for inter-ethnic conflict, too, was growing. Social relationships were extremely harsh, often violent.
Lenin and the communists came to power expecting to solve most of these problems quickly. Their October Revolution was meant to facilitate revolution throughout Europe and to re-set the agenda of politics, economics and culture around the globe. To their consternation, revolution did not break out across Europe and the central party leaders increasingly had to concentrate on problems inherited from the tsars.
In reality the behaviour of Lenin and his successors often aggravated rather than resolved the problems. Their theories even before the October Revolution had an inclination towards arbitrary, intolerant and violent modes of rule. While proclaiming the goal of a society devoid of oppression, they swiftly became oppressors to an unprecedented degree of intensity. Soviet communists, unconsciously or not, fortified the country’s traditional political postures: the resort to police-state procedures, ideological persecution and anti-individualism derived as much from tsarist political and social precedents as from Marxism-Leninism. What is more, the concern that Russia might lose its status as a Great Power was as important to Stalin and his successors as to the Romanov dynasty. The appeal to Russian national pride became a regular feature of governmental pronouncements. Office-holders thought of themselves as Marxist-Leninists; but increasingly they behaved as if Russia’s interests should have precedence over aspirations to worldwide revolution.
Russia, of course, was not the entire USSR and not all Soviet citizens were Russians. Furthermore, it was party policy throughout the USSR’s history to transmute existing national identities into a sense of belonging to a supranational ‘Soviet people’. This was part of a general endeavour by the state to eradicate any organizations or groupings independent of its control. The central politicians could not afford to let Russian national self- assertiveness get out of hand.
But what on earth was Russia? And what was Russia’s part in the Soviet Union? These are questions which are much less easy to answer than they superficially appear. The borders of the Russian republic within the USSR were altered several times after 1917. Nearly every redefinition involved a loss of territory to the USSR’s other republics. The status of ethnic Russians, too, changed under several political leaderships. Whereas Lenin was wary of Russian national self-assertiveness, Stalin sought to control and exploit it for his political purposes; and the Soviet communist leadership after Stalin’s death, despite coming to rely politically upon the Russians more than upon other nationalities in the Soviet Union, never gave them outright mastery. Nor was Russian culture allowed to develop without restriction: the Orthodox Church, peasant traditions and a free-thinking intelligentsia were aspects of Mother Russia which no General Secretary until the accession of Gorbachev was willing to foster. Russian national identity was perennially manipulated by official interventions.
For some witnesses the Soviet era was an assault on everything fundamentally Russian. For others, Russia under Stalin and Brezhnev attained its destiny as the dominant republic within the USSR. For yet others neither tsarism nor communism embodied any positive essence of Russianness. The chances are that Russian history will remain politically sensitive. This is not simply a case of public figures whipping up debate. Russians in general are interested in discussions of Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin and Gorbachev; and the past and the present are enmeshed in every public debate.
Russia is under the spotlight in this book. But the history of Russia is inseparable from the history of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States. It would be artificial to deal exclusively with Russian themes in those many cases in which these themes are knotted together with the situation in adjacent areas. My rule of thumb has been to omit from the account those events and situations that had little impact upon ‘Russia’ and affected only the non-Russian areas of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States. On the other hand, the chapters are not designed as an account of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States with the ‘Russian factor’ being addressed only glancingly. For the general history of this huge area of Europe and Asia can be understood only when Russia’s history is thrown into relief.
In still broader terms, the plan is to treat Soviet history as a unitary period and to explain the inner strengths and strains of the USSR. Recently it has become fashionable to assert that communism in Russia could easily have been eradicated at any moment in its seventy years of existence. This is just as exaggerated a notion as the earlier conventional notion that the regime was impervious to any kind of domestic or foreign pressure.
But what kind of regime was the USSR? Continuities with the tsarist years are examined in the following chapters; so, too, are the surviving elements of the communist order in post-Soviet Russia. The shifting nature of Russian national identity is also highlighted. And an account is offered not only of the central political leadership but also of the entire regime as well as of the rest of society. This means that the focus is not confined to leading ‘personalities’ or to ‘history from below’. Instead the purpose is to give an analysis of the complex interaction between rulers and ruled, an interaction that changed in nature over the decades. Not only politics but also economics, sociology and culture are examined. For it is an organizing principle of the book that we can unravel Russia’s mysteries only by taking a panoramic viewpoint.
Greater attention is given to politics than to anything else. This is deliberate. The Soviet economic, social and cultural order in Russia is incomprehensible without sustained attention to political developments. The policies and ideas of the party leadership counted greatly; it also mattered which leader was paramount at any given moment. Politics penetrated nearly all areas of Soviet society in some fashion or other; and even though the purposes of the leadership were frequently and systematically thwarted, they never lost their deep impact on society.
Russia has had an extraordinary history since 1900. Its transformation has been massive: from autocratic monarchy through communism to an elected president and parliament; from capitalist development through a centrally owned, planned economy to wild market economics; from a largely agrarian and uneducated society to urban industrialism and literacy. Russia has undergone revolutions, civil war and mass terror; its wars against foreign states have involved defence, liberation and conquest. In 1900 no one foresaw these abrupt turns of fortune. Now nobody can be sure what the twenty-first century has in store. Yet few Russians want to repeat the experience of their parents and grandparents: they yearn for peaceful, gradual change. Among the factors that will affect their progress will be an ability to see the past through spectacles unblurred by mythology and unimpeded by obstacles to public debate and access to official documents. The prospects are not wholly encouraging. Official Russian policies since the start of the twenty-first century have unfortunately been aimed at inhibiting open-ended research and debate.
Winston Churchill described Russia as a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. As many obscurities are being dispelled, we have never been in a better position to take the measure of a country whose history after 1917 turned the world upside down. For seven decades Soviet communism offered itself as a model of social organization; and even in transition from communism Russia has kept its intriguing interest. It has been a delusion of the age, after the dissolution of the USSR, to assume that capitalism has all the answers ready-made to the problems faced by our troubled world. Communism is the young god that failed; capitalism, an older deity, has yet to succeed for most of the world’s people most of the time.
1
And Russia?
(1900–1914)
No imperial power before the First World War was more reviled in Europe than the Russian Empire. Generations of democrats hated the Romanov dynasty. Neither Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany nor Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary rivalled Russia’s Emperor Nicholas II in notoriety. Repression of Russian parties and trade unions was severe. In 1905 Nicholas reluctantly conceded a parliament (or
Yet the Russian Empire had weaknesses. Although in 1812 its troops chased Napoleon’s troops back into France, its subsequent embroilments were less impressive. In 1854–6, confronting British and French expeditionary forces in Crimea, it failed to drive them into the Black Sea. Russian pride was retrieved to some extent by victory over the Turks in the war of 1877–8. But there was no room for complacency; for the Ottoman Empire was
