In addition to these problems, the West, including the US, suffered from the ‘security complex’, with the enormous role accorded to the secret services and their mindset of ‘anything goes’ in the line of duty – launching covert operations, hobnobbing with criminal or semi-criminal military formations, detecting communism and subversion anywhere and everywhere, buying off media outlets, infiltrating different social organizations. The obsession with security had a damaging effect on democratic institutions and created a powerful cover for the growth of internal anti-democratic forces, which were hard at work undermining American democracy. And the fact that Stalinism was worse, with its terror and witch-hunts, is little comfort. The faintest resemblance between the two systems – the very possibility of such a thing – was a danger to the liberties that furnished the battle-cry and the alleged stakes of the great contest.
Despite the contribution of genuine scholars committed to rigorous research, representations of the Soviet system were significantly influenced by the ideological and political realities of a bipolar world. Public opinion was guided in a particular direction by the large-scale diffusion of rooted ideological judgements, shaped by government agencies, the media and publicists with little interest in supporting their declarations with facts or arguments. While many other problems, countries and histories were open to debate, when it came to Soviet Russia a ‘public discourse’ emerged, based on deeply ingrained but unverified assumptions.
Setting aside the unilateral focus on misdeeds and crimes characteristic of propaganda, we shall instead point to limitations of a methodological kind. In fact, objective, methodologically sound research came up against rigid thought patterns that were widespread among publics and opinion-formers alike. These consisted in:
(1) Concentrating on leaders and government agencies as prime movers, instead of making them an object of study in order to grasp what they were engaged in and what determined their actions.
(2) Studying the USSR essentially in terms of its ‘undemocratic’ status, which meant endlessly listing all the features of a ‘non-democracy’ and dealing with what it was not, rather than attempting to deal with what it was. Let us recall that even today democracy is not the only system on the planet and that the other systems must be understood in their own right.
(3) Disregarding the historical context in which leaders operated and to which they reacted. Ahistoricism is a very common error and the gravest fault of all, because human action does not occur in a void; it is not a deus ex machina. To take an example, in 1916–17 Lenin was not someone who sought to destroy a healthy, thriving system. Quite the reverse, he (like millions of others) faced a world that was literally in a state of collapse and a disintegrating Russia, and he sprang into action without any guarantee that he would not perish before he had even begun to confront the ongoing and impending catastrophes. Or to take a subsequent example, which further clarifies the importance of attending to context, the world economic crisis of the 1930s is crucial for understanding the prestige Soviet Russia had in many people’s eyes, and helped to legitimize Stalinism. The Second World War likewise threw a veil over Stalin’s mass atrocities, at a time when the regime and his own power were already decaying because of their own internal maladies.
These considerations mean that readers can expect historical background and context, both internal and external, to play a key role in the arguments presented below.
But we have not yet done with surveying the obstacles to a real knowledge of the USSR. We must also draw attention to even more convoluted thought patterns that use and abuse the notion of Stalinism.
What I have in mind is the tendency to ‘demonize’ Stalin, by piling up on him and his system a ludicrously inflated, impossible, and quite unverifiable number of victims, involving the victims both of the terror and of his political and economic policies. When it transpires, for example, that the human losses attributed to his crimes also include major demographic losses expressed in estimates of unborn children, one can only scratch one’s head in disbelief. Why is such a calculation necessary? And for whom? Deflating these figures and other arithmetical sleights of hand was a laborious business for specialists (especially when the archives were closed to them). But it has now been done successfully, allowing us to deal with Stalin and Stalinism as they actually were. We are left with quite enough horrors to condemn what needs to be condemned, but also to disentangle the threads of a drama which, having occupied centre-stage, made for a different episode following the dictator’s death. In fact, the terror itself underwent changes; and in history it is indispensable to distinguish between different periods. The tendency to perpetuate ‘Stalinism’, by backdating it to 1917 and extending it to the end of the Soviet Union, pertains to those ‘uses and abuses’ of history of which there are many examples.
In this respect, mention should be made of the Historikerstreit (the ‘historians’ controversy’) set off by conservative German historians. In their attempt to justify representatives of the non-Nazi German Right who had helped Hitler to power, and by the same token to rehabilitate Hitler and his infernal designs on the world, they resorted to a rather predictable stratagem, counting on Western connivance encouraged by the Cold War. They wished us to believe that Hitler’s madness could somehow be attributed to Stalin, who supposedly created the atrocious precedent that inspired him. In particular, so it was claimed, the Holocaust was modelled on the treatment meted out to the kulaks. And Hitler’s aggression, although it began with attacks on countries other than Russia, was nothing but a defensive war against the war Stalin some day planned to launch against Germany.[2] The anti-communist indoctrination characteristic of the Cold War permitted this kind of ideological manoeuvre in the West. Fortunately, enough voices were raised to condemn the operation and persevere with the project of understanding the dynamic of the Soviet system.
This book does not aim to offer a history of the USSR. It is restricted to a presentation of general aspects of the system. It has three parts. Part One is devoted to the Stalinist period, with an emphasis on its specific characteristics, but also its fluctuations. Part Two deals with the post-Stalinist period (from Khrushchev to Andropov), identified as a different model that reinvigorated the system for a time, but which then sank into stagnation (zastoi). Part Three broaches the ‘Soviet era’ as a whole, attempting a bird’s-eye view of the system’s historical trajectory. It underscores the general features and specificities of this trajectory, as well as the historical underpinnings of its success and subsequent failure. Both these moments had worldwide resonance and both, we might add, were equally unpredictable and surprising. What we stress is the complexity and richness of this historical process (however gruesome many of its chapters), but also the importance of an awareness of the specifically historical dimension, including when reflecting on the course of post-Gorbachev Russia.
2
See Peter Baldwin, ed.,