The USSR in Its International Aspect: a Philosophical and Historical Analysis of the Ways for Solving Agrarian Question by the Bolsheviks

Abstract

The formation of the USSR five years after the October Revolution followed not only from internal needs, but also from the idea of “dialectical transition” of the feudal-capitalist component of the Russian empire’s heritage to the socialist form. The USSR formation also had a more ambitious goal: The Soviet Union was expected to become the first experience of creating the “world workers and peasants union” (V.I. Lenin). First of all, this experience was gained in the agri­cultural sphere – the dominant sector of the country’s economy. In this regard, the main scientific problem of this article is the philosophical and historical un­derstanding of the methods invented by the Bolsheviks during the war commu­nism policy period in 1918–1921 to form a new sense of agrarian life adequate to the future “world USSR”. After a short break of NEP the experience gained in the agrarian sphere was used during the forcible сollectivization in the Russian Federation and in the territories of the former Russian Empire annexed to it for internationalist purposes. The article analyzes in detail the political and ideologi­cal reasons of the Bolshevik’s activities solving the agrarian question during the periods of “war communism” and collectivization, the legal basis they had de­veloped for this issue, the successive elimination of the peasant cooperation as a self-organization of active people, the idea of historical necessity and the com­munist practicability of the overall labor obligation and the effectiveness of forced labor, as well as the consequences of these measures: the terrible famine of 1920–1921 and the armed resistance of the peasantry to the agrarian policy of the Bolsheviks.