Questions for discussion:

What vision did the leading Bolsheviks have of the new society they hoped to build? Which policies did the new Soviet state put in place to bring this new society to life? How did the pressures of Civil War transform their attitudes to ‘the masses’?

Set reading (to be prepared for class discussion):

Source: V. I. Lenin, ‘Tasks of the Youth Leagues'. This source can be found online here.

Orlando Figes, ‘The Red Army and Mass Mobilization during the Russian Civil War 1918-1920’, Past & Present, 1990, pp. 168–211.

Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, (Oxford: Oxford University Press USA, 1989). Chapter 2, ‘Revolution: Utopias in the Air and on the Ground', pp. 37-57. Available as an ebook through the Library website.

Selected further reading:

Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (University of California Press, 1998). E-book.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia’, The Journal of Modern History, 65 (1993), 745–70.

David L. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939, 1 edition (Cornell University Press, 2011). E-book.

Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis 1914-1921 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002). E-book.

Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). E-book.

Christopher Read, From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and Their Revolution, 1917-21 (New York: Oxford University Press Inc, 1996). Chapters 10 and 11. E-book.