The Soviet Century

PREFACE

The Soviet Union is no more. As some like to put it, ‘It’s history’ – meaning ‘Forget all that.’ Politicians, academics and the media elaborate on this formula in accordance with their specific interests and perspectives. But the term ‘history’ is rich in meanings and the Soviet era is still recent history. Even if their numbers are declining, the majority of the populations of Russia and the other republics of the ex-Soviet Union were formed in the USSR and many are even nostalgic for it. It is still part of the biographies of millions of people, and in this sense the ‘past’ is still relevant to their lives.

This ‘biographical’ dimension is only one index of the persistence of the past. The question of the country’s national identity preoccupies Russian citizens, and this debate involves different attitudes to, and conceptions of, the USSR. Yet when such an important collective analysis is conducted without serious knowledge of the past – which is still frequently the case – national debate turns to farce.

For historians and for all those who are aware of the myriad ways in which history, however distant, makes its presence felt, ‘Forget all that’ is an utterly absurd attitude. Especially in the last fifteen years of its existence, the USSR did not cope with its present. Yet in so far as it now belongs to the past, it represents an immutable reality that cannot be altered by successive interpretations of it: it is – and will remain – a crucial part of the dramatic twentieth century. And who seriously believes that we no longer require a knowledge of the twentieth century?

Soviet Russia remains a weighty component of Russia’s cultural and political tradition, which continues to influence the country to this day – not unlike the Tsarist past, which continued to shape the USSR. Can this be ignored by anyone who is interested in their country’s destiny and reflects on it?

Thus, the USSR as ‘past’ is needed in the present for the simple reason that it is impossible to dispose of history. One of the contentions of this book is that the USSR remains an ill-understood system. The veil of secrecy that was the hallmark of the Soviet system has been lifted for earlier periods (including the Stalin period), which can now be, and are being, studied systematically. Previously, the lack of access to archives and other indispensable sources of information made studying Soviet history a very frustrating and arduous enterprise. Coming across data that contained useful pointers, or hitting upon a well-documented Soviet publication, was a signal event.

So when Soviet archives became accessible, historians had to take advantage of them. For me personally, obtaining such material, whether found by myself or published in documentary collections by others, became my main activity for a number of years. The more I read, the richer the reality began to look to me. But at the same time I experienced renewed frustration because of the lack of access to material dealing with the later stages of the Soviet era.

In this work, I endeavour to bring out what I consider to be unknown or neglected aspects, even though they afford greater insight into the guts of the system. I have made little use of Western sources here – something I intend to do in the more systematic future work I have in mind. Here reliance on new materials – archives, memoirs, autobiographies or documentary publications – is an objective in itself. But it is also a kind of self-examination: after consulting a mass of new evidence, what remains of my former understanding of the Soviet phenomenon? How has it changed? Where did it err? Most of what I say in the forthcoming pages answers these questions, as the new materials revealed things I knew little about and allowed me to formulate problems I could not raise before.

The other privileged source in these pages is current work by Russian scholars, who either have access to first-hand information, or have worked in governmental institutions, or who were already writing knowledgeably and critically in Soviet times.

I also thought that readers would benefit from the opportunity to get a feel for what these sources consist in, what they ‘say’, and what the regime knew or could know on the basis of the information communicated by its various agencies. In order to lay bare the building-blocks of my interpretation, and offer readers a sample of what Soviet leaders were themselves reading, I have therefore both summarized and quoted extensively from these documents and authors.

Thus it turns out that although society was poorly informed – and often seriously misinformed – the regime, especially in the post-Stalinist period, often had at its disposal a mass of good material and, in addition, rigorous analyses of the country and of the outside world. But good information never helps mediocre leaders. The problem lay in what these leaders were able to understand, what they wanted to know, what they did know – even if they were incapable of doing anything with it – but also in what they had absolutely no desire to know.

These questions take us to the heart of our inquiry into the Soviet system’s mechanisms and underpinnings.