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 colossaclass="underline" 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.