The Consolidation of power by the revolutionaries.

1. The Consolidation of power by the revolutionaries. Soviet Society and culture under Lenin: Control or tradition

2. Position of Women • What Changed? • Party sections were set up to educate women members to become more assertive and independent. • Wives were encouraged to refuse obedience from their husbands • The encouragement for communal spaces in housing blocks- that in turn broke down the traditional family unit. • The Bolsheviks’ Family Code of 1918 made divorce easier, with more significant rights within marriage • Abortion was made legal • Crèches were encouraged- driven by the need for women to work during civil war.

3. Position of Women • Was it effective? • The initial changes was ineffective. • People were resistant to change, still wanted traditional. • There was some success the Urban populations divorce rate • Increased rate and abortions. • Women with children who had divorced, received little support form the father as the women were now expected to work

4. Religion • What Changed? • In 1918 the Decree on Freedom and Conscience separated the Orthodox Church from the state and the Church lost it’s status • It had all the land taken away from them without compensation • All religious education was banned • A significant number of churches were destroyed and converted for government purposes. • Government closed all monasteries

5. Religion • Was it effective? • Was effective to the extent that there were no huge masses of gatherings for religious ceremonies or services. • In the mid-1920s a survey to the peasantry revealed the 55% of people were still Christians. • Attacks launched on the Church were eventually met by resistance. • After the civil war concluded the Bolsheviks were softer in regards to religious beliefs, but they still did not approve by any measures.

6. Culture and relations to arts

7. Propaganda • Exterminating the bourgeois as a class • Propaganda showing women as independent • New radio - ‘The spoken Newspaper of the Russian Telegraph Agency’ was all about featured news and propaganda, with little on music. • Installed loudspeakers in public places to get the message across for radios

8. Censorship • Creation of Commissariat of Enlightenment • 1918, Lenin had liquidated the independent press, as well as journals stemming from the eighteenth century • GOSIZDAT – The state publishing organisation an instrument of Bolshevik control over published material

9. Literature • Vladimir Mayakovsky – Russian poet, produced slogans for the Bolsheviks • Best literature – Novelist M. Sholokhov (Novels realistically depicted the lives of people in rural Russia) poet Anna Akhmatova (One of the greatest Russian poets, patriotic themes and supported Bolsheviks) and Satirist E. Zamyatin (‘We’ 1920, envisaged a regimented society where people were identified only by numbers) • Literature could be used to criticise the government as well as support. • In popular fiction the influence of futurists was shown by an emphasis on science fiction. • Constructivists – create a new socialist culture • Started to impose restrictions on it in early 1920s • Futurism – Artists attempting to convey visions of a new futuristic world • The theatre supported the Bolsheviks revolutionary aims • Mystery Bouffe (1918) – showed the workers defeating the exploiters • Anniversary of the revolution in 1920 celebrated with a re-enactment of the storming of winter palace • Radio and cinema were easy to manipulate, as there was no tradition of long independent activity. • Film was used to promote political messages • Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko put soviet film making at the forefront of the cinema.