Soviet culture and foreign policy from the Cambridge history of Russia, volume 3

In fact more was needed. Collisions between the Red Army and Japanese forces in the summer of that year showed worrying weaknesses in Soviet military capabilities. And not until September 1939 did the Russians, in this case under the command of the ruthless and efficient Georgii Zhukov, overwhelm the Japanese and teach them a lesson they would not soon forget - at the Battle of Khalkhin-Gol on the frontiers of Mongolia. But more important still was the fact that the Russians had retreated from the emerging war in Europe. The Nazi-Soviet pact, to which Hitler had agreed without consulting Japan, came as a grievous blow to Japanese aspirations of forcing the Russians to fight a two-front war. This failure of co-ordination between East and West was vital to Soviet survival, not only between 1939 and 1941, but even more after Hitler decided on war with Russia.

The Popular Front collapses, 1939

The Popular Front strategy, along with its siamese twin Collective Security, could last only as long as it served Stalin's purpose. The failure to form an effective ring around Nazi Germany highlighted the need to come to terms and drop the distinction hard won by Litvinov between democratic and non- democratic capitalist states. The brutal manner in which the Soviet Union was deliberately kept out of the solution to the crisis over Czechoslovakia by Prime

Minister Neville Chamberlain in September 1938 marked the low point of trust between Moscow and the democracies. Similarly the collapse of Soviet efforts to sustain the Popular Front government in Spain, which received substantial military aid in both men and munitions despite adverse logistical difficulties, spelt the collapse of a policy intended to contain Fascism by other means. No longer would Moscow act to preserve the territorial status quo in Europe created by the Versailles Treaty system. As late as 9 July 1939 Stalin told Chiang Kai-shek that a 'satisfactory result' was not impossible in the negotiations with Britain and France.[156] But Stalin's price was the de facto reabsorption of the Baltic states as protectorates, with a fate not much different for Poland, and that meant the expansion of Soviet powerto the West, something Chamberlain feared even more than the Germans. Impatient at the lack of seriousness with which the British approached alliance negotiations with the Soviet Union and ever suspicious that these negotiations were merely there to enhance London's bargaining power vis-a-vis Germany, Stalin cut his losses and signed up with Hitler.

The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact signed on 23-4 August 1939 con­tained within it a secret protocol allowing for the partition of Poland and the Baltic states. This was a tragedy for the victim states. More important for the fate of the world, however, were the assumptions underlying the agree­ment, which Litvinov, for one - forced into premature retirement in May - considered entirely misconceived. Overestimating British and French power and underestimating that of the Germans, Stalin saw the pact as a means of throwing the entire capitalist world into confusion, from which the Soviet Union would draw unilateral long-term advantage, extending its territory and expanding the reach of socialism at one stroke. 'The extinction of this state [Poland]', Stalin said, 'in current conditions would mean one bourgeois Fascist state less! What would be so bad about extending the socialist system to new territories and populations as a result ofthe defeat of Poland.'[157] Indeed, Stalin's acts attracted unwanted and backhanded congratulations from Leon Trotsky in his place of exile. He unflatteringly compared the role of Stalin to that of Napoleon: though exterminating the revolution at home, he was obliged to spread it abroad.[158]

In an extraordinary outburst that echoed the unreal hopes of 1932-3, which had also led to disaster, Stalin commented thus on Germany and the Allies: 'We would not mind if they got into a good fight and weakened one another,' he said. 'It would be no bad thing if the position of the richest capitalist Powers (particularly England) was shattered at the hands of Germany. Hitler, without understanding or wishing for this, is shattering and blowing up the capitalist system.' The implications for Comintern policy were clear. Before the war, a contradistinction between Fascist and democratic regimes was correct. But, At a time of war between the imperialist Powers [it] would no longer be correct. Distinguishing between Fascist and democratic capitalist countries has lost its former significance.'[159] Thus the role now ascribed to the Communist parties in Europe and the United States was to oppose the war.

Nothing could have undermined their strenuous efforts to identify more closely with the nation than this. From the time the instructions went out, fraternal parties conducted a policy of defeatism that undermined the national war effort and made it that much easier for Hitler to conquer the greater part of the subcontinent. Anxious at the speed of the Wehrmacht progress, on 17 September Stalin invaded Poland in haste to meet the incoming German troops. Large numbers of senior Polish officers and other members of the elite were captured; a substantial number were then ordered to be shot by the Politburo on 5 March 1940.[160] Poland out of the way, Stalin moved to force the Baltic states to heel and, with the signature of the Friendship Pact with Berlin at the end of September he included Lithuania in with Latvia and Estonia as new Soviet protectorates. The blunt refusal of Social Democratic Finland to submit then resulted in war on 30 November, a conflict brought to an end after great cost only in March 1940. And by then Hitler was on the way to the total domination of Western Europe.

Stalin believed the Nazi-Soviet agreements had bought the Soviet govern­ment time both to expand and to prepare against the eventuality of a German attack. 'A German attack is also possible', he told the Letts. 'For six years German fascists and the communists cursed each other. Now an unexpected turn took place; that happens in the course of history. But one cannot rely upon it. We must be prepared in time. Others who were not ready paid the price'.[161] But Stalin badly miscalculated the speed of the German advance and failed to anticipate, as did most others, the rapid collapse of France. The key to sustaining a balance against Germany was French survival. Stalin was caught off guard because his own evaluation of both Britain and France seriously over­estimated their power as against that of Germany. The reigning assessment of the balance of forces suggested stalemate rather than the victory of the Blitzkrieg.

On 9 April 1940 the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway. The Soviet leadership were evidently baffled by this unexpected turn of events. Voroshilov spoke of the international situation being 'extremely muddled' and called for vigilance.[162] Three days later, on 7 May the Soviet government re-established the ranks of General and Admiral. On 10 May the Germans attacked Belgium and the Netherlands. The only good news for the Russians was the resignation of the hated Neville Chamberlain and the reassuring reappearance of Winston Churchill, bent on defeating Hitler. On 14 May Holland surrendered and three days later German troops were taking possession of Brussels. Soon British and French forces evacuated Norway, giving way to German occupation on 10 June. Now the French capital itself lay in imminent danger. Initially, in September 1939, the PCF was strongly instructed to oppose the war for fear that Britain and France would win. Now it was instructed to sustain its opposition for fear of offending the Germans. At the very last minute, on 10 June, Comintern leaders Dimitrov and Manuil'skii sent a text drafted by the leaders of the PCF to Stalin with a request for advice. The draft declaration, though loaded with vituperative denunciation for the leaders of France, the capitalist system, the leaders ofthe French Socialists and avoiding any mention of Germany (!), ended with what effectively amounted to a call to arms to forestall 'capitulation'.[163] For good measure it was also sent to Molotov. Finally, on 13 June, permission came through for acting upon it and the Comintern secretariat formally approved the dispatch of appropriate instructions.[164] But on the following day German troops entered Paris and on 15 June the secretariat reported that it would not be appropriate to publish the declaration.⁴⁹

Reflecting the abysmal level of defeatism signalled after the surrender was taken on 22 June, the egregious Jacques Duclos, leading the PCF on the ground in Paris, then made moves parallel to the capitulationism of Petain by attempt­ing to secure Nazi co-operation for party publications and activities. Finally Moscow took fright and issued orders to desist. But it does indicate just how disoriented the entire international Communist movement had become in the face of Moscow's irresolution that the most important party in Western Europe should have descended to such depths.

Stalin's mind was, ofcourse, elsewhere and in some degree ofpanic. In mid- June he was talked into offering an olive branch to Britain, much against his own inclination. Andrew Rothstein, a leading Stalinist in the British Communist Party, informed the Foreign Office that the Russians wanted Prime Minister Churchill to meet Ambassador Ivan Maiskii for a 'frank discussion'. In passing on this request, Rothstein confessed that the fall of France came as 'something of a surprise, even to the Moscow realists'. He also noted that the takeover of the Baltic and the mobilisation of Soviet troops along the Polish frontier would not please Berlin. The time was ripe, he concluded, for an improvement in relations between London and Moscow.[165] But since Sir Stafford Cripps had already been sent to Moscow to improve relations but had yet to see Stalin, none of this really seemed at all convincing. Clearly something of a vacuum had opened up in Moscow, and Stalin was procrastinating, as he often did when faced with key decisions, allowing others to propose alternatives, until events finally forced a decision upon him.

Meanwhile, as a precautionary measure Russian troops speedily occupied the Baltic states from 17 to 21 June and on 26 June the Supreme Soviet prohib­ited citizens from leaving their jobs, and imposed a seven-day working week with an eight-hour working day. Then on 28-30 June Stalin took Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina from Romania by force, eventually setting up the bastard republic of Moldavia on 2 August. The Soviet Union now held the Baltic and had a toe-hold in the Balkans, much to Hitler's personal irritation (in reaction on 5 August he issued the first draft plan for the invasion of the Soviet Union).

The key issue, however, was whether Britain would hold out when Opera­tion Sea Lion was launched by Hitler for the invasion of the home islands on 16 July. An article by Eugene Varga, head of the Institute of Global Economics and International Relations (IMEMO) caught the prevalent mood in Moscow:

We will not be so bold as to give a final prognosis; but it seems to us that from the point of view of purely military possibilities - with aid in only supplies from the USA - England could still continue the war. However, the political side to the question is decisive: is the English ruling class in actual fact deter­mined to conduct the struggle to the end to win or perish?

Varga noted there were two camps in London - one for peace; the other for war: 'The scant information available to us now about what is going on in England does not enable us to judge which of these two tendencies is the stronger.'[166] Events answered that question when Churchill rebuffed Hitler's offer of negotiations. A further article that went to press on 24 October argued that the United States would enter the war.[167] The Kremlin was thus deluded, despite a raft of intelligence warnings, that it was safe while Britain remained undefeated. Hitler had in Mein Kampf criticised his predecessors for fighting simultaneously on two fronts and gave every indication that he would not repeat that fatal error. Furthermore, on returning from Moscow at the begin­ning of January 1941 the Soviet military attache in Paris indicated that 'it was no longer believed in Moscow that the Axis Powers could deliver a definitive victory against Great Britain. There is also scepticism ofthe possibility of a dev­astating victory by Great Britain ... The opinion most widespread in Moscow is that the war must end in a compromise peace acceptable to the British empire and limiting the advantages and the preponderance in Europe that the Reich has conquered.' The notion therefore was that the Soviet Union would not intervene until peace negotiations opened and then it would do so with military power to back up its position.[168] German disinformation conveyed to agents in Berlin trusted by the Russians also played its part. One instance was the dispatch from Berlin on 24 April indicating that the Germans had dropped the idea of going against Russia and were going to focus on pushing the British out of the Middle East.[169]

German troops entered Romania on 12 October 1940 and on 28 October the Italians invaded Greece. The Balkans were now engulfed in war. Molotov's visit to Berlin on 12 Novemberto sort out the state of relations with Hitlerpersonally gave the Russians the impression that the Germans were still committed to the defeat of Britain. Yet little more than a month later, on 18 December, Hitler signed Directive 21, Barbarossa, for the invasion of the Soviet Union. But Moscow continued firmly in the belief that any talk of Germany aiming to attack Russia was merely a smokescreen or an attempt to bluff the Kremlin into conceding some of its territorial gains. And the more the British attempted to persuade the Russians otherwise, the more firmly Stalin and Molotov clung to that conclusion. The signing of a Neutrality Pact with Japan on 13 April also indicated Soviet confidence, because the Russians had turned down a non- aggression pact that the Japanese had been seeking for over a year, evidently believing that no such agreement (which would foreshorten the option of war with Japan) was necessary.[170]

The flight to Britain of Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess made matters worse. Prior to his arrival and in some desperation, British Ambassador Sir Stafford Cripps recommended a strategy to London that ultimately proved disastrous, because the Russians were reading his mail. His attempts to persuade Stalin that a German invasion was inevitable had come to nothing. The only 'counter­weight', he noted, 'is the fear that we may conclude a separate peace on the basis of a German withdrawal from occupied territories of Western Europe and a free hand for Hitler in the East...' 'I realise of course', he continued, 'that this is a most delicate matter to be handled through round about channels. Nevertheless I consider it our most valuable card in a very difficult hand and I trust some means may be found of playing it. Soviet talent for acquiring information through illicit channels might surely for once be turned to our account.'[171]

Hess arrived by plane in Scotland on 10 May. When news of his arrival reached Moscow via Kim Philby, then spying for the Russians within the heart of Whitehall, Stalin demanded to know what peace terms had accompanied him. At the Foreign Office Deputy Secretary Orme Sargent expressed the 'wish we could get out of the Hess incident some material which Sir Stafford Cripps could use on the Soviet Government'.[172] Philby, after some anxious investigation, concluded that 'now the time for peace negotiations has not yet arrived, but in the process of the future development of the war Hess will possibly become the centre of intrigues for the conclusion of a compromise peace and will be useful for the peace party in England and for Hitler'.[173] Sargent did not immediately recommend adoption of the Cripps proposal, but before the end of May he did recommend a variation of it, to be delivered as a 'whisper'. The line was 'to give some assurance to the Soviet Government that they need not buy off Germany with a new and unfavourable agreement because there is clear evidence that Germany does not intend to embark on a war with the Soviet Union in present circumstances'.⁵⁹ Cripps's proposal and Sargent's comments were precisely the confirmation that Stalin needed to demonstrate that all talk of a German invasion had been merely a British plot and that, having found out that it no longer served its purpose, London had reversed its line. Thus it was that on 22 June the Soviet government was caught unawares when Hitler attacked. The full consequences of Stalin's misjudgement were to be felt for a long time to come. The tragedy went further than the massive loss of life entailed. The very suspicions that had given rise to the mistake were to multiply as the war proceeded and would lead to the very situation Neville Chamberlain once feared and Churchill hoped would never come to pass: the emergence of Soviet Russia as a mighty power determined to hold the balance of Europe in its own hands. This was not the first time and certainly not the last when Western ignorance of the Soviet Union inadvertently combined with deep-seated Russian suspicions to wreak havoc with a relationship that had never been good.

59 Sargent's comment of30 May 1941 on Cripps (Moscow) to London, 27 May 1941: Public Record Office, FO 371/29481. The fact that these documents were not declassified under the thirty-year rule but fifty years later indicates that the usual excuse of 'security' is utter nonsense. These materials were retained evidently to save the Foreign Office embarrassment at such monumental incompetence.

Moscow's foreign policy, 1945-2000: identities, institutions and interests

TED HOPF

A great power has no permanent friends, just permanent interests', an oft- heard aphorism about international politics, assumes these interests are obvi­ous. In Britain's case it was to prevent the domination of continental Europe. For Great Powers in general, it has been to maintain a balance against emerg­ing hegemonic threats, such as Napoleonic France, Hitler's Germany or the post-war Soviet Union.

Advising states to balance against power, the aphorism also warns against treating other states as natural allies, as an enemy today might be a friend tomorrow, as Britain found with the Soviet Union in June 1941. But aphorisms are rarely more than half-truths. States' interests are no more permanent than their allies or enemies. Threats and interests are not obvious or objective. There is nothing about French and British nuclear weapons that make them objectively less threatening to the United States than Chinese warheads.

How, then, does a state become a threat? Realism tells us that power threat­ens. No Great Power feels threatened by Togo. But power is only necessary, not sufficient, to threaten. Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States and France did not balance against Hitler's Germany before the Second World War. Britain and France did not balance against the United States after the Sec­ond World War. Britain, France, China and Russia have not balanced against the United States since the end of the Cold War.

The meaning of power is not given; it is interpreted. Threats are the social constructions of states. States construct threats both by interacting with other states and their own societies.[174] For example, France could have learned that Soviet power was more dangerous than Nazi Germany's through its interac­tions with Moscow. But France may have felt more threatened by the Soviet Union than Germany because French understanding of itself as a bourgeois liberal capitalist state made the Communist Soviet Union more dangerous than Fascist Germany.

1 explore Moscow's relations with Eastern Europe, China, Western Europe, the decolonising world and the United States (US) since 1945 from the perspec­tive of Soviet and Russian identity relations with these states. Six different identities have predominated in Moscow since the Second World War:

• 1945-7, Soviet Union as part of a Great Power condominium

• 1947-53, Soviet Union within capitalist encirclement

• 1953-6, Soviet Union as natural ally

• 1956-85, Soviet Union as the other superpower

• 1985-91, Soviet Union as normal Great Power in international society

• 1992-2000 Russia as European Great Power

Each of these identities has its roots in the relationship between the state and society.

Post-war ambiguity, 1945-7

The re-establishment of an orthodox Stalinist identity for the Soviet Union took only eighteen months. From September 1945 to June 1947 uncertainty about Soviet identity was replaced by a strict binary: the New Soviet Man (NSM) and its dangerous deviant Other. The NSM was an ultra-modern, supranational, secular carrier of working-class consciousness. The formal dec­laration of the triumph of orthodoxy over difference was Andrei Zhdanov's August 1946 speech declaiming authors who offered a 'false, distorted depic­tion of the Soviet people', that is, who did not write as if the NSM was reality.

Zhdanovshchina began with the closure of the literary journals Zvezda and Leningrad and the expulsion of Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko from the Writers' Union.[175] A connection was drawn between these deviations and the imperialist threat to the existence of socialism. This was not a wholly imagined danger. Reports from local Ministry of State Security (MGB) and oblast committee (obkom) secretaries to their superiors in Moscow told of widespread rumours among the peasantry that Britain and the United States were threatening to use military force to coerce Stalin to disband collective farms.[176] Meanwhile, the US and Britain were providing military aid to anti- Soviet guerrillas in Poland, Western Ukraine and the Baltic republics, and this was known to Stalin.[177]

The level of danger was tied to parlous economic conditions. As early as September 1945, workers demonstrated at defence plants in the Urals and Siberia. Crime, especially the theft of food, soared. Best estimates are that 100 million Soviets suffered from malnutrition in 1946-7, and 2 million died of starvation from 1946 to 1948. There was no soap or winter clothing. Local party committees cancelled the 7 November 1946 celebration of the Bolshevik revolution, realising people would freeze to death without adequate clothing.[178]

Stalinism itself was the primary institutional carrier of the NSM. All instru­ments of the party and state both policed Soviet society for deviance and saturated the public space with the dominant discourse. But a peculiar foreign policy institution operated, too. Many post-war East European Communist Party elites had spent the war in the Soviet Union and had formed close ties with Soviet party elites. The latter had their favourites among these allies, and the former curried favour in the Kremlin by energetically fulfilling Soviet wishes in their own countries. Indeed, foreign Communists competed to demonstrate their obedience. This relationship was an institutional route for Moscow's influence in Eastern Europe. East European Communist leaders, identified with Moscow, were often hostage to Soviet elite politics; leadership manoeu- vrings in the Kremlin reverberated throughout the alliance in Eastern Europe.[179]

There was a certain 'Frankenstein effect' at work. Eastern European Com­munists who had remained in Moscow had become more 'orthodox than the Patriarch'. Soviet leaders faced demands from their allies to support more radical Stalinisation than Moscow itself was imagining. In May 1945 Finnish Communists petitioned Moscow to make Finland a Soviet Republic! Zhdanov replied by advising them to become a parliamentary party in coalition with others in Finland.[180] Soviet leaders reined in their allies. As Stalin told the Czech leader Klement Gottwald in the summer of 1946, 'the Red Army has already paid the price for you. You can avoid establishing a dictatorship of the prole­tariat of the Soviet type.'[181]

Soviet foreign policy correlates with the evolution of Soviet identity at home. An initial expectation of Great Power condominium rapidly gave way to a binarised conflict with former allies. On 10 January 1944 Maksim Litvinov and Ivan Maiskii gave Molotov a memorandum about the post-war world, in which the world was divided largely between the United States and the Soviet Union, the latter having indirect control over much of Europe.[182] Even as late as November 1946, and from the Soviet leader most closely associated with the division of the world into 'two camps', Zhdanov, there were calls for maintenance of this coalition.

The partially pluralist domestic scene was reflected in Soviet views of the imperialist world as differentiated. In Lenin's contribution to international rela­tions theory, 'Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism', wars among impe­rialist powers are inevitable, since they will compete over global resources.[183]The Second World War apparently having validated this theory, Stalin expected differences between Britain and the US after the war, but he was disappointed by British agreement to US policies on Turkey and Iran, and the Truman Doc­trine, which assumed British obligations 'east of Suez'. The Marshall Plan, announced only three months after the Truman Doctrine was promulgated, struck Stalin as an effective effort by the US to establish its hegemony over all of Europe, hence muting any differences between Europe and the US, and threatening Stalin's more coercive forms of control. Just as Stalinist society was becoming binarised, so too was international society.

Regimes which had been discouraged from Stalinising were now deemed insufficiently 'friendly' to the Soviet Union. East European publics were turn­ing against their Soviet occupiers and those they perceived as Moscow's local agents.[184] The NSM must be replicated in Eastern Europe. The 'peaceful path' to socialism had come to nothing in France, Italy and Finland; and the civil war had been lost in Greece.[185] By the middle of 1947, Molotov and Zhdanov were advising allies in Eastern Europe to 'strengthen the class struggle', that is, stamp out difference that could become dangerous deviation, entailing a turn towards imperialism.[186]

On 5 June 1947 US Secretary of State George Marshall outlined the European Recovery Program. Just two days before the Paris meeting on the plan was to commence, Soviet ambassadors in Eastern Europe delivered the message from Moscow demanding its allies stay away from Paris.[187] If in 1945 and 1946, Soviet embassies in Eastern Europe had active contacts with non-Communist political parties, then by the second half of 1947, these had all but stopped, and completely ended by 1948. Election results in Poland, Romania and Hungary in 1947 were openly falsified. All police forces in Eastern Europe slipped under the control of Moscow's Communist allies. In September 1947, the Cominform was established, an international institution designed to ensure conformity with the Soviet model.[188]

How to explain the self-defeating policies of Stalin in Eastern Europe? Self- defeating in the near term, as they accelerated Western unity before an appar­ent Soviet threat; in the medium term, as popular support for its allies was very thin; and in the long term, as the Soviet-subsidised alliance stood as evidence of Soviet expansionism. At Yalta in February 1945 Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that East European governments should be 'free, and friendly towards the Soviet Union'. This was an oxymoron. Freely elected governments would not choose friendship with Moscow and Moscow's idea of friendship necessi­tated forms of government that were not free. Some twenty-five years after Yalta, Molotov reminisced that Poland should have been 'independent, but not hostile. But they tried to impose a bourgeois government, which natu­rally would have been an agent of imperialism and hostile towards the Soviet Union'.[189]

Here is captured the connection between the NSM, fear of difference, and Soviet foreign policy. Stalinist identity politics implied that any non-socialist government in Eastern Europe would be naturally hostile to the Soviet Union and an ally ofthe most hostile imperialist Other-the US. Just as the bourgeoisie or landlords at home were dangerous deviants allied with foreign capitalists, so too any deviant governments in Eastern Europe. As Soviet fear of difference becoming bourgeois degeneration increased at home, fears of the threat from the US correspondingly increased, and then so too did the belief that allies must be as similar to the NSM as possible. This helps explain the connection between orthodoxy at home, increased threat abroad and increasing demands on allies in Eastern Europe to become more Stalinist.[190]

The mixed Soviet strategy of formal co-operation with its wartime allies and sympathy for the emergence of new socialist allies abroad was evident in policy towards the Chinese civil war.[191] In August 1945, Moscow signed a treaty of friendship and alliance with Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist Chinese against Japan. This was the legal foundation for the presence of Soviet forces in Port Arthur and Dalian, gave Moscow control over Manchurian railroads and gave Outer Mongolia independence. Soviet military aid to Mao's army in and through Manchuria did not end, however, and when Soviet forces withdrew from China in the spring of 1946, they left this territory to Mao's forces. As late as April 1947 Molotov was assuring Secretary of State Marshall of a continued Soviet commitment to the August 1945 agreement with the Guomindang.[192] But by October 1947, the Soviet Union transferred to the Red Army enough materiel to equip 600,000 soldiers.[193] Stalin later admitted to the Yugoslav Communist Miloslav Djilas that he had mistakenly advised Mao to continue co-operating with Chiang Kai-shek, rather than push for armed

victory.[194]

Stalinism's two camps at home and abroad, 1947-53

The dangerous deviants in these last years of high Stalinism - slavish wor­shippers of all things Western, rootless cosmopolitans and wreckers and saboteurs - shared one feature. They were all accomplices of the West in overthrowing socialism in the Soviet Union. Zhdanovshchina had already con­demned as deviant the failure to extol the virtues of the NSM in all cultural products. But kowtowing to the West was associated with disdain for Russian and Soviet achievements, and an unpatriotic preference for life in the West. The official launch of this campaign came a month after the Marshall Plan was announced.[195] It was accompanied by a new official celebration of Russia, punctuated by Moscow's 800th birthday party in September 1947.[196]

After the murder of the director of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in January 1948, a campaign against the Jewish intelligentsia ensued. The Union of Jewish Writers was closed, Jews were purged from political and cultural institutions and works in Yiddish were banned. The accusation was that 'some' Jews had become a fifth column allied with US and British intelligence. Just as the campaign had seemingly lapsed, it was revived in May 1952 with the public trial of those implicated in the Anti-Fascist Committee Affair', and then, in the winter of 1952-3, with the announcement of the 'Doctors' Plot', which only ended with Stalin's death. Other campaigns, in Georgia and Estonia, for example, connected local nationalism to an alliance with the West. In the 'Leningrad Affair', in which that party organisation was purged of 'saboteurs and wreckers', from 1949 to 1952, the vulnerability of even the highest ranks of the party to the allure of the West was revealed.[197]

The danger expected from difference was reflected in institutional modifica­tions. In October 1949, the police, or militsia, was removed from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and shifted to the MGB. In July 1952, the Coun­cil of Ministers drafted an order to move all censorship responsibilities from local control to the MGB, as well.[198] The making of foreign-policy decisions remained tightly centralised around Stalin himself, Zhdanov, Molotov, Andrei Vyshinsky, who replaced Molotov in 1949, and Anastas Mikoyan. After 1948, the Presidium rarely met.[199] East European Communist elites continued to have institutionalised channels of communication with their Moscow colleagues.

Soviet participation in East European decision-making was as institutionalised as Moscow's participation in obkom decision-making at home.

East Europeans frequently appealed to the Soviet embassy to reverse deci­sions made by their own governments. Local elites competed to provide Moscow with compromising material (kompromat) on each other, hoping to gain Moscow's favour against local rivals. Accusations tracked perfectly with the kinds of dangerous deviance being rooted out in the Soviet Union. The Soviet leadership had its own channels of verification, as well: its embassies, MVD, MGB, the Cominform and members of official Soviet delegations. East European allies adopted institutional forms to look like Soviet ones, right down to the number of members on the Central Committee (CC) Pre­sidium, or number and names of CC departments.[200] MGB advisers would often take over the handling of local interrogations and 'affairs', establishing which charges were appropriate and which confessions should be coerced. All of this was done to ensure that the kinds of deviations revealed in, say, the 'Rajk Affair', would correspond to the particular deviation prevailing in Moscow.[201]

Soviet interests in Eastern Europe did not change from 1945 to 1953: regimes friendly to Moscow. But how Soviets understood what constituted friendly changed dramatically. Replications of the Soviet Union were now necessary. The Soviet need for similarity squandered genuine post-war support for the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. Soviet practices there pushed the West to unite against it, forgetting about any German threat, and displaced Eastern European memories about Soviet liberation with apprehensions of the Soviets as occupiers. Especially in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union was regarded as protection against Germany into 1947. But by 1948, both the Min­istry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and the CC were reporting less sympathy for Moscow, 'even among progressive parts of the population' in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. In January 1949, a poll in Slovakia showed that 36 per cent of those asked would prefer a war between the US and Soviet Union in which the US emerged victorious, versus 20 per cent who favoured a Soviet victory.

The poll was broken down by class, and only the working class narrowly supported a Soviet victory (by 35-32 per cent).[202]

Yugoslavia's Tito was doubly deviant, manifesting independence in both foreign and domestic matters. His territorial ambitions alarmed Moscow. It feared other East European allies might mimic Tito's behaviour, and that Tito might use the Cominform as an institutional vehicle to spread his heresy.[203]Tito's popularity in other East European countries was well known to Soviet political elites.[204] Stalin and Molotov deemed Yugoslavia's behaviour adventur- istic, as it threatened to unite the US and Britain against Moscow.[205] Moscow withdrew its advisers from Yugoslavia in March 1948, following up with a letter of excommunication distributed to all Cominform members.[206] Tito's codename within the CC was changed from Eagle (Orel) to Vulture (Stervy- atnik).[207] To Moscow's alarm, other East European Communist parties, with the exception of Hungary's, did not immediately support either Moscow's letter or the subsequent June 1948 Cominform resolution repeating Moscow's charges. The Romanian, Czech, Bulgarian and Polish Communist parties had to be prodded to hold meetings to discuss and approve the Soviet position. The problem was not only with Communist elites, but also with average folk on the street, who, it was reported back to Moscow, 'see Tito as a hero worthy of imitation'.[208]

As Volokitina and her co-authors put it, a 'new stage in the history of the region' began in 1948: 'the hot phase of Sovietisation'.[209] The Soviet continuum from difference to danger was evident in East European identity relations. Rudolf Slansky, for example, was initially charged with a 'nationalist devia­tion', permitting Czechoslovakia to embark upon a 'special path to socialism' which ignored the universality of the Soviet model. This then threatened the 'restoration of capitalism' in the republic, which in turn would have turned

Czechoslovakia over to 'the English and American imperialists'.[210] A Soviet consulate in Hungary approvingly reported the renaming of hundreds of sites for Lenin, Stalin, Molotov, the Red Army and Gorky, as well as the introduction of Russian language study. The works of Akhmatova, Zoshchenko and other 'disgraced' Soviet authors were removed from Hungarian libraries.[211]

Hungarian party elites told their Soviet counterparts that there was too much Jewish influence in their ranks. But in early 1950, the anti-cosmopolitan campaign had lulled, and so Hungarian reports were ignored. Less than two years later, however, as the Soviet trials in the Anti-Fascist Committee Affair' got under way, Hungarian and Czech Communists were instructed to unmask their own cosmopolitan fifth columns.[212] Just as attention to Western art, cul­ture and science was being regarded at home as dangerous, Soviet officials reported that Western culture was exerting too much influence in Eastern Europe. In July 1949, the Soviet Union requested the closure of all Western culture and information centres in Eastern Europe, as well as the reduction of tourism and exchanges to a minimum. The allure of the West was related directly to the vulnerability of socialism in these countries.[213]

Purges also followed Soviet procedures. As Stalin wrote to Hungarian party leader Matyas Rakosi in September 1949: 'I think that Rajkmust be executed, since the people will not understand any other sentence.' And so he was, two weeks later.[214] Moscow measured the effectiveness of campaigns in Eastern Europe as it had in the Soviet Union: by the numbers. Soviets monitored how many people were arrested, purged and executed, recommending more 'vigilance' if too few affairs were being pursued.[215] The 'liberal pacifistic' atti­tude ofCzech comrades was criticised because too many Czech deviants were allowed to emigrate, rather than be incarcerated or executed. Just as political prisoners in the Soviet Union were dragooned into slave labour to build the White Sea canal, Romanian deviants worked on 'socialist projects', such as the Danube-Black Sea canal.[216]

Stalinist fear of difference importing imperialist danger dominated relations with Eastern Europe. But relations with China were not fraught with a fear of difference, but were the external projection of the Stalinist hierarchy of centre and periphery, modernity and pre-modernity. China was the Soviet Union's oldest little brother, a revolutionary comrade-in-arms who aspired to become just like its elder and better. In the summer of 1949 Stalin met six times in Moscow with Liu Shaoqi, one of Mao's closest colleagues. At one meeting, Liu presented a six-hour report on China's political realities in which China was repeatedly described as on the road to becoming the Soviet Union. On Stalin's personal copy are a dozen 'Da!'s written in Stalin's hand after passages that acknowledge China's subordinate position.⁴⁴ During these meetings an international division of revolutionary labour emerged. Stalin delegated to China leadership of the anti-colonial movements of Asia, while reserving for Moscow overall leadership of the world Communist movement, including Eastern Europe, and the working-classes of modern North America and Western Europe. China would be the surrogate vanguard for revolutions in places like Vietnam and Indonesia, while the Soviet Union would be China's vanguard. Mao agreed to this hierarchy in his December 1949 meeting with Stalin in Moscow.⁴⁵

This division of labour got its first serious test in Korea. A month after Mao left Moscow, North Korea's leader, Kim Il-Sung, arrived with promises of a quick victory in a short war against South Korea. Stalin agreed to provide the necessary military assistance, but told Kim that no Soviet forces would fight, even if the US did intervene, but that China would. In June 1950, North Korea attacked with initial success. But the US-led counter-attack had, by late September, resulted in US forces approaching the Chinese border. On 1 Octo­ber, Kim sent a telegram to Stalin warning of a North Korean collapse. Zhou En-lai visited Stalin in Sochi a week later where Stalin suggested that China could demonstrate its identity as vanguard of the Asian national liberation movement (NLM) by saving North Korea. Stalin told Zhou En-lai that it was China's war, but the Soviet Union would provide military equipment and fighter pilots.⁴⁶

During Mao's only meetings with Stalin, the February 1950 treaty of alliance was signed, promising vast quantities of Soviet economic and military aid,

44 In Jun, 'Origins of the Sino-Soviet Alliance', p. 305. The original is in APRF, f. 45, oi, d. 328.

45 Goncharov Lewis and Litai, Uncertain Partners, pp. 46-74; Chen Jian, Mao's Chinaand the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 50 and 120; Ilya V Gaiduk, Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy towards the Indochina Conflict (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 2.

46 Goncharov Lewis and Litai, Uncertain Partners, pp. 137-44 and 188-95; Zubok and Ple- shakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, pp. 62-8; Chen Jian, Mao's China, pp. 121-55; and Danilov and Pyzhikov, Rozhdeniesverkhderzhavy, pp. 65-6.

along with an alliance against the US and Japan. At the same time, however, Mao had to swallow what he later called 'two bitter pills': continued Soviet control over Port Arthur and the Manchurian railroad, and a secret agreement to keep foreigners and foreign investment, other than Soviet, out of Manchuria and Xinjiang.[217]

Soviet relations with China also revealed relative Soviet indifference towards NLMs. At Chinese behest Ho Chi Minh arrived secretly (a Soviet condition) in Moscow while Mao was there. In his only meeting with Stalin, Ho was advised to work through China, and not through the Soviet Union directly. While China recognised the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) with great fanfare on 18 January 1950, the Soviet Union did not recognise Hanoi for two weeks, and then most quietly. Moreover, contacts with Ho were handled through the French Communist Party, reflecting the Eurocentrism of Stalin's foreign policy more generally.[218]

The politics of identity between the Soviet Union and its Chinese allies worked differently from the way it did in Eastern Europe. Increasing Soviet intolerance of difference resulted in purges, arrests and executions and the assumption ofpower in Eastern Europe of Communists with close associations withpatrons in the Kremlin. Mao, onthe other hand, independently and enthu­siastically promoted the adoption of the Soviet model in China. At the March 1949 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plenum, Mao stated so explicitly.[219]Moscow found itself with a very close ally in its struggle against deviation.

Difference at home: allies abroad, 1953-6

Stalin's death buried the NSM. The 'us versus them' binarisation of the world was replaced by a continuum of difference, with a broad contested middle ground between the NSM and its dangerous deviant Other, including the possibility of being neither us nor them. The possibility of a 'private' self appeared, an individual personality unconnected to the public performance of being Soviet, socialist or Communist. The recognition of the possibility of irrelevant and innocuous difference entailed as well the acknowledgement of fallibility, of the possibility that errors might be made by even good Soviets. Tolerance for both mistakes and difference spoke of a new level of security and confidence felt by the post-Stalin generation of political elites in Moscow.

This said, two important elements of the Stalinist identity of the Soviet Union remained: hierarchy and the Russian nation. The Soviet Union remained the apex and the centre of the world communist community, and the teleo- logical endpoint for all modern humanity. Within the Soviet Union, Russia remained the vanguard for all other republics and peoples, with Central Asians deemed the most peripheral and needful of a vanguard in Russia and Moscow. The Russian nation remained the surrogate nation for a putatively suprana­tional Soviet man.[220]

The political manifestations of these identity shifts in March 1953 were dramatic and almost instantaneous. Within a month, 1.2 million prisoners were amnestied andboththe Doctors' Plot and Mingrelian Affair were publicly declared over and mistaken. Within months, Ilya Ehrenburg's novel The Thaw was published and Zoshchenko was readmitted to the Writers' Union. All victims of the Leningrad Affair were publicly rehabilitated within a year of Stalin's funeral. In December 1954, the Second Writers' Congress was held, the first since 1938, at which all the issues of Soviet identity were debated publicly for five days. In September 1955, Molotov was forced to write a public recantation in the pages of the single most important theoretical publication of the CPSU, Kommunist, in which he admitted socialism had already been built in the Soviet Union, not just had its foundations laid, and so the Soviet system was far more secure than he had hitherto acknowledged. The capstone to the period was the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, where Stalin's excesses were revealed and publicly condemned.[221]

The boundaries of permissible difference were revealed in Budapest in November 1956, and were reflected back into Soviet society. But there was no turning back. Molotov persistently struggled against difference, but he, too, was defeated, at the June 1957 CC plenum devoted to the removal of the 'anti-party group'. The next thirty years witnessed a continual contestation of the boundaries of permissible deviation from the Soviet model at home.[222]

In this initial period after Stalin's death, institutionalisation of a discourse of difference did not occur as much as Stalinism was de-institutionalised. Just one day after Stalin's death, for example, the MVD and MGB were merged, so the police were again being supervised by those responsible for internal law and order, not for finding foreign agents. A year later, the MGB and its intelligence functions were severed from the MVD, so the Stalinist conception of criminality as being connected to a foreign threat was deprived of its insti­tutionalised power.⁵³ Only two weeks later, the Gulag was transferred from the MVD to the Ministry of Justice.⁵⁴ With Georgii Malenkov's demotion in January 1955, Khrushchev packed the CC with his proponents.⁵⁵ This strategy paid off in the June 1957 CC meeting that removed Molotov, Malenkov, Lazar Kaganovich and Dmitrii Shepilov.

New institutional carriers for the discourse of difference emerged in society more broadly. The custom of readers writing letters to editors of newspapers and magazines became so widespread that media outlets competed for them. The intelligentsia as a social stratum was revived in strength and confidence, making editorial boards of journals and the meetings and directorates of their official organisations platforms for advancing the boundaries of difference both in everyday discussions and in mass publications.⁵⁶

With regard to foreign policy, the death of Stalin disrupted the institu­tionalised relationships between East European Communist leaders and their allies in Moscow. And the growing tolerance of difference put them on inse­cure discursive footing. The abolition of the Cominform in April 1956 was the official end to institutionalised compulsion to adhere to a single Soviet model of socialism.

The new discourse of difference changed Soviet interests in other countries in the world. East Europeans could be good allies without reproducing the Soviet model in detail. NLMs could be good allies just by not being allied with the imperialist West. Russian success at home as vanguard for Central Asia gave Moscow confidence that the Soviet Union could be a surrogate vanguard for dozens of countries trying to become independent of colonial rule. The Soviet Union officially recognised many roads to socialism, including electoral ones.

The recognition of difference was also reflected in relations with the West. The realisation that the US was not the West and that European states, in

Istoricheskii Arkhiv 3 (1993): 73; 'Posledniaia "Antipartiinaia" Gruppa. Stenograficheskii', 21; 'Posledniaia "Antipartiinaia Gruppa"', pp. 33-4; Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, 203; Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 301-7; and 'Vengriia, Aprel'-Oktiabr' 1956', Istoricheskii Arkhiv 4 (1993): 113.

53 Beda, Sovetskaiapoliticheskaiakul'tura, pp. 45-7. 54 Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 246.

55 Chuev, Molotov Remembers,p. 351. 56 Zubkova, Russia after the War,p. 161.

particular, had interests autonomous from Washington, was reflected in a softer foreign policy on Finland, Turkey, Korea and Austria, and unilateral reductions in armed forces, in part, expected to encourage more European independence from the imperialist centre in the US. Recognition ofdifference dramatically expanded the numbers and kinds of states with which the Soviet Union could develop an interest in allying. Capitalist encirclement was replaced by a zone of peace. And recognition of fallibility, of having made mistakes in the past, made new alliances more probable and rendered existing alliances less problematic.

In Eastern Europe, Soviet confessions that the Doctors' Plot, the anti- cosmopolitan campaign and other purges in the last five years had been mis­guided put local Communists who had been trying to implement the Soviet model in awkward positions. Those most closely identified with the Stalinist model were discredited; those they had replaced, imprisoned or executed were politically reborn. Wladislaw Gomulka and Imre Nagy, for example, returned to power in Poland and Hungary, respectively. But, less dramatically in the rest of Eastern Europe, Stalinist leaders were compelled to rehabilitate those they had just purged, many posthumously.[223]

One of the most dramatic changes in Soviet foreign policy came in rela­tions with Yugoslavia. Just three months after Stalin's death, the Soviet Union returned its ambassador to Belgrade. Tito was visited by Khrushchev and a large and apologetic entourage in 1955. New Soviet identity relations helped make this alliance possible. Whereas before, Tito's national brand ofsocialism was deemed dangerous, by 1955 it was understood as an example of tolerable difference from the Soviet model. In addition, Moscow remained the centre of the world Communist movement, and therefore, Yugoslavia remained sub­ordinate to that centre, at least from Moscow's perspective. Yugoslavia was understood as a younger Slavic brother to the Russian nation. This Slavic fraternity helped mitigate concerns about deviations from the Soviet model. Finally, the Soviet leadership confessed to having erred in its treatment of Yugoslavia in the past.

Each of these understandings was resisted by Molotov. At the July 1955 CC plenum devoted to Yugoslavia, Molotov branded Tito a dangerous deviant, denied the relevance of ethno-national Russian identity to the Soviet model, defended earlier Soviet actions and concluded that the Soviet conferral of a socialist identity on Tito would only encourage further deviations from the Soviet model in Eastern Europe.[224]

Molotov's fears were justified. Khrushchev's not-so-secret speech enumer­ating Stalin's errors at the Twentieth Party Congress was followed by unrest in Poland.[225] In the June 1956 Poznan demonstrations, workers demanded reli­gious freedom and made anti-Soviet and anti-Communist speeches. Seventy were killed and 500 wounded. The Polish party was split between supporters of the orthodox Soviet model and proponents of a Polish path to socialism. In August, Gomulka's party membership was restored, and in October he rejoined the Politburo, becoming first secretary once again on 17 October. Two days later, Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich and Khrushchev arrived in Warsaw. Khrushchev refused to shake hands and called Poles traitors. Gomulka greeted Khrushchev by saying, 'I am Gomulka, the one you kept in prison for three years.' The day after the Soviet delegation left, tens of thousands of Poles participated in pro-Gomulka rallies, culminating in 500,000 demonstrators in Warsaw on 24 October.[226] This mass support for the embodiment of Polish difference was noted in Politburo meetings in Moscow, as was Gomulka's assurance that Poland had no intentions of leaving the Warsaw Pact.[227]

Poland had just missed violating the boundaries of permissible difference; Hungary would not, becoming accused of dangerous deviation for the next thirty years.[228] In June 1953 Matyas Rakosi was advised by Moscow to abandon Stalinist methods of rule. Rakosi held out, hoping his allies in the Kremlin would overcome this new tolerance of difference. His hopes were realised. In April 1955, Rakosi had his reformist prime minister, Imre Nagy, removed and expelled from the party.[229] But this return to orthodoxy was short-lived, as Khrushchev was welcoming Tito's Yugoslavia into the ranks of socialist allies. As Molotov recalled, 'the turning point was already completed with the Yugoslav question', not the Twentieth Party Congress.⁶⁴ Both Poles and Hun­garians watched de-Stalinisation carefully, and still more, the rapprochement with Yugoslavia, the Stalinists with Molotovian dread, the discredited reform­ers, with hope.[230]

After the Twentieth Party Congress, Hungarian demonstrators demanded de-Stalinisation resume and that Nagy be restored. Iurii Andropov, the Soviet ambassador to Hungary at the time, supported Rakosi, and called his oppo­sition 'dangerous counter-revolutionaries'. The reformist riots in Poznan encouraged Hungarians to push for more reform. In July 1956, Mikoyan went to Budapest to replace Rakosi with a less Stalinist figure. In the following weeks and months, the peculiarly close alliance relationships between Moscow and Eastern Europe were repeatedly demonstrated. Mikoyan participated in Hun­garian Politburo meetings in July, Janos Kadar in Soviet Politburo meetings in November, and Liu Shaoqi in Soviet Politburo meetings about Hungary in the

autumn. [231]

By October, student demonstrators had crossed a red line: they demanded not only the restoration of Nagy, but the withdrawal of all Soviet armed forces. Nagy was restored to the Politburo on 23 October, but the Soviet Politburo, save Mikoyan, agreed to deploy Soviet troops against the Hungarian protestors the same day. During Soviet Politburo discussions, Molotov took advantage of the occasion to remind his colleagues how wrong Khrushchev had been about tolerating difference, especially with regard to Yugoslavia. Khrushchev himself was having second thoughts, coming to see Nagy as a dangerous acolyte of Tito. Molotov preferred Ferenc Miinnich, who had spent half his life in the Soviet Union, as Nagy's replacement. The rest ofthe Politburo preferred Kadar, because he had been imprisoned by the Stalinist Rakosi. Molotov opposed him for the very same reason![232]

The pivotal day was 30 October. In a document on relations between the Soviet Union and other socialist countries adopted that day, Moscow admitted it had erred, violated its allies' sovereign equality and was committed to re- examining its troop deployments in Eastern Europe, save Germany. But later the same day, Suslov and Mikoyan reported from Budapest that the Hungarian army could not be trusted and that Nagy had asked that negotiations begin on Hungarian withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Difference had already become dangerous disloyalty.

Fear of falling dominoes, loss of credibility and promises of a short war were all evident in Soviet decision-making on Hungary. As Khrushchev told the rest of the Politburo on 31 October, 'If we leave Hungary . . . the imperialists, the Americans, English, and French, will perceive it as weakness on our part and will go on the offensive.' At the same time, a series of intelligence and foreign ministry reports from embassies, especially in Romania and Czechoslovakia, spoke of the degenerative effect of Hungary on the political situations in these countries. Hungarians along the Romanian border had begun to seek support in Romania; ethnic Hungarians in Romania and Czechoslovakia had begun to manifest sympathy for events in Budapest; and Romanian students demon­strated in support of Nagy. In Moscow and other Soviet cities students were meeting in support of Nagy. By 1 November, Presidium members began invok­ing the fears of their allies in Eastern Europe, arguing that these friends were losing confidence in Moscow. Finally, Marshal Konev promised Khrushchev and the Politburo that it would take only three to four days to crush the counter-revolution in Hungary. He was right.

The invasion of Hungary stalled the Thaw in the Soviet Union. The limits of tolerable difference had been reached and breached. Hungarian events alerted Soviet elites to the danger of difference at home. Often when Khrushchev would consider reviving the Thaw he was met by references to Hungary, before which 'he would retreat'.[233] And there was reason for such fears. Especially in the Baltic republics, local party leaders reported growing unrest, support for Gomulka and Nagy and anti-Soviet, nationalist and religious demonstrations. On the night of 2 November, for example, in Kaunas, Lithuania, at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, 35,000 Lithuanians, mainly students, gathered to demand that Russians end their Communist occupation. In Vilnius, people questioned why the Soviet declaration on relations with other socialist countries did not apply to them, as well![234]

Reformist Communists abroad were so worried about the orthodox reac­tion that they petitioned the Kremlin not to purge their more tolerant allies in Moscow.[235] Orthodox Soviet allies in the GDR, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, took advantage of Moscow's fear of devi­ation.[236] Richter shows how Hungary empowered Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich in foreign policy, leading to their June 1957 attempt to depose Khrushchev.⁷² But Khrushchev, too, had learned the limits of difference. Khrushchev came to regard Tito increasingly as China did, a dangerous deviant within the ranks.[237] The threat from Hungary was reflexively linked to the threat from the US; deviation there was closely associated with US intentions to undermine socialism in Eastern Europe in general. Many future initiatives of Khrushchev in the area of arms control and troop withdrawals from East­ern Europe were opposed by other Politburo members invoking the lessons of Hungary.[238]

One might expect that the discourse of difference would have soured rela­tions with Stalinist China. This prediction is inaccurate, but only in timing. While national roads to socialism violated Chinese adherence to a single Stalin­ist model, and they did oppose treating Tito's Yugoslavia as a socialist country, Soviet admissions of past mistakes compensated for the toleration of deviance. Moreover, Khrushchev's decision to use force in Hungary, sanctioned and urged by the Chinese leadership at the time, reassured Beijing that there were some limits Khrushchev would thankfully not tolerate.[239]

Soviet aid in the construction of industrial and defence plants accelerated after Stalin's death. In May 1953, the Soviet Union agreed to an additional ninety-one enterprises, and to the replacement of fighter aircraft and tanks with newer models.[240] During Khrushchev's first visit to China in October 1954, Mao asked to acquire nuclear weapons. Khrushchev suggested China concentrate on economic reconstruction, pledging it could rely on the Soviet deterrent, but did offer a civilian nuclear reactor. In March 1955, Moscow agreed to build another 166 industrial enterprises and help China build an atomic reactor and cyclotron. Seventy per cent of China's foreign trade in the 1950s was with the Soviet Union.[241]

Mao cautiously supported Khrushchev's campaign against Stalin, though not the discourse of difference more generally. As Mao told the Soviet ambas­sador, Iudin, in May 1956, if he 'had always followed Stalin's advice, he wouldbe deadby now'.[242] Mao was dissatisfied with the ambiguity createdby the ongoing debates in the Soviet Union between difference and orthodoxy. In April 1956, Mao published his own interpretation of the Twentieth Party Congress, craft­ing the 70 : 30 rule of thumb about Stalin: he was 70 per cent right (about the economic and political development model) and 30 per cent wrong (on treatment of China and murder of colleagues).[243] Mao fashioned his own Thaw, the Hundred Flowers campaign launched in January i957. But it was aimed not at expanding the boundaries of difference, but at flushing out 'Rightists' who would then be arrested.[244]

In the decolonising world, the discourse of difference greatly expanded potential Soviet allies beyond Communist Parties. The experience of Central Asia provided living proof that a vanguard in Moscow could substitute for the absence of a proletarian vanguard abroad. US support for its allies in the Third World made Soviet support for NLMs that much more natural.

In April 1955, the non-aligned movement was born in Bandung, Indone­sia. From the perspective of the new discourse of difference in the Soviet Union, non-aligned meant not aligned with imperialism, permitting closer relations with Moscow. Nehru, Sukarno and Nasser became friends in the struggle against imperialism in the newly christened zone of peace. In August 1955, Moscow approved the sale of Czech arms to Egypt. In November and December 1955, Khrushchev spent four weeks in India, Burma and Afghanistan, during which he compared these three countries to Central Asia. Reading the decolonising world through the Soviet experience in Central Asia, Khrushchev declared that the road to socialism was possible for anybody in the developing world, no matter how meagre their material resources. One need only rely on Soviet experience and help.

Molotov found preposterous the idea of socialism in places like India as he did on difference at home and in Yugoslavia. While not denying the possibility of normal relations with Delhi, he rejected the idea that leaders such as Nehru could ever escape their petit bourgeois nationalist identities, and consequent roles as imperialist lackeys.[245] On 1 June 1956 Molotov was replaced as foreign minister by Dmitrii Shepilov, who had played a key role in the Soviet opening to Egypt in 1955.⁸² At the June 1957 CC plenum, Molotov was accused by Mikoyan of not recognising the obvious differences between India, Egypt and Afghanistan, on the one hand, and Pakistan, the Philippines and Iraq, on the other. Instead 'Molotov says the bourgeois camp is united against us... He is a bygone conservative ... This is a left-wing infantile disease in which we cannot indulge . . .We should not be fetishists or dogmatists.' Khrushchev summed matters up: 'Comrade Molotov, if they accept you as one of our leaders, you will ruin your country, take it into isolation ... Molotov is a hopeless dried-up

old man.'⁸³

Cold peace at home: cold war abroad, 1957-85

At a May 1957 Kremlin meeting with the intelligentsia, Khrushchev warned them that if they ever tried to create a 'Pett^'fi circle' of reformist intellectuals like they had in Budapest the year before, we 'will grind you into dust'.[246]Khrushchev's fulminations were characteristic of the rest of his rule: support for pushing the boundaries of difference with periodic eruptions of vitriol against what he deemed transgressive. Khrushchev charged Pasternak and others with a lack of patriotism after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Lit­erature in October 1958. But in May i960 Khrushchev approved the publication, in Pravda no less, of an anti-Stalinist poem by Andrei Tvardovskii. Two years later, Khrushchev was railing at the Manezh exhibit of contemporary Soviet art about 'all this shit' they were producing. But almost simultaneously he was approving, along with the Politburo, which met twice over the manuscript, the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's epic anti-Stalinist novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.[247]

The removal of Khrushchev from power in October 1964 did not narrow the boundaries of permissible difference. Indeed, Mikhail Suslov, in reading the bill of particulars before the CC, praised 'Khrushchev's positive role in unmasking the cult of personality of Stalin', and agreed with the removal of Molotov in 1957.[248] Under Brezhnev and his two successors, the main targets of official repression were those who engaged in public dissent, especially after August 1968.[249] The Siniavskii/Daniel' trials of February 1966 were an early manifestation of official intolerance. But it grew more comprehensive and more directed against those with manifest political demands to change the Soviet political system.[250] Solzhenitsyn, for example, was finally exiled in February 1974, at Andropov's personal behest.[251] A 1979 KGB report on avant- garde artists could have been written in 1955: 'they produce individualistic works . . . based strictly on personal perceptions'.⁹⁰

This struggle over difference at home was not isolated from identity relations with the outside world: China was a prominent player. The removal of Molotov in 1957 not only marked the triumph of difference over the NSM, but also the irreversible turn towards alienation from China. China's Stalinist model helped proponents of difference at home point out what restoration ofthe NSM would mean for socialism in the Soviet Union. This domestic role for Chinese identity continued until the Chinese alliance with the United States after the death of Mao in the late 1970s. By then, however, a new external Other had emerged on the revisionist side of the spectrum: Eurocommunism, or National Social Democracy, personified by Enrico Berlinguer in Italy.[252]

Soviet identity was publicly contested in the discourse of permissible differ­ence in relationship to Chinese dogmatism, Eurocommunist revisionism and competition with the imperialist camp headed by the United States. Mean­while, identification with Europe was a counter-discourse within the Soviet party elite and intelligentsia. Its public manifestations, whether as Eurocom­munism or as Andrei Sakharov's 'Letter to the Soviet Leadership', were offi­cially repressed as anti-Soviet, but identification with European Social Democ­racy as the desirable Soviet future was already emerging as the alternative beyond the boundaries of permissible difference in the 1950s. Ironically, both the invasion ofCzechoslovakia in 1968 and the accession to the Helsinki Treaty in 1975 energised identification with Europe among Soviet elites.[253] By the 1960s, a discourse on ethno-national Russian identity was emerging, especially among the 'village prose writers', led by Valentin Rasputin. While granted more offi­cial tolerance to publish its views, it was not as deeply institutionalised as its European alternative.[254]

If the early years of the Thaw were characterised by the de- institutionalisation ofStalinism, then the next thirty years witnessed the insti- tutionalisation of both the dominant discourse and its competitors. There are several related issues here: the institutionalised lack of unbiased information available to decision makers; the position of General Secretary within the decision-making process; the split between the MFA and Central Committee International Department (CCID); the development of research institutes; and the persistence of the intelligentsia as a carrier of the discourse of difference.

Khrushchev, despite making agriculture his primary domestic avo­cation, continued to receive inflated statistics on harvests, yields and technological innovation throughout his tenure as General Secretary.[255] Georgii Shakhnazarov, an aide to both Andropov in the i960s and i970s, and then Gor­bachev in the i980s, relates how party elites, such as CCID secretary Boris Ponomarev and Defence Minister Dmitrii Ustinov, remained in a state of delu­sion about the economic conditions of the country, reporting their election excursions to the countryside, where all had been made ready for them, as if it were a representative sample of Soviet reality.[256] But this delusion extended to foreign and security policy as well. It was not until 1990, for example, that Sovi­ets found out that the May i960 shootdown of Gary Powers's U-2 spy plane had required thirteen missiles, and had only inadvertently been hit.[257] Soviet ambas­sadors, especially in the developing world, reported to Moscow just like an obkom secretary would, exaggerating the industrial, agricultural and political accomplishments of the piece of territory they considered to be their own.[258]

Oleg Grinevskii, for example, recalls the 'false, at times even absurd, infor­mation the KGB and CCID fed the Politburo', representations that reinforced the Soviet identity of world revolutionary vanguard with regard to coun­tries where a revolutionary situation hardly existed.[259] This discursive bias, the twin exaggerations of socialism's prospects and imperialism's hostility, manifested itself with especially baleful consequences in the decision-making on Afghanistan in 1978-9, but was commonplace.[260] The apocrypha about Soviet negotiators at arms control talks learning Soviet military secrets from their Western counterparts are true. Gorbachev himself noted that not even Politburo members could get basic information about the military-industrial complex, or even the economy.[261] In response to Andropov's conclusion as KGB chairman in May i98i that the US was preparing to launch a nuclear war, local KGB officers around the world, for the next three years, dutifully col­lected evidence to support the view held in Moscow.[262] Information contrary to Soviet policy, such as a memorandum recommending withdrawal from Afghanistan in early 1980 that went unread until 1986, was ignored, rarely contemplated, written up or submitted.[263] As Evgenii Primakov noted in his memoirs, 'we [journalists and scholars who opposed the decision to intervene in Afghanistan] were led mainly by the established custom of unreservedly supporting all decisions taken from above'.[264]

The General Secretary's position was an institution ofauthority and power. As Shakhnazarov, writing as a political scientist, concluded, the Soviet Union and its socialist allies had one 'basic principle in common, its functioning was one-third defined by institutions and two-thirds by the personality of the leader'. While 'no one would challenge the right of the General Secretary to have the last word in resolving any question, this right did not belong so much to the man as to the position'.[265] Shakhnazarov recounts Andropov receiving a phone call from Khrushchev: 'before my eyes this lively striking interesting man was transformed into a soldier ready to fulfil any order of the commander. Even his voice changed, with tones of obedience and submissiveness.'[266]

The norm of party elite unity reinforced this authority and helps explain how the General Secretary preserved the prevailing discourse. After the post- Stalinist discourse of difference was fixed after 1957, Khrushchev staved off attacks from more orthodox quarters. Only when there was an overwhelm­ing consensus, as in October 1964, did other elites join the attacks.[267] Elite fear of difference helped preserve the norm of unity. The discursive power concentrated in a particular General Secretary also accounts for the possibil­ity of a dramatic shift in discourse once a General Secretary dies, as in the case of Stalin in 1953 and Chernenko in 1985. The institution of the General Secretary, combined with the institutionalised bias for agreeable information, helps explains the staying power of the predominant discourse, as well as the structural disadvantages faced by challengers.[268]

The discourse of difference implied recognition of the decolonising world as a zone of peace, rather than as a zone of imperialist lackeys. This recognition was institutionalised within the CCID, which had responsibility for relations with these revolutionary nationalist movements. The CCID and MFA were competitors for the next thirty years. The MFA, especially after Shepilov's replacement by Gromyko in February 1957, became still more closely associ­ated with the reproduction of a Great Power Soviet identity in competition with the US and Europe.[269] Within the MFA there emerged a privileged group around Gromyko in Moscow and Ambassador Anatolii Dobrynin in Washing­ton closely associated with Europe and the US.[270] 'Only the US, big European countries and the UN interested Gromyko ... His heart did not lie in the Third World. He did not consider them to be serious partners. "He considered the Third World only to be a problem," writes Dobrynin. "He himself told me this".'[271]

At one of the meetings in the CC in late 1978 Rostislav Ul'ianovskii (Pono- marev's deputy) said:

'We need to bring things to the point that the NLM of Arabs becomes a socialist revolution. Agreements with American imperialism . . . will only . . . distract the Arab working class from its main political task.'

Ponomarev nodded his head in agreement.

'God!', lamented Robert Turdiev, an MFA expert, on leaving the CC build­ing. 'Do these people understand what is happening on planet Earth? What Arab working class? What socialist revolution in the Middle East? Where do these senile old men live? On the moon, on Mars?'

'In an office on Staraya Ploshchad',' answered Anatolii Filev.

But Gromyko responded completely differently.

'Why have a conversation about a Middle East settlement in the CCID at all? This is not their business. Let them deal with Communist parties and NLMs.'[272]

The CCID preserved the orthodox Soviet identity of vanguard for socialist development in Central Asia. Ponomarev, who had been an aide to Georgii Dimitrov, head of the Comintern in the i940s, saw himself in that tradition. Shakhnazarov relates details of a meeting of the CC commission on Poland that took place in early 1981 under the chairmanship of Mikhail Suslov. The Soviet ambassador to Poland at the time, Boris Aristov, reported that the Polish peasantry, despite its traditional ideas, had turned out to be a far more reliable support for the regime than the working class, which had fallen under the influence of both Solidarity and the Catholic Church. This is heresy to the orthodox Soviet model of a working-class vanguard, and Ponomarev inter­rupted, saying that the Polish leadership needed to collectivise its private farms. Aristov demurred, repeating that Polish private farmers mostly supported the government. Ponomarev then reminisced about the 1920s and the great feat of collectivisation. Suslov, 'a reservoir of quotations from Lenin', cited an appropriate one on collectivisation. Suslov and Ponomarev then opined about Lenin and collectivisation. Finally, Ustinov said, 'Mikhail Andreevich, Boris Nikolaevich, why are we talking about communes when with each passing day Solidarity is threatening to remove the party from power!?'[273]

The institutionalisation of information, the authority ofthe General Secre­tary and the Great Power and vanguard identities of the MFA and CCID, respec­tively, help account forthe predominance ofthe orthodox official discourse; the emergence of research institutions, expert advice and the creative associations of the intelligentsia explain the development and deepening of its alternatives.

Shortly after the Twentieth Party Congress the Institute of World Eco­nomics and International Relations (IMEMO) was restored from Stalinist oblivion. Over the next ten years, regional institutes associated with the Soviet Academy of Sciences would be established for Latin America (1961), Africa (1962), Asia (1966) and the USA and Canada (ISKAN, 1967).[274] What these, and other research institutions such as the Novosibirsk Institute of Economics and Industrial Organisation and the Public Opinion Research Institute at Komso- mol'skaia Pravda, had in common was access to information about the outside world unavailable to average party or government officials, let alone the gen­eral public.[275] Another important site was in Prague, the editorial headquar­ters of Problems of Peace and Socialism, the journal of the world Communist movement.[276] Not only was there access to foreign publications, but daily dis­cussions with socialists from all over the world, most significantly, Western Europe. The cadre of Soviets who worked in Prague in the 1950s and 1960s became important carriers of a Soviet identification with Europe as a Social Democratic alternative to the Soviet model.[277]

These Soviet scholars and party workers formed a loose network of younger researchers, all informed about the outside world, and all interested in a reformed version of the Soviet model. While they never were a majority in any of the institutions that employed them, they affected and effected both local and national conversations about socialism through years of informal meetings, seminars, conferences and joint work on memos and speeches for political superiors.¹¹⁷

Given how information was organised in these years, this reformist dis­course rarely influenced decision-making at the top. But this too began to change slowly over time. Andropov, as CC secretary of the department of relations with socialist countries, recruited heavily from among the reformist cadres who had been in Prague to form his own personal staffofconsultants.[278]But this was uncommon. In the late i970s, for example, it was forbidden to send unsolicited memos directly to the Politburo or CC apparat. They had to be vetted by Chernenko's department, a death sentence for almost all ofthem. But a revolution of sorts occurred when Andropov became General Secretary in November 1982. He commissioned some 110 reports about Soviet domestic affairs from these reformist experts, and Gorbachev was in charge of this task.

The last institutional carrier of reformist discourse was the intelligentsia. They lived all across the Soviet Union and had their own institutions in creative unions, editorialboards of journals and publishing houses, performance spaces and, of course, their own works. They were the mass base for the reformist cadres who were officially placed in research institutes and party and gov­ernment positions. The intelligentsia was a vast and authoritative terrain on which the discourse of difference was acted out on a daily basis, keeping con­testation alive. I say authoritative because even Brezhnev failed to appoint his own favourites to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. And not even Brezhnev dared ask the academy to expel Sakharov from its ranks.[279]

The Soviet identity of difference, unchallenged after Molotov's removal, contradicted the Chinese identity of Stalinist orthodoxy. The discourse between China and the Soviet Union after i957 is almost identical to that between Molotov and Khrushchev the previous four years.[280] The Soviet iden­tification of itself as the centre and apex of the world revolutionary movement was in conflict with China's growing understanding of the Soviet Union as a revisionist, degenerate, bourgeois state. 'Each country defined the image of its partner according to whether or not it corresponded to its own ideas about the criteria of socialism.'[281] The identity conflict with China affected Soviet policy all over the world. Challenged by China for leadership of revolutions in the decolonising world, the Soviet Union redoubled its efforts there to counter these charges and establish its credentials as the true socialist vanguard. Criti­cised for sacrificing the world revolutionary movement on the altar of detente with the US, Khrushchev was increasingly constrained in making concessions to the West. Moreover, detente with the West increased Soviet interests in supporting NLMs in the developing world, to compensate for the softer line with the imperialists on the issues of Germany and nuclear weapons. The identity conflict with China also had domestic consequences for Soviet iden­tity. If Hungary fixed the limits of difference in 1956, then China in the 1960s empowered Soviet proponents of difference by giving them an example of orthodox Stalinism against which the Soviet Union was officially struggling.[282]

Identity politics helps explain why, as the split reached its climax in the 1960s, it was China, not the Soviet Union, who pushed matters to a complete break. Chinese identity was vulnerable to a reformist understanding of difference, because it had embarked on a neo-Stalinist industrial and cultural revolution. Soviet identity was not threatened, as China's greater orthodoxy was explained away by China's subordinate position on the hierarchy of modernity and revolutionary progress.[283] Soviet deviation could not so easily be explained away by China.

The fact that the Soviet Union never denied China its socialist identity reveals an important discursive bias in Moscow.[284] Difference in the direction of reformism could result in the loss of a socialist identity, as in Hungary and Czechoslovakia; difference in the direction of greater orthodoxy could not. This privileging of orthodoxy helps explain the extraordinary leverage Soviet allies in Eastern Europe and the decolonising world had on the Soviet leader­ship whenever they invoked more orthodox or revolutionary commitments than prevailed in Soviet discourse at home at the time.

In October 1957, the Soviets agreed to give China a model of an atomic bomb. But in January 1958 Mao announced the 'great leap forward', a neo-Stalinist modernisation programme. In March, Mao told his colleagues that the Soviet model was no longer appropriate.[285] In July 1959, Khrushchev declared the great leap forward to be a Leftist error. In August, the Soviet Union remained neutral on the border clashes between Indian and Chinese forces.[286] The same month, the Soviet Union informed China that nuclear co-operation was over because it was inconsistent with Soviet efforts to get a comprehensive ban on testing nuclear weapons with the United States.¹²⁷ A month later, after his trip to the United States, Khrushchev travelled to Beijing where Mao accused him of 'Right opportunism', incidentally, the charge made by Stalin in his purges in the 1930s against Bukharin, Tomskii and Rykov.[287] Suslov, in his report to the December 1959 CC plenum, wrote that Mao had created a cult of personality, parroting Twentieth Party Congress charges against Stalin.[288] In June i960, at the Romanian party congress, Khrushchev publicly declared Mao to be an 'ultra-leftist, ultra-dogmatist, indeed a Left revisionist', echoing the i957 charges against Molotov.[289] He announced, upon returning to Moscow, the withdrawal of all Soviet advisers from China. Khrushchev reported to a i960 CC plenum that 'when he talks to Mao, he gets the impression he is listening to Stalin'.[290]

The change in identity relations with China implied Soviet interests in proving its vanguard identity in the decolonising world.[291] At the December i960 meeting of Communist and workers' parties in Moscow, the Communist parties from Latin America, south-east Asia, and India all sided with China against the Soviet position of appreciating difference, of collaborating with bourgeois nationalists in decolonising countries. The next month, Khrushchev gave a speech at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in which he distinguished between just wars of national liberation and local and colonial wars that were both unjust and fraught with the risk of escalation to nuclear war. Soviet reluctance to arm resistance fighters in Algeria and Laos was overcome by the Chinese threat to supplant Moscow as the revolutionary vanguard.[292] In August i96i, Khrushchev approved an unprecedented level of military aid to NLMs in Latin America and Africa.[293] At a 1964 meeting of Latin American Communist parties in Havana, Moscow agreed to more military aid for local rebels on the condition that none of it ended up with factions enjoying Chinese support.[294] An April 1970 KGB memo to the CCID advocating a more aggressive

Soviet policy in Africa justified doing so by citing competition with China for leadership of revolutionary movements on that continent.[295] Together, the CCID and identity relations with China kept Soviet vanguard identity alive throughout the Cold War and pushed Moscow to a series of military interventions there to vindicate that identity.[296]

By 1962, economic activity between the two countries had been reduced to 5 per cent of 1959's level.[297] From September 1963 to July 1964, the CCP published a nine-part open letter in which it developed its case against the Soviet bourgeois deviant.[298] As Kulik put it, relations between the two were now based 'on generally accepted norms, [not] on the principles of socialist internationalism'.[299] From 1965 to 1973, the Soviets engaged in a sustained and massive military build-up in the Far East, punctuated by the armed clashes on the Amur River in 1969. From 1969 to 1973, Soviet manpower tripled to forty divisions, about 370,000 troops, most units of which were equipped with tactical nuclear missiles. ¹⁴¹

Only in 1978, with the ascension of Deng Xiaoping, and his reformist domes­tic policy, does the Stalinist Chinese Other disappear from Soviet identity pol­itics. It is replaced within the CCID by a view of China as a revisionist socialist power and within the MFA as a less hostile threat.¹⁴² As Wishnick observes, Suslov, CC secretary in charge of ideology until 1982 and Oleg Rakhmanin, secretary in charge of relations with socialist countries until 1986, were the 'headquarters in opposition to any change in relations with China'. They were uniquely advantaged institutionally by their mandates and by the fact that 'they enjoyed a near monopoly over information and analysis on China'.¹⁴³

The introduction of a 'limited contingent' of Soviet armed forces into Afghanistan in 1979 was the final act of Soviet self-encirclement. Opposed to the coup that toppled Mohammed Daud and brought the People's Demo­cratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) to power in April 1978, opposed to the PDPA's radical domestic programme, opposed to deploying Soviet troops to save an unpopular regime, Soviet leaders found themselves in a quagmire made oftheir own identity relations, institutional biases, deterrence fears and allied manipulation.

Andropov and Ponomarev told Taraki that a coup would not be welcome in Moscow. On 17 April 1978, the evening of the coup, both the MFA and KGB sent messages to the Soviet embassy in Kabul instructing them to stop it. But Taraki and Amin ignored them. When Ponomarev arrived in Kabul after the coup, Taraki boasted: 'Tell Ul'ianovskii, who always told me that we are a backward country not ready for revolution that I am now sitting in the presi­dential palace!'[300] While opposing the government's radicalism, the CCID saw a new country of socialist orientation, and Moscow as its vanguard.[301] Mean­while, Soviet intelligence agencies were, only a bit prematurely, it turns out, reporting about US support for 'reactionary forces', the mujahedin based in

Pakistan.[302]

Soviet leaders knew that the Afghan government, despite incessant plead­ings from Moscow, was doing little to elicit popular support.[303] At a March i979 Politburo meeting devoted to Afghanistan, there was unanimity on three things: the People's Republic of Afghanistan (PRA) had little popular support; the Soviet Union would not intervene militarily to support the PRA; the PRA government could not be allowed to fall. Kirilenko made the first point: 'We gave them everything. And what has come of it? Nothing of any value. They have executed innocent people for no reason and then told us that we also executed people under Lenin. What kind of Marxists have we found?'[304]Gromyko declared, 'I completely support Comrade Andropov's proposal to rule out deployment of our troops to Afghanistan.' He went on to point out that Afghanistan has not been subjected to any aggression. This is its inter­nal affair', implying no Great Power conflict with the US yet.[305] But Kosygin made a commitment that went unchallenged: 'Naturally, we must preserve Afghanistan as an allied government.'[306]

Kosygin, in a Moscow meeting with Taraki, with Gromyko, Ustinov and Ponomarev present, told him that this was not Vietnam. 'Our mutual enemies are just waiting for Soviet forces to appear on Afghan territory. This would give them an excuse to deploy' their own forces there.[307] Taraki nonetheless begged for Soviet troops to defend Afghanistan against the enemies it was creating, even suggesting Uzbeks dress up like Afghans. In May 1979, the Soviet embassy in Kabul denied an Afghan request for poison gas.[308] From March to Decem­ber 1979, Kabul requested Soviet military intervention eighteen times.[309] The professional military, represented by then Chief of the General Staff Nikolai Ogarkov and his first deputy, Sergei Akhromeev, both opposed Soviet forces entering Afghanistan.[310]

The mood in Moscow began to turn in October 1979; the Great Power deterrent discourse began to penetrate. After Hafizullah Amin had Taraki murdered after the latter returned from a Moscow meeting with Brezhnev, the KGB began to talk about Amin 'doing a Sadat', turning Afghanistan into a base to replace what the US had lost in Iran.[311] In early December, Andropov sent Brezhnev a memo arguing that Amin might turn to the West to secure his power.[312] Meanwhile, typical of Soviet allied relationships, Moscow had preferred candidates to Amin waiting in the wings, in this case Babrak Karmal, a favourite of the CCID.[313] In this same memo, the consensus on no Soviet troops is preserved, with one exception: the promise of a short successful operation to install Karmal in power, if necessary.[314]

At the 8 December 1979 Politburo meeting, all the discursive pieces added up. Andropov and Ustinov argued that Afghanistan would fall to the US, where they might deploy Pershing II intermediate-range nuclear missiles. A short successful military engagement was the worst-case scenario. Karmal would pursue a more moderate socialist programme where the Soviet vanguard could guarantee success. On 12 December, the decision was taken.¹⁵⁹ Shortly thereafter, Dobrynin asked Gromyko why, as the Americans were now so riled up. Gromyko answered: It's only for a month; we will do it and then get out quickly.'¹⁶⁰

A week after the Christmas Eve intervention, Andropov, Gromyko, Ustinov and Ponomarev reported to the Politburo that the new Karmal government intended to correct the revolutionary excesses of the previous regime.¹⁶¹ But by the first week of February, Ustinov speculated that Soviet troops would remain at least eighteen months. By the first week of March, Gromyko, Andropov and Ustinov reported to the Politburo that Karmal was not achieving the promised reforms.¹⁶² The war continued for nine years.

Social Democracy at home: normal Great Power abroad, 1985-91

Gorbachev understood the Soviet Union as a failing, yet perfectible, socialist project. If only it were to become more democratic, it could fulfil the Marxist- Leninist promise of being a model of Social Democracy for the world. This understanding had immediate foreign-policy implications. First, by admitting that the Soviet model itself was fraught with problems, the idea of the NSM as infallible was rejected. This rejection entailed the rejection of the Soviet Union as the model for the world revolutionary movement, as the vanguard or centre of Eastern European and Chinese socialism, and NLMs around the world. Difference with the Soviet model was no longer just grudgingly toler­ated, but demanded, as Soviet experience had shown it was grossly inadequate even at home, let alone when emulated abroad in less hospitable contexts.¹⁶³ Under Gorbachev, European Social Democracy and Eurocommunism became significant Others to imitate, not oppose.¹⁶⁴ The common roots of Soviet com­munism and European Social Democracy in progressive thought were hailed as promising the integration of the Soviet Union as a normal, civilised, socialist Great Power in a family of Great Powers all committed to common human values of prosperity at home and peaceful resolution of conflict abroad. It was a liberal vision of both the Soviet Union and the world. As Gorbachev himself put it, 'We are merging into the common stream of world civilization.'¹⁶⁵

160 Quoted in Mlechin, MID,p. 420.

161 'The Soviet Union and Afghanistan', pp. 160-3. 162 Ibid., pp. 166-73.

163 Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, trans. and ed. Robert English and Elizabeth Tucker (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), p. 61.

164 English, Russia and the Idea of the West, pp. 72-91,140-1,183-228; Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy, pp. 191-205; Chernyaev, My Six Years, p. 297; and Primakov, Gody v bol'shoi politike, p. 33.

165 Quoted in English, Russia and the Idea of the West, p. 193.

This new Soviet identity implied a far higher level of security for the Soviet Union. The zone of peace had been discursively expanded beyond Eastern Europe, NLMs and the world proletariat, to include virtually all humankind. What insecurity Soviets experienced was addressable through perestroika, glas- nost', and democratisation at home, making the country more prosperous and democratic, and new thinking abroad, reassuring the world that the Soviet Union had become a new country with which all could live in liberal harmony.[315] As early as March 1986, Gorbachev told a meeting of foreign min­istry officials that domestic Soviet identity was a foreign policy issue, namely, the development of democracy and respect for human rights at home would inspire trust for the Soviet Union abroad.[316]

De-institutionalisation of the NSM began with glasnost', or Gorbachev's demand that the media begin to report about problems confronting the Soviet economy. At first limited to economic issues, ecology and corruption, it was soon extended to political matters and history, and finally to foreign policy and security. The discrediting of the previous Soviet model cleared the way for Gorbachev to begin economic and political reforms. Reformist periodicals, such as Ogonek and Argumenty i fakty found that revealing shortcomings in the NSM paid: circulation for Ogonek went from 260,000 to 4 million, for Aif from 10,000 to 32.5 million.[317] In the last years of his rule, Gorbachev was con­strained by the discursive changes he authored. Irritated by reporting in Aif, he demanded the editor be fired; instead, journalists formed an ad hoc defence committee, and forced Gorbachev to back down from his old thinking.[318]

Gorbachev used the institutions he inherited, empowered ones that were emergent and created new ones. Gorbachev benefited from the inherited institution of General Secretary. Beyond the power it gave him to make all the other institutional and personnel changes noted above, it permitted the consolidation of his vision of Soviet identity as the predominant discourse in the Soviet Union. Within days of becoming General Secretary, he put Pono- marev, with whom he shared virtually no common intellectual ground, in charge of an array of foreign policy issues, in order to undermine Gromyko's MFA monopoly, and create an institutionalised challenge to those positions.¹⁷⁰ But within a year Ponomarev was replaced as CCID secretary by Dobrynin.

With this one appointment, the single foreign policy institution most respon­sible for the maintenance of the Soviet Union's vanguard identity, and for advocating support for NLMs around the world, was cut off at the discursive knees. Moreover, the MFA became the single most important foreign-policy institution, no longer competing with the CCID.[319]

In July 1985 Gorbachev replaced Gromyko with Eduard Shevardnadze, who replaced personnel, created a new division on arms control and disarmament, a department of humanitarian and cultural contacts and established a for­malised conduit to alternative discourses with the creation of an academic consultative council within the ministry. This council institutionalised the par­ticipation of experts, such as Primakov and Arbatov, whose reformist views had been largely ignored until then. Within a year, the MFA had experienced more turnover in personnel than any other Soviet bureaucracy. They brought new thinking and reinforced the MFA's focus on West European and American affairs, at the expense of the developing world and Eastern Europe. Shevard­nadze demanded 'unembellished pictures of events', just as Gorbachev was demanding from obkom secretaries and the media at home, and developed an alternative intelligence network of foreign ministry officials and researchers at IMEMO, ISKAN, the new Institute of Europe and the Moscow State Institute of International Affairs (MGIMO).

Shevardnadze's 'very non-professionalism helped him take bolder deci­sions . . . He would often put his aides off-balance. He would give them a paper, and then ask: "why have we taken this position?" All would shrug their shoulders with surprise, and say: "Well, we have always taken it." Shevard­nadze would shake his head, and reply: "That's not an answer. Explain to me the sense of this position."'[320] The new foreign minister compelled his colleagues to think in ways that were literally unimaginable to them before.

The military was one of the MFA's primary targets in the struggle over information. Having created a department of arms control within the MFA, the latter developed expertise and data, independent of the Defence Ministry and General Staff, that undermined arguments about Soviet military inferiority. The military was increasingly on the defensive, faced by a growing group of experts with privileged access to both the General Secretary and sensitive information that, until then, had been its monopoly.[321]

Aleksandr Yakovlev's CC Ideology Department created a new section on human rights.[322] Gorbachev used the traditional instruments of the General Secretary to purge the apparatus of old cadres. By 1986, there were eight new Politburo members and at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February 1987, 38 per cent of the CC was replaced. Editorial boards of key journals and newspapers were stocked with new thinkers.[323] Gorbachev created 'presiden­tial commissions', ad hoc bodies designed to provide him with advice, while circumventing inherited institutions such as the CC departments.[324]

The Soviet Union's new identity was enacted in Gorbachev's foreign policy of new thinking. Having abandoned the identity of vanguard and centre of the world revolutionary movement, interests in NLMs in the developing world, and in Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and China were transformed.

East European allies lost institutional entree into the Kremlin and discov­ered that their own post-Stalinist identities had little in common with the new Soviet understanding of itself as a European Social Democracy in the mak­ing. Ponomarev was infuriated by the fact that Gorbachev preferred to meet with Eurocommunists than with East European allies. As Ponomarev put it: 'How can this be? Scores of good communist leaders, and he meets with the bad Italians.'[325] Gorbachev met with the 'bad Italians' because he identified the Soviet future with the revisionist deviant discourse of Eurocommunism. What institutionalised resistance there was in Moscow to Gorbachev's new conceptualisation of relations with Eastern Europe was undercut by the arrival of Dobrynin and Aleksandr Yakovlev to the CCID, and the restoration of the MFA as the centre of Soviet foreign policy.[326] At an October 1985 meeting of the Warsaw Pact Political Consultative Council, Gorbachev told the assem­bled leaders that it was time for them to act independently of Moscow.[327] In a renunciation of the vanguard discourse of the previous thirty years, Gorbachev said that 'it is time we stopped running fraternal parties like obkoms ...If we disagree with them, then we have to make our point, not just excommunicate them, scheming and meddling in their internal affairs.'[328]

Gorbachev's expectation that East European states would remain Soviet allies, that they would become Social Democracies, along with the Soviet

Union, reflected his confidence in common human values.[329] Deviance was impossible in Eastern Europe since the Soviet vanguard identity was no more. In a meeting with East European Communist leaders in late i986, Gorbachev told them they could no longer rely on Moscow for support; they would have to generate their own domestic legitimacy.[330] By 1989, Gorbachev had proscribed the use of force in Eastern Europe, and not because the Soviet military was incapable, but because this 'would be the end of perestroika', at home; such actions were incompatible with Soviet identity and its implied interests in a liberal, law-governed, international order.[331] At the December i989 CC plenum, Yakovlev tied the new democratic Soviet identity to Soviet interests in Eastern Europe: 'If we have proclaimed freedom and democracy for ourselves, then how can we deny it to others?'[332]

The abandonment of the vanguard identity had similar effects on Soviet interests in the 'countries of socialist orientation' inherited from the thirty years of support for NLMs in the decolonisingworld. The most notable change was the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, a decision made by Gorbachev in principle in March 1985. But its formula of 'national reconciliation', that is, negotiated settlements resulting in coalition governments and subsequent elections, was pursued as well in Angola, Nicaragua and El Salvador.[333] From being a constituent part of the world revolutionary alliance, Gorbachev rede­fined the developing world as part of a global alliance against nuclear war and for the peaceful resolution of all conflicts. As in other realms of foreign policy, the discourse shifted radically because of the marginalisation of the CCID, and the empowerment of a minority point of view that had been in research institutes all along.[334]

Soviet interests in China were redefined in accordance with the new identity. China was no longer understood along socialist lines within the predominant discourse, though, importantly, within the CCID, they continued to treat China as a revisionist deviation, given DengXiaoping's market reforms. Contrariwise,

Soviet reformers seized on Chinese reforms as demonstrating the possibilities of the market at home. Control over policy on China shifted from the CCID to the MFA and the General Secretary, and so relations were normalised during the i980s such that by i998 trade between the two countries had already reached the level of the 1950s.[335]

Finally, the end of the Cold War with the West was associated with the new identity's acknowledgement of fallibility at home and abroad. Violations of the ideals of Social Democracy by Stalin and his successors had made the Soviet Union into an untrustworthy and threatening state; and its foreign policy actions in Afghanistan, Poland and Czechoslovakia, and its nuclear and conventional military build-up had exacerbated the problem. As a Great Power vanguard, the Soviet Union had encircled itself. By becoming a normal Social Democratic Great Power, the Soviet Union would ally with humanity against common threats, most importantly the danger of nuclear war. The Soviet Union would be more secure because the new discourse recognised the independent sovereignty of each state, thereby dissipating the illusory threat from a monolithic imperialist bloc headed by Washington. Gorbachev told a May 1986 MFA assembly that the most important direction of Soviet foreign policy should be European, and that the ministry was too Americanised.[336]

Gorbachev linked this new Soviet identity with the security dilemma previ­ous Soviet behaviour had created. Reporting to the Politburo after a meeting with the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, Gorbachev told his col­leagues that what she most wanted to know was 'What is the USSR today? She emphasized trust, and said the USSR had undermined that trust', but that the USSR's domestic reforms were making a deep impression on her, changing her image of the USSR.[337] Gorbachev told his Politburo colleagues that the West European leaders with whom he had met after the summit in Reykjavik with Reagan in November 1986 had said: 'you have no democracy . . . Let's say we trust you personally, but if you are gone tomorrow, then what? . . . Without democracy we will never achieve real trust in Soviet foreign policy abroad.'[338] The new Soviet identity treated public opinion in the West as real, and as partly the product of the Soviet Union's own foreign policy errors.[339]

Among the concessions Gorbachev made to change Soviet identity in the eyes of the West were: a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing announced in August 1985, repeatedly renewed until February 1987, by which time the US had conducted over twenty tests; acceptance of zero SS-20s, codified in the Decem­ber 1987 INF Treaty; April 1988 agreement to withdraw from Afghanistan; a unilateral 500,000 cut in conventional forces in Eastern Europe announced in December 1988; delinkage of strategic weapons talks from SDI in September 1989; non-interference in the peaceful liberation of Eastern Europe, culmi­nating in the velvet revolutions of November-December 1989; reunification of Germany accepted in July 1990; and support for the US war against Iraq, autumn 1990. Soviet insecurity was a self-inflicted wound that could be healed through not just changes in Soviet foreign policy, but a transformation of what the USSR was.[340]

Gorbachev spent the last two years of his rule desperately trying to convince the West that the Soviet Union hadbecome something else and that they should invest in his reforms so that world politics couldbeforevertransformed. Hewas disappointed. In May 1990, he told visiting German bankers that 'An historic turn is occurring in Europe and the world. If this turn is missed . . . then this will be narrow-minded pragmatism... If the Soviet Union does not fundamentally change itself, then nothing will change in the world. The Soviet people have turned to new forms of life. This is an epochal turn... But in the West, and especially in the US, they don't show a sufficiently broad approach.'[341] At the first Group of Eight (G8) meeting in London in July 1991, Gorbachev asked President George Bush explicitly: 'What kind of Soviet Union does the United States want to

see?'[342]

Between Europe and the United States, 1992-2000

There were three main discourses on Russian identity in the 1990s in Moscow: liberal, conservative and centrist. Each understood Russia with respect to internal, external and historical Others.[343] Liberals identified Russia's future, at first with the American, and then with the European, present. Theyidentified against the Soviet past and against the internal representation of that Other: the conservative discourse of Communists and far-right national patriots. They recognised the weakness of the Moscow federal Centre vis-a-vis its eighty- nine federal subjects, but felt economic prosperity within a democratic market economy would secure Russia from threats. Russia was understood as part of a universal civilisation of modern liberal market democracy.

Conservatives identified Russia's future with a Soviet past shorn of its Stal­inist brutality and an ethno-national Russian past of Great Power status and strong centralised rule. Its domestic Other were the liberals who were under­stood as a fifth column of the United States and the West. The vulnerability of the Moscow federal Centre to the growing autonomy of the republics was a major source of insecurity, necessitating a more forceful response from Moscow. Russia was understood as a unique, sometimes Eurasian, project to be differentiated from Western conceptions of freedom and economics.

The centrist discourse identified Russia with European Social Democracy, but against American wild west capitalism. It also identified with an idealised Soviet past, but its internal Other was neither liberal nor conservative, but rather the disintegrative processes occurring within the country, most graph­ically, in Chechnya. Centrists explicitly rejected an ethno-national conceptual­isation of Russia, instead adopting a civic national 'Rossian' identity designed to capture the multinational character of the Russian Federation.¹⁹⁶ While Russia was unique, it was situated within a universal civilisation of modern Social Democracy.¹⁹⁷

In 1992, Russia was polarised between liberal and conservative identities, with liberals implementing their economic and political plans to make Russia

Westview Press, 1996), pp. 69-94; Bennett, Condemned to Repetition?, pp. 306-9; Johan Matz, Constructing a Post-Soviet International Political Reality (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2001); English, Russia and the Idea of the West; Prizel, National Identity and foreign policy, pp. 220-68; Margot Light, 'Post-Soviet Russian Foreign Policy', in Archie Brown (ed.), Contemporary Russian Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Neil Malcolm, 'Russian Foreign-Policy Decision-Making', in Peter Shearman (ed.), Russian Foreign Policy since 1990 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 3-27; and William Zimmerman, The Russian People and Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

196 Pal Kolsto, Political Construction Sites: Nation-Building in Russia and the Post-Soviet States (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000), pp. 203-27; and Tadashi Anno, 'Nihonjiron and russkaia ideia: Transformation ofJapanese and Russian Nationalism in the Postwar Era and Beyond', in Gilbert Rozman (ed.),Japan andRussia: The Tortuous Path to Normaliza­tion (New York: St Martin's Press, 2000), pp. 344-7.

197 Matz, Constructing Post-Soviet Reality, p. 169; and English, Russia and the Idea of the West,

p. 237.

into a liberal market democracy. The collapse of the Russian economy, the failure of the US to provide any significant aid, the rampant and rising crime, corruption and violence associated with privatisation and democratisation and the new issue of 25 million Russians living in the Former Soviet Union, discredited liberal discourse.[344] But conservative discourse did not take its place. Instead, a centrist discourse emerged, which, over the i990s, became at first the main competitor with conservatives, and finally, by the late i990s, the predominant representation of Russian identity.

Each of these three discourses had implications for Russian interests and foreign policy. Liberals desired a Russian alliance with the United States and the West. Conservatives desired a Russian alliance with anybody in the world who would balance against the United States and the West. Centrists preferred no alliances with anyone against any particular Other, but rather Russia as one among several Great Powers in a multilateral management of global affairs.

Russia's liberal identity was institutionally privileged in 1992.[345] The MFA under Andrei Kozyrev was initially the only coherent foreign policy institution in Russia, and Kozyrev purged it of Soviet holdovers. But the MFA's monopoly did not go unchallenged. The Russian Ministry of Defence (MOD) and pres­idential Security Council (SC) were created in the spring. The defence and international relations committees in parliament became sites of conservative and centrist attacks on the liberal MFA. The 'power ministries', the different intelligence and security branches of the federal government, also institution­alised centre-conservative discursive renderings of Russian identity. Moreover, elements ofthe armed forces, most notably and consequentially, the 14th army in the Trans-Dniestrian area of Moldova and local air force and army personnel in Abkhazia in Georgia, acted independently of the Yeltsin government, creat­ing faits accomplis on the ground.[346] It took time for the Russian government to reassert control over armed groups acting in the name of Russia in the FSU.

The conservative Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) was the only mass national political party. By early 1993, the MFA had become a policy-making arm of the increasingly centrist Yeltsin government, and so liberal identity was to be found mostly in national daily newspapers such as

Kommersant and Izvestiia, as well as in the research institutions revived under Gorbachev.[347] In October 1993, Yeltsin crushed a primary institutional carrier of conservative identity, the parliament, replacing it in December 1993 with a no less conservative collection of legislators in the Duma, but in a con­stitutionally subordinate position to the centrist president. The national TV networks came increasingly under centrist control, although the weekend evening 'analytical news' programmes, such as Namedni (Recent events), Svo- bodaslova (Free speech), Vremena (Times), Zerkalo (Mirror) and others remained national free-for-alls, with all discourses represented. Newspapers also contin­ued to reflect the widest range of Russian identities, and regional TV stations, the instruments of local governors, reflected the political coloration of that particular region. The dominance of the Russian economy by 'oligarchs' also institutionalised that part of the centrist-liberal discourse that identified the recovery of Russian Great Power status in the world, and the strengthening of the federal centre in Moscow, as best achieved through economic growth and

development.[348]

We can see the three discourses of Russian identity in relations with Belarus, the FSU or near abroad, NATO, and NATO's war against Yugoslavia in April 1999.[349] Conservative construction of Russian interests in Belarus and the Com­monwealth of Independent States (CIS) more generally was the restoration of the Soviet Union in these former Soviet republics. This included the advo­cacy of the forceful defence of ethnic Russians in these places, and the use of coercion to return these republics, excepting the Baltic, to Moscow's rule. Both the expansion of NATO to the east, and NATO's war against Yugoslavia on the behalf of Kosovo's Albanian majority, were construed as a direct US threat to Russian security, necessitating a Russian military response. Conser­vatives identified with their Slavic brethren in Belarus and Serbia, generating an ethno-national Russian interest in these countries absent in the other two discourses.

Liberal constructions of Russian interests could not be more different. Understanding the Soviet past as something to be avoided, they were against its restoration in the form of reunification with Belarus or a centralised CIS under Moscow's management. Interests in the FSU should be the product of market economic calculations, not ethno-national fraternity or an atavistic Cold War competition with the US. Liberals did not oppose the expansion of NATO, but for its domestic political empowerment of conservatives.²⁰⁴ While liberals did not support NATO's war against Yugoslavia, they also saw no security implications for Russia, except for its energising of conservative discourse at home.

Russian foreign policy was neither liberal nor conservative, but centrist, at least after 1992. Integration with Belarus was neither spurned nor accelerated, but rather treated as an issue of economic efficiency.²⁰⁵ The creation of the CIS was neither treated as trivial nor understood as a way to restore the Soviet Union, but was instead cobbled together to co-ordinate defence and economic policy among its twelve very different members.²⁰⁶ NATO expansion was neither welcomed nor opposed by arming or allying with other states against it. Instead, it was opposed, with the expectation that Russia's interests would be taken into account as much as was politically feasible as the expansion unfolded. NATO's war in Kosovo was opposed vigorously, but once begun, Russian efforts were aimed at getting Slobodan Milosevic to sue for peace as quickly as possible, not at arming him, or encouraging him to resist.²⁰⁷

The common centrist thread through the 1990s was to maintain or restore Russia's Great Power status through economic development at home and the empowerment of multilateral international institutions abroad. These main themes were evident in Russian foreign policy towards the diaspora. Despite incessant conservative calls to use military force to rescue Russians from discriminatory citizenship laws in the Baltic states, Moscow consistently worked through multilateral institutions, such as the Council of Europe and the Council for Security and Co-operation in Europe.²⁰⁸ Meanwhile, Russian multinational companies, such as Yukos, Lukoil and Gazprom, cemented a Russian presence in the FSU through direct investments and debt-for-equity swaps to amortise local energy arrears.²⁰⁹

204 Ekedahl and Goodman, WarsofEduardShevardnadze,pp. 169-76; James M. Goldgeier, Not Whether but When (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), pp. 15-16; Kvitsinskii, Vremiaisluchai,pp. 39-43,67-9;Chernyaev My Six Years,pp. 272-3; Kornienko, Kholodnaia voina, pp. 264-7; and Primakov, Gody vbol'shoi politike, pp. 232-3.

205 Vyachaslau Paznyak, 'Customs Union of Five and the Russia-Belarus Union', in Dwan and Pavliuk, Building Security, pp. 66-79.

206 MarthaBrill Olcott, Anders Aslund, and Sherman W. Garnett, GettingitWrong(Washing­ton: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999); Matz, ConstructingPost-Soviet Reality; and Lena Jonson, 'Russia and Central Asia', in Roy Allison and Lena Jonson (eds.), Central Asian Security: The New International Context (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2001).

207 Primakov, Gody vbol'shoi politike, pp. 174-6, 305. See also Allen Lynch, 'The Realism of Russia's Foreign Policy', Europe-Asia Studies 53, 1 (Jan. 2001): 7-31.

208 Kolsto, Political Construction Sites, pp. 208-13.

209 Olcott, Aslund and Garnett, Getting it Wrong, pp. 54-66.

Conclusion

The Stalinist understanding of the Soviet Self squandered pro-Soviet sympa­thies in Eastern Europe and anti-German feelings throughout Europe so as to reproduce the NSM in the socialist community. The post-Stalinist discourse of difference multiplied allies in the Third World, but entailed the loss of China as an ally and spurred the quest for difference in Eastern Europe. Subsequent sup­pression of the latter, combined with support for NLMs, led to a Soviet Union encircled by states allied against it. The Gorbachev revolution eliminated that Soviet Great Power vanguard identity that had fixed the Soviet Union and the US in a global competition for international dominance. Soviet interests in the NLMs and control of Eastern Europe disappeared with the old Soviet iden­tity. The Russian Federation understands itself today as a Great Power who can either join European Social Democratic civilisation as a counterweight to US liberal market hegemony, or bandwagon with that hegemony in order to pursue more narrow tactical considerations in defence of its own fissiparous periphery.

What is the Soviet Union? What is Russia? These are questions about a state's identity. The answers are found in how a state understands itself, in relationship to its significant Others, at home and abroad. We have seen that how that question was answered in Moscow from the end of the Second World War to the dawn of the twenty-first century has profoundly affected foreign policy and international order more generally. States interact not only with other states, but also with themselves, with their societies and institutions. Interstate interaction affords an opportunity for other states to help empower or disempower the discourses of identity that are being reproduced at home. But they cannot in and of themselves account for a state's identity. States interact with their own pasts, their own social groups, their own political institutional landscapes. These form the domestic sources of a state's identity, and are fundamental to understanding any state's foreign policy.

The Soviet Union and the road to communism

LARS T. LIH

The heart of the governing ideology of the Soviet Union was an image of itself as a traveller on the road to communism. This image was embedded in the narrative of class struggle and class mission created by Karl Marx and first embodied in a mass political movement by European Social Democracy. When Russian Social Democrats took power in October 1917, they founded a regime that was unique in its day because of their profound sense that the country had embarked on a journey of radical self-transformation.

Throughout its history, the Soviet Union's self-definition as a traveller on the road to socialism coloured its political institutions, its economy, its foreign policy and its culture. The inner history of Soviet ideology is thus the story of a metaphor - a history of the changing perceptions of the road to communism. In 1925, Nikolai Bukharin's book Road to Socialism exuded the confidence of the first generation of Soviet leaders. Sixty years later, the catch-phrase 'which path leads to the temple?' reflected the doubts and searching of the perestroika era. Right to the end, Soviet society assumed that there was a path with a temple at the end of it and that society had the duty to travel down that path.

Marxism and the class narrative

The Soviet Union's vision of the journey's end - socialist society - was in many respects the common property of the European Left as a whole. The distinc­tive contribution of the Marxist tradition to the new revolutionary regime in Russia was a narrative about how socialist society would come to be. Marxism described the protagonists whose interaction would result in socialism, their motivations, the tasks they set themselves and the dramatic clashes between them that propelled society forward.

Marx shaped the Soviet Union's constitutive narrative in three crucial ways. First, the narrative was about classes. The Marxist understanding of 'class' is deeply shaped by seeing classes as characters in a narrative, with motivations, will, purposes and the ability to perceive and overcome obstacles. The role of 'scientific socialism' was to give a strong underpinning to this narrative. The doctrine of surplus value, for example, demonstrated the unavoidable conflict between proletariat and bourgeoisie and this in turn gave the proletariat as a class its essential motivation.

Second, the central episode in Marx's world-historical narrative portrays the process by which the industrial proletariat recognises, accepts and carries out the historical mission of taking political power as a class and using it to introduce socialism. This central episode is summed up by the phrase 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. The proletariat needed political power in order to carry out its mission for two sets of reasons: the defensive/repressive need to protect socialism from hostile classes and the constructive need for society-wide insti­tutional transformation. Although a class dictatorship was only possible when the class in question was in a position to carry out its class interest fully and without compromise, Marx always assumed that the proletarian class dicta­torship would rest securely on the voluntary support of the other non-elite classes.

Third, Marx brought the world-historical narrative home by assigning a mission here and nowto dedicated socialist revolutionaries. 'The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.' The famous motto of the First International can be understood in two ways. On one reading, the motto tells revolutionaries from other classes to clear off: the emancipation ofthe working class is the business of the workers and no one else. The motto was understood in this way by the French Proudhonists who were perhaps the most important constituency within the First International.

On another reading, the motto not only refuses to close the door to non- proletarian revolutionaries but actually invites them in. If only the workers themselves can bring about their liberation, then it is imperative that they come to understand what it is they need to do and that they obtain the requisite organisational tools. This mission of preparing the working class for its mission was incumbent upon any socialist who accepted the Marxist class narrative, no matter what his or her social origin.

Revolutionary Social Democracy: 'The merger of socialism and the worker movement'

The basic self-definition of the Bolsheviks was that they were the Russian embodiment of 'revolutionary Social Democracy'. Their angry rejection of the label 'Social Democracy' in 1918 was meant to be a defiant assertion of continued loyalty to what the label once stood for. When the pioneers of Russian Social Democracy looked West in the 1890s, they saw a powerful, prestigious and yet still revolutionary movement. They saw mass worker par­ties, inspired by the Marxist class narrative, that continued to advance despite the persecutions of such redoubtable enemies as Chancellor Bismarck. They saw a set of innovative institutions - a party of a new type - that set out to bring the message to the workers and instil in them an 'alternative culture'.[350]

The man who gave canonical expression to the elaborated class narrative of Social Democracy was Karl Kautsky. Kautsky is remembered as the most influential theoretician of international Social Democracy, but in certain key respects - particularly in the case of the fledgling Russian Social Democracy - Kautsky's role went beyond influence. In 1892, Kautsky wrote The Erfurt Pro­gramme, a semi-official commentary on the recently adopted programme of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). This book defined Social Democracy for Russian activists - it was the book one read to find out what it meant to be a Social Democrat. In 1894, a young provincial revolutionary named Vladimir Ul'ianov translated The Erfurt Programme into Russian just at the time he was acquiring his lifelong identity as a revolutionary Social Democrat.

In The Erfurt Programme, Kautsky defined Social Democracy as 'the merger [Vereinigung] of socialism and the worker movement'. This slogan summarised not only the proletarian mission to introduce socialism, but also the Social Democratic mission of filling the proletariat with an awareness of its task. Kautsky's formula also provided Social Democracy with its own origin story. According to the merger formula, Social Democracy was a synthesis. As Kaut­sky put it, each earlier strand of both socialism and the worker movement possessed 'ein StUckchen des Richtigen', a little bit of the truth.[351] This little bit of truth could be preserved, but only if its one-sidedness was transcended. In this way, the merger formula implied a two-front polemical war against all who defended the continued isolation of either socialism or the worker movement. The technical term within social democratic discourse for the effort to keep the working-class struggle free from socialism was Nurgew- erkschaftlerei, 'trade-unions-only-ism'. (Since England was the classical home of this anti-Social Democratic ideology, the English words 'trade union' were used by both German and Russian Social Democrats to make an '-ism' that was equivalent for Nurgewerkschaftlerei. To render Lenin's epithet tred-iunionizm as 'trade-unionism' is really a mistranslation, since it implies that Lenin was hos­tile towards trade unions rather than towards a specific ideology that denied the need for a Social Democratic worker party) A corresponding 'Nur term could have been coined for bomb-throwing revolutionaries who continued to think that it was a waste of time to propagandise and educate the working class as a whole prior to the revolution.

By assigning the task of introducing socialism to the working class itself, the merger formula implied an exalted sense of a world historical mission. The most powerful source for this aspect of the Social Democratic narrative was Ferdinand Lassalle, the forgotten founding father of modern socialism. The cult of Lassalle that was an integral part of the culture of the German Social Democratic Party was based on his thrilling insistence during his brief two years ofproto-Social Democratic agitation (1862-4) that the workers, the despised fourth estate, accept the noble burden of an exalted mission. 'The high and world-wide honour of this destiny must occupy all your thoughts. Neither the load of the oppressed, nor the idle dissipation of the thoughtless, nor even the harmless frivolity of the insignificant, are henceforth becoming to you. You are the rock on which the Church of the present is to be built.'[352] Anyone who pictures Social Democracy as based on dry and deterministic 'scientific socialism' and overlooks the fervent rhetoric of good news and saving missions has missed the point.

The merger formula also reveals the logic that drove the creation of the party-led alternative culture. The fantastic array of newspapers, the sport­ing clubs, the socialist hymns, all under the leadership of a highly organised national political party - this entire innovative panoply was meant to merge in the most profound way possible the new socialist outlook with the outlook of each worker.

Social Democracy's self-proclaimed mission of bringing the good news of socialism to the workers meant that it had a profound stake in political democracy and particularly in political liberties such as freedom of speech, press and assembly. Political liberties were only a means - but they were an absolutely essential means. In an image that profoundly influenced Russian Social Democracy, Kautsky asserted that political liberties were 'light and air for the proletariat'.[353] The vital importance of political liberties was a key sector in the two-front polemical war against both isolated trade-union activists and isolated revolutionaries, both of whom tended to ignore or even scorn the need for fighting absolutism and broadening political liberties.

Indeed, Social Democracy pictured itself, accurately enough, as one of the principal forces sustaining political democracy in turn-of-the-century Europe. The reasoning behind this claim is the basis for the political strategy to which the Russian Social Democrats gave the name of 'hegemony in the democratic revolution'. The bourgeoisie does indeed have a class interest in full parliamen­tary democracy and political liberties, but as time goes by, the bourgeoisie is less and less ready to act on this interest. The same reason that makes Social Democracy eager for democracy (political liberties make the merger of social­ism and the worker movement possible and therefore inevitable) douses the enthusiasm of the bourgeoisie. Thus Social Democracy becomes the only consistent fighter for democracy. In fact, some major democratic reforms will probably have to wait until the dictatorship of the proletariat and the era of socialist transformation. In the meantime, bourgeois democracy is much too important to be left to the bourgeoisie.

The defence of democracy was a national task in which Social Democracy saw itself as a fighter for the here-and-now interests of all the non-elite classes. In the Social Democratic narrative, the proletariat did not look on all the other labouring classes with 'contempt' (as is often stated). The proletariat was rather pictured as the inspiring leader of what might be called follower classes. As Kautsky explained in a section of The Erfurt Programme entitled Die Sozialdemokratie und das Volk, the leadership role of the proletariat had two aspects. In the long run, peasants and urban petty bourgeoisie would see that their own deepest aspiration - to assert control over their productive activity - could only be attained through the 'proletarian socialism' of centralised social control and not through individual ownership. In the short run, the non-elite classes would realise - sooner rather than later - that nationally organised and militant Social Democracy was the only effective defender of their current per­ceived interests. In the Marxist texts that most influenced Lenin, the dominant note is not pessimism and fear of, say, the peasants but rather an unrealis­tic optimism that they would soon accept the leadership of the organised workers.

Russian Social Democracy

From the point of view of a young Russian revolutionary in the 1890s choosing a political identity, what was the greatest obstacle to choosing to be a revo­lutionary Social Democrat? A Social Democrat had to reject the pessimistic horror that capitalist industrialisation had inspired in earlier Russian revolu­tionaries, but this rejection was hardly an obstacle - on the contrary, it was an impetus for optimistic energy in the face of what seemed by the 1890s to be inevitable economic processes. The minuscule dimensions of the new Russian industrial working class also hardly constituted an obstacle, since organising and propagandising even the relatively few Russian workers offered plenty of scope for activity.

The greatest obstacle - the crucial distinction between Russia and the coun­tries where Social Democracy flourished - was the lack of political liberties. The tsarist autocracy seemed to make 'Russian Social Democrat' something of an oxymoron. The whole meaning of Social Democracy revolved around pro­paganda and agitation on a national level. What then was the point of even talking about Social Democracy in a country where even prominent and loyal members of the elite were prohibited from publicly speaking their mind?

Accordingly, many revolutionaries adopted severely modified forms of Social Democratic ideas. Some accepted the importance of achieving political liberty but concluded that a mass movement was a non-starter as a way of overthrowing tsarism. Others accepted the importance of organising the working class but felt that political liberties were not so fundamental that overthrowing the autocracy should be a top priority task for the workers.

The central strand of Russian Social Democracy - the strand that ran from the Liberation of Labour group (Georgii Plekhanov, Pavel Aksel'rod and Vera Zasulich) in the early 1880s through the Iskra organisation of 1900-3 and then through both the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions that emerged from Iskra - tried to be as close to Western-style Social Democracy as circumstances would allow. The guiding principle of Russian Social Democracy can be summed up as: Let us build a party as much like the German SPD as possible under absolutist conditions so we can overthrow the tsar and obtain the political liberties that we need to make the party even more like the SPD!

As worked out by the polemics of the underground newspaper Iskra at the turn of the century, this basic principle led to the following assertions. The Russian working class can be organised by revolutionaries working in under­ground conditions. The workers can understand the imperative of political liberty both for the sake of immediate economic interests and for the long-run prospects of socialism. Their militant support of a democratic anti-tsarist revo­lution will instigate other non-elite classes and even the progressive parts of the elite to press home their own revolutionary demands. Thanks primarily to the militancy of the working class, the coming Russian democratic revolution will have a more satisfactory outcome than, say, the half-baked German revolution in the middle of the nineteenth century, since it will attain the greatest possible amount of political liberty. And these political liberties will allow the education and organisation of the Russian working class on an SPD scale, thus creating the fundamental prerequisite of socialist revolution, a class ready and able to take political power.

Compared to the trends they were combating, the Iskra team stands out by its optimism about the potential of the Russian working class to organise and become an effective and indeed leading national political force under tsarism. Iskra believed that this potential could only be realised given the existence of a well-organised and highly motivated Social Democracy - a lesson they learned from the astounding success of German Social Democracy. Many readers of Lenin's What Is To Be Done? have concluded that Lenin wanted a nationally organised party of disciplined activists because he had pessimistically given up on the revolutionary inclinations of the workers. In reality, Lenin wanted an SPD-type party - one with a national centre and a full-time corps of activists - because of his optimistic confidence that even the relatively backward Russian proletariat living under tsarist repression would enthusiastically respond to the Social Democratic message. Lenin's opponents were the sceptical ones on this crucial issue.

It is completely anachronistic to see Lenin assuming in 1902 that the party could accomplish its task only if it had control of the state and a monopoly of propaganda. His idea of an effective party in 1902 was an organisation that was efficient enough to publish and distribute a national underground newspaper in regular fashion and that was surrounded by a core of activists who were inspired by and could inspire others with the good news of Social Democracy. Thus the key sentence in What Is To Be Done? is: 'You brag about your practicality and you don't see (a fact known to any Russianpraktik) what miracles for the revolution­ary cause can be brought about not only by a circle but by a lone individual.'[354]

Given later events, it is difficult to remember that a central plank in the Iskra platform was the crucial importance of political liberties. Iskra insisted to other socialists that achieving political liberty had to be an urgent priority. It insisted to other anti-tsarist revolutionaries that only proletarian leadership in the revolution would ensure the maximum achievable amount of political liberty. They drummed home in their propaganda and agitation the vital importance of what might be called the four S's: svoboda slova, sobraniia, stachek, freedom of speech, assembly and strikes. The Social Democratic narrative absolutely required these freedoms to operate.

Overthrowing the autocracy was a national task that would advance the interests of almost every group in Russian society. Following the logic of the Social Democracy class narrative, Iskra assumed that a socialist party could and should assume the leadership role in achieving democracy. They engaged in a complicated political strategy whereby they supported anti-tsarist liberals, fought with the liberals for the loyalty of the non-elite classes and tried to make the non-elite classes aware of the necessity of winning as much political liberty as possible in the upcoming revolution.

Iskra conducted the usual Social Democratic two-front polemical war. The prominence of What Is To Be Done? means that we see only one front of the war, namely, the attack against the 'economists' who allegedly wanted to keep the workers aloof from the great merger. In Iskra's activity (and in Lenin's writings) as a whole during this period, the other front in the war was just as prominent or even more so: the attack against the terrorists who allegedly believed that an organised mass worker movement was a pipe dream that would only delay the revolution.

After 1903, the Iskra organisation broke up into two Social Democratic factions. The Menshevik/Bolshevik split has achieved mythic status as the place where two roads diverged and taking one rather than the other made all the difference. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, the Menshevik leaders originally dismissed Lenin as someone who put too high a priority on achieving political liberties, who would allow Social Democracy to be exploited by bourgeois revolutionaries and who neglected the specifically socialist task of instilling hostility between worker and capitalist.

Similarly, Bolshevism prior to the First World War can almost be defined as the Social Democratic faction most fanatically insistent on the importance of political liberties. Lenin's precepts were: Don't be satisfied with bourgeois leadership of the bourgeois revolution because the liberals will not push the revolution to achieve its maximum gains. Don't be satisfied with the meagre liberties provided by the post-1905 Stolypin regime. Search for the most radically democratic allies among the non-elite classes. Preserve at all costs a party base in the illegal underground that is the only space in Russia for truly free speech.

The class narrative in a time of troubles

In 1914 a group of Bolsheviks - the party's representatives in the national legislative Duma - met to compare impressions about the stunning news that the German SPD had voted in favour of war credits for the German government. This news shook them profoundly because 'all Social Democrats had "learned from the Germans" how to be socialists'. The deputies agreed on one thing: the erstwhile model party had betrayed revolutionary socialism.[355]

Six years later, at the Second Congress of the Third International, another party presented itself as an international model: the Bolsheviks themselves. This new Bolshevik model, profoundly marked by the intervening six years of war and civil war, could not have been predicted from knowledge of pre-war Bolshevism. A party that had put the achievement of 'bourgeois democracy' in Russia at the centre of its political strategy now angrily rejected bourgeois democracy and all its works. A party that had propagandised the crucial impor­tance of political liberties had become notorious for dictatorial repression and a state monopoly of mass media.

And yet, despite all these changes, the Bolsheviks claimed to remain loyal to the old class narrative - indeed, they claimed to be the only loyal ones. Bolshevism as a factor in world history - as an alternative model for a socialist party and as the constitutive myth of the Soviet Union - was based on the Social Democratic class narrative as it emerged from the severe and distorting impact of an era of world crisis.

Three major developments influenced the new version of the class narra­tive. The first was the sense of betrayal by Western Social Democracy. The Western European party leaders had announced in solemn convocation that they would make war impossible by using the threat of revolution - and now they not only refused to make good on this threat but turned into cheerlead­ers for their respective national war machines! The next influence was the apocalyptic world war. The adjective is hardly too strong: the war seemed to the Bolsheviks to present mankind with a choice between socialism and the collapse of civilisation.

The third influence was the Bolshevik experience as a ruling party. The Bol­sheviks understood the October Revolution as the onset of the central episode ofthe class narrative-the long-awaited proletarian conquest ofpower. All their experiences in power were deeply informed by this narrative framework. In turn, the rigours and emergencies ofthe civil-war period modified their under­standing of the framework. Just as fundamentally, the very concept of a class in power was discovered in practice to contain a host of hitherto unsuspected consequences and implications.

The experience of being a ruling party responsible for all of society meant dealing with other classes. This necessity intensified a fear already latent in the class narrative - the fear of becoming infected by contact with other classes and losing the proletarian qualities needed to accomplish the great mission. A group often hailed as the conscience of the party, the Worker Opposition of 1920-1, was also the one that most energetically followed out the resulting logic of purge, purification and suspicion.

When the Bolsheviks closed down the bourgeois and even the socialist press, they shocked many socialists into realising their own commitment to 'bour­geois democracy'. The short-term justification was that coercion was needed to complete any revolution, as shown by the record of bourgeois revolutions. This argument was not as fateful as the decision to create an exclusive state monopoly of the mass media. This decision paradoxically had strong roots in the pre-war class narrative. The central reasonthat Social Democracy required freedom of speech was to be able to raise the consciousness of its worker con­stituency, and Social Democrats had always envied the tools of indoctrination at the command of the elite classes. If one mark of an SPD-type party was the massive effort to inculcate an alternative culture, then one possible path for an SPD-type party in power was to create what has been called the 'propaganda state'. Grigorii Zinoviev explained why the Bolsheviks chose this path:

As long as the bourgeoisie holds power, as long as it controls the press, educa­tion, parliament and art, a large part of the working class will be corrupted by the propaganda of the bourgeoisie and its agents and driven into the bourgeois camp ... But as soon as there is freedom of the press for the working class, as soon as we gain control of the schools and the press, the time will come - it is not very far off - when gradually, day by day, large groups of the working class will come into the party until, one day, we have won the majority ofthe working class to our ranks.[356]

The Bolshevik self-definition as the proletariat inpower impliedthat the new regime had begun the process of socialist transformation. It did not necessarily imply anything definite about the depth of that transformation at any one time nor even about its tempo. Unfortunately, there are two deep-rooted misunderstandings about what the Bolsheviks actually did claim about the road to socialism in the early years of the regime. The first misunderstanding is associated with the phrase 'smash the state'. Many have felt that Lenin's use of this phrase in State and Revolution (written in 1917) was a promise (whether sincere or not) to bring about an immediate end to any repressive or centralised state. Some writers have gone further and posited a genuine if temporary conversion to anarchism that led to a massive attempt in I9I7-I8 to create a 'commune-state' that was the polar opposite of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'.[357] The other misunderstanding is associated with the phrase 'short cut to communism'. Although the Bolsheviks never used this phrase, scholars invariably employ it when describing the policies of'war communism' in 1917­20. According to the short-cut thesis, the Bolsheviks thought that measures put in place to fight the civil war had accelerated the pace of social transformation to the point of bringing Russia to the brink of a leap into full socialism.

These two myths obscure the real innovation in the Bolshevik version of the class narrative - one which the Bolshevik leaders themselves insisted upon. This innovation was the thesis that a proletarian revolution was neces­sarily accompanied by a massive, society-wide political and economic crisis. As Leon Trotsky summed it up in an epigram from 1922: 'Revolution opens the door to a new political system, but it achieves this by means of a destructive catastrophe.'[358] Far from implying any acceleration of socialist transformation - as suggested by both 'smash the state' and 'short cut to communism' - this quasi-inevitable crisis meant that the new era in world history would be inaugurated by a series of severe challenges to any meaningful transformation.

Lenin's use of 'smash the state' in I9I7 was conducted entirely within the framework of the class narrative: the proletariat wrests political power away from the bourgeoisie and uses it to gradually remove the class contradictions that make a repressive state necessary. In his celebrated epigram about the cook running the affairs of the state, Lenin promised only that the new regime would set about teaching the cook how to administer society. 'Smash the state' always meant 'smash the bourgeois state in order to replace it with a proletarian state'. The new proletarian state might have many ofthe same institutions and even many of the same personnel - and yet class rule would have changed hands and this made all the difference.

Bukharin drew out another implication of the 'smash the state' scenario. If the bourgeois state had to be smashed and the proletarian state had to be built up, a time of breakdown would have to be endured - and therefore social breakdown was no argument against revolution. The paradigmatic instance of this process was the army. Naturally the oldbourgeois army had to disintegrate, since its use as a weapon against the revolution had to be forestalled, its officers could not be trusted and anyway soldiers in a revolutionary period would simply no longer obey orders. The army thus falls apart, but 'every revolution smashes what is old and rotten: a certain period (a very difficult one) must pass before the new arises, before a beautiful home starts to be built upon the ruins of the old pig-sty'. Eventually a new proletarian army arises. This army would fight according to the standard rules for an effective war machine and it would recruit as many 'bourgeois military specialists' as possible - of course, under the watchful eye of the commissars appointed by the new proletarian state authority.[359]

Much confusion will be avoided once we realise that the Bolsheviks saw the mighty Red Army not as a refutation but as a paradigm of the 'smash the state' scenario. When the Bolsheviks took stock as the civil war wound down in 1920, they were proud that they had successfully defended their right to go down the road to socialism, and they certainly felt they were moving in the right direction - but they also realised that the civil war had set them back in a major way. The Bolshevik economist Iurii Larin told foreign visitors in 1920 that the real economic history of the new regime would begin after the civil war. In December 1920 (supposedly the height of the euphoria of'War Communism'), Trotsky put it this way: 'We attack, retreat and again attack, and we always say that we have not traversed even a small portion of the road. The slowness of the unfolding of the proletarian revolution is explained by the colossal nature of the task and the profound approach of the working class to this task.'[360]

Thus, remarkably, the Bolsheviks had committed themselves to promising the workers a vast social crisis in the event of a successful proletarian revolution. This strand of Bolshevism only makes sense when seen in the context of the all-embracing disaster of the world war. What reasonable worker or peasant would refuse the sacrifices needed to put into practice the only possible escape from a recurrence of this tragedy?

The new themes and emphases that Bolshevism brought to the old class narrative during this time of troubles were not ironed out into a completely consistent whole. Underneath the aggressive defiance, some embarrassment can be detected on issues such as freedom of speech. Still, the heart of this new amalgam was the same as the old class narrative: the proletariat's mission to conquer state power and to use it to construct socialism, and, just as important, the inspired and inspiring leadership that fills the proletariat with a sense of its mission. This underlying faith that the proletariat could and would respond to inspiring leadership informed what outsiders could hardly help seeing as a cynical and manipulative strategy. It was this same faith that became the real constitution of the new regime and a central influence on its institutions and policies.

'Who-whom' and the transformation of the countryside

Nowhere is the influence of the class narrative more evident than in the crucial decisions made in the 1920s about the best way to effect the socialist transformation of the countryside. The link between the class narrative and Bolshevik thinking about the peasantry is the scenario summarised by the phrase kto-kogo or 'who-whom'.

Kto-kogo - usually glossed as 'who will beat, crush or dominate whom?' - is widely seen as the hard-line heart of Lenin's outlook. Eric Hobsbawm writes: '"Who whom?" was Lenin's basic maxim: the struggle as a zero-sum game in which the winner took, the loser lost all.'[361] This understanding of kto-kogo fits in with a standard account of the origins of Stalin's collectivisation drive that goes like this: the Bolsheviks tried to force communism on the peasants during the period of War Communism but found that the task was beyond their strength. Harbouring a deep contempt and resentment of the peasantry, they retreated in 1921 by introducing NEP (New Economic Policy), after which they waited for the day when they would have the strength to renew their assault on the countryside.

Given the almost folkloric status of kto-kogo as Lenin's favourite phrase, it is something of a shock to discover that Lenin's first and only use of the words kto-kogo is in two of his last public speeches given at the end of his career and that his aim in coining the phrase was to explain the logic of NEP. After the Bolsheviks legalised various forms of capitalist activity at the beginning of NEP, the Bolshevik leaders had to demonstrate - to themselves as well as to their audience - that permitting capitalist activity could actually redound to the ultimate advantage of socialism. In speeches of late 1921 and early 1922, Lenin put it this way: yes, we are giving the capitalists more room to manoeuvre in order to revive the economy - and therefore it is up to us to ensure that this revival strengthens socialist construction rather than capitalist restoration. The question therefore is, who will outpace whom (kto-kogo operedit), who will take ultimate advantage of the new economic policies? This question in turn boiled down to a problem in class leadership:

From the point of view of strategy, the essential question is, who will more quickly take advantage of this new situation? The whole question is, whom will the peasantry follow? - the proletariat, striving to build socialist society, or the capitalist who says 'Let's go back, it's safer that way, don't worry about that socialism dreamed up by somebody.'[362]

Lenin pounded this basic point home in a great many formulations and the phrase kto-kogo would have pass unnoticed if it had not been picked up by Zinoviev when he gave the principal political speech at the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924. Zinoviev glossed the phrase as follows: 'Kto-kogo? In which direction are we growing? Is the revival that we all observe working to the advantage of the capitalist or is it preparing the ground for us? . . . Time is working - for whom?'[363]

Thus the kto-kogo scenario was indeed built around the class struggle, but the enemy class was not the peasantry but NEP's 'new bourgeoisie'. Victory would be achieved by using the economic advantages of socialism to win the loyalty of the peasantry. This scenario was not a product of NEP-era rethinking, but rather a variant of the class leadership scenario operative during the civil-war era. Basing themselves on the peasant scenario of Marx, Engels and Kautsky, the Bolsheviks saw the peasants as a wavering class but a crucial one, since the fate of the revolution would be decided by which class the peasants chose to follow. As the Bolsheviks saw it, they had been compelled during the civil war to place heavy burdens on the peasantry. Nevertheless, when push came to shove, the mass of the peasantry realised that the Bolsheviks were defending peasant interests as the peasants themselves defined them and therefore gave the Bolsheviks just that extra margin of support that ensured military victory. This scenario meant that, far from looking back at the civil war as a time of fundamental conflict between worker and peasant, leaders like Bukharin urged Bolsheviks to look back at the successful military collaboration of the civil war as a model for the economic class struggle of the 1920s.

Official Bolshevik scenarios assumed that complete socialist transformation of the countryside - large-scale collective agricultural enterprises operating as units in a planned economy - would not be possible without an extremely high level of industrial technology. The transformative power of technology was symbolised by the slogans of electrification and tractorisation that Lenin coined prior to NEP. This task of economic transformation was so gargantuan that many Bolsheviks assumed it would not occur until a European socialist revolution released resources unavailable to Russia alone. As good Marxists, the Bolsheviks felt that the use of force to create fundamentally new pro­duction relations (as opposed to defending the revolution) was not so much wrong as futile. Precisely in I9I9, when the Bolsheviks were putting extreme pressure on the peasantry in order to retain power, can be found Lenin's most eloquent denunciations of any use of force in the establishment of communes or collective farms.

The kto-kogo scenario is thus an application of an underlying scenario of class leadership of the peasants to the new post-1921 situation of a tolerated market and a tolerated 'new bourgeoisie'. The Bolshevik understanding of the dynamics of this situation was based heavily on pre-war Marxist theories of the evolution of modern capitalism. According to Bolshevik theorists, these evo­lutionary trends were immanent in any modern economy, whether capitalist or socialist - although of course the socialist version would be more demo­cratic and less socially destructive. General European capitalist trends could thus serve the Bolsheviks as rough guides to their own near future. One such trend was the steady movement towards organised and monopolistic forms and the consequent self-annulment of the competitive market. The Bolshe­viks also took over Kautsky's assertion that the city was always the economic leader of the countryside. These two factors together implied a steady pro­cess of 'squeezing-out' (Verdmngung, vytesnenie) of small-scale forms by more efficient and larger ones - petty traders by large-scale trading concerns, small single-owner farms by large-scale collective enterprises (which could be either capitalist or socialist).

These perceived trends informed the Bolshevik scenario of class leadership during the I920s. The Bolsheviks had no doubt that the countryside would eventually be dominated economically by large-scale, urban-based and society- wide monopolistic institutions. The perceived challenge was not here but in the kto-kogo question: what class would be running these institutions? To use another term coined by Lenin at the same time as kto-kogo: what kind of smy- chka would be forged between town and country? Smychka is usually translated 'link' but this can be misleading if it is taken to imply that the Bolsheviks were unaware prior to NEP of the need for town-country economic links. The smychka slogan is specific to NEP because it evokes the economic aspect ofthe kto-kogo struggle against a tolerated bourgeoisie for the loyalty of the peasants. As Bukharin put it in 1924: 'The class struggle of the proletariat for influence over the peasantry takes on the character of a struggle against private capital and for an economic smychka with the peasant farm through co-operatives and state trade.'[364] The Bolsheviks assumed that 'the advantages of socialism' - the efficiencies generated by large-scale, society-wide institutions in general and a fortiori by the planned and rationalised socialist version of such institutions - would steadily come into play and fund the class leadership struggle by pro­viding economic benefits to the peasants.

Stalin presented the mass collectivisation of 1929-30 as the triumphal out­come of Lenin's kto-kogo scenario. Kto-kogo acquired its aura of hard-line coer­cion from Stalin's use of it during this period: 'we live by the formula of Lenin - kto-kovo: will we knock them, the capitalists, flat and give them (as Lenin expresses it) the final, decisive battle, or will they knock us flat?'[365] Yet Stalin's claim to embody the original spirit of kto-kogo contains some paradoxes. Lenin and the Bolshevik leaders who picked up on his phrase had used kto-kogo to jus­tify an economic competition with the Nepmen who dominated trade activities - a competition that would result in new forms of agricultural production only after an extremely high level of industrial technology was available. Stalin used kto-kogo to justify a policy of mass coercion against peasant kulaks to implant collective farms long before industry reached a high level.

These paradoxes make the often-heard claim that Stalin was simply carrying out Lenin's plan a bizarre one. Nevertheless, a close reading of Stalin's speeches in 1928-9 shows that the rationale - and perhaps even the real motivation - for his radical strategy was strongly based on the narrative of class leadership. His key assertion was that 'the socialist town can lead the small-peasant village in no other way than by implanting collective farms [kolkhozy] and state farms [sovkhozy] in the village and transforming the village in a new socialist way'. This was because class leadership would be qualitatively different within the collective farms from what it would be in a countryside dominated by single- owner farms:

Of course, individualist and even kulak habits will persist in the collective farms; these habits have not fallen away but they will definitely fall away in the course of time, as the collective farms become stronger and more mechanised. But can it really be denied that the collective farms as a whole, with all their contradictions and inadequacies but existing as an economic fact, basically represent a new path for the development of the village - a path of socialist development as opposed to a kulak, capitalist path of development?[366]

The role of the collective farms as an incubator of the new peasantry helps account for de-kulakisation, the most brutal aspect of Stalin's strategy. If the kulaks were not removed from the village or, even worse, they were allowed into the collective farms, they would simply take over and continue to exercise leadership in the wrong direction. As Stalin lieutenant Mikhail Kalinin put it, excluding the kulaks was a 'prophylactic' measure that 'ensures the healthy development of the kolkhoz organism in the future'.[367]

In Kalinin's defence of Stalin's murderous form of class leadership, we still hear a faint echo of the original meaning of kto-kogo: 'You must understand that de-kulakization is only the first and easiest stage. The main thing is to be able to get production going properly in the collective farms. Here, in the final analysis, is the solution to the question: kto-kogo.' Nevertheless many Bolsheviks were appalled by Stalin's version of kto-kogo. In the so-called 'Riutin platform' that was circulated in underground fashion among sections of the Bolshevik elite in 1932 (it is unclear how much of the 100-page document was written by Martemian Riutin himself), it is argued that the Leninist path towards liquidation of the class basis of the kulak meant showing the mass of peasants 'genuine examples of the genuine advantages of collective farms organised in genuinely voluntary fashion'. But Stalin's idea of class leadership of the peasants had the same relation to real leadership as Japan's Manchuria policy did to national self-determination. As a result, 'pluses have been turned into minuses, and the best hopes of the best human minds have been turned into a squalid joke. Instead of a demonstration of the advantages of large- scale socialist agriculture, we see its defects in comparison to the small-scale individual farm.'[368]

We have traced the path of kto-kogo starting with Lenin's coinage of the term to express the logic of NEP and ending with Stalin's contested claim that mass collectivisation was the decisive answer to the kto-kogo question: who will win the class allegiance of the peasantry? Kto-kogo establishes a link between Lenin and Stalin but it also demonstrates the inadvisability of turning that link into an equation. Most importantly, kto-kogo refers us back to the narrative of class leadership and the basic assumptions guiding the Bolsheviks as they tackled their most fateful task, the socialist transformation of the countryside.

From path to treadmill: the next sixty years

Out ofthe turmoil of the early 1930s emerged the system that remained intact in the Soviet Union until near the very end: collective farms, centralised industrial planning, monopolistic party-state. The construction of this system entailed a fundamental shift in the nature of the authoritative class narrative. Stalin officially declared that no hostile classes still existed in the Soviet Union, nor were there any substantial numbers of still unpersuaded waverers. This new situation meant that although there still existed a long road ahead to full communism, the heroic days of class leadership were over.

In one sense, the new class narrative of the early 1930s remained unchanged for the next six decades. Within its framework, there were various attempts to realise 'the advantages of socialism', either in frighteningly irrational attempts to rid the system of saboteurs or more reasonable attempts to tinker with the parameters of the planning system. This 'treadmill of reform' (as the economist Gertrude Schroeder famously described the process) was bathed in an atmo­sphere of constant celebration about the achievements and prospects of the united Soviet community as it journeyed towards communism. But under­neath this resolutely optimistic framework we can discern a real history of the changes in the way people related to the narrative emotionally and intellectu­ally - a history in which uncertainty and anxiety play a much greater role. By focusing on certain key moments in the presentation of the authoritative class narrative, we can provide an outline of this history.

In March 1938, the big story in Pravda was the trial of the Right-Trotskyist bloc - the last of the big Moscow show trials at which Bukharin, Rykov and other luminaries were condemned as traitors and sentenced to death. But alongside transcripts and reports 'from the courtroom' were continuing stories on topics such as Arctic exploration, the party's attempts to apply the plenum resolution of January 1938, campaigns to fulfil economic targets and the crisis- ridden international situation.

The Moscow show trial was intended to dramatise the need for 'vigilance' and for a 'purification' of Soviet institutions from disguised saboteurs and spies. The terror of 1937-8 was paradoxically explained and justified by the premiss that there no longer existed hostile classes and undecided groups in the Soviet Union. Therefore, if the 'advantages of socialism' were not immediately apparent, the problems were not caused by the understandable interests of an identifiable group - and certainly not by structural problems - but only by individual saboteurs who were wearing the mask of a loyal Soviet citizen or even party member. Stalin insisted that the danger of isolated saboteurs was potentially immense. Class leadership was therefore no longer described as persuading wavering groups to follow the lead of the party but simply as 'vigilance', as ripping the maskfrom two-faced dvurushniki or 'double-dealers'.

But on the same Pravda pages as the trial coverage were other stories that stressed the damage done by the vigilance campaign. In January 1938, the Central Committee passed a resolution that tried to cool down the prevailing hysteria - and yet the leadership proved singularly unable to move past the metaphor of the hidden enemy within:

All these facts show that many of our party organisations and leaders still to this day haven't learned to see through and expose the artfully masked enemy who attempts with cries of vigilance to mask his own enemy status . . . and who uses repressive measures to cut down our Bolshevik cadres and to sow insecurity and excessive suspicion in our ranks.[369]

Pravda also printed resolutions from economic officials that say in effect: 'Yes, we know we have problems fulfilling our plan directives, but what can you expect, with all those wreckers running around? But now the wreckers have been caught and we promise to do better.' One can perhaps see in these stories the beginnings of a new approach to improving poor economic performance: tinkering with reforms rather than catching wreckers.

March 1938 was also the month of the Nazi takeover of Austria. Pravda stories about international tension were used to underscore the necessity of vigilance. But the shadow of the looming war also strengthened the desire of many to move beyond the internecine paranoia of the purification campaign.

The pages of Pravda were not exclusively devoted to the anxiety-provoking evils of two-faced wreckers, super-vigilant party officials, poor economic per­formance and international tension. Its pages in March I938 were also filled with a symbolic triumph of Soviet society: the return of Arctic explorers Ivan Papanin and his team from a dangerous and heroic expedition. As Papanin and his men travelled closer and closer to the capital, the stories about them became bigger and bigger. With exquisite timing, they hit Moscow only a few days after the trial closed and several issues of Pravda were entirely devoted to the ecstatic welcome they received. A smiling Stalin made an appearance in order to greet the heroes.

This sense of a triumphal progression after overcoming heroic difficulties was for many participants - including the top leaders - as much or more a part of the meaning of the 1930s as the traumas associated with collectivisation or the purification campaign. This way of remembering the 1930s should be kept in mind when we approach the speech given by Andrei Zhdanov in Septem­ber 1946 which denounced the alleged pessimistic outlook of the great literary artists Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko. More than just a clamp- down on literature, this speech served as a signal that the political leadership was going to try to re-create the triumphal mood that it remembered before the war. The complex of hopes and illusions, disappointments and strivings gener­ated in Soviet society by the anti-Nazi war stood in the way of this project and were therefore perceived as an unsettling and dangerous threat. Thus the key passage in the speech - undoubtedly reflecting Stalin's own preoccupations - is: 'And what would have happened if we had brought up young people in a spirit of gloom and lack of belief in our cause? The result would have been that we would not have won the Great Fatherland war.'

Zhdanov presented the Soviet Union as a traveller on a long journey in which the present moment lacked meaning. 'We are not today what we were yesterday and tomorrow we will not be what we are today.' Writers were enlisted as guides and leaders on the journey whose job was 'to help light up with a searchlight the path ahead'.

In this version ofthe constitutive Soviet narrative, 'class' has almost dropped out while 'leadership' remains. Thankfully, the spotlight is not directedtowards searching out hidden enemies. Yet an atmosphere of doubt and anxiety emanates from the speech: can we meet the difficulties ahead if the com­ing generation does not see itself as participants in a triumphal progression? Thus the core of the attack on Akhmatova was her concern with her own 'utterly insignificant experiences', her 'small, narrow, personal life' - a tirade in which 'personal' (lichnyi) is a synonym for 'small' and 'narrow'. The Stalin era is often called the era ofthe 'cult of personality [lichnost']', but it might just as well be called the era of the fear of a personal life.[370]

When the Stalin era came to an end in early 1953, things immediately started to change, and the leadership came face to face with a task which it never really solved: how to account for these changes within the framework of the overar­ching narrative? The key problem was brought up as early as June 1953 at the Central Committee plenum during which the Politburo (called Presidium dur­ing this period) announced and justified to the party elite the arrest of Lavrentii Beria, head of the NKVD. The archival publication of these deliberations in 1991 showed how the leadership had to face up to an embarrassing question (as formulated by Lazar Kaganovich): 'It's good that you [leaders] acted decisively and put an end to the adventurist schemes of Beria and to him personally, but where were you earlier and why did you allow such a person into the very heart of the leadership?'[371] The question is here a narrow one about individual leaders, but the same question was bound to expand to the much more difficult issue of why the Soviet system as a whole allowed Stalinism.

The June plenum revealed two different narratives about the downfall of Beria, one mired in the past and the other struggling towards the future. The paradigmatic examples of these contrasting narratives can be found in the speeches by Kaganovich and Anastas Mikoyan. Kaganovich insistently defined the present situation as another 1937. More than once he approvingly referred to Stalin's 1937 speech 'On Inadequacies in Party Work', a speech that served as a signal for the terroristic purification campaign of 1937-8. Using 1937 rhetoric, Kaganovich condemned Beria as a spy in the pay of imperialist powers. Accord­ingly, Kaganovich called for renewed 'vigilance' and 'purification'. 'Much of what was said in 1937 must be taken into account today as well.'

Mikoyan also employed 1937 rhetoric such as 'double-dealerism' (dvurush- nichestvo). But the spirit behind his use of such terms is almost comically opposed to the spirit of 1937. Here is Mikoyan's proof of Beria's double- dealerism: 'I asked him [after Stalin's death]: why do you want to head the NKVD? And he answered: we have to establish legality, we can't tolerate this state of things in the country. We have a lot of arrested people, we have to liberate them and not send people to the camps for no reason.' Mikoyan had no problem with this statement as a policy goal, but he argued that Beria was a dvurushnik because - he did not move fast enough during the three months since Stalin's death to introduce legality and release prisoners!

Kaganovich was genuinely angry at Beria, who 'insulted Stalin and used the most unpleasant and insulting words about him'. Beria's insulting attitude towards Stalin did not seem to bother Mikoyan - indeed, in his low-key way, Mikoyan made it clear that Stalin was mainly responsible for Beria's rise to power. Mikoyan rejected the 1937 scenario as simply irrelevant: 'We do not yet have direct proof on whether or not [Beria] was a spy, whether or not he received orders from foreign bosses, but is this really what's important?' He was clearly anxious to get past Beria and talk about issues of economic reform. He described the ludicrous situation in which the government offered unre- alistically low prices for potatoes, the kolkhozniki had therefore no economic interest in growing them, and government institutions sent out highly paid white-collar workers every year to plant them while 'the kolkhozniki look on and laugh'.

The same only partially successful struggle to shed the old language in order to present new concerns can be seen in many ofthe literary works of the 'Thaw' that took place in the period 1953-6. A novel such as Vladimir Dudintsev's Not By Bread Alone (1956) resembles in many respects the old narrative of unmasking evildoers who carry a party card. The noble inventor Lopatkin is thwarted at every turn by officials such as Drozdov. Drozdov is not a spy who should be shot or sent to the camps, but he is an enemy of the people who should be purged.

The historic originality of Not by Bread Alone and other literary productions of the 'Thaw' does not come from its muck-raking narrative but rather from its mode ofbeing. The novel is a personal statement by an individual, Vladimir Dudintsev, who wrote it to express his views on the country's situation. For the first time in Soviet history, the party-state's monopoly on shaping the author­itative narrative was challenged. This aspect was magnified by the enormous and unprecedented public discussion generated by the book. Again for the first time in Soviet history, an autonomous public opinion used public channels to hear and deliberate, pro and con, on vital issues.

The narrative of Not by Bread Alone also affirmed an autonomous space for 'small, narrow, personal life'. Lopatkin has an affair with Drozdov's estranged wife who has left Drozdov partly because of his inability to have any sort of personal life. Indeed, Lopatkin, the counter-Drozdov, has trouble accepting his own need and right to have a personal life. The real climax of the novel is not when Lopatkin's invention is officially introduced but when he decides to ask Nadia to marry him - or rather, when he decides he can ask her to marry him.

Some aspects of Dudintsev's novel are more evident today than they could have been to contemporary observers. In a brief episode towards the end of the novel, Dudintsev touches on another great turning-point in Soviet history: the return of Gulag inmates to Soviet society. In hindsight we can also see that Lopatkin is a proto-dissident. Lopatkin survives on the margin of society, outside state service, relying on the support of fellow eccentrics, odd jobs, material aid from sympathisers and finally on occasional patronage from people within the system. Given the new possibility of independent material existence and armed with a ferocious self-righteousness, Lopatkin sets out to reform the system.

The last lines of the novel evoke the path metaphor. Although Lopatkin's machine was already made and handed over to the factories, he again suddenly saw before him a path that lost itself in the distance, a path that most likely had no end. This path awaited him, stretched in front of him, luring him on with its mysterious windings and with its stern responsibility.'[372] Lopatkin's personally chosen and mysterious road without an end subverts the narrative of society's triumphal journey to communism.

Yet the triumphal official version of the path metaphor still had some life in it. One of the most exuberant, optimistic and inclusive speeches in Soviet history is Nikita Khrushchev's comments on the new party programme at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961. Here Khrushchev updated the path metaphor in an allusion to the successful exploits in space that appeared to validate Soviet claims to leadership: 'The Programmes of the Party [1903,1919, 1961] may be compared to a three-stage rocket. The first stage wrested our country away from the capitalist world, the second propelled it to socialism, and the third is to place it in the orbit of communism. It is a wonderful rocket, comrades! (Stormy applause).'

The new programme ratified a fundamental shift in the conception of class leadership within the narrative. The official formula that summarised this shift was the replacement of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' by the 'state of the whole people'. The proletarian dictatorship was defined as not only a time of repression but also of class leadership:

The workers' and peasants' alliance needed the dictatorship ofthe proletariat to combat the exploiting classes, to transform peasant farming along socialist lines and to re-educate the peasantry, and to build socialism . . . The working class leads the peasantry and the other labouring sections of society, its allies and brothers-in-arms, and helps them to take the socialist path of their own free will.

In essence, this shift had been announced already in the early 1930s, but Khrushchev now drew the full implications without obsessing about the enemy within. 'The transition to communism [in contrast to the transition from capitalism to socialism] proceeds in the absence of any exploiting classes, when all members of society - workers, peasants, intellectuals - have a vested interest in the victory of communism, and work for it consciously.' The trans­formative function of class leadership was now transferred to the more or less automatic results of economic growth.[373]

On the basis of this combination of class collaboration and institutional tinkering, Khrushchev promised the realisation of full communism within twenty years. But this less dramatic and more inclusive version of the path metaphor ran into trouble when the expected 'advantages of socialism' failed to materialise. During the post-Khrushchev period, the journey to communism seemed stalled. The Brezhnev period is now known to history as the era of stagnation, but an even more sardonic label can be found in a song by Vladimir Vysotskii. Vysotskii was a figure scarcely conceivable in earlier phases of Soviet society - a hugely popular actor and singer who was also famous for his contribution to the genre of magnitizdat, the guitar poetry that circulated unofficially on tape cassettes.

One of his more hilarious songs is entitled 'Morning Gymnastics'. Sung up-tempo with manic cheerfulness, the song urges us to preserve our health by doing push-ups every morning until we drop.[374] The climactic final verse is given special emphasis:

We don't fear any bad news.

Our answer is - to run on the spot!

Even beginners derive benefits.

Isn't it great! - among the runners, no one is in first place and no one is backward.

Running on the spot reconciles everybody!

'Morning Gymnastics' was not an underground song - it can be found on a record sold in Soviet stores around 1980. To read the final verse as a satirical comment on Soviet society may be over-interpreting a highly entertaining comic song (although this kind of over-interpretation was also a feature of this complex and ambiguous period). Nevertheless, whether Vysotskii meant it this way or not, his image of'running on the spot' is a highly appropriate symbol of the class leadership narrative in its last days. A sense of frantic activity without real movement, a loss of the earlier dynamic arising from a vanguard seeking to inspire backward strata, a 'hear-no-evil' refusal to acknowledge problems - many Soviet citizens, even the most loyal, saw their society increasingly in these terms. Khrushchev had called for conflict-free progress towards communism, and what was the result? 'Running on the spot reconciles everybody!'