workers in the October Revolution.19 Francesco Benvenuti looked at the political leadership of the Red Army, Orlando Figes looked at peasants in the Civil War and Richard Stites highlighted experimental and utopian trends throughout society.20 The 1930s, too, were scrutinized. R. W. Davies examined the dilemmas of policy-makers in Stalin’s Kremlin; Moshe Lewin pointed to the turbulent conditions which brought chaos to state administration.21 Francesco Benvenuti, Donald Filtzer and Lewis Siegelbaum researched the industrial labour force before the Second World War.22 An unknown USSR was hauled into the daylight as the chronic difficulties of governing the USSR were disclosed.
Initially this kind of scholarship existed only in the West; it was rejected in the USSR until radical political reforms began in the late 1980s and enabled Russian historians to join in the discussions.23 But revisionism’s success in shining a lamp on neglected areas of the Soviet past could not disguise its failure to supply a general alternative to the totalitarianist model it cogently criticized. There were anyhow serious divisions within revisionist writing. Sheila Fitzpatrick urged that social factors should take precedence over political ones in historical explanation. She and others attributed little importance to dictatorship and terror and for many years suggested that Stalin’s regime rested on strong popular approval.24 Stephen Kotkin proposed that Stalin built a new civilization and inculcated its new values in Soviet citizens.25 Such interpretations were contentious. Stephen Cohen, Moshe Lewin and R. W. Davies agreed with Fitzpatrick that Lenin’s revolutionary strategy in the last years of his life broke with his violent inclinations in earlier years; but they objected to the gentle treatment of Stalin and his deeds.26 Objections also continued to be widely made to any downplaying of terror’s importance in the building of Stalinism.
A parallel controversy sprang up about what kind of USSR existed in the decades after Stalin’s death. Jerry Hough investigated the authority and functions of the provincial party secretaries; and Gordon Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths as well as Hough contended that something like the economic and social interest groups that influenced politics in the West also functioned in the communist countries.27 Moshe Lewin argued that the Stalinist mode of industrialization proved unable to resist the influence of long-term trends in advanced industrial society. Universal schooling gave people a better understanding of public life and a higher set of personal aspirations.28 T. H. Rigby maintained that informal organizational links had characterized the Soviet state since its inception and that patronage networks had become strong at every level.29 The effect of such writings was to counteract the notion that no important change happened — or could happen — without being instigated by the men in the Kremlin. Disputes among the commentators were less about the trends themselves than about their significance. Archie Brown denied that institutional and interest groupings had autonomy from the Politburo; but he insisted that drastic reform was possible if a dynamic reformer were to become party leader.30 The diagnoses of recent politics in the USSR were quite as fiercely disputed as those being offered for pre-war history.
General accounts of the Soviet period fell away, at least outside the bickerings among Western communist grouplets, as the concentration on specific phases grew. The general trend was towards compartmentalizing research. Politics, economics and sociology were studied in sealed boxes. History, moreover, became disjoined from contemporary studies.
Supporters of the totalitarianist case took a bleak view of those writings which held back from condemning the Soviet order. Martin Malia and Richard Pipes castigated what they saw as a complete lapse of moral and historical perspective.31 The debates among historians produced sharp polemics. Often more heat than light was generated. What was ignored by the protagonists on both sides was that several innovative studies in the totalitarianist tradition, particularly the early monographs of Merle Fainsod and Robert Conquest, had stressed that cracks had always existed in the USSR’s monolith. They had drawn attention to the ceaseless dissension about policy in the midst of the Kremlin leadership. They had emphasized too that whole sectors of society and the economy in the Soviet Union proved resistant to official policy.32 The history and scope of totalitarianism acquire fresh nuances. Archie Brown argued that whereas the concept was an apt description of Stalin’s USSR, it lost its applicability when Khrushchev’s reforms were introduced, and the state remained extremely authoritarian but was no longer totalitarian.33 Geoffrey Hosking stressed that pre-revolutionary attitudes of faith, nationhood and intellectual autonomy survived across the Soviet decades, even to some degree under Stalin, and functioned as an impediment to the Politburo’s commands.34
The theory of totalitarianism, even in these looser applications, falls short of explaining the range and depth of resistance, non-compliance and apathy towards the demands of the state. The USSR was regulated to an exceptional degree in some ways while eluding central political control in others. Behind the facade of party congresses and Red Square parades there was greater disobedience to official authority than in most liberal- democratic countries even though the Soviet leadership could wield a panoply of dictatorial instruments. Informal and mainly illegal practices pervaded existence in the USSR. Clientelist politics and fraudulent economic management were ubiquitous and local agendas were pursued to the detriment of Kremlin policies. Officials in each institution systematically supplied misinformation to superior levels of authority. People in general withheld active co-operation with the authorities. Lack of conscientiousness was customary at the workplace — in factory, farm and office. A profound scepticism was widespread. Such phenomena had existed in the Russian Empire for centuries. But far from fading, they were strengthened under communism and were constant ingredients in the Soviet compound so long as the USSR lasted.
The core of my analysis is that these same features should not be regarded as wrenches flung into the machinery of state and society. They did not obstruct the camshafts, pulleys and engine. Quite the opposite: they were the lubricating oil essential for the machinery to function. Without them, as even Stalin accepted by the end of the 1930s, everything would have clattered to a standstill.
Thus the Soviet compound in reality combined the official with the unofficial, unplanned and illicit. This dualism was a fundamental feature of the entire course of the USSR’s history. So if we are to use totalitarianism in description and analysis, the term needs to undergo fundamental redefinition. The unofficial, unplanned and illicit features of existence in the Soviet Union were not ‘lapses’ or ‘aberrations’ from the essence of totalitarianist state and society: they were integral elements of totalitarianism. The conventional definition of totalitarianism is focused exclusively on the effective and ruthless imposition of the Kremlin’s commands; this is counterposed to the operation of liberal democracies. What is missing is an awareness that such democracies are by and large characterized by popular consent, obedience and order. It was not the same in the USSR, where every individual or group below the level of the central political leadership engaged in behaviour inimical to officially approved purposes. The result was a high degree of disorder from the viewpoint of the authorities — and it was much higher than in the countries of advanced capitalism. The process was predictable. Soviet rulers treated their people badly. The people reacted by defending their immediate interests in the only ways they could.
Even so, the communist rulers achieved a lot of what they wanted. They were unremovable from power and could always quell revolts and disturbances and suppress dissent. Only if they fell out irrevocably among themselves would leaders face a fundamental threat to their rule. Or indeed if, as happened in the late 1980s, they opted for policies that undermined the foundations of the Soviet order.
Alternative terms such as ‘mono-organizational society’, ‘bureaucratic centralism’ (or, for the period after Stalin, ‘bureaucratic pluralism’) are altogether too bland. They fail to encapsulate the reality of the USSR, red in tooth and claw with its dictatorial party and security police, its labour camps and monopolistic ideology. Thus totalitarianism, suitably re-designated as involving insubordination and chaos as well as harshly imposed hierarchy, is the most suitable concept to characterize the USSR. The system of power, moreover, stood in place for seven decades. Undoubtedly the regimes of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev had their own distinctive features. Yet the differences were less significant than the likenesses and this book postulates that the entire period of communist rule had a basic unity. Political dictatorship, administrative centralism, judicial arbitrariness, cramped national and religious self-expression, ideological uniformity and massive state economic intervention were durable ingredients of the Soviet compound. They were put into the crucible by Lenin and his party within a couple of years of the October Revolution; Gorbachev’s Politburo started to remove them only two or three years before the whole USSR was dissolved. The list of ingredients was constant from beginning to end.
Across the years, though, the central political leadership found that these same ingredients produced solvents which modified the original compound. The process was dynamic. Thus the consolidation of a one-party state had the unintended effect of encouraging individuals to join the party for the perks of membership. Quite apart from careerism, there was the difficulty that Marxism-Leninism was ambiguous in many fundamental ways. Nor could even a one-ideology state terminate disputes about ideas if central party leaders were among the participants
