Robert Service
* * *
THE PENGUIN HISTORY OF MODERN RUSSIA
From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century
FOURTH EDITION
Contents
A Note on Transliteration
Maps
1 The Russian Empire in 1900
2 The Soviet Union, 1924–1936
3 The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe after 1945
4 The Commonwealth of Independent States in 1997
5 The Russian Federation in 1997
Introduction
1 And Russia? 1900–1914
2 The Fall of the Romanovs 1914–1917
PART ONE
3 Conflicts and Crises 1917
4 The October Revolution 1917–1918
5 New World, Old World
6 Civil Wars 1918–1921
7 The New Economic Policy 1921–1928
8 Leninism and its Discontents
PART TWO
9 The First Five-Year Plan 1928–1932
10 Fortresses under Storm: Culture, Religion, Nation
11 Terror upon Terror 1934–1938
12 Coping with Big Brothers
13 The Second World War 1939–1945
CODA
14 Suffering and Struggle 1941–1945
PART THREE
15 The Hammers of Peace 1945–1953
16 The Despot and his Masks
17 ‘De-Stalinization’ 1953–1961
18 Hopes Unsettled 1961–1964
19 Stabilization 1964–1970
PART FOUR
20 ‘Developed Socialism’ 1970–1982
21 Privilege and Alienation
22 Towards Reform 1982–1985
23 Glasnost and Perestroika 1986–1988
24 Imploding Imperium 1989
25 Hail and Farewell 1990–1991
PART FIVE
26 Power and the Market 1992–1993
27 The Lowering of Expectations 1994–1999
28 Experimenting with Retrenchment 2000–2008
29 And Russia? from 2009
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
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PENGUIN BOOKS
THE PENGUIN HISTORY OF MODERN RUSSIA
Robert Service is emeritus professor of Russian history at Oxford University, emeritus fellow of St Antony’s College and senior fellow of the Hoover Institution. His other books include biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, a textbook on the Russian Revolution and Russia: Experiment with a People, from 1991 to the Present as well as Comrades: A World History of Communism. He writes and broadcasts for the media and is a fellow of the British Academy.
To Adele, with love
A Note on Transliteration
The transliterations in this book are a simplified version of the system used by the US Library of Congress. The first difference consists in the dropping of both the diacritical mark and the so-called soft i. Thus whereas the Library of Congress system has Sokol’nikov and Krestinskii, this book has Sokolnikov and Krestinski. Secondly, the yo sound which appears in words such as Gorbachyov is given as an ë, as in Gorbachëv. Thirdly, the yeh sound is rendered as ye when it occurs at the beginning of proper nouns such as Yeltsin.
These differences are intended to make the text less exotic in appearance. By and large, I have kept to the Russian version of proper names. But some look so odd in English that I have Anglicized them: thus Alexander rather than Aleksandr. Finally there are several non-Russian names in the text. In the case of Polish, Hungarian and Czech leaders, for example, their names are given in their native version; and the names of Ukrainian leaders are transliterated without the simplification used for Russians. This is inconsistent, but it helps to give a sense of the variety of countries involved in Russian history. A further inconsistency lies in my use of Russian-language names for most places in the USSR: thus Kharkov, not Kharkiv. Until all of us become more accustomed to place-names according to their post-Soviet official nomenclature this seems a decent workable compromise.
1 The Russian Empire in 1900
2 The Soviet Union, 1924–1936
3 The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe after 1945
4 The Commonwealth of Independent States in 1997
5 The Russian Federation in 1997
Introduction
The centrepiece of this history of Russia from 1900 to the present day is focussed on the long decades of communist rule. The Soviet years continue to lie heavily on the country. Before 1917 the Russian Empire was governed by tsars of the Romanov dynasty. Nicholas II was overthrown in the February Revolution, and the ensuing Provisional Government of liberals and socialists lasted merely a few months. Vladimir Lenin and his communist party organized the October Revolution and established the world’s first communist state, which survived until the USSR’s abolition at the end of 1991. A new compound of politics, society, economics and culture prevailed in the intervening years. The USSR was a highly centralized, one-party dictatorship. It enforced a single official ideology; it imposed severe restrictions on national, religious and cultural self-expression. Its economy was predominantly state-owned. This Soviet compound served as model for the many communist states created elsewhere.
The phases of the recent Russian past have passed with breath-taking rapidity. After the October Revolution a Civil War broke out across Russia and its former empire. Having won the military struggle, the communists themselves came close to being overthrown by popular rebellions. Lenin introduced a New Economic Policy in 1921 which made temporary concessions, especially to the peasantry; but at the end of the same decade Iosif Stalin, who was emerging as the leading party figure after Lenin’s death in 1924, hurled the country into a campaign for forced-rate industrialization and forcible agricultural collectivization. The Great Terror followed in the late 1930s. Then came the Second World War. After Germany’s defeat in 1945, Stalin brought Eastern Europe under Soviet dominion and undertook post-war reconstruction with his own brutal methods. Only after his death in 1953 could the party leadership under Nikita Khrushchëv begin to reform the Soviet order. But Khrushchëv’s rule produced such political instability and resentment that in 1964 he was ousted by his colleagues.
His successor Leonid Brezhnev presided over a phase, and a lengthy phase at that, of uneasy stabilization. When he died in 1982, the struggle over the desirability of reform was resumed. Mikhail Gorbachëv became communist party leader in 1985 and introduced radical reforms of policies and institutions. A drastic transformation resulted. In 1989, after Gorbachëv had indicated that he would not use his armed forces to maintain Soviet political control in Eastern Europe, the communist regimes there fell in quick succession. Russia’s ‘outer empire’ crumbled. At home, too, Gorbachëv’s measures undermined the status quo. Most of his central party and governmental associates were disconcerted by his reforms. In August 1991 some of them made a bungled attempt to stop the process through a coup d’état. Gorbachëv returned briefly to power, but was constrained to abandon his own Soviet communist party and accept the dissolution of the USSR.
Russia and other Soviet republics gained their independence at the start of 1992, and Boris Yeltsin as Russian president proclaimed the de-communization of political and economic life as his strategic aim. Several fundamental difficulties endured. The economy’s decline sharply accelerated. The manufacturing sector collapsed. Social and administrative dislocation became acute. Criminality became an epidemic. In October 1993, when Yeltsin faced stalemate in his contest with leading opponents, he ordered the storming of the Russian White House and their arrest. Although he introduced a fresh
constitution in December, strong challenges to his policies of reform remained. Communism had not been just an ideology, a party and a state; it had been consolidated as an entire social order, and the attitudes, techniques and objective interests within society were resistant to rapid dissolution. The path towards democracy and the market economy was strewn with obstacles. Yeltsin’s successors Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev busied themselves with orderly central power at the expense of the constitution and legality. They also cultivated respect for Soviet achievements, calling for an end to denigration of the USSR. Political and business elites benefited hugely from the profits made in energy exports. The Kremlin’s ruling group ruthlessly eliminated opposition. Authoritarian rule was re-imposed.
This turbulent history led to differing interpretations. Journalists and former diplomats published the initial accounts. Some were vehemently anti-Soviet, others were equally passionate on the other side of the debate – and still others avoided taking political sides and concentrated on depicting the bizarre aspects of life in the USSR. Few foreigners produced works of sophisticated analysis before the Second World War. It was Russian refugees and deportees who provided the works of lasting value. The Western focus on Soviet affairs was sharpened after 1945 when the USSR emerged as a world power. Research institutes were created in the USA, Western Europe and Japan; books and articles appeared in a publishing torrent. Debate was always lively, often polemical. Such discussions were severely curtailed for decades in Moscow by a regime seeking to impose doctrinal uniformity; but from the late 1980s Soviet writers too were permitted to publish the results of their thinking.
Official communist propagandists from 1917 through to the mid-1980s claimed there was nothing seriously wrong with the Soviet Union and that a perfectly functioning socialist order was within attainable range.1 Such boasts were challenged from the start. Otto Bauer, an Austrian Marxist, regarded the USSR as a barbarous state. He accepted, though, that the Bolsheviks had produced as much socialism as was possible in so backward a country.2 Yuli Martov, Karl Kautsky, Bertrand Russell and Fëdor Dan retorted that Leninism, being based on dictatorship and bureaucracy, was a fundamental distortion of any worthwhile version of socialism.3 By the end of the 1920s Lev Trotski was making similar points about bureaucratic degeneration, albeit with the proviso that it was Stalin’s misapplication of Leninism rather than Leninism itself that was the crucible for the distorting process.4 Other writers, especially Ivan Ilin and, in later decades, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, denounced Leninism as an import entirely alien to traditional Russian virtues and customs.5 This school of thought was challenged by the religious philosopher and socialist Nikolai Berdyaev who depicted the USSR as a reincarnation of Russian intellectual extremism. Berdyaev argued that the regime of Lenin and Stalin had reinforced the traditions of political repression, ideological intolerance and a passive, resentful society.6
René Fülöp-Miller’s rejoinder was that all this underestimated the cultural effervescence after the October Revolution.7 But Nikolai Trubetskoi, who fled Russia after the communist seizure of power, put forward yet another interpretation. He stressed that Russian history had always followed a path which was neither ‘European’ nor ‘Asian’ but a mixture of the two. From such ideas came the so-called Eurasianist school of thought. Trubetskoi and his fellow thinkers regarded a strong ruler and a centralized administrative order as vital to the country’s well-being. They suggested that several basic features of Soviet life – the clan-like groups in politics, the pitiless suppression of opposition and the culture of unthinking obedience – were simply a continuation of ages-old tradition.8 Nikolai Ustryalov, a conservative émigré, concurred that the communists were not as revolutionary as they seemed, and he celebrated Lenin’s re-establishment of a unitary state in the former Russian Empire. He and fellow analysts at the ‘Change of Landmarks’ journal insisted that communism in power was not merely traditionalism with a new red neckscarf. Ustryalov regarded the communists as essentially the economic modernizers needed by society. He predicted that the interests of Russia as a great power would mean steadily more to them than the tenets of their Marxism.9
After the Second World War the Eurasianism of Trubetskoi underwent further development by Lev Gumilëv, who praised the Mongol contribution to Russian political and cultural achievements.10 E. H. Carr and Barrington Moore in the 1950s steered clear of any such idea and instead resumed and strengthened Ustryalov’s stress on state-building. They depicted Lenin and Stalin first and foremost as authoritarian modernizers. While not expressly condoning state terror, Carr and Moore treated communist rule as the sole effective modality for Russia to compete with the economy and culture of the West.11
This strand of interpretation appeared downright insipid to Franz Neumann, who in the late 1930s categorized the USSR as a ‘totalitarian’ order. Merle Fainsod and Leonard Schapiro picked up this concept after the Second World War.12 They suggested that the USSR and Nazi Germany had invented a form of state order wherein all power was exercised at the political centre and the governing group monopolized control over the means of coercion and public communication and intervened deeply in the economy. Such an order retained a willingness to use force against its citizens as a normal method of rule. Writers of this persuasion contended that the outcome was the total subjection of the entire society to the demands of the supreme ruling group. Individual citizens were completely defenceless. The ruling group, accordingly, had made itself invulnerable to reactions in the broader state and society. In Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany such a group was dominated by its dictator. But the system could be totalitarian even if a single dictator was lacking. Fainsod and Schapiro insisted that the main aspects of the Soviet order remained intact after Stalin’s death in 1953.
Viewing things from a somewhat different angle, the Yugoslav former communist Milovan Djilas suggested that a new class had come into existence with its own interests and authority. Accordingly the USSR, far from moving towards a classless condition, had administrative elites capable of passing on their privileges from generation to generation.13 While not repudiating Djilas’s analysis, Daniel Bell argued that trends in contemporary industrial society were already pushing the Soviet leadership into slackening its authoritarianism – and Bell noted that Western capitalist societies were adopting many measures of state economic regulation and welfare provision favoured in the USSR. In this fashion, it was said, a convergence of Soviet and Western types of society was occurring.14
There was a grain of validity in the official Soviet claim that advances were made in popular welfare, even though several of them failed to take place until many decades after 1917. Yet Martov and others possessed greater weight through their counter-claim that Lenin distorted socialist ideas and introduced policies that ruined the lives of millions of people; and, as Solzhenitsyn later emphasized, many features of Soviet ideology originated outside Russia. Berdyaev for his part was convincing in his suggestion that the USSR reproduced pre-revolutionary ideological and social traditions. Trubetskoi was justified in pointing to the impact of Russia’s long encounter with Asia. So, too, was Ustryalov in asserting that the policies of communist leaders were increasingly motivated by considerations of the interests of the USSR as a Great Power. As Carr and Moore insisted, these leaders were also authoritarian modernizers. There was plausibility, too, in Djilas’s case that the Soviet administrative élites were turning into a distinct social class in the USSR; and Bell’s point was persuasive that modern industrial society was producing social and economic pressures which could not entirely be dispelled by the Kremlin leadership. And Fainsod and Schapiro were overwhelmingly right to underline the unprecedented oppressiveness of the Soviet order in its struggle for complete control of state and society.
This book incorporates the chief insights from the diverse interpretations; but one interpretation – the totalitarianist one – seems to me to take the measure of the USSR better than the others. There are difficulties with total
itarianism as an analytical model. A comparison of Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany reveals differences as well as similarities. In Nazi Germany many traditions of a civil society survived. The economy remained largely a capitalist one and state ownership was never dominant. The churches continued to function; priests were arrested only if they criticized Nazism. Private associations and clubs were allowed to survive so long as they offered no direct challenge to Hitler’s government. The contrast with the Soviet Union was that Hitler could count on support or at least acquiescence from most of Germany’s inhabitants, whereas Stalin had reason to distrust a dangerously large number of those over whom he ruled. State terror was a dominant presence in both the USSR and the Third Reich. But whereas most German families lived lives undisrupted by Nazism in many ways until the middle of the Second World War, Russians and other peoples of the Soviet Union were subjected to an unrelenting attack on their basic values and aspirations. Hitler was a totalitarianist and so was Stalin. One had a much harder job than the other in regimenting his citizens.
The USSR for most years of its existence contained few features of a civil society, market economics, open religious observance or private clubs. This was true not only in the 1930s and 1940s but also, to a very large extent, in subsequent decades.15 The Soviet compound was unrivalled, outside the communist world, in the scope of its practical intrusiveness. The ingredients included a one-party state, dictatorship, administrative hyper-centralism, a state-dominated economy, restricted national self-expression, legal nihilism and a monopolistic idecology. Central power was exercised with sustained callousness. It penetrated and dominated politics, economics, administration and culture; it assaulted religion; it inhibited the expression of nationhood. Such ingredients were stronger in some phases than in others. But even during the 1920s and 1970s, when the compound was at its weakest, communist rulers were deeply intrusive and repressive. What is more, the compound was patented by communism in the USSR and reproduced after the Second World War in Eastern Europe, China and eventually north Vietnam, Cuba and countries in Africa.
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