What historians choose to argue is usually inseparable from how they get hold of, and select, their material.
A group of researchers at Harvard, funded by the US Air Force, tracked down close to 3K displaced former Soviet citizens, seeing their unique potential as informants on the USSR from within.
In this light, the designation of the USSR as “totalitarian” is not so much wrong as incomplete and intellectually limiting. It implies comparison with other regimes (Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Communist China) that may differ from the Soviet Union in many important respects. It is contaminated by the political rhetoric of the Cold War, which at times turned the concept of totalitarianism into a term of condemnation rather than a tool of analysis. Most of all, it does a bad job of explaining change over time. For the 1st half of its existence, the Soviet regime used terror as a 1st-resort technique of government; in the 2nd half, it did not.
Marxist-Leninist ideology presented itself as a “scientific” world-view based on close and objective analysis of economic data, but it was usually bad at finding clear-cut solutions to practical problems.
Labels like “leftist,” “rightist,” “bourgeois,” and “deviationist” were regularly thrown at people, but what these terms meant was unclear. For an ideology purportedly based on the values of Enlightenment rationalism, Soviet socialism made surprisingly extensive use of irrational sources of authority: leader cults, quasi-religious rituals, oracular pronouncements, public confession and recantation.
One does not have to try too hard to see further paradoxes of Soviet rule. This was a regime with an ideology of egalitarianism and social justice that was at the same time discriminatory from the very start. It oversaw a “planned” and supposedly rational economy that led to chaos in resource distribution, ad hoc bargaining, and the creation of a dense network of patron-client relations.
Most governments have to perform a balancing act between the exigencies of the present and the prospects for the future. If in doubt they normally favor the present. The leaders of the Bolshevik state, by contrast, subordinated the present to the future. Soviet people were told insistently that they would work hard and live badly for a long and indefinite period of time — all this in the interests of building an abstract noun. The USSR was a state built on the myth of inexorable historical progress from darkness to light, from nationalism to internationalism, from poverty to prosperity, from class division to social unity.
Life is wonderful! And it is wonderful above all because it will be even wonderfuller!
According to Lenin, Russia should not allow the bourgeoisie any piece of its revolution: the proletariat should take over immediately. Given that Russia was several historical steps short of the level of economic development that orthodox Marxism considered necessary for such a step, its insubstantial proletariat would require assistance from the peasantry (which could be mobilized by land reform) and from a highly organized and disciplined political party (the Bolsheviks) which would fight for its interests before it was even able to articulate them.
The Bolsheviks were making projections into the future that had little foundation in the present: how likely was it that the poor, hungry, ill-educated, fractious, and traumatized society that emerged from the Civil War would learn good habits and be able to dispense with the coercive functions of the state?
To take such predictions seriously, even as a dim and distant prospect, required a leap of faith and a concentrated effort of the collective imagination. Marxism-Leninism had to become not only the ideology of the ruling party but also the belief system of Soviet society; it had to become a political religion.
Khrushchev’s decision to expose Stalin’s crimes against his own party brought a renewed crisis of historical memory. How was the Soviet Union to redefine its historical myths, given that so many of them had grown alongside the cult of the deceased dictator?
The solution, as ever, was to return to Lenin: to assert that the leader of the Revolution represented an unblemished Bolshevik ethos that was subsequently distorted by the “cult of personality” under Stalin. But in fact the first and most enduring cult of personality had been that of Lenin.
Brezhnev took several steps back from Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization. Criticism of Stalin could now be interpreted as an unhealthy fixation on moral questions at the expense of national and state considerations. While Soviet people knew quite well about Stalin’s terror, they could also be encouraged to think of the dictator as a leader who used (often rightly) cruel means to defend the interests of the Soviet state and to build a just society. In time-honored fashion, “excesses” could be put down to the ways in which his comrades misled him or distorted his instructions.
Instead of pointing the way to a radiant Soviet future, perestroika led to an accelerated reckoning with the past. Soviet people learned that Stalin’s crimes had been not only against party members but against all manner of other people as well. Worse still, in 1989-90 Russian historians began to take aim at the hitherto untouchable subjects: Marxism, Leninism, and the Revolution itself.
Between 1987-91, history (whether political, social, or cultural) became a mass political issue in a way that it has probably never been at any other time and in any other place. How could Gorbachev cling to the idea of a legitimate Soviet order when historical sources were showing that the regime had been murderous from the very beginning?
It is true that the October Revolution is by now close to an irrelevance. When Russians look to an historical event in the Soviet period to stir their blood, they think above all of the Great Patriotic War.
Such assessments draw our attention to a central irony of the uniquely forward-looking Soviet civilization. The USSR was brought into being by a group of revolutionaries who constantly professed communism as their ultimate goal. This fundamental orientation towards the future never disappeared, though it often went out of focus. At the same time, the Soviet Union was gaining more and more of a past: its own history, its own traditions, generations of people who had been socialized as “Soviet.” How was a society obliged to pay obeisance to 1917 to keep in step with the rapid changes of the 20th century? Eventually, in the Soviet Union as in other societies, most people found their most useful point of reference not in prospective Marxist stages of development but in the near past of living memory and recent experience and the distant past of stories of common origins.
A mere 6 weeks after their seizure of power they set up an Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter Revolution and Sabotage (Cheka), which acquired judicial and executive functions early in 1918. As its name suggests, this institution was first viewed as a temporary expedient, but it proved far too useful to be dispensed with. In 1922, it was incorporated into the Ministry of Internal Affairs (NKVD).
The Bolsheviks operated an extreme variant of “us and them” ideology; for those excluded from the Soviet community, the consequences could be terrifying. But the criteria for social exclusion and physical elimination were often opaque. It was often hard to say who “we” were and who “they” might be.
It was as if all members of Soviet society were guilty until proved innocent — and innocence could not be proved once and for all, but had continually to be demonstrated anew through deeds rather than words.
The “soviets” were popularly elected councils that had first formed during the revolution of 1905. After the February Revolution of 1917, they again sprang up in all manner of environments: factories, army units, villages. The larger soviets in the major cities quickly became powerful, if unruly, institutions. They stood in a tense and uncertain relationship to the “Provisional Government” that was filled mainly with pre-revolutionary parliamentarians. By the summer of 1917, the slogan of “soviet power” — based on the notion that popularly elected soviets should take over government — was gaining force. The problem, however, was that the soviets did not represent a coherent or structured set of political interests: they accommodated several socialist parties and factions, as well as plenty of people who followed no party line.
As soviets turned into institutions of revolutionary government, their working practices became altogether less democratic than the revolutionary ideal of a popular assembly. Even before the Bolshevik takeover, the working life of a the soviets was hived off into committees, sub-committees, and smoke-filled rooms. After October, the soviets were soon overshadowed by other institutions: above all, the Bolshevik Party, which during the Civil War period assumed a close supervisory role.
In the interwar the Soviet Union (and not only there), democracy never purported to be liberal; it was quite compatible with dictatorship. To as Soviet ear, democracy in a Western understanding connoted social injustice, division, and the rule of special interests. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, democracy both acted out the laws of history and represented the concerted and organized expression of the popular will. The interests of the “toiling masses” were not watered down by “bourgeois” parliamentary institutions but rather acted out by the Bolshevik state.
Contrary to many conventional notions of the totalitarian state as striving for omniscience and control, this was a society without firm rules where everyone had the right of appeal to higher authority to gain advantage over their neighbors. The problem, however, was that everyone was vulnerable to similar appeals being made against them. What took place was “the induced self-destruction of a community.” We are left with a disturbing picture of a totalitarian regime not as an all-seeing executioner but as a slovenly and inhumane prison guard who leaves the inmates to fight a Hobbesian war of all against all, knowing that he can intervene with decisive effect in any particular conflict.
One of the many drawbacks of a violent dictatorship is that it has few ways of gauging popular opinion. Among the few sources are secret police reports on the popular mood, which reveal a good deal of everyday dissatisfaction.
Popular attitudes in Russia were often as conservative as anywhere else in the world. A clandestine survey found that more than three-quarters supported the decision to invade Czechoslovakia. “My country, right or wrong” was the general position.
At the end of 1989, democratized legislative bodies were allowed at the level of individual republics, which gave a huge boost to separatist movements.
This was no popular rebellion and no Velvet Revolution on Czechoslovak lines. Many Soviet people did not realize they had to choose between the new Russia and the old Soviet Union until the choice had been made for them by the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus in December 1991.
During the Revolution, and for much of the following 2 decades, to be poor — in theory, at least — was to be politically admirable.
The rationing system introduced in 1919 was designed according to class principles. Manual workers were entitled to 8 times as much as artisans and traders.
The Soviet Union was a “backward” country that had undergone a Marxist revolution at an historical moment when, theoretically, it did not qualify. According to Marx’s model, intensive economic development and capital concentration would be taken care of by a bourgeoisie of bankers and industrialists. Only when they had done this important historical work would socialists take over. The bourgeoisie would get its hands dirty dealing with all the problems and traumas of economic development: urban squalor, poverty, extreme economic inequality, popular political mobilization, threats of war from similar industrializing great powers.
These figures give little sense of the de facto civil war that collectivization triggered. Faced with the effective confiscation of their property, peasants engaged in desperate resistance — from hoarding of grain to slaughtering of livestock to armed rebellion.
The corollary of shortage was privilege. Since the Soviet Union was a distributional state where wealth depended less on money than on access to short-supply goods, the best way to gain access to such goods was to belong to one of the many “closed distribution” networks in Soviet society. In a category of their own stood the party, government, military, and intellectual elites.
The material well-being of Soviet people would until the very collapse of the USSR depend on their workplace — namely, on the particular closed distribution system that they had at their disposal.
With the mass consumer emphasis, the population’s sense of entitlement increased, so that price rises and other austerity measures were likely to arouse protest and even unrest.
This unrest was put down, but Soviet leaders drew the necessary conclusion: never again would they try to raise food prices.
On the other hand, the Soviet system was trapped in the story it insisted on telling of ever increasing prosperity. Among the consequences was a tendency to enter undignified and futile competition with the West over living standards. Hi-tech and diet-conscious America was much less interested than Soviet Russia in claiming supremacy in production of animal fats (even if supremacy was what it continued to enjoy).
If the Americans had nearly 100M cars by this time, the Soviet Union could count only 5M in personal use. In 1970, two-fifths of the average household budget was spent on food.
The energy sector was a microcosm of a command economy where the central planners could not let market mechanisms take over such complex tasks as assessing risk, calibrating supply and demand, and ascribing value.
In the stores butter costs 3 rubles a kg, but the cost of its production to the state is 8 rubles.
From a study of historical precedent, he concluded that “the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.” In other words, the proletariat might express particular grievances and protest on particular issues, but on its own it was unable to mount a concerted challenge to the political order that kept it down. For that to occur, a disciplined and organized party of revolutionaries had to assume leadership of the proletariat.
Lenin stated that the dictatorship of the proletariat would for the medium tern have more to do with dictatorship than with the proletariat: the transition from capitalism to communism still required a “machinery for suppression,” namely the state.
The Bolsheviks did not necessarily need to be too apologetic. They were a cross between an army and a church, and so could claim obedience and allegiance on grounds other than democratic accountability. The people needed to be led, and the party had a duty to perform this role. The Bolsheviks had ideological tools to rationalize the unequal relationship between leaders and led. In the Marxist dialectic, the “consciousness” of the political elite would join with the “spontaneity” and energy of the masses to impel socialism forward.
As the Soviet equivalent of the church, the party had to maintain doctrinal purity, yet it was also obliged to proselytize and to convert.
The Soviet regime never did anything more than tolerate the rural population, which it regarded as “backward” and an obstacle to progress.
The industrial working class was an entirely different matter: this was the agent of history.
The immediate political motivation for cultural revolution was less a commitment to social justice than the pressing need to create a new, larger, loyal, and competent elite.
By 1936, the year of Stalin’s constitution, this was declared to be a society beyond class: the antagonistic relationships between social groups due to economic inequities that characterized all other countries and eras had just ceased in the Soviet Union. Soviet society was composed of 2 full-blown “classes” (workers and peasants) and one “stratum” (the intelligentsia).
The interlude between Great Terror and war confirmed that egalitarianism was much less important to the Soviet regime than effective mobilization.
Soviet viewers were not more inclined than their Western counterparts to use the new medium for self-improving purposes. High levels of TV watching correlated neatly with low levels of education.
Marx’s attention had largely been focused on more ethnically homogenous states. His writings gave few answers to a question that was coming to preoccupy the Russian revolutionary movement: what was Marxism to do about nationalism?
By the 1970s and 1980s, it was clear that an early Bolshevik assumption — that modernization would lead to the erosion of national sentiment — had been mistaken. Soviet cities were not becoming multinational melting pots where citizens lost touch with their original ethnicity. People were showing clear signs of emotional attachment to a particular “homeland” within the socialist union.
Non-Slavs had only limited upward mobility, and were much less likely than Russians or Ukrainians to be assigned to combat units.
But Russian nationalism was not just a matter of cultural renaissance. It also fed off xenophobia and resentment. Many Russians became convinced that they were giving more to the socialist union than they were receiving from their fellow republics.
If Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were seeking liberation from the Soviet-Russian yoke, Armenia and Azerbaijan were more hostile to each other than to the Russians.
Ukrainian independence was not a cause pushed through by popular protest. Rather, it was a measure taken with minimal discussion by a political elite under the pressure of events and only later ratified by a popular vote.
In 1919 the cause of international revolution gained an organizational home with the creation of the Comintern, which pledged to fight for the overthrow of the world’s bourgeoisie and the triumph of international socialism.
To an extent, the existence of Comintern allowed the USSR to pursue a 2-track foreign policy, striking convenient deals with capitalist powers while giving vent to its internationalist anti-capitalist militancy. But the Western powers were hardly fooled, and Soviet objectives were themselves confused. Economic self-interest, ideology, and geopolitics were frequently in tension or contradiction.
Stalin was willing to profess in public his admiration for “the efficiency that the American display in everything — in industry, in technology, in literature and in life.”
Stalin’s intentions were to delay the war that he regarded as inevitable in the long term. But his calculations were based on an overestimate of the time it would take the German to overcome France and an underestimate of Hitler’s willingness to take risks.
The wartime alliance was at its strongest before the defeat of Germany was certain. From late 1943 onwards, as the issue of the postwar settlement loomed larger, irreconcilable differences came into view. The most intractable issue was Germany: neither side could agree to the country’s reunification on the other’s terms.
By the 1980s, Lenin was used to justify the policies of 27 regimes around the world. It is thus an oversimplification to dismiss Soviet socialism because it did not trigger proletarian revolution in Europe. Where it did make a big impact was in Asia and Africa. Lenin turned out to be a theorist of the Third World, not of the bourgeois West.
Third World “clients” were often less than subservient to their enormous socialist patron. Time and again, the Soviet Union funneled arms and aid into regimes that — in Moscow’s view — proved ungrateful and unworthy. Vast Soviet economic and military aid to Egypt in the 1960s did not prevent that country abruptly expelling Soviet military advisers in 1972 and allying with the Americans. By the mid 1970s, Iraq was the greatest Third World recipient of Soviet military aid, but it launched a terror campaign against its own communist party in 1978. The Soviet Union provided abundant aid to Somalia and Ethiopia, who then fought a war against each other. Worse still, the biggest and most powerful client of all — Maoist China — defiantly threw off Soviet tutelage, and by the late 1960s was seen by the Kremlin as at least as much of a geopolitical menace as the USA.
The Soviet leadership, whatever its rhetoric on the Third World, could not resist measuring itself by Western — above all, American — standards. Khrushchev was not averse to citing examples of US productivity to goad his own people into greater activity.