Gregory Grossman has pioneered the study of the phenomenon known as the ‘second economy’, while others – and the Russians themselves – prefer the more mysterious-sounding ‘shadow economy’ (the literal translation of the Russian term tenevaia ekonomika), which refers to a much broader, more complex reality than the readily definable ‘black economy’. This is unquestionably a thorny issue, with economic, social, legal, criminal, and even profoundly political dimensions. The authors of a serious Russian work, who are well acquainted with Western publications on the subject and refer to them, have enriched the debate by bringing previously inaccessible Russian sources and studies to our attention.1
The shadow economy is not easy to define, but efforts to circumscribe it lead us into some of the less well-known complexities of the Soviet economy. For some scholars, its causes are to be sought in the almost permanent imbalance between supply and demand, with the deficit in consumer goods and services leading to inflationary pressures. According to the Hungarian economist Janos Kornai, bureaucratic planning creates shortages of capital and goods and the shadow economy emerges as a partial correction of the straitjacket imposed by an economy of shortages. As wages lose their purchasing power, the population is forced to find other sources of income, prompting many to engage in some additional activity on top of their regular state jobs. Experts who have tried to assess the extent of the shadow economy for the years 1960–90 estimate that it multiplied eighteen-fold in this period: one-third of it in agriculture, a further third in commerce and catering, and the remaining third in industry and construction. In the case of services, the main activities in the shadow economy were home and car repairs, and private medical services and education at home.
I. G. Minervin, who contributed the chapter dealing directly with the Soviet period, made ample use of Western works and recent Russian contributions. The majority of Western authors (Grossman, Wiles, Shelley) concur that the emergence of a shadow economy is inevitable in the so-called socialist economies, and this is mostly confirmed by later Russian studies. But how exactly is it to be defined? For some, it comprises all economic activities not included in the official statistics or all forms of economic activity conducted for personal profit that flout existing laws. Others (Western scholars) regard it as a ‘second economy’ or a ‘parallel market’. However, because the dividing-line between legal and illegal activities is often difficult to draw, some of them include all activities that were acceptable in practice, but which did not pertain to the official economy. Thus, Grossman’s ‘second economy’ encompasses activities that were common to the Eastern bloc and Western Europe, such as the cultivation of a private plot or the sale of its produce in kolkhoz markets – activities that were legal in the USSR, but which might sometimes be connected with illegal practices. The situation was similarly ambiguous in construction: building materials from dubious sources, bribes, illicit use of state transport, helping private citizens or influential bosses to build a house or dacha. The same applies to repair work of all kinds carried out by private individuals or teams: this could be legal, semi-legal or illegal (the latter two categories belonging to the ‘shadow economy’).
What was peculiar about the phenomenon was that it involved the circulation of legal goods and services on illegal markets. The sources and character of the ‘deals’ were semi-legal or illegal. Such semi-legal markets provided services that were not declared for purposes of taxation (privately rented housing, medical care, private lessons, repairs), as well as barter deals between enterprises seeking ways to make up for their failure to achieve the targets laid down by the plan.
The unambiguously illegal sphere included the sale of all kinds of scarce goods (like spare parts and consumer goods), and illegally produced or stolen merchandise. A separate category contains such criminal activities as embezzlement, smuggling, drug-trafficking and so on, which are prohibited the world over. But the criminal economy proper accounted for only part of the shadow economy, even if it was the most dangerous, and as such deemed unacceptable by many who were themselves engaged in parallel economic activities.
The US scholar Louise Shelley has offered an illuminating alternative definition. Within the ‘second economy’, she distinguishes between legal and illegal activities, but excludes anything that is obviously criminal. The legal private sector essentially corresponded to markets where peasants, but others too, sold what they had grown on private plots. The illegal economy was much larger and had two components – one of them operating within the official economy, while the other functioned in parallel to it. The principal illegal activities in the official economy consisted in speculation on scarce goods, bribes to influential people, corrupt practices in the education system, the formation of work-teams for hire in construction, the manipulation of accounts and false data in response to investigations (e.g. adding ‘dead souls’ to payrolls), and, finally, the construction of illegal factories concealed within official ones and using their raw materials.
In addition to the problem of defining the shadow economy, we face the difficulty of estimating its extent. Researchers are agreed that it was sizeable, supplying large quantities of goods and services. Gosplan’s research institute estimated that at the beginning of the 1960s it involved less than 10 per cent of the annual average number of workers, employees and kolkhoz members, whereas by the end of the 1980s more than a fifth of the working population was engaged in it (some 30 million people). In some branches of the service sector (house building and repairs, car repairs), it was responsible for between 30 and 50 per cent of all the work undertaken – and often much more than an equivalent state service performed (Menshikov’s estimate). For example, the quantity of vodka distilled at home – an important branch of the ‘private sector’ – was difficult to assess, because official and unofficial production of alcohol were interconnected.
Researchers point out that the parallel economy also exists in the West, where its development reflects the growth in state regulation. In the Soviet case, the shadow economy may be considered an adaptation and reaction on the part of the population to state controls and the deficiencies of the state-run economy.
At the beginning of the 1980s, Gosplan’s research institute proposed the following classification, which was probably the optimal one in the Soviet case:
(1)The ‘unofficial’ economy, involving mostly legal activities that included the production of goods and services which, although subject to taxation, were not declared. These were tolerated.
(2)The ‘fictitious’ economy: false accounting, embezzlement, speculation, bribes.
(3)The underground economy, comprising actions forbidden by law.
This picture must be rounded off by what we had to say about the snaby-sbyty. Therewith we obtain a more realistic image of Soviet economic activity, the interaction between different economic agencies, and the innumerable varieties of private or semi-private initiative. We shall shortly address the political implications of this complex economic scene.
The whole set of shortcomings and malfunctions afflicting the bureaucratic system – phenomenal shortages of goods and services had become systemic – prompted or forced different institutions to seek solutions in private arrangements, bartering of merchandise or raw materials, and falsifying results. Even if personal gain was not necessarily the principal objective, it increasingly became a powerful motive force, especially at the beginning of the 1980s, when it was clear to everyone that the leadership was displaying little zeal when it came to the prosecution of highly placed offenders. Louise Shelley notes that in the 1970s, 90 per cent of cadres accused of breaking the law got off with a simple reprimand from the party. A double standard could be discerned in the attitude of party and state leaders to the unofficial economy, which certainly complicated the task of streamlining and improving leadership at the centre.
For its part, the population quite naturally strove to maintain or improve its standard of living by obtaining additional income, at a time when the consumer market was defective and open or hidden inflation high. The discrepancy between widespread corruption in the state administration and the official ideological rejection of any private enterprise helped to fuel the economic and psychological factors pushing people into the shadow economy, or even directly into the black market.
Some researchers believe that the shadow economy actually enabled the system to survive, by supplying a partial corrective to its malfunctioning; that it helped most citizens to make ends meet; and that it thereby preserved the regime. In my view, the positive function of informal economies should not be exaggerated. The same authors reckon that such practices inculcated new motivations among economic managers, which supplemented the official ones attaching to their duties. On the other hand, the existence of a whole range of parallel networks led some sections of the Soviet elite to separate themselves from the official system and forge closer links with ‘unofficial’ elites. The two elites had much in common. Leaders of the unofficial elite (who were implicated in the black market, if not directly connected with criminal mafias) themselves retained official positions, or maintained close ties with the official elite, enabling them to play a background role as pressure groups for dubious causes or undesirable elements. Such activities might be characterized as pertaining to a ‘shadow polity’.
The Soviet system guaranteed all its citizens social security, public health services, education, and pension entitlements, whereas employment in the shadow economy was mostly part-time and unregulated. Thus the official sector provided social services to the unofficial one, thereby contributing to the reproduction of the labour force in the shadow economy.2 R. Ryfkina and L. Kosals have aptly summarized the situation: it was no longer possible to distinguish between legal and illegal activities in many enterprises. A ‘black-and-white’ market had emerged.3
Others believe that although the shadow economy made it much more difficult to create a healthy contemporary economy, it was still better than the savage, mafia-style capitalism that descended on Russia after the fall of the Soviet system. At all events, the phenomenon is an additional aspect of the trends that emerged in the Soviet system, conditioning, maintaining or undermining it. The resources the population found, and which it could rely on in coping with the system’s vagaries, formed one of them. The low intensity and low productivity of the working day, which were at the heart of the ‘social contract’ between workers and the state, facilitated ‘work on the side’ (cultivation of private plots, etc.). Such resources, officially unacknowledged, became increasingly sizeable with the growth of the shadow economy, which not only supplied supplementary foodstuffs, but also provided additional income through part-time employment that became available to ever more people. Criminal activities are excluded from these resources: they could lead to prison.
While the managers of the state-run economy were seeking ways to remedy a labour shortage and a drop in labour productivity, sociologists, and particularly experts in economic sociology, were confirming the significance of the shadow economy and arriving at some startling conclusions. Despite the bad news announced by the planning authorities and clear signs of a system in decline, living standards actually rose during the years of stagnation. The population’s reaction and adaptation to changing economic conditions produced new patterns of behaviour and new values, which official statistical data were incapable of assimilating.
The data used by the sociologists derived from two sources: their own studies conducted in the Siberian city of Rubtsovsk (Altai region) in 1972 and repeated in 1980 and 1990; and those carried out among the rural population in the Novosibirsk area in 1975–6 and 1986–7.4 The development indicators in Rubtsovsk approximated to the general Russian average for the 1970s and ’80s, while those of the Novosibirsk area (one of the most important in Western Siberia) were close to the Russian inter-regional average. Thus, the data collected in these studies, conducted by the Moscow and Novosibirsk academies of science, may be regarded as faithfully reflecting the national situation.
From them we learn that the housing situation had improved; that the purchase of consumer durables had increased appreciably; that there were more recreational facilities for city dwellers; and that many families had a private plot near their residence or in the neighbouring countryside (even though demand still outstripped supply). A third of the population had access to collective vegetable gardens. During the twenty years under study, in line with increased house construction, many garages, garden sheds and various types of summer houses had been built. On the whole, the least well-off sections of the population had seen their incomes rise, attesting to a general trend towards decent minimum living standards. The most marked differences, as measured by key indicators like housing, incomes and personal means of transport, had decreased significantly.
These findings provide an explanation for the paradox of nostalgia among the population of post-communist Russia for the Brezhnevite ‘good old days’. The ‘miracle’ of improving living standards in a declining economy was based on the existence of untapped labour energy that was not mobilized by the state-run economy, of underemployed resources, and an abundance of other resources that had yet to be squandered (the country remained fabulously wealthy). However, as the authors of the study confirm, improved living standards in the 1970s and ’80s came at a very high price. While economists and the leadership were seeking to raise output and labour productivity, to reduce waste and use resources more rationally, the latter were being systematically plundered.
Everyday life in the 1970s and ’80s would sooner or later reflect the decline of the state economy, in the form of an increased unpaid personal workload on private plots or at home. Many people had to find a second job; many others said they would like to. A similar increase in the workload also occurred in the countryside, with men and women investing more time in their private plots or home-based work – the main source of additional income – which enabled them to support relatives in town and exchange agricultural products against manufactured products.
The same trend of greater worker workloads and lower monetary incomes could already be observed in the years 1972–80. Following the collapse of the USSR, in the 1990s the role of the private plot or garden became indispensable, taking up much of many people’s working time. The garden, a place of leisure in developed urban societies, reverted to its pre-industrial function. A similar regression was evident in many spheres of existence, where survival strategies led to the devaluation of one of the most obvious successes of previous decades: the improvement in educational standards, which became less and less useful (a trend already apparent at the end of the 1970s). This was attested by the falling numbers of those taking after-work courses. The authors deplore the decline in what they call the economic and cultural function of higher education and higher professional qualifications, in favour of a pragmatic search for material benefits. The reduction in the time given over to leisure activities is explained by the need to work more in order to make ends meet, as a result of the failures of the state economy in the 1970s and ’80s.
In conclusion, improved living standards in the regime’s final years, though genuine, were no ‘miracle’. They were more of a mirage, like cheeks that glow after they have been pinched – the prelude to a slow decline that would witness the ruin of many past achievements.
In order to make do, the population of the USSR had to increase its workload. By contrast, its ruling networks, especially at the upper level of the nomenklatura, saw their material well-being improve – by expanding existing income streams – without being obliged to work harder or change their leisure habits. We must therefore turn our attention to them once again.
Our examination of the shadow economy deepened our understanding of the processes at work within the ranks of state officials, particularly with the snaby-sbyty – the procurement and sales networks that supplied production units with what the state should have provided in the first place. Despite being officially frowned on, such semi-legal activities rapidly became indispensable, because they played a vital role for the enterprises they supplied. The availability of partially or completely concealed reserves of materials, financial resources or even manpower; the increase in bargaining and lobbying; the vast scope for activity on the borderline between the shadow economy and the black market – all this indicates the emergence of a model, even a system, which was at once indispensable and parasitic (like a body that produces beneficial pathologies). In the behaviour of enterprise managers, we witness a progressive blurring of the boundary between state and private property. Another boundary was blurred concurrently: between the official incomes and privileges allocated to top officials on the one hand, and the considerable room the latter enjoyed for increasing them by exploiting their position in the state hierarchy, on the other. And this avenue led to something even more significant in the behaviour of some heads of institutions or enterprises. It is one thing to strive to extract ever more perks from the state. It is quite another no longer to be content with such perks and to seek to accumulate wealth. Networks for that very purpose now existed within the state sector – in the various forms of the shadow economy – but also outside the state sector – in the form of the ‘black market’, itself spawning the mafia connections that flourished as never before under Brezhnev.
A longer-term historical perspective enables us at this point to discern broader political transformations – to distinguish successive stages in the bureaucracy’s position in the system and their consequences for the whole regime. Once the administrative class had been liberated from the rigours and horrors of Stalinism, it attained a higher status and became co-ruler of the state. But it did not stop there: the senior ranks of the bureaucracy actually began to appropriate the state as the collective representative of its interests and were highly conscious of the fact. The heads of ministries or other agencies referred to themselves as ‘those in charge of the state’.
The autobiography of A. G. Zverev, who served as Finance Minister both under Stalin and after him, provides a good illustration of this self-image. He barely mentions the party: membership of it is taken for granted as an obvious formality. For this to have occurred, the party, as we saw in Parts One and Two, had to have undergone a transformation. Having itself become an administrative apparatus and a hierarchy, it not only found itself in a position of utter dependency, but ended up being absorbed by the class of top state officials we just mentioned. This allowed the latter to take a further step in their ‘emancipation’: although formally subject to all sorts of rules, they now existed as an uncontrollable bureaucracy, free of all curbs. They began to attack the sacrosanct principle of state ownership of the economy. The spontaneous processes at work emptied a series of ideological and political principles of any content. The most important of them – state ownership of assets and the means of production – was slowly eroded, initially issuing in the formation of veritable fiefdoms inside ministries, and then in the de facto privatization of enterprises by their managers. This process must be called by its real name: the crystallization of a proto-capitalism within the state-owned economy.
This point has been very aptly highlighted by Menshikov, an economist whom we have already cited in connection with the shadow economy.5 He pays particular attention to the illegal sectors within the state economy that he calls the ‘internal shadow economy’, and which exercised strong influence on the official economy. This powerful sector became possible because of the division between the functions of ownership and those of management. What was evolving was, on the one hand, private management of the social capital of state enterprises; on the other, private appropriation of the products of that capital. It involved not only those who operated in the shadow economy, but also the official managers of enterprises in league with the highest reaches of the nomenklatura. All these figures, Menshikov argues, played an important role when the capitalism that emerged through the pores of central planning matured, in due course, into a decisive and potent force that shattered the system. Thus it was that the nomenklatura metamorphosed from covert owner of state property into its overt owner.
This interpretation foregrounds the inevitable consequences of a prior social reality: the takeover by the upper strata of the bureaucracy of the totality of state power and hence of the economy. The principle of state ownership – the system’s main pillar – was progressively subverted, preparing the ground for the transition from quasi-privatization to the fully-fledged variety.
Readers will now probably appreciate why we needed to deal with the snaby-sbyty in some detail: they were the ‘termites’ that helped to accomplish this task. No wonder that with the advent of perestroika these supply offices–depots–warehouses were the very first Soviet agencies to declare themselves ‘private firms’ and adopt an openly commercial status. This looked like a step in the right direction. But they were privatizing something that did not belong them, whereas the first principle of the market economy is that if one wants to acquire assets, they have to be paid for. Otherwise, it is a matter for the criminal law. And the intimate connection in the course of the post-Soviet reforms between ‘privatization’ and criminal activity is now widely known.
But we have not yet reached the phase of perestroika. We are examining the era of so-called ‘stagnation’, when the system’s chief pillars were crumbling. Not only had the economy lost steam, but the main thing it generated was waste. So what was Gosplan up to? Its collegium (the assembly of top officials) seemed to be in agreement with the conclusions of its research institute, which had diagnosed a fatal tendency in the economy: extensive trends were outstripping intensive trends. In 1970 it issued a statement, serene in its tone (it contained not a single alarmist word), in which it formulated a quite chilling diagnosis cum-prognosis: the projections of the eighth five-year plan (1966–70) contained inbuilt disproportions. As a result, ‘all basic indicators will decelerate, deteriorate or stagnate’.6 The reason was that the very low efficiency indicators on which the calculations were based were leading to a dual imbalance: on the one hand, between the state’s resources and the needs of the national economy; on the other, between the population’s monetary income and the output of consumer goods and services (this remark implies that some previous version of the plan did contain the requisite proportions and balances). Hence the fear of a looming deterioration in the circulation of money and marketable goods in the course of the ninth five-year plan: a decline in the incentivizing role of wages in raising labour productivity and other ways of managing production was to be anticipated. It was as if the report was actually claiming that the eighth plan had programmed a deterioration of the economy in the course of the subsequent plan. In other words, Soviet economists were perfectly well aware of the downward slope the economy was set on.
‘Stagnation’ was marked by the impossibility of extracting anything from the bureaucracy and a lack of will and ideas at the top about how to stop the rot. All attempts to reduce the size of the bureaucracy, or force it to change its habits, were so many losing battles. Post-Stalin, the new rules of the game – the ‘bargaining’ between government agencies and central government (the Politburo and Council of Ministers) – allowed the bureaucracy to become a colossus that was not only the real master of the state, but also formed bureaucratic fiefdoms under the eyes of the party apparatus, which was reduced to a mere spectator and gradually yielded to the inevitable.
The diagnosis was simple: the system was sick while the bureaucracy was in fine fettle. Reforming the system entailed reforming the bureaucracy: no one was in a position to impose this and why should it undertake the task itself? This meant that the writing was on the wall – of the Kremlin this time.
It was imperative to resolve the problem of growing labour shortages and arrest economic decline by a dramatic rise in labour productivity. But this implied nothing less than a revolution. It could not be done without switching to a mixed economy, which was only conceivable on certain political conditions – and these too amounted to a revolution. Technological and economic reforms were inextricably bound up with political reforms. The party machine had to be divested of its last power: the power to prevent change. A mass uprising against state institutions would have accomplished this, but it did not occur. The alternative was reform from within, directed in the first instance at the party. Only a revitalized political force could compel the bureaucracy to make the transition to a mixed economy, bringing pressure to bear on it from above and from below, and threatening it with full-scale expropriation. The establishment of a transitional system would make it possible to preserve minimum living standards, avoid economic collapse, and open the way to individual and group economic initiative. The next task would be to begin to empower the population politically. Since none of this happened, what (it might be asked) is the point of mentioning it? I do so for a simple methodological reason – namely, in order to arrive at a better understanding of what actually did happen.
The political aspects of the system, which we already know a fair amount about, demand our attention once again at this point. The erosion of political systems, and of the ability of ruling groups to act, is a frequent enough phenomenon in history. Each instance is a combination of general features and particular characteristics. Observers detect such erosion when they find a system stuck in the groove of a successful past, not unlike generals who tend to stick with the winning strategies of the last war. The scenario is one that periodically re-emerges in different historical circumstances, and is regularly observed in the case of regimes in decline. Politicians and political analysts should always bear it in mind, even when dealing with seemingly thriving systems.
The Soviet system was successful, albeit in truncated fashion, when it responded to the call of history by mobilizing the country’s wealth and large population. No great thinker, Boris Yeltsin once said that the Soviet system was nothing more than an experiment which had wasted everyone’s time. This might have been true of his own years as party boss in Sverdlovsk and as Russian President in the Kremlin, but such remarks, endlessly repeated with no regard for historical realities, are empty chatter. I have devoted many pages to describing the decay of the system, for this is a reality that needs to be studied. But that does not license distortion of the whole historical record. The Soviet system saved Russia from disintegration in 1917–22. It rescued it again – and Europe with it – from a Nazi domination that would have stretched from Brest to Vladivostok. Let us imagine – if we dare – what that would have meant for the world. To these achievements must be added others, measured by twentieth-century criteria for defining a developed country: Soviet Russia scored quite well on demography, education, health, urbanization, the role of science – so much capital that was to be squandered by the lacklustre reformers of the 1990s.
So where did things go wrong? All the social changes that enabled the country to ‘marry its century’ represented a job only half-done. The other part of the job – state-building – proceeded in the wrong direction. When the historical circumstances changed (in part on account of the regime’s own efforts), the USSR found itself confronting a fatal bifurcation and contradiction: the social sphere exploded, while the politico-bureaucratic universe froze. The turn of events that I have referred to as the ‘second emancipation of the bureaucracy’ ultimately consisted in the de facto absorption of the party apparatus by the ministerial cohorts. This process had a further dimension, to which reference has already been made. The Soviet economy and the whole of the country’s wealth were formally owned by the state; and the state administration existed to serve the nation. But who was the real owner of this ‘property’? The ideology and practice of nationalization derived from Communist Party notions about how to build a supposedly socialist system. It was for the party to take charge of the integrity of the system, whose core was precisely the principle of state ownership. But the huge bureaucratic machine that managed the ‘common wealth’ imposed its own conception of the state and made itself the latter’s sole representative. It laid claim to equal status with the party apparatus, even to first place. The other side of this process was the social and political fusion of the party apparatus into a single bloc with the state bureaucracy. The party always maintained that it retained a dominant position, but in reality the bureaucratic directorates in the ministries and enterprises had become the country’s true masters. No matter that the Constitution continued to proclaim otherwise. The party cells in ministries and enterprises served no purpose and its central bodies merely repeated what the Council of Ministers and ministers themselves had initiated. A political organization is only justified if it performs a political function: as soon as it is content to reiterate what has been decided elsewhere, it no longer possesses any raison d’être.
I subsume this process under the category of what I have called the ‘de-politicization of the party’. The party’s role changed once its function of political leadership had been eroded on account of its submersion in the bureaucratic milieu. It might be said that the party and its leadership had been expropriated and replaced by a bureaucratic hydra, which formed a class holding state power. Henceforth any political will was paralysed. The summit of this over-centralized state impeded any explicit reformist endeavours, deemed unacceptable by the various components of the bureaucracy. Party leaders could no longer afford to antagonize the latter. Quite the reverse, the privileges of those who now constituted the regime’s mainstay were allowed to increase, in order to keep them happy. Worse still, with political volition at an all-time low, illegalities and a high degree of corruption were tolerated. The periods of stagnation and decay encouraged the privileged to engage in what were, to put it mildly, reprehensible practices – another dubious pay-off.
We are now in a position to offer a response to a question that we have raised several times: Can a bureaucracy be controlled by another bureaucracy or even by itself? Our answer is a categorical ‘No’. Control can be exercised only by a country’s political leaders and citizens. It is for them to define the relevant tasks and the means required to implement such control. But it was this ability that the leadership of the USSR had lost, generating a set of fatal paradoxes: the party was ‘de-politicized’ and the ever more bureaucratized economy was managed and controlled by an administrative class more intent on preserving its own power than increasing production; more concerned with maintaining its cosy routines than cultivating creativity and technological development. Hence another series of paradoxes: an ‘ailing economy’ but a ‘flourishing bureaucracy’, which thrived on its sloth; bureaucratic privileges on the increase, even as the system’s performance deteriorated; rising investment combined with dwindling growth; a marked expansion in the number of educated and qualified people whom the regime, unable to tolerate independent talent, excluded – in short, a veritable magical formula for systemic breakdown.
The various phenomena and processes that unfolded at the summit had an impact on the population, which sensed that the factories and other national assets simultaneously belonged to everyone and no one – that there was a swarm of ‘bosses’ and yet no one was taking charge. This explains why Andropov’s arrival in the post of general-secretary was so well received across most of the social spectrum: the country finally had a ‘boss’ (khoziain). The task awaiting him was colossal: to overcome the effects of a process set in train by Stalin, which had stripped the party of any political rights. This trend had not been reversed after the death of the supreme leader: the party remained an organization whose members possessed no rights and whose leaders were fooling themselves when they asserted that policy was their preserve. They remained without a voice and paralysed in the face of an administrative class that had ceased to listen to them. A party had to be reconstituted that would respond to its leaders’ call to embark on reforms: confronted with a determined leadership that was ready to mobilize its base, a recalcitrant bureaucracy would have little chance of prevailing. Andropov was seemingly readying himself to reiterate Lenin’s famous question of May 1917: ‘Which party will have the courage to take power on its own?’ – to which he had replied: ‘There is such a party’, provoking guffaws among the assembled anti-Leninists.
I would characterize the Soviet regime as a ‘state without a political system’ – an imposing skeleton without any flesh on its bones. This should have been realized (apparently it was by some), prompting a series of initiatives aimed at gradually creating what was lacking: more freedom of inquiry, information and discussion, free trade unions, the re-creation (or re-politicization) of the party. Reviving the party’s internal political life (whether in the form of fractions, a programme, currents of opinion, statutes), as recommended by Osinsky-Obolensky in Pravda in 1920 – such was the programme formulated by Andropov some six decades later, one year before he succumbed to illness.
What happened to the Soviet system from the late 1960s onwards marks the re-emergence of a whole series of traits that had plagued Tsarist Russia for centuries, and which Russia never managed to divest itself of. It was as if the country was weighed down by a historical burden, which was thought to have been shaken off, but that returned to haunt it. Old Russia, where the development of the state and its power always preceded social advance, had ended up stumbling: the political system became blocked, impeding any economic and social progress. And here was the same scenario repeating itself – and in the course of the same century.
The rise and fall of the Soviet system is perfectly encapsulated in the fate of the Mir space station. At the outset, it represented an unprecedented technological breakthrough, with a long life ahead of it. But it soon fell victim to endless manufacturing defects and malfunctions: it was constantly being repaired by the incredibly resourceful operators responsible for it (confirming my own wartime observations of truck drivers who managed to keep their vehicles moving by fixing or connecting missing or broken parts with shoe-laces!). The episode ended with Mir’s plunge into the ocean, sufficiently well-directed as to inflict no damage on anyone …
On the other hand, it is worth reminding readers what did not happen. Post-Stalinist Russia did not experience the omnipresent, omniscient hyper-control predicted by some writers. Had it been faithful to, and capable of, any kind of ‘decent’ totalitarianism, it would have lasted for ever. The terrifying literary phantasmagorias (some of them written when the spectre was present and horror reigned) both did and did not come to pass: Zamiatin, Huxley and Orwell prophesied that a monopolistic power would bring about the total enslavement of human beings, transforming them into the numbered cogs of some huge machine. But despite its dark pages, history avoided this terrible mantrap. In reality, whatever the regime’s policies and ideology, historical processes were at work that are missed when the whole focus of study is the regime or, in one of its variants, denunciation of the regime.
When I refer to a return of Russia’s historical burden, what I have in mind is secular historical trends which, after having initially benefited Russia, came to plague much of its history. The Russian historian Solovev perceived the process of Russian colonization – small groups of people migrating to and populating huge territories – as a characteristic feature of its history, which he qualified as ‘drawn out’.7 In other words, this history involved quantitative expansion in space, complicating any transition to a qualitative – i.e. intensive and in-depth – modus operandi. For a while it looked as though the Soviet regime was overcoming this handicap. But in the twilight of the Soviet era, when nearly all vital signs were fading, Russia once again found itself stuck in the syndrome of quantitative expansion, portending an ineluctable exhaustion of its economic, social and political resources. The extraordinary momentum of Soviet development had modernized the country, and yet perpetuated a mode of extensive development; and of this Gosplan’s experts were sadly conscious. It should be noted that this tendency in Russian history is far from exhausted.
Once again, these observations require qualification. Paradoxically, such extensive, quantity-oriented development was also embodied in the vigorous Stalinist mobilization that made victory possible in 1945, saving Russia and Europe with it. In other words, the traditional impetus from above – from the state – could accomplish many things. But such prowess had its limits and was only fully effective in the transition from a profoundly rural civilization to an increasingly urban one.
Irreplaceable when it comes to reflecting on Russia’s past and its burdens, the Russian historian Kliuchevsky (who died in 1911) suggested that a huge country like his own was unwieldy to govern and that it would be very difficult to alter its historical course. Kliuchevsky was no fatalist: he was registering the existence of a ‘burden’ that had yet to be lightened.