Thus tsarist Russia on the eve of the First World War was the poorest of the advanced countries in Europe, measured in terms of GDP per capita. However, it was rich compared to the rest of the world. The tragedy of Soviet history is that no matter what the Kremlin did, regardless of how grand its plans and how many people it sacrificed to fulfill them, the USSR was unable to match Western European prosperity levels over the entire period from the Russian Revolution up to 1989. The gap between the USSR and the so-called European offshoots—the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—widened yearly from 1917 until 1940, and thereafter the gap increased even more rapidly.19
Even though the Soviet Union eventually attained reasonable growth rates after the Second World War, the countries that lost the war did better. For example, Japan was less prosperous than Russia in 1913, and yet by 1970 the Asian giant had recovered and moved ahead of the USSR, and by 1989 its GDP per capita was 2.5 times larger. Postwar Western Europe, including war-ravaged Germany, easily outpaced the Soviet Union and by 1989 was further ahead of it than Japan.
Stalin’s disciples in other countries—either on his orders or their own initiative—led crusades that were nearly as destructive as his. Each of those lands is coming to grips with the past and all the victims, as well as trying to build for a better future.20 The economies of Eastern Europe have been slow to recover since 1990, and with the notable exception of Poland and Hungary, the GDP per capita in all of them actually fell during their first years of freedom.21
More recently attempts have been made to assess the elusive “quality of life” in the nations of the world. One effort, published in 2005, included nine variables in the calculation, such as each country’s measurable health (calculated by life expectancy in years), its family life (by looking at divorce rates), and so on, to quantify community life, climate, job security, political freedom, political stability and security, and gender equality. The numbers were then tallied up.
The resulting rankings varied when compared to the calculation of GDP per capita. The United States, for example, came in second for its GDP per capita but fell to thirteenth on the quality of life scale; the U.K. placed thirteenth in “prosperity” but dropped to twenty-ninth for its quality of life. Nearly all the top thirty quality of life slots were Western European countries or European offshoots like Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada. The only former Communist country to make it into this select group was Slovenia (at number twenty-seven). Although in 2005 Russia’s GDP per capita ranked fifty-fifth, its quality of life plunged to 105; Belarus ended up at 100; and Ukraine at 98. These results were only slightly better than some of the worst-off third-world countries. Of all the former Soviet satellites, the only ones in the top fifty on the quality of life scale were the Czech Republic (at 34); Hungary (at 37); Slovakia (at 45); and Poland (at 48). This is not to say that everything is just fine in the United States, the United Kingdom, or Western Europe, because we can find ample data to show that too many people in those countries do not enjoy a decent quality of life.22
From beginning to end, all the Communist countries suffered from a deficit of legitimacy, because the great majority of their populations faced enduring scarcities and limited opportunities. Official attempts to compensate by propaganda rituals and refurbishing the official ideology “ran up against cognitive dissonance, the gap between promise and reality.”23 The trade-off between accepting restrictions on basic freedoms and political rights, in return for the state provision of material benefits, began to fail so badly that most people grew demoralized and others disobedient. The economies of all the Communist countries did not completely fail, but to the very end, they never created a modern consumer-oriented market.24
When the Communist systems finally collapsed, great expectations arose that the self-liberated countries would introduce liberal democracy. It turns out that political cultures, authoritarian traditions, and command economies do not change as quickly as regimes. In several former Soviet republics, as well as in Russia, many long for another Stalin, and periodically his image is refurbished. Vladimir Putin, the former and now again president of the Russian Federation, embodies the ambivalent feelings of his country toward its Stalinist past. On the one hand, he has been hard on the political opposition and made a farce out of freedom of the press, but on the other hand, in 2007 he visited a former NKVD killing field near Moscow, then met with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, regarded by many as an icon of the Soviet victims. When the famed author died the next year, the Putin government remarkably made The Gulag Archipelago “mandatory reading” in schools. On top of that, in 2010 Prime Minister Putin invited his Polish counterpart to commemorate the Polish officers murdered at Katyń, the symbol of Stalinist crimes against foreign countries.25
The struggle between the anti-Stalinists and the Stalinists is still going on in Russia and, to a greater or lesser extent, also in the former Soviet Union and its satellite countries. Given the trends in the world, the anti-Stalinists will most likely prevail. We need to keep in mind that it took the Soviet Union three-quarters of a century or so to dig itself into a hole, and with varying amounts of coercion and encouragement from Moscow, other nations followed the Red flag into the abyss. It is going to take time to get out of it. Even now there are signs that the worst may be behind them and grounds for hope that they will ultimately triumph over Stalin’s curse.
Acknowledgments
I began research for this book with the generous support of the Alexander von Humboldt–Foundation. At that time I was serving as the Strassler Professor in Holocaust History at Clark University. My present academic home at Florida State University has provided a congenial research environment, and I am thankful for the encouragement offered by Joe Travis and Joe McElrath and by my colleagues in the history department. I have benefited immensely from exchanges with many of the students I have met here and elsewhere.
Norman Naimark and Paul Gregory invited me to one of their summer research workshops at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, dealing with recently released documents from the Russian archives. The experience, including the seminars and discussions with international colleagues, was especially helpful. Jonathan Brent answered questions and led me to Yale University Press’s Stalin Digital Archive. Also invaluable is the virtual archive of the Cold War International History Project in Washington. In Russia the Alexander Yakovlev archive makes tens of thousands of documents available online. Many Russian sites offer online the entire works of nearly all the major figures, such as Lenin http://politazbuka.ru/biblioteka/marksizm/562-lenin-vladimir-polnoe-sobranie-sochineniy-5-izdanie.html and the sixteen volumes of Stalin’s collected works: http://grachev62.narod.ru/stalin/t1/cont_1.htm.
Special thanks go to Andrew Wylie and James Pullen, to my editors Andrew Miller and Matthew Cotton, and to the four anonymous referees who made excellent suggestions for improving the book. I am extremely grateful to Erik van Ree and Mark Harrison, who were unfailing in their generosity in answering questions and providing certain documents. Many others gave advice, answered questions, or helped me in other ways at various stages of the project. These include Jörg Baberowski, Amir Weiner, Robert Service, Lynne Viola, Paul Hagenloh, David Shearer, Jeffrey Burds, Michael Ellman, Peter Krafft, Timothy Colton, Steven Wheatcroft, Tanja Penter, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Vladimir Tismăneanu, Jan Behrends, Yuri Slezkine, Donald Rayfield, Chen Jian, Simon Ertz, Orlando Figes, Robert Argenbright, Yoram Gorlizki, Ingo Haar, and Dieter Pohl.