it was enabled to strengthen the existing state forms of repression, state economic intervention and disrespect for due legal process. At the same time it promised to deliver material prosperity and military security where the tsars had failed. To this extent the communist order found favourable conditions in Russia in the early part of the twentieth century.
Moreover, Soviet communism had achievements to its name — and these achievements were indispensable to ensuring its survival. Communism deepened and widened educational progress. It propagated respect for high culture, especially in literature; it subsidized the performing arts; it increased the official commitment to science. It broadened access to sport and leisure activities. It eradicated the worst excesses of popular culture, especially the obscurantist and violent features of life in the Russian countryside. It built towns. It defeated Europe’s most vicious right-wing military power, Nazi Germany. In subsequent decades, at last, it succeeded in providing nearly all its citizens with at least a minimal safety-net of food, shelter, clothing, health care and employment. It offered a peaceful, predictable framework of people to live their lives.
There were other achievements of a more objectionable quality which allowed the communists to perpetuate their regime. The USSR made itself into the epicentre of the world communist movement. It also became a military superpower. It not only imposed its authority throughout the outlying regions of the lands of the tsars but also acquired a vast new dominion in Eastern Europe. This inner and outer empire was not formally acknowledged as such; but the popular pride in its acquisition was a stimulus to the belief that Soviet communism was part of the normal world order.
The costs of Soviet rule greatly outweighed the advantages. The state of Lenin and Stalin brutalized politics in Russia for decades. It is true that the communists made many economic and social gains beyond those of Nicholas II’s government; but they also reinforced certain features of tsarism which they had vowed to eradicate. National enmities intensified. Political alienation deepened and social respect for law decreased. As the dictatorship broke up society into the tiniest segments, those civil associations that obstructed the central state’s will were crushed. The outcome was a mass of intimidated citizens who took little interest in their neighbours’ welfare. Selfishness became more endemic even than under capitalism. What is more, as the state came close to devouring the rest of society, the state itself became less effective at fostering co-operation with its own policies. In short, it failed to integrate society while managing to prevent society from effecting its own integration.
Even as a mode for achieving industrialization and military security it was ultimately a failure. Stalin’s economic encasement made it unfeasible to attempt further basic ‘modernization’ without dismantling the Soviet order. His institutions acquired rigid interests and repressive capacity. His rule scared the wits out of managers, scientists and writers, and the freedom of thought vital for a self-renewing industrial society was absent. There was also a lack of those market mechanisms which reduce costs. State-directed economic growth was extremely wasteful. The control organs that were established to eliminate wastefulness became merely yet another drain on the country’s resources. Worse still, they made a bureaucratic, authoritarian state order still more bureaucratic and authoritarian. With such an economic and administrative framework it was unavoidable that Stalin’s successors, in their quest to maintain the USSR’s status as a superpower, diverted a massive proportion of the budget to armaments.
The cramping of public criticism meant that the state’s objectives were attained at an even greater environmental cost than elsewhere in the advanced industrial world. Only the huge size of the USSR prevented Soviet rulers from bringing about a general natural calamity which even the dimmest of them would have had to recognize as such.
Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader to face up to the interconnected difficulties of political intimidation, economic inhibition, militarist organization and environmental pollution — and he failed to resolve the difficulties before he was overwhelmed. The fundamental problem for any gradualist reformer in politics and the economy was that the Soviet compound had eradicated most of the social groups and associations whose co-operation might have facilitated success. By the 1980s, reform had to come from above in the first instance and could be implemented only by a small circle of reformers. A further problem was that radical reform dissolved the linkages of the Soviet compound. Decomposition was inherent in the entire project of change. Those organizations based on politics, religion or nationality which had previously been cowed had no objective interest in conserving the status quo. Gorbachev’s eventual decision to eliminate the one-party state, ideological autocracy, arbitrary rule, ultra- centralist administration and a predominantly state-owned economy was bound to release such organizations into conflict with his government. The only wonder is that he did not see this from the beginning.
As collapse approached it was unsurprising that many beneficiaries of the Soviet compound should seek to make the best of a bad job. They quietly abandoned communist ideology. They engaged in private business. They became more and more openly corrupt. As they flourished locally in both political and material respects they flaunted their disobedience of the Kremlin. Having started by opposing reform, they ended by exploiting it to their advantage.
This happened in many other communist countries which rejected communism in 1989–1991. But de- communization was more difficult in the former USSR than elsewhere. Soviet political and economic interest groups had been consolidated not merely since the Second World War, as in Eastern Europe, but since the establishment of the communist regime through the October Revolution of 1917. Consequently, not only in Russia but also in Ukraine and Uzbekistan there were long-established groups of officials who had plenty of experience and cunning to see off any new opposition. And whereas communism was imported by the Red Army to Eastern Europe, it had been invented by revolutionaries in the former Russian Empire. In revolting against communism, the peoples of Eastern Europe were struggling against foreign domination. In the Soviet Union, communism was a native product. Indeed Lenin retained a remarkable popularity in opinion polls in Russia even after 1991. No wonder that the banner of anti-communism attracted few active followers there.
The question of Russian nationhood aggravated the dilemmas of reform. Before the First World War there had been a fitful privileging of the Russians over the other nations of the empire. This was eliminated under Lenin but resumed under Stalin and prolonged with modifications under successive communist rulers. Nevertheless Russians were confused by the contradictory messages they received. What they had thought of as peculiar to them before 1917 — especially their Orthodox Christianity and their peasant customs — was rejected by the official communist authorities; and Stalin’s highly selective version of Russianness was virtually his own invention. Thus Russian national identity under tsars and commissars was cross-cut by an imperial identity. At least until the mid- 1960s, moreover, the various alternative versions of Russianness were banned from public discussion — and even through to the late 1980s, debates had to steer clear of overt hostility to Marxism-Leninism. Russians emerged from the communist years with a vaguer sense of their identity than most other peoples of the former USSR.
The Russian Federation received an unenviable legacy from the USSR. The creation of an integrated civic culture had hardly begun. The emergent market economy evoked more popular suspicion than enthusiasm. The constitutional and legal framework was frail. Russians had not had a lengthy opportunity to decide what it was to be Russian. All former empires have been afflicted by this problem. The Russian case was acute because even the borders of the new Russian state are not uncontroversial. Russia’s basic territory was never defined during the Russian Empire and was redrawn several times in the Soviet period. And by 1991 twenty-five million ethnic Russians lived in adjacent, newly independent states.
Hopes for democracy and the rule of law were disappointed. Rulers from Yeltsin onwards used a range of dirty methods to exercise their power. The new capitalism brought a windfall of profits to the few, leaving the many — tens of millions of them — to fend for themselves. Reform of police, armed forces and judiciary was not seriously attempted. Multi-party competition was hemmed in by restrictions. Brutal military campaigns were started against Chechen rebels. The President and the rest of the executive exerted dominance over parliament. Elections to high central office were marked by egregious skulduggery. The abuses were not peculiar to the Kremlin. Local politicians and business barons made a mockery of popular choice outside Moscow. The campaign against terrorism was made into a pretext for interfering with civil liberties. Dissent in the media attracted punitive sanctions. Political assassinations were not uncommon. Russia in the twenty-first century became an authoritarian state which has yet to find a settled purpose for itself in its region and in the world.
Must the forecast be pessimistic? Not entirely. The very political passivity that was earlier mentioned as a problem is also an asset. Few Russians have gathered on the streets in support of demagogues of the far right or the far left. Most citizens are tired of turmoil. Even after the disintegration of the USSR, furthermore, Russia was left with a cornucopia of human and natural resources at its disposal. Russia has gas, oil and gold in superabundance. It lacks hardly any essential minerals or metals; it has huge forests and waterways. Its people
