in controversy. Furthermore, leaders in the localities as well as at the centre protected their personal interests by appointing friends and associates to posts within their administrative fiefdoms. Clientelism was rife. So, too, were attempts by officials in each locality to combine to dull the edge of demands made upon them by the central leadership; and the absence of the rule of law, together with the ban on free elections, gave rise to a culture of corruption.
Mendacious reporting to higher administrative authority was a conventional procedure. Accounts were fiddled; regulations on working practices were neglected. There were persistent grounds for worry, too, on the national question. Many peoples of the USSR enhanced their feelings of distinctness and some of them aspired to national independence. Official measures to de-nationalize society had the effect of strengthening nationalism.
The Soviet central authorities repeatedly turned to measures intended to re-activate the compound’s elements. This sometimes led to purges of the party, mostly involving mere expulsion from the ranks but in the 1930s and the 1940s being accompanied by terror. Throughout the years after the October Revolution, furthermore, institutions were established to inspect and control other institutions. A central determination existed to set quantitative objectives to be attained by local government and party bodies in economic and political affairs. The Kremlin leaders resorted to exhortations, instructions and outright threats and gave preferential promotion in public life to those showing implicit obedience to them. Intrusive political campaigns were a standard feature; and exaggerated rhetoric was employed as the regime, centrally and locally, tried to impose its wishes within the structure of the compound created in the first few years after the October Revolution.
The efforts at re-activation prompted individuals, institutions and nations to adopt measures of self-defence. People strove after a quiet life. Evasiveness and downright disruption were pervasive at every lower level. This in turn impelled the central leadership to strengthen its intrusiveness. Over the seven decades after 1917 the USSR experienced a cycle of activation, disruption and re-activation. There was an ineluctable logic to the process so long as the leadership aimed to preserve the compound of the Soviet order.
Consequently the rulers of the USSR never exercised a completely unrestrained authority. The jailers of the Leninist system of power were also its prisoners. But what jailers, what prisoners! Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Gorbachev have gripped the world’s imagination. Even losers in the struggles of Soviet politics, such as Trotski and Bukharin, have acquired an enduring reputation. And although a succession of Soviet central leaders fell short of their ambition in utterly dominating their societies, each leader wielded enormous power. The political system was centralized and authoritarian. It was also oligarchic: just a few individuals made the principal decisions — and Stalin turned it into a personal despotism. So that the particularities of character were bound to have a deep effect on public life. The USSR would not have come into being without Lenin’s intolerant confidence; and it would not have collapsed when and how it did without Gorbachev’s naive audacity.
The idiosyncratic ideas of leaders, too, left their mark. Lenin’s thinking about dictatorship, industrialization and nationality had a formative influence on the nature of the Soviet state; Stalin’s grotesque enthusiasm for terror was no less momentous. Such figures shaped history, moreover, not only by their ideas but also by their actions. Stalin made a calamitous blunder in denying that Hitler was poised to invade the USSR in mid-1941; Khrushchev’s insistence in 1956 in breaking the official silence about the horrors of the 1930s brought enduring benefit to his country.
These were not the sole unpredictable factors that channelled the course of development. The factional struggles of the 1920s were complex processes, and it was not a foregone conclusion that Stalin would defeat Trotski. The political culture, the institutional interests and the course of events in Russia and the rest of the world worked to Stalin’s advantage. In addition, no communist in 1917 anticipated the measure of savagery of the Civil War. State and society were brutalized by this experience to an extent that made it easier for Stalin to impose forcible agricultural collectivization. Nor did Stalin and his generals foresee the scale of barbarity and destruction on the Eastern front in the Second World War. And, having industrialized their country in the 1930s, Soviet leaders did not understand that the nature of industrialism changes from generation to generation. In the 1980s they were taken aback when the advanced capitalist states of the West achieved a rapid diffusion of computerized technology throughout the civilian sectors of their economies. Contingency was a major factor in the history of twentieth- century Russia.
Even as dominant a ruler as Stalin, however, eventually had to have an eye for the internal necessities of the system. The compound of the Soviet order was continuously imperilled, to a greater or less degree, by popular dissatisfaction. Stabilizing ingredients had to be introduced to preserve the compound, and an effort was needed to win the support from a large section of society for the maintenance of the status quo. Rewards had to be used as well as punishments.
The attempt at stabilization started soon after 1917 with the introduction of a tariff of privileges for the officials of party and government. Before the October Revolution there had been a tension in Leninist thought between hierarchical methods and egalitarian goals; but as soon as the communists actually held power, the choice was persistently made in favour of hierarchy. Officialdom did not have it entirely its own way. Far from it: in the late 1930s the life of a politician or an administrator became a cheap commodity. But the general tendency to give high remuneration to this stratum of the population was strengthened. The young promotees who stepped into dead men’s shoes were also occupying their homes and using their special shops and special hospitals. Social equality had become the goal for an ever receding future, and Marxist professions of egalitarianism sounded ever more hollow: from Stalin to Gorbachev they were little more than ritual incantations.
None the less the central political leaders also ensured that the tariff was not confined to officials but was extended lower into society. As early as the 1920s, those people who enrolled as ordinary party members were given enhanced opportunities for promotion at work and for leisure-time facilities. In most phases of the Soviet era there was positive discrimination in favour of the offspring of the working class and the peasantry. It was from among such beneficiaries of the regime that its strongest support came.
Yet the nature of official policies meant that not everyone could live a cosseted life. Huge sacrifices were exacted from ordinary people at times of crisis. The basic amenities of existence were unavailable to them during the Civil War, the First Five-Year Plan and the Second World War. Life was extremely harsh for Soviet citizens in those and other phases. But at other times the regime took care not to push its demands dangerously hard. Labour discipline was notoriously slack by the standards of modern industry elsewhere. Quality of workmanship was low, punctuality poor. In addition, there was more or less full employment in the USSR from the early 1930s; and a safety-net of minimal welfare benefits was erected even for the most disadvantaged members of society from the late 1950s. It was not a comfortable existence for most people, but the provision of a predictable level of food, clothing and housing helped to reconcile them to life under the Soviet order.
Even so, revolts occurred at the end of the Civil War and at the end of the 1920s, and urban disturbances took place sporadically in the mid-1960s, the 1970s and the late 1980s. But, on the whole, rebellion was rare. This infrequency resulted not only from the state’s ruthless violence but also from its provision of primitive social security. There was a tacit contract between the regime and society which endured to the end of the communist era, a contract which has proved difficult for the country’s subsequent government to tear up.
Russians and other peoples of the USSR had always had ideas of social justice and been suspicious of their rulers, and the Soviet regime’s repressiveness fortified this attitude. They also noted the communist party’s failure, from one generation to another, to fulfil its promises. The USSR never became a land of plenty for most of its citizens, and the material and social benefits bestowed by communism could not camouflage the unfairnesses that pervaded society. In time, moreover, a country of peasants was turned into an industrial, urban society. As in other countries, the inhabitants of the towns directed an ever greater cynicism at politicians. The increasing contact with Western countries added to the contempt felt for an ideology which had never been accepted in its entirety by most citizens. Russia, which was hard enough to tame in 1917–1918, had become still less easy to hold in subjection by the late 1980s.
The rulers anyway faced problems which were not simply the consequence of 1917. The heritage of the more distant past also bore down upon them. Russia’s size, climate and ethnic diversity greatly complicated the tasks of government. It also lagged behind its chief competitors in industrial and technological capacity; it was threatened by states to the West and the East and its frontiers were the longest in the world. Arbitrary state power was a dominant feature in public life. Official respect for legality was negligible and the political and administrative hierarchy was over-centralized. Russia, furthermore, had an administration which barely reached the lower social classes on a day-to-day basis. Most people were preoccupied by local affairs and were unresponsive to appeals to patriotism. Education was not widely spread; civic integration and inter-class tolerance were minimal. The potential
