A movement that began in Russia in the late nineteenth century under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin in response to the destabilized economy.
Bolshevism was primarily a labor movement in the early years that concerned itself with propagating Lenin’s interpretation of Karl Marx’s theories of communism and the revolutionary impulse. After the serfs were freed by the tsar in the 1860s, the social structure of Russia, especially in the countryside, was destabilized as millions of peasants and former landowners found themselves without property or means. As Marxism was beginning to sweep Europe, the ideas began to filter into Russia and consolidate with a small group of intellectuals who eventually called themselves Bolsheviks.
The group advocated state assistance to stabilize the socioeconomic system and improve the labor situation. Tensions reached a boiling point in 1905, with a series of labor strikes all across Russia. The strikes were singularly unusual because of the absence of even rudimentary trade unions and because there was no cultural precedent for any kind of labor movement from below in Russia. The strikes began violently on January 9, 1905, which was quickly dubbed Bloody Sunday. The strikers advocated for eight-hour working days and regulated wages. The strikes continued throughout the rest of 1905, as the story of Bloody Sunday spread across the country and the various Bolshevik groups took up the cause. The Bolshevik attitude reflected the conditions of the day, in which there was no systematized program of labor unions. Lenin cautioned Moscow and Saint Petersburg to be slow to strike, and the two cities waited until the fall of 1905 to begin strikes.
The 1917 Bolshevik revolution was both liberating and brutal. While it freed Russian peasants from the control of aristocratic landowners and launched the country on a great modernization effort, it also resulted in gross human rights violations. Here, prisoners are jammed into a boxcar for deportation to Siberian work camps. (Library of Congress)
After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks consolidated power in Russia and concentrated their economic policies on the domestic situation in Russia and on improving the working conditions for the average worker. The resulting civil war after the revolutions placed a hold on this economic priority as resources were diverted toward the war effort. After the triumph of Bolshevism by 1923, the state began implementation of the policies that would govern the trade of the Soviet Union, both domestically and abroad.
After 1923, the state controlled nearly all the economic activity inside the Soviet Union and considered importation of consumer goods to be a luxury and secondary to the kinds of imports that would build the industry and technological base of the economy. Lenin decreed in 1918 that the state would protect all industry and take over industry planning and economic development so as to ensure the full realization of the communist system. Imports, which were restricted, especially in the early years of the Soviet Union, were considered only a supplement; the main idea was that the Soviet Union would become self-sufficient. As the underlying ideology of the Soviet state was the empowerment of the worker and the attainment of a workers’ utopia, the Bolsheviks (later consolidated into the Soviet Union) concentrated on increasing internal production and encouraging healthy labor relations. The Soviet state was understandably reluctant to look beyond its shores for economic assistance in the early years.
Imports were further restricted to avoid “capitalist contamination,” so trade relations with the West, particularly Germany, France, Britain, and the United States, were slow to develop. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union expected that Western companies that had operated in Russia before the revolutions and were dispossessed as a result would simply restart their operations in Soviet Russia. Those companies were reluctant to make such an undertaking, partially out of bad memory, and partially because of the poor state of economic affairs across the globe. Germany was the only country in a real position to be able to accommodate the Soviet trade requests and reopened forty-nine operations; Great Britain reopened half that, and the United States and France were only able to resume operations on six each. These operations were primarily concerned with raw materials like oil, mining, timber, paper, sugar, cement, and the like, as well as a few chemical and electro-technical industries.
As the Soviet Union feared capitalist contamination for the remainder of its existence, trade with the West remained restricted to specific areas until the 1990s.
Jill Vossen
See also: Soviet Union.
Carr, E.H. The Bolshevik Revolution. Vol. 2. London: Pelican, 1966.
DePauw, John W. Soviet-American Trade Negotiations. New York: Praeger, 1979.
Libbey, James K. American-Russian Economic Relations. Claremont, CA: Regina, 1989.
Schwarz, Solomon M. The Russian Revolution of 1905, trans. Gertrude Vakar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.
Williams, Andrew J. Trading with the Bolsheviks: The Politics of East-West Trade, 1920–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992.