HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK
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Le Monde diplomatique
December 2001
WHY THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THE SOVIET PAST
The history of the Russian future
By MOSHE LEWIN ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Professor emeritus, University of Pennsylvania. Author of The making of
the Soviet system: essays in the social history of interwar Russia,
Methuen, London, 1985, and The Gorbachev phenomenon: a historical
interpretation, Radius, London, 1988 The Soviet system created in 1917
finally collapsed a decade ago with Mikhail Gorbachev's resignation, and
was replaced by the Russian Federation. But we still do not understand
what the Soviet system was like. What was the relationship between
Stalinism and Tsarism? How did conservatism andbureaucracy defeat the
need for reform? Russia now is divided between nostalgia and rejection
of its past.
We need to correct two mistakes in contemporary thought about the
Soviet Union: the confusion of anti-communism with real analysis of the
USSR and the belief that the entire history of the Soviet Union was
Stalinism, or one long gulag.
Anti-communism is an ideology that pretends to be scientific. Under
cover of a commitment to democracy, it ignores reality and promotes
conservatism by exploiting the dictatorial nature of a hostile regime.
German intellectuals who emphasised Stalin's atrocities to whitewash
Hitler did this. McCarthyism in the United States was based on the fear
of communism. The West, in defending human rights, has been indulgent
to some and castigated others, but has contributed little to a proper
understanding of the Soviet system.
We cannot easily classify the Soviet system because except during
the civil war period, when it was little more than a military camp there
were several different Soviet systems. Russian history is a laboratory
in which we can study the development of different authoritarian
systems and their crises down to the present day. Socialism has been
understood as a deepening, rather than a rejection, of political
democracy. Its tenets are socialisation of the economy and
democratisation of the political regime. But in the USSR, there was only
statification of the economy and bureaucratisation of politics. We
cannot describe the Soviet system
after the death of Stalin in 1953 as socialism, since a prerequisite
of socialism is that economic assets are owned by society as a whole,
not by a bureaucracy.
The Soviet system has been discussed for too long in the wrong,
"socialist" terms: the confusion arose because the USSR was not a
capitalist economy its economic assets were owned by the state and
entrusted to top-level bureaucrats. So the Soviet system belongs in the
same category as traditional regimes where the ownership of vast estates
conferred power over the state. The pre-Soviet-Revolutionary Muscovy
autocracy maintained an influential bureaucracy, even though the
sovereign held absolute power. The bureaucracy also became all-powerful
in the Soviet Union, and the resulting "bureaucratic absolutism" was a
modern version of Tsarist rule.
Although the bureaucratic Soviet state recruited its personnel from
among the lower classes, it inherited Tsarist institutions and used
Tsarist methods. Even Lenin complained that whole sections of the
Tsarist administration remained in place after the
revolution unavoidably, since the new regime had much to learn, and had
to rely on the experience of government departments, which operated by
the old methods. A new state was created, but its civil servants were
ancien regime.
Lenin's problem was improving efficiency. Whenever a new government
department was needed, a special commission was appointed to supervise
its establishment. The usual practice was to ask a historian of
government administration or an experienced civil servant to study the
functioning of a similar department under the Tsarist regime. When there
was no Tsarist precedent, Western models were used.
Stalin went even further, taking the Tsarist state based on the
absolute power of a bureaucratic hierarchy as his quasi-official model.
Maintaining that model was essential to the Soviet system. Even the
apparently new office of general secretary kept Tsarist features. The
imposing ceremonies of both the Tsarist and Soviet regimes derived from
a common culture, in which the emphasis on icons,
and on images of strength and invincibility, disguised internal
fragility.
In the last decades of the Soviet era, the favourite name for the
strong state the construction of which began in the late 1920s, was
derzhava (great power), a term borrowed from the Tsarist vocabulary,
and particularly popular in conservative circles. In Lenin's day
derzhavnik (an advocate of derzhava) was a derogatory term for
supporters of ruthless nationalism. Its later popularity came from an
association with samoderzhets (autocrat) the official term for the
power of the Tsar. The hammer and sickle replaced the Tsarist golden
globe and cross, but they became empty relics of a revolutionary past.
State ownership of all land, entrusted to an absolute monarch, had
been the distinguishing feature of several pre-revolutionary regimes in
central and eastern Europe. In the name of socialism in the USSR, state
ownership was extended to the entire economy and other sectors. This
system, despite its more modern appearance, was essentially a
continuation and strengthening of the earlier model of state ownership
of land, which had been the main economic resource.
The state as developer
Although the Soviet state belonged in the same category as earlier
land-owning autocracies, it fulfilled a specifically 20th century
purpose that of the state as developer. There was a historical need for
a state capable of directing economic development. The state played and
continues to play this role in Eastern and Middle Eastern countries,
including the old rural empires of China, India and Iran. The emergence
of the Stalinist state was partly determined by this need, even if
Stalinism was a dangerous distortion of it. And the elimination of
Stalinism, like the elimination of Maoism in China, proves that a
transition to dictatorship can be reversed.
By the 1980s the Soviet Union had reached a high level of economic
and social development, but the system was entrenched. The reforms
envisaged by Yuri Andropov could have given the country what it needed
desperately a reformed, active state still capable of directing economic
development,
but while gradually freed from its obsolete authoritarianism and
keeping pace with social and political change.
Instead, recourse to the tired symbolism of derzhava, reflecting
the interests of the groups in power, showed that the state had run out
of steam. Political power was used for personal ends. This prevented the
state from acting as developer. Rather than setting the computer
beside the hammer and sickle, Soviet leaders took refuge in a
conservatism at odds with the aspirations of the people, who were living
in the 20th not the 18th
century. A gap opened between state and citizens.
The Soviet system is best described as "bureaucratic absolutism", a
term borrowed from studies of the 18th-century Prussian monarchy. The
Prussian monarch, though titular head of the bureaucracy, was dependent
on it. Party leaders in the USSR, supposed monarchs of the state, lost
all power over their bureaucrats. The memoirs of former Soviet ministers
reveal nostalgia for the Soviet super-state. They fail to understand
that infatuation with great-power status was at its height just as
the state ceased to fulfil its earlier functions. Derzhava was the last
form of a system about to share the fate of other outmoded regimes with
which it had many features in common.
The Soviet period was typical of Russian history because of the
importance of the international environment. Russia's history has
been a series of upheavals largely determined by relations with its
neighbours. Russian sovereigns were forced to develop such relations
through all possible channels, including ideology: whether they
borrowed their ideas from abroad or opposed foreign ideas with
home-thought concepts, they had to keep a constant watch on the outside
world.
International developments also had a major influence on the
history of the Soviet Union. The first world war decided the course of
Leninism and Soviet Russia in the 1920s, while Stalinism was conditioned
by the depression of the 1930s and by the second world war. At the
height of its power in the
1930s, the Stalinist regime enjoyed considerable prestige in the
West despite the persecution of Soviet citizens; this was mostly the
result of the West's negative self-image, caused by the depression.
Russia seemed to have impressive industrial impetus and many believed
its poverty would soon be ended by industrial growth. At the time of
victory over Germany in 1945, Stalinism also looked good, although the
Soviet Union was suffering from extreme poverty that could not be
explained just by the war.
The cold war ended this positive image of the Soviet regime.
According to Stalin's interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov, it really began
with Stalin's annoyance at the US delay in landing in Normandy and
opening a second front. Stalin was convinced that Roosevelt was
manoeuvring to keep the US out of the war in Europe until the two major
belligerents, Germany and the USSR, were exhausted. From Moscow, the
atomic bombs dropped on Japan seemed to confirm that the US intended to
assert a new relationship with the USSR and the rest of the world.
Whether that was the intention, the effect was to impose the role of
superpower on the Soviet Union, beginning an arms race that perpetuated
the most conservative features of its state system and undermined its
ability to reform them.
At the same time, the US replaced the old powers of Britain, France
and Germany as a model for Soviet leaders, and became the secret measure
for all Soviet performance. As a result, some Soviet leaders realised
that their country was increasingly lagging behind. Others refused
to accept reality. After the Soviet defeat in the race to the moon, the
country's inability to carry through a computer revolution spread
helplessness in some ruling circles, while conservatives continued
to bury their heads in the sand. The infatuation with everything
American led many former members of the nomenklatura to court
favour with the US when they took control of the Kremlin under Boris
Yeltsin.
Welfare paradise or disaster?
It is natural that those researching Russia in the 1990s should
make comparisons with the last years of the Soviet system, although it
is strange that sociologists who wrote books highly critical of the
Soviet system should now depict that as a welfare paradise: the standard
of living of the Russians has fallen constantly since the early 1990s.
Not just social welfare benefits have been eroded.
Attendance at theatres, concerts and circuses is in steep decline.
People use libraries far less and newspaper subscriptions have fallen
dramatically. There was much more time for cultural activities in the
last years of the Soviet Union, when leisure hours were increasing. Now
longer working hours are the rule, and many Russians also work on their
smallholdings or allotments to supplement their incomes or just to
survive.
New rights and freedoms, like the expensive services now offered,
have benefited only the richer, better-qualified and more
entrepreneurial Russians. Outside Moscow, access to culture has been
considerably reduced. Now that television has become the main
recreation, sociologists are critical of the dismal quality of Russian
TV. There has been a even more significant decline in scientific
research, student enrolment, and medical and social services and a fall
in demographic vitality, suggesting the survival of the nation is at
stake.
To divert attention from the decline, the new authorities have begun
a big campaign vilifying the Soviet system, using all the tricks of the
West. The Soviet Union is shown as a monstrosity from the original sin
of 1917 through to the failed coup of August 1991, which began the new
era of freedom. Modern Russia, already pathetically weakened, is
abasing itself as well: not content with plundering the economy, the
"reformers" are also attacking history, and from ignorance rather
than through critical analysis.
They search frantically for other versions of the past to satisfy
the national craving for a new identity. First came reappropriation of
anything Tsarist and pre-revolutionary, then rejection of the Soviet
Union and all its works, followed by rehabilitation of the civil war
Whites. This enthusiasm for anything that the Bolsheviks opposed is
stupid. Many Russians have reacted by seeing the elite who grabbed power
in 1991 as Tartar invaders, hostile to the interests of the nation.
And many of Russia's best minds now see no prospect for Russia other
than a decline to the level of the third world.
Despite the adverse effects of obscurantism, there are some signs
of recovery. At a well-attended conference of scholars in Moscow, the
political philosopher Boris Mezhuev stressed that a country cannot
exist without its history. Russian reformers, he said, whether
communists, democrats, slavophiles or Westernisers, all fail to
establish a rational and morally justified continuity between Russia's
past and future. Some see the past as the only model; others deny it any
validity. For the former, the future can only be a renarration of old
themes. For the latter, there is only a mechanical acceptance of an
opposite that has no precedent in Russian history. Mezhuev argued that
the future had to be seen primarily in its relation to the past,
especially the past Russia was only just leaving behind.
A total loss?
He challenged free-market economist Andrei Illarionov's view that
the 20th century had been a total loss for Russia. According to
Illarionov, the socialist revolution diverted Russia from the path to
liberalism, turning it from giant to midget; he believes that the only
hope is a return to the free market. Mezhuev argues that it is easy to
be wise after the event, hard to analyse reality. To reproach Russia
with not having become a free-market economy early in the 20th
century was to be profoundly ignorant both of Russian history and
liberal economics. Liberalism was the outcome of a long historical
development through the Middle Ages, the Reformation and the
Renaissance, often involving revolutions against absolute monarchies.
Mezhuev contends that it is wrong to focus on the Bolshevik
revolution as the key to Russian history in the 20th century. There had
been three revolutions in 12 years; the first, in 1905, was defeated;
the second, in February 1917, saw the victory of moderate revolutionary
forces. The October revolution, which brought the radicals to power, was
simply the last phase. As an earlier philosopher, Nikolai Berdiaev,
correctly perceived, the Bolsheviks were the instruments of the
revolution, not its makers and it was pointless to condemn the cruelty
on moral grounds. All civil wars are cruel. Revolutions are not moral or
judicial acts: they are acts of coercion. All have been bloody.
To condemn the Russian revolutions, Mezhuev continued, was to
condemn the Russian intelligentsia and the course of Russian history,
which had prepared the ground for them. Revolutions always
disappoint expectations, but they open new historical chapters. The
important thing was to understand the meaning of the chapter, and not to
rely on the interpretations of victors and vanquished. The socialism of
the Soviet Union had been "Russian capitalism" capitalist in
technological content and anti-capitalist in form.
Mezhuev argued that it was difficult for a country on the periphery
of the West to combine modernisation with democracy, since one must give
way to the other for a time. Because the Bolsheviks understood this,
they were victorious in the civil war and second world war. China also
understood this, when it chose to combine accelerated modernisation
and a market economy with an undemocratic political system. No regime
was wise to reject the past as empty. The past should be used to
encourage new progress, and any real grandeur it had should be
preserved.
With its nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary era, modern Russia is
more distant from the West than the Bolsheviks were, Mezhuev observed.
Russian liberals had nothing to boast of but the destruction of
past achievements. But Russia had to build its future on the
preservation and development of those achievements. It must maintain
continuity while defining new tasks. The link with the past was broken,
but it would be restored. He was not calling for a return to a pre- or
post-revolutionary past. Russians had simply to ask themselves what in
the past was dear to them, and what
would help them face the future. The 20th century had been a time
of great catastrophes, but those who sought to erase it from memory
would then dismiss the greatness of Russia.
One may not always agree with Mezhuev, but he identifies the crux
of the problem: Russia's past is of vital concern for 20th-century
European and world history, and that cannot be understood without
impartial study of the Soviet system.
Translated by Barry Smerin
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