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

When the perestroika era began in 1985, there was a widespread feeling that running on the spot could now finally be transformed into real move­ment forward. Instead, the perestroika era was marked by an ever-intensifying feeling that no one really knew any more where society should go. This de-enchantment of the narrative of the path to socialism took place in two interlocking processes. The first process was the development of reform think­ing away from the question 'how do we realise the advantages of socialism?' and towards the question 'how do we avoid the disadvantages of socialism?' The other process was a painful rethinking of Soviet history. How and when did we lose the true way and what must we do to get back on track?

Now that the lid was off, Soviet society had to face up to the full implica­tions of the question that Kaganovich dimly perceived back in 1953. Mikhail Gorbachev tried to give an answer that fully acknowledged the disasters of Soviet history while preserving the sense that Soviet society still had a mission to complete the great journey. 'Neither flagrant mistakes nor the deviations from socialist principles that were allowed could turn our people or our coun­try off the road on which they set out when they made their choice in 1917. The impulse of October was too great!'[375]

The two processes - the rapid evolution of reform thinking and the ago­nising reappraisal of Soviet history - came together in the use of NEP as a symbol of the path not taken. On the one hand, NEP represented a type of socialism that co-existed with market elements and that could therefore be used to delegitimise the 'administrative command system' associated with the Soviet planned economy. On the other hand, NEP seemed to represent a genuine alternative within Soviet history to Stalinist crimes and inefficiency.

But NEP provided only a temporary barrier between the glory of the rev­olution and the taint of Stalinism. The actual NEP had meant the short-term toleration of the market on the road to socialism. If the reformers of pere- stroika were indeed on the same road, they were travelling in the opposite direction. And the more closely the reformers looked at the political institu­tions of NEP, the less it looked like a genuine alternative to Stalinism. As the novelist Fazil Iskander wrote sadly in 1988, 'the awful thing is that, remem­bering the party arguments of the time, I somehow cannot remember one man who put forward a Programme for the democratisation of the country. There were arguments about inter-party democracy but I don't remember any others ... In such conditions Stalin, naturally, proved to be the best Stalinist, and won.'[376]

The feeling grew stronger that perhaps 'the impulse of October' opened up a fundamentally false path and made it impossible to get off that path - or even that the path metaphor is simply not a useful way of thinking about a society's development. When in 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed not with a bang but a whimper, this unexpected outcome was partly the result of the previous de- enchantment ofthe narrative of class leadership. The Soviet Union had always been based on fervent belief in this narrative in its various permutations. When the binding power of the narrative dissolved, the Soviet Union itself dissolved.