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.
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WHAT WAS THE SOVIET SYSTEM?
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).
7
Quoted by G. Vernadsky,
1
See David Joravsky, ‘Communism in Historical Perspective’,