Reflection on the USSR has been marred – and still is – by two frequent errors, which need to be cleared up before we address the question posed by the title of this chapter. The first is to take anti-communism for a study of the Soviet Union. The second – a consequence of the first – consists in ‘Stalinizing’ the whole Soviet phenomenon, as if it had been one giant gulag from beginning to end.
Anti-communism (and its offshoots) is not historical scholarship: it is an ideology masquerading as such. Not only did it not correspond to the realities of the ‘political animal’ in question, but waving the flag of democracy, it paradoxically exploited the USSR’s authoritarian (dictatorial) regime in the service of conservative causes or worse. In the United States, McCarthyism, or the subversive political role played by the FBI head Hoover, were both based on the communist bogey. The unsavoury manoeuvring by some on the German Right to whitewash Hitler by foregrounding Stalin and his atrocities entails such use and abuse of history. In its defence of human rights, the West proved highly indulgent towards some regimes and very severe with others (this is not to mention its own violations of these rights). Such behaviour did not serve to enhance its image and certainly did not aid an understanding of the Soviet experience and related important phenomena.
David Joravsky has been especially scathing in his critique of the methods used by the West to embellish its image, as if hymns to the market economy, and the defence of human rights, democracy and liberties by ‘anti-communists’, were conducive to understanding the USSR.1 As for ‘totalitarianism’ – an historically inadequate and purely ideological tool – it served to mask the various dark pages in the history of the West (starting with the horrific mass slaughter initiated by the First World War), and to gloss over the contradictions and weaknesses of Western democratic regimes and the misdeeds of imperialist policies that were still current. Joravsky has also criticized the contradictions and failures of German Social-Democracy: its highly praised renunciation of class radicalism, and conversion to supposedly democratic procedures, served to emasculate the SPD and make it an auxiliary and then a victim of obscurantist regimes it was not prepared to fight.
This commonsensical appeal to stop drawing a veil over the numerous failings of Western civilization and its terrible crises (thereby magnifying the sombre realities of the other side) was also a call to restore dignity to historical scholarship and recognize an inescapable truth: however specific and shaped by its own particular historical traditions, the ‘other side’ was itself a product of the crisis of the civilization dominated by the West and its imperialist world system.
But where is the Soviet system to be situated in the great book of history? The answer is all the more complicated in that there were at least two, if not three, versions of it (excluding the Civil War period, when it was just a military camp).
We have already posed this question in connection with the Stalinist period and proposed an answer. Russian history is a remarkable laboratory for the study of a variety of authoritarian systems and their crises, up to and including the present day. So let us now formulate the question rather differently, focusing on the system after Stalin’s death: was it socialist? Definitely not. Socialism involves ownership of the means of production by society, not by a bureaucracy. It has always been conceived of as a deepening – not a rejection – of political democracy. To persist in speaking of ‘Soviet socialism’ is to engage in a veritable comedy of errors. Assuming that socialism is feasible, it would involve socialization of the economy and democratization of the polity. What we witnessed in the Soviet Union was state ownership of the economy and a bureaucratization of economy and polity alike. If, confronted with a hippopotamus, someone insisted that it was a giraffe, would he or she be given a chair in zoology? Are the social sciences really that much less exact than zoology?
The confusion derives from the fact that the USSR was not capitalist: ownership of the economy and other national assets was in the hands of the state, which in practice meant the summit of its bureaucracy. This is a crucial defining characteristic, entailing that the Soviet system should be placed in the same category as traditional regimes where ownership of a huge patrimonial estate equalled state power. Such was the historical process at work in the constitution of Muscovy and its monarchic autocracy. It too had an influential bureaucracy, but it was the sovereign who possessed absolute power, not his bureaucracy. In the Soviet case, it was the bureaucracy which, in the final analysis, collectively acquired undivided and unchallenged power. ‘Bureaucratic absolutism’ – a relative of the older ‘agrarian despotisms’ – was much more modern than that of the Tsars or Stalin. But it belonged to the same species, especially when we factor in political control of the population by the state.
This line of argument also implies that the Soviet bureaucratic state, despite its revolutionary innovations in both terminology and recruitment of personnel from the lower classes, directly inherited many of the old Tsarist institutions; and thus it was inevitable that it continued Tsarist traditions of state-building. In large part, this stemmed from the fact that after the revolution the agencies reactivated under Soviet auspices could function only with the help of officials from the old regime. Lenin himself had noted with regret that entire sections of the Tsarist administration remained in operation under the new regime, leading to a much greater degree of historical continuity than had been envisaged prior to October. The new regime had to learn how to handle finances, foreign affairs, military matters, intelligence operations, and so on; and it was obliged to turn not just to the expertise of some specialists, but to whole agencies, which in many respects continued to function according to established procedures. The old officialdom could not be replaced or changed overnight. A new state had been created, but its officials derived from the old one. The problem now, as Lenin saw it, was how to get them to work better.2 Such continuity with the practices and traditions of the past was, of course, unavoidable, especially inasmuch as the relevant personnel numbered in the tens of thousands and traditions in state institutions were so entrenched. The new authorities did not know how to reconstruct them. In fact, they had no alternative but to take over these institutions, alter some of the details, and let them conduct business as usual.
The Soviet system ended up erecting a rather ‘classic’ bureaucratic state, run by a pyramidal hierarchy. Accordingly, once the phase of revolutionary fervour was over, there was no real need for it to distance itself from old models – except, perhaps, in the case of institutions that had no counterpart under Tsarism. Moreover, every time a new agency had to be created, a special commission was appointed to oversee its organization, and it became common practice to ask a specialist scholar or experienced bureaucrat to study how a parallel institution had operated in Tsarist Russia. Where no precedent existed, Western models were consulted.
Recourse to historical precedents is natural anywhere, but in the Soviet case it was especially pronounced. In practice, Stalin’s Russia adopted the ideological principles of the Tsarist state on a well-nigh official basis. Even if the specifically Stalinist practice of displaying old nationalist symbols was abandoned after his death, the Soviet bureaucratic model retained a good many of its predecessor’s features, if not its ideological accoutrements. The tradition it continued defined the very essence of the system: an absolutism representing the bureaucratic hierarchy it was based on. Even the supposedly new position of general-secretary had more than a little in common with the image of the ‘Tsar, master of the land’. If the symbols and scenarios of the public manifestations of power were not the same, the imposing ceremonies staged by the Tsarist and Soviet regimes hailed from the same culture, in which icons had pride of place. They aimed to project an image of invincible might, which was sometimes nothing more than a way of concealing, exorcizing or distracting attention from internal fragility. But the Tsars’ successors must have known, especially in the twilight years of their regime, that systemic crisis and collapse were also part of the historical repertoire.
Given that from the end of the 1920s the construction of a strong state was at the heart of their endeavours, the issue of how to classify it arose. In the end, the old Tsarist term derzhava, especially cherished in conservative statist circles and among those in the military and public security bodies, was widely and openly used. In Lenin’s time, derzhavnik was a pejorative term for supporters of an oppressive, brutal chauvinism. As for derzhava, it harks back to the past in its kinship with two other terms used to define the essence of Tsarist power: samoderzhets, denoting the absolute ruler (the autocrat); and samoderzhavie, characterizing the regime as an ‘autocracy’. No doubt the hammer and sickle replaced the golden sphere topped off with a cross – the symbol of imperial power – but they represented nothing more than relics of the revolutionary past, much to the amusement of the bureaucratic ranks.
Ownership of all the country’s land by the state, as vested in the autocrat, had been characteristic of a number of old Eastern and Central European states. In the USSR, such ownership, laying claim to socialist credentials, extended to the whole economy and many other spheres of national life. Notwithstanding a more modern outlook (unlike their Tsarist predecessors, Soviet bureaucrats ran factories that built machines and even ‘atomic cities’), the affinity with the old model of ownership of all the land (the main economic resource in earlier times) was preserved, and even reinforced, by the state power exercised over the direct producers.
Throughout our explanation of the nature of this state we have encountered ‘bifurcations’ in the pattern of development and a whole series of ambiguities. If the system belonged in the old category of landowning autocracies, it was nevertheless performing a twentieth-century task – that of a ‘developmental state’ – and we have described in detail how it proceeded to develop the country. It is to this category of ‘developmental state’ that the USSR belonged in the initial stages of its existence. Such states have existed, and still do exist, in several countries – in particular in the immense territories of the East and Middle East (China, India, Iran), where ancient rural monarchies ruled. This historical rationality was at work in the construction of the post-Leninist state, even if its transformation into ‘Stalinism’ was something that dictatorial systems are readily prone to. But the transition to a despotic model is not an incurable pathology, as is demonstrated by the elimination of Stalinism in Russia and Maoism in China. And despite the pitfalls, the presence of a state that makes possible and directs economic development remains a historical necessity.
Towards the 1980s, the USSR had achieved a level of economic and social development superior to China’s, but its system was stuck fast in a self-destructive logic. The kind of reforms envisaged by Andropov could have given the country what it needed: a reformed, active state able to continue its developmental role, but also capable of renouncing an authoritarianism that was now obsolete, inasmuch as the social landscape had been profoundly transformed.
However, the recourse to the venerable symbolism of the derzhava, which expressed the mindset and interests of a significant component of the ruling elite, was the sign of a loss of vigour on the part of the state apparatus, the members of which, stuck in a groove, now used its power solely to further their personal interests. It also signalled the interruption of any reformist dynamic at the very moment when the country was crying out for reform. Rather than adding the computer to the hammer and sickle, the leadership took refuge in conservatism, embarking on an inglorious path. If the population lived under a system with an ancient pedigree and characteristics, they were no longer living in the eighteenth century, but the twentieth. The state had remained behind and such ‘bifurcation’ (society going in one direction, the state in another) was fatal.
The term ‘bureaucratic absolutism’, which seems apt to us to characterize the Soviet system, is borrowed from an analysis of the Prussian bureaucratic monarchy in the eighteenth century, wherein the monarch was in fact dependent on his bureaucracy despite being its head.3 In the Soviet case, the party’s top bosses, putative masters of the state, had actually lost any power over ‘their’ bureaucrats.
Insignificant ex-ministers of the USSR, writing nostalgically in their memoirs about the glory of the superpower they have lost, do not realize that the fashion for the term derzhava precisely coincided with the period when the state had ceased to accomplish the task it had once been capable of performing – and had indeed performed. It had become a shadow of its former self, the last gasp of a power about to join the grave of a family of antiquated regimes to which it remained bound by too many ties.
The Soviet phenomenon was a profoundly typical chapter in Russian history – not in spite, but because, of the role of the international environment, including the use of ideologies borrowed from abroad. The autocrats who have proved most successful in Russian history also maintained such links with the external world. A country with a highly complex history, constantly engaged in friendly or hostile relations with neighbours near and far, Russia had to develop relations not only on the military, economic, commercial, diplomatic and cultural levels, but also by responding culturally and ideologically to a series of challenges. It did so either by borrowing ideas from abroad, or by counterposing indigenous notions – which explains why its rulers’ antennae were pointed in two directions, inwards and outwards. Similarly, in the history of the USSR the outside world constantly helped to determine the form the regime took, in a variety of ways. The First World War and the concurrent crisis of capitalism had a lot to do with the Leninist phenomenon and the phases Soviet Russia went through in the 1920s. The crisis of the 1930s and the Second World War likewise had a direct impact on Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The ‘distorting mirrors’ we referred to in the case of Stalinism influenced the images that populations and rulers formed of the opposing camp. Since both competing systems experienced crises and phases of development, the ‘distorting mirrors’ on both sides projected and reflected images in which reality and fiction were almost impossible to disentangle. If in the 1930s Stalinism, then at the peak of its momentum, enjoyed great prestige and benevolent attention in the West despite the misery and persecution endured by Soviet citizens, it was largely because of the negative image of capitalism projected by global economic crisis – particularly that afflicting Central and Eastern Europe. Russia reflected back the image of its industrial momentum, and the poverty of the population was relativized by the notion that this impressive progress would rapidly overcome it. A similar distorting effect can be seen in the case of Stalin and Stalinism at the moment of its triumph over Germany in 1945, when the country was once again plunged into a profound poverty for which the ravages of war were not exclusively responsible. The exchange of distorted images had significant political consequences: divining the intentions of the other side often became a guessing game.
The Cold War was an unusual contest. Seen from Moscow, it was dramatically unleashed with the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. But if Berezhkov’s memoirs are to be believed, it began earlier with the American delay in opening a second – western – front: Stalin regarded this as a deliberate ploy on the part of the USA, intent on entering the thick of battle only after the German and Soviet contestants had exhausted one another.4 This delay, compounded by the use of atomic weapons against Japan, had been perceived as evidence of the American desire to let it be known that a new era had opened in international relations – a declaration made not to Japan, but to the USSR and the rest of the world, which the Soviet leadership had interpreted accordingly. That the USA did think in this way at the time cannot be ruled out. What effects the opening of the second front a year earlier, or abstaining from the atomic bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, might have had on postwar relations can only be speculated about. The fact remains that the war and postwar developments propelled the USSR into the role of a superpower and pushed it into an arms race that helped to perpetuate the worst, most conservative features of the system and to reduce its ability to reform itself.
Among the consequences of the Cold War, we should note the fact that the US found itself in a position to exercise considerable influence and pressure on the Soviet leadership’s way of thinking. The Old World (England, France, Germany), which had hitherto served as a model, was replaced by the New World: the US became the Soviets’ yardstick for assessing their own performance when it came to the economy, science, military capability and, needless to say, espionage. The impact of this reorientation to the US was concealed from both the Soviet population and the West (this is a vast subject awaiting exploration). We may assume that on account of the US the Soviet leadership came to realize the systemic nature of their country’s grave inferiority, though it could be that some of them refused to acknowledge the reality. After having been beaten in the (utterly useless) race to get to the Moon first, the country’s inability to embark on the new scientific and information revolution – even though a special ministry was created to supervise the task! – must have engendered a sense of powerlessness in some ruling circles, while the conservatives stuck with their immobilism and hard line.
It was this same image of the US as superpower that led so many ex-members of the nomenklatura to bid for American favours after they had taken control of the Kremlin under Yeltsin’s mantle. However, this episode belongs to the post-Soviet era and is of interest to us here only in so far as it casts some additional light on the historical record of the system – a system that is dead and buried, and yet remains present in the constant search for a national identity which will only be defined when the past, warts and all, has been seriously re-examined and mastered.
It is perfectly natural that researchers studying the state of Russia in the 1990s should use data from the later Soviet period as their starting point. The situation becomes ironic only when sociologists who have a pro-found knowledge of this past, from the studies they conducted at the time (when they were very critical of the system), now treat it as some kind of Eldorado, on account of the living standards and social benefits enjoyed by the population not so long ago, but which have deteriorated inexorably since the beginning of the 1990s.5 The picture they present is highly instructive: decreasing numbers of people go to the theatre, concerts, the circus or libraries; the reading of literary works and subscriptions to newspapers are in sharp decline in town and countryside alike. The whole structure of leisure activity has been transformed because of increased workloads. Leisure is now much more passive (essentially ‘restorative’), whereas it was becoming culture-oriented in the late Soviet era with the growth in free time. The phenomenon is particularly striking in the case of specialists and managers. The need to increase household incomes compelled many Russians to rear more cattle and poultry on their mini-farms to improve their diet and earn a little more money, or simply in order to survive, with a corresponding reduction in their time for rest and cultural recreation.
The expansion of liberties and rights, as well as the emergence of expensive services, have benefited only the best off, the best qualified, and the most enterprising. A majority of people saw their access to national and international culture reduced. The sociologists we are referring to are highly critical of the quality of television programmes. Television has become the dominant leisure activity, with especially deleterious effects on children who, left to their own devices in the afternoon, sit glued to bovine broadcasts.
According to the authors, two processes are at work: an ever-deepening social stratification, and withdrawal by individuals into their own selves (fewer social and family contacts, lack of interest in culture and politics), which is less pronounced in the major urban centres of European Russia, but very marked in the provincial towns and the countryside. They do not deal with the decline in scientific research, education, and medical and social services, or the fall in demographic indicators, producing a catastrophic situation in which the country’s very survival is at stake.
To conceal this woeful state of affairs, the new power-holders – most of them from the old nomenklatura but now rebaptized ‘democrats’, ‘liberals’, or ‘reformers’ – embarked on a massive propaganda campaign against the old Soviet system, using all the devices previously employed in the West and even outbidding them: the system was nothing but a monstrosity run by monsters, from the original sin of October 1917 right up to the failed coup d’état by conservative party stalwarts against Gorbachev in August 1991. Thereafter, a miracle supposedly occurred, with the dawning of a new era of freedom under President Yeltsin. As a result of this kind of political discourse, contemporary Russia, already woefully diminished and still in a state of shock, also suffers from a kind of self-denigration of its historical identity. Not content with looting and squandering the nation’s wealth, the ‘reformers’ also mounted a frontal assault on its past, directed at its culture, identity and vitality. This was no critical approach to the past: it was sheer ignorance.
The mendacious and nihilistic campaign against the Soviet era was accompanied by a kind of frantic shopping around for alternative pasts to offer the nation for it to identify with. It began with a wholesale readoption of anything Tsarist and pre-revolutionary – a pathetic attempt to find a worthy predecessor in a decaying system. Then, when the rejection of anything Soviet became yet more intense, crystallizing in a hatred of Lenin, Leninism and Bolshevism as issuing from Hell, attempts were made to rehabilitate the Whites in the Civil War – the most reactionary right wing of the Tsarist political spectrum, which lost precisely because it had nothing to offer the country.
Identification with anything and everything detested by the Bolsheviks or the Soviet regime simply attested to intellectual feebleness. The first wave of ‘new elites’ who conquered the Kremlin and power were regarded by many Russians as something approaching a new ‘Tatar invasion’, attacking the country’s political and cultural interests. The nation’s best minds and moral authorities feared lest its only prospect was the nightmarish one of sinking to the level of a Third World country.
It takes time to recover from the ravages of obscurantism. But various cultural events offer positive signs that a slow recovery is under way. We should remember the historian Kliuchevsky’s reaction to those who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, claimed that ‘the past is in the past’. No, he said: with all the difficulties crowding in on us and the errors that have been committed, the past is all around us, enveloping reforms, distorting and almost swallowing them up.
As if taking up where Kliuchevsky had left off, the political philosopher Mezhuev, speaking at a conference in Moscow organized by Tatyana Zaslavskaya, forcefully argued that ‘a country cannot exist without its history’.6 His highly stimulating thoughts are worth quoting at length:
Our reformers – whether communists, democrats, slavophiles, or people fascinated by the West – all make the crucial mistake of failing to identify a rationally and morally justified continuity between Russia’s past and its future, between what it has been and what (according to them) it should be. Some negate the past and others identify it as the only possible model. The result is that for some the future is merely a mixture of past themes, while for others it is the mechanical acceptance of the opposite – something without any analogy in Russian history. But the future must be conceived in the first instance in relation to the past – in particular to the past we have just left behind.
Mezhuev proceeds to criticize the liberal economist A. Illarionov, who regards the twentieth century as a wasted one for Russia: having lived under socialism, the country deviated from its liberal trajectory and that is why yesterday’s giant has become today’s midget. For Illarionov, the only salvation consists in a return to liberalism. According to Mezhuev, such nihilism is historically absurd. It is easier to be wise after the event than to analyse what happened and why. To rail against Russia for not having become liberal at the beginning of the century is to demonstrate a profound ignorance of Russian history and liberalism alike. The triumph of liberalism was the product of a protracted historical process: the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the revolutions that emancipated societies from absolutist monarchies (but not everywhere!). England itself, the mother of liberalism, took time to embark on the liberal road. Russia and many other countries did not develop a liberal market economy. Should they be blamed for this? That would be pointless. The important thing is to understand the past century and the role it will play in future developments.
For Mezhuev, the key to twentieth-century Russian history is to be found in three revolutions, not exclusively in the Bolshevik revolution. The first – in 1905 – was defeated. The second – in February 1917 – witnessed the victory of moderate revolutionary forces. The third – October – which saw the triumph of more radical revolutionaries, was only the last phase in this revolutionary process. That is how such processes always unfold. Once triggered, there is no one to blame; the process pursues its course to a conclusion. The philosopher Berdyaev had understood this well: the Bolsheviks were not the revolution’s authors, but the instrument of its development. It is pointless adopting primarily moral criteria and denouncing the cruelties inflicted, for it is always thus in situations of civil war or struggles against oppression. A revolution is not a moral or legal action, but a deployment of coercive force. There are no ‘good’ revolutions; they are always bloody:
If you condemn revolutions, you should condemn virtually the whole Russian intelligentsia, and the whole of Russian history for that matter, since it provided the soil for these revolutionary events. Revolutions do not appease; they do the opposite. They always disappoint expectations, but they open a genuinely new page. The important thing is to understand what this page consists in – without placing too much faith in what either the victors or the vanquished say … Our socialism was in fact a ‘capitalism à la Russe’ – capitalist in its technological content and anti-capitalist in its form.
On this point, Mezhuev reviews the opinions of such thinkers as Berdyaev, Fedotov, Bogdanov and others. He himself leans towards the following interpretation. It is difficult for a country located on the periphery to combine modernization with democracy and freedom. For a time, one of them must give way to the other. The Bolsheviks understood this, and that is why they won the Civil War and why the USSR emerged victorious from the Second World War. China too appreciates this: it has opted to combine rapid modernization via the market with an undemocratic political system. Whatever the regime in question, wisdom consists not in refusing the past as if it were a barren desert, but in regarding it as a springboard for further development and preserving its genuine (not its mythical) grandeur.
In this respect, the Russian variant of socialism must be credited with its faith in science. The prestige of the scientist and engineer was never higher in Russian history than during the Soviet period and the regime opened the doors of science to many. Here its rulers were realists and pragmatists. Taking their speeches literally, the West was wrong to perceive any hostility in this. Contemporary Russia, with its nostalgia for pre-revolutionary times, is more distant from the West than the Bolsheviks were:
Our liberals have nothing to boast about except the destruction of these achievements. Russia’s future must be constructed on the basis of preserving and developing past achievements. Continuity must be preserved even as new tasks are defined. As of now, this link with the past has been broken. But it will be restored one day. This does not involve returning to a pre- or post-revolutionary past. Ask what in the past is dear to you, what must be continued or preserved, and that will help you to face the future … If the past contains nothing positive, then there is no future and there is nothing left to do but ‘forget it all and sink into slumber’ … Those who want to erase the twentieth century – an era of great catastrophes – must also bid farewell to a great Russia.
Mezhuev remains convinced that the Russian revolution will one day receive the same recognition as revolutions in the West – a recognition that would hopefully open the way for a genuine Russian renaissance.
The preceding paragraphs do no more than summarize a long and impassioned address. Mezhuev is not a historian, and his interpretation is not unproblematic. The terms ‘socialism’, ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘communism’, but also a whole set of ideas about the revolution, derive from a terminology and approach that need to be reconsidered. But we are here in the presence of a real challenge to ‘nihilism’ and an illustration of the battle for history as a remedy making it possible for a nation in the throes of a painful decline to rediscover its identity and discover its future.
It is well known that history is subject to constant use and abuse. Listening to a non-historian plead for an objective historical knowledge as indispensable to a nation, whether in its torment or its glory days, is unusual in a media and computer-dominated age fixated on the present instant. But the instant is just that – it passes – whereas history remains. It continues to provide some of the building-blocks for the future, whether sound or defective. It is the basis that nations rest on and which they add to. It is not absurd to believe that history, in common with the applied sciences, has a practical dimension – even if it cannot provide immediate, guaranteed remedies.