Russia’s achievements since 1991 have not been unimpressive. Parliamentary and presidential elections have been held; they have been rough-and-ready processes but the fact that they took place at all has set precedents which it will be hard for Russian rulers to repudiate. Competition among political parties has continued. Social groups have continued to give voice to their aspirations and grievances. A market economy has been established. The heavy hand of the state military-industrial establishment has been weakened. Entrepreneurship has been fostered. The press has enjoyed much freedom. Police agencies invade the privacy of citizens to a lesser extent than at any time for decades, and Russian armed forces have rarely crossed the country’s international frontiers in anger. Economic recovery and development have got under way. Russia was a humbled vestige of its old self through to the end of the twentieth century. In the present millennium it is a great power again. Flattened Russia stands tall.
Gorbachëv did the groundwork and put up the scaffolding when reconstructing the USSR. Then Yeltsin built up the new Russian edifice. Russia ceased to be a serious threat to global peace. It is a great power possessing and brandishing nuclear weapons but is no longer a superpower which endangers the rest of the world. Eastern Europe, so long under the USSR’s heel, is not menaced by re-conquest. Even in the event of a return to power by the communist party it is hard to imagine that a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship would be re-created.
Not everything gave reason for cheer, and in some respects the situation was worse under Yeltsin and his successors than under Gorbachëv. In 1993 Yeltsin reintroduced violence to political struggle in Moscow; and in 1994 and 1999 he ordered the attacks on Chechnya. It is far from clear that Yeltsin and his group would have stood down if he had lost the election of 1996. Subsequent presidential elections have been conducted with gross unfairness. Enormous power is concentrated in the Russian presidency and it has not been exercised with restraint. Democratic and legal procedures have been treated with contempt by politicians in Moscow and the provinces. Public debates have been strident and unbecoming. Administration has been conducted on an arbitrary basis. The judiciary has lost much of its short-lived semi-autonomy. Criminality is rife. Ordinary citizens have little opportunity to defend themselves against the threats of the rich and powerful. Impoverishment remains widespread. Programmes of social and material welfare have been neglected and the economy has yet to surmount the effects of de-industrialization and environmental pollution.
There is also much apathy about current politics, and active membership of parties remains low. Russians agree more about what they dislike than about what they like. The price they are paying is that they have a diminishing impact on the government and other state agencies even at elections.
The burden of the past lies heavily upon Russia, but it is a burden which is not solely the product of the assumption of power by Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries. Under the tsars, the Russian Empire faced many problems; approval of the state’s purposes was largely absent from society. The gap in economic productivity was widening between Russia and other capitalist powers. Military security posed acute difficulties; administrative and educational co-ordination remained frail. Political parties in the State Duma had little impact on public life. Furthermore, the traditional propertied classes made little effort to engender a sense of civic community among the poorer members of society. And several non-Russian nations had a sharp sense of national resentment. The Russian Empire was a restless, unintegrated society.
Nicholas II, the last tsar, had put himself in double jeopardy. He had seriously annoyed the emergent elements of a civil society: the political parties, professional associations and trade unions. At the same time he stopped trying to suppress them entirely. The result was that there was constant challenge to the tsarist regime. The social and economic transformation before the First World War merely added to the problems. Those groups in society which had suffered from poverty were understandably hostile to the authorities. Other groups had enjoyed improvement in their material conditions; but several of these constituted a danger since they felt frustrated by the nature of the political order. It was in this situation that the Great War broke out and pulled down the remaining stays of the regime. The consequence was the February Revolution of 1917 in circumstances of economic collapse, administrative dislocation and military difficulty. Vent was given to a surge of local efforts at popular self-rule; and workers, peasants and military conscripts across the empire asserted their demands without impediment.
These same circumstances made political liberalism, conservatism and fascism unlikely to succeed for a number of years ahead: some kind of socialist government was by far the likeliest outcome after the Romanov monarchy’s removal. It was not inevitable that the most extreme variant of socialism – Bolshevism – should take power. What was scarcely avoidable was that once the Bolsheviks made their revolution, they would not be able to survive without making their policies even more violent and regimentative than they already were. Lenin’s party had much too little durable support to remain in government without resort to terror. This in turn placed limits on its ability to solve those many problems identified by nearly all the tsarist regime’s enemies as needing to be solved. The Bolsheviks aspired to economic competitiveness, political integration, inter-ethnic co-operation, social tranquillity, administrative efficiency, cultural dynamism and universal education. The means they employed inevitably vitiated their declared ends.
After 1917 they groped towards the invention of a new kind of order in state and society, an order described in this book as the Soviet compound. This was not a planned experiment. Nor did Bolshevik leaders expect to achieve what they did; on the contrary, they gave out their utopian prognosis of a world-wide community of humanity emancipated from all trammels of state authority. Instead they strongly increased state authority. They should have and could have known better; but the plain fact is that they did not. Their policies quickly led to the one-party state, ideological autocracy, legal nihilism, ultra-centralist administration and the minimizing of private economic ownership. Assembled by Lenin, the Soviet compound underwent drastic remodelling by Stalin; and without Stalin’s intervention it might not have lasted as long as it did. But Stalinism itself induced strains which were not entirely relieved by the adjustments made after his death in 1953. In their various ways Khrushchëv, Brezhnev and Gorbachëv tried to make the compound workable. In the end Gorbachëv opted for reforms so radical that the resultant instabilities brought about the dissolution of the compound and an end to the Soviet Union.
But why did the compound survive so long? The ample use of force was certainly a crucial factor, and fear of the communist state was a powerful deterrent to opposition. But force by itself would not have worked for several decades. Another reason was the creation of a graduated system of rewards and indulgences which bought off much of the discontent that had accumulated under the tsars. The promotees to administrative office were the system’s main beneficiaries; and there was just enough benefit available to others to keep them from actions of rebelliousness. Rewards were a great stabilizer. But even the combination of force and remuneration was not enough to make this a durable system. There also had to be a recurrent agitation of the compound’s ingredients. Expulsions from the party; quotas for industrial production; inter-province rivalry; systematic denunciation from below: these were among the techniques developed to keep the compound from internal degradation. They achieved the purpose of acting as solvents of the tendency of the stabilizers to become the dominant ingredients in the compound.
Soviet communism had several advantages in consolidating itself. Firstly it worked with the grain of many popular traditions; in particular it used the existing inclinations towards collective welfare and social revenge. Thus it was enabled to strengthen the existing state forms of repression, state economic intervention and disrespect for due legal process. At the same time it promised to deliver material prosperity and military security where the tsars had failed. To this extent the communist order found favourable conditions in Russia in the early part of the twentieth century.
Moreover, Soviet communism had achievements to its name – and these achievements were indispensable to ensuring its survival. Communism deepened and widened educational progress. It propagated respect for high culture, especially in literature; it subsidized the performing arts; it increased the official commitment to science. It broadened access to sport and leisure activities. It eradicated the worst excesses of popular culture, especially the obscurantist and violent features of life in the Russian countryside. It built towns. It defeated Europe’s most vicious right-wing military power, Nazi Germany. In subsequent decades, at last, it succeeded in providing nearly all its citizens with at least a minimal safety-net of food, shelter, clothing, health care and employment. It offered a peaceful, predictable framework of people to live their lives.
There were other achievements of a more objectionable quality which allowed the communists to perpetuate their regime. The USSR made itself into the epicentre of the world communist movement. It also became a military superpower. It not only imposed its authority throughout the outlying regions of the lands of the tsars but also acquired a vast new dominion in Eastern Europe. This inner and outer empire was not formally acknowledged as such; but the popular pride in its acquisition was a stimulus to the belief that Soviet communism was part of the normal world order.
The costs of Soviet rule greatly outweighed the advantages. The state of Lenin and Stalin brutalized politics in Russia for decades. It is true that the communists made many economic and social gains beyond those of Nicholas II’s government; but they also reinforced certain features of tsarism which they had vowed to eradicate. National enmities intensified. Political alienation deepened and social respect for law decreased. As the dictatorship broke up society into the tiniest segments, those civil associations that obstructed the central state’s will were crushed. The outcome was a mass of intimidated citizens who took little interest in their neighbours’ welfare. Selfishness became more endemic even than under capitalism. What is more, as the state came close to devouring the rest of society, the state itself became less effective at fostering co-operation with its own policies. In short, it failed to integrate society while managing to prevent society from effecting its own integration.
Even as a mode for achieving industrialization and military security it was ultimately a failure. Stalin’s economic encasement made it unfeasible to attempt further basic ‘modernization’ without dismantling the Soviet order. His institutions acquired rigid interests and repressive capacity. His rule scared the wits out of managers, scientists and writers, and the freedom of thought vital for a self-renewing industrial society was absent. There was also a lack of those market mechanisms which reduce costs. State-directed economic growth was extremely wasteful. The control organs that were established to eliminate wastefulness became merely yet another drain on the country’s resources. Worse still, they made a bureaucratic, authoritarian state order still more bureaucratic and authoritarian. With such an economic and administrative framework it was unavoidable that Stalin’s successors, in their quest to maintain the USSR’s status as a superpower, diverted a massive proportion of the budget to armaments.
The cramping of public criticism meant that the state’s objectives were attained at an even greater environmental cost than elsewhere in the advanced industrial world. Only the huge size of the USSR prevented Soviet rulers from bringing about a general natural calamity which even the dimmest of them would have had to recognize as such.
Gorbachëv was the first Soviet leader to face up to the interconnected difficulties of political intimidation, economic inhibition, militarist organization and environmental pollution – and he failed to resolve the difficulties before he was overwhelmed. The fundamental problem for any gradualist reformer in politics and the economy was that the Soviet compound had eradicated most of the social groups and associations whose co-operation might have facilitated success. By the 1980s, reform had to come from above in the first instance and could be implemented only by a small circle of reformers. A further problem was that radical reform dissolved the linkages of the Soviet compound. Decomposition was inherent in the entire project of change. Those organizations based on politics, religion or nationality which had previously been cowed had no objective interest in conserving the status quo. Gorbachëv’s eventual decision to eliminate the one-party state, ideological autocracy, arbitrary rule, ultra-centralist administration and a predominantly state-owned economy was bound to release such organizations into conflict with his government. The only wonder is that he did not see this from the beginning.
As collapse approached it was unsurprising that many beneficiaries of the Soviet compound should seek to make the best of a bad job. They quietly abandoned communist ideology. They engaged in private business. They became more and more openly corrupt. As they flourished locally in both political and material respects they flaunted their disobedience of the Kremlin. Having started by opposing reform, they ended by exploiting it to their advantage.
This happened in many other communist countries which rejected communism in 1989–1991. But de-communization was more difficult in the former USSR than elsewhere. Soviet political and economic interest groups had been consolidated not merely since the Second World War, as in Eastern Europe, but since the establishment of the communist regime through the October Revolution of 1917. Consequently, not only in Russia but also in Ukraine and Uzbekistan there were long-established groups of officials who had plenty of experience and cunning to see off any new opposition. And whereas communism was imported by the Red Army to Eastern Europe, it had been invented by revolutionaries in the former Russian Empire. In revolting against communism, the peoples of Eastern Europe were struggling against foreign domination. In the Soviet Union, communism was a native product. Indeed Lenin retained a remarkable popularity in opinion polls in Russia even after 1991. No wonder that the banner of anti-communism attracted few active followers there.
The question of Russian nationhood aggravated the dilemmas of reform. Before the First World War there had been a fitful privileging of the Russians over the other nations of the empire. This was eliminated under Lenin but resumed under Stalin and prolonged with modifications under successive communist rulers. Nevertheless Russians were confused by the contradictory messages they received. What they had thought of as peculiar to them before 1917 – especially their Orthodox Christianity and their peasant customs – was rejected by the official communist authorities; and Stalin’s highly selective version of Russianness was virtually his own invention. Thus Russian national identity under tsars and commissars was cross-cut by an imperial identity. At least until the mid-1960s, moreover, the various alternative versions of Russianness were banned from public discussion – and even through to the late 1980s, debates had to steer clear of overt hostility to Marxism-Leninism. Russians emerged from the communist years with a vaguer sense of their identity than most other peoples of the former USSR.
The Russian Federation received an unenviable legacy from the USSR. The creation of an integrated civic culture had hardly begun. The emergent market economy evoked more popular suspicion than enthusiasm. The constitutional and legal framework was frail. Russians had not had a lengthy opportunity to decide what it was to be Russian. All former empires have been afflicted by this problem. The Russian case was acute because even the borders of the new Russian state are not uncontroversial. Russia’s basic territory was never defined during the Russian Empire and was redrawn several times in the Soviet period. And by 1991 twenty-five million ethnic Russians lived in adjacent, newly independent states.
Hopes for democracy and the rule of law were disappointed. Rulers from Yeltsin onwards used a range of dirty methods to exercise their power. The new capitalism brought a windfall of profits to the few, leaving the many – tens of millions of them – to fend for themselves. Reform of police, armed forces and judiciary was not seriously attempted. Multi-party competition was hemmed in by restrictions. Brutal military campaigns were started against Chechen rebels. The President and the rest of the executive exerted dominance over parliament. Elections to high central office were marked by egregious skulduggery. The abuses were not peculiar to the Kremlin. Local politicians and business barons made a mockery of popular choice outside Moscow. The campaign against terrorism was made into a pretext for interfering with civil liberties. Dissent in the media attracted punitive sanctions. Political assassinations were not uncommon. Russia in the twenty-first century became an authoritarian state which has yet to find a settled purpose for itself in its region and in the world.
Must the forecast be pessimistic? Not entirely. The very political passivity that was earlier mentioned as a problem is also an asset. Few Russians have gathered on the streets in support of demagogues of the far right or the far left. Most citizens are tired of turmoil. Even after the disintegration of the USSR, furthermore, Russia was left with a cornucopia of human and natural resources at its disposal. Russia has gas, oil and gold in superabundance. It lacks hardly any essential minerals or metals; it has huge forests and waterways. Its people have an impressive degree of organization, patience and education. Russia has learned from experience about the defects of the alternatives to peaceful, gradual change: it has recent experience of civil war, world war, dictatorship and ideological intolerance.
Yet the preconditions for even a cautious optimism have yet to be met. Time, imagination and will-power will be required if progress is to be made. Russia in the twentieth century was full of surprises. It gave rise to a wholly new way of ordering political, economic and social affairs. Dozens of states adopted the Soviet compound as their model. Russia was the wonder and the horror of the entire world. That single country produced Lenin, Khrushchëv and Gorbachëv; it also brought forth Shostakovich, Akhmatova, Kapitsa, Sakharov and Pavlov. Its ordinary people, from the piteous inmates of the Gulag to the proud Red Army conscript-victors over Hitler, became symbols of momentous episodes in the history of our times. Russia over the past hundred years has endured extraordinary vicissitudes.
It became and then ceased to be a superpower. It was once a largely agrarian and illiterate empire and is now literate, industrial and bereft of its borderland dominions. Russia has not stopped changing. There is no reason to assume that its record in astounding itself, its neighbours and the world has come to an end.