The Soviet Century

INTRODUCTION

Power games and personal ambitions are part of history. They also exert strong pressure for history to be written in such a way as to serve interests or causes. From its inception, the Soviet regime presented a radical challenge, which was reinforced during the Cold War with the polarization of the world and the arms race, and the ensuing unprecedented propaganda war. All this created the conditions in which propaganda was readily mistaken for analysis. Both sides paid a heavy price for this fallacy, impairing their own ability to understand themselves and the world around them. The Soviet Union, which prohibited free social, political and historical research, was more damaged. It was also much poorer. Ideological frenzy, with its natural bent for propaganda, cost the USSR dearly in terms of its ability to grasp its own – and global – reality and to respond with appropriate strategies.

During the 1960s and ’70s, the Soviet leadership did in fact allow some scope for published, and particularly unpublished, research and debate. It created high-quality research institutes, which enabled it to learn about the other side. Given its democratic character, in the US statistics and all sorts of information about the country were available; and this was helpful to the Soviets, notably from the 1960s onwards, when they were ready to use such data. In fact, specialists provided leaders with a sufficiently accurate picture of both the external world and Russia itself What was done with this knowledge is another story; it depended on the leaders’ conservative mentality. Even so, at various stages the USSR was ready to play the card of ‘peaceful coexistence’ and reduce tension. Aware of its inferiority (especially in the final stages of its history), it sought to implement policies that reflected a realistic appreciation of things.

In the US, the fact that independent research could be pursued, and alternative ideas and positions debated, did not necessarily mean that they counted. After all, freedom to publish critical analyses is not everything. It then has to be asked: Who pays any attention to them? Some analyses served as a cover for dubious policies and misconceptions, which were supposedly true simply by virtue of originating in the Free World.

A single illustration will suffice at this point. A group of specialists who have analysed the work of the US intelligence services[1] maintain that an organization like the CIA (and, in their turn, the leadership circles dependent on it) incorrectly assessed the strengths and weaknesses of the Soviet Union; in any event, it did not have a clue about where the USSR was headed. Yet it was capable of listening in on Brezhnev’s phone conversations and, in all likelihood, of counting the exact number of Soviet missiles. Evidently, the blinding force of ideology and the logic of power (personal or imperial), as well as an obsession with secrecy, were not the monopoly of the Soviet ‘propaganda state’, even though they were highly potent there and served the interests of conservative elements to the country’s detriment. But cognitive capacities are not the exclusive property of any one system. The Cold War, which encouraged innovation in some spheres of technology, was also a great simplifier when it came to grasping global realities; and in this regard the West was by no means faultless.

In addition to these problems, the West, including the US, suffered from the ‘security complex’, with the enormous role accorded to the secret services and their mindset of ‘anything goes’ in the line of duty – launching covert operations, hobnobbing with criminal or semi-criminal military formations, detecting communism and subversion anywhere and everywhere, buying off media outlets, infiltrating different social organizations. The obsession with security had a damaging effect on democratic institutions and created a powerful cover for the growth of internal anti-democratic forces, which were hard at work undermining American democracy. And the fact that Stalinism was worse, with its terror and witch-hunts, is little comfort. The faintest resemblance between the two systems – the very possibility of such a thing – was a danger to the liberties that furnished the battle-cry and the alleged stakes of the great contest.

Despite the contribution of genuine scholars committed to rigorous research, representations of the Soviet system were significantly influenced by the ideological and political realities of a bipolar world. Public opinion was guided in a particular direction by the large-scale diffusion of rooted ideological judgements, shaped by government agencies, the media and publicists with little interest in supporting their declarations with facts or arguments. While many other problems, countries and histories were open to debate, when it came to Soviet Russia a ‘public discourse’ emerged, based on deeply ingrained but unverified assumptions.

Setting aside the unilateral focus on misdeeds and crimes characteristic of propaganda, we shall instead point to limitations of a methodological kind. In fact, objective, methodologically sound research came up against rigid thought patterns that were widespread among publics and opinion-formers alike. These consisted in:

(1) Concentrating on leaders and government agencies as prime movers, instead of making them an object of study in order to grasp what they were engaged in and what determined their actions.

(2) Studying the USSR essentially in terms of its ‘undemocratic’ status, which meant endlessly listing all the features of a ‘non-democracy’ and dealing with what it was not, rather than attempting to deal with what it was. Let us recall that even today democracy is not the only system on the planet and that the other systems must be understood in their own right.

(3) Disregarding the historical context in which leaders operated and to which they reacted. Ahistoricism is a very common error and the gravest fault of all, because human action does not occur in a void; it is not a deus ex machina. To take an example, in 1916–17 Lenin was not someone who sought to destroy a healthy, thriving system. Quite the reverse, he (like millions of others) faced a world that was literally in a state of collapse and a disintegrating Russia, and he sprang into action without any guarantee that he would not perish before he had even begun to confront the ongoing and impending catastrophes. Or to take a subsequent example, which further clarifies the importance of attending to context, the world economic crisis of the 1930s is crucial for understanding the prestige Soviet Russia had in many people’s eyes, and helped to legitimize Stalinism. The Second World War likewise threw a veil over Stalin’s mass atrocities, at a time when the regime and his own power were already decaying because of their own internal maladies.

These considerations mean that readers can expect historical background and context, both internal and external, to play a key role in the arguments presented below.

But we have not yet done with surveying the obstacles to a real knowledge of the USSR. We must also draw attention to even more convoluted thought patterns that use and abuse the notion of Stalinism.

What I have in mind is the tendency to ‘demonize’ Stalin, by piling up on him and his system a ludicrously inflated, impossible, and quite unverifiable number of victims, involving the victims both of the terror and of his political and economic policies. When it transpires, for example, that the human losses attributed to his crimes also include major demographic losses expressed in estimates of unborn children, one can only scratch one’s head in disbelief. Why is such a calculation necessary? And for whom? Deflating these figures and other arithmetical sleights of hand was a laborious business for specialists (especially when the archives were closed to them). But it has now been done successfully, allowing us to deal with Stalin and Stalinism as they actually were. We are left with quite enough horrors to condemn what needs to be condemned, but also to disentangle the threads of a drama which, having occupied centre-stage, made for a different episode following the dictator’s death. In fact, the terror itself underwent changes; and in history it is indispensable to distinguish between different periods. The tendency to perpetuate ‘Stalinism’, by backdating it to 1917 and extending it to the end of the Soviet Union, pertains to those ‘uses and abuses’ of history of which there are many examples.

In this respect, mention should be made of the Historikerstreit (the ‘historians’ controversy’) set off by conservative German historians. In their attempt to justify representatives of the non-Nazi German Right who had helped Hitler to power, and by the same token to rehabilitate Hitler and his infernal designs on the world, they resorted to a rather predictable stratagem, counting on Western connivance encouraged by the Cold War. They wished us to believe that Hitler’s madness could somehow be attributed to Stalin, who supposedly created the atrocious precedent that inspired him. In particular, so it was claimed, the Holocaust was modelled on the treatment meted out to the kulaks. And Hitler’s aggression, although it began with attacks on countries other than Russia, was nothing but a defensive war against the war Stalin some day planned to launch against Germany.[2] The anti-communist indoctrination characteristic of the Cold War permitted this kind of ideological manoeuvre in the West. Fortunately, enough voices were raised to condemn the operation and persevere with the project of understanding the dynamic of the Soviet system.

This book does not aim to offer a history of the USSR. It is restricted to a presentation of general aspects of the system. It has three parts. Part One is devoted to the Stalinist period, with an emphasis on its specific characteristics, but also its fluctuations. Part Two deals with the post-Stalinist period (from Khrushchev to Andropov), identified as a different model that reinvigorated the system for a time, but which then sank into stagnation (zastoi). Part Three broaches the ‘Soviet era’ as a whole, attempting a bird’s-eye view of the system’s historical trajectory. It underscores the general features and specificities of this trajectory, as well as the historical underpinnings of its success and subsequent failure. Both these moments had worldwide resonance and both, we might add, were equally unpredictable and surprising. What we stress is the complexity and richness of this historical process (however gruesome many of its chapters), but also the importance of an awareness of the specifically historical dimension, including when reflecting on the course of post-Gorbachev Russia.

The political philosopher V. P. Mezhuev, of the Russian Academy’s Institute of Philosophy, addressed precisely these problems during a conference in Moscow in 1999:

This is well put, and we shall return to these considerations in our conclusion. But we wish to insist on one point: we are perfectly aware that historical research is a difficult undertaking and it seems to us crucial that it be conducted in a dispassionate and unbiased fashion. When an author professes to offer a work of scholarship, a short disclaimer is in order: intentions, however sincere, are no guarantee of success. The pitfalls en route are many and varied: sources and evidence, degree of professional mastery, personal biases, but also the infinite complexity of historical realities, which are fluid, ambiguous and manifold – and resist being reordered in any explanatory schema. And yet, if they do not attempt precisely that, historians would not even produce a convincing story. There would simply be false stories, or rather the same one endlessly trotted out.