A society with an incomplete social structure is a journalistic notion used in early articles of the Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod. It referred to a society lacking people of high social standing — the kind usually gained through talent, enterprise, luck or birth.

Those articles explained such an incomplete structure by three causes: a primitive stage of development dominated by tradition and ritual; conquest, in which repression is aimed above all at the educated strata; and totalitarian dictatorship, which rewards loyalty and conformism at the expense of independence. Once formed, such a society, in this view, reproduces itself “from below” — through the standardisation of public life and the expectation of a “strong hand”. The notion stood alongside other journalistic ideas of the same articles — the “feminine essence of Russia” and the “sovok”.

Documents of the Red Terror served as examples of a policy that wipes out such strata. Among them is a note from V. I. Lenin to G. F. Fedorov in Nizhny Novgorod dated 9 August 1918: expecting a White Guard uprising in the city, Lenin demanded that they “immediately introduce mass terror, shoot and deport hundreds of prostitutes who get the soldiers drunk, former officers, etc. Not a minute’s delay”[1]. Two days later he wrote to Penza: “Hang (be sure to hang, so that the people see) no fewer than a hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers”[2].

See also

Sources

  1. leninism.su — V. I. Lenin. Complete Works, vol. 50: letters of July — August 1918 (note to G. F. Fedorov of 9 August 1918)
  2. docs.historyrussia.org — Electronic Library of Historical Documents — Letter to V. V. Kuraev, E. B. Bosh and A. E. Minkin, 11 August 1918