The centrepiece of this history of contemporary Russia is the period of communist government. The weight of the Soviet years continues to lie heavily on the country. Before 1917 the Russian Empire was ruled by the tsars of the Romanov dynasty. Nicholas II was overthrown in the February Revolution, and the ensuing Provisional Government of liberals and socialists lasted merely a few months. Vladimir Lenin and his communist party organized the October Revolution in 1917 and established the world’s first communist state, which survived until the USSR’s abolition at the end of 1991. A new compound of politics, society, economics and culture prevailed in the intervening years. The USSR was a highly centralized, one-party dictatorship. It enforced a single official ideology; it imposed severe restrictions on national, religious and cultural self-expression. Its economy was predominantly state-owned. This Soviet compound served as model for the many communist states created elsewhere.
The phases of the recent Russian past have passed with breathtaking rapidity. After the October Revolution a Civil War broke out across Russia and its former empire. Having won the military struggle, the communists themselves came close to being overthrown by popular rebellions. Lenin introduced a New Economic Policy in 1921 which made temporary concessions, especially to the peasantry; but at the end of the same decade Iosif Stalin, who was emerging as the leading party figure after Lenin’s death in 1924, hurled the country into a campaign for forced-rate industrialization and forcible agricultural collectivization. The Great Terror followed in the late 1930s. Then came the Second World War. After Germany’s defeat in 1945, Stalin brought Eastern Europe under Soviet dominion and undertook post-war reconstruction with his own brutal methods. Only after his death in 1953 could the party leadership under Nikita Khrushchëv begin to reform the Soviet order. But Khrushchëv’s rule produced such political instability and resentment that in 1964 he was ousted by his colleagues.
His successor Leonid Brezhnev presided over a phase, and a lengthy phase at that, of uneasy stabilization. When he died in 1982, the struggle over the desirability of reform was resumed. Mikhail Gorbachëv became communist party leader in 1985 and introduced radical reforms of policies and institutions. A drastic transformation resulted. In 1989, after Gorbachëv had indicated that he would not use his armed forces to maintain Soviet political control in Eastern Europe, the communist regimes there fell in quick succession. Russia’s ‘outer empire’ crumbled. At home, too, Gorbachëv’s measures undermined the status quo. Most of his central party and governmental associates were disconcerted by his reforms. In August 1991 some of them made a bungled attempt to stop the process through a coup d’état. Gorbachëv returned briefly to power, but was constrained to abandon his own Soviet communist party and accept the dissolution of the USSR.
Russia and other Soviet republics gained their independence at the start of 1992, and Boris Yeltsin as Russian president proclaimed the de-communization of political and economic life as his strategic aim. Several fundamental difficulties endured. The economy’s decline sharply accelerated. The manufacturing sector collapsed. Social and administrative dislocation became acute. Criminality became an epidemic. In October 1993, when Yeltsin faced stalemate in his contest with leading opponents, he ordered the storming of the Russian White House and their arrest. Although he introduced a fresh constitution in December, strong challenges to his policies of reform remained. Communism had not been just an ideology, a party and a state; it had been consolidated as an entire social order, and the attitudes, techniques and objective interests within society were resistant to rapid dissolution. The path towards democracy and the market economy was strewn with obstacles. Yeltsin’s successors Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev busied themselves with orderly central power at the expense of the constitution and legality. They also cultivated respect for Soviet achievements, calling for an end to denigration of the USSR. Political and business elites benefited hugely from the profits made in energy exports. The Kremlin’s ruling group ruthlessly eliminated opposition. Authoritarian rule was re-imposed.
This turbulent history led to differing interpretations. Journalists and former diplomats published the initial accounts. Some were vehemently anti-Soviet, others were equally passionate on the other side of the debate – and still others avoided taking political sides and concentrated on depicting the bizarre aspects of life in the USSR. Few foreigners produced works of sophisticated analysis before the Second World War. It was Russian refugees and deportees who provided the works of lasting value. The Western focus on Soviet affairs was sharpened after 1945 when the USSR emerged as a world power. Research institutes were created in the USA, Western Europe and Japan; books and articles appeared in a publishing torrent. Debate was always lively, often polemical. Such discussions were severely curtailed for decades in Moscow by a regime seeking to impose doctrinal uniformity; but from the late 1980s Soviet writers too were permitted to publish the results of their thinking.
Official communist propagandists from 1917 through to the mid-1980s claimed there was nothing seriously wrong with the Soviet Union and that a perfectly functioning socialist order was within attainable range.1 Such boasts were challenged from the start. Otto Bauer, an Austrian Marxist, regarded the USSR as a barbarous state. He accepted, though, that the Bolsheviks had produced as much socialism as was possible in so backward a country.2 Yuli Martov, Karl Kautsky, Bertrand Russell and Fëdor Dan retorted that Leninism, being based on dictatorship and bureaucracy, was a fundamental distortion of any worthwhile version of socialism.3 By the end of the 1920s Lev Trotski was making similar points about bureaucratic degeneration, albeit with the proviso that it was Stalin’s misapplication of Leninism rather than Leninism itself that was the crucible for the distorting process.4 Other writers, especially Ivan Ilin and, in later decades, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, denounced Leninism as an import entirely alien to traditional Russian virtues and customs.5 This school of thought was challenged by the religious philosopher and socialist Nikolai Berdyaev who depicted the USSR as a reincarnation of Russian intellectual extremism. Berdyaev argued that the regime of Lenin and Stalin had reinforced the traditions of political repression, ideological intolerance and a passive, resentful society.6
René Fülöp-Miller’s rejoinder was that all this underestimated the cultural effervescence after the October Revolution.7 But Nikolai Trubetskoi, who fled Russia after the communist seizure of power, offered yet another interpretation. He stressed that Russian history had always followed a path which was neither ‘European’ nor ‘Asian’ but a mixture of the two. From such ideas came the so-called Eurasianist school of thought. Trubetskoi and his fellow thinkers regarded a strong ruler and a centralized administrative order as vital to the country’s well-being. They suggested that several basic features of Soviet life – the clan-like groups in politics, the pitiless suppression of opposition and the culture of unthinking obedience – were simply a continuation of ages-old tradition.8 Nikolai Ustryalov, a conservative émigré, concurred that the communists were not as revolutionary as they seemed, and he celebrated Lenin’s re-establishment of a unitary state in the former Russian Empire. He and fellow analysts at the ‘Change of Landmarks’ journal insisted that communism in power was not merely traditionalism with a new red neckscarf. Ustryalov regarded the communists as essentially the economic modernizers needed by society. He predicted that the interests of Russia as a great power would mean steadily more to them than the tenets of their Marxism.9
After the Second World War the Eurasianism of Trubetskoi underwent further development by Lev Gumilëv, who praised the Mongol contribution to Russian political and cultural achievements.10 E. H. Carr and Barrington Moore in the 1950s steered clear of any such idea and instead resumed and strengthened Ustryalov’s stress on state-building. They depicted Lenin and Stalin first and foremost as authoritarian modernizers. While not expressly condoning state terror, Carr and Moore treated communist rule as the sole effective modality for Russia to compete with the economy and culture of the West.11
This strand of interpretation appeared downright insipid to Franz Neumann, who in the late 1930s categorized the USSR as a ‘totalitarian’ order. Merle Fainsod and Leonard Schapiro picked up this concept after the Second World War.12 They suggested that the USSR and Nazi Germany had invented a form of state order wherein all power was exercised at the political centre and the governing group monopolized control over the means of coercion and public communication and intervened deeply in the economy. Such an order retained a willingness to use force against its citizens as a normal method of rule. Writers of this persuasion contended that the outcome was the total subjection of the entire society to the demands of the supreme ruling group. Individual citizens were completely defenceless. The ruling group, accordingly, had made itself invulnerable to reactions in the broader state and society. In Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany such a group was dominated by its dictator. But the system could be totalitarian even if a single dictator was lacking. Fainsod and Schapiro insisted that the main aspects of the Soviet order remained intact after Stalin’s death in 1953.
Viewing things from a somewhat different angle, the Yugoslav former communist Milovan Djilas suggested that a new class had come into existence with its own interests and authority. Accordingly the USSR, far from moving towards a classless condition, had administrative elites capable of passing on their privileges from generation to generation.13 While not repudiating Djilas’s analysis, Daniel Bell argued that trends in contemporary industrial society were already pushing the Soviet leadership into slackening its authoritarianism – and Bell noted that Western capitalist societies were adopting many measures of state economic regulation and welfare provision favoured in the USSR. In this fashion, it was said, a convergence of Soviet and Western types of society was occurring.14
There was a grain of validity in the official Soviet claim that advances were made in popular welfare, even though several of them failed to take place until many decades after 1917. Yet Martov and others possessed greater weight through their counter-claim that Lenin distorted socialist ideas and introduced policies that ruined the lives of millions of people; and, as Solzhenitsyn later emphasized, many features of Soviet ideology originated outside Russia. Berdyaev for his part was convincing in his suggestion that the USSR reproduced pre-revolutionary ideological and social traditions. Trubetskoi was justified in pointing to the impact of Russia’s long encounter with Asia. So, too, was Ustryalov in asserting that the policies of communist leaders were increasingly motivated by considerations of the interests of the USSR as a Great Power. As Carr and Moore insisted, these leaders were also authoritarian modernizers. There was plausibility, too, in Djilas’s case that the Soviet administrative élites were turning into a distinct social class in the USSR; and Bell’s point was persuasive that modern industrial society was producing social and economic pressures which could not entirely be dispelled by the Kremlin leadership. And Fainsod and Schapiro were overwhelmingly right to underline the unprecedented oppressiveness of the Soviet order in its struggle for complete control of state and society.
This book incorporates the chief insights from the diverse interpretations; but one interpretation – the totalitarianist one – seems to me to take the measure of the USSR better than the others. There are difficulties with totalitarianism as an analytical model. A comparison of Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany reveals differences as well as similarities. In Nazi Germany many traditions of a civil society survived. The economy remained largely a capitalist one and state ownership was never dominant. The churches continued to function; priests were arrested only if they criticized Nazism. Private associations and clubs were allowed to survive so long as they offered no direct challenge to Hitler’s government. The contrast with the Soviet Union was that Hitler could count on support or at least acquiescence from most of Germany’s inhabitants, whereas Stalin had reason to distrust a dangerously large number of those over whom he ruled. State terror was a dominant presence in both the USSR and the Third Reich. But whereas most German families lived lives undisrupted by Nazism in many ways until the middle of the Second World War, Russians and other peoples of the Soviet Union were subjected to an attack on their values and aspirations. Hitler was a totalitarianist and so was Stalin. One had a much harder job than the other in regimenting his citizens.
The USSR for most years of its existence contained few features of a civil society, market economics, open religious observance or private clubs. This was true not only in the 1930s and 1940s but also, to a very large extent, in subsequent decades.15 The Soviet compound was unrivalled, outside the communist world, in the scope of its practical intrusiveness. The ingredients included a one-party state, dictatorship, administrative hyper-centralism, a state-dominated economy, restricted national self-expression, legal nihilism and a monopolistic ideology. Central power was exercised with sustained callousness. It penetrated and dominated politics, economics, administration and culture; it assaulted religion; it inhibited the expression of nationhood. Such ingredients were stronger in some phases than in others. But even during the 1920s and 1970s, when the compound was at its weakest, communist rulers were deeply intrusive and repressive. What is more, the compound was patented by communism in the USSR and reproduced after the Second World War in Eastern Europe, China and eventually in Cuba and countries in Africa.
Unfortunately most works categorizing the USSR as totalitarian contained gross exaggerations. The concept worked best when applied to politics. Nevertheless the Soviet leadership never totally controlled its own state – and the state never totally controlled society. From the 1970s several writers in Western Europe and the USA complained that current writings were focused on Kremlin politicians and their policies to the neglect of lower administrative levels, of ‘the localities’ and of broad social groups. ‘History from below’ was offered as a corrective. This revisionism, as it became known, started up fitfully in the 1950s when David Granick and Joseph Berliner studied the Soviet industrial managers of the post-war period;16 and it raced forward in the 1970s. Ronald Suny investigated the south Caucasus in 1917–1918.17 The present author examined local party committees under the early Soviet regime.18 Diane Koenker and Steve Smith chronicled workers in the October Revolution.19 Francesco Benvenuti looked at the political leadership of the Red Army, Orlando Figes looked at peasants in the Civil War and Richard Stites highlighted experimental and utopian trends throughout society.20 The 1930s, too, were scrutinized. R. W. Davies examined the dilemmas of policy-makers in Stalin’s Kremlin; Moshe Lewin pointed to the turbulent conditions which brought chaos to state administration.21 Francesco Benvenuti, Donald Filtzer and Lewis Siegelbaum researched the industrial labour force before the Second World War.22 An unknown USSR was hauled into the daylight as the chronic difficulties of governing the USSR were disclosed.
Initially this kind of scholarship existed only in the West; it was rejected in the USSR until radical political reforms began in the late 1980s and enabled Russian historians to join in the discussions.23 But revisionism’s success in shining a lamp on neglected areas of the Soviet past could not disguise its failure to supply a general alternative to the totalitarianist model it cogently criticized. There were anyhow serious divisions within revisionist writing. Sheila Fitzpatrick urged that social factors should take precedence over political ones in historical explanation. She and others attributed little importance to dictatorship and terror and for many years suggested that Stalin’s regime rested on strong popular approval.24 Stephen Kotkin proposed that Stalin built a new civilization and inculcated its new values in Soviet citizens.25 Such interpretations were contentious. Stephen Cohen, Moshe Lewin and R. W. Davies agreed with Fitzpatrick that Lenin’s revolutionary strategy in the last years of his life broke with his violent inclinations in earlier years; but they objected to the gentle treatment of Stalin and his deeds.26 Objections also continued to be widely made to any downplaying of terror’s importance in the building of Stalinism.
A parallel controversy sprang up about what kind of USSR existed in the decades after Stalin’s death. Jerry Hough investigated the authority and functions of the provincial party secretaries; and Gordon Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths as well as Hough contended that something like the economic and social interest groups that influenced politics in the West also functioned in the communist countries.27 Moshe Lewin argued that the Stalinist mode of industrialization proved unable to resist the influence of long-term trends in advanced industrial society. Universal schooling gave people a better understanding of public life and a higher set of personal aspirations.28 T. H. Rigby maintained that informal organizational links had characterized the Soviet state since its inception and that patronage networks had become strong at every level.29 The effect of such writings was to counteract the notion that no important change happened – or could happen – without being instigated by the men in the Kremlin. Disputes among the commentators were less about the trends themselves than about their significance. Archie Brown denied that institutional and interest groupings had autonomy from the Politburo; but he insisted that drastic reform was possible if a dynamic reformer were to become party leader.30 The diagnoses of recent politics in the USSR were quite as fiercely disputed as those being offered for pre-war history.
General accounts of the Soviet period fell away, at least outside the bickerings among Western communist grouplets, as the concentration on specific phases grew. The general trend was towards compartmentalizing research. Politics, economics and sociology were studied in sealed boxes. History, moreover, became disjoined from contemporary studies.
Supporters of the totalitarianist case took a bleak view of those writings which held back from condemning the Soviet order. Martin Malia and Richard Pipes castigated what they saw as a complete lapse of moral and historical perspective.31 The debates among historians produced sharp polemics. Often more heat than light was generated. What was ignored by the protagonists on both sides was that several innovative studies in the totalitarianist tradition, particularly the early monographs of Merle Fainsod and Robert Conquest, had stressed that cracks had always existed in the USSR’s monolith. They had drawn attention to the ceaseless dissension about policy in the midst of the Kremlin leadership. They had emphasized too that whole sectors of society and the economy in the Soviet Union proved resistant to official policy.32 The history and scope of totalitarianism acquire fresh nuances. Archie Brown argued that whereas the concept was an apt description of Stalin’s USSR, it lost its applicability when Khrushchëv’s reforms were introduced, and the state remained extremely authoritarian but was no longer totalitarian.33 Geoffrey Hosking stressed that pre-revolutionary attitudes of faith, nationhood and intellectual autonomy survived across the Soviet decades, even to some degree under Stalin, and functioned as an impediment to the Politburo’s commands.34
The theory of totalitarianism, even in these looser applications, falls short of explaining the range and depth of resistance, non-compliance and apathy towards the demands of the state. The USSR was regulated to an exceptional degree in some ways while eluding central political control in others. Behind the façade of party congresses and Red Square parades there was greater disobedience to official authority than in most liberal-democratic countries even though the Soviet leadership could wield a panoply of dictatorial instruments. Informal and mainly illegal practices pervaded existence in the USSR. Clientelist politics and fraudulent economic management were ubiquitous and local agendas were pursued to the detriment of Kremlin policies. Officials in each institution systematically supplied misinformation to superior levels of authority. People in general withheld active co-operation with the authorities. Lack of conscientiousness was customary at the workplace – in factory, farm and office. A profound scepticism was widespread. Such phenomena had existed in the Russian Empire for centuries. But far from fading, they were strengthened under communism and were constant ingredients in the Soviet compound so long as the USSR lasted.
The core of my analysis is that these same features should not be regarded as wrenches flung into the machinery of state and society. They did not obstruct the camshafts, pulleys and engine. Quite the opposite: they were the lubricating oil essential for the machinery to function. Without them, as even Stalin accepted by the end of the 1930s, everything would have clattered to a standstill.
Thus the Soviet compound in reality combined the official with the unofficial, unplanned and illicit. This dualism was a fundamental feature of the entire course of the USSR’s history. So if we are to use totalitarianism in description and analysis, the term needs to undergo fundamental redefinition. The unofficial, unplanned and illicit features of existence in the Soviet Union were not ‘lapses’ or ‘aberrations’ from the essence of totalitarianist state and society: they were integral elements of totalitarianism. The conventional definition of totalitarianism is focused exclusively on the effective and ruthless imposition of the Kremlin’s commands; this is counterposed to the operation of liberal democracies. What is missing is an awareness that such democracies are by and large characterized by popular consent, obedience and order. It was not the same in the USSR, where every individual or group below the level of the central political leadership engaged in behaviour inimical to officially approved purposes. The result was a high degree of disorder from the viewpoint of the authorities – and it was much higher than in the countries of advanced capitalism. The process was predictable. Soviet rulers treated their people badly. The people reacted by defending their immediate interests in the only ways they could.
Even so, the communist rulers achieved a lot of what they wanted. They were unremovable from power and could always quell revolts and disturbances and suppress dissent. Only if they fell out irrevocably among themselves would leaders face a fundamental threat to their rule. Or indeed if, as happened in the late 1980s, they opted for policies that undermined the foundations of the Soviet order.
Alternative terms such as ‘mono-organizational society’, ‘bureaucratic centralism’ (or, for the period after Stalin, ‘bureaucratic pluralism’) are altogether too bland. They fail to encapsulate the reality of the USSR, red in tooth and claw with its dictatorial party and security police, its labour camps and monopolistic ideology. Thus totalitarianism, suitably re-designated as involving insubordination and chaos as well as harshly imposed hierarchy, is the most suitable concept to characterize the USSR. The system of power, moreover, stood in place for seven decades. Undoubtedly the regimes of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchëv and Brezhnev had their own distinctive features. Yet the differences were less significant than the likenesses and this book postulates that the entire period of communist rule had a basic unity. Political dictatorship, administrative centralism, judicial arbitrariness, cramped national and religious self-expression, ideological uniformity and massive state economic intervention were durable ingredients of the Soviet compound. They were put into the crucible by Lenin and his party within a couple of years of the October Revolution; Gorbachëv’s Politburo started to remove them only two or three years before the whole USSR was dissolved. The list of ingredients was constant from beginning to end.
Across the years, though, the central political leadership found that these same ingredients produced solvents which modified the original compound. The process was dynamic. Thus the consolidation of a one-party state had the unintended effect of encouraging individuals to join the party for the perks of membership. Quite apart from careerism, there was the difficulty that Marxism-Leninism was ambiguous in many fundamental ways. Nor could even a one-ideology state terminate disputes about ideas if central party leaders were among the participants in controversy. Furthermore, leaders in the localities as well as at the centre protected their personal interests by appointing friends and associates to posts within their administrative fiefdoms. Clientelism was rife. So, too, were attempts by officials in each locality to combine to dull the edge of demands made upon them by the central leadership; and the absence of the rule of law, together with the ban on free elections, gave rise to a culture of corruption.
Mendacious reporting to higher administrative authority was a conventional procedure. Accounts were fiddled; regulations on working practices were neglected. There were persistent grounds for worry, too, on the national question. Many peoples of the USSR enhanced their feelings of distinctness and some of them aspired to national independence. Official measures to de-nationalize society had the effect of strengthening nationalism.
The Soviet central authorities repeatedly turned to measures intended to re-activate the compound’s elements. This sometimes led to purges of the party, mostly involving mere expulsion from the ranks but in the 1930s and the 1940s being accompanied by terror. Throughout the years after the October Revolution, furthermore, institutions were established to inspect and control other institutions. A central determination existed to set quantitative objectives to be attained by local government and party bodies in economic and political affairs. The Kremlin leaders resorted to exhortations, instructions and outright threats and gave preferential promotion in public life to those showing implicit obedience to them. Intrusive political campaigns were a standard feature; and exaggerated rhetoric was employed as the regime, centrally and locally, tried to impose its wishes within the structure of the compound created in the first few years after the October Revolution.
The efforts at re-activation prompted individuals, institutions and nations to adopt measures of self-defence. People strove after a quiet life. Evasiveness and downright disruption were pervasive at every lower level. This in turn impelled the central leadership to strengthen its intrusiveness. Over the seven decades after 1917 the USSR experienced a cycle of activation, disruption and re-activation. There was an ineluctable logic to the process so long as the leadership aimed to preserve the compound of the Soviet order.
Consequently the rulers of the USSR never exercised a completely unrestrained authority. The jailers of the Leninist system of power were also its prisoners. But what jailers, what prisoners! Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchëv and Gorbachëv have gripped the world’s imagination. Even losers in the struggles of Soviet politics, such as Trotski and Bukharin, have acquired an enduring reputation. And although a succession of Soviet central leaders fell short of their ambition in utterly dominating their societies, each leader wielded enormous power. The political system was centralized and authoritarian. It was also oligarchic: just a few individuals made the principal decisions – and Stalin turned it into a personal despotism. So that the particularities of character were bound to have a deep effect on public life. The USSR would not have come into being without Lenin’s intolerant confidence; and it would not have collapsed when and how it did without Gorbachëv’s naïve audacity.
The idiosyncratic ideas of leaders, too, left their mark. Lenin’s thinking about dictatorship, industrialization and nationality had a formative influence on the nature of the Soviet state; Stalin’s grotesque enthusiasm for terror was no less momentous. Such figures shaped history, moreover, not only by their ideas but also by their actions. Stalin made a calamitous blunder in denying that Hitler was poised to invade the USSR in mid-1941; Khrushchëv’s insistence in 1956 in breaking the official silence about the horrors of the 1930s brought enduring benefit to his country.
These were not the sole unpredictable factors that channelled the course of development. The factional struggles of the 1920s were complex processes, and it was not a foregone conclusion that Stalin would defeat Trotski. The political culture, the institutional interests and the course of events in Russia and the rest of the world worked to Stalin’s advantage. In addition, no communist in 1917 anticipated the measure of savagery of the Civil War. State and society were brutalized by this experience to an extent that made it easier for Stalin to impose forcible agricultural collectivization. Nor did Stalin and his generals foresee the scale of barbarity and destruction on the Eastern front in the Second World War. And, having industrialized their country in the 1930s, Soviet leaders did not understand that the nature of industrialism changes from generation to generation. In the 1980s they were taken aback when the advanced capitalist states of the West achieved a rapid diffusion of computerized technology throughout the civilian sectors of their economies. Contingency was a major factor in the history of twentieth-century Russia.
Even as dominant a ruler as Stalin, however, eventually had to have an eye for the internal necessities of the system. The compound of the Soviet order was continuously imperilled, to a greater or less degree, by popular dissatisfaction. Stabilizing ingredients had to be introduced to preserve the compound, and an effort was needed to win the support from a large section of society for the maintenance of the status quo. Rewards had to be used as well as punishments.
The attempt at stabilization started soon after 1917 with the introduction of a tariff of privileges for the officials of party and government. Before the October Revolution there had been a tension in Leninist thought between hierarchical methods and egalitarian goals; but as soon as the communists actually held power, the choice was persistently made in favour of hierarchy. Officialdom did not have it entirely its own way. Far from it: in the late 1930s the life of a politician or an administrator became a cheap commodity. But the general tendency to give high remuneration to this stratum of the population was strengthened. The young promotees who stepped into dead men’s shoes were also occupying their homes and using their special shops and special hospitals. Social equality had become the goal for an ever receding future, and Marxist professions of egalitarianism sounded ever more hollow: from Stalin to Gorbachëv they were little more than ritual incantations.
None the less the central political leaders also ensured that the tariff was not confined to officials but was extended lower into society. As early as the 1920s, those people who enrolled as ordinary party members were given enhanced opportunities for promotion at work and for leisure-time facilities. In most phases of the Soviet era there was positive discrimination in favour of the offspring of the working class and the peasantry. It was from among such beneficiaries of the regime that its strongest support came.
Yet the nature of official policies meant that not everyone could live a cosseted life. Huge sacrifices were exacted from ordinary people at times of crisis. The basic amenities of existence were unavailable to them during the Civil War, the First Five-Year Plan and the Second World War. Life was extremely harsh for Soviet citizens in those and other phases. But at other times the regime took care not to push its demands dangerously hard. Labour discipline was notoriously slack by the standards of modern industry elsewhere. Quality of workmanship was low, punctuality poor. In addition, there was more or less full employment in the USSR from the early 1930s; and a safety-net of minimal welfare benefits was erected even for the most disadvantaged members of society from the late 1950s. It was not a comfortable existence for most people, but the provision of a predictable level of food, clothing and housing helped to reconcile them to life under the Soviet order.
Even so, revolts occurred at the end of the Civil War and at the end of the 1920s, and urban disturbances took place sporadically in the mid-1960s, the 1970s and the late 1980s. But, on the whole, rebellion was rare. This infrequency resulted not only from the state’s ruthless violence but also from its provision of primitive social security. There was a tacit contract between the regime and society which endured to the end of the communist era, a contract which has proved difficult for the country’s subsequent government to tear up.
Russians and other peoples of the USSR had always had ideas of social justice and been suspicious of their rulers, and the Soviet regime’s repressiveness fortified this attitude. They also noted the communist party’s failure, from one generation to another, to fulfil its promises. The USSR never became a land of plenty for most of its citizens, and the material and social benefits bestowed by communism could not camouflage the unfairnesses that pervaded society. In time, moreover, a country of peasants was turned into an industrial, urban society. As in other countries, the inhabitants of the towns directed an ever greater cynicism at politicians. The increasing contact with Western countries added to the contempt felt for an ideology which had never been accepted in its entirety by most citizens. Russia, which was hard enough to tame in 1917–1918, had become still less easy to hold in subjection by the late 1980s.
The rulers anyway faced problems which were not simply the consequence of 1917. The heritage of the more distant past also bore down upon them. Russia’s size, climate and ethnic diversity greatly complicated the tasks of government. It also lagged behind its chief competitors in industrial and technological capacity; it was threatened by states to the West and the East and its frontiers were the longest in the world. Arbitrary state power was a dominant feature in public life. Official respect for legality was negligible and the political and administrative hierarchy was over-centralized. Russia, furthermore, had an administration which barely reached the lower social classes on a day-to-day basis. Most people were preoccupied by local affairs and were unresponsive to appeals to patriotism. Education was not widely spread; civic integration and inter-class tolerance were minimal. The potential for inter-ethnic conflict, too, was growing. Social relationships were extremely harsh, often violent.
Lenin and the communists came to power expecting to solve most of these problems quickly. Their October Revolution was meant to facilitate revolution throughout Europe and to re-set the agenda of politics, economics and culture around the globe. To their consternation, revolution did not break out across Europe and the central party leaders increasingly had to concentrate on problems inherited from the tsars.
In reality the behaviour of Lenin and his successors often aggravated rather than resolved the problems. Their theories even before the October Revolution had an inclination towards arbitrary, intolerant and violent modes of rule. While proclaiming the goal of a society devoid of oppression, they swiftly became oppressors to an unprecedented degree of intensity. Soviet communists, unconsciously or not, fortified the country’s traditional political postures: the resort to police-state procedures, ideological persecution and anti-individualism derived as much from tsarist political and social precedents as from Marxism-Leninism. What is more, the concern that Russia might lose its status as a Great Power was as important to Stalin and his successors as to the Romanov dynasty. The appeal to Russian national pride became a regular feature of governmental pronouncements. Office-holders thought of themselves as Marxist-Leninists; but increasingly they behaved as if Russia’s interests should have precedence over aspirations to worldwide revolution.
Russia, of course, was not the entire USSR and not all Soviet citizens were Russians. Furthermore, it was party policy throughout the USSR’s history to transmute existing national identities into a sense of belonging to a supranational ‘Soviet people’. This was part of a general endeavour by the state to eradicate any organizations or groupings independent of its control. The central politicians could not afford to let Russian national self-assertiveness get out of hand.
But what on earth was Russia? And what was Russia’s part in the Soviet Union? These are questions which are much less easy to answer than they superficially appear. The borders of the Russian republic within the USSR were altered several times after 1917. Nearly every redefinition involved a loss of territory to the USSR’s other republics. The status of ethnic Russians, too, changed under several political leaderships. Whereas Lenin was wary of Russian national self-assertiveness, Stalin sought to control and exploit it for his political purposes; and the Soviet communist leadership after Stalin’s death, despite coming to rely politically upon the Russians more than upon other nationalities in the Soviet Union, never gave them outright mastery. Nor was Russian culture allowed to develop without restriction: the Orthodox Church, peasant traditions and a free-thinking intelligentsia were aspects of Mother Russia which no General Secretary until the accession of Gorbachëv was willing to foster. Russian national identity was perennially manipulated by official interventions.
For some witnesses the Soviet era was an assault on everything fundamentally Russian. For others, Russia under Stalin and Brezhnev attained its destiny as the dominant republic within the USSR. For yet others neither tsarism nor communism embodied any positive essence of Russianness. The chances are that Russian history will remain politically sensitive. This is not simply a case of public figures whipping up debate. Russians in general are interested in discussions of Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin and Gorbachëv; and the past and the present are enmeshed in every public debate.
Russia is under the spotlight in this book. But the history of Russia is inseparable from the history of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States. It would be artificial to deal exclusively with Russian themes in those many cases in which these themes are knotted together with the situation in adjacent areas. My rule of thumb has been to omit from the account those events and situations that had little impact upon ‘Russia’ and affected only the non-Russian areas of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States. On the other hand, the chapters are not designed as an account of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States with the ‘Russian factor’ being addressed only glancingly. For the general history of this huge area of Europe and Asia can be understood only when Russia’s history is thrown into relief.
In still broader terms, the plan is to treat Soviet history as a unitary period and to explain the inner strengths and strains of the USSR. Recently it has become fashionable to assert that communism in Russia could easily have been eradicated at any moment in its seventy years of existence. This is just as exaggerated a notion as the earlier conventional notion that the regime was impervious to any kind of domestic or foreign pressure.
But what kind of regime was the USSR? Continuities with the tsarist years are examined in the following chapters; so, too, are the surviving elements of the communist order in post-Soviet Russia. The shifting nature of Russian national identity is also highlighted. And an account is offered not only of the central political leadership but also of the entire regime as well as of the rest of society. This means that the focus is not confined to leading ‘personalities’ or to ‘history from below’. Instead the purpose is to give an analysis of the complex interaction between rulers and ruled, an interaction that changed in nature over the decades. Not only politics but also economics, sociology and culture are examined. For it is an organizing principle of the book that we can unravel Russia’s mysteries only by taking a panoramic viewpoint.
Greater attention is given to politics than to anything else. This is deliberate. The Soviet economic, social and cultural order in Russia is incomprehensible without sustained attention to political developments. The policies and ideas of the party leadership counted greatly; it also mattered which leader was paramount at any given moment. Politics penetrated nearly all areas of Soviet society in some fashion or other; and even though the purposes of the leadership were frequently and systematically thwarted, they never lost their deep impact on society.
Russia has had an extraordinary history since 1900. Its transformation has been massive: from autocratic monarchy through communism to an elected president and parliament; from capitalist development through a centrally owned, planned economy to wild market economics; from a largely agrarian and uneducated society to urban industrialism and literacy. Russia has undergone revolutions, civil war and mass terror; its wars against foreign states have involved defence, liberation and conquest. In 1900 no one foresaw these abrupt turns of fortune. Now nobody can be sure what the twenty-first century has in store. Yet few Russians want to repeat the experience of their parents and grandparents: they yearn for peaceful, gradual change. Among the factors that will affect their progress will be an ability to see the past through spectacles unblurred by mythology and unimpeded by obstacles to public debate and access to official documents. The prospects are not wholly encouraging. Official Russian policies since the start of the twenty-first century have unfortunately been aimed at inhibiting open-ended research and debate.
Winston Churchill described Russia as a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. As many obscurities are being dispelled, we have never been in a better position to take the measure of a country whose history after 1917 turned the world upside down. For seven decades Soviet communism offered itself as a model of social organization; and even in transition from communism Russia has kept its intriguing interest. It has been a delusion of the age, after the dissolution of the USSR, to assume that capitalism has all the answers ready-made to the problems faced by our troubled world. Communism is the young god that failed; capitalism, an older deity, has yet to succeed for most of the world’s people most of the time.