The USSR covered some 22.4M square kilometers, 7 times the area of India and 2.5 times that of the US.


From 1989, conflicts developed between the parliament of the USSR and those of the individual republics, mainly over the respective powers of the center and the republics. These conflicts were exacerbated by the resurgence of ethnic nationalism and increasing demands for autonomy and even for full independence.


For the sake of stability, tsarism insisted on rigid autocracy that effectively shut out the population from participation in government. At the same time, to maintain its status as a great power, it promoted industrial development and higher education, which were inherently dynamic. The result was perpetual tension between government and society, especially its educated element, known as the intelligentsia.


The tsar was absolute and unlimited in his authority, which was subject to neither constitutional restraints nor parliamentary institutions. He ruled with the help of a bureaucratic caste, subject to no external controls and above the law, and the army, one of whose main tasks was maintaining internal order.


Although Lenin and Trotsky had carried out the October coup in the name of soviets, they intended from the beginning to concentrate all power in the hands of the ruling organs of the Bolshevik Party. The resulting novel arrangement — the prototype of all totalitarian regimes — vested actual sovereignty in the hands of a private organization, called “the Party,” which, however, exercised it indirectly, through state institutions. Bolsheviks held leading posts in the state: no decisions could be taken and no laws passed without their consent.


These measures, which in 1921 received the name “War Communism,” had 2 primary objectives. One was political: as Marxists, the Bolsheviks believed that private ownership of the means of production provided the basis of political power. By nationalizing it, they undermined the opposition. They further acted in the conviction that a centralized and planned economy was inherently more efficient than a capitalist one and would in no time turn Soviet Russia into the most productive country in the world.


“War Communism” entailed 4 sets of measures:

  1. The nationalization of all the means of production and transportation.
  2. The abolition of money and its replacement by barter tokens as well as free goods and services.
  3. The imposition on the national economy of a single plan.
  4. The introduction of compulsory labor.

Money was effectively destroyed by the unrestrained printing of banknotes, which led, as intended, to an extraordinary inflation.


To prevent further attempts on his life and those of his associates, Lenin instituted the practice of taking hostages from among officials of the old regime and well-to-do citizenry: these were to be executed whenever the state’s interests required it.


Command over the troops and the formulation of strategic decisions was entrusted to professional officers of the ex-tsarist army, some 75K of whom were drafted. To prevent defections and sabotage, the orders of these officers were subject to approval of Bolshevik political commissars assigned to them. Officer families were treated as hostages.


These measures do not seem to have had the desired effect; on the contrary, the hardships and bloodshed accompanying the Revolution intensified religious feelings and led to increased church attendance.


The Russians and Germans also collaborated against Poland, which they viewed as a bastion of French influence in eastern Europe directed at them both.


Step by step, other sectors of the economy were liberalized, with private enterprise allowed in the consumer sector of industry. The “commanding heights” of the economy, embracing heavy industry, transportation, and foreign trade, remained firmly in government hands.


Although far less known, Stalin was much better positioned to succeed Lenin. Intellectually unprepossessing, a dull speaker and lackluster writer, he operated behind the scenes. Realizing early that the centralized system of government that Lenin had created vested extraordinary power in the party machine, he avoided the spotlight and instead concentrated on building up cadres loyal to himself. By 1922 he was in a unique position to manipulate policies to his own ends by virtue of the fact that he alone belonged to both the Politburo, which set policy, and the Secretariat, which managed personnel.


The factional struggle, ever growing in intensity, by now was confined to a limited circle, the members of the party’s Central Committee and a few score — a the most a few hundred — party members of high prestige. Lenin had noted a few years earlier that Communist Party policy was in fact being determined not by its rank-and-file but by the “tiny section that might be called the Party’s Old Guard.”


Within the Politburo itself, the defeated faction would sometimes call for democracy, only to have their own words from their period of power quoted against them.


Lenin passed straight from the log cabin where he had been hiding from persecution to the place of highest authority.


The Communist Party itself was ruthlessly purged. Of the 139 full and candidate members of the CC elected at 17th Congress in 1934, 115 were arrested; and of the 1966 delegates to that Congress, 1108 were arrested. The local leaderships in Leningrad, in Ukraine, and elsewhere were almost annihilated.


The major factions opposing Stalin had been defeated by 1930. The early months of 1937 had seen the defeat of the last attempt to restrain Stalin. The 18th Party Congress in 1939 marked the final transformation of Soviet politics. All independence of mind of the part of an of the Stalinist leadership had effectively vanished. Therefore the history of the USSR until 1953 was, generally speaking, confined to Stalin’s decisions and the attempts of his subordinates to gain his confidence.


Brezhnev was adept at politics within the Soviet power structure. He was a team players and ever acted rashly or hastily. Unlike Khrushchev, he did not make decisions without substantial consultation from his colleagues, and was always willing to hear their opinions.


But in any case the West was offering a pact that might or might not deter Hitler and that might lead to Soviet involvement in an uncertain war if it did not; whereas Hitler’s offer was of a great increase in Soviet territory and, at least for the present, peace.


The party, state, administrative, and intellectual cadres had been largely destroyed and replaced by intellectually and morally inferior personnel. Moreover, this new stratum had itself been heavily purged, so that all spheres were ruled by a caste motivated by dogma, fear, ambition, malice, and greed — a process commonly described as “negative selection.”


An amnesty freed prisoners from the labor camps but affected only the elite and their families and friends. Those in exile were allowed to return to the city of their choice. Molotov got his wife back, Mikoyan his son, and Khrushchev’s daughter-in-law also returned.


The revelation of Stalin’s crimes shocked the delegates and fatally undermined the legitimacy of the party at home and abroad. Khrushchev’s motive seems to have been to destroy his political opponents, believing that his promise that the Stalinist past would never recur would be accepted at face value. He signaled that coercion would not be applied again in the political arena. In effect he dealt the party a deadly blow. Its infallibility shattered, it was now just as prone to error as any other party.


There were many reforms but all to no avail. The economy had become very complex, but there was no mechanism, in the absence of the market, to coordinate economic activity in the interests of society. A bureaucratic market took over. Bureaucrats and enterprises negotiated the acquisition of inputs and agreed where the final product should go. The goal of every enterprise was to become a monopoly producer. The core of this system was the military-industrial complex, which accounted for the top quarter of output. It had first call on resource allocation.


The root of the problem was motivation. Over time fewer and fewer workers were willing to do an honest day’s work. Not subject to international competition, management was lax and resisted innovation. Overstaffing led to labor shortages, and this gave the labor force considerable leverage over management.


Native cadres in Central Asia made headway in all top party and government functions in their republics and by the late 1960s occupied more than half the posts. In the Baltic republics local dominated top positions. However, in the CPSU Politburo there was a marked preference for Russians. In 1980 among the leading 150 functionaries in the CC apparat, only 3 were non-Slav. There were also only 3 non-Slavs among the top 150 military personnel.


The 2 sides agreed to negotiate their differences, but the Soviets strengthened their military presence along the Chinese border. They also extended military aid to India, Pakistan, and North Vietnam in an effort to counter Chinese influence there.


The Helsinki Accords recognized as inviolable the postwar frontiers in Europe. In return the USSR and its socialist allies had to concede that human rights in each European state were the legitimate concern of all states.


The USSR intervened in Afghanistan in December 1979, fearing that an anti-Soviet regime could seize power there. The Soviets underestimated the tenacity of Muslim resistance and completely misjudged American reaction.


Moscow paid a heavy price for its Afghan miscalculation. Their egregious misjudgment of Western resolve over the deployment of cruise and Pershing II missiles revealed how out-of-touch Moscow decision makers, dominated by the Soviet military, had become. The long string of failures so undermined Soviet military confidence that they came to believe that the West was planning a nuclear attack on the USSR.


He underlined the need for greater social justice, a more important role for local soviets, and more participation by workers at the workplace. His goal was to set in motion a revolution controlled from above. He did not wish to undermine the Soviet system, only to make it more efficient. The leading role of the party and the central direction of the economy were to stay.


A major problem for Gorbachev was that there was no agreement at the top as to what perestroika, glasnost, and democratization should achieve. The problem was compounded by an apparent lack of clarity in Gorbachev’s own thinking. He was never able to construct a coherent goal and the means of reaching it. His frustration with the party apparat led him to formulate a very radical solution — to emasculate it. He wanted to exclude it from day-to-day involvement in the management of the economy and to end its dominance over the state legislature and party affairs. The secretariat had been the party’s brain, and all key decisions had been taken there. Gorbachev wanted to end the party officials’ domination of the soviets. The party thereby lost is dominant role at the center of the political process but gained its revenge on Gorbachev by consolidating its power at the periphery, where the weak soviets were no match for it. Hence there was a centrifugal flow of power from the center to the periphery.


Multiparty politics became legitimate in 1990, when Article 6 of the constitution, which had guaranteed a communist monopoly, was removed. Hundreds, indeed thousands of informal associations and then parties sprang up in the receptive climate of glasnost and democratization.


The economic stagnation of the late Brezhnev era was the result of various factors: the exhaustion of easily available resources, especially raw materials, and the growing structural imbalance of the economy due to the distorting effects of the incentive system, which paralyzed initiative and dissuade people from doing an honest day’s work. Under perestroika the economy moved from stagnation to crisis, and this deepened as time passed. Hence the policies of perestroika must carry much of the blame for the economic catastrophe that resulted. Gorbachev admitted in 1988 that the first 2 years had been wasted since he was unaware of the depth of the crisis when he took over. This is an extraordinary statement for a party leader to make. Either he had paid little attention to the underlying trends of the economy or no one at the top was aware of the real situation. The latter is probably more accurate, since the state planning commission had no model of how the economy functioned.


Between 1985-7 the Gorbachev leadership increased investment and defense expenditure, while at the same time state revenue was declining owing to a fall in alcohol sales and lower prices for export goods. From 1988 the situation became dire. In 1991 the economy was facing total collapse. The government found it increasingly difficult to intervene decisively.


The election of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies made it virtually impossible for the Gorbachev leadership to adopt austerity measures. The popular mood was one of spend, spend, spend. Gorbachev paid only paid cursory attention to the economy until late 1989. A charitable explanation for this would be that he was concentrating on political reform. A less charitable one would be that he lacked the intellectual capacity to grasp the seriousness of the economic crisis.