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“LIFE IS GETTING BETTER, COMRADES,
LIFE IS GETTING BRIGHTER”
Timeline
| 1905 | 1905 Revolution |
| 1914–8 | First World War |
| 1917 | February Revolution and end of tsarism |
| October Revolution | |
| 1918–22 | Russian Civil War |
| 1924 | Lenin dies |
| 1941–5 | Great Patriotic War |
| 1953 | Death of Stalin |
| 1956 | Hungarian Uprising crushed |
| 1968 | Prague Spring crushed |
| 1979–89 | Soviet–Afghan War |
| 1985 | Gorbachev becomes general secretary |
| 1991 | End of the Soviet Union |
The Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum, 1957
© Manfred & Barbara Aulbach, CC-SA-3.0
What does it say that an ardently secular revolutionary regime would nonetheless mummify its leader—against his own wishes—and treat Lenin in death as a saint? That the brutal dictator who murdered most of his comrades and allies then for a while joins him briefly in reverent limbo, a site for pilgrimages from the far reaches of the country? That a Communist Party preaching internationalism builds on the tsar’s empire and expands its borders with equal zeal? That the Soviets, for all their professed commitment to Marxist–Leninist egalitarianism, ended up creating a near-hereditary class of Party-card-holding aristocrats every bit as rapacious and self-interested as the boyars? And that the same dilemmas—of modernization versus stability, of whether to think of themselves as Europeans or something different—continued to shape Russia’s twentieth century? Perhaps a new, red flag (adopted in 1922) and murdering the last tsar and his family (by firing squad in 1918) do not quite make a wholly new country.
1905
The 1905 Revolution was not really a revolution in the sense of a coordinated effort to bring down the government. Rather, it was a wave of strikes, unrest, protests and risings, generated by a combination of frustration and anger. It did not represent an existential threat to tsarism and the status quo, but it certainly seemed that way at the time to an embattled and panicked elite. After a general strike that involved perhaps two million workers, Nicholas II issued a manifesto grudgingly promising a constitution, new freedoms of speech and religion and an elected parliament. Although the revolutionaries rejected any compromise, the more moderate forces, especially the Constitutional Democrat Party (Kadets) accepted this as a step in the right direction.
By the time this new constitution—the Fundamental Laws—was introduced in 1906, it was clear that the regime was feeling more confident. The tsar remained autocrat and the lower house of parliament, the Duma, was elected on a franchise weighted toward the middle and upper classes, while the upper house, the State Council, was half appointed by the tsar. The Kadets won the most seats and agitated for more sweeping constitutional change. So the government dissolved the Duma. A second Duma in 1907 saw more extreme parties win seats, including the urban Social Democrats and the rural Social Revolutionaries (both Marxist). So the government dissolved that one too, and restricted the vote more strictly to the propertied classes. The third Duma was suitably loyal.
As the tide of protest receded, not least following a brutal campaign of piecemeal repression, the tsar hoped to return to “normality.” However, his formidable new prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, had other ideas. Stolypin was no liberal—he had so freely used the death sentence to reimpose order that the hangman’s noose became known as “Stolypin’s necktie”—but a shrewd operator who realized that the system needed to restore its social foundations, although by appealing to a new constituency. The peasants had been emancipated but were still impoverished by inefficient communal land holdings. His vision was of a “wager on the strong,” breaking up the communes so that the more able and industrious peasants could become a new class of kulaks, prosperous small landowners, the very people who were the bastion of conservatism in Germany.
“Give me twenty years of peace and you will not know Russia,” he promised. But Russia didn’t have 20 years of peace. The peasants resisted the end of the communes, the nobility were suspicious of any change, and Nicholas was increasingly disaffected. When Stolypin was assassinated in 1911, in a plot possibly foreknown to the tsar, any chance at meaningful reform died with him. The revolutionary leader Lenin himself delivered arguably the most accurate epitaph: “the failure of Stolypin’s policy is the failure of tsarism on this last, the last conceivable, road for tsarism.”
Meanwhile, the revolutionaries were massing. The Social Democrats had split in 1906 between Lenin’s Bolsheviks—the so-called “Majoritarians,” although they were actually the smaller faction—and the Mensheviks. The latter saw the best chance for revolution in slowly building up a mass base of support. Lenin, instead, said that a small, disciplined body of professional revolutionaries could seize power when the time was right. They just needed an opportunity, and the Great War was about to provide them one.
War and Revolution
Karl Marx wrote that war “puts a nation to the test. As exposure to the atmosphere reduces all mummies to instant dissolution, so war passes supreme judgment upon social systems that have outlived their vitality.” In this, at least, he was right, and the looming cataclysm that was the First World War was finally to end this zombie regime’s existence. The balance of power in Europe had by 1914 been lost: the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires were in decline, a rising Germany was looking for its place in the sun, and colonial rivalries between Britain, France and other players were getting sharper. It was just a matter of time, and when Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria on a sunny Sunday morning in Sarajevo, the dominoes started to fall. As the Austrians squared off against the Serbs, backed by the Germans, a reluctant Russia felt it had no option but to support the Orthodox Serbians. Unwilling to risk giving slow but massive Russia a chance to mobilize its forces, Germany felt it had no option but to strike first. Desperate to use the opportunity to cut a challenger down to size, France and later Britain felt they had no option but to join Russia.
The start of the war witnessed the usual grotesque spectacle of the same masses who would provide the cannon fodder greeting it with patriotic glee. Soon, though, it became clear that this, the first truly industrial modern war, posed a test Russia could not pass. By October 1917, some 15.5 million Russians had been mobilized—but more than 1.8 million were dead (and another 1.5 million civilians), 3.5 million wounded and up to 2 million captured. At peak, Russia was suffering 150,000 casualties a month, often because soldiers were being sent into battle without boots or even rifles, against machine guns and rapid-fire artillery. To feed this insatiable meat-grinder, the government was increasingly resorting to press-ganging anyone they could find. Meanwhile, the economy was near collapse. Between 1914 and 1917, prices rose by 400 percent while wages stayed static, so people were going hungry.
In a move that demonstrated a characteristic mix of imperiousness, conscientiousness and foolishness, Nicholas had made himself commander-in-chief from the first, anticipating reaping the political rewards of a quick victory. Instead, he became the embodiment of failure and hardship. That his beloved wife, Alexandra, was German-born and that he had pandered to the dissolute monk-charlatan Grigory Rasputin (until his murder in 1916) became the basis for lurid and dangerous rumors of every kind as it became clear Russia was losing the war. In February 1917, matters came to a head when the garrison of the capital, Petrograd—St. Petersburg had been renamed at the start of the war, as it sounded too German—refused to put down bread riots and even elite Guard regiments mutinied.
In Petrograd, not one but two new governments were declared. The Duma formed a Provisional Government, largely of Kadets, committed to founding a constitutional order. Meanwhile, revolutionaries among the workers and the soldiers looked to the Petrograd Soviet—the word simply means council—dominated by Mensheviks. Nicholas, meanwhile, was induced to abdicate by his own generals and advisers. He tried to hand power to his brother, Grand Duke Mikhail, but he recognized a poisoned chalice when presented with one. All of a sudden, there was no tsar, no representative of divine right.
As the news spread, the old order crumbled. Meanwhile, the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet were locked in competition. This period is often called one of “Dual Power,” but in practice it was of no power. The Kadets had all the trappings of government, but the Soviet could countermand their orders, and their reluctant commitment to continuing the war lost them much wider support. The Soviet had the streets, but was too divided and too limited to the capital to do anything with them. There was, in effect, a vacuum of power, and politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Someone was going to fill it, and the ruthless and pragmatic Lenin realized the moment.
That spring, the Germans—seeing him as a potential source of disruption behind enemy lines—had allowed him safe passage into Russia, and he had been building the Bolsheviks’ power base. On 7 November 1917 (25 October by the old Russian calendar), they struck. However much this was later romanticized as a popular rising, mobs waving red flags in the streets, it was really an armed coup. The Bolshevik Red Guards seized the Winter Palace, the main garrisons and arsenals, and the Provisional Government melted away before it. Most of the other major cities fell to the revolutionaries too. Lenin offered the Russian people “peace, bread and land,” and if many were uncertain whether he could deliver, they were at least not willing to fight to prevent him from trying. Seizing power proved to be easy. It was holding on to it that would prove hard—and the compromises the Bolsheviks would make to do so would shape the future of the Soviet regime.
Lenin vs. Lenin
In many ways, there was not one Lenin, but two. Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in 1870, he took to revolutionary politics from the age of 17 after his brother was executed for plotting to assassinate the tsar. Ruthless, indefatigable and divisive, he had spent most of his life on the run, in Siberia or in foreign exile. Like the Bolshevik party he had forged, Lenin was at once a fervent believer in an ideology whose dream was a world without oppression, misery, exploitation or want, and at the same time a merciless pragmatist, who felt that any means were justified, however bloody, if they advanced this cause.
It was Lenin-the-pragmatist who seized power in 1917. Never mind that Russia hardly seemed ready for socialism, lacking a large and politically mature working class. Never mind that, in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx had warned that trying to force socialism onto a country not yet prepared for it would be counterproductive, leading to a regime with conservative instincts but all the energy of revolution. (And Stalin proved him right.) Never mind all that: Lenin saw an opportunity and tied his ideology into knots to justify seizing it. After all, surely world revolution was just around the corner, and everything would work out?
Not so much. The Bolsheviks first sought to make good on their promise of peace, signing the disastrous Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that surrendered swathes of territory to the west and south—including the rich farmlands of Ukraine. However, this also unlocked the army from the frontline, and while many units simply evaporated as soldiers deserted, a collection of disgruntled generals (the so-called “Whites”) began to look toward removing this usurper regime. Meanwhile, elections to a new Constituent Assembly saw the Socialist Revolutionaries, not the Bolsheviks, win a majority. Lenin had not seized power only to hand it to his rural rivals, so in January 1918 Red Guards dissolved it and the Bolshevik-dominated Congress of Soviets became the new seat of government.
More to the point, where was the bread? The cities were starving and there was no money to buy grain for them. Facing a military threat from the Whites (aided by British, US, French and even Japanese intervention), nationalist risings from various non-Russian territories, rival challenges from the Socialist Revolutionaries, and a looming collapse of the state and economy, Lenin-the-pragmatist turned to a policy called War Communism—although arguably this was more about war than communism. The democratic structures of the Soviets began to be bypassed by executive orders. Grain was requisitioned by Red Guards at bayonet-point, and when peasants resisted, they were killed. A new secret police was founded, the Cheka, and it increasingly became a central element of Bolshevik rule.
Between 1918 and 1922, the country was racked by a vicious civil war, from which the Bolsheviks would emerge victorious, and regions such as Ukraine and the Caucasus had been reconquered, but only at a terrible cost. As many as 12 million people had died, many from famine and disease. Any traces of Lenin-the-idealist had been burned out of the Communist Party (as the Bolshevik party became known in 1918), which won by being more ruthless, disciplined and united than their numerous enemies. The Party in effect had to become the new state bureaucracy and expanded dramatically, largely by recruiting opportunists, holdovers from the old regime and politically illiterate workers. The whole culture of the Party became a war-fighting one, paranoid and savage.
After the Civil War, the state was formally named the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), but the struggle would continue. To rebuild the economy, in 1921 Lenin instituted the New Economic Policy that liberalized some grassroots economic activity. It proved rather successful, despite intermittent crises, and meanwhile Soviet Russia also experienced an explosion of cultural, social and artistic experimentation and radical enthusiasm. This was the era of Futurist writers such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, avant-garde artists such as Kazimir Malevich, and social measures such as the 1918 “Code on Marriage, the Family and Guardianship” that explicitly recognized women as equal partners (either could choose to take the other’s surname) and made divorce easy and free of blame. It was still possible to believe that, despite everything, something truly new and exciting could be built.
However, in 1922, Lenin suffered the first of a series of strokes and was largely out of the political scene. He died in 1924, but not before beginning to show serious concerns about the bureaucratic police state he had created. In particular, Lenin-the-idealist was worried about the rise of Iosif Djugashvili, known as Stalin. In his testament left to the Bolshevik leadership, he made one unambiguous recommendation: “I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin.” They didn’t listen to him, anxious to avoid a split in the Party, and perhaps even incredulous that Stalin, widely seen as a dull functionary—he was the general secretary of the Party, the job that later would mean leader of the state but at that time just the administrator-in-chief—could be such a threat. They were wrong.
Stalin quickly demonstrated his political skills, piling on the eulogies of Lenin (for whom Petrograd was renamed) to mask the burial of the testament, and outmaneuvering his rivals to left and right. Compared with most of them, who were educated, cosmopolitan, Stalin also represented the rising “Civil War generation” of Party officials, pragmatic, self-interested and often nationalistic to the point of racism. By the late 1920s, he was dominant, and it was clear that Stalin planned to change the country in a truly fundamental way, whatever the cost.
Terror
The age-old Russian dilemma, after all, had been how to modernize while maintaining state power. Usually, this had been attempted from above, whether Peter the Great hiring foreign shipwrights, Catherine the Great dabbling with Western philosophies or Nicholas I turning to Baltic aristocrats. Those who had tried more fundamental restructuring of the very bases of the system, such as Alexander II with emancipation or Stolypin and his “wager on the strong,” had soon run into the resistance of the entrenched elites. Stalin, though, inherited a country with a new and still green elite, in a century in which the telephone and the railway, barbed wire and the machine gun, would create whole new opportunities for the dictator. He was also willing to think on a scale on which none of his predecessors had the callous coldheartedness to dream.
In 1928, he launched his “Socialism in One Country” program intended dramatically to modernize the USSR. The aim was to industrialize this sprawling state, and in the process consolidate his rule. To the twin challenges of how to afford it—where would the money come from to build factories, import Western technology and the like?—and how to impose it on a recalcitrant country, he had a single answer: terror. The countryside was collectivized: in effect, land was nationalized and the peasantry turned into employees of the state. When the farmers resisted, they were suppressed with staggering brutality. Ukraine was brought to its knees by an engineered famine in 1932–3 that killed more than 3 million, while by 1931, at least a million peasants had been sent to the Gulag labor camps and 12 million deported to Siberia.
Collectivization was meant to bring economies of scale and new technology to farming, but more than anything else it imposed unprecedented state control over the countryside. It had been the tsarist minister Vyshnegradsky who had said, “Let us starve, but let us export,” but it was Stalin who truly applied that, sending grain westward in return for money and technology, whatever the human cost at home. That also permitted industrialization, though in a clumsy and brutal way. Terror also helped motivate the workforce: real wages plummeted, but the fear of being denounced as a “wrecker” and the promise of bonuses for those “overachieving the plan” together helped keep people working. Besides, the Gulag labor camp network, which by 1939 contained 1.6 million prisoners, may have started as a place to bury the politically inconvenient, but also became a source of slave labor, from digging canals to cutting trees.
Meanwhile, Stalin turned the terror against the Communist Party itself, first staging show trials of his rivals—accusing them of being everything from spies to saboteurs—and then systematically purging everyone who could conceivably challenge him. Culminating in an orgy of torture, mass arrests and firing squads in 1937, this saw the Party elite broken: three-quarters of all the representatives elected to the Party Congress in 1934 did not survive until 1939. Even the military high command was decimated. In 1937 alone, 90 percent of all the generals and three of the Red Army’s five marshals were purged. Art, culture, education and ideology all were turned to the glorification of the state and Stalin; Mayakovsky, incidentally, committed suicide in 1930, Malevich was arrested by the secret police in the same year, and the radical social experimentation of early Bolshevism was rolled back, in a new drive to encourage large, stable families (“We need fighters, they build this life. We need people”) and keep women in their place.
How did Stalin get away with it? He understood power at a visceral level, and kept firm control of the political police, in many ways the true heart of his state. The very scale of his ambition and the consequent horrors were also beyond the apprehension of most, until it was too late. He also offered a ruthless, cannibalistic social mobility of sorts, and those willing to play the game could hope to rise very far, very fast. For the rest, alongside the paranoid hunt for spies and saboteurs that created its own hysteria, Stalin maintained a huge propaganda apparatus that tapped into the very same cultural roots as the myth of the “Good Tsar” who was on the side of the people, only misled by his selfish advisers. “Life is getting better, comrades,” he told his subjects, “life is getting brighter”—and many so desperately wanted to believe. Yet what lay around the corner was not a brave, socialist future, but the apocalypse of the Second World War.
The Great Patriotic War
In 1931, Stalin had said, “We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us.” Ten years later, the Soviet Union was fighting for its life.
The USSR had been considered a pariah nation in the interwar period. As fascism rose in Europe, Stalin had first hoped to use it to reach some common cause with Britain and France, then opportunistically made his own deals with Hitler’s Germany, leading to their joint partition of Poland in 1939. It is not that he did not think war with the Nazis was inevitable: he knew perfectly well Hitler saw the Soviet Union as prospective Lebensraum, “living space” for a new generation of Aryan master-colonists, using Slav slave labor to grow the crops and extract the resources he would need. Rather, Stalin had hoped to postpone war against Germany to give him as much time as possible to prepare.
When, in June 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, it came as a devastating strategic surprise. Stalin’s spies, diplomats and generals had all told him what was coming, but he was sure he had Hitler’s measure and that war had been delayed until next year. The Red Army was thus wholly unprepared, and by mid-July the Germans were two-thirds of the way to Moscow, most of the Soviet air force had been destroyed, and Lenin’s embalmed body was being sent secretly to safety in Tyumen, 2,500 kilometers (1,500 miles) to the east. Stalin himself seems to have had something of a nervous breakdown and, for the first two weeks of the war, there was scarcely any central guidance from Moscow.
But then he recovered and threw every effort into survival. What followed were four years of phenomenal national effort, in which the invasion was gradually slowed, then halted, and finally turned around in a counteroffensive that would eventually see the Red Army crashing into Berlin, and Soviet rule imposed on Central Europe. Stalin’s crude, brutal industrialization had built a war-fighting economy, and factories relocated away from the frontlines would soon be churning out the guns, planes and tanks needed. Stalin was also pragmatic: generals who had previously been sent to the Gulags as traitors were hurriedly recalled to arms, and churches that had been closed by the aggressively secular regime were reopened to enlist Orthodoxy in the struggle. The Soviets would also demonstrate once again an extraordinary will to defend the Motherland (although honesty demands that we note that this was often backed by a fear of a ruthless state). More died in the siege of Leningrad alone than the total British and American casualties of the entire war, for example.
No wonder the Russians still call this the Great Patriotic War. It is impossible to understate its importance. More than 20 million died in the war, and everybody suffered. Yet by the end, the pariah nation had become a superpower, Stalin sitting down with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference in 1945 to carve up the postwar world, with Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia directly incorporated into the USSR, and East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania destined to become its vassals. It seemed to have confirmed the terrible necessity of Stalin’s industrialization, and the Party would be able to point to the shared experience of the war as a basis for its legitimacy.
Stalin ruled until his death in 1953, presiding over the ruthless consolidation of his puppet regimes in Central Europe and the reconstruction of the country. However, after the triumph of 1945, the limitations of Stalinism were becoming clearer. His economic model was increasingly ill-suited to the new technologies of the postwar era, and the Gulag camps were of diminishing value, not least as risings within them became more common. A restive and ambitious elite had their own agendas too. There are many indications that Stalin had decided on a new purge to cut them back down to size when he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He might have survived had he received prompt medical care, but he was so infamously paranoid that his guards were not allowed to check in on him and so it was too late by the time he was discovered: let no one say fate has no sense of irony.
The Long Goodbye
Stalin’s successors would, in their own ways, all grapple with the familiar challenge of modernization. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet Union seemed a rising power, such that when Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, told the West “we will bury you”—not quite as threatening as it sounds, but meaning that the Soviets were in the ascendant—many in the West feared the future did indeed belong to them. In hindsight, though, the real story was one of a failure of imagination and will.
Khrushchev was known for opening up the Gulags, rolling back some of the worst excesses of Stalinism and his “Secret Speech” of 1956 denouncing the old leader’s “negative characteristics.” In part, this was genuine, but Khrushchev had been one of Stalin’s right-hand men, and he was trying to distance himself, and the Party, from the Terror. (While Stalin’s body was suitably embalmed and moved into Lenin’s mausoleum after his death, he was turfed out in 1961.) Khrushchev certainly had no qualms brutally crushing an anti-Soviet rising in Hungary in 1956, for example. More to the point, the Party elite began to see him as dangerous: his brinkmanship almost led to nuclear war during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and he had so mishandled the economy that there were widespread food shortages.
© Helen Stirling
Khrushchev had been a product of the Stalinist system and tried to rule as autocrat, not realizing that power had shifted to the wider Party elite—the boyars of the new order. In 1964, he was ousted in a bloodless political coup, and his eventual successor, Leonid Brezhnev, adapted to these new political realities. He was not the vozhd—“boss”—but more the chairman of the board of USSR Incorporated. His role was to broker consensus among the main interest groups and bring more efficient, technocratic management to the system. As such, the first part of his lengthy time as general secretary—1964–82—seemed strikingly successful, offering something for everyone. The elite got stability and prosperity, not least through increased opportunities for corruption and embezzlement. Ordinary Soviet citizens got an improving quality of life, their political quiescence bought with laxer discipline and new consumer goods: between 1964 and 1975, the average wage increased by almost two-thirds. Even the West was offered a less confrontational stance, and a new era of detente and coexistence.
So far, so good, but the very strengths of the Brezhnev order were to be its downfall, not least because all these developments depended on ample funds to buy everyone off. By the mid-1970s, problems that had previously been buried in avalanches of rubles were beginning to surface. Massive economic ventures such as the opening up of new areas to farming had failed to deliver on their promises. A new global industrial revolution based on computing was beginning, and the USSR was falling behind. Corruption and black marketeering were eating the heart out of the official economy. A vastly expensive arms race with the West had begun. This was a slow-burning crisis that needed urgent, decisive action, but that is precisely what the aging, cautious Brezhnev couldn’t and wouldn’t provide. He lacked the temperament, political authority or ideas. So instead, he just survived: a metaphor for the Soviet state, becoming less capable, less healthy, more senile by the year.
By the time of his death in 1982, it was impossible to ignore the crisis. The Soviet Union was mired in a vicious conflict in Afghanistan in which boys were coming home in zinc coffins while the official media still claimed there was no war there. Poland was convulsed by nationalist protests and there were signs of restiveness in the other satellite states. The economy was stagnant, food supplies were increasingly rationed and the population was not so much rebellious as apathetic and depressed: “They pretend to pay us,” went the common refrain, “and we pretend to work.” Stalin’s crash industrialization and the technocratic management of later years had turned peasant Russia into a Soviet nation of cities and railways, engineers and doctors, readers and writers: in 1917, only 17 percent of the population lived in cities, but this was 67 percent by 1989, and literacy rates rose from around 30 percent to near enough 100 percent. But what price such progress when your newspapers were full of lies, your leaders spoke of egalitarianism while living a privileged life such as you could not dream of enjoying, and you had to stand in line for a loaf of bread?
The new general secretary was the ascetic and acerbic Yuri Andropov, former head of the KGB political police and one of the few men largely untouched by the prevailing corruption and careerism. He was as determined to bring about change as he was unlucky: within three months of taking office he suffered kidney failure. He lasted only one more year, but his main achievement was rapidly promoting a relatively young, relatively reformist Party official called Mikhail Gorbachev. When Andropov died in 1984, Gorbachev was still not yet in a position to take over, so he adroitly backed the grayest of Party functionaries, Konstantin Chernenko, instead. After all, Chernenko was himself very ill and could be counted on to die soon. This he obligingly did in 1985, allowing Gorbachev to become general secretary. His ambition was to save the Soviet system. Instead, he was to kill it.
Reformed to Death
Gorbachev was one of the last true believers. He looked at the country, with its moribund economy, corrupt Party functionaries, demoralized workers, declining global status and threadbare Marxist–Leninist ideology, and somehow thought that it could be reformed, saved, even though he had few resources to play with and a wafer-thin majority within the ruling Politburo, or cabinet of the Party. It was a sign of unusual naivety that he could convince himself of this; it was a sign of unusual maturity that he could grow and evolve as his successive programs failed.
He began by thinking that the problem was essentially one of a few rotten apples within the nomenklatura, the Party elite, and a need to crack down on inefficiency and labor indiscipline. It soon became clear that it was much more systemic, and by 1986 he was talking about the need for perestroika (restructuring) at a more fundamental level. This meant economic modernization, but also political reform. Central to the latter was glasnost, usually translated as openness but really having more of a sense of speaking out. He encouraged an honest and realistic assessment of the country’s problems, in part to try and convey to everyone quite how necessary reforms were, considering that for decades people had been fed a diet of comforting propaganda. After the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, when a power plant in Ukraine went into meltdown and even Gorbachev reverted to old Soviet instincts and at first tried to cover it up, he realized this had to come from below as much as above.
Increasingly, though, Gorbachev was encountering resistance and losing control. The Party bosses resented his attempts to reform. National minorities began to use new freedoms to agitate for freedom. Glasnost acquired a momentum of its own and all the bloody skeletons in the Party’s closet began to be discovered, from corruption in the nomenklatura to Stalin’s crimes. Instead of retreating, though, he became more radical, and in 1989 created a new constitutional basis for the country, with an elected president. Why did the general secretary of the Communist Party also need to be president? Because Gorbachev had come to realize that the Party was actually the greatest obstacle to reform and he needed an independent power base to try and force it to change.
It didn’t work, though. The hardliners simply became more entrenched, and as the economy worsened, new political forces began to emerge, taking advantage of his democratization. Nationalists in Ukraine and the Baltic states began mobilizing for independence, others in Armenia and Azerbaijan began reopening old territorial disputes. Most dangerously, a former local Party boss whom Gorbachev had first promoted and then sacked, Boris Yeltsin, was rising, in due course being elected president of the Russian part of the Soviet Union. The winter of 1990–1 was a hard one, with massive miners’ strikes, and Gorbachev wobbled, contemplating an alliance with the hardliners to restore order. He refused to give in to this temptation, though, and again emerged more radical than ever. He began negotiating with the elected presidents of the various constituent republics of the USSR, to agree to a new Union Treaty that would totally reshape the state, turning it from a Muscovite empire in all but name to a genuine federation of voluntary members.
This was too much for the hardliners, so in August 1991 they staged a coup, confining Gorbachev to his mansion in Crimea and declaring that an “Emergency Committee” was now in charge. They had anticipated that a cowed and docile Soviet population would simply accept their decrees. They were wrong. People began coming out onto the streets in protest, in Moscow and across the country. Had the “Emergency Committee” been as ruthless as so many previous Russian usurpers, they might have still won the day, but at that fateful moment they were not willing or able to use force. Emboldened, hundreds of protesters became thousands, and Yeltsin—whom the plotters had not even thought to have arrested—emerged as their champion.
After just three days, the coup collapsed and Gorbachev was back in Moscow, but the whole calculus of power had shifted. Yeltsin had gone along with the idea of a new Union Treaty reluctantly, largely because the risk was that otherwise the hardliners would take over. They had tried and failed, though, and Yeltsin could now indulge his deep grudge against Gorbachev. He outlawed the Communist Party and refused to sign the Union Treaty. The Baltic States declared their independence; the Ukrainians demanded theirs. Recognizing the realities of the situation, for his final duty as president of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev decreed that it would be dissolved at midnight on 31 December 1991.
The End of the Soviet Idea
The old regime was broken by the First World War, but as it had exhausted its capacity to evolve, one could argue it was already dead but just didn’t yet know it. The revolutionaries who seized power in 1917 under Lenin had ruthlessness and idealism but no real blueprint for the future. The desperate struggle of the 1918–22 Civil War saw them take the country but lose their soul, idealism giving way to opportunism in a way that helped ensure Stalin’s rise to power. His “Socialism in One Country” was an expression not just of his own hunger of power, but his keen awareness of the Soviet Union’s vulnerabilities. He mobilized a new national myth, of the construction of socialism, in the name of a brutal campaign to modernize. Victory in the Great Patriotic War represented the apotheosis of a long-standing Russian messianism, the sense that there was something special, unique, about the country and that it had a greater destiny. In 1812, then during the revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century, they had claimed to be Europe’s defenders, not its backward cousins, and now they had proof. The irony is that the savior of Europe then became the occupier of half the continent and the threat to the rest, and the Iron Curtain not only locked Russia away from Europe, it made it more “other” than ever.
In late Soviet times, as the claim that history was on the Communist Party’s side became harder and harder to believe, as corruption devoured the state from within and the economy ground slower and slower, the Kremlin was forced to rely more and more on propaganda and lies. But neither the Party nor the masses truly bought into the red-bannered fantasies that were peddled. Instead, everyone sought their own slice of Europe, from the ordinary citizens listening to the BBC in darkened rooms and swapping black-market Beatles tapes, to the elite buying themselves Scotch and imported jeans in Party-only special shops. The Soviet idea ended up as tsarism on steroids, but the Soviet people themselves had very different dreams. With the USSR over, though, were they going to be able at last to realize them?
Further reading: A good general history of the Soviet era is Robert
Service’s The Penguin History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-first Century (Penguin, 2015). The best biographies of the key leaders are Service’s Lenin (Macmillan, 2000), Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Knopf, 2004), and William Taubman’s Gorbachev: His Life and Times (Simon & Schuster, 2017). Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Penguin, 2000) remains the sharpest and most distilled introduction to life in the Gulag.