaders, feminist ideals were always ancillary to the fundamental Marxist vision of class straggle and the building of socialism. And they were crushed, together with other autonomous views, once the U.S.S.R. was set in the firm Stalinist mold. There was some relaxation but no basic change in the situation after the death of the crucial dictator.
Lapidus and other scholars have done much recently to present and interpret the position of Soviet women in both its positive and its negative aspects. The former include, notably, the great increase in education, to where women came to be proportionately better represented as students in Soviet institutions of higher learning than men. Concurrently women rose remarkably in the professions, so that today, for example, the great majority of the doctors of medicine in Russia are women. Yet, as it has been repeatedly pointed out, few women reached the top rungs of their profession, medicine included, and they were strikingly absent at the highest levels of both Party and government. Moreover, Soviet women both held full-time jobs and performed the great bulk of the work at home, a task made all the more difficult by the hard conditions of life in the Soviet Union. It might be added that feminism in the Western sense was at best in its incipient stage in the U.S.S.R. Nor were all its emphases - as a student of Soviet society will readily understand - particularly relevant to the Soviet scene.
The Nationalities
Its multinational composition was a major problem for the Soviet Union as it had been for the Russian Empire. While in 1917 Great Russians formed about half of the population of the country, and Ukrainians and White Russians, or Belorassians, approximately another quarter, the remaining quarter consisted of a staggering variety of ethnic and linguistic groups. The Caucasus alone contains a fantastically complicated mixture of peoples. More than a hundred and fifty languages and dialects were spoken in the Soviet Union. Soviet nationalities ranged from ancient civilized peoples, such as the Armenians and the Georgians, to primitive Siberian tribes. They included Lutherans and Catholics as well as Orthodox, and Moslems and Buddhists together with shamanists. Moreover, many of these peoples showed nationalist tendencies in the years of revolution and civil war, which corresponded only too well to the generally nationalist atmosphere of the twentieth century.
Soviet authorities developed several basic policies in dealing with national groups. They allowed them no independence in ideological, political, economic,
or social matters, and even no deviation from the established official line. The U.S.S.R. remained essentially a most highly centralized state. The single Communist party of the Soviet Union acted as an especially important foundation and guarantee of that unity. At the same time, Soviet rulers granted a kind of cultural autonomy to the nationalities in the Soviet Union - indeed they sponsored heavily such autonomy - stating that their cultures should be "national in form, and socialist in content." The form included the language and the cultural tradition of a given people, which, however, had to be fitted, as in the case of the Russians proper, into the Soviet-Marxist framework. Thus, the government tried to destroy Islam as well as Orthodoxy and interpreted Georgian history as well as Russian in the simple terms of a class straggle.
But this dual approach to nationalities proved difficult to maintain in practice. Cultural autonomy could easily become cultural nationalism, and that in turn would lead to separatism. Always suspicious, the Soviet leadership kept uncovering "bourgeois nationalists" in union republics and lesser subdivisions of the U.S.S.R. In the crucially important case of Ukraine, for example, the Party apparatus itself suffered several sweeping purges because of its "deviations." Moreover, after a controlled measure of Great Russian patriotism and nationalism became respectable in the Soviet Union, Stalin and the Politburo began to stress the Russian language and the historical role of the Great Russian people as binding cement of their multinational state. This trend continued during the Second World War and in the postwar years. Eastern peoples of the U.S.S.R. were made to use the Cyrillic in place of the Latin alphabet for their native tongues, while the Russian language received emphasis in all Soviet schools. Histories had to be rewritten again to demonstrate that the incorporation of minority nationalities into the Russian state was a positive good rather than merely the lesser evil as compared to other alternatives. Basically contrary to Marxism, the new interpretation was fitted into Marxist dress by such means as stress on the progressive nature of the Russian proletariat and the advanced character of the Russian revolutionary movement, which benefited all the peoples fortunate enough to be associated with Russians. But Stalin, and some other Soviet leaders as well, went further, giving violent expression to some of the worst kinds of prejudices. Notably the quite un-Marxist vice of anti-Semitism found fertile soil in the Soviet Union. Yiddish intellectuals were among the groups virtually wiped out by the purges. Jews were generally excluded from the Soviet diplomatic service. Stalin's and Zhdanov's fierce attack on "cosmopolitanism" after the Second World War seemed particularly difficult to reconcile with the international character of Marxism or with the legacy of Lenin. The Jewish emigration from the U.S.S.R. had more than one sound reason behind it.
Education
Education played an extremely important role in the development of the Soviet Union. Educational advances were a most important part of state planning
and made the striking Soviet economic and technological progress possible. As already indicated, education also stood at the heart of the evolution of Soviet society.
Somewhat less than half of the Russian people were literate at the time of the Bolshevik revolution. Furthermore, the years of civil war, famine, epidemics, and general disorganization that followed the establishment of the Soviet regime resulted in a decline of literacy and in a general lowering of the educational level in the country. Beginning in 1922, however, the authorities began to implement a large-scale educational program, aiming not only at establishing schools for all children, but also at eliminating illiteracy among adults. By the end of the Second Five-Year Plan, that is, by 1938, a network of four-year elementary schools covered the U.S.S.R., while more advanced seven-year schools had been organized for urban children. The total elimination of illiteracy proved more difficult, although the government created more than 19,000 "centers for liquidating illiteracy" by 1925 and persevered in its efforts. The census of 1926 registered 51 per cent of Soviet citizens, aged ten and above, as literate; that of 1939 81.1 per cent. Projecting the increase, 85 per cent of the Soviet people must have been literate at the time of the German invasion, and almost all at the end of the Communist regime.