Shinichi Kajikawa, "Revolution of Illusion: From October Revolution to Nep" Overview and Impressions - The Realities of a Revolution That Began with Hunger and Moved Forward with Illusion
Shinichi Kajikawa's "Revolution of Illusion: From October Revolution to Nep" was published in 2004 by Kyoto University Academic Press.
Let's take a quick look at the contents of this piece.
Based on documents in the Russian archives, the film clearly depicts the tragedy of the Bolshevik leadership's "illusion" of steady progress toward the ideal of communism. Nep reveals that the market economy was not conceived as an extension of wartime communism and introduced as a policy, but that it was created by spontaneous trends among the starving population.
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In 1921, the Soviet Union was suffering from a severe famine.
However, this famine was not a natural disaster, but a man-made one.
The previous year, Lenin had thoroughly deprived the peasants of food, even taking their seeds for planting the following year.
This caused havoc in the farming villages, which suffered from unprecedented famine.
The Soviet Union would collapse if nothing was done, so the Soviet Union would launch a new economic policy (NEP).
Until then, the Soviet philosophy of communization had led to the nationalization of economic activities, but here they decided to give some approval to free commerce.
This relationship between nep and hunger is the main theme of this book.
The Soviet government will not accept responsibility for starvation only. It sees nep as an inevitability of history. It was advertised as a glorious development, and many believed it.
Behind the scenes, however, in rural areas far from the cities, the situation was hellish.
One of them is quoted here.
The following is the interrogation report of a 30-year-old man from Andreyevskaya Township, Buzuluk County, who was abandoned by all and became a cannibal.
He is illiterate and married. His family consists of himself, his wife, and their seven-year-old child Mihail and her baby. In our village, every single person has been starving since September 2011. At first they ate weeds, their dogs and cats, or collected bones and crushed them and mixed them with weed powder.
I knew from books that cannibalism existed, but I still had to eat human flesh.
A woman came to my house and lived with us for two weeks. She died of starvation. She was a widow living 15 versts from the village, and she was 50 years old. She died in the middle of the night, and there she suggested to me that I boil the meat from her corpse so that we could eat it. I agreed.
I cut the meat off my calf with a knife, cooked it, gave it to my children and ate it myself. Then we cut up more and ate it. We devoured everything except the head and the flanks.
I sent my wife to Sovet to make a statement that we had eaten human flesh. I did so in order to enroll one of us in the communal dining hall. Of our family, only the seven-year-old child received communal meals, and I myself was a wounded soldier in the war against Germany, with a shattered bone in my left arm.
In our village there are three communal canteens, where only 150 people are served, but the population here is 280. Children are given a quarter of a loaf of bread and a spoonful of soup. Eating at home is so difficult that if you take away even one slice from a child's portion, he or she cries.
When I tried to place the child in an institution, they would not take him, saying that he had a father and mother and that they only accept orphans there. I have never heard of any person eating human flesh in this village, and perhaps others do, but this is kept secret.
I have spoken of myself. I only hope they don't send me back home. Send me wherever you like. I am willing to work hard to keep my belly full. I can sew mittens, I used to work as a servant, and I also worked as an assistant in a bakery. His family stayed at home, and his mother was too sick and weak to leave him. I have nothing more to say to you.
In the spring of 2011, they had a decent business, seven horses, three mares, and ten sheep, but two horses were taken away by self-defense bandits, two horses were eaten by wolves, and all the rest were devoured.
Kyoto University Press, Shinichi Kajikawa, Revolution of Illusion: From October Revolution to Nep, p. 256
Some line breaks have been made.
It's quite shocking, isn't it? The book reveals how huge numbers of peasants starved to death in the shadow of the seemingly brilliant Soviet economic policy of NEP.
The partial liberation of the market by Nep also created wealthy people called Nepmen. This was evident in urban areas such as Moscow, which would show astonishing prosperity while rural areas starved to death.
In contrast to these dismal scenes in the rural areas, the metropolis underwent a major transformation over the course of 21 years. In Moscow, markets and bazaars sprang up spontaneously in the squares with the introduction of the tax on goods in kind, and their number increased rapidly after the summer, as commercial facilities were developed. The squares were paved with asphalt and equipped with electric lighting, cafes, and telephones. The streets were filled with well-dressed people, and stores were filled with a wide variety of goods. (omitted).
Moscow's bustle was exceptional. In order to emphasize the drastic turn to the nep, much of the literature has described the astonishing transformations in the cities at the end of 21. However, it must be emphasized that this is only a small part of the original landscape of Russia in 2011, and that, in turn, these transformations in no way signified a shift in Bolshevik policy ideals.
As long as the famine of 21 was not caused simply by natural disasters such as the drought that had been continuing since 1945, and as long as there were no fundamental changes in the Bolshevik policy of peasant rule that had been in place since the October Revolution, the Bolshevik power to collect from the peasantry remained largely unchanged during the Nep period, even if it changed from quota collection to a tax in kind and then to a single agricultural money tax. As long as the Bolsheviks continued to collect taxes from the peasantry, the plight of the Russian peasantry remained largely unchanged during the Neppe period.
Kyoto University Press, Shinichi Kajikawa, Revolution of Illusion: From October Revolution to Nep, p. 291-292
In contrast to the hellish rural areas, Moscow, the center of Soviet government, enjoyed incredible prosperity. Soviet officials enjoyed this prosperity, and the city residents who supported them also received a share of the profits.
This Moscow-like prosperity was promoted by the Soviet Union. And this nepotism was often mentioned as a justification for Lenin's policies.
Although the Soviet Union's vision of a great future is often associated with NEP, author Kajikawa, based on documents from the time, goes on to show that NEP was not a very ideal policy as it was associated with starvation in the first place.
In this book, you will learn that the illusions portrayed by the Soviet leaders led to enormous starvation deaths.
It may be a bit tough as an introductory book, as it is difficult to understand without knowing the general flow of the Russian Revolution, but it was a very interesting book to learn about the reality of the Russian Revolution.
The above is "Shinichi Kajikawa, "Revolution of Illusion: From the October Revolution to NEP" - The Realities of a Revolution that Started with Hunger and Moved Forward with Illusion.
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