Of course, this is all counter-factual history. Andropov, who suffered from an incurable kidney disease, soon departed the stage in 1984. He was replaced by another very sick man, Chernenko – a faceless apparatchik who lasted only thirteen months. Thereafter, the ‘party’ was headed for some spectacular novel experiences. First, in 1985, came a young general-secretary, Gorbachev, who was Andropov’s heir, had many of the right ideas, and was destined for a downfall that was as pitiful as his rise had been meteoric. Next, the state-party (or party-state) would disappear, without any blood being spilt, with its formidable security forces still intact but receiving no orders to shoot. This was another of Gorbachev’s merits, but it did not prevent him from sinking into impotence and losing power. In fact, there was no one to shoot at, since the system had not been toppled by enraged masses. There then ensued the slide into ‘reforms’ that have plunged Russia into a new form of underdevelopment.
DIAGNOSTIC NOTES
Terms like ‘paradox’ and ‘irony’ are wholly apt for characterizing Russia’s historical destiny. But so is the image of a heavy burden borne by its people, in the manner of the bargemen of the Volga who hauled heavy barges while singing: ‘Those smart English have an easy time of it; they use machines to haul their loads.’ For their part, the Russians had only their song to give them courage.
This troubled history, with its twists and turns, has induced a deep existential anguish in many Russians (or, more precisely, inhabitants of Russia), which is best expressed by the term toska, with its wealth of nuances from melancholy, through sadness and anguish, to depression. We may add to it unynie (despair), as well as a touch of self-pity of course. This is a powerful brew of sorrows – one that could perhaps only be drowned by another brew… These sentiments, plus an unbearable dose of cynicism, are to be found in popular songs about the underworld, with their sentimental attachment to the knife – a tool for settling scores and the symbol of a whole way of life. Prior to pere-stroika, singers like Okudzhava, Galich and Vysotsky rarely sang cheerful songs: they expressed a mood – theirs and their country’s – poised between rejection, commiseration, entreaty and despair. Not because people knew no gaiety in the USSR (there was plenty of it), but because these artists perceived that the country was on the wrong track and that history would not treat it kindly. In times of decline, decay and stagnation, the rich party and the bards despair.
Our data are drawn from the archives of Gosplan and the Central Statistical Office, which were unavailable when the songs of the bards were reverberating in Russia. Yet putting these two types of ‘source’ together, we find that they were telling the same story after all.
PART THREE
THE SOVIET CENTURY: RUSSIA IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
20
LENIN’S TIME AND WORLDS
In the Introduction, it was pointed out that the polarization of opinion and the powerful impact of Cold War propaganda had squeezed out the ‘contextual reflection’ indispensable to historical inquiry in favour of other objectives and priorities, to the benefit of the media, ideology, and emotion.
Scholarly work on the Soviet Union has to confront widely held and fervently defended opinions – a highly structured ‘public discourse’ that does not exist in other fields of knowledge. This discourse rests upon a series of methodological errors that are paraded in the various media as obvious verities. The first error consists in focusing on leaders, actors and ideology, depicted as independent agents abstracted from their historical context. Neither the circumstances that shaped and conditioned them, nor the past, nor the surrounding world are taken into account. For many, everything began in 1917 – the moment of the ‘original sin’. For others, it occurred even earlier, in 1902–3, with the publication of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? Thereafter, events unfolded as if they had been genetically programmed, and the sequence Leninism–Bolshevism–Communism is constructed as a fatality. I exaggerate somewhat, but the irony is justified when we recall that What Is to Be Done? was written at a time when Russian Social-Democracy in its entirety, Lenin included, was absolutely convinced that the coming revolution in Russia would be a liberal one (‘bourgeois-democratic’ was their term) – something that precluded the Left taking power. In those years, Lenin regarded Russian capitalism as a triumphant force, rushing full steam ahead and already visible under every bush…
Whenever a determinist perspective is adopted, historical research takes a back seat; and whenever a ‘party line’ (left, right or centre) is adopted in historical research, one only gets out of the piggy-bank what has already been put in it – not a penny more.
In the case of historiography about the Soviet Union, an additional impediment is the common tendency to discount the social changes it actually underwent. The failure to study the society over the longer durée, and the almost exclusive focus instead on the power structure, is sometimes justified by the formula ‘There was no society, only a regime’: the Kremlin, the Staraia Ploshchad, the Lubianka – three addresses, and nothing else. More recently, the term nomenklatura has been presented as a great discovery, without noticing that in the absence of a detailed study of what it denoted, it is only another word.
This is just one example among many of the propensity of numerous commentators for not noticing the obvious gaps in our knowledge of the country. Knowing that such gaps exist and wanting to fill them stems from an old piece of epistemological advice: scio ut nescio.
The ‘contextual’ approach also requires paying attention to the general European scene, its dramas and their aftermath. There the situation changed rapidly, with one crisis following another. From 1914 to 1953 we witness a veritable cascade of cataclysmic events, which impacted very heavily on Russia’s population. And the leaders, before engaging in any action, had to confront this series of crises – many of them not of their making. Lenin did not cause the First World War, or engineer the fall of Tsarism, or even the failure of democratic forces to control the chaos in Russia in 1917. Action or inaction, folly or reason – these cannot be understood without taking account of a period that was confused, crisis-ridden, and laden with the past: it engulfed people and set their agendas. A political strategist par excellence, Lenin was only reacting to what he perceived and understood of the crises he was living through. It is therefore imperative that we broaden the canvas and situate people and movements on it.