Lenin’s Domestic Social Policies: Aims and Results
Education and Youth
- Aim: Create a literate, socialist citizenry.
- Policy: Free, universal, compulsory schooling; secular curriculum; literacy campaigns (1919); Komsomol (youth league).
- Result: Literacy improved (c. 40% → 60%+ by mid-1920s); spread of ideology but underfunded and uneven in rural areas.
Women
- Aim: Promote gender equality, mobilize women for economy and revolution.
- Policy: Zhenotdel (1919) → reforms on divorce, abortion, workplace rights; childcare and communal services planned.
- Result: More access to work/education, but patriarchy persisted; lack of resources limited change. Zhenotdel shut in 1930.
Religion
- Aim: Break Orthodox Church power, replace with atheism/Marxism.
- Policy: Church land nationalized; anti-religious propaganda (League of the Militant Godless); priests persecuted.
- Result: Church weakened but not eradicated; rural believers continued underground practice; caused peasant resentment.
Propaganda and Culture
- Aim: Build revolutionary culture, control ideas.
- Policy: Agitprop trains, posters, theatre, cinema (Eisenstein); censorship; Proletkult movement.
- Result: Powerful propaganda legacy, cultural innovation within limits; artistic freedom curtailed.
Historiography
- Figes: Social policies pragmatic but shallow.
- Fitzpatrick: Women and education reforms progressive but limited in practice.
- Pipes: Social reforms were more about political control than genuine liberation.
Self review
- What were Lenin’s key aims for education, and how far were they achieved?
- Did Lenin’s women’s policies create genuine equality or mainly serve state needs?
- Why did the Bolsheviks attack religion, and with what results?
- How was propaganda used to maintain power?
- To what extent were Lenin’s social policies progressive?
