The Soviet Century

In the Introduction, it was pointed out that the polarization of opinion and the powerful impact of Cold War propaganda had squeezed out the ‘contextual reflection’ indispensable to historical inquiry in favour of other objectives and priorities, to the benefit of the media, ideology, and emotion.

Scholarly work on the Soviet Union has to confront widely held and fervently defended opinions – a highly structured ‘public discourse’ that does not exist in other fields of knowledge. This discourse rests upon a series of methodological errors that are paraded in the various media as obvious verities. The first error consists in focusing on leaders, actors and ideology, depicted as independent agents abstracted from their historical context. Neither the circumstances that shaped and conditioned them, nor the past, nor the surrounding world are taken into account. For many, everything began in 1917 – the moment of the ‘original sin’. For others, it occurred even earlier, in 1902–3, with the publication of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? Thereafter, events unfolded as if they had been genetically programmed, and the sequence Leninism–Bolshevism–Communism is constructed as a fatality. I exaggerate somewhat, but the irony is justified when we recall that What Is to Be Done? was written at a time when Russian Social-Democracy in its entirety, Lenin included, was absolutely convinced that the coming revolution in Russia would be a liberal one (‘bourgeois-democratic’ was their term) – something that precluded the Left taking power. In those years, Lenin regarded Russian capitalism as a triumphant force, rushing full steam ahead and already visible under every bush…

Whenever a determinist perspective is adopted, historical research takes a back seat; and whenever a ‘party line’ (left, right or centre) is adopted in historical research, one only gets out of the piggy-bank what has already been put in it – not a penny more.

In the case of historiography about the Soviet Union, an additional impediment is the common tendency to discount the social changes it actually underwent. The failure to study the society over the longer durée, and the almost exclusive focus instead on the power structure, is sometimes justified by the formula ‘There was no society, only a regime’: the Kremlin, the Staraia Ploshchad, the Lubianka – three addresses, and nothing else. More recently, the term nomenklatura has been presented as a great discovery, without noticing that in the absence of a detailed study of what it denoted, it is only another word.

This is just one example among many of the propensity of numerous commentators for not noticing the obvious gaps in our knowledge of the country. Knowing that such gaps exist and wanting to fill them stems from an old piece of epistemological advice: scio ut nescio.

The ‘contextual’ approach also requires paying attention to the general European scene, its dramas and their aftermath. There the situation changed rapidly, with one crisis following another. From 1914 to 1953 we witness a veritable cascade of cataclysmic events, which impacted very heavily on Russia’s population. And the leaders, before engaging in any action, had to confront this series of crises – many of them not of their making. Lenin did not cause the First World War, or engineer the fall of Tsarism, or even the failure of democratic forces to control the chaos in Russia in 1917. Action or inaction, folly or reason – these cannot be understood without taking account of a period that was confused, crisis-ridden, and laden with the past: it engulfed people and set their agendas. A political strategist par excellence, Lenin was only reacting to what he perceived and understood of the crises he was living through. It is therefore imperative that we broaden the canvas and situate people and movements on it.

Historical complexity is composed of countless factors that can converge, diverge, or collide. It is always much more than the action of a leader, a ruling group, a dominant class, an elite. To arrive at a better understanding of these factors, broader parameters are indispensable. Even the history of a regime as brutal as Stalin’s is not one-dimensional. We have to pose its whys and wherefores, distinguish between its different phases, and determine when it was in – and when it was out of – touch with reality.

Whatever the regime’s degree of isolation and autarky, the external environment cannot be ignored. Not only were foreign radio broadcasts monitored, but systematic studies of Western economic performance landed on the desks of Soviet leaders. The intelligence services, diplomats, and officials from the Foreign Trade Ministry were so many sources of information about what happened abroad, even though it was reserved for the elite. As to the broader Soviet public, we should not underestimate the importance of foreign literary works in translation. However selective, they were numerous: they included many masterpieces of world culture and the quality of the translations was excellent. Soviet citizens became renowned for being great readers of quality works, not to mention their passion for poetry and its specific political role. Today, these qualities have almost entirely vanished.

I have already alluded to another set of problems, which are just as complex and difficult to disentangle. The Soviet and Western systems impacted on and influenced one another, the repercussions varying in form and intensity with the fluctuating international situation. The image the USSR wished to project of itself – as a country building socialism – was at the heart of this process. A closer look at this theme will allow us to clarify some of its aspects, both in the history of Soviet ideology and in its interaction with the outside world – notably in the images and self-images of ‘socialism versus capitalism’ that the two camps projected at one another at different historical stages. How and why so many left-wing critics of the Western world were led to see in the Soviet Union something it was not, and could not have been, is a complicated issue that belongs here. At the same time, we must not forget the use made by the Right of the Soviet Union’s claim to be what it was not, in order to strengthen its grip on Western societies and try to undermine democratic institutions.

The Soviet claim to represent a counter-model and alternative to capitalism helped the USSR mobilize not only its own people, but also considerable external support. It was used after the war to justify the existence of a ‘socialist camp’ and to deck it out in what seemed like natural finery. But if the voice was Jacob’s, the hands were Esau’s. Looked at more closely, the reality had nothing idyllic about it, but was a phenomenon in its own right – much like the Chinese system, which today is a power to be reckoned with.

The last of the impediments worth mentioning here is the massive use of concepts like ‘totalitarianism’ (I shall return to it) that have greatly contributed to ignorance of the significant changes which occurred in the Soviet system. The blatant disregard for the social dimension was proof positive of the conceptual inadequacy of the ideology of totalitarianism. Its concentration on the regime, as if society was by definition so much putty, contributed to the neglect of the deep structural changes in society that were crucial for understanding the regime’s achievements, internal changes, crises and downfall.

These omissions, encouraged by the aridity of ideological confrontation and propaganda warfare, are themselves legitimate subjects for historical inquiry, as of course is the damage the Soviet regime inflicted on itself by banning free inquiry and debate. Ideological arguments and postulates, wherever they come from, cannot be a guide in research; they can only be one of its topics, with a view to unpicking unwarranted claims and understanding their source and purpose. But the important task is to fashion conceptual tools and research strategies in order to clarify what the Soviet system really was, how it evolved (ideology included), and where it is to be situated on the map of political systems.

Let us reiterate the point: the past – in fact, several pasts – were (and are) active, because in Russia realities (not merely relics) inherited from earlier centuries coexisted simultaneously. Unlike periods when the pace of change is slow, in crisis-ridden periods social strata and phenomena pertaining to different epochs collide violently, and in the utmost confusion they shape and reshape political behaviour and institutions. Tsarist Russia experienced its fair share of upheavals in the twentieth century, and these continued well into the Soviet period, exhibiting a whole range of phenomena bound up with political and social changes: ‘crises’, ‘revolutions’, ‘civil war’, upswings, ‘decline’, and then collapse. This spectacle is not necessarily tedious, even if it is somewhat depressing. We also need to hit upon the right terms for each phenomenon, because we cannot use the same ones for the prewar Stalinist phase of breakneck industrialization, combining social development and a ‘cancerous’ political pathology, and the postwar Stalinist period of rapid economic recovery and retrograde political and ideological campaigns. Finally, we must not lose sight of the swing of the pendulum specific to Russia. An important European power in 1913, it was a devastated country by 1920. Mobilized in an impressive war effort from 1941 to 1945, it was a victorious superpower in 1945 and yet once again ravaged. Ten or so years later, it was a superpower with Sputniks and intercontinental missiles, and the sequel was no less surprising. This is a very dense set of hectic historical processes – and a vast field for students of social change.

We are not going to play the role of counsel for the prosecution or for the defence. Any historical study deserving of the name strives to state what was the case. Where there is something positive – progress – it should emerge clearly; and where there is a pathology (history is full of them), it too should emerge.

We have seen that widespread opinions in political circles, the media and popular perception are so many obstacles to serious study of the USSR. The scholarly works devoted to this country and its system belong in another category altogether; they must be approached quite differently, even if some academics contributed to the confection of a standard ‘public discourse’ on the Soviet Union. Spread over many countries, academic research has generated a wide variety of studies that certainly reflected the biases of the ‘great contest’ in some respects, but which were nevertheless the product of serious, sometimes impressive work. In the absence of access to Soviet sources, they adopted a multiplicity of approaches and formed into various schools of thought. Today, given easier access to the archives, but perhaps also in view of the sad state of contemporary Russia, many colleagues would probably concur that a more balanced approach to the Soviet era, warts and all, is not only possible, but indispensable.

The Soviet Union was an integral and intricate part of the twentieth century. It cannot be ‘decoded’ without a clear grasp of the role it played in that century’s dramas. This brings us back to a virtual truism: the impact of world events on Russia was constant and formative.

The 1905 revolution and the First World War strongly influenced the programme of the Russian Social-Democrats, including the tendency led by Lenin (it was established as a party in 1912), and guided their expectations and strategies. Let us reiterate that this political movement had been created with a view not to exercising power or leading a revolution in the short term, but to participating in it and propelling it in the direction of the prescribed historical stage. However, when the attempt at a ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution in 1905–7 failed, Lenin began to doubt the validity of his own and the Social-Democratic Party’s assessment of the extent of capitalist development and its impact on Russia. He had hitherto seen capitalism at work everywhere; now he discovered that the leading force ready to topple the Tsarist regime was not the liberals, but rather the peasantry. Accordingly, Lenin began, rather tentatively, to search for a new perspective and a new strategy. And it was only during the First World War that his initial conception of the coming revolution (in fact formulated by Plekhanov) began to change, although it remained valid for most members of his party.

It is important to stress that many members of the Russian Social-Democratic Party, including Lenin himself, had lived in the West and participated in the activities of Western social-democratic parties, while continuing to follow Russian affairs very closely. It might be said that they possessed political ‘dual nationality’ or, more precisely, that they lived in two different worlds politically. Lenin was a case in point. He was a Russian-German social-democrat and a member of the Executive Committee of the Second International. There is no reason to doubt his commitment to that side of the equation; and as with so many others, it was where he had acquired the conceptual tools he used to think about the world. However – and it was no secret to anyone – he was also moulded by Russia, which remained at the centre of his concerns. But this Russian universe was quite distinct from the West. As Lenin had discovered, notably by reading historians of Tsarist Russia, it was a multi-faceted conglomeration, whose components coexisted in the same space without moving at the same pace. Both his worlds were now entering into a long period of turmoil, beginning with the First World War and continuing in crises and revolutions. These events overtook the whole of Central and Eastern Europe – an economically underdeveloped, largely agrarian region, run or about to be run by dictatorial or deeply authoritarian regimes (with the exception of Germany and Czechoslovakia, whose democracy was actually more stable than the Weimar Republic). All these factors have to be encompassed in the matrix of the Soviet system. A further crucial point should not be forgotten: German Social-Democracy (in a sense, Lenin’s ideological alma mater) had rallied to its country’s war effort and aims, as had other socialist parties in their respective countries. The Second International, seemingly so powerful in 1914, split apart – a disaster from which European socialism never really recovered. The unprecedented slaughter and economic devastation produced by the war created expectations in many left-wing circles that it would be followed by a revolutionary crisis throughout Europe. They threw themselves into a search for prognoses and strategies that would lead to a revolutionary government in Europe. The role of Russia, and its own historical potential (as a backward country), was deemed of secondary importance.

An exchange of letters in 1915 between two Bolshevik emigres, Lenin and Bukharin, in which they argued about revolutionary prospects and strategy, offers a flavour of their high hopes and their thinking. At the time, Lenin, like Bukharin (a young, romantic revolutionary ten years his junior), was completely immersed in the prospect of a future revolution in Europe or even on a world scale. Often young, the Bolsheviks were preparing to play a decisive role in it. In all seriousness, Lenin and Bukharin discussed the possibility of resorting to a ‘revolutionary invasion’ of Germany to defend the revolution, but disagreed as to whether the backing of the German Left should be sought. Bukharin considered it indispensable: otherwise, he argued, there was a risk of nationalist unity being created in Germany and ‘our invasion’ failing. In this European revolutionary perspective, revolution in Russia seemed a secondary issue to Lenin, and Bukharin’s ‘our invasion’ referred to any revolutionary force in Europe – not some invasion from Russia. Lenin and Bukharin wondered whether the impossibility of establishing socialism in Russia (a hitherto commonly accepted idea) was still a problem. According to Bukharin, that would be the case if only some countries were affected by revolution. But if the revolution was to be pan-European, Russia would become just one part of a much broader entity; and in any case, national identities would dissolve.[1]

It emerges from this exchange that revolutionary strategy, and not just in Russia, would be imposed by… ‘Bolsheviks’ – a term that now seems to refer to European revolutionary parties, united in a new international organization, since the Second International was dead and its leaders bankrupt. What was occurring was a shift to the Left, with such ‘Bolsheviks’ taking the lead.

The thinking here is rather utopian and might seem to imply a ‘red imperialism’. But since the stage of current and future events was global, it was not about Russia (which, as everyone agreed, had no socialist potential), and certainly did not situate Russia at the centre of events and speculate about any expansionist advantages it might draw from them. Lenin’s orientation towards the revolutionary potential of Europe was to persist until the launch of the NEP in the Soviet Union. With the recession of revolutionary prospects in Europe, the feverish search for allies in some crisis-torn country, which was motivated not by the strength but by the extreme vulnerability of the new Russian regime, was abandoned. A very different Leninism then took the place of its predecessor.

1917: THE MAIN CAMPS

With all this in mind, we may jump forward to 1917 – a year that experienced a glorious spring, but a very harsh autumn. The brevity and intensity of these two seasons, and the contrasts between them, are striking, though there were of course more than two chapters in this highly compressed slice of history.

The exhilarating revolution that broke out in Russia in February-March 1917 was full of unusual features. Tsarist autocracy was not actually overthrown by anyone: it faded from the scene in the middle of a war, without any obvious alternative to take its place. The Duma, which enjoyed zero prestige, was incapable of taking over. It simply produced a provisional government and then retired from the public political stage. The government was not accountable to it and did not last. Thereafter, a new government was formed every two months. Since we are only concerned here with the bare essentials, we must underline the appearance – and then the disappearance – of three main players. First, there were the soviets, whose leaders – Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks – became (with or without the liberals) the central figures in successive provisional governments from May 1917 onwards. Next came the Bolsheviks, who initially played a merely subsidiary role in the soviets, but whose strength grew rapidly. Finally the future ‘Whites’, almost entirely absent at the outset, began to assemble their forces and soon became the third central protagonist. As for the liberals, they had their own agenda and switched allies accordingly.

The soviets – a unique phenomenon that had first emerged in 1905 – were in fact the only structure resembling something like state power. However, their leaders did not push them to assume power because, according to their analysis and ideology, the future regime was to be a liberal one. The two socialist parties gained a place in government thanks to the soviets, but were almost embarrassed by the fact. For example, the Mensheviks – most of them orthodox Marxists – based their whole strategy on the impossibility of socialism in Russia. For them, the only route ahead was capitalism and democracy; hence the sole indispensable ally was the propertied classes (the middle classes in current terminology). As Ziva Galili has shown, the Mensheviks were divided into various currents. Once in government, some of them revised their pre-revolutionary positions. Others worked in the soviets or stuck with their earlier views. There was also a minority led by Martov – the ‘internationalists’ – that preferred a purely socialist government supported by the soviets. It was opposed to socialist participation in the Provisional Government, which it considered too heavy a price to pay.[2]

The Constitutional Democrats (the Cadets), led by the historian and politician Pavel Miliukov, initially wanted to preserve the monarchy in order to avoid a revolution. From May onwards, however, they ‘withdrew’ (as Miliukov put it) – renounced any responsibility for developments as a party and sympathized with General Kornilov when he attempted a coup against Kerensky’s government. They longed for a strong government capable of containing the chaos that threatened to engulf the country. Miliukov stressed that this should not be a military dictatorship, but proposed that Kornilov should take the place of Kerensky, whom he deemed ineffectual. Thus the Cadets banked on a monarchist general to restore order and proceed to a democratic republic when circumstances permitted. The key point here is that the liberals (or at least those who shared Miliukov’s views) believed a strong hand was required – but not, of course, from the Left. They did cooperate with the Provisional Government in lukewarm fashion, not as a party but in the shape of individuals accepting ministerial portfolios in order to counter the Left, which was linked to the soviets. The latter represented the only force the Provisional Government could count on. But because they sought the support of the Cadets, the democratic left-wing parties had to pay the price of participating in the government and forsaking the support of the soviets. Such were the contradictions in which, on account of their political and ideological orientation, the Cadets on the one hand and the leaders of the soviets on the other found themselves trapped. These issues must be treated in more detail, since they allow us to understand the kaleidoscope of events that filled the first ten months of 1917.

The political opinions and options of Miliukov and his supporters among the Cadets are highly illuminating. The most heavily criticized aspect of Lenin’s revolution – his programme for a one-party dictatorial regime – started out from a sense of what was possible and what was inevitable that was shared by other forces in the political arena. It is scarcely a revelation to indicate that the Whites (mainly monarchists) intended to install a military dictatorship which would restore an autocracy. They loathed such institutions as the Duma – even the fairly impotent one that existed under the Tsar. And there is no doubt that they were not fond of Miliukov’s party, even when, in response to their attacks, Miliukov insisted that he had done everything in his power to save Tsarism – it was not his fault if it had turned out to be irredeemable. But although they were supporters of a constitutional monarchy, the Cadets – the liberal party – believed that even that degree of liberalization was excluded in Russia for the time being; and for this reason, they defended a dictatorship. This was also the case with the third main actor: Lenin and the Bolsheviks. This unexpected parallel between Miliukov and Lenin in assessing the Russian situation may prove illuminating.

Miliukov’s description of the final days of the monarchy in his 1927 book, Rossia na Perelome (‘Russia at the Crossroads’), is as sombre as that subsequently offered by the Soviet historian Avrekh in a remarkably detailed volume on the twilight of Tsarism. Miliukov sets out his thesis of a lack of ‘cohesion’ between the various classes – peasantry, nobility, middle classes – and between Tsarism and the rest of society.[3] Hence the enormous fragility of the Tsarist system, which found expression in the indolence of the state, a propensity for rebellion among popular strata, and the utopian thinking of the intelligentsia. Miliukov’s views – including his formulas about the primacy of the state over society (which amounted to making it the sole bulwark against the danger of fragmentation) – were influential in Russian historiography. Even if they used a different terminology, Lenin and Trotsky’s ideas about Russia’s social structure exhibit some affinity with Miliukov’s. His pessimism about the prospects for a democratic outcome to the events of 1917 onwards was grounded in a historical perspective: military dictatorship or chaos.

Some older, unpublished texts by Miliukov, recently discovered in the archives, explain why he hoped to save the monarchy.[4] It is clear that it was the absence of any alternative acceptable to him, in circumstances where the door to democracy was barred, which justified this card in a game of historical poker, as far as he was concerned.

The ‘democratic forces’, which corresponded to the non-Bolshevik or, more precisely, anti-Bolshevik Left – the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries – were in principle committed to a democratic solution. Confronted, however, with the reality of a disintegrating country, some within their ranks, particularly ministers in the Provisional Government, were forced – hesitantly at first – to resort to measures associated with a state of emergency: price controls, rationing, compulsory grain purchases, dispatch of police and military units to quell unrest in the countryside. Inadvertently to start off with, but soon quite deliberately, many of them became champions of a strong state, in outright contradiction of their previous orientation and ideology. Moreover, although they approximated most closely to a genuine democratic outlook, and adamantly refused the diagnosis of Miliukov and Lenin, they never stopped ‘yearning for Miliukov’ – which was a mirage, given that Miliukov was yearning for the ‘iron fist’ of a monarchist: another mirage. No wonder nothing seemed feasible.

The government was headed for financial bankruptcy. The Finance Minister, Shingarev, depicted the approaching catastrophe as follows. Before the war, the money in circulation had amounted to 1.6 billion roubles in paper notes and 400 million in gold. During the war, however, instead of the projected 6 billion roubles, 12 billion had been printed – hence the very high inflation that he characterized as a ‘sweet poison’. The revolution had unleashed enormous expectations among the population. Everyone’s wages had been increased, as had pensions. Expenditure went on rising, but the state treasury was ‘empty’. Thirty million roubles were being printed daily (something that required 8,000 workers). How was this chaos to be brought to an end? It was impossible to print more than a billion roubles a month, and yet it cost 1.5 billion because of inflation. Ten million people were enrolled in the army: ‘Blood is flowing on the front, but in the rear we are having what might be called a feast during the plague. The country is on the verge of ruin. The fatherland is in danger!’[5]

Police reports coming in from all over the country attested to the growing unrest in the countryside, a deterioration in food supplies, and the piteous state of the army. In this sombre context, the Provisional Government, mainly composed of Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks (with the symbolic participation of some property owners), realized that it was no longer in control of anything, that its legitimacy was dwindling with every passing day, and that it was running out of room for manoeuvre. The need for a new, reinvigorated coalition led it to convene on 14 September a ‘Democratic Assembly’, which was to elect an informal ‘pre-parliament’ charged with negotiating the makeup of a new, strengthened provisional government with (or so it was hoped) some prestige. But everyone observing the debates and manoeuvring within the pre-parliament elected by the Assembly had to conclude that the political will and ability to build a state were altogether absent from it. All it had to offer was interminable talk.

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1917: THE PRE-PARLIAMENT

The reality of the pre-parliament is clearly described in the memoirs of Nikolai Avksentev, one of the leaders of the right wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries.[6] From February 1917 he was president of the executive committee of peasant soviets; in July he was appointed Interior Minister; and in September he became president of the provisional soviet of the Russian Republic (the pre-parliament).

His narrative offers the impression of a solemn session in some luxurious palace – in fact, an utterly sterile gathering united only by hatred for the Bolsheviks – when on the outside a quite different system was already being conceived. With much bitterness, Avksentev vividly describes the internal divisions within each group (all the parties were fissiparous). The situation possessed the typical features of a case of stalemate and impotence, a glaring example of which had been the meeting in Nicholas II’s headquarters at the front a year earlier, when he had proved incapable of doing anything except endlessly reshuffling his government while everything around him was collapsing. Further examples of such paralysis could be cited. The screenplay is different on each occasion, but the spectacle is the same: the political impotence of the key players of the moment. The efforts in September-October 1917 to regain control of events are a classic of the genre.

Avksentev and his associates tried to stabilize the situation by calling on the representatives of the soviets to accept a minority position in the ‘pre-parliament’ that the Democratic Assembly was about to constitute. A majority position was offered to ‘property-owners’ – that is to say, the organizations and parties representing the middle classes. The Democratic Assembly met in mid-September in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks, who participated at the outset, wanted to exclude the property-owners completely and to create a purely socialist government, which they declared themselves ready to support. This position was of interest only to a small left-wing group in the Menshevik Party, led by Martov. The Democratic Assembly proceeded to elect 250 members according to their party’s relative strength in the Assembly; and 250 other persons were added from various middle-class and business milieux. These representatives were supposed to provide political and moral support for the government. According to Avksentev, this was necessary because ‘the government enjoyed no other support whatsoever’.

The situation described by Avksentev is one paradox wrapped up in another. The democratic camp offered the property-owners a majority in order to secure legitimacy for the government, without seeing that the soviets (which they led) were the only source of legitimate support. Thus, they sought support from elements who possessed nothing like the power of the soviets. Avksentev understood this very well: he extolled the efforts made by the heads of the soviets to organize the bourgeoisie and bring it into the political fray, and yet he noted: ‘this only served to highlight the weakness of the bourgeoisie’ – something for which neither the Bolsheviks nor the democratic forces were responsible. In the coalition government, the democrats (i.e. the socialists) had mass support (in the soviets), while their bourgeois allies had none. Yet the democratic forces continued to offer parity – even a majority – in the Assembly to bourgeois elements who had nothing to offer except their weakness, but who demanded a high price for it.

Avksentev stresses the debilitating character of the whole process of trying to establish an utterly artificial coalition. It yielded only petty squabbles, failing to produce unity or the kind of succour the government needed.

The remaining Provisional Government ministers – Kerensky, Tereshchenko and others – then embarked on negotiations with different protagonists in the Winter Palace. All sides were aware that the country was on the road to ruin and that unity was urgently required. Yet each of them stuck to their sacrosanct ‘formula’, fearful lest the masses on the outside cry treason if their magical terms were abandoned. The bickering focused on minor questions of dogma, even simple points of grammar. While the nitpicking proceeded within the palace walls, outside a storm was brewing that would soon sweep them all away.

In the meantime, a coalition government was formed and another body – the Provisional Council of the Republic – set up. The latter was to be inaugurated at the beginning of October, to give the Cadets and property-owners enough time to select their representatives. Negotiations continued on the composition of its presidium. Avksentev recounts them in great detail and finally brings us to the solemn meeting of the Provisional Council on 7 October, at 3 PM, in the Marinsky Palace – the very hall where the Tsar convened his Grand State Council. The hall was full; the diplomatic corps was present in its loggias; applause greeted Kerensky, who opened the session. Yet as Avksentev recounts, ‘one did not sense any real conviction that a great new beginning was under way… A unitary institution had been created for the democrats and the bourgeoisie, but there was no unity in it… and the contradictions remained just as potent’. People were more concerned with words than deeds. The Left insisted on peace and the agrarian question, whereas these were things the Cadets would not countenance. Avksentev was in agreement with the latter, and sought to persuade the Mensheviks to exclude contentious items from the final document that was to be adopted. According to Avksentev, it was the soviets – in other words their Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary leaders – who demonstrated their impotence at a critical moment and failed to support the government. So much for Avksentev’s account.

Avksentev accused the ‘democratic Left’ of programmatic inflexibility. In fact, it had no independent political programme corresponding to its actual strength. Its representatives placed all their hopes in the Cadets and other bourgeois elements, while the Cadets only had eyes for the monarchists. Like the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks were divided, and neither party could offer anything clear of their own or accept anything proposed by other forces. When Martov called for a purely socialist government based on the soviets, his position at least possessed the merit of clarity – but it commanded only a small minority of his party.

As everyone argued against the Bolsheviks, there was no prospect of socialism. Here the Mensheviks and others were perfectly right. However, while they already possessed considerable power, this did not fit their ‘formula’. The latter required that they persuade the middle classes to opt for a democratic system. But the bourgeoisie was in disarray and did not wish to participate in such a government. So this raises the question: What were the Mensheviks right about? As Miliukov clearly understood, the ‘middle classes’ whom everyone was counting on were a phantom army politically; and the liberals who should have been their political leaders dreamed only of taming the beast and finding someone with an iron fist. The country was falling apart and there was no central government available capable of averting total chaos.

The monarchist Right saw no other way of resolving matters than through military force and recourse to terror; and they made no secret of it. But what system were they planning to establish once the rioters had been hanged from the lampposts? Many of the White generals looked to the past for a model – a return to the monarchy that they still believed feasible. In the first months of 1917, these stalwarts of the old regime seemed to have been shown the door. Yet Kornilov’s abortive coup in August and the fact that the liberals supported him should have rung alarm bells. Kornilov’s target was not just the Bolsheviks but the whole of the Left, the Provisional Government, and the forces behind it. For the military and other right-wing circles, the leaders of the soviets were guilty of perpetrating a crime – the equivalent of what the German Right was to denounce after the defeat of 1918, or the myth of the ‘stab in the back’ by the enemy within. The introduction of soviets into the army on the initiative of the leaders of the civilian soviets was an affront to the officer corps and, in its view, undermined the troops’ fighting ability. The future White forces (including many ‘Black Hundreds’) needed time to regroup. They dreamt of then retaking Moscow, having the bells of its hundred of churches tolled, and then restoring the empire with a Tsar at its head.

For the time being, though, from September 1917 onwards the country was not governed and looked ungovernable. Only a movement that supported the construction of a strong state could save it. But one candidate for the task – the democratic Left – was in decline. It had no armed forces at its disposal and took no initiatives. Having been certain that the country was ready for a liberal democracy, and nothing else, and having failed to realize that the liberals themselves did not believe in this prospect, it refused to acknowledge its error or pose an obvious question: What was Russia ready for? For their part, the liberals were very weak and saw no alternative to making common cause with the Whites, for only an iron fist could save the country.

My intention is not to denigrate these people, most of them honourable men caught in a historical cul-de-sac. Many of the future victors would also crack their heads (sometimes literally) on all these problems, starting with the same dilemma: What was Russia ready for?

The pre-parliament’s inability to come up with anything was chronic. It offered a foretaste of what would happen in the Constituent Assembly after its inaugural session on 19 January 1918, under the presidency of V. Chernov, who was completely discredited even in his own party (Socialist Revolutionaries), let alone outside it. The forces that had supported the Provisional Government were no more capable of producing a new leadership team in January 1918 than they had been in September 1917. By then, their political potential was completely exhausted and they had also lost any support among the military, especially after the disastrous results of the July 1917 offensive ordered by Kerensky. When they convened the following January in the Constituent Assembly elected in October, they were already a spent force. Yet such an assembly, which was something completely novel in Russia, was incapable of effecting a historical turn without the combined support of the popular masses and the troops. It did not enjoy the support of the soviets (including the military soviets), and those who had elected it in October had already forgotten all about it by January, so fast did the scenery change on the stage of history. The Bolsheviks were not the only ones who wanted to send this Constituent Assembly packing. Had they represented a unified force at the time, the Whites would have done the same. And the Cadets, the supposedly quintessential ‘bourgeois-democratic’ party, had no use for it either: they held only 17 of the some 800 seats and the divided Left that dominated the Assembly was of no interest to them.[7]

In January 1918, the central committee of the Cadet party adopted a resolution stating that it was ‘neither necessary nor advisable’ to demand the restoration of the dissolved Constituent Assembly, because it was incapable of discharging the duties assigned it and hence of restoring order in Russia.[8] Such was the logic of those who longed for a ‘strong hand’. The Cadets looked for such a figure among the right-wing military, because they did not believe in a democratic solution at this stage, at a time when Russia must continue to fight alongside her allies and in any event was not ready for real change. Thus their response to the actual needs of a country in danger of disintegrating was to set off in search of a promising general.

As has been indicated, the background to this analysis lay in Miliukov’s ideas about Russia’s structural weakness: its socially composite character made it prone to crisis, which threatened it with disintegration. But this analysis should have led its author to dwell on the causes of the fall of Tsarism and be more sceptical as to the potential of a right-wing military dictator. One of Miliukov’s reasons for trying to keep Nicholas II on his throne in 1917 was that ‘we cannot afford to change national symbols in times of turmoil’, but the Tsar had disappointed him. His subsequent decision to opt for a right-wing dictator was based on an incorrect socio-political analysis of what such a figure implied: dictators do not usually float above social reality for the duration of their restorative mission. The social forces behind each of the generals on whom Miliukov successively pinned his hopes were already basically spent. Miliukov later described the predicament his party found itself in when cooperating with the Whites: some of its members felt out of place, whereas others were perfectly at ease in this camp – an obvious reason for them to renounce their allegiances and split the party.

In September 1917, some Bolshevik leaders believed that the situation was desperate and that the Provisional Government was bankrupt. But the line of action to adopt was still a matter of debate. After some hesitation, in September 1917 Lenin adjudged that Russia was experiencing a ‘revolutionary situation’ which was not be missed. This concept – i.e. Lenin’s definition of this type of crisis – was crucial in his thinking. In the absence of visible symptoms of a revolutionary crisis, seeking to take power was sheer adventurism. Assessing such situations accurately is not easy, and Lenin had erred on several occasions: when the whole of Europe was tottering on its foundations, ‘revolutionary situations’ could be detected at will. But Lenin admitted his errors and sought to rectify them. In the autumn of 1917, things seemed clear in Russia: the formula for a revolutionary crisis – that is to say, a situation where the ruling classes can no longer rule and the popular classes will no longer tolerate their lot – obtained. The growing power vacuum could only be filled by a left-wing force or forces (a conclusion categorically rejected, as we have seen, by the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries); otherwise, the monarchist Right might step in. A sizeable group of Bolshevik leaders, led by Zinoviev and Kamenev, agreed with the characterization of the crisis, but was in favour of a coalition government containing the parties active in the soviets. For them, this was a sine qua non of any takeover of power by socialists. But they were no more successful in securing the cooperation of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries than the latter had been in their overtures to the elusive bourgeoisie.

Lenin and Trotsky did not believe that all they had to do to establish a post-capitalist regime was to proclaim a socialist revolution. The starting point of Trotsky’s theory of ‘permanent revolution’ was the premise that Russia on its own was far from ripe for socialism. For Lenin too, the prospect of socialism could only be envisaged on a European scale. After October, he left open the issue of how to characterize the new regime and how it might – and should – evolve. At all events, what is certain is that following his initial disillusionment with the prospect of rapid capitalist development in Tsarist Russia, he switched to a much more sober thesis about Russia’s ‘combined development’ (Trotsky’s term), with the coexistence of ‘the most backward agriculture, the most uncouth countryside – and yet also the most advanced industrial and financial capitalism’.[9] Obviously, this was not a good starting point for any socialist project: even after the bastions of financial and industrial capitalism had been seized, the bulk of the population would remain historically too remote from the first steps leading to post-capitalism. Lenin’s second, more realistic assessment of Russia’s socio-economic system as ‘multi-layered’, which may have been inspired by Miliukov’s historiography, did not make the task any less complicated: the prospect of socialism remained just as remote.

Thus the proclamation of a ‘socialist revolution’ in October meant above all that socialists were taking power and that they believed the international situation to be revolutionary. In the case of Russia, it was a statement of intent, referring to a distant future in a different international environment. Although utopian, the declaration possessed genuine political force: presenting the seizure of power as a socialist revolution (even if fraught with difficulties for the future) played a decisive role. It foregrounded the Leninist notion that backward Russia could serve as a trigger or catalyst on a very troubled international stage. The prognosis was not confirmed, but at the time there was nothing absurd about it.

The second crucial advantage of this utopian vision stemmed from the fact that ‘socialism’ signified a commitment to social justice and equal rights for the various nationalities: an essential ingredient in the credo, with a strong resonance among the latter. The absence of a Russian nationalist orientation proved a powerful weapon against the Whites, who espoused a traditional Great Russian domination – a fatal weakness in a multinational country.

The socialist vision also allowed for an appeal to the peasantry; class terms were familiar to them. Moreover, the slogan ‘Seize the land from the landowners and the rich’ was not an incitement to do it, but retrospective acceptance of the fact that peasants were already in the process of doing precisely that and that no one could stop them. The peasants thereby eliminated the landowners, who constituted a class, and the richer peasants – the kulaks – who were also regarded as a class (though this was not unproblematic in a more rigorous class analysis). The Bolshevik approach thus expressed a reality that was familiar to the peasants and contained demands for social justice that were very close to their basic interests. The term ‘socialist’ made sense to them, without having to read Marx. This was another considerable advantage over the Whites: in the territories they conquered, they restored the land to the nobility and landowners – a fatal but far from accidental blunder. However powerful militarily, the Whites were doomed to failure politically, as was Russian monarchism in general.

At any rate, a few months after October and the Bolshevik seizure of power, the alternative facing Russia was crystal-clear. On one side were the Reds, a radical camp with considerable appeal and the ability to fashion a state; on the other were the Whites, who knew how to fight but who were incapable of (re) constructing a state – precisely as Lenin had predicted.

Because it was oriented to the poor peasantry, soldiers and workers, this revolution that could not be socialist could be a distant relative of the same: a ‘plebeian’ revolution. And that was the key to its victory: it allowed the Bolsheviks to mobilize vast armies hailing from the popular classes. The composition of the Red Army is very revealing. The soldiers were mainly peasants and the NCOs workers who had served in the Tsarist army; others, like Khrushchev, had undergone rapid training courses for young commanders. Many members of the intelligentsia were in military or political-military positions. The picture was complicated by the presence of tens of thousands of former Tsarist officers, some of them issuing from the nobility. While some of the latter deserted to the Whites, a majority remained loyal to the soviets. It was a winning combination!

The revolutionary phase in the strict sense (late 1917–early 1918) saw little bloodshed. But the situation became ever more tense and when full-blown civil war broke out in July 1918, it was a savage, bloody confrontation for very high stakes. It would determine who was to hold power in a country that had been plunged into indescribable chaos. No compromise was possible between the two camps: it was a struggle to the death.

These events drastically changed the Bolshevik Party’s modus operandi, which no longer had anything in common with the pre-October situation. Not only was the organization completely remoulded, but membership was renewed by successive waves of adhesion – each of them bringing different ways of thinking and acting. With the approach of peace, there was a further influx of new members who wanted to contribute to a wholly novel task: constructing a state, administering a country, fashioning a strategy for the conduct of international relations. For a time, the principal cadres were recruited from among those who had joined the party during the Civil War, which had formed them politically. This explains why many of them were supporters of an authoritarian line even in peacetime. From 1924 onwards, a new recruitment would alter the membership once again, filling its ranks with what some of the old guard regarded as completely ‘raw’ elements – that is to say, people with no political experience who, unlike the Civil War veterans, had not demonstrated their commitment to the regime. For the old Bolsheviks, whose surviving number generally held high positions, the party was no longer recognizable: it was no longer a party of revolutionaries totally devoted to the cause of socialism. The newcomers shared neither their values nor their past. They would all now be moulded into an organization that was altogether different from the earlier one, even if was still called ‘the’ party.

Let us note that the broadly plebeian orientation of this recruitment remained a source of strength throughout the 1920s. The policy of comprehensive industrialization in the 1930s brought the party additional popular strata who had a stake in the regime and were also instrumental in the victory of 1945.

A clarification is in order here: there is all the difference in the world between a privileged person who acquires an additional privilege and someone at the bottom of the social ladder who suddenly has access to what was previously beyond her, however modest it might be. Although power did not belong to the ‘plebeians’ as a popular class, they and their children (many of them) now had the chance of attaining positions that had previously been out of their reach. For the regime, this influx of popular elements into the lower and middle levels of the bureaucracy and technical professions remained a constant source of strength and popular support. But because ‘plebeian’ meant low educational levels and a propensity for authoritarianism, an old Bolshevik, who was often highly educated and who had studied Das Kapital (frequently in a Tsarist prison), could feel swamped by a milieu where (to borrow a witticism from industrial Birmingham) they would not know the difference between Marx and Engels and Marks & Spencer.

In fact, this predominance of plebeian origins and attitudes, combined with the pride of place given ‘technicians’ (often trained on the job or crash courses), had a darker potential: it could serve as the social background for the politics and ideology of Stalinism, during the NEP to start off with and then massively during the subsequent decade. For those who had experienced such upward social mobility (and who had such attitudes), the power of the state and its head were not only acceptable but necessary. Even so, the social base of Stalinism, which accounts for the apparent mass support it enjoyed in the 1930s and thereafter, was not the only source of the phenomenon. As I argued in Part One, the seeds of Stalinism lay in the peculiar brand of ‘statist’ ideology that emerged in the ranks of Civil War combatants who gravitated towards Stalin as the NEP was unfolding.

We have established a link between the Russian revolution and the general European crisis unleashed by the First World War. Some have argued – even categorically so – that without the war, the Tsarist system would have survived. This line of argument is strengthened if we recall that the 1905 revolution seems to have been triggered by Russia’s defeat at Japanese hands. We do not know what would have happened in Russia had there been no world war, or had Russia been able to stay out of it. The latter scenario is of course utterly counter-factual, and the only thing that can be claimed with certainty is that wars, whilst not the only determinate causes, accelerate the collapse of regimes that prove incapable of winning them. The Tsarist regime had already lost wars in the nineteenth century and its defeat in 1905 by Japan – a seemingly much weaker power – was immediately followed by a revolution. Examination of the causes of these defeats leads to the conclusion that Russia was in a state of crisis that could only deepen before and during the major cataclysm of 1914–18. After 1905, nothing had been done to redress the situation and no adequate preparations were made for any subsequent war. Social problems were left to fester and the regime itself (its way of governing) was in an advanced state of decay and had lost contact with reality. If this diagnosis is correct, then it was not the war that toppled Tsarism. It was already undermined by a crisis, and it was this that led to its military defeats and subsequent decomposition. The fact that other, more modern parties and social groups, which should have been able to assume control, failed to prevent the regime’s collapse is further proof of the existence of a grave systemic crisis. This condemned to impotence the narrow Tsarist establishment, the elites who represented alternative middle-class and inter-class sympathies, and also the still embryonic multi-party system brought about by Russia’s development since the beginning of the century. In circumstances of military defeat and an ever more feeble government, the disgruntled soldiers and humiliated officers of a defeated army played a decisive role in the Civil War and the victory of the Reds. This was one of the key features of the whole upheaval of 1917–21 – not to mention the fact that those soldiers were overwhelmingly peasants.

It is important to stress the impact of the military factor in these years. The effects of the First World War and the Civil War were the subject of a roundtable discussion by scholars in Moscow in 1993, which unearthed new data in the archives. Its conclusions are of interest.

A first paradox is that the war, which was initially a unifying factor among considerable sections of society, was also something in whose absence February 1917 would not have occurred. At the outset, the war kept millions of soldiers in the trenches, but as it unfolded it increasingly fractured society. By creating 2 million deserters and arming the nation, it supplied the fuel without which the Civil War would have been impossible. In this respect, pointing the finger at the Bolsheviks makes no sense: they contributed to the downfall of the old regime, but the objective conditions of its collapse were not of their making. More than 15 million soldiers served on the eastern front, around 3 million of them in auxiliary duties – more than the French and British armies combined. They represented the bulk of the nation’s workforce, people aged between twenty and forty and hailing from all social groups – in a word, the country’s lifeblood. On the eve of February 1917 there were 10 million soldiers in the armed forces, 7.2 million of them in the regular army. This means that in two and a half years of war, about 5 million of those mobilized and active had died in combat or as a result of their wounds, or had been taken prisoner, fled, or been invalided out. Almost one in three! These were staggering losses – much higher than anything suffered by the other belligerents.

Russia’s soldiers paid with their blood for their country’s technological backwardness and lack of preparedness. They had to hump heavy loads; they had to toil hard; and they were poorly fed: amid a dramatic shortage of all kinds of supplies, the army received no more than between 30 and 60 per cent of its peacetime requirements. The enormous military losses profoundly altered the socio-political situation in the country. Masses of people now had access to arms and their psychology was that of front-line troops. A large number of regular army officers and category one reservists perished. They were replaced by second and third category reservists, and by men who were over the age for military service and who were not really fit to serve or ready to risk their lives. The highest losses were recorded in the elite units (Cossacks, imperial guard) and among regular officers and sergeants – the army’s backbone. Wartime ensigns and reserve officers had also been hard hit. This was how Tsarism lost its main prop: the army. The monumental mistake made by Kerensky in July 1917, when he threw the troops into a new offensive, contributed still further to the demoralization of this mass of armed peasants, who were soon going to disperse throughout the country with their weapons. They would swell the ranks of all kinds of bands, whether of ‘greens’ (neither red nor white) or mere bandits, while providing the peasantry with the weapons and leadership it needed to seize the land from the landowners and redistribute it. This was a major contribution to turning the crisis into a deepening catastrophe.[1]

These are important points. Nothing is more dangerous and devastating than a demoralized army collapsing into banditry, and it was on these masses of deserting soldiers that the two sides would draw to conduct the Civil War. If, as we have seen, the NCOs were workers and the soldiers predominantly peasants, the officers derived from the middle classes, the intelligentsia and the nobility. The Whites rallied to their cause officers, cadets, and what remained of the Cossack units; the Reds counted on party members, factory workers, a sizeable contingent of NCOs from the Tsarist army, and even – more surprisingly – many officers.

The fact that defeated soldiers played such an important role in the decomposition of the old regime and the creation of a new one is further evidence that the result of the war was attributable to the regime’s dilapidation, not to misfortune. It also confirms the plebeian character of the revolution. It is puzzling that the authors I have drawn on here refer to the ‘soldiery’ without mentioning that they were peasants. In the introduction to his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky describes it as a predominantly peasant phenomenon, involving the rural masses whether in or out of military uniform.

RUSSIA’S BACKWARDNESS AND LENINISM

The picture of post-revolutionary Russia we sketched in Part One (Marxist intellectuals, an enormous mass of semi-literate party members and even cadres, breakneck industrialization, and a leadership cult straight out of an old political repertoire) brings into focus the issue of Russian backwardness.

The key syndrome in this underdevelopment was the chasm (i.e. the historical gulf) between the elites and the bulk of a still rural population. In itself a cause of crises, this distance, which was deeply rooted in Russian history, could only exacerbate the socio-political crises that did occur. The tendency of a state to respond to problems with repression rather than flexibility and compromise is a familiar scenario, and it is not impossible that Stalin reasoned thus.

The other dimension of the same problem was the historical distance between an underdeveloped empire and the developed countries. In such a situation, the problems to be resolved are defined both by the ‘advanced’ countries and by those that have to catch up with them. The more powerful the imperative to quicken the pace, the more crucial the state’s role becomes – especially when this scenario has long been operative in the country’s history. In Russia, the problem was especially acute because of the lack of ‘cohesion’ (tseplenie – a term used by Miliukov) between the various social strata, who geographically inhabited the same territory, but who did not live in the same century economically, socially and culturally. Lenin had clearly identified this problem when he distinguished between five socio-economic strata (or structures), ranging from the landless peasant who still used a wooden plough to the ultra-modern financial and industrial groups in Moscow or Petrograd. These structures (uklady) were used in the USSR itself by critical historians to challenge the thesis defended by party conservatives in the 1960s – namely that the 1917 revolution was a socialist revolution and the system a bona fide developed socialism. These historians, who advanced a different interpretation of 1917, started out from Lenin’s ‘structures’ to show that the Russian revolution was not and could not have been socialist, implying that the ruling conservatives were making false claims. This debate occurred during a conference at Sverdlovsk, and readers will not be surprised to hear that the historians lost their jobs, under pressure from Trapeznikov, whom we have already encountered.

If we regard it as a central feature of Russian economic and social reality in 1917 that the overwhelming majority of the population had not yet entered into the industrial age, we are bound to assign great significance to the surplus dose of backwardness and underdevelopment occasioned by the Civil War. In conditions where merely staying alive was difficult enough, it was normal that the most sophisticated forms of human organization should have been the most vulnerable, while the most basic forms of activity, providing at least some food and fuel, had the best record of survival. As regards economic, demographic, political and cultural indicators, the regime’s starting point in 1921 was in fact some fifty years in arrears. Many landowners and businessmen had been killed during the Civil War; many more had emigrated. The landowning class (about 500,000 people, including family members) and the grande bourgeoisie (125,000 people) had disappeared. A mere 11–12 per cent of former landowners – most of them small ones – remained in the countryside, working in the manner of peasants. The losses in the ranks of the intellectual professions were also heavy. On the eve of the First World War, 136,000 people with a university education were employed in the economy, and an even larger number of semi-professionals. They were mostly hostile to the new regime and it is assumed that a high proportion of them emigrated, although we do not possess precise figures. It is known, however, that a majority of doctors remained and continued to work. But the ravages of war, revolution and civil war were even greater than the numbers betray. As a consequence of the war and the events of 1917, about 17.5 million people (more than 12 per cent of the population) were displaced and lived a precarious existence. Several million more were uprooted in the course of the next few years. Large towns lost many of their inhabitants. Between 1917 and 1920 the combined populations of Petrograd and Moscow fell from 4.3 million to 1.96 million (more than 2 million people emigrated). During the 1921–2 famine, many of those who stayed became refugees in search of food.

Some 3 million soldiers were killed in combat or died of their wounds or disease. Some 13 million civilians died prematurely, mainly because of the 1921–2 famine and a series of epidemics that gripped Russia (particularly the Spanish flu that struck the whole of Europe). In January 1923 the population of the USSR hit its lowest point – some 6 to 9 million below the January 1914 total. The combined events of 1914–21 plunged the Russian population into misery and inflicted colossal losses. Naturally, the economy was also devastated. The output of large-scale industry was only 13 per cent of the 1913 total (iron and steel a mere 4 per cent). Grain output was no more than two-thirds of the 1909–13 level, and that was a miracle which can only be explained by peasant vigour and endurance. Foreign trade had collapsed, and at the beginning of 1921 a disastrous fuel, transport and food crisis supervened. Protest and unrest spread among industrial workers, who were regarded as pillars of the regime.[2] Never had the country touched such a nadir. The political effects of this enormous regression generated an ‘archaicization’ of society, with the destruction of many elements of civilization accumulated in the past. The consequences were momentous. There can be no doubt that such conditions were conducive to the formation of a primitive autocracy. In the short term, however, they triggered the New Economic Policy, which in many respects was successful and dictated a redefinition of the regime’s strategy.

In 1917–19, Lenin, who belonged (as we have said) to two worlds, reacted to the crisis of socialism in the West as a disappointed member of the Second International by creating the Third International (1919). Two years later he was facing a West that had begun to recover its strength and a Russia that was more backward than ever and scarcely the site from which to direct a world revolution. Moreover, it was now saddled with the challenge its revolutionary slogans and the creation of the Comintern presented to the West and East. One way or another, everything had to be rethought and placed in historical perspective. True to character, Lenin recognized the depth of the changes in Russia and the world and began to reconsider many aspects of the previous strategy, mapping out an entirely new one. Forced to react to dramatic historical developments, he switched perspectives and strategy. This rules out imputing any inflexibility to his ‘ism’, despite a widespread view to the contrary that is itself utterly inflexible.

LENINISMS AND THE LAST REVISION

The relevant ‘ism’ was largely shaped by abruptly changing historical conditions. The prewar period, when the forthcoming revolution was supposed to be a liberal one; the crisis unleashed by the First World War; 1917 with its very different perspectives; the Civil War and war communism; and finally the NEP – each involved sufficiently divergent conjunctures to require in each instance a change not just of diagnosis but also of strategy and the very goals to be pursued. It may well be that the essence of ‘Leninism’ consisted in Lenin’s ability to conceptualize and initiate these turns. If so, there were at least three different Leninisms, the last of which is especially interesting.

In 1921, with the advent of a period of domestic peace, the revision and adaptation Lenin engaged in involved all aspects of the system to be constructed, including its ideology. On 27 March 1922 he declared to the Eleventh Party Congress (the last one he participated in) that ‘the car is not travelling in the direction the driver thinks he is headed in’. This was a ‘classic’ Leninist declaration – especially when he added: ‘We need to rethink our ideas about socialism.’ This was followed by other public utterances of the same tenor in the course of 1922 and up until May 1923, in what became known as his ‘testament’.[3] But already at the Eleventh Congress, frail as he was due to illness, Lenin had advanced a set of new ideas that paved the way for a substantial revision of previous concepts and practices.

Lenin now made a general recommendation: ‘We must learn from anyone who knows more about something than us’ – whether it be national and international capitalists, humble employees in a commercial firm, or even former ‘white guards’ if they were competent. For the important thing was to demonstrate to the peasantry that the new masters of the country were willing to learn; that they knew how to run the country and to do so to the peasantry’s advantage. This was followed by a stern warning: ‘Either we pass the exam of competition with the private sector, or things will be a total failure.’ Not unexpectedly, he then reverted to the idea of ‘state capitalism’ that he had already toyed with in 1918, and which seemed to him the best solution as long as it was kept within certain limits by the new state. This was a concept that allowed for a degree of realism while retaining a socialist perspective, even if it was postponed to a distant future. In his speech to the Fourth Congress of the Comintern on 13 November 1922, Lenin reminded his audience that he had already raised this idea in 1918 (it had been inspired by the German war economy operated by Walter Rathenau). But it now had to be geared to the needs of a social alliance. He still saw Russia’s socio-economic system as composed of five structures, from private peasant farms to state-owned firms (dubbed ‘socialist’). The issue he now raised was whether ‘state capitalism’, which came second in the scale of progressive socio-economic formations, should not take precedence over socialism in the immediate present and future.[4]

The subject was a complex one, but the aim was clear: Lenin was trying to map out a different long-term perspective in the framework of his appeal to ‘rethink our ideas about socialism’. Given that the party was socialist, whence the need for this line of thought? What existed was a still primitive patriarchal peasantry with some isolated socialist forms at the summit. Although not socialist, ‘state capitalism’ would manifestly represent a real advance for Russia: ‘We have made a revolution, but it is preferable to achieve the state capitalist stage first.’ Lenin returned to the term when explaining the reasons for the introduction of the NEP: ‘state capitalism’ was the best way of establishing an alliance between peasants and government, by offering the peasantry a state that played the role of a major producer and merchant. Russia was not modern enough to proceed directly to socialism; commencing with ‘state capitalism’ was the right course.

Lenin sought feverishly for a non-utopian way of preserving a long-term socialist perspective and ideals, while embarking on a transition towards realistic objectives, whereby the state would become a kind of collective capitalist with the aid of a private sector. In sum, this was a form of mixed economy of the same variety as Trotsky had proposed in late 1921 at a session of the Comintern (or its executive committee), but without using the term ‘state capitalism’. Trotsky explained to his audience that socialism was a distant prospect (several decades away) and that there was only one way for state-owned factories to become socialist: it led through the school of the market economy. Lenin had read this text, published by Trotsky in a small print-run. He found it ‘a superb pamphlet’ and wrote to Stalin and Molotov to request that they publish it in an edition of 200,000 copies. Naturally, they did not.[5]

The central feature of this thinking was the attention paid to the peasantry and the development of a corresponding strategy. In the texts that make up his ‘testament’, Lenin argued that while a radical policy had been appropriate in the context of the Civil War, it had to be seriously moderated in peacetime: ‘no communism in the countryside’, ‘no summary executions’, socialism is a system of ‘civilized cooperation’ – itself a task and a challenge, given that the bulk of the peasantry was barely literate. But such a declaration also signified that the state was looking for a genuine alliance with the rural world, which would respond to its vital needs and induce the countryside to understand and accept its policies. It also implied a significant rectification of the character of the dictatorial system. Dictatorships are not all established for the same reasons and the differences between them can be enormous – as ‘no summary executions’ attests.

Thus, all the elements were assembled: Lenin was ready to redefine the concept of socialism in accordance with Russian realities, to switch strategy towards the peasantry,[6] and clearly to indicate the type of state he hoped to see. His plans for the functioning of the party, and the institutional set-up required to guarantee the ultimate primacy of the party Congress over its elected bodies (starting with the Politburo), are another crucial dimension of his new doctrine. And in this context we should not forget his dramatic call, albeit as yet secret, for Stalin to be removed from his top post.[7]

Fully to appreciate the scope and depth of the rethinking, we need to return to something that has already been discussed in Part One in connection with the conflict between Lenin and Stalin over the making of the USSR. We saw that it involved a clash between two political camps: between what was still ‘Bolshevism’ – a radical branch of Russian and European Social-Democracy – and a new current that emerged from the Bolshevik Party and which would become known by the name of ‘Stalinism’. It was a decisive battle in which the very nature of the new state hung in the balance: either a variety of dictatorship that rejected autocracy and addressed itself to society as it was (predominantly peasant), negotiating with it as it were, or an autocracy that prioritized violence.

The two currents seemed to be one and the same. In reality, however, there was a deadly antagonism between them, as is demonstrated by the fact that the victor set out deliberately and systematically to destroy his opponents. ‘Bolshevism’ remained part of the party’s jargon, but not of its substance. We must therefore dwell for a while on this political organization before it exited the historical stage.

WHAT WAS BOLSHEVISM?

The question can be answered by briefly examining the political turns effected and methods of action adopted, including their capacity to produce the programme we have just evoked.

We shall set aside the Bolsheviks’ pre-revolutionary activity underground (to the best of my knowledge, there is no recent monograph on this subject). But it was nevertheless an organized political party at the time and continued to operate as such during the Civil War and thereafter. The substance of ‘Bolshevism’ cannot be understood without a close examination of the way it functioned. A comparison between the texts of the early congresses and those of later ones indicates the profundity of the metamorphosis. Leninism was a strategy (or rather, a series of strategies) for transforming society. Bolshevism was a party organization, possessing various structures that ensured its functioning as such. It sought to preserve the popular character of the state in the making and excluded any regressive affinities with earlier forms of despotism. Policy discussions were a normal procedure; the exchanges were often sharp and decisions taken by majority vote. Virtually all the leading figures, and also many lesser ones, had crossed swords with Lenin, often vigorously, on key questions of political strategy. Ideological debates were a normal feature of inner-party procedure, which occurred not only in the restricted circle of the Politburo, but also during sessions of the Central Committee and, more widely, in party congresses and conferences.

Characteristically, even during the Civil War, when party cadres were mobilized and had to come straight from the front for meetings, congresses and conferences were yearly events, as required by party statutes. The minutes offer a clear picture of these gatherings: people not just discussing policy, but battling it out, with reports and counter-reports; the chair silencing a speaker from the majority so as to allow a representative of the minority to exercise his right to express his views or rebut the majority position. However highly respected, Lenin was frequently subjected to strenuous attack and could react irascibly. But that was it: such were the rules. A few years later, these procedures had disappeared without a trace. In view of future developments, it bears repeating that Lenin was not the object of a ‘cult’, either before or after the revolution. But if the term ‘charisma’ can be used without metaphysical connotations, then Lenin possessed it. It took a specially staged operation for his body, notwithstanding the protests of his wife and family, to be embalmed and thus ‘beatified’. This rendered him more dead politically than if he had been given a normal burial.

Founder and leader of the party and the state, Lenin never behaved as a despot or dictator in his party. He enjoyed genuine authority, but so to some extent did other leaders who found themselves in disagreement with him on many occasions, without losing their positions as a result. In the one well-known instance in 1917 when he did want to expel two leaders (Zinoviev and Kamenev) from the Central Committee, he was quietly told by the chairman of the session, Jakov Sverdlov: ‘Comrade Lenin, we do not act like that in our party.’ This is a revealing snapshot: in the course of a meeting where taking power was under discussion, Lenin, who was agitated and conducted himself in a emotional manner, was called to order by another influential leader who was in the chair. This modus operandi, which was constitutive of the Bolshevik tradition, persisted after the revolution. Lenin always operated in the framework of party procedures: he debated and protested vigorously, but accepted that all important decisions should be voted on, as required by party statutes, and was not infrequently outvoted. He was a leader, not a despot. He was a top leader of his party, not its proprietor. He cannot therefore be treated as ‘Russia’s dictator’, and even less so when we recall that during the Civil War the leadership was hyphenated to ‘Lenin-Trotsky’ in the eyes of the world and Russia itself – an interesting phenomenon given that the party’s founder was Lenin and him alone. But Trotsky was a co-leader of the revolution alongside him, and this was accepted by the party and by Lenin himself.

Bolshevism was a party, but it was also an ethos. Discussion could range far and wide. We shall offer a few examples of the issues debated in party bodies and in public. Thanks to the publication of the Central Committee minutes from August 1917 until February 1918,[8] the debate about whether to take power in 1917 and, if so, with or without allies, is well known. Another example: in December 1920, Osinsky-Obolensky – a leader of the ‘democratic centralist’ oppositional current – published an article in Pravda. The party was still militarized and he himself was performing military duties at the front. However, victory now seemed assured and Osinsky believed it was time to tackle impending difficult issues. According to him, one of these was the task of reviving the party as a political organization once the military phase was over. He therefore proposed constitutional rules that would enable majorities to pursue their chosen policies, while allowing minorities the right to criticize and take the helm if the previous line proved a failure. Otherwise – and this was a warning to the leadership and ordinary membership alike – the party would perish as a political organization. Even though a paper shortage often reduced the main party daily to a single sheet, the article was published in Pravda.

A further example of debate on sensitive subjects was the post-mortem on the failed push on Warsaw, conducted during a party conference in late 1920. Part of the debate occurred in closed session (and there are no published minutes). But the other part was staged in public, and it was here that a party leader like Radek could taunt Lenin (the minutes confirm it) with a ‘We told you so’. Along with other leaders, he had warned that Polish workers would not rally to the Russian troops and that the counter-offensive on Warsaw was an error. I do not know who the main instigators of the Polish adventure were, but Lenin had endorsed the idea in the hope of rousing the German Left. He certainly did not enjoy Radek’s taunting remarks, but was obliged to listen to them. Trotsky too was opposed to the operation (this probably accounts for Radek’s ‘we’) and made it known at the Eleventh Congress without anyone contradicting him – something that was entirely acceptable in these years. In short, the left wing of the party had been against the operation and Lenin had erred.

Even graver issues were aired in open public discussion or broached in the party press: the evidence is available in the minutes of party congresses and conferences. Lenin was not alone in reacting to the problems that plagued the party. It was a poorly organized ruling party, acutely aware of its weaknesses and the low level of its cadres and press. It was also debilitated by a proliferation of internal squabbles and ‘cliques’, particularly in ruling circles at local and central levels. A major issue was the development of a growing, deeply resented gulf in power and privileges between those at the top and those at the bottom. This was an especially disquieting phenomenon in an egalitarian party of ‘comrades’, most of whom suffered material poverty. The problem was openly debated in party organizations and the party press; and the leadership, conscious of the depth of the malaise, sought to do something about it.

But an outcry from the base was not the only source of the debates forced upon a sometimes reluctant leadership. They themselves raised political and social problems and discussed them publicly, pointing to the dangers the party was exposing itself to. Witness the reflection by Zinoviev, a Politburo member, at the Eleventh Congress. Shortly before, Lenin had sounded the alarm about the disappearance of the ‘working class’ during and after the Civil War. According to Zinoviev, this was no longer the problem: the working class was being reconstituted, was leaving the countryside where it had sought refuge, and was ready to join the party. What worried him was the influx into the party of barely literate workers and many candidate members from other classes. He supported a temporary suspension of recruitment in order to exorcize the dangerous spectre of a process of degeneration – a kind of Thermidor from within (my term). Menshevik emigres were forecasting this as an imminent prospect and Zinoviev cited them to this effect – something unthinkable a few years later.

Increasing social differentiation within the party, on account of the influx of new members, was leading to the emergence of various ideological and political trends. This was the thesis defended by David Dallin, a Menshevik leader, in a book he had just published in Berlin.[9] To his mind, there was no political and social life in Russia outside the party and army; and he therefore reckoned it impossible to eliminate Bolshevism from without. Contrariwise, this could happen as a result of spontaneous processes occurring inside the party. Dallin anticipated all manner of splits, plots and intrigues. Elements of the peasantry and various groups of workers and petty bourgeois were slowly acquiring a sense of their own interests. The intelligentsia was reacquiring its natural capacity for generating ideological currents (democratic, imperial, revisionist). All these would surface in due course ‘and political history will be full of their political battles’. All of this was cited by Zinoviev and features in the congress proceedings. Dallin mocked the naive idea that a purge (in the traditional sense of expulsion from the party) could alter anything when it came to the inevitable expression of the centrifugal forces in society. Zinoviev would not appear to have disagreed with him. He declared himself convinced that ‘there is, in fact, a molecular process in the party, which is not simply a reflection of internal struggles, but echoes everything that is occurring in the country more widely – the whole spectrum of the ongoing class struggle’. All manner of elements foreign to the world of work were penetrating the party, but he still hoped that the ‘proletarian core’ would endure, maintain the party’s original ideological commitment, and prevent alien elements getting the upper hand.

Zinoviev also reckoned that at this juncture preserving workers’ democracy would have a healthy influence on party life. The ‘workers’ opposition’ (composed of party trade-union leaders) deplored its absence and made it a central plank in its list of demands. It even demanded that such a ‘workers’ democracy’ should be strengthened by purging white-collar elements and muzzling the intelligentsia – a rather problematic way to create a viable party! These positions were not acceptable to the party leadership. The cultural level and class consciousness of workers at the time was too low to base party-building exclusively on them.

In fact, the party had no compelling answers to all these questions in the short term. What it could do was make the switch to the NEP without losing control of the process; improve the work of the party and its administrative apparatus; and undertake patient educational work, while excluding dubious elements. All this assumed an increased dose of central control and authoritarianism. Whatever the good intentions, democratic objectives were manifestly unattainable even within the party. Even so, the party’s old guard still hoped to maintain a democratic spirit and modus operandi in its upper echelons.

Members of the old guard remained committed to the pre-revolutionary ethos. For them, party membership was not the route to a cosy career. They had burnt themselves out in the party’s service during the revolution and Civil War and amid the ruins it left behind it. Many leaders were in poor health and their doctors warned them that they could not continue at the same pace. In several cases, they had to be forced by government decision to take leave and seek treatment, often in Germany or elsewhere abroad. It is true that many thousands who joined during the Civil War did not belong to the old guard in the strict sense, but they were still people who were ready to pay a high price for the cause. For the most committed members, in itself power was not a major concern. Membership was a commitment that exacted a personal price – not something that brought a reward.

All these debates occurred just before or during Lenin’s radical rethink, which lasted as long as he could think, speak and dictate. During his dramatic last appearance, at the Eleventh Congress, he vehemently criticized supporters of authoritarian methods – a point that we have not as yet mentioned. In these years, party members participated in numerous public meetings in clubs that existed throughout Moscow and probably elsewhere – meetings where party policy was freely criticized, if not roundly denounced. Some party conservatives railed against such ‘disloyal behaviour’ and appealed to Lenin to put a halt to these infringements of party discipline. During the Eleventh Congress, one of the ‘undisciplined elements’ – Riazanov – was present in the hall and the supporters of a hard line, hoping for Lenin’s backing, reminded him that he had banned political factions within the party in 1921, at a point when it was splintering into different groups and subgroups. Lenin’s lengthy response was unambiguous. He did not refer to the 1921 episode, but offered many past examples of fundamental discussions in the party and asserted that, in the absence of free debate, it would not have survived – and would not now survive.

The key point we are seeking to stress here is the following: Bolshevism was a political party that offered its members the right to express their opinions and participate in the development of its political line, and Lenin was eager to preserve it as such. In his speech to the same congress, he also declared that the party must free itself of administrative tasks and concentrate primarily on political leadership, leaving administration to professional bureaucrats, the forces of ‘state capitalism’, and cooperative organizations.

Such were the essentials of the last version of Leninism. There is no question but that the situation looked alarming to Lenin. In his last appearances, statements and writings, he countered the style and substance of the policy pursued after his death with a firm, lucid ‘No’. And this cannot be erased from historical memory.

As we know, the programme of this major figure, who had led a radical revolution but pleaded for moderation now that power had been conquered, was not implemented. The possibility of reflecting freely on the party’s problems, the currents it contained, or the threats it faced, was the prerogative of the historically specific political formation that called itself ‘Bolshevik’. As long as its various bodies functioned and the decision-making process followed the rules that stipulated the division of authority between them, there was no personal dictatorship either in Russia or in the party. The dictatorship was in the hands of the party, not Lenin. When it did fall into the hands of an individual, the party’s party would soon be over.

A ONE-PARTY SYSTEM?

The bulk of old party cadres were still members and continued to regard themselves as such. But they sooner or later discovered that they were now actually somewhere else. Soon after Lenin’s death, they no longer recognized the party and reacted by leaving it, adapting to the new line, or joining one of the opposition currents (and perishing as a result). We know that the system was kept in one piece, but – as it turned out – at the price of its wholesale transformation, which involved mass terror against the party and a profound change in the spinal column of the party and system alike, which were henceforth dominated by classes dependent on the state.

Mensheviks (from abroad) and a number of internal party critics continued to advance the idea that political monopoly was bound to come into conflict with the inevitable social differentiation occurring inside and outside the party. Dallin anticipated an implosion in the more or less short term. And it might be said that something of the sort did in fact happen under Stalin’s absolute dictatorship. But it was not an ‘implosion’ consequent upon inner-party contradictions. Describing it in the terms and categories of the inner-party controversies of 1902–3, or the beginning of the Soviet period, makes no sense. The political scene had changed utterly. Terms like ‘party’, ‘Bolshevik’, ‘socialist’, and even ‘Leninist’ were still used – but had a quite different content. The pathological character of the top leader and the consolidation of his autocratic power – phenomena foreign to Bolshevism – now defined the essence of the political order. Rapid industrialization and population movements towards the towns generated massive changes, and increasing social differentiation was accompanied by the emergence of new social trends and interests. All this complicated the rulers’ task. Stalin detected a constant threat in these developments and natural differentiation, which were in fact positive phenomena. And throughout his long rule he waged a war rooted in terror against the cadres and broader layers of the population. This was the irrational core of his policy, exacerbated by the paranoiac dimension of his personality.

The Twelfth Congress of March 1923 may be regarded as the last one where the party could still legitimately use its revolutionary name, and the year 1924 as marking the end of ‘Bolshevism’. For a few more years, one group of old Bolsheviks after another was to engage in rearguard actions in an attempt to rectify the course of events in one fashion or another. But their political tradition and organization, rooted in the history of Russian and European Social-Democracy, were rapidly swept aside by the mass of new members and new organizational structures which pressed that formation into an entirely different mould. The process of the party’s conversion into an apparatus – careers, discipline, ranks, abolition of all political rights – was an absolute scandal for the oppositions of 1924–8. But their old party was dead. People should not be misled by old names and ideologies: in a fluid political context, names last longer than substances.

That Russia was not ready for any form of Marxian socialism was a self-evident truth to every Marxist. However, the mass of new members set no store by such theoretical considerations. They joined the party to serve the cause offered them, including that of thoroughly erasing the original Bolshevism. For a while, the impossible socialism served as a fig-leaf. Yet the events and trends we are studying cannot be described as the ‘failure of socialism’, because socialism was not there in the first place. Devastated Russia was fit neither for democracy as Miliukov understood it, nor for socialism, as Lenin and Trotsky knew full well. In these conditions, the original cadres found themselves flooded by masses of newcomers who shared neither their ideology nor their ethos. The ruling party, denounced throughout the world by the enemies of socialism and Bolshevism, reinvented itself for new tasks and realities, while retaining the original labels.

Viewed in this optic, Lenin’s last writings represent an attempt to refound Bolshevism in order to prevent the emergence of a totally different creature. Lenin realized that his opponents were inspired by the pre-capitalist forms of an absolutist state; and that Russia’s political culture, the character of the cadres formed in the Civil War, and the influx into the party of poorly educated new members with little or no political experience conduced to this regression. The country’s backwardness and the imperative of accelerating its economic growth likewise afforded fertile ground for the construction of a no-nonsense ‘strong state’ – something that could win over, or even serve as an ideal for, people dedicated to their country, whatever its current policies. This is even more true when the backwardness is hampering a country with an imperial past and potential and the pressure being exercised on it by more advanced countries is strong, prompting a commensurate popular mobilization in its defence. In such an atmosphere, the formation of a ‘despotic regime’ was not immediately perceived as altogether different from the construction of a ‘strong state’. Lenin had grasped the difference, called it by its name, and identified the real culprits. To put it mildly, however, most of his erstwhile companions from the heroic years did not get the point. And Bolshevism exited the stage soon after the death of its founder.

We have dwelt on the institutional decay of what was supposed to be the system’s mainstay. This chapter will be entirely given over to social dynamics, change, and progress. Here too we shall encounter conflicts and will consider them in due course.

We have already stressed the extent to which the depth of the inherited backwardness and the complexity of the task were dramatically accentuated by the serious regression consequent upon the First World War and the Civil War. In a country already in the throes of a crisis, such regression made the task of reconstruction and recovery that much more difficult and increased the pressure for recourse to the big stick – i.e. the state. However, this assertion must be qualified somewhat in view of the NEP, its vitality, and the interest in its possible retention for a much longer period – an expectation shared by Lenin and Trotsky alike when it was launched. The short-lived NEP still continues to fuel discussion about the alternatives open to Russia at the time (during perestroika, some even believed that it could serve as a model for the post-Soviet period). Evidently, one of the readily available alternatives was a hypertrophied, despotic state, which (as we keep on stressing) found fertile ground in the country’s history – ground rendered even more fertile by recent catastrophes. In 1921, the country was poorer than it had been before the First World War, and it lagged even further behind the West – something that was painfully felt. The ‘historical distance’ between rural, urban and bureaucratic components widened. Those who embarked on modernization after Lenin’s death began by emasculating the original political organization of the revolutionaries who, having arrived in power in 1917, had constructed a state, saved the country from disintegration, and planned great things for the future. They now prioritized their own methods, which combined accelerated economic development with an accentuated form of political archaism, leading some commentators to use the term ‘agrarian despotism’ to characterize the Stalinist state. At all events, we are dealing with the phenomenon of a non-modern modernizing state, creating a conundrum that would influence the country’s destiny for decades.

This line of thought also proves useful when attempting to understand the Soviet phenomenon in its historical trajectory as a whole. The contradiction involved in the category of ‘non-modern modernizer’ endured and manifested itself in a variety of guises after Stalin’s death. The modernizing aspect of the state’s activity (industrialization) generated a series of developments (urbanization, education, upward social mobility) that were broadly emancipatory for the masses of people involved, even if this emancipation was constrained by some powerful checks. One of the keys to the Soviet riddle lies in the interplay between emancipation and the factors fettering it.

Development in the standard sense of the term could not occur without bringing millions of peasants into the towns and partially closing the gap between privileged minorities and the broader mass of the population. Such a dynamic accorded with the plebeian spirit and character of the revolution. Soviet social development was in fact very broad and profound, with momentous effects that varied depending upon the period – the 1920s, under Stalin, and thereafter. Often used and sometimes criticized, the term ‘modernity’ is applicable here so long as we stick to the bare facts and steer clear of its ideological undertones, which are sometimes present in the sources we use below.

INDICATORS OF MODERNITY IN THE USSR

One of these sources is the two-volume social history of Russia recently published by B. N. Mironov, a Russian historian and statistician.[1] His approach is based in the main on anthropometric data, although he also assigns considerable space to social factors. The book contains a wealth of analysis and information. Yet readers must be attentive to the highly subjective and metaphorical character of some of Mironov’s statements, which we shall occasionally react to but mostly allow to speak for themselves.

Mironov’s adoption of ‘the West’ not simply as a model, but as an absolute yardstick for measuring historical development, is disarmingly naive. Readers can judge for themselves as I recount his findings. In sum, what it boils down to is informing us that Russia was not the West. But it is not enough merely to cite what the East lacks when compared with the West. Over the centuries, ‘the East’ (in fact, there are several of them) founded states, resolved problems and produced cultures; accordingly, we must also examine things from within and not simply refer to the non-existent.

Even so, Mironov’s general view of the USSR’s actual advance towards what can be called ‘modernity’ is realistic and competently argued. Russia, he maintains, differed from the West in the way an adolescent does from an adult: it was emotional, hyper-active, lacking sufficient self-control and prudence, tending to experimentation, naive, and absolutist in its demands – but at the same time endowed with an innate curiosity and an ability to assimilate novelty. After all, an adolescent is not a ‘backward adult’. Russians did not produce Western institutions, not because they proved incapable of so doing, but because they did not feel the need for them. Everything of value in the West reached Russia sooner or later – if not at the beginning of the twentieth century, then at its close.

Mironov highlights the secularization of social consciousness, which comfortably exceeds what we observe in the West: the Russian value-system became fully secular and temporal. A demographic revolution occurred that liberated women from the heavy burden of giving birth to children who were condemned to die young. The social structure acquired a modern aspect: social mobility attained high levels and social classes became open. Society as a whole became more receptive to the influence of Western values and behavioural norms. A nuclear family model emerged, with children receiving greater attention and women achieving legal equality with men and higher social status. Urbanization progressed: the country became basically urban and its inhabitants reoriented themselves to urban patterns of consumption. They automatically switched from rural-communitarian forms of social organization to different, more complex ones, including in the countryside itself.

Thus, by the end of the Soviet era modernization had progressed quite far towards Western models. A robust social welfare system had been created (pensions, health care, benefits for pregnant women, family allowances), and the list can be rounded off by noting the remarkable development of education and intellectual culture as a whole. In addition, the empire became a de jure confederation and the non-Slav nations experienced genuine development. Only in the Soviet period did a ‘disciplined’ society (Mironov uses Foucault’s term) emerge in Russia, which made it possible to avoid any revolutionary explosion during the transition to a post-Soviet regime. In broad terms, the distance between Russia and the West had thus been reduced, and the country was no longer part of the developing world. Mironov is, of course, aware of the means used at the outset to effect this modernization. But he is right to stress that the outcome was remarkable. I would add some more features: personal physical security, libraries, a broad reading public, interest in the arts in general and poetry in particular, the importance of science. For reasons unknown to me, Mironov does not register the fact that since 1991 all these developmental indicators have regressed appreciably, when such knowledge is indispensable for a better understanding of the Soviet phenomenon and its legacy.

Mironov then turns to a method borrowed from Western researchers: the use of anthropometric criteria – e.g. the height of conscripts during their compulsory military service – which, he believes, offer a good indicator of the country’s fluctuating socio-economic state. Thus, we find that the average height of men began to fall from the 1850s (on account of the Crimean War) and went on dropping after the emancipation of the serfs. The crisis lasted thirty years and its main victims were peasants, on the verge of exhaustion as they bore the brunt of warfare and taxation. In the 1880s, the biological condition of the population improved somewhat. Various data (which are not altogether reliable) suggest that nutrition worsened between 1850 and 1890, but improved thereafter up to 1910. Mortality was high and unstable between 1850 and 1890, but declined from 1890 onwards thanks to medical progress. After Alexander II’s reforms there was much talk of the degeneration of the Russian people, based precisely on the physical condition of young recruits. Such complaints continued until the end of the century, although improvements began in the 1880s. P. R. Gregory’s estimates for national income for the years 1885–1913, quoted by Mironov, indicate a growth in per capita consumption from the mid-1880s onwards.

In 1927, as we know from reliable data published subsequently, the population had recovered from the ravages of the First World War and the Civil War. In the towns, the average height of recruits was 1.676 m; in the countryside, 1.675 m. Their average weight was 61.6 and 61.9 kg, respectively. Hence the body mass index (the weight-size ratio) was 22 in the former case and 22.54 in the latter, indicating what Mironov calls a ‘good bio–status’. Thus, contrary to what might be expected, the height of the newborn continued to grow between the end of the Civil War (1920) and the late 1960s (and even between 1985 and 1991) – meaning that the 1930s and the Second World War did not have an impact in this respect. Beginning with the 1936–40 generation, the increase in average height was as rapid in towns as in the countryside. In the space of a quarter-century, it rose on average (according to different categories) between 47 and 61 mm – an unprecedented rate of growth. This means that during the Soviet era the ‘biological status’ of town dwellers, and probably that of rural inhabitants as well, went on improving.

How was this possible when we know that the state was constantly depressing living standards?, asks Mironov. His hypothesis is that in the 1930s—1950s per capita family income rose thanks to internal resources, and in part to external resources, in four ways. Birth rates decreased sharply, and with them the cost of rearing children. Medical expenses likewise declined, for the population in general and children in particular. Many women who had not previously worked were now able to do so, because they had fewer children, there was a huge demand for labour, and the state supplied crèches and kindergartens. Finally, a better distribution of wealth also conduced to this improvement in ‘biological status’. We might add that this is a fascinating but under-explored topic.

All this has to be seen in the framework of the demographic revolution that occurred in Russia between 1920 and 1961 (later than in the West, where it had already been achieved by the beginning of the century). It was marked by a sharp reduction in birth rates (in accordance with parents’ own wishes), by greater success in the fight against infectious diseases, and by a reduction in infant mortality – in sum, a more modern, rational and economic pattern of population reproduction.

Some reduction in birth rates had already been observed following the 1861 reforms. A further reduction was attributable to the ravages of two world wars and a civil war. By the mid-1920s, prewar birth rates had been restored. The second half of the 1920s exhibited a downward trend that continued into the 1930s. In 1941, the rate was 25 per cent down on the 1925 figure. The Second World War further aggravated the decline. Peace did not, however, restore prewar rates. After some increase in 1949, a sharp, irreversible reduction set in. Two figures illustrate the scope of the phenomenon: Russia went from a birth rate of 206 per thousand in the 1920s to 29 per thousand in the 1960s. The main cause was the desire of Russians to limit the number of children they had, in particular by abortion (the highest rate in the world). Some importance must also be ascribed to the tendency to postpone marriage, the divorce rate, and the increase in the number of unmarried women.

This downward trend in birth rates was counterbalanced by an extraordinary decline in general mortality (39.8 per thousand in the 1880s, 30.2 in 1900, 22.9 in the 1920s, 7.4 in the 1960s), with a corresponding increase in life expectancy (28.3 years in 1838–50, 32.34 in 1896–7, 44.35 in 1926–7, 68.59 in 1958–9) and a commensurate growth in the number of pensioners. In 1926, for every 100 able-bodied persons we find 92 not belonging to the active population (including 71 children and 16 pensioners); in 1959, the figure for the non-active population was 74 per 100 (53 children and 21 pensioners). In the years 1926–59, the average figure fell by 20 per cent per family. And since most non-able-bodied people received pensions, the family was aided correspondingly. All in all, society and families thus benefited from the decline in mortality and the increased length of working life. Mironov concludes that everyone gained from the demographic revolution, which he calls a ‘rationalization of the process of reproduction’.

This kind of modern reproduction rationalized the whole life-cycle of families and individuals – especially women. The procreative functions that had demanded such enormous effort from them in the past, from the onset of nubility to the menopause, were henceforth confined to a narrower span of their life, allowing them to work and help increase the family income. Women in fact became an important component of the workforce in all key branches. By 1970 they were broadly well educated, were well represented in the technical professions, and had a strong presence in scientific research. Mironov is right to insist that ‘no other country in the world has experienced such a high level of female participation in the world of work and culture’.

We might halt here for a moment to point out that, while basically accurate, this strikes an unduly triumphant note. Numerous Soviet sociological studies have demonstrated that the very real emancipation of women was marred by two limits: their purely symbolic presence in the power structure and a tenacious patriarchal system, including in urban families. The latter was aggravated by an inadequate supply of household appliances. Women still returned home after a hard working day to a good three hours of household chores, contributing to widespread chronic fatigue. In the 1960s the state made ‘heroic’ efforts to increase the production and supply of household appliances and obtained satisfactory results. But this was not enough to eradicate a sizeable obstacle to women’s equality.

Despite these qualifications, the indicators of female emancipation are undeniable and we are indebted to Mironov for a better appreciation of the changes that occurred in the country’s social structure and the formation of what I call a ‘new society’ – and this in record time and despite past cataclysms. The demographic data will detain us further in the next chapter, for whilst they indicate a genuine emancipation, they also reflect some darker realities.

For now, we shall make do with mentioning in passing a phenomenon described by Mironov, which is specific to Soviet society and well known, but never really studied in depth, and whose importance has also been underlined by the prestigious sociologist Tatyana Zaslavskaya of the Academy of Sciences. Mironov argues that the ‘equalization of incomes for the broad mass of the population around a certain average represented a further internal reserve that Soviet society could mobilize’. He makes an even stronger claim to the effect that reduced income inequality between social groups contributed to the improvement in the population’s ‘biological status’: the poorer a society, the more prone its ‘biological status’ to inequalities. We do not possess any reliable assessment of this inequality in the USSR, but the state worked hard to reduce material inequalities and it unquestionably succeeded. Significant population mobility and mixed marriages between people from different regions and cultures also impacted positively on such indices as the height of conscripts, as did the phenomenal rate of urbanization (from 15 per cent in 1921 to 50 per cent in 1961). Even if the system offered its citizens a much lower standard of living than that of Western countries, it remains the case that the height of men went on increasing in Russia, until the 1980s at least, at about the same tempo as in developed countries.

From Mironov’s work we shall above all single out the idea that the improvement in ‘biological status’ (and the set of factors that produced it) was the system’s ‘secret’ – a secret it might not have been aware of itself. And given that the population’s ‘biological status’ is no doubt on the decline in the post-Soviet period, this probably accounts for the nostalgia felt by many Russian citizens for the defunct Soviet system.

Our constant attention to the changing social landscape – bureaucracy, politics, economics and law enforcement all belong to this landscape – offers an analytical framework enabling us to distinguish between what was urbanized and modernized, on the one hand, and what urbanized without really modernizing itself, on the other. The important issue of income equality merits further research. But relative equality, and the concomitant reduction of class differences and barriers among broad swathes of the population, were incontestable facts, fondly remembered even among many Russian emigres to, say, the USA, where economic inequality forms part of the system’s ethos.

Mironov’s positive assessment of this phenomenon contradicts his own conception of modernity, defined in terms of conformity to the Western model. Moreover, it leads him to regard the fading of the old Russian ‘community spirit’ (obshchinnost’), inherited from the rural past, as a sign of the country’s ‘maturity’. But what was the sense of equality and neighbourliness that had such a positive impact on the health, physical growth and moral well-being of Russian citizens, if not the ‘non-modern’ spirit of community? Is it really a good thing for modern societies to be rid of it? The common phenomenon of solitude amid milling urban masses is an unhealthy product of social atomization that can only be remedied by a ‘community spirit’.

If we have thus far dwelt mainly on ‘mechanical changes’ – i.e. continuous waves of migration, which are a complex phenomenon in their own right – it is important to appreciate that urbanization imparts a novel content to the term ‘mobility’. It does not merely involve changing address or workplace, or moving across space. In what was now an urban environment, we are dealing with social, cultural, economic and psychological mobility, which is best understood when juxtaposed to the traditional spatial sense of the term.

The complexity of urbanization and its transforming power consisted in generating masses of ideas that circulated via new channels of communication, exposed the population to a flood of information, put a premium on inventiveness, education and intellectual creativity, and, finally, engendered new conceptions of existence and new needs in people’s personal lives. All this was light years away from the rural rhythms of traditional Russia, where change was slow and the social world often just a village – hence easily mastered (everyone knew the details of their neighbours’ lives), offering a profound sense of familiarity with social reality and inducing fatalism about the vagaries of nature. Clinging to tradition, limited mobility and narrow horizons (frequently in the literal geographical sense) – these were the rule. Without proper schooling and transitional stages, this rural civilization was not equipped to face the large towns and urban settlements, where it was indispensable to have an education, to improve one’s professional skills, or to switch professions. The newcomer was exposed to a bewildering variety of creeds, personalities, fashions, information and values, which constantly disrupted traditional familiar social arrangements of all kinds. Atomizing influences, as well as incentives to enter into all sorts of networks of new and different relations – social, political, economic and cultural – challenged the traditional socio-cultural universe, wearing down its sometimes stubborn resistance.

But it was not just the rural world that came under challenge. Urban society also exercised enormous pressure on the state – to begin with, simply because it presented a new, utterly different entity to be governed. Moreover, this society was still rather young, inexperienced in the ways of self-regulation, and carrying quite a freight of older traditions. It is therefore appropriate – and maybe by now rather obvious – to regard the urbanization process as tantamount to the formation of a new society. For as long as the transition period made it possible to speak of a halfway stage, old rural and new urban worlds coexisted, earlier traditions and mentalities mixing with the commotion of capitals and the complexity of ‘scientific towns’. The state and its principal institutions were governing ‘different centuries’ simultaneously and under ideological and political pressure from utterly heterogeneous groups. The complex interplay of culture and mentalities, which at this stage was reflected in the sphere of politics and the state, yielded a mix of religious and secular elements that could be detected in the state’s symbolism and the way it exercised power, but also in the population’s reaction to state power. The cult of Stalin, the explosion of popular grief at his death, the acceptance deep down of an authoritarian government, the phenomenon represented by Nikita Khrushchev – not only the manner of his leadership, but also the widespread protests it elicited from the populace and the intelligentsia: all this indicated a social and cultural landscape undergoing massive changes. Urbanization was progressing and urban society was becoming the dominant way of life.

Whatever the survivals from past traditions and practices, urbanization transformed society and forced the government to adapt to this new entity, since otherwise the country could not be governed or developed. In other words, the state and system of government had to acquire a mobility of their own and respond to a quite different historical agenda. The changes we have already pointed to – particularly in the sphere of repression – were a reaction to the complexity of the tasks imposed on the state by new realities. The old methods of coercion and mobilization were no longer suitable: new means were required and novel, more thoughtful strategies had to be adopted. Problems often developed spontaneously and their resolution dictated flexibility and an ability to negotiate with the population. But the bureaucratic authorities were still neophytes when it came to handling the urban maze, which was often independent and intractable. Urbanization, which went hand in glove with modernization, generated new trends in social behaviour and a wealth of specific ‘resources’ that largely eluded state policy. This huge concentration of dynamic energy could not be controlled with the methods and apparatuses that had been employed to manage a predominantly rural population and a relatively small urban sector. In this particular instance, the ‘call of history’ required the state to adapt to the new reality and alter itself sufficiently to give rein to the dynamic forces of urban society and concentrate on the domains where it was actually competent.

In this regard, the changes made at the beginning of the Khrushchev period in the spheres of penal, labour, educational and social policy – surveyed in Part Two – were promising moves in the right direction. They betokened the system’s recognition of the transformation under way in society as a whole and gave rise to new forms of relationship between society and the state apparatus. This process proceeded in tandem with a ‘de-militarization’ of society and the regime. The imbrication of social and economic factors became extremely complex and the state strove to respond to it by adapting to new needs and moods. The relationship between the world of work and the state was often summed up from the workers’ standpoint by a quip we have already cited: ‘You pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.’ Some people took it for the literal truth, and although it was only a witty remark it did contain a grain of truth – i.e. the existence of a tacit social contract, never signed or ratified, whereby the relevant parties arrived at an understanding about running a low-intensity, low-productivity economy. Its consequences were multiple. The first was that it made for a relatively small number of conflicts in the workplace, and perhaps even in society at large. But it also meant a rather low standard of living, which encouraged people to find ways to supplement their income in various private activities, whether legal or semi-legal (private plots, part-time second jobs). And this in turn had consequences that were not necessarily negative for all concerned.

For their part, the administrative strata, who were now better educated and more firmly in the saddle, used a whole range of initiatives, whether tolerated or illegal, which were indispensable for the success of the official side of the operation. Sometimes they veered towards plainly criminal acts of corruption and black-marketeering. In order to get anywhere near meeting the targets fixed by the planning authorities, ministerial agencies and the management of firms learnt to protect themselves with a whole array of defensive measures. In fact, they established a system based on informal rules: building up unauthorized reserves of stocks, means of production, and labour; using tolkachi (‘pushers’, expediters) and other intermediaries to obtain the requisite supplies from outside official channels; sabotaging or disregarding official investigations and policies; and, finally, creating powerful networks of allies and lobbies at the top. These administrative bodies eluded any real control by the party (or any other instance) and were not far from being the actual holders of state power.

The reality of an urban society and a nationalized economy also accounts for the changes in the modus operandi of the party, which was supposed to be the system’s forcing house, and in its relations with upper echelons of the bureaucracy. Its lower ranks (‘employees’) were part of society at large, as well as of the administrative network they were employed in. As such, they were both a source and a recipient of social opinions, moods, practices and interests. Bureaucratic interest groups (the managers of economic branches, the military–industrial complex, the scientific community, the military), as well as the interests, opinions and rights of lower bureaucratic layers (trade-union members all of them), were de facto legitimized. Similarly, the right of specialists to bargain hard over terms and conditions was de facto recognized in a ‘specialists’ labour market’. The de jure and de facto existence of a labour market became part of Soviet reality, as did the complex relations between management, workers, unions and party.

Concern about public expectations and a desire to respond to them now frequently featured on the government’s agenda and altered its modus operandi to a degree that was unprecedented since the end of the NEP. Party and state documents published at the time, or subsequently discovered in the archives, contain ample information and warnings about the moods of different social strata: party or government bodies express their anxiety over some particular policy (or lack of policy) that risks creating discontent. Workers’ attitudes were a major concern for the authorities and were often discussed by the apparatus, especially when reports indicated that workers were not attending party meetings, were not opening their mouths, or were booing speakers – not to mention the more determined forms of action and different forms of protest they resorted to (the number of strikes was on the increase).

Trends and opinions among students, intellectuals and administrative cadres were likewise reported and widely discussed. Low morale among these strata was issuing in poor performance and, not infrequently, in hostility to the party. This was why when a policy did create massive discontent it was moderated, officially withdrawn, or effectively abandoned. If women refused to accept jobs unless there were crèches for their children, the authorities responded: they admonished those responsible for this state of affairs, reorganized things, took steps to improve social policy, and offered concessions. This amounted to de facto – even de jure – recognition of various rights on a massive scale. Taking account of public opinion and negotiating with citizens were henceforth part of the socio-political scene. And when this was interrupted by rash policy decisions (as occurred under Khrushchev from time to time) there was an immediate political price to pay.

Given the efforts undertaken to improve the civil and criminal codes and modernize the judicial system, can we speak of a Rechtsstaat? No. For this category to be appropriate, legality would also have had to apply, at least partially but unambiguously, to the top leadership. The system would also have had to extend rights to critics, or at least grant oppositionists the right to a fair trial. This was not the case. On the other hand, we certainly may speak of a vastly increased role for the law and legal system following the abolition of secret extra-judicial procedures and arbitrary executions.

‘Mass disorder’ of the Novocherkask variety haunted the KGB, because it did not know how to deal with it: in that particular instance, military intervention had produced a considerable number of casualties. A recent book based on archival research provides data about events of this kind, which were of such concern to Semichastny.[1] In the Brezhnev period, there were nine cases of mass rioting, seven during the first two years. Under Khrushchev, the figure was two and a half times higher. Between 1957 and 1964, weapons were used in eight cases; under Brezhnev, in three (all of them in 1967). Under Khrushchev, the number of dead and wounded among the rioters totalled 264, as against 71 under Brezhnev. The total number of casualties during riots in the space of twenty-five years amounted to 335 – most of them wounded (but the number is not specified). Thus, the annual average was 13.4 wounded or killed (although many years witnessed no riots). It would be useful to have details about instances of rioting in other countries (incidence and casualties). Was the Soviet figure – 335 casualties in twenty-five years – exceptional, given the huge size of the country and a non-democratic regime?

The panorama of changes, innovations and reforms we have provided hopefully makes it possible for readers to appreciate the difference between the Stalinist and post-Stalinist models. The elimination of mass terror as a means of governing forced the authorities – and the party, in the first instance – to engage in what I have called ‘negotiation’ with the main social and bureaucratic actors, increasing the regime’s dependency on them.

‘Over-Stalinizing’ the whole of Soviet history, by extending it backwards and forwards, is a common practice that serves a variety of purposes – but not that of historical inquiry. We have no reason to ignore the extent and significance of the changes in the social structure, the strategic weight of particular social groups (large or small), the fusion between the state apparatus and the party, the end of mass terror – unless, of course, we are pursuing some ideological hypothesis, as opposed to trying to unravel a complex historical reality.

That said, we must not forget that this society and regime were not insulated against the emergence of reactionary ideological and political currents, including from within the state and among party leaders. Here we shall tackle this huge subject exclusively with respect to the difficulties of de-Stalinization and the pressure for a rehabilitation of Stalin. The continuing internal debates among the post-Stalinist leadership, and the opposition to Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization, were focused not on the continuation of Stalinism as such, but on the image of Stalin as state-builder and head of a ‘great power’ (derzhava); and a readiness to use drastic methods when state interests were at stake. Unquestionably, and not surprisingly, some among the leadership of a dictatorial regime defended this attitude. Nevertheless, it is important to note that, despite all sorts of trial balloons and half-measures towards restoring Stalin’s image as a great leader, rehabilitation did not occur because it no longer made sense. Even among the Stalinists, no one any longer defended the idea of bloody purges. Political arrests certainly continued. But they involved actual critics and real political activities, not imaginary or hallucinatory crimes that people were forced to ‘confess’ to. This did not have much in common, whether in character or scope, with the Stalinist period.

But this verdict on what the system no longer was would remain suspended in a vacuum if we did not offer a broad picture of what it had become. Seen from below, it was a veritable maze: masses of people and agencies acted as they saw fit, while a significant number of decrees and laws issued by the Central Committee or, more solemnly, jointly by it and the Council of Ministers, were not observed or were followed only half-heartedly. Mass phenomena like labour turnover remained just as pronounced. Officials did not actually lose their jobs even if they were sacked. Judges who disagreed with the severity of some laws sought to reduce charges when they felt that punishment made no sense; others did exactly the opposite, in the belief that the new policies were too liberal. What all this indicates is that a history restricted to government policy would be misleading. The historical events we are observing took the form of processes that depended on policy measures only in part. In fact, they mainly – even completely – derived from spontaneous developments (the stikhiia we have already encountered).

‘Those above’ were not just promoters of a voluntarist politics. The Politburo governed with the help of a 2–4 million strong layer of nachal’niki (‘bosses’ in the broad sense): around a million of them in top positions, a million in administrative positions of lesser importance, and a further million in charge of industrial enterprises. This amounted to a broad social stratum with its own history and sociology. Its members were conscious of their own interests – just like the workers, peasants and intellectuals who worked under their authority. Thus we find the managers of industrial enterprises setting up their factories in well-developed areas even if it was formally prohibited, and maintaining labour reserves and hoarding other stock – schemes that were also proscribed and, what is more, not financed. (So where did the money come from? Secret funds?) Even nomenklatura rules were circumvented to offer good positions and promotions, making it possible to constitute a network of cronies around a boss, with its attendant coteries, cliques and clienteles, as any sociologist would have expected.

Such spontaneous developments involve every social group, whatever the regime: the higher ups concentrate on their own affairs, while their subordinates do everything they can, licit or illicit, to further their own interests. Consequently, when a broad range of factors is involved, we can make out several interacting dynamics that render reality more complex than is portrayed by official cliches. The social changes that occurred during the hectic phase of urbanization ushered in a new stage in social complexity, expressed in the increased momentum of the ‘social factor’ (greater freedom of movement for labour, creation of a labour market for specialists which helped enhance the role of the intelligentsia). This degree of complexity was bound to test the limits of the political system severely.

Attending to the ‘social factor’, as we have done throughout this book, aids us in appreciating a complex social reality and the profound changes that accompanied it. The existence of the Soviet regime in the post-Stalin period was relatively short, but it was characterized by a historical experience of exceptional intensity. After Stalin’s death, we witness not only the abandonment of mass terror, but also the disappearance of other features pertaining to the ‘enserfment’ of the population. The changes consequent upon the end of this state of serfdom were especially significant: they marked an expansion in personal freedom that should be acknowledged, and not dismissed with contempt on the grounds that a democratic system offers much more. The subsequent fate of the regime would be unintelligible without this increased breathing space for popular and other classes. The improvement in social conditions, the greater attention to safety at work, the shorter working day, longer holidays in more readily accessible holiday resorts, higher wages (albeit not spectacularly so) – all these must be factored into our reflection on the system. Thus, as we indicated in Part Two, labour relations were now based on the labour code and legal guarantees granting workers the right to switch workplaces. The rights of workers and employees were more clearly defined and better protected: legal dispositions made it possible to challenge management decisions and pursue cases in tribunals or special chambers created to settle work disputes – tribunals where workers had a good chance of winning.

This was all certainly aided by the improvement in workers’ educational levels, due in part to an influx of secondary school graduates into factories. The latter put considerable social pressure on management and government when they realized the gap between their level of education and aspirations and the still relatively primitive working conditions in industrial and other concerns, which were slow to introduce the technological innovations young workers expected to see. Whereas many workers from the previous generation had adapted without difficulty to a low-intensity system, this educated section of the workforce was certainly disappointed. Dissatisfied with the monotonous, archaic and often even non-mechanized character of their work, they were ready to look for more interesting jobs elsewhere and now had the right to do so. To retain them, the technological level of enterprises had to improve. But for this to happen, the whole incentive system in industry (and the economy in general) had to be revised – a prospect that raised immensely complicated economic problems and became a real headache for the leadership.

The term ‘sociology’ is shorthand here for the set of interests, interactions, and practices of social groups, and also applies to the production and circulation of ideas, ideologies, political trends and moods, which were now of considerable intensity. This was bound up with the enhanced role of the intelligentsia, the growing weight of public opinion, and the attitudes that now pervaded the bureaucratic class, the party apparatus, the young, and the working population. Some seem to think that there can be no political history – let alone ideological history – in a country that does not recognize the right of other political opinions to exist, express themselves, and take organized form. However, ideological and political trends did indeed exist in the USSR and found ways to make themselves heard, even if they did not assume an organized form and seek to overthrow the regime. Those who pursued that course risked the attentions of the secret police, but the latter, however powerful, proved helpless when it came to ideas diffused among youth and large segments of the general population, the bureaucracy, the army or the intelligentsia. When such diffuse ideas emerge, history (or, if one prefers, political sociology) takes over, and the police are powerless, especially when these opinions are widespread among leading strata, even in their own ranks.

The party, too, was not only helpless, but succumbed to these ideas and trends: varieties of (sometimes virulent) nationalism or ‘statism’, deeply rooted in these circles, were almost openly expressed with impunity, even though they helped undermine the regime that tolerated them. But directly anti-regime forces were not able seriously to threaten it. The regime was not toppled: it died after exhausting its inner resources and collapsed under its own weight – a special case in the history of the fall of empires. Nuclei of individuals and forces who wished to overthrow it certainly existed, but they lacked sufficient popular support. We have seen that Andropov’s agencies put the number of potential opponents and plotters at some 8.5 million people, mainly located in south-east Russia and among the intelligentsia of the capitals. But these elements never managed to combine into a coherent political force.[2]

The presence of police controls and informers (stukachi) is insufficient on its own to explain the regime’s robustness. Citizens must have found something in the system to desire or appreciate, be it the country’s international status, the relative social homogeneity of its population, the considerable openings for social promotion for disadvantaged strata, or the relative novelty of the liberties that were granted, de jure or de facto, during the revitalization of the system after Stalin’s death and even in its declining phase. All these freedoms were bound up with a new urban reality that was probably still too young to allow for the crystallization of new, clear-cut political aspirations, with the capacity to attract broad popular support.

In the context of an expanding urban society, the emergence of sociology as a field of scholarly knowledge is a natural and yet highly significant development. Pressure to develop a hitherto banned discipline derived not only from academicians, but also from various officials and analysts at Gosplan, the Finance Ministry, the Central Statistical Office and the State Labour Committee – so many bodies whose sphere of activity was not restricted to a single branch, but involved the whole economy, society, and the machinery of government. Not to be outdone, the KGB, with the help of the Academy of Sciences, created an institute for the sociological study of various milieux – the student world, in particular – with an emphasis on behaviour that was anti-social and actually or potentially hostile to the regime.

Sociology underwent rapid development. Whether wittingly or otherwise, sociologists became a pressure group (supported by academic institutions and their members) and rapidly seemed indispensable for a better knowledge of society, workplaces, youth and its aspirations, the condition of women, and so on. Sociologists’ articles, and particularly their field studies, offered an image of reality that had little in common with the cliches and rhetoric of official ideology. They forced this reality on the consciousness of ordinary people, but also of party and state officials, attuning them to new realities, new tasks and new approaches. Government agencies soon began to commission sociological studies. Various sociologists stood out (Tatyana Zaslavskaya and her colleagues at the highly innovative academic centre in Novosibirsk, others in Moscow and Leningrad). Without mincing their words, they produced realistic studies on living conditions in the rural world, factories and offices. Economists from various centres, particularly those at the Central Institute of Mathematical Economics, engaged in intensive research, circulating studies, whether or not they were published, which were communicated to the government. Some of these were commissioned; others were carried out on the initiative of the researchers. Political scientists also gave their opinion, even when they had not been asked for it. They sent unsolicited memoranda to the leadership protesting against some particular policy (for example, the intervention in Afghanistan).

The government and party apparatus selected academic experts as permanent or occasional advisers. These academics formed the branch of the intelligentsia best attuned to urban reality in all its complexity and sought to develop a new type of analysis – one that was remote from official ideological discourse or conservative agitprop. In this respect, government circles were sometimes much more open than the party apparatus, which was packed with Brezhnevites, even if their influence was counterbalanced by the tendency on the part of some departments and secretariats to have their own brains trust. Andropov, who probably initiated this trend, introduced some very bright, forward-looking people into his department.[3] Following the fall of the regime, many of them were to demonstrate an intellectual and moral capacity that imparts credibility to their accounts of the past.

This educated urban society harboured much more than the encouraging phenomena we have just referred to. Politically, it produced not only enlightened reformers but also reactionaries and hardliners of various hues. But we have chosen to focus here on the novelty and complexity of the urban reality that the regime had to confront, and not on any particular political current – especially given that such currents can readily switch direction.

WHAT DID THE ECONOMY ‘SAY’?

The functioning and performance of the economy was becoming ever more of a problem. A fatal dichotomy seemed to be operative: as the new social structure expanded, economic growth rates went on declining. It suffices to indicate that the rate of growth of national income (according to Western estimates), having reached a respectable 5.7 per cent a year in the 1950s (almost as rapid as during the first five-year plan), dropped to 5.2 per cent in the 1960s, 3.7 in the first half of the 1970s, and 2 per cent in 1980–5.[4]

Robert Davies has confirmed this picture. From the mid-1970s, the Soviet growth rate fell so low that for the first time since the 1920s GNP was increasing less rapidly than in the USA, and much less rapidly than in several newly industrialized countries. Behind such data lay an ever more intricate reality that eluded all economic or political regulation. Economic agencies and scholars knew that the situation was becoming increasingly acute.

No wonder, then, that the man in charge of the whole edifice, Prime Minister Kosygin, had already asked the Academy of Sciences in 1966 to assess things from the standpoint of competitiveness with the USA. The Academy had a section responsible for ‘competition with capitalism’, and thus could be asked to do this without irking Gosplan or the Central Statistical Office, which regularly supplied the government with comparative data on the development of the Western economies. The report in question, commissioned by the Council of Ministers, was probably finished at the end of 1966 and presented to the government at the beginning of 1967. The study, which was wholly in the spirit of Kosygin’s economic reforms (officially launched in 1965 and the focus of heated debate), sought to impart a sense of urgency that might strengthen the reformers’ hand. The picture of the economy offered to the government and Gosplan was stark. Lack of access to Kosygin’s archives means that we cannot tell what he thought of the situation, but the text is the best clue we possess as to his own anxieties about the system’s vitality. Moreover, the report did not breathe a word about the burden of military expenditure, which was blocking economic development. It made do with arguing that higher wages and expanded production of consumer goods were a precondition for the whole economy embarking on a course of accelerated technological progress.[5] But Kosygin certainly knew all this already from other sources.

We know that the Academy’s economists demonstrated that the USSR was lagging behind on all key indicators, except in what were regarded as the leading branches at the end of the nineteenth century. Conservatives hostile to Kosygin’s projects probably claimed that improving economic management would suffice to eliminate waste and increase resources, without interfering with the system. This was a way of suggesting that the waste was attributable to Kosygin… But if Kosygin was absorbed with the problem, he was not responsible for it: waste was the effect – not the cause – of the malady. Investigating its breadth and depth would help to identify the blockages more clearly. The task was entrusted to a Commission for the Elimination of Waste equipped with considerable powers, and certainly with Kosygin’s support, even if his opponents were also interested in such a commission (it might actually have been their initiative).

Appointed in 1966, after having been renamed the Commission for Economizing State Resources, it was composed of the heads of the inter-sectoral ministries and agencies (Gosplan, Finances, Statistics, Labour and Wages, Gossnab). With the help of other agencies, its task was to study the system’s key sectors (we do not know whether its remit extended to the huge military-industrial complex). The Commission’s labours yielded an enormous report examining the work of administrative bodies in most areas (including research, investment, economic branches, culture and public health). It almost resembled the medical examination of a gigantic body that was ailing all over, conducted by a hospital’s staff in its entirety. The facts and figures were surely known to Kosygin, but it may be (as we have suggested) that the initiative was a double-edged sword. Moreover, the ‘doctors’ had nothing to say about how to cure the patient.

Among other data, the commission had used material supplied by the State Control Commission, which detailed, for example, wastage and loss of raw materials; the enormous amount of damage suffered by materials as they were being transported; the waste of fuel and electricity; the accumulation of non-saleable products; the production of goods that were too heavy and/or too primitive on account of obsolescent production techniques and methods; and the costly use of coal from very remote regions when it was readily available nearby at much lower cost.[6]

Here are just a few examples. The importance of pipes and pipelines in the economy was enormous. Yet the Soviet economy was continuing to produce metallic pipes rather than reinforced concrete pipes (e.g. for water mains), even though the latter were between 30 and 40 per cent less expensive even taking account of the investment required to switch to this type of production. In addition, using them would make possible a saving in metal of 80–90 per cent and their lifespan was three times greater. Yet the 1966 plan anticipated the production of only a small quantity of modern pipes, as opposed to the requisite 1 million cubic metres.

Another costly anomaly was factories accumulating reserves of materials (raw materials and finished products) greatly in excess of authorized norms. These were often stored in unsuitable premises, sometimes in the open air, where they were vulnerable to bad weather and pilfering. Enterprises refused to sell them on to others in need of them, even though they had the right to do so. In defiance of the regulations, factories also often used considerable resources to pay wages for exceeding production targets in the case of goods for which there was little demand. Measures had been proposed to compel managers to reduce reserve stocks to an acceptable level.

Another problem was growing distribution costs, which represented 5.31 per cent of retail price sale in 1958 and 6.25 per cent in 1965. Furthermore, the cost of work canteens had risen sharply in the same period, on account of the loss of goods while they were being transported or stored, low-quality packaging, and the overpayment of personnel (and also because of the payment of high fines).

Many enterprises offered wage increases that outstripped improvements in labour productivity. In the first half of 1966, 11 per cent of industrial, commercial and transport enterprises had acted thus, running up a wage overdraft of 200 million roubles.

Because of the illegal dismissal of workers, the government was incurring serious costs. In 1965, in 60 per cent of the cases brought before them, tribunals had ordered the reinstatement of sacked workers; and paying the wages they had lost cost 2 million roubles every year, while the officials responsible for the illegal dismissals went unpunished.

Losses attributable to shortage of stock and misappropriation of goods in commercial organizations and the food industry were estimated at 300 million roubles. The culprits were referred to the courts, but the cases were long-drawn-out and the payment of damages very slow. Many enterprises were in no hurry to sue the culprits.

The situation in commerce was repeated in the fields of research and culture, where facilities were underused and heavily overstaffed. Moreover, enterprises took a considerable time to apply technological inventions to production. The report provided a list of products and equipment that had been developed years ago, but which were still not in use. Once again, the losses were staggering.

For its part, the Popular Control Committee had investigated a large number of industrial enterprises and added its contribution to the litany of complaints. In particular, it had discovered that the production costs fixed by the plan were invariably exaggerated. The determination of these costs did not take account of the fact that the costs in previous years, which served as a base-line, had already been overstated on account of waste, mismanagement, overproduction, and poor use of productive capacity. The Committee did not skimp when it came to listing inefficiencies and waste, but we should note the ‘gentility’ of its recommendations to the ministries that swallowed up resources. It merely drew ‘the ministries’ attention to the need to plan a reduction in production costs more carefully’. But what incentive did they have to do that?

As ever when a control commission or task force was appointed to look into a problem, it presented a picture of utter chaos where nothing worked. It must therefore be made clear that many enterprises functioned reasonably well: otherwise, the whole economy would have collapsed long ago. But the system was approaching the critical point where ‘waste’ was going to render it a historical aberration: a system that produced more costs than goods.

If it continued to limp along, it was because the country possessed immense resources. Hence another paradox: a very wealthy country with very low consumption. In sum, the commission suggested that everyone had to learn to be more thrifty. In fact, the problem did not stem exclusively from wastage. No less amazing was the fact that the planning system perpetuated, even exacerbated, inefficiency and waste in the production process, when by definition it should have prevented them.

By now, purely economic and technological measures would not do the trick. Some experts thought that reserves for economic development were to be found in the costly arms sector, since, according to Gosplan’s calculations, 40 per cent of all new machines manufactured in the USSR were intended for ‘special projects’. Was it not time for them to help revive the civilian sector? But this was another pipe dream. In the military-industrial complex itself, technological progress was rooted in waste and utter disregard for costs. Excessive secrecy (and the excessive power of this complex) aggravated the situation. Whatever the achievements (and they were numerous, but remained in the notorious ‘closed cities’ that took a lot without giving anything in return), the economic spin-off for civilian industry was non-existent.

On the other hand, the Soviet ‘planning’ system, whose targets were almost exclusively quantitative, failed to establish sufficiently well-thought-out correlations between these targets and the incentive system; or to ensure an overall balance between the main socio-economic factors conducive to scientific and technical progress and to the satisfaction of social needs that were changing and growing. Soviet planners knew full well that the most advanced Western economies established these correlations successfully – most of the time, at least. A formula for outperforming the West existed on paper in Gosplan’s offices; and things seemed to have worked out in the regime’s early years and during the war. But that simply meant that pathologies could be tolerated for a time. With the economy growing and changing, unaltered planning methods were becoming a fetter: they only perpetuated – even exacerbated – the pathologies. The planning system was in disarray and decaying together with the whole politico-economic statist model.

That is why, as far as Kosygin was concerned, the task was much more complicated than squeezing savings out of each agency (industrial, commercial, etc.). The real task was nothing less than Herculean.

A good indicator for assessing and understanding both the growth of the 1960s and the decline of the 1970s is to be found in the complex of factors which, astonishingly enough, created a growing labour shortage.

As we saw in Part Two from Gosplan’s own research, in 1965 the main problem stemmed from a distorted geographical distribution of labour: some areas had a surplus, and yet it was difficult to persuade workers to move; others experienced shortages that were difficult to make good.

As the years passed, it became ever more clear that planning methods had not progressed sufficiently beyond the original 1930s model. This consisted in allocating investments in abundance, while relying on the system’s ability to mobilize massive labour reserves when and where required. Everything was different now. In the first place, the planning and education systems had to train large numbers of qualified personnel – technicians and high-level specialists, as well as scientific researchers – and this was a task they acquitted rather successfully. But from 1968 onwards, an entirely new problem arose: the spectre of an outright labour shortage (not just of certain categories) – and without any real prospect of remedying it.

How are we to explain such a situation in a country of 270 million inhabitants, a higher population than the USA’s, but with an economy and national income that were much smaller? In the previous chapter, the report we summarized at some length revealed that ‘waste’ was absolutely central. The factors underlying it also hampered productivity and allowed for growth exclusively through an injection of huge sums of investment, which issued in quantitative expansion – a formula that could only lead, in the more or less short term, into a dead end if nothing was done. Some had grasped this logic at a time when the Soviet economy still seemed to be in reasonably good shape. The plan was unable to ensure a fit between investment targets, output, and an adequate supply of labour. Numbers for the quantity of labour required did exist, but there were no coherent policies and measures for guaranteeing its supply. That in turn would have required appropriate social policies. In the past, labour requirements had been met by the spontaneous gravitation of labour or its mobilization. These mechanisms were no longer operative, and everything was complicated still further by demographic factors.

The articulation of the relevant factors in a situation where labour could no longer be ‘mobilized’ was analysed by an expert in 1968 before a selected audience of top officials. The lecturer – E. V. Kasimovsky – was head of the Research Institute of the Russian Federation’s Gosplan, and his lecture was entitled ‘Problems of Labour and the Standard of Living’.[1] His richly documented presentation surveyed the problems of labour, labour productivity, and the geographical distribution of labour resources. Here we shall cite some key points.

In recent years, large urban centres had experienced labour shortages, to the tune of tens of thousands not only in Leningrad but also in Moscow, Kuibyshev, Cheliabinsk and Sverdlovsk. The situation was even worse in Siberia. ‘This is a new period’, said Kasimovsky, ‘and we have never seen anything like it before.’ No doubt demographic projections held out the hope that the next five-year plan would see a strong influx of young people into the labour market. But they also anticipated that this increase would drop off thereafter. In 1961–5, 2.6 million young people had arrived on the labour market; an additional 4.6 million were expected for the 1966–70 plan and 6.3 million for 1971–5. But the figure subsided to 4.6 million for 1976–80.

Added to this decline in the number of young people arriving on the labour market was the fact that the introduction of compulsory secondary school education would rule out employing fourteen- to fifteen-year-olds in production. In 1965 the Russian Federation had 287,000 young workers of that age, and it would still have 263,000 in 1970. But the figure would fall to 130,000 in 1980.

Obviously, demographic factors were introducing a new blockage. The predicted reduction in the youth cohorts entering production was attributable to falling birth rates, which had been especially marked since the beginning of the 1960s. In 1950 the rate was still 27 births per 1,000, but in 1967 it was no more than 17 per 1,000 (14.5 per 1,000 in the Russian Federation itself). Despite the drop in mortality in these years, falling birth rates had substantially reduced natural population increase, from 17 per cent in 1950 to 10 per cent in 1967 (less than 8 per cent in Russia). Birth rates had fallen in the twelve Soviet republics – especially in Russia, the Ukraine, Belorussia, Moldavia and Kazakhstan. The phenomenon was especially troubling in the Soviet Union’s two metropolises: between 1960 and 1966, Moscow’s birth rates had fallen from 7 to 2.2 per 1,000 and Leningrad’s from 6.4 to 3 per 1,000. According to some estimates, in 1972 Moscow’s mortality rate would be 3 per cent higher than its birth rate, and in 1973 Leningrad’s would be 2 per cent higher. In 2000, the figure for deaths would be 2.5 times that for births – equivalent to a population decrease of several hundreds of thousands.

Over the Union as a whole, the drop in birth rates in towns was higher than in the countryside. But an utterly novel trend had emerged: overall birth rates in the Russian Federation, where a quarter of the USSR’s rural population lived, were lower than in the towns. Of the seventy-one administrative units of the Russian Federation, eighteen had birth rates below those of towns. In areas like Novgorod, Pskov and Kalinin, birth rates were lower than mortality rates.

The rate of reproduction of the population was plummeting. For the whole USSR, it had dropped from 1.4 in 1938–9 to 1.12 in 1968, which was lower than that of leading capitalist countries (1.56 in the USA, 1.13 in Canada, 1.38 in France, and 1.44 in the UK).

In the USSR (and the Russian Federation), women had an average of 2.6 children (1.9 in towns and 3.3 in the countryside). Research by the Central Statistical Office indicated that an average of 3 children was required for normal population reproduction. This meant that the urban population was no longer reproducing itself, but growing only thanks to an influx from the countryside.

The decline in birth rates in the USSR was more rapid than that experienced by the other socialist countries and the capitalist countries. What would its effects be on the supply of labour? Some demographers argued that it presented no threat to living standards. But Kasimovsky differed: if the decline in births persisted, workers’ living standards would suffer.

Population density remained low in the USSR – thirty-two inhabitants per square kilometre – and was lower still in Siberia. Falling birth rates would slow down any increase in population density and thus further reduce the prospects of populating Siberia, which was now a major problem. If birth rates did not pick up, the outcome could be stagnation, or even reduction, in living standards, which were already too low.

THE CAUSES OF DECLINING BIRTH RATES

Births had fallen during the war and had not yet recovered. The structure of the population in terms of sex and age had changed. In the first instance, this involved the disparity between men and women. But there was also a gap in the 30–50 age groups. In 1959, the 20–24 age group counted 106 women for 100 men in towns and 98 women for 100 men in the countryside. In 1967, the corresponding figures were 98 women for 100 men in towns and 95 women for 100 men in the countryside. Thus, the situation had almost been normalized in the towns, but it had deteriorated in the countryside. For the 25–29 age group, in 1959 there were more women than men in the towns; and in 1967 the situation was worse. In the countryside there were 131 women for 100 men. These imbalances represented a serious handicap in terms of labour supplies and demographics. They obviously had a major impact on birth rates and the reproduction of the population.

The sharp increase in the number of women employed in production (19 million in 1950 and around 40 million in 1968) was also a factor. The proportion of women in production in the Russian Federation had doubled. But the birth rate among working women (workers or employees) was 30–40 per cent lower than that of women working at home or on the family plot. The main reason was the greater difficulty experienced by working women in caring for their children. Many of them had no relatives to help out and could not afford a nanny. In many towns there were no places in the crèches and kindergartens. The fact that women (several million of them) were often employed in very heavy, non-mechanized labour – mining, machine construction, metallurgy – was a further element. Kasimovsky reckoned that the time had come to revise the list of jobs open to women, so that they could both work and bear children. Another well-known factor was birth control: the number of abortions exceeded that of births.

In the first quarter of 1968, the research institute of the Russian Federation’s Gosplan, the Health Ministry, the Finance Ministry and the Central Statistical Office studied the causes of falling birth rates in thirteen large towns and ten rural regions in Bashkiria, Krasnodarskii krai, Kaliniskaia and Pskov. The responses of 1,600 women asked about the reasons for their abortions confirmed the results of an earlier inquiry among 26,000 women: 22 per cent of them stated that they did not want a baby because of inadequate housing, which would only deteriorate with the arrival of a baby; 18 per cent mentioned the difficulty of finding a crèche; 14 per cent believed that their income was insufficient and would fall with a baby. These three reasons accounted for half of the causes invoked.

Although house construction had been accelerated, the situation remained unsatisfactory in many towns. Places for children in crèches and kindergartens were also increasing, but only half of existing demand was met. Moreover, despite the rise in the minimum wage to 60–70 roubles a month, household incomes remained too low – especially in the case of single-parent families, which were quite common. Benefits were given to only a small number of people, and more substantial help was offered to women only with the birth of their fifth child. In 1967 a mere 3.5 million women received family allowance. Of these, 2.1 million had five or more children. Many women had abortions for health reasons, often as a result of heavy labour. Because the period of convalescence following an abortion was not paid, many women resumed work immediately, which often led to complications and even sterility.

Birth rates also suffered from increased instability in conjugal relations. In recent years, the number of divorces had risen steeply, especially in the countryside. In 1960, there were roughly nine marriages for every divorce; by 1966, only three.

In the conclusion to his report, Kasimovsky indicated that, some months prior to this inquiry, a population study laboratory had finally been created at Moscow University (an institute of the Academy of Sciences that had existed before the war had not yet been re-established). Measures to increase the birth rate and a study of the whole issue had been submitted to the government and the Central Committee.

We can assume that some of the problems were attributable to living standards in the USSR. An author like Mironov would be inclined to detect the effects of modernization, which are evident in all urban societies. But that would be to underestimate some of the socially deleterious effects of modernization, especially in Soviet conditions. We must therefore round off his unduly positive picture by pointing to dangerous side-effects overlooked by him.

WERE THERE ANY LABOUR FORCE RESERVES?

Falling birth rates were not the only reason for the problem in recruiting labour. It was becoming increasingly difficult to tap the reserves represented by those who still worked at home or on private plots. In 1960 the people engaged in such activities still represented between a quarter and a fifth of the reserve labour force (19 per cent in Russia), but by 1970 the percentage was reckoned not to exceed 8 per cent. In addition, a distinction had to be made between those employed in this sector and real reserves. In fact, only half of those so employed accepted the idea of going to work outside their homes (and half of them stipulated various conditions). Moreover, the method used to count this potential labour force was faulty and a source of disappointment. In the Russian Federation, 5,700,000 had been recruited to work in the state economy in 1960–5, but the total for the next plan was 1,000,000. Projections for the one after indicated that 500,000 might be the maximum, and the number of people working their own plots might increase sharply. Furthermore, there was a great deal of regional variation in the situation. Let us note in passing that the majority of those working in and around the house, cultivating plots, or keeping animals, were women.

Thus, labour reserves were pretty much exhausted. Some local resources still existed here and there, but were difficult to release. Many people preferred working at home, since it was more likely to improve their standard of living.

Another possible source of labour was pensioners. The population was ageing and the share of pensioners in it was rising. Many areas that lacked labour had developed social services to attract pensioners. But this was a limited source. In 1965, 1.9 million pensioners were employed in the state economy; estimates anticipated 2 million in 1970 and perhaps 2.5 million in 1980.

The authorities certainly understood that development depended less on labour reserves than on improving labour productivity. Yet labour productivity rates, measured over the long term, were in decline. Labour productivity had increased by 7.7 per cent per annum between 1951 and 1960, but only by 5.6 per cent between 1961 and 1965. In 1962 there had been a temporary recovery to 6 per cent. In 1967, however, there was a new drop as a result of a sharp decrease in growth in agriculture. The rate of growth in some leading industrial branches was still high. Yet overall, it lagged substantially behind the main capitalist countries. In the USA, labour productivity was 2.5 times higher in industry and services and 4.5 times higher in agriculture (according to the Soviet Central Statistical Office). The experts sounded the alert: if productivity did not increase, the USSR would not even catch up with the West by 2000! Improving this crucial indicator was now an overriding task: the means and measures to achieve it had to be found.

POPULATION AND LABOUR MIGRATION

Better specialization and cooperation between enterprises and industrial branches was indispensable. Decisions to this effect had been taken for Leningrad and Moscow, but they would take some years to be implemented and bear fruit. The most urgent thing was to mobilize labour reserves. However, their geographical distribution presented an additional problem. Of the 128 million inhabitants of the Russian Federation (to which we shall restrict ourselves here), only 25 million lived in eastern regions (basically meaning the Urals and especially Siberia). This imbalance was hampering the economic development of these regions, where the strongest economic growth should have occurred given the abundance of natural resources there. To achieve the targets that had been fixed, it was necessary to transfer 2.6 million people (the period being referred to is apparently 1968–80). Yet in the last fifteen years, population movements had been in the opposite direction. People were leaving Russia for other republics to the tune of 200,000 a year on average and the figures for the eastern regions were even higher. Between 1950 and 1960, Russia had lost 2.8 million inhabitants to other republics. Even more disturbing was the fact that in Russia itself people were leaving areas where labour was in short supply, and moving to areas where there was a surplus. What attracted them to Northern Caucasus or the Stavropol region was a better climate and more developed small-scale farming.

The countryside suffered from its own share of miseries. Labour productivity was between four and five times lower than that of the USA, but with regional variations. The sex and age imbalance in the rural population was getting worse. There was high, unplanned migration to the towns, which was all the more alarming in that 73 per cent of the migrants were under the age of twenty-five and 65 per cent of them were women in the same age group. The proportion of young people and of thirty- to forty-year-olds in the rural population was shrinking, whereas that of older people or those incapable of working was expanding. Those who were leaving were precisely the ones whom the countryside most needed to service the increased mechanization and electrification of agriculture. In 1968 there was only one able-bodied male for every two kolkhoz households. The average age of a working member of a kolkhoz was fifty and many worked beyond retirement age.

The overall picture was thus disturbing. The dangerously distorted age profile and the conjunction of declining labour productivity and departures for the towns were bleeding the countryside dry. Accordingly, this traditional, seemingly inexhaustible source of labour could no longer even provide for its own needs. The search for labour reserves now resembled scraping the barrel. Among those who preferred to work on their own plots (particularly women), many would only accept part-time work outside the home. But their number was also dwindling rapidly – not to mention the fact that jobs which removed them from their plots (especially in the countryside) would entail an immediate drop in food production.

Did this already amount to a crisis? At all events, one was certainly brewing. The documents we used in Part Two indicate that, according to Gosplan’s experts, the auguries for the 1971–5 five-year plan were far from favourable.

As labour became a rare commodity, there was a proliferation of studies, research and conferences. A continuous flow of texts ran from Gosplan to the Central Committee and from the State Labour Committee to the Council of Ministers. One expert put it bluntly: ‘For the country as a whole, I believe that our labour resources are practically exhausted.’ When we recall that at the same time many, if not all, enterprises were heavily overstaffed, the absurdity of this complete deadend on the labour question (to say nothing of other aspects of the economic system) should have served to put the leadership on constant high alert. And yet, the enormous flow of information and analysis, which offered a picture of monumental mismanagement and foresaw this supposed super-state rapidly approaching a point of no return, created no visible stir. The Politburo was content to produce endless resolutions enjoining everyone to be more efficient.

It is now time for us to turn once again to those who actually ran (we have not as yet said ‘owned’) the economic branches and services. It is impossible to tackle any aspect of Soviet society, economy and politics without constantly running into the administrative class, whether state bureaucrats, party apparatchiks, or both in their intricate inter-relations. We are therefore going to revert to this phenomenon, starting out from the findings of the Commission for the Elimination of Waste,[×] whose remit extended to the bureaucracy.

The history of state and party institutions is full of constant structuring and restructuring: structures were set up, split, abolished, re-established. By contrast, the last fifteen years of the regime witnessed great stability in this respect. Khrushchev’s disbanding of more than one hundred industrial ministries at the stroke of a pen was the most spectacular anti-bureaucratic initiative – the only one on such a scale. And it is worth repeating that they were all reconstituted in 1965. The institutional problem we are referring to here – a systemic feature in itself- consisted in a kind of incessant tinkering, a form of ‘bureaucratic neurosis’ that the system was cured of only by catching another illness. The administration possessed a lot of weight, became highly influential, and sought to curb the Politburo’s despotic power. The bureaucratic neurosis was a way of evading real reform, on the basis of the idea – dear to Stalin – that all that was needed was to ‘correct’ the administrators.

All this requires some explanation. Tracking the vagaries of the administrative system is no easy task.[1] Despite having been a prime mover in Soviet history, the bureaucracy (and its administrative networks) has been insufficiently examined. Its study takes us to the very heart of the system, revealing that the bureaucracy which ran the state virtually came to own it. Changes in its structure, self-image and status must be examined not only in the framework of administrative history, but also in a political optic, contrary to the widespread view that the chief political features of the system were embodied in the party. Under Stalin, the bureaucracy was already an indispensable co-ruler, but unstable and fragile on account of the relative youth of its structures and the novelty of its tasks. Moreover, its members were ‘suspect’ because Stalin understood and feared its potential for consolidating itself and its thirst for power. The situation changed profoundly in the post-Stalin period: initially still deeply marked by the country’s plebeian and rural traditions, during the 1950s and ’60s the bureaucracy became a fully urban phenomenon in a society that was itself now urbanized. In its upper echelons, it was now a solidly established and firmly entrenched power. This emancipation of the bureaucracy was one of the key features of the whole post-Stalinist period. The state and party bureaucracy put an end to the arbitrary practices that had made its situation so precarious under Stalin. Stalinism was thereby replaced by a fully bureaucratic model that rapidly acquired a quasi-monopoly over all strategic positions of power.

Here we must recall the speed of social change in the 1950s and ’60s and the consequent drastic alteration of the socio-historical landscape. The construction of a still fragile bureaucracy under Stalin, and its consolidation as a monopolistic power structure in the years immediately after his death, occurred in a primarily agrarian society. Its monopolistic position in the state and entrenchment in power preceded the definitive transition to an urban civilization. An old characteristic of Russian history, pointed out by Miliukov and reformulated by Trotsky, was once again replicated here: the establishment of a strong state preceded the development of society and enabled the former to dominate the latter. But the Soviet era also witnessed the converse: successive waves of social development on a grand scale generated new systemic characteristics and a whole series of complex phenomena, which we are seeking to untangle in this book.

The bureaucratic phenomenon would unquestionably become more palpable if we had some idea of its size, internal structure and power. We already know that ascertaining the precise number of people employed by the state and other administrative agencies is not straightforward, since much depended on the criteria used by those who counted them – in particular, the Central Statistical Office. The best data are probably those produced by the census of administrative agencies conducted in 1970. Just reading this material and enumerating its results discloses the complex, tentacular character of the phenomenon. Here we shall simply offer a brief synthesis.

The census focused on the administrative personnel of all state institutions and supplied a breakdown between the various important administrative units, enterprises and organizations. Each republican administration was presented separately, as was local government. This abundance of statistics is mentioned only to remind readers that it does exist.

The Central Statistical Office’s computing centre explained that on this occasion it had included everyone not directly engaged in productive activity. Where there was ambiguity, they had split the difference: for example, an engineer working on the shop floor was not regarded as a member of the administrative personnel; but an engineer who worked in the factory’s administrative office was – unless his job was planning and design work. Auxiliary and service staff were included, albeit in a separate category. Guards were a separate category again, probably because they were better paid than auxiliary staff in the strict sense.

On 15 September 1970 – the date of the census – the total administrative apparatus consisted of some 13,874,200 employees, or 15 per cent of the working population (workers and employees). Top managers (rukovoditeli) and their deputies numbered 4,143,400 (this encompassed all institutions at central, republican and regional levels). The next most important category was that of ‘chief specialists’ and their deputies, containing all the engineers, technicians, agronomists and so on, working in administration: some 2,080,400. Then came engineer-economists, economists and planners: 543,400. The rest were distributed between accountants, statisticians, computer scientists, office employees and auxiliary staff.

One particular type of institution was singled out for separate treatment – namely, central ministries and their equivalents in the republics, as well as the other major agencies of comparable status and importance (state committees). The organizations under them employed the bulk of the country’s working population – 49,708,377 workers and employees. Administering all these workers were 7,996,116 officials, of whom 2,539,797 belonged to the top managerial category. In other words, one in three of them was a ‘boss’.[2]

Above this layer we find the very senior officials – some hundreds of people in charge of gigantic institutions. From another source we learn that around 1977 there were 32 USSR-level ministries (25 of them industrial) and 30 Union ministries that had equivalents at republican level (10 of them industrial).[3] To these must be added some 500 institutions that were referred to as ‘ministries’, but which were government agencies in the ‘autonomous’ republics – something important for the study of local elites, but not the topmost stratum.

Before the 1970 census, the figure of 8 million was generally given for the number of employees in state administration, 2.5 million of whom were described as nachal’niki (‘heads’). With the census, the picture changed to a more realistic total of 13 million, with some 4 million nachal’niki. The statisticians had rightly separated out another category: the members of the central ministerial core, who constituted the real ruling stratum. It involved six Union-level state committees (Science and Technology, International Trade, Meteorology, etc.), twelve committees with dual competence (Union and republics), and agencies like the KGB, Gosplan, the Central Statistical Office, the Finance Ministry, and so on. The officials who headed these institutions were all members of the central government.

To this hard core, composed of the heads of some eighty major government institutions, we must add the members of the Politburo, the heads of the party apparatus (at central and republican levels), and party secretaries in the regions and the capitals – a select group of some 1,000 people (of whom slightly fewer than half were Central Committee members). All of these were top players, mindful of the interests of the 2.5 million people who underpinned them. If the ‘ruling elite’ is what we are interested in, then the first figure (1,000) is the relevant one; but if the ‘ruling class’ is the subject of our study, then the second (2,500,000) is appropriate. A number of intellectuals, scientists and artists belonged here – some in the narrower circle, most in the wider one. But this is beyond the scope of our immediate concerns.

THE ‘ENVIRONMENT’ IN WHICH THE RULERS WERE FORMED

When wading through the mass of files and documents relating to the Politburo, the Orgburo and the Secretariat, one is struck by the intensity of the contacts between state bureaucrats and party bureaucrats within each apparatus. A factory manager, who might also be a bureaucrat in the formal as well as the pejorative sense, was in daily contact with people from other social groups – workers and technicians. By contrast, top leaders encountered workers only during official visits; typically, they made a speech and the workers applauded. The poverty of such contacts is normal for rulers, as is the fact that their milieu mainly consists of bureaucrats and that the whole politico-administrative process unfolds within it. Inside the party apparatus itself, from the Politburo to party cells, personnel issues took up a lot of time, together with minor economic and administrative details. General issues were reserved for a very small number of figures. Such was the environment and activity in which Molotov, Malenkov and Khrushchev were immersed; and this was what shaped them. An in-depth knowledge of the nuts and bolts was a sign of their mastery, and they exhibited it to impress their audience or interlocutors.

On the other hand, the capacity to deal with major problems – normally a leader’s main task – was utterly lacking in most of them. They devoted most of their time to resolving budgetary and salary issues, and signing the tens of thousands of decrees drafted by various agencies. Such activities pertain not to the remit of political leadership in the proper sense, but to that of a pernickety inspector who deludes himself that he is the master of the situation (when real mastery consists in a profound grasp of broader realities). Their subsidiary skills (shrewdness, cunning, the ability to construct a clientele) mainly served their personal power games. Behind them and this ‘passion for control’, which consumed their best efforts and skills, we can discern the waning of their political power and their highly coveted ability to control all the levers. We may note in passing that in 1966 a very powerful state control agency, whose running costs outstripped those of the Health and Culture ministries combined, was disbanded by Brezhnev simply to counter the influence of its highly ambitious head, Shelepin.

The leaders’ formation by their milieu was closely bound up with the Soviet principle that the national economy was state property. This was the source of the bureaucracy’s monopolistic power and of the only type of leadership such a state was capable of producing.

The administrative strata themselves underwent changes as a result of the country’s ongoing urbanization. Their educational level, professionalism, living standards and cultural habits were so many factors that necessarily impacted on intra- and inter-bureaucratic functioning. Even if the impression persisted that the general-secretary was absolute master (full stop!), the system was no longer a genuine autocracy. The general-secretary could dominate the party apparatus (though he was also heavily dependent on it), but the actual exercise of power and policy implementation took the form, as has been said, of extended bargaining between different government agencies. The latter were adept at manipulating the formal and informal lines of authority. Their rights, official and unofficial, went on expanding, to the point where their objections, counter-proposals and demands had become a component of political and administrative procedure, acquiring a quasi-constitutional status that we know too little about. For example, we have already seen that the centre was incapable of compelling the ministries to comply with planning procedures. In numerous respects, they acted exclusively in accordance with their own interests.

Given that nothing could be done without the ministries and other such agencies, events, or, more precisely, the powerful contradictory trends that were at work, forced the system’s rulers to adapt not only to changing social realities, but also to the ‘sociology’ of the bureaucracy itself. Various trends characteristic of the bureaucratic universe can be identified as ‘system-making’. After all, the state and its leading administrative personnel had become almost indistinguishable.

The formation of the complex structures of this stratum is a crucial phenomenon. As we have seen, its numbers exceeded 2 million in 1970, to restrict ourselves to the most sensitive posts. Their power allowed them to dictate acceptance of their insatiable drive for higher living standards, more perks, ever more power, and also toleration of a degree of corruption. They were the mainstay of the system. Hence another trend can be discerned, leading to the de facto amalgamation of these upper echelons of the state and party to form a single power complex. The most important ministers were members of the Central Committee, and some (KGB, Foreign Affairs, Defence) had a seat in the Politburo. Paradoxically, what facilitated this amalgamation was the procedures of the nomenklatura. Restored after the war to put the administrative monster in its place, it rapidly revealed its other side, which pointed in the opposite direction. If the whole elite was composed of ‘nomenklaturists’ – all of them high-ranking officials, but often also high-ranking party functionaries – the question of who actually controlled whom is not without point. Nomenklatura appointees and the apparatuses under them were running the state: this became the overarching reality of the Soviet polity.

In these circumstances, what exactly was the role of the party or, more precisely, of its leadership? Evidently, it was a powerful apparatus that relied on the governmental administrative machinery to rule the country. But the impression that the former controlled the latter, because the bureaucracy was its nomenklatura, is misleading. The Politburo and its apparatus were also an administration and, by this token, formed part of a much larger bureaucracy. The state administration had employees and workers; the party had employees and members. To insist that these members controlled nothing would be superfluous. Since this ‘party’ possessed some curious features, it is appropriate to put quotation marks around the term.

FROM A ‘ONE-PARTY’ TO A ‘NO-PARTY’ SYSTEM

However paradoxical at first sight, we are going to explore the hypothesis that the ‘ruling party’ did not in fact hold power. This seems surreal, but Soviet history is replete with myths and shams, misnomers and deliria. Thus, such resounding slogans as ‘collectivization’, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, ‘communism’, ‘democratic centralism’, ‘Marxism-Leninism’ and ‘vanguard’ had little to do with reality, at least most of the time.

As the years passed, the regime’s initial orientation towards the working and peasant classes and masses gave way to a different orientation – towards the state administration, its ‘organs’, and the various categories of ‘officials’. This all-encompassing process of ‘statization’, whereby the state’s centrality became absolute, culminated in a cult of the state, which represented the mindset of the upper echelons of the bureaucracy. In private discussions, but also in public, we find top party officials declaring that government ministries deal only with sectoral matters, whereas the party alone concerns itself with the higher interests of the state. Obviously they were responding to ministerial circles, which asserted precisely the opposite. This enables us better to appreciate what ‘statism’ meant. Party officials were not claiming that they alone were capable of representing society’s interests: they were competing with other bureaucrats to be the better spokesmen for the state and seeking to assert their primacy in the state.

In the 1930s, the organization calling itself the ‘party’ had already lost its political character; it had been transformed into an administrative network, wherein a hierarchy ruled a rank and file. During the next step, even this administrative creature was deprived of any power: under Stalin, it made no sense to speak of a party in power, given that its institutions did not function, no one asked its members for their views, and the rare occasional congress was just one long clapping session.

It is true that Khrushchev restored power over the party and state to the party’s summit (the Central Committee) and its apparatus. However, this made no difference to various key characteristics: rank-and-file members still had no political rights and the party remained a ruling hierarchy, devoid of any real political life. Under Stalin, the party had lost power to the supreme leader; after Khrushchev, it kept losing power to the state machine, which ended up absorbing its ruling network, making it into its own spokesman and representative – and this time for good. The process of ‘statization’ which was so important in the Soviet phenomenon, and probably its main characteristic when it came to the political system, reached its final stage. When the system entered into a prolonged phase of ‘stagnation’, the party, unable to do anything, powerless to impose far-reaching measures on ministries and other agencies, foundered along with everything else.

We can already formulate some initial conclusions: the ‘party’ was not actually always in power; and at a certain moment, it stopped being a political party and became one agency among others – the linchpin of an administration. This is why it is appropriate to put the term ‘party’ in quotation marks. We can even go so far as to venture that the ‘one-party’ system, on which so much ink has been spilt, eventually became a ‘no-party’ system. It may well be that if the USSR had possessed a genuine party, engaged in political life and capable of political leadership, it might have escaped its sorry fate and the country been spared a monumental crisis. However, after so many years and waves of historical change, this political structure, based on a powerful apparatus and members deprived of rights, was moth-eaten. No wonder it collapsed so easily, without any need for a strong jolt or storm.

What were the factors and circumstances that led the party system to a quasi-phantom existence, despite the awe inspired, then and now, by the Staraia Ploshchad? It was the transformation of the party into an apparatus – an old phenomenon – that entailed its de facto absorption by and into the bureaucratic realities of the state. The process started when the party became directly immersed in economic and other minutiae that were supposed to be handled by government ministries. Ministerial staff justly sensed that the party was duplicating their work, rather than concentrating on its own. The little-known conflict between Brezhnev and Kosygin over who should represent the country abroad is a good illustration of the problem.

The party’s ‘identity crisis’ – a formula used in Part One to describe the reformist endeavours of 1946–8 – can now be further deciphered. The apparatus had been restructured in 1946 with a view to its rediscovering its political identity by withdrawing from direct supervision of economic life. The argument was that the ministries ‘were buying the apparatchiks’, the ‘party had lost power’, and it must revert to its proper functions if it wanted to recover its power. Two years later, however, it was once again restructured for the converse reasons: so that it could interfere in economic affairs and ‘control’ them. The contradiction was the following: when the party concerned itself with politics, it lost control of the economy and bureaucracy; when it was fully engaged in controlling the economy, and meddled directly with what the ministries were doing and the way they were doing it, it lost its specific functions – even any sense of what they were. The second logic prevailed, and it allowed the party’s de facto absorption by the bureaucratic colossus.

It is worth remembering that Lenin and Trotsky (the latter in a letter to the Politburo just before the Eleventh Congress) had raised this problem, and warned Bolshevik leaders that direct meddling in the affairs of economic agencies (as opposed to ruling through them) would encourage the bureaucratization of the party, as well as increasing irresponsibility on the part of the administration. Trotsky argued that just as they had declared that the trade unions should not engage in managing the economy, but should remain trade unions, so the party should remain a party. But things did not turn out that way, prompting Bukharin 1928 to lament a virtual fait accompli: ‘The party and state apparatuses have merged and it’s a calamity.’ Following Stalin’s death, this was to lead to a further deepening of this trend.

THE ANTI-WASTE COMMISSION AT WORK

Growing labour shortages elicited an almost ‘classical’ market response. Labour is a commodity and as the state – the principal employer – became more and more dependent on it (and with forced labour no longer an option), it had to confront these shortages in various ways. As a result of the interaction of the factors involved, a different climate and new patterns emerged in labour relations. But this was insufficient to cure the illness ravaging the state economy. The regime brought in more and more measures in response to the pressures and aspirations of different social strata. However, despite the urgent recommendations impressed on it by the Anti-Waste Commission, the State Control Commission, and many other agencies, the regime failed to secure an increase in labour productivity, to prevent enterprises accumulating reserve stocks of labour and raw materials, and to stimulate the sluggish rate of technological innovation. The country’s rulers faced a dilemma. On the one hand, they were desperately in need of labour and had to court the labour force. On the other, they also had to court the administrative bodies that managed the labour force. This was not an easy game to play. A ‘consensual’ modus operandi was now unavoidable; and bargaining with the ministries became the rule. As is always the case with bureaucracies, however, this finally amounted to sharing power with them. There was no such power-sharing with labour, although here too we could point – as we did – to many concessions, improvements and extentions of rights (the same was true for other interests and social groups). This new way of conducting affairs of state, consisting in taking account of all sorts of social pressures and responding to them, is never registered by theorists of ‘totalitarianism’, for whom dependency remained total and unilateral. (In this instance, one can sympathize with their predicament: by definition, a semi-totalitarian regime is as impossible as a half-pregnant woman.)

Yet this was the major novelty of the post-Stalinist period and certainly contributed to the regime’s vitality in the 1960s. But the fact that the bureaucracy which managed the state obtained (or, more precisely, extracted) more than others, and reached an entente cordiale with the political leadership, was difficult to reconcile with satisfying the interests of workers and other social strata. Any hopes of maintaining social peace and developing the country were frustrated by a sluggish, wasteful economy. Bureaucratic planning did succeed in modernizing the economy and the ‘deal’ made with the bureaucracy enhanced its power, but did not improve its performance. Informal agreements with the bureaucrats did not constitute a policy; they amounted to a drift in a direction that aggravated the system’s ailments.

Readers are now well aware of the system’s malfunctioning and presumably keen to know what the Anti-Waste Commission proposed by way of remedies for government ministries and other agencies. For some conservatives, the indicated road was clear: the solution consisted in greater discipline – ‘law and order’, as they say in other political contexts. But this was a delusion.

From the outset, the history of state administration had been dominated by the Politburo’s endless battles to contain (and even reduce) its expansion and improve its efficiency. The Anti-Waste Commission, which had redefined its function from ‘eliminating waste’ to the rather less offensive formula of ‘saving state resources’, met with representatives of the central and republican ministries to prepare a draft proposal, taking account of the mass of data and information it had gathered on each and every branch. Its attempt to find ways of making savings in expenditure on state administration was seemingly rather courageous. Reducing the proliferating cohorts of the bureaucracy had hitherto seemed utterly impossible, given that each administrative machine was run by one of the most powerful figures in the regime. Persuading them to make cuts would be no easy matter. Moreover, some members of the Anti-Waste Commission (its membership is listed in footnote 4 below) themselves ran sizeable administrative departments.

N. Rogovsky, a noted expert and head of Gosplan’s labour department, reported on the discussions that took place during the Commission’s sessions, and they certainly involved quite a battle.[4] The Commission initially proposed to reduce administrative costs by 1,015 million roubles, but after some long and hard bargaining agreed to the lower figure of 905.3 million. For their part, the central and republican ministries would accept no more than 644 million. Detailed discussions on expenditure and staffing were conducted with each ministry separately and the same pattern invariably emerged: in each instance, the Anti-Waste Commission made concessions on the requisite cuts, while the other side gave little or nothing. Rogovsky informed the government that the majority of central ministries and republics opposed any change, preferring to leave things as they were.

As regards the number of state employees – another sticking point – the Anti-Waste Commission wanted to abolish 512,700 posts – a sizeable chunk of the total administrative workforce projected in the 1967 plan – which would have saved 590 million roubles on wages. Needless to say, the ministries affected would not hear of it.

In the defence of budgetary cuts that he addressed to the government, Rogovsky stressed one of the biggest obstacles faced by the Soviet economy: the problem of finding a balance between the population’s income and the supply of consumer goods. Reducing administrative costs would help. It is difficult not to register a certain perplexity here: eliminating half a million jobs would certainly reduce the sum total of monetary incomes, but those who lost their jobs would swell the ranks of the poor.

What actually happened? Some job cutting did occur here and there, but most of the officials affected found administrative work elsewhere or even in the same ministry. The hope entertained by some – that officials made redundant would turn to manual jobs (where there were real shortages, especially in remote regions) – was a pipe dream.

Another valuable source on the bureaucratic universe derives from the State Control Committee, which surveyed it in 1966 and made its contribution to Baibakov’s Anti-Waste Commission. It also offered a series of suggestions as to how to reduce state administrative costs. We may start with a proposal that was hidden among various other items: abolition of the benefits offered to certain categories of top officials, which would of course have produced significant savings. The State Control Committee drew up a list of the various perks that officials awarded themselves, calculated in roubles (millions of roubles, naturally) for each category of ‘service’. The list is revealing. Officials and departmental heads received a so-called ‘healthy diet’ allowance, as well as an allowance (equivalent to a month’s salary) for ‘social needs’, with vouchers for stays in sanatoriums and rest homes at reduced prices. They had at their disposal dachas, whose maintenance and repair were carried out at government expense. The State Control Committee proposed abolishing all these benefits and some even more outrageous ones enjoyed by senior military officers and their families. It was alarmed by the fact that administrative personnel had increased by 24 per cent in the last five years, bringing their total to more than 7 million (let us recall that this number referred to the hard core of the ministerial network) and the overall wage bill to 13 billion roubles. This rate of growth surpassed that of employment in general and curbing it would easily save a billion roubles.

An especially profligate branch when it came to staffing was the network of various supply agencies maintained by most ministries. The State Control Committee offered some examples, which should not be neglected if we wish to grasp Soviet realities.

Without counting those employed in stores and canteens, these departments and directorates for ‘supplying workers’ employed 36,700 people, receiving 40 million roubles a year. They could often have been closed down, and the stores and canteens directly supplied by the state’s own commercial network.

The Central Committee and Council of Ministers decreed that the problem of ‘workers’ supply’ should be addressed by a single unified system, which was already in the process of being constructed, in the hope that it would be less expensive and more efficient. But a number of ministries refused to rely on other organizations and preferred to retain their own supply channels for food, raw materials and machines, continuing to create and maintain depots and offices for supplies and marketing. Some of them bought materials and products of general industrial use from enterprises and marketed them through their own networks in other regions or republics. To take one example: the Ministry of Chemical Industry was shipping all manner of equipment and semi-finished products from its Sverdlovsk marketing office to Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad and Donetsk, even though such articles were available there in the local warehouses of the bodies responsible for supplies. This system, which employed many thousands of superfluous workers and issued in such irrationality, was an endless source of good jokes (we do not need the archives to know them).

We shall return to these issues of supply and marketing (snaby-sbyty),[×] in connection with one of their unforeseen consequences. First, however, let us turn to further examples of the ‘excesses’ indulged in by the ranks of the bureaucracy, and condemned as such by the State Control Committee. Among them were the ‘official trips’ (komandirovki) to Moscow – a million a year – for seminars or conferences, or even (in 50 per cent of cases) in the absence of any reason or invitation, which cost the state some 600 million roubles a year. The State Control Committee proposed to reduce the number of such trips by 30 per cent (which once again would not be easy, given that going to Moscow and enjoying its pleasures was one of the most sought-after perks). Another practice that had assumed unacceptable proportions was sending all sorts of intermediaries (khodatye i tolkachi) to finalize deals and find materials. In general, the State Control Committee deplored the fact that the measures and efforts undertaken to reduce bureaucratic ‘mobility’ had yielded no results.[5]

As we have seen, administrative officials liked to offer themselves as many services and perks at the state’s expense as they could extract. They also liked to party. Even in the postwar days of penury, high-ranking officials had had a good time. But in the 1960s the libations were more lavish and the parties rowdier! No one even tried to claim that they had anything to do with serving the common weal. The pile of empty bottles consumed by civil servants at state expense spoke for itself The government regularly received indignant letters condemning this lifestyle and became seriously alarmed about it. A countrywide campaign was launched against illegal expenditure of state resources on banquets and receptions, and large-scale investigations undertaken, which revealed the extent of the problem. All kinds of occasions were excuses for banquets – anniversaries, jubilees, conferences, visits by dignitaries – during which vodka, cognac and wine were served in generous quantities. Finance and control agencies had plenty of material on these goings-on; they knew perfectly well that managers and their accountants were burying such expenses as ‘production outlays’ and that the ministries and senior officials were turning a blind eye to it. The Council of Ministers drafted a decree stipulating that in future ministries could only give banquets in exceptional circumstances, following permission from the Council (or the local authorities in the republics), and that alcohol was not to be served during them. Infringements were to be severely punished and the culprits required to reimburse the cost out of their own pockets.

The draft decree was jointly proposed by the Finance Minister (Garbuzov) and the Chairman of the State Control Committee (Kovanov), after they had presented their government colleagues with a ‘panorama’ of such excesses. In 1968, 6,500 government enterprises and agencies had been investigated (at central, republican and district levels), revealing that more than a thousand of them had staged lavish banquets where enormous quantities of alcohol were consumed and presents offered to honoured guests. In Izhevsk, twelve enterprises belonging to different ministries had each spent thousands of roubles on receptions and parties. Between October 1967 and July 1968, one of them had drained 350 bottles of cognac, 25 bottles of vodka and 80 bottles of champagne during the merry-making, at a total cost of 3,100 roubles. Sometimes the banquets were staged in restaurants, which were cited in the document together with the bills stating the price of the drinks.[6]

As we can see, there was no shortage of information on the lifestyle of officials financed by the state, and the leadership sought to remedy the situation. But it is doubtful whether the measures they took or proposed had any effect. The decree itself offered a loophole, authorizing banquets in some circumstances (it was impossible to ban them altogether), and we can be sure that the requisite permission was given. For such was the style of the system, in which everything functioned via personal contacts, exchanges of services, deals, promotions, and so on.

This detour was necessary in order to return to the crowds of ‘suppliers’ (snabzhentsy), for whom meals in restaurants, receptions and binges were part of the routine. Working without these, not to mention bribes, was inconceivable; and this was common knowledge. The KGB and prosecuting authorities could recount some especially juicy stories. In any case, libations were only the preliminary to a whole ‘culture’ of wheeling and dealing, profiteering and corruption. The supply agencies were the quintessential milieu that generated this culture and diffused it throughout the administration, especially to economic agencies. As we proceed, we shall discover the existence of powerful systemic springs at work, transforming the whole Soviet bureaucratic scene into a setting from a different play altogether.

THE USSR’S GOSSNAB: STAFF AND ACTIVITIES (1970)

By name at least, such Soviet institutions as the KGB or Gosplan were known throughout the world. But outside the ranks of specialists, no one abroad referred to Gossnab. For Soviet economists and the whole administrative class, Gossnab – the State Committee for Material and Technical Supplies – was the engine of the economic system. Like the KGB and Gosplan, Gossnab was a supra-ministerial body, run by a prestigious economist and administrator, V. Dymshits, who had won his spurs in Gosplan.

Gossnab was supposed to provide the economy with everything it needed in order to function. Its warehouses, stations and offices were a sort of Mecca for the innumerable tolkachi (‘pushers’) and other agents from the various ministries, agencies and production units. These emissaries arrived to assure themselves that Gossnab would indeed deliver what they had been promised in order to fulfil the plan. Not receiving what had been envisaged, or receiving nothing at all, or getting it too late was a major anxiety; and given that Gossnab was frequently short of all sorts of items, the tolkachi were charged with making contacts with its officials, arranging deals and obtaining results.

A centralized supplier on this scale was regarded as a contradiction in terms by leading Soviet economists. Even when competently run, Gossnab, like every other Soviet agency, experienced shortages and deficiencies. It was cursed by just about everyone, with the exception of those who enjoyed the seal of government priority in procurement (the arms sector or other pet projects of the leadership).

Despite its elevated position in the Soviet institutional hierarchy, Gossnab had to submit to the same administrative routines as other bodies when it came to its budgets, personnel and structural units. Acquaintance with these procedures will help us to understand the character of this apparatus. Budgetary negotiations with the Finance Ministry were not particularly exacting, because the latter was aware of the complexity of Gossnab’s duties and its high status. On 8 August 1970, Dymshits approved the list of Gossnab’s staff and sent it to the Finance Ministry for registration, as procedure dictated, in order to secure the requisite personnel and corresponding budget. The document specified the number of top officials and their salaries, the number of specialists, and each specialist department together with its field of activity, for everything had to be approved by the financial auditors. Thus we learn that Gossnab comprised 34 units with 1,302 employees. Among them we find 286 holding higher managerial posts, 10 of which were leadership positions. The monthly wage bill for these 286 posts was 284,786 roubles. A separate table indicated the salary of the 10 highest officials (between 550 and 700 roubles, plus unspecified perks), or a monthly total of 5,300 roubles (though this excludes the salary of Gossnab’s head). At the other end of the wage scale, we find employees earning 70 roubles a month and enjoying no perks.

As has been said, the bargaining went smoothly. At this stage, Dymshits was still in a strong position. The Finance Ministry’s inspectors went through the motions of approving a central staffing level of 1,302, while trying to nibble away at numbers and wages wherever possible. When Dymshits requested an average monthly salary of 219 roubles per administrator (it had been 215 the previous year), the Finance Ministry suggested 214. Representatives of the Finance Ministry had fixed rules as regards categories of employees (nachal’niki, ‘specialists’, ‘senior specialists’), and they quibbled over everything. But they readily agreed to the requested number (ten) of top officials. Next came the examination of Gossnab’s activities and departments (in addition to its supply agencies, Gossnab had factories, construction teams and research laboratories). The supply activities were distributed between the specialist departments: heavy industry, energy, metals, construction, materials, and so on, as well as an import-export department and the usual internal administrative agencies.[7]

A lengthy page would be required just to list the departments and sections of this imposing body. It employed some 130,000 people, which was not excessive given its task – namely, to organize a smooth flow to the country’s productive apparatus of all the supplies required for it to function: machinery and equipment, raw materials, fuel, construction materials and tools, and so on. Everything sounds perfectly reasonable – until we realize that in the USSR a single bureaucratic agency was responsible for doing what market mechanisms did elsewhere. If Gossnab had performed satisfactorily, the USSR would indeed have represented the alternative to capitalism it sometimes claimed to be. Gossnab and Gosplan would have been the two cathedrals of a new world. Here we might remind the reader that a good socialist like Trotsky had explained to the Comintern executive committee in 1921 that socialism was a long-term project and that those who wished to realize it one day had to start off by following in the footsteps of the market economy.

The reality is that in the Soviet world no other centralized agency produced such a host of ‘decentralized’ side-effects. Gossnab, super-supplier, was in fact one of the system’s bottlenecks, for it was the cause and manager of constant shortages. Consequently, it is scarcely surprising that the whole economic apparatus responded to these shortages, and to Gosplan’s patent inability to furnish vital supplies consistently, with all sorts of devices and practices and an independent supply-cum-marketing system, emulating the ministries and important enterprises. This murky world of snaby and sbyty acquired a life of its own, becoming a key fixture of economic and social life. No study of Soviet reality can ignore it, and it is important not to confuse it with Gossnab.

‘Murky’ is the appropriate adjective to describe this plethora of operators on the margins of the official system. Even so, had the regime really wanted to know how things stood (and even if it did not really wish to know), it could have referred to the inspection agencies, which regularly conducted inquiries into the sector, or (even better) to the Central Statistical Office, which on 1 October 1970 carried out a census of these ‘commercial’ organizations. Although it could not claim to be exhaustive – naturally, it did not encompass military procurement agencies – the figures are impressive. The 11,184 organizations recorded in the third quarter of 1970 employed 722,289 people, with a total payroll of 259,503,700 roubles. The Central Statistical Office also provided information on warehouses, inventories and transportation costs.[8]

The census was incomplete because it did not include the unofficial personnel of these snaby-sbyty bodies. The notorious tolkachi featured on the payrolls as employees of other administrative agencies or in more or less fictitious jobs in enterprises. They actually spent most of their time dealing with all manner of suppliers and disposed of the requisite resources to ‘speed things up’, or simply to secure indispensable supplies in means of production and consumer goods. For crucial supplies were rarely obtained without a nudge in the right direction; and that was precisely the task of the tolkachi. Their activities were severely condemned by the party, but flourished nevertheless, for without them the economy would have stalled completely.

There was a further dimension that the census could not take account of Possessing plentiful resources, these operators frequently meshed with dealers on the black market, who hovered around factory warehouses whose stocks were not strictly inventoried. The huge army of people engaged in snaby-sbyty activities formed a natural environment for all sorts of deals, and thus for the development of a shadowy proto-market economy, which was often vital and useful. At all events, it constituted a surreal aspect of Soviet reality.

Gregory Grossman has pioneered the study of the phenomenon known as the ‘second economy’, while others – and the Russians themselves – prefer the more mysterious-sounding ‘shadow economy’ (the literal translation of the Russian term tenevaia ekonomika), which refers to a much broader, more complex reality than the readily definable ‘black economy’. This is unquestionably a thorny issue, with economic, social, legal, criminal, and even profoundly political dimensions. The authors of a serious Russian work, who are well acquainted with Western publications on the subject and refer to them, have enriched the debate by bringing previously inaccessible Russian sources and studies to our attention.[1]

The shadow economy is not easy to define, but efforts to circumscribe it lead us into some of the less well-known complexities of the Soviet economy. For some scholars, its causes are to be sought in the almost permanent imbalance between supply and demand, with the deficit in consumer goods and services leading to inflationary pressures. According to the Hungarian economist Janos Kornai, bureaucratic planning creates shortages of capital and goods and the shadow economy emerges as a partial correction of the straitjacket imposed by an economy of shortages. As wages lose their purchasing power, the population is forced to find other sources of income, prompting many to engage in some additional activity on top of their regular state jobs. Experts who have tried to assess the extent of the shadow economy for the years 1960–90 estimate that it multiplied eighteen-fold in this period: one-third of it in agriculture, a further third in commerce and catering, and the remaining third in industry and construction. In the case of services, the main activities in the shadow economy were home and car repairs, and private medical services and education at home.

I. G. Minervin, who contributed the chapter dealing directly with the Soviet period, made ample use of Western works and recent Russian contributions. The majority of Western authors (Grossman, Wiles, Shelley) concur that the emergence of a shadow economy is inevitable in the so-called socialist economies, and this is mostly confirmed by later Russian studies. But how exactly is it to be defined? For some, it comprises all economic activities not included in the official statistics or all forms of economic activity conducted for personal profit that flout existing laws. Others (Western scholars) regard it as a ‘second economy’ or a ‘parallel market’. However, because the dividing-line between legal and illegal activities is often difficult to draw, some of them include all activities that were acceptable in practice, but which did not pertain to the official economy. Thus, Grossman’s ‘second economy’ encompasses activities that were common to the Eastern bloc and Western Europe, such as the cultivation of a private plot or the sale of its produce in kolkhoz markets – activities that were legal in the USSR, but which might sometimes be connected with illegal practices. The situation was similarly ambiguous in construction: building materials from dubious sources, bribes, illicit use of state transport, helping private citizens or influential bosses to build a house or dacha. The same applies to repair work of all kinds carried out by private individuals or teams: this could be legal, semi-legal or illegal (the latter two categories belonging to the ‘shadow economy’).

What was peculiar about the phenomenon was that it involved the circulation of legal goods and services on illegal markets. The sources and character of the ‘deals’ were semi-legal or illegal. Such semi-legal markets provided services that were not declared for purposes of taxation (privately rented housing, medical care, private lessons, repairs), as well as barter deals between enterprises seeking ways to make up for their failure to achieve the targets laid down by the plan.

The unambiguously illegal sphere included the sale of all kinds of scarce goods (like spare parts and consumer goods), and illegally produced or stolen merchandise. A separate category contains such criminal activities as embezzlement, smuggling, drug-trafficking and so on, which are prohibited the world over. But the criminal economy proper accounted for only part of the shadow economy, even if it was the most dangerous, and as such deemed unacceptable by many who were themselves engaged in parallel economic activities.

The US scholar Louise Shelley has offered an illuminating alternative definition. Within the ‘second economy’, she distinguishes between legal and illegal activities, but excludes anything that is obviously criminal. The legal private sector essentially corresponded to markets where peasants, but others too, sold what they had grown on private plots. The illegal economy was much larger and had two components – one of them operating within the official economy, while the other functioned in parallel to it. The principal illegal activities in the official economy consisted in speculation on scarce goods, bribes to influential people, corrupt practices in the education system, the formation of work-teams for hire in construction, the manipulation of accounts and false data in response to investigations (e.g. adding ‘dead souls’ to payrolls), and, finally, the construction of illegal factories concealed within official ones and using their raw materials.

THE EXTENT OF THE SHADOW ECONOMY

In addition to the problem of defining the shadow economy, we face the difficulty of estimating its extent. Researchers are agreed that it was sizeable, supplying large quantities of goods and services. Gosplan’s research institute estimated that at the beginning of the 1960s it involved less than 10 per cent of the annual average number of workers, employees and kolkhoz members, whereas by the end of the 1980s more than a fifth of the working population was engaged in it (some 30 million people). In some branches of the service sector (house building and repairs, car repairs), it was responsible for between 30 and 50 per cent of all the work undertaken – and often much more than an equivalent state service performed (Menshikov’s estimate). For example, the quantity of vodka distilled at home – an important branch of the ‘private sector’ – was difficult to assess, because official and unofficial production of alcohol were interconnected.

Researchers point out that the parallel economy also exists in the West, where its development reflects the growth in state regulation. In the Soviet case, the shadow economy may be considered an adaptation and reaction on the part of the population to state controls and the deficiencies of the state-run economy.

At the beginning of the 1980s, Gosplan’s research institute proposed the following classification, which was probably the optimal one in the Soviet case:

(1) The ‘unofficial’ economy, involving mostly legal activities that included the production of goods and services which, although subject to taxation, were not declared. These were tolerated.

(2) The ‘fictitious’ economy: false accounting, embezzlement, speculation, bribes.

(3) The underground economy, comprising actions forbidden by law.

This picture must be rounded off by what we had to say about the snaby-sbyty. Therewith we obtain a more realistic image of Soviet economic activity, the interaction between different economic agencies, and the innumerable varieties of private or semi-private initiative. We shall shortly address the political implications of this complex economic scene.

The whole set of shortcomings and malfunctions afflicting the bureaucratic system – phenomenal shortages of goods and services had become systemic – prompted or forced different institutions to seek solutions in private arrangements, bartering of merchandise or raw materials, and falsifying results. Even if personal gain was not necessarily the principal objective, it increasingly became a powerful motive force, especially at the beginning of the 1980s, when it was clear to everyone that the leadership was displaying little zeal when it came to the prosecution of highly placed offenders. Louise Shelley notes that in the 1970s, 90 per cent of cadres accused of breaking the law got off with a simple reprimand from the party. A double standard could be discerned in the attitude of party and state leaders to the unofficial economy, which certainly complicated the task of streamlining and improving leadership at the centre.

For its part, the population quite naturally strove to maintain or improve its standard of living by obtaining additional income, at a time when the consumer market was defective and open or hidden inflation high. The discrepancy between widespread corruption in the state administration and the official ideological rejection of any private enterprise helped to fuel the economic and psychological factors pushing people into the shadow economy, or even directly into the black market.

Some researchers believe that the shadow economy actually enabled the system to survive, by supplying a partial corrective to its malfunctioning; that it helped most citizens to make ends meet; and that it thereby preserved the regime. In my view, the positive function of informal economies should not be exaggerated. The same authors reckon that such practices inculcated new motivations among economic managers, which supplemented the official ones attaching to their duties. On the other hand, the existence of a whole range of parallel networks led some sections of the Soviet elite to separate themselves from the official system and forge closer links with ‘unofficial’ elites. The two elites had much in common. Leaders of the unofficial elite (who were implicated in the black market, if not directly connected with criminal mafias) themselves retained official positions, or maintained close ties with the official elite, enabling them to play a background role as pressure groups for dubious causes or undesirable elements. Such activities might be characterized as pertaining to a ‘shadow polity’.

The Soviet system guaranteed all its citizens social security, public health services, education, and pension entitlements, whereas employment in the shadow economy was mostly part-time and unregulated. Thus the official sector provided social services to the unofficial one, thereby contributing to the reproduction of the labour force in the shadow economy.[2] R. Ryfkina and L. Kosals have aptly summarized the situation: it was no longer possible to distinguish between legal and illegal activities in many enterprises. A ‘black-and-white’ market had emerged.[3]

Others believe that although the shadow economy made it much more difficult to create a healthy contemporary economy, it was still better than the savage, mafia-style capitalism that descended on Russia after the fall of the Soviet system. At all events, the phenomenon is an additional aspect of the trends that emerged in the Soviet system, conditioning, maintaining or undermining it. The resources the population found, and which it could rely on in coping with the system’s vagaries, formed one of them. The low intensity and low productivity of the working day, which were at the heart of the ‘social contract’ between workers and the state, facilitated ‘work on the side’ (cultivation of private plots, etc.). Such resources, officially unacknowledged, became increasingly sizeable with the growth of the shadow economy, which not only supplied supplementary foodstuffs, but also provided additional income through part-time employment that became available to ever more people. Criminal activities are excluded from these resources: they could lead to prison.

SOCIOLOGISTS AND LIVING STANDARDS (1972–80)

While the managers of the state-run economy were seeking ways to remedy a labour shortage and a drop in labour productivity, sociologists, and particularly experts in economic sociology, were confirming the significance of the shadow economy and arriving at some startling conclusions. Despite the bad news announced by the planning authorities and clear signs of a system in decline, living standards actually rose during the years of stagnation. The population’s reaction and adaptation to changing economic conditions produced new patterns of behaviour and new values, which official statistical data were incapable of assimilating.

The data used by the sociologists derived from two sources: their own studies conducted in the Siberian city of Rubtsovsk (Altai region) in 1972 and repeated in 1980 and 1990; and those carried out among the rural population in the Novosibirsk area in 1975–6 and 1986–7.[4] The development indicators in Rubtsovsk approximated to the general Russian average for the 1970s and ’80s, while those of the Novosibirsk area (one of the most important in Western Siberia) were close to the Russian inter-regional average. Thus, the data collected in these studies, conducted by the Moscow and Novosibirsk academies of science, may be regarded as faithfully reflecting the national situation.

From them we learn that the housing situation had improved; that the purchase of consumer durables had increased appreciably; that there were more recreational facilities for city dwellers; and that many families had a private plot near their residence or in the neighbouring countryside (even though demand still outstripped supply). A third of the population had access to collective vegetable gardens. During the twenty years under study, in line with increased house construction, many garages, garden sheds and various types of summer houses had been built. On the whole, the least well-off sections of the population had seen their incomes rise, attesting to a general trend towards decent minimum living standards. The most marked differences, as measured by key indicators like housing, incomes and personal means of transport, had decreased significantly.

These findings provide an explanation for the paradox of nostalgia among the population of post-communist Russia for the Brezhnevite ‘good old days’. The ‘miracle’ of improving living standards in a declining economy was based on the existence of untapped labour energy that was not mobilized by the state-run economy, of underemployed resources, and an abundance of other resources that had yet to be squandered (the country remained fabulously wealthy). However, as the authors of the study confirm, improved living standards in the 1970s and ’80s came at a very high price. While economists and the leadership were seeking to raise output and labour productivity, to reduce waste and use resources more rationally, the latter were being systematically plundered.

Everyday life in the 1970s and ’80s would sooner or later reflect the decline of the state economy, in the form of an increased unpaid personal workload on private plots or at home. Many people had to find a second job; many others said they would like to. A similar increase in the workload also occurred in the countryside, with men and women investing more time in their private plots or home-based work – the main source of additional income – which enabled them to support relatives in town and exchange agricultural products against manufactured products.

The same trend of greater worker workloads and lower monetary incomes could already be observed in the years 1972–80. Following the collapse of the USSR, in the 1990s the role of the private plot or garden became indispensable, taking up much of many people’s working time. The garden, a place of leisure in developed urban societies, reverted to its pre-industrial function. A similar regression was evident in many spheres of existence, where survival strategies led to the devaluation of one of the most obvious successes of previous decades: the improvement in educational standards, which became less and less useful (a trend already apparent at the end of the 1970s). This was attested by the falling numbers of those taking after-work courses. The authors deplore the decline in what they call the economic and cultural function of higher education and higher professional qualifications, in favour of a pragmatic search for material benefits. The reduction in the time given over to leisure activities is explained by the need to work more in order to make ends meet, as a result of the failures of the state economy in the 1970s and ’80s.

In conclusion, improved living standards in the regime’s final years, though genuine, were no ‘miracle’. They were more of a mirage, like cheeks that glow after they have been pinched – the prelude to a slow decline that would witness the ruin of many past achievements.

PRIVATIZING THE STATE?

In order to make do, the population of the USSR had to increase its workload. By contrast, its ruling networks, especially at the upper level of the nomenklatura, saw their material well-being improve – by expanding existing income streams – without being obliged to work harder or change their leisure habits. We must therefore turn our attention to them once again.

Our examination of the shadow economy deepened our understanding of the processes at work within the ranks of state officials, particularly with the snaby-sbyty – the procurement and sales networks that supplied production units with what the state should have provided in the first place. Despite being officially frowned on, such semi-legal activities rapidly became indispensable, because they played a vital role for the enterprises they supplied. The availability of partially or completely concealed reserves of materials, financial resources or even manpower; the increase in bargaining and lobbying; the vast scope for activity on the borderline between the shadow economy and the black market – all this indicates the emergence of a model, even a system, which was at once indispensable and parasitic (like a body that produces beneficial pathologies). In the behaviour of enterprise managers, we witness a progressive blurring of the boundary between state and private property. Another boundary was blurred concurrently: between the official incomes and privileges allocated to top officials on the one hand, and the considerable room the latter enjoyed for increasing them by exploiting their position in the state hierarchy, on the other. And this avenue led to something even more significant in the behaviour of some heads of institutions or enterprises. It is one thing to strive to extract ever more perks from the state. It is quite another no longer to be content with such perks and to seek to accumulate wealth. Networks for that very purpose now existed within the state sector – in the various forms of the shadow economy – but also outside the state sector – in the form of the ‘black market’, itself spawning the mafia connections that flourished as never before under Brezhnev.

A longer-term historical perspective enables us at this point to discern broader political transformations – to distinguish successive stages in the bureaucracy’s position in the system and their consequences for the whole regime. Once the administrative class had been liberated from the rigours and horrors of Stalinism, it attained a higher status and became co-ruler of the state. But it did not stop there: the senior ranks of the bureaucracy actually began to appropriate the state as the collective representative of its interests and were highly conscious of the fact. The heads of ministries or other agencies referred to themselves as ‘those in charge of the state’.

The autobiography of A. G. Zverev, who served as Finance Minister both under Stalin and after him, provides a good illustration of this self-image. He barely mentions the party: membership of it is taken for granted as an obvious formality. For this to have occurred, the party, as we saw in Parts One and Two, had to have undergone a transformation. Having itself become an administrative apparatus and a hierarchy, it not only found itself in a position of utter dependency, but ended up being absorbed by the class of top state officials we just mentioned. This allowed the latter to take a further step in their ‘emancipation’: although formally subject to all sorts of rules, they now existed as an uncontrollable bureaucracy, free of all curbs. They began to attack the sacrosanct principle of state ownership of the economy. The spontaneous processes at work emptied a series of ideological and political principles of any content. The most important of them – state ownership of assets and the means of production – was slowly eroded, initially issuing in the formation of veritable fiefdoms inside ministries, and then in the de facto privatization of enterprises by their managers. This process must be called by its real name: the crystallization of a proto-capitalism within the state-owned economy.

This point has been very aptly highlighted by Menshikov, an economist whom we have already cited in connection with the shadow economy.[5] He pays particular attention to the illegal sectors within the state economy that he calls the ‘internal shadow economy’, and which exercised strong influence on the official economy. This powerful sector became possible because of the division between the functions of ownership and those of management. What was evolving was, on the one hand, private management of the social capital of state enterprises; on the other, private appropriation of the products of that capital. It involved not only those who operated in the shadow economy, but also the official managers of enterprises in league with the highest reaches of the nomenklatura. All these figures, Menshikov argues, played an important role when the capitalism that emerged through the pores of central planning matured, in due course, into a decisive and potent force that shattered the system. Thus it was that the nomenklatura metamorphosed from covert owner of state property into its overt owner.

This interpretation foregrounds the inevitable consequences of a prior social reality: the takeover by the upper strata of the bureaucracy of the totality of state power and hence of the economy. The principle of state ownership – the system’s main pillar – was progressively subverted, preparing the ground for the transition from quasi-privatization to the fully-fledged variety.

Readers will now probably appreciate why we needed to deal with the snaby-sbyty in some detail: they were the ‘termites’ that helped to accomplish this task. No wonder that with the advent of perestroika these supply offices–depots–warehouses were the very first Soviet agencies to declare themselves ‘private firms’ and adopt an openly commercial status. This looked like a step in the right direction. But they were privatizing something that did not belong them, whereas the first principle of the market economy is that if one wants to acquire assets, they have to be paid for. Otherwise, it is a matter for the criminal law. And the intimate connection in the course of the post-Soviet reforms between ‘privatization’ and criminal activity is now widely known.

But we have not yet reached the phase of perestroika. We are examining the era of so-called ‘stagnation’, when the system’s chief pillars were crumbling. Not only had the economy lost steam, but the main thing it generated was waste. So what was Gosplan up to? Its collegium (the assembly of top officials) seemed to be in agreement with the conclusions of its research institute, which had diagnosed a fatal tendency in the economy: extensive trends were outstripping intensive trends. In 1970 it issued a statement, serene in its tone (it contained not a single alarmist word), in which it formulated a quite chilling diagnosis cum-prognosis: the projections of the eighth five-year plan (1966–70) contained inbuilt disproportions. As a result, ‘all basic indicators will decelerate, deteriorate or stagnate’.[6] The reason was that the very low efficiency indicators on which the calculations were based were leading to a dual imbalance: on the one hand, between the state’s resources and the needs of the national economy; on the other, between the population’s monetary income and the output of consumer goods and services (this remark implies that some previous version of the plan did contain the requisite proportions and balances). Hence the fear of a looming deterioration in the circulation of money and marketable goods in the course of the ninth five-year plan: a decline in the incentivizing role of wages in raising labour productivity and other ways of managing production was to be anticipated. It was as if the report was actually claiming that the eighth plan had programmed a deterioration of the economy in the course of the subsequent plan. In other words, Soviet economists were perfectly well aware of the downward slope the economy was set on.

‘Stagnation’ was marked by the impossibility of extracting anything from the bureaucracy and a lack of will and ideas at the top about how to stop the rot. All attempts to reduce the size of the bureaucracy, or force it to change its habits, were so many losing battles. Post-Stalin, the new rules of the game – the ‘bargaining’ between government agencies and central government (the Politburo and Council of Ministers) – allowed the bureaucracy to become a colossus that was not only the real master of the state, but also formed bureaucratic fiefdoms under the eyes of the party apparatus, which was reduced to a mere spectator and gradually yielded to the inevitable.

The diagnosis was simple: the system was sick while the bureaucracy was in fine fettle. Reforming the system entailed reforming the bureaucracy: no one was in a position to impose this and why should it undertake the task itself? This meant that the writing was on the wall – of the Kremlin this time.

It was imperative to resolve the problem of growing labour shortages and arrest economic decline by a dramatic rise in labour productivity. But this implied nothing less than a revolution. It could not be done without switching to a mixed economy, which was only conceivable on certain political conditions – and these too amounted to a revolution. Technological and economic reforms were inextricably bound up with political reforms. The party machine had to be divested of its last power: the power to prevent change. A mass uprising against state institutions would have accomplished this, but it did not occur. The alternative was reform from within, directed in the first instance at the party. Only a revitalized political force could compel the bureaucracy to make the transition to a mixed economy, bringing pressure to bear on it from above and from below, and threatening it with full-scale expropriation. The establishment of a transitional system would make it possible to preserve minimum living standards, avoid economic collapse, and open the way to individual and group economic initiative. The next task would be to begin to empower the population politically. Since none of this happened, what (it might be asked) is the point of mentioning it? I do so for a simple methodological reason – namely, in order to arrive at a better understanding of what actually did happen.

The political aspects of the system, which we already know a fair amount about, demand our attention once again at this point. The erosion of political systems, and of the ability of ruling groups to act, is a frequent enough phenomenon in history. Each instance is a combination of general features and particular characteristics. Observers detect such erosion when they find a system stuck in the groove of a successful past, not unlike generals who tend to stick with the winning strategies of the last war. The scenario is one that periodically re-emerges in different historical circumstances, and is regularly observed in the case of regimes in decline. Politicians and political analysts should always bear it in mind, even when dealing with seemingly thriving systems.

The Soviet system was successful, albeit in truncated fashion, when it responded to the call of history by mobilizing the country’s wealth and large population. No great thinker, Boris Yeltsin once said that the Soviet system was nothing more than an experiment which had wasted everyone’s time. This might have been true of his own years as party boss in Sverdlovsk and as Russian President in the Kremlin, but such remarks, endlessly repeated with no regard for historical realities, are empty chatter. I have devoted many pages to describing the decay of the system, for this is a reality that needs to be studied. But that does not license distortion of the whole historical record. The Soviet system saved Russia from disintegration in 1917–22. It rescued it again – and Europe with it – from a Nazi domination that would have stretched from Brest to Vladivostok. Let us imagine – if we dare – what that would have meant for the world. To these achievements must be added others, measured by twentieth-century criteria for defining a developed country: Soviet Russia scored quite well on demography, education, health, urbanization, the role of science – so much capital that was to be squandered by the lacklustre reformers of the 1990s.

So where did things go wrong? All the social changes that enabled the country to ‘marry its century’ represented a job only half-done. The other part of the job – state-building – proceeded in the wrong direction. When the historical circumstances changed (in part on account of the regime’s own efforts), the USSR found itself confronting a fatal bifurcation and contradiction: the social sphere exploded, while the politico-bureaucratic universe froze. The turn of events that I have referred to as the ‘second emancipation of the bureaucracy’ ultimately consisted in the de facto absorption of the party apparatus by the ministerial cohorts. This process had a further dimension, to which reference has already been made. The Soviet economy and the whole of the country’s wealth were formally owned by the state; and the state administration existed to serve the nation. But who was the real owner of this ‘property’? The ideology and practice of nationalization derived from Communist Party notions about how to build a supposedly socialist system. It was for the party to take charge of the integrity of the system, whose core was precisely the principle of state ownership. But the huge bureaucratic machine that managed the ‘common wealth’ imposed its own conception of the state and made itself the latter’s sole representative. It laid claim to equal status with the party apparatus, even to first place. The other side of this process was the social and political fusion of the party apparatus into a single bloc with the state bureaucracy. The party always maintained that it retained a dominant position, but in reality the bureaucratic directorates in the ministries and enterprises had become the country’s true masters. No matter that the Constitution continued to proclaim otherwise. The party cells in ministries and enterprises served no purpose and its central bodies merely repeated what the Council of Ministers and ministers themselves had initiated. A political organization is only justified if it performs a political function: as soon as it is content to reiterate what has been decided elsewhere, it no longer possesses any raison d’être.

I subsume this process under the category of what I have called the ‘de-politicization of the party’. The party’s role changed once its function of political leadership had been eroded on account of its submersion in the bureaucratic milieu. It might be said that the party and its leadership had been expropriated and replaced by a bureaucratic hydra, which formed a class holding state power. Henceforth any political will was paralysed. The summit of this over-centralized state impeded any explicit reformist endeavours, deemed unacceptable by the various components of the bureaucracy. Party leaders could no longer afford to antagonize the latter. Quite the reverse, the privileges of those who now constituted the regime’s mainstay were allowed to increase, in order to keep them happy. Worse still, with political volition at an all-time low, illegalities and a high degree of corruption were tolerated. The periods of stagnation and decay encouraged the privileged to engage in what were, to put it mildly, reprehensible practices – another dubious pay-off.

We are now in a position to offer a response to a question that we have raised several times: Can a bureaucracy be controlled by another bureaucracy or even by itself? Our answer is a categorical ‘No’. Control can be exercised only by a country’s political leaders and citizens. It is for them to define the relevant tasks and the means required to implement such control. But it was this ability that the leadership of the USSR had lost, generating a set of fatal paradoxes: the party was ‘de-politicized’ and the ever more bureaucratized economy was managed and controlled by an administrative class more intent on preserving its own power than increasing production; more concerned with maintaining its cosy routines than cultivating creativity and technological development. Hence another series of paradoxes: an ‘ailing economy’ but a ‘flourishing bureaucracy’, which thrived on its sloth; bureaucratic privileges on the increase, even as the system’s performance deteriorated; rising investment combined with dwindling growth; a marked expansion in the number of educated and qualified people whom the regime, unable to tolerate independent talent, excluded – in short, a veritable magical formula for systemic breakdown.

The various phenomena and processes that unfolded at the summit had an impact on the population, which sensed that the factories and other national assets simultaneously belonged to everyone and no one – that there was a swarm of ‘bosses’ and yet no one was taking charge. This explains why Andropov’s arrival in the post of general-secretary was so well received across most of the social spectrum: the country finally had a ‘boss’ (khoziain). The task awaiting him was colossal: to overcome the effects of a process set in train by Stalin, which had stripped the party of any political rights. This trend had not been reversed after the death of the supreme leader: the party remained an organization whose members possessed no rights and whose leaders were fooling themselves when they asserted that policy was their preserve. They remained without a voice and paralysed in the face of an administrative class that had ceased to listen to them. A party had to be reconstituted that would respond to its leaders’ call to embark on reforms: confronted with a determined leadership that was ready to mobilize its base, a recalcitrant bureaucracy would have little chance of prevailing. Andropov was seemingly readying himself to reiterate Lenin’s famous question of May 1917: ‘Which party will have the courage to take power on its own?’ – to which he had replied: ‘There is such a party’, provoking guffaws among the assembled anti-Leninists.

I would characterize the Soviet regime as a ‘state without a political system’ – an imposing skeleton without any flesh on its bones. This should have been realized (apparently it was by some), prompting a series of initiatives aimed at gradually creating what was lacking: more freedom of inquiry, information and discussion, free trade unions, the re-creation (or re-politicization) of the party. Reviving the party’s internal political life (whether in the form of fractions, a programme, currents of opinion, statutes), as recommended by Osinsky-Obolensky in Pravda in 1920 – such was the programme formulated by Andropov some six decades later, one year before he succumbed to illness.

THE BURDEN OF HISTORY

What happened to the Soviet system from the late 1960s onwards marks the re-emergence of a whole series of traits that had plagued Tsarist Russia for centuries, and which Russia never managed to divest itself of. It was as if the country was weighed down by a historical burden, which was thought to have been shaken off, but that returned to haunt it. Old Russia, where the development of the state and its power always preceded social advance, had ended up stumbling: the political system became blocked, impeding any economic and social progress. And here was the same scenario repeating itself – and in the course of the same century.

The rise and fall of the Soviet system is perfectly encapsulated in the fate of the Mir space station. At the outset, it represented an unprecedented technological breakthrough, with a long life ahead of it. But it soon fell victim to endless manufacturing defects and malfunctions: it was constantly being repaired by the incredibly resourceful operators responsible for it (confirming my own wartime observations of truck drivers who managed to keep their vehicles moving by fixing or connecting missing or broken parts with shoe-laces!). The episode ended with Mir’s plunge into the ocean, sufficiently well-directed as to inflict no damage on anyone…

On the other hand, it is worth reminding readers what did not happen. Post-Stalinist Russia did not experience the omnipresent, omniscient hyper-control predicted by some writers. Had it been faithful to, and capable of, any kind of ‘decent’ totalitarianism, it would have lasted for ever. The terrifying literary phantasmagorias (some of them written when the spectre was present and horror reigned) both did and did not come to pass: Zamiatin, Huxley and Orwell prophesied that a monopolistic power would bring about the total enslavement of human beings, transforming them into the numbered cogs of some huge machine. But despite its dark pages, history avoided this terrible mantrap. In reality, whatever the regime’s policies and ideology, historical processes were at work that are missed when the whole focus of study is the regime or, in one of its variants, denunciation of the regime.

When I refer to a return of Russia’s historical burden, what I have in mind is secular historical trends which, after having initially benefited Russia, came to plague much of its history. The Russian historian Solovev perceived the process of Russian colonization – small groups of people migrating to and populating huge territories – as a characteristic feature of its history, which he qualified as ‘drawn out’.[7] In other words, this history involved quantitative expansion in space, complicating any transition to a qualitative – i.e. intensive and in-depth – modus operandi. For a while it looked as though the Soviet regime was overcoming this handicap. But in the twilight of the Soviet era, when nearly all vital signs were fading, Russia once again found itself stuck in the syndrome of quantitative expansion, portending an ineluctable exhaustion of its economic, social and political resources. The extraordinary momentum of Soviet development had modernized the country, and yet perpetuated a mode of extensive development; and of this Gosplan’s experts were sadly conscious. It should be noted that this tendency in Russian history is far from exhausted.

Once again, these observations require qualification. Paradoxically, such extensive, quantity-oriented development was also embodied in the vigorous Stalinist mobilization that made victory possible in 1945, saving Russia and Europe with it. In other words, the traditional impetus from above – from the state – could accomplish many things. But such prowess had its limits and was only fully effective in the transition from a profoundly rural civilization to an increasingly urban one.

Irreplaceable when it comes to reflecting on Russia’s past and its burdens, the Russian historian Kliuchevsky (who died in 1911) suggested that a huge country like his own was unwieldy to govern and that it would be very difficult to alter its historical course. Kliuchevsky was no fatalist: he was registering the existence of a ‘burden’ that had yet to be lightened.

Reflection on the USSR has been marred – and still is – by two frequent errors, which need to be cleared up before we address the question posed by the title of this chapter. The first is to take anti-communism for a study of the Soviet Union. The second – a consequence of the first – consists in ‘Stalinizing’ the whole Soviet phenomenon, as if it had been one giant gulag from beginning to end.

Anti-communism (and its offshoots) is not historical scholarship: it is an ideology masquerading as such. Not only did it not correspond to the realities of the ‘political animal’ in question, but waving the flag of democracy, it paradoxically exploited the USSR’s authoritarian (dictatorial) regime in the service of conservative causes or worse. In the United States, McCarthyism, or the subversive political role played by the FBI head Hoover, were both based on the communist bogey. The unsavoury manoeuvring by some on the German Right to whitewash Hitler by foregrounding Stalin and his atrocities entails such use and abuse of history. In its defence of human rights, the West proved highly indulgent towards some regimes and very severe with others (this is not to mention its own violations of these rights). Such behaviour did not serve to enhance its image and certainly did not aid an understanding of the Soviet experience and related important phenomena.

David Joravsky has been especially scathing in his critique of the methods used by the West to embellish its image, as if hymns to the market economy, and the defence of human rights, democracy and liberties by ‘anti-communists’, were conducive to understanding the USSR.[1] As for ‘totalitarianism’ – an historically inadequate and purely ideological tool – it served to mask the various dark pages in the history of the West (starting with the horrific mass slaughter initiated by the First World War), and to gloss over the contradictions and weaknesses of Western democratic regimes and the misdeeds of imperialist policies that were still current. Joravsky has also criticized the contradictions and failures of German Social-Democracy: its highly praised renunciation of class radicalism, and conversion to supposedly democratic procedures, served to emasculate the SPD and make it an auxiliary and then a victim of obscurantist regimes it was not prepared to fight.

This commonsensical appeal to stop drawing a veil over the numerous failings of Western civilization and its terrible crises (thereby magnifying the sombre realities of the other side) was also a call to restore dignity to historical scholarship and recognize an inescapable truth: however specific and shaped by its own particular historical traditions, the ‘other side’ was itself a product of the crisis of the civilization dominated by the West and its imperialist world system.

But where is the Soviet system to be situated in the great book of history? The answer is all the more complicated in that there were at least two, if not three, versions of it (excluding the Civil War period, when it was just a military camp).

We have already posed this question in connection with the Stalinist period and proposed an answer. Russian history is a remarkable laboratory for the study of a variety of authoritarian systems and their crises, up to and including the present day. So let us now formulate the question rather differently, focusing on the system after Stalin’s death: was it socialist? Definitely not. Socialism involves ownership of the means of production by society, not by a bureaucracy. It has always been conceived of as a deepening – not a rejection – of political democracy. To persist in speaking of ‘Soviet socialism’ is to engage in a veritable comedy of errors. Assuming that socialism is feasible, it would involve socialization of the economy and democratization of the polity. What we witnessed in the Soviet Union was state ownership of the economy and a bureaucratization of economy and polity alike. If, confronted with a hippopotamus, someone insisted that it was a giraffe, would he or she be given a chair in zoology? Are the social sciences really that much less exact than zoology?

The confusion derives from the fact that the USSR was not capitalist: ownership of the economy and other national assets was in the hands of the state, which in practice meant the summit of its bureaucracy. This is a crucial defining characteristic, entailing that the Soviet system should be placed in the same category as traditional regimes where ownership of a huge patrimonial estate equalled state power. Such was the historical process at work in the constitution of Muscovy and its monarchic autocracy. It too had an influential bureaucracy, but it was the sovereign who possessed absolute power, not his bureaucracy. In the Soviet case, it was the bureaucracy which, in the final analysis, collectively acquired undivided and unchallenged power. ‘Bureaucratic absolutism’ – a relative of the older ‘agrarian despotisms’ – was much more modern than that of the Tsars or Stalin. But it belonged to the same species, especially when we factor in political control of the population by the state.

This line of argument also implies that the Soviet bureaucratic state, despite its revolutionary innovations in both terminology and recruitment of personnel from the lower classes, directly inherited many of the old Tsarist institutions; and thus it was inevitable that it continued Tsarist traditions of state-building. In large part, this stemmed from the fact that after the revolution the agencies reactivated under Soviet auspices could function only with the help of officials from the old regime. Lenin himself had noted with regret that entire sections of the Tsarist administration remained in operation under the new regime, leading to a much greater degree of historical continuity than had been envisaged prior to October. The new regime had to learn how to handle finances, foreign affairs, military matters, intelligence operations, and so on; and it was obliged to turn not just to the expertise of some specialists, but to whole agencies, which in many respects continued to function according to established procedures. The old officialdom could not be replaced or changed overnight. A new state had been created, but its officials derived from the old one. The problem now, as Lenin saw it, was how to get them to work better.[2] Such continuity with the practices and traditions of the past was, of course, unavoidable, especially inasmuch as the relevant personnel numbered in the tens of thousands and traditions in state institutions were so entrenched. The new authorities did not know how to reconstruct them. In fact, they had no alternative but to take over these institutions, alter some of the details, and let them conduct business as usual.

The Soviet system ended up erecting a rather ‘classic’ bureaucratic state, run by a pyramidal hierarchy. Accordingly, once the phase of revolutionary fervour was over, there was no real need for it to distance itself from old models – except, perhaps, in the case of institutions that had no counterpart under Tsarism. Moreover, every time a new agency had to be created, a special commission was appointed to oversee its organization, and it became common practice to ask a specialist scholar or experienced bureaucrat to study how a parallel institution had operated in Tsarist Russia. Where no precedent existed, Western models were consulted.

Recourse to historical precedents is natural anywhere, but in the Soviet case it was especially pronounced. In practice, Stalin’s Russia adopted the ideological principles of the Tsarist state on a well-nigh official basis. Even if the specifically Stalinist practice of displaying old nationalist symbols was abandoned after his death, the Soviet bureaucratic model retained a good many of its predecessor’s features, if not its ideological accoutrements. The tradition it continued defined the very essence of the system: an absolutism representing the bureaucratic hierarchy it was based on. Even the supposedly new position of general-secretary had more than a little in common with the image of the ‘Tsar, master of the land’. If the symbols and scenarios of the public manifestations of power were not the same, the imposing ceremonies staged by the Tsarist and Soviet regimes hailed from the same culture, in which icons had pride of place. They aimed to project an image of invincible might, which was sometimes nothing more than a way of concealing, exorcizing or distracting attention from internal fragility. But the Tsars’ successors must have known, especially in the twilight years of their regime, that systemic crisis and collapse were also part of the historical repertoire.

Given that from the end of the 1920s the construction of a strong state was at the heart of their endeavours, the issue of how to classify it arose. In the end, the old Tsarist term derzhava, especially cherished in conservative statist circles and among those in the military and public security bodies, was widely and openly used. In Lenin’s time, derzhavnik was a pejorative term for supporters of an oppressive, brutal chauvinism. As for derzhava, it harks back to the past in its kinship with two other terms used to define the essence of Tsarist power: samoderzhets, denoting the absolute ruler (the autocrat); and samoderzhavie, characterizing the regime as an ‘autocracy’. No doubt the hammer and sickle replaced the golden sphere topped off with a cross – the symbol of imperial power – but they represented nothing more than relics of the revolutionary past, much to the amusement of the bureaucratic ranks.

Ownership of all the country’s land by the state, as vested in the autocrat, had been characteristic of a number of old Eastern and Central European states. In the USSR, such ownership, laying claim to socialist credentials, extended to the whole economy and many other spheres of national life. Notwithstanding a more modern outlook (unlike their Tsarist predecessors, Soviet bureaucrats ran factories that built machines and even ‘atomic cities’), the affinity with the old model of ownership of all the land (the main economic resource in earlier times) was preserved, and even reinforced, by the state power exercised over the direct producers.

Throughout our explanation of the nature of this state we have encountered ‘bifurcations’ in the pattern of development and a whole series of ambiguities. If the system belonged in the old category of landowning autocracies, it was nevertheless performing a twentieth-century task – that of a ‘developmental state’ – and we have described in detail how it proceeded to develop the country. It is to this category of ‘developmental state’ that the USSR belonged in the initial stages of its existence. Such states have existed, and still do exist, in several countries – in particular in the immense territories of the East and Middle East (China, India, Iran), where ancient rural monarchies ruled. This historical rationality was at work in the construction of the post-Leninist state, even if its transformation into ‘Stalinism’ was something that dictatorial systems are readily prone to. But the transition to a despotic model is not an incurable pathology, as is demonstrated by the elimination of Stalinism in Russia and Maoism in China. And despite the pitfalls, the presence of a state that makes possible and directs economic development remains a historical necessity.

Towards the 1980s, the USSR had achieved a level of economic and social development superior to China’s, but its system was stuck fast in a self-destructive logic. The kind of reforms envisaged by Andropov could have given the country what it needed: a reformed, active state able to continue its developmental role, but also capable of renouncing an authoritarianism that was now obsolete, inasmuch as the social landscape had been profoundly transformed.

However, the recourse to the venerable symbolism of the derzhava, which expressed the mindset and interests of a significant component of the ruling elite, was the sign of a loss of vigour on the part of the state apparatus, the members of which, stuck in a groove, now used its power solely to further their personal interests. It also signalled the interruption of any reformist dynamic at the very moment when the country was crying out for reform. Rather than adding the computer to the hammer and sickle, the leadership took refuge in conservatism, embarking on an inglorious path. If the population lived under a system with an ancient pedigree and characteristics, they were no longer living in the eighteenth century, but the twentieth. The state had remained behind and such ‘bifurcation’ (society going in one direction, the state in another) was fatal.

The term ‘bureaucratic absolutism’, which seems apt to us to characterize the Soviet system, is borrowed from an analysis of the Prussian bureaucratic monarchy in the eighteenth century, wherein the monarch was in fact dependent on his bureaucracy despite being its head.[3] In the Soviet case, the party’s top bosses, putative masters of the state, had actually lost any power over ‘their’ bureaucrats.

Insignificant ex-ministers of the USSR, writing nostalgically in their memoirs about the glory of the superpower they have lost, do not realize that the fashion for the term derzhava precisely coincided with the period when the state had ceased to accomplish the task it had once been capable of performing – and had indeed performed. It had become a shadow of its former self, the last gasp of a power about to join the grave of a family of antiquated regimes to which it remained bound by too many ties.

THE FOREIGN FACTOR

The Soviet phenomenon was a profoundly typical chapter in Russian history – not in spite, but because, of the role of the international environment, including the use of ideologies borrowed from abroad. The autocrats who have proved most successful in Russian history also maintained such links with the external world. A country with a highly complex history, constantly engaged in friendly or hostile relations with neighbours near and far, Russia had to develop relations not only on the military, economic, commercial, diplomatic and cultural levels, but also by responding culturally and ideologically to a series of challenges. It did so either by borrowing ideas from abroad, or by counterposing indigenous notions – which explains why its rulers’ antennae were pointed in two directions, inwards and outwards. Similarly, in the history of the USSR the outside world constantly helped to determine the form the regime took, in a variety of ways. The First World War and the concurrent crisis of capitalism had a lot to do with the Leninist phenomenon and the phases Soviet Russia went through in the 1920s. The crisis of the 1930s and the Second World War likewise had a direct impact on Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The ‘distorting mirrors’ we referred to in the case of Stalinism influenced the images that populations and rulers formed of the opposing camp. Since both competing systems experienced crises and phases of development, the ‘distorting mirrors’ on both sides projected and reflected images in which reality and fiction were almost impossible to disentangle. If in the 1930s Stalinism, then at the peak of its momentum, enjoyed great prestige and benevolent attention in the West despite the misery and persecution endured by Soviet citizens, it was largely because of the negative image of capitalism projected by global economic crisis – particularly that afflicting Central and Eastern Europe. Russia reflected back the image of its industrial momentum, and the poverty of the population was relativized by the notion that this impressive progress would rapidly overcome it. A similar distorting effect can be seen in the case of Stalin and Stalinism at the moment of its triumph over Germany in 1945, when the country was once again plunged into a profound poverty for which the ravages of war were not exclusively responsible. The exchange of distorted images had significant political consequences: divining the intentions of the other side often became a guessing game.

The Cold War was an unusual contest. Seen from Moscow, it was dramatically unleashed with the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. But if Berezhkov’s memoirs are to be believed, it began earlier with the American delay in opening a second – western – front: Stalin regarded this as a deliberate ploy on the part of the USA, intent on entering the thick of battle only after the German and Soviet contestants had exhausted one another.[4] This delay, compounded by the use of atomic weapons against Japan, had been perceived as evidence of the American desire to let it be known that a new era had opened in international relations – a declaration made not to Japan, but to the USSR and the rest of the world, which the Soviet leadership had interpreted accordingly. That the USA did think in this way at the time cannot be ruled out. What effects the opening of the second front a year earlier, or abstaining from the atomic bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, might have had on postwar relations can only be speculated about. The fact remains that the war and postwar developments propelled the USSR into the role of a superpower and pushed it into an arms race that helped to perpetuate the worst, most conservative features of the system and to reduce its ability to reform itself.

Among the consequences of the Cold War, we should note the fact that the US found itself in a position to exercise considerable influence and pressure on the Soviet leadership’s way of thinking. The Old World (England, France, Germany), which had hitherto served as a model, was replaced by the New World: the US became the Soviets’ yardstick for assessing their own performance when it came to the economy, science, military capability and, needless to say, espionage. The impact of this reorientation to the US was concealed from both the Soviet population and the West (this is a vast subject awaiting exploration). We may assume that on account of the US the Soviet leadership came to realize the systemic nature of their country’s grave inferiority, though it could be that some of them refused to acknowledge the reality. After having been beaten in the (utterly useless) race to get to the Moon first, the country’s inability to embark on the new scientific and information revolution – even though a special ministry was created to supervise the task! – must have engendered a sense of powerlessness in some ruling circles, while the conservatives stuck with their immobilism and hard line.

It was this same image of the US as superpower that led so many ex-members of the nomenklatura to bid for American favours after they had taken control of the Kremlin under Yeltsin’s mantle. However, this episode belongs to the post-Soviet era and is of interest to us here only in so far as it casts some additional light on the historical record of the system – a system that is dead and buried, and yet remains present in the constant search for a national identity which will only be defined when the past, warts and all, has been seriously re-examined and mastered.

POSTSCRIPT: A COUNTRY IN SEARCH OF A PAST

It is perfectly natural that researchers studying the state of Russia in the 1990s should use data from the later Soviet period as their starting point. The situation becomes ironic only when sociologists who have a pro-found knowledge of this past, from the studies they conducted at the time (when they were very critical of the system), now treat it as some kind of Eldorado, on account of the living standards and social benefits enjoyed by the population not so long ago, but which have deteriorated inexorably since the beginning of the 1990s.[5] The picture they present is highly instructive: decreasing numbers of people go to the theatre, concerts, the circus or libraries; the reading of literary works and subscriptions to newspapers are in sharp decline in town and countryside alike. The whole structure of leisure activity has been transformed because of increased workloads. Leisure is now much more passive (essentially ‘restorative’), whereas it was becoming culture-oriented in the late Soviet era with the growth in free time. The phenomenon is particularly striking in the case of specialists and managers. The need to increase household incomes compelled many Russians to rear more cattle and poultry on their mini-farms to improve their diet and earn a little more money, or simply in order to survive, with a corresponding reduction in their time for rest and cultural recreation.

The expansion of liberties and rights, as well as the emergence of expensive services, have benefited only the best off, the best qualified, and the most enterprising. A majority of people saw their access to national and international culture reduced. The sociologists we are referring to are highly critical of the quality of television programmes. Television has become the dominant leisure activity, with especially deleterious effects on children who, left to their own devices in the afternoon, sit glued to bovine broadcasts.

According to the authors, two processes are at work: an ever-deepening social stratification, and withdrawal by individuals into their own selves (fewer social and family contacts, lack of interest in culture and politics), which is less pronounced in the major urban centres of European Russia, but very marked in the provincial towns and the countryside. They do not deal with the decline in scientific research, education, and medical and social services, or the fall in demographic indicators, producing a catastrophic situation in which the country’s very survival is at stake.

To conceal this woeful state of affairs, the new power-holders – most of them from the old nomenklatura but now rebaptized ‘democrats’, ‘liberals’, or ‘reformers’ – embarked on a massive propaganda campaign against the old Soviet system, using all the devices previously employed in the West and even outbidding them: the system was nothing but a monstrosity run by monsters, from the original sin of October 1917 right up to the failed coup d’état by conservative party stalwarts against Gorbachev in August 1991. Thereafter, a miracle supposedly occurred, with the dawning of a new era of freedom under President Yeltsin. As a result of this kind of political discourse, contemporary Russia, already woefully diminished and still in a state of shock, also suffers from a kind of self-denigration of its historical identity. Not content with looting and squandering the nation’s wealth, the ‘reformers’ also mounted a frontal assault on its past, directed at its culture, identity and vitality. This was no critical approach to the past: it was sheer ignorance.

The mendacious and nihilistic campaign against the Soviet era was accompanied by a kind of frantic shopping around for alternative pasts to offer the nation for it to identify with. It began with a wholesale readoption of anything Tsarist and pre-revolutionary – a pathetic attempt to find a worthy predecessor in a decaying system. Then, when the rejection of anything Soviet became yet more intense, crystallizing in a hatred of Lenin, Leninism and Bolshevism as issuing from Hell, attempts were made to rehabilitate the Whites in the Civil War – the most reactionary right wing of the Tsarist political spectrum, which lost precisely because it had nothing to offer the country.

Identification with anything and everything detested by the Bolsheviks or the Soviet regime simply attested to intellectual feebleness. The first wave of ‘new elites’ who conquered the Kremlin and power were regarded by many Russians as something approaching a new ‘Tatar invasion’, attacking the country’s political and cultural interests. The nation’s best minds and moral authorities feared lest its only prospect was the nightmarish one of sinking to the level of a Third World country.

It takes time to recover from the ravages of obscurantism. But various cultural events offer positive signs that a slow recovery is under way. We should remember the historian Kliuchevsky’s reaction to those who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, claimed that ‘the past is in the past’. No, he said: with all the difficulties crowding in on us and the errors that have been committed, the past is all around us, enveloping reforms, distorting and almost swallowing them up.

As if taking up where Kliuchevsky had left off, the political philosopher Mezhuev, speaking at a conference in Moscow organized by Tatyana Zaslavskaya, forcefully argued that ‘a country cannot exist without its history’.[6] His highly stimulating thoughts are worth quoting at length:

Mezhuev proceeds to criticize the liberal economist A. Illarionov, who regards the twentieth century as a wasted one for Russia: having lived under socialism, the country deviated from its liberal trajectory and that is why yesterday’s giant has become today’s midget. For Illarionov, the only salvation consists in a return to liberalism. According to Mezhuev, such nihilism is historically absurd. It is easier to be wise after the event than to analyse what happened and why. To rail against Russia for not having become liberal at the beginning of the century is to demonstrate a profound ignorance of Russian history and liberalism alike. The triumph of liberalism was the product of a protracted historical process: the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the revolutions that emancipated societies from absolutist monarchies (but not everywhere!). England itself, the mother of liberalism, took time to embark on the liberal road. Russia and many other countries did not develop a liberal market economy. Should they be blamed for this? That would be pointless. The important thing is to understand the past century and the role it will play in future developments.

For Mezhuev, the key to twentieth-century Russian history is to be found in three revolutions, not exclusively in the Bolshevik revolution. The first – in 1905 – was defeated. The second – in February 1917 – witnessed the victory of moderate revolutionary forces. The third – October – which saw the triumph of more radical revolutionaries, was only the last phase in this revolutionary process. That is how such processes always unfold. Once triggered, there is no one to blame; the process pursues its course to a conclusion. The philosopher Berdyaev had understood this well: the Bolsheviks were not the revolution’s authors, but the instrument of its development. It is pointless adopting primarily moral criteria and denouncing the cruelties inflicted, for it is always thus in situations of civil war or struggles against oppression. A revolution is not a moral or legal action, but a deployment of coercive force. There are no ‘good’ revolutions; they are always bloody:

On this point, Mezhuev reviews the opinions of such thinkers as Berdyaev, Fedotov, Bogdanov and others. He himself leans towards the following interpretation. It is difficult for a country located on the periphery to combine modernization with democracy and freedom. For a time, one of them must give way to the other. The Bolsheviks understood this, and that is why they won the Civil War and why the USSR emerged victorious from the Second World War. China too appreciates this: it has opted to combine rapid modernization via the market with an undemocratic political system. Whatever the regime in question, wisdom consists not in refusing the past as if it were a barren desert, but in regarding it as a springboard for further development and preserving its genuine (not its mythical) grandeur.

In this respect, the Russian variant of socialism must be credited with its faith in science. The prestige of the scientist and engineer was never higher in Russian history than during the Soviet period and the regime opened the doors of science to many. Here its rulers were realists and pragmatists. Taking their speeches literally, the West was wrong to perceive any hostility in this. Contemporary Russia, with its nostalgia for pre-revolutionary times, is more distant from the West than the Bolsheviks were:

Mezhuev remains convinced that the Russian revolution will one day receive the same recognition as revolutions in the West – a recognition that would hopefully open the way for a genuine Russian renaissance.

The preceding paragraphs do no more than summarize a long and impassioned address. Mezhuev is not a historian, and his interpretation is not unproblematic. The terms ‘socialism’, ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘communism’, but also a whole set of ideas about the revolution, derive from a terminology and approach that need to be reconsidered. But we are here in the presence of a real challenge to ‘nihilism’ and an illustration of the battle for history as a remedy making it possible for a nation in the throes of a painful decline to rediscover its identity and discover its future.

It is well known that history is subject to constant use and abuse. Listening to a non-historian plead for an objective historical knowledge as indispensable to a nation, whether in its torment or its glory days, is unusual in a media and computer-dominated age fixated on the present instant. But the instant is just that – it passes – whereas history remains. It continues to provide some of the building-blocks for the future, whether sound or defective. It is the basis that nations rest on and which they add to. It is not absurd to believe that history, in common with the applied sciences, has a practical dimension – even if it cannot provide immediate, guaranteed remedies.