How the West wrote the Soviet history from Cambridge history of Russia, volume 3

After 1991 sovietological political scientists had lost their subject and turned to a cluster of new questions: how did a great state self-destruct; why did the Cold War end; will the 'transition' from command to market economy, from dictatorship to democracy, be successful; are post-Soviet transitions comparable to democratisation in capitalist states?[161] Several explained the Gorbachev 'revolution' as largely emanating from the very top of the Soviet political structure and emphasised the agency of the General Secretary, his chief opponent, Boris Yeltsin, and other actors over structural factors. Others focused on institutions, the actual 'Soviet constitution' of power and the loss of confidence and eventual defection of Soviet apparatchiki to the side of the marketeers and self-styled democrats. Still others argued that Leninist nationality policies had created a structure of national polities within the USSR that fostered potent nationalist constituencies and proved to be a 'time bomb' that with the weakening of central power tore the union apart. Rather than nationalism as the chief catalyst of state collapse, they found that state weakness and disintegration precipitated nationalist movements.[162]

'Transitologists' who had studied the fall of Latin American and Iberian dictatorships had developed a model of democratisation that largely eschewed the cultural, social and economic prerequisites for successful democratisa- tion that modernisation theorists had proposed. Instead, they argued that getting the process right - namely negotiating a 'pact' between the old rulers and the emerging opposition - was the best guarantee for effective democratic transition.[163] Post-sovietologists disputed the universal applicability of the transitological model by specifying the differences between non-market economies and capitalist societies and authoritarian dictatorships in the West and 'totalitarian' states in the East.[164] Michael McFaul showed how the transition in Russia was revolutionary, occurred without pacting, and involved mass participation - all of which were excluded from the original model.[165]But as the new century began and Vladimir Putin solidified his power in the Kremlin, the jury remained out on how consolidated, liberal or effectively representative Russian (or, for that matter, Ukrainian, Armenian or any other) democracy was.

Even as it claimed to break with the old sovietology, Western scholarship reproduced many of its older concerns a decade and a half after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and remained true to fundamental assumptions deriving from Western liberalism. The T-model had counterposed the indoctrinated, believing 'Soviet Man' against an imagined, free, liberal individual in the West, a person self-directed and capable of independent thought.[166] Cold War scholars were dismayed by the destruction of the individual in Sovietised societies and the inability of citizens to resist the regime effectively. They found it hard to believe in the authentic commitment of people to such an illiberal project as Stalinism or to accept the legitimacy of such political deviance from a Whig trajectory. Images of Koestler's Rubashov confessing to crimes he had not committed or Orwell's Winston Smith capitulating to Big Brother powerfully conveyed Soviet socialism's threat to liberal individuality. Yet, as social historians had demonstrated, Soviet subjects were neither atomised nor completely terrorised and propagandised victims of the system; they managed to adapt to and even shape the contours imposed from above.

When post-Soviet scholars or journalists looked back at the seventy-four years of the Soviet experience, they most often turned to the Stalinist horrors as the emblem of Leninist hubris. In 1999 a team of scholars produced a massive catalogue of crimes, terror and repression by Soviet-style communisms. The Black Book of Communism contended that 'Communist regimes did not just commit criminal acts (all states do so on occasion); they were criminal enterprises in their very essence: on principle, so to speak, they all ruled lawlessly, by violence and without regard for human life.'[167] Given this foundational claim, it followed that 'there never was a benign, initial phase of communism before some mythical "wrong turn" threw it off track'.¹⁹⁸ Its violence was a deliberative, not a reactive, policy of the revolutionary regimes and was based in Marxist 'science' that elevated the class struggle to the central driving force of history. The aim of The Black Book was not only to show that the very essence of communism was terror as a form of rule, but even more ambitiously to demonstrate that communism was not just comparable to fascism but was actually worse than Nazism. The Black Book lay the burden of guilt on intellectuals, those who thought up, spread and justified the idea that liberation and secular salvation ought to be purchased at any price.

Yet in its attempt to judge Soviet killing by the standard of Nazi crimes, The Black Book actually de-historicised Soviet violence. Context and causation were less important than the equation with the colossal, seemingly inexplicable evil that led to the Holocaust. These claims led to an intense international debate around The Black Book that recapitulated arguments that had divided historians of the Soviet Union for decades: is explanation to be sought in the social or the ideological? Is there an essential connection between all communist movements that stems from communism's roots in Leninism that produces the violence that has accompanied them in all parts of the world? Or are these movements, while related, more particularly the products of their own social, political and cultural environments?

161

For an analytical and critical review ofpost-sovietology, see David D. Laitin, 'Post-Soviet Politics', Annual Review of Political Science, 2000,3:117-48.

162

Suny, The Revenge of the Past; Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

163

Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, i99i); and Adam Przeworksi et al., Sustainable Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, i995).

164

Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Michael McFaul, Russia's Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001); Philippe C. Schmitter with Terry Lynn Karl, 'The Conceptual Travels of Transitologists and Consolidologists: How Far to the East Should They Attempt to Go?' Slavic Review 53,1 (Spring 1994): 173-85; Valerie Bunce, 'Should Transitologists Be Grounded?' Slavic Review 54, 1 (Spring 1995): 111-27; Terry Lynn Karl and Philippe C. Schmitter, 'From an Iron Curtain to a Paper Curtain: Grounding Transitologists or Students of Postcommunism?' Slavic Review 54, 4 (Winter 1995): 965-978; and Valerie Bunce, 'Paper Curtains and Paper Tigers', ibid., pp. 979-87.

165

McFaul, Russia's Unfinished Revolution.

166

For development of this theme, to which this paragraph is indebted, see the insightful discussion in Anna Krylova, 'The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies', Kritika 1,1 (Winter 2000): 119-46.

167

Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, p. xvii. 198 Ibid., p. xviii.