The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  Unfortunately most works categorizing the USSR as totalitarian contained gross exaggerations. The concept worked best when applied to politics. Nevertheless the Soviet leadership never totally controlled its own state – and the state never totally controlled society. From the 1970s several writers in Western Europe and the USA complained that current writings were focused on Kremlin politicians and their policies to the neglect of lower administrative levels, of ‘the localities’ and of broad social groups. ‘History from below’ was offered as a corrective. This revisionism, as it became known, started up fitfully in the 1950s when David Granick and Joseph Berliner studied the Soviet industrial managers of the post-war period;16 and it raced forward in the 1970s. Ronald Suny investigated the south Caucasus in 1917–1918.17 The present author examined local party committees under the early Soviet regime.18 Diane Koenker and Steve Smith chronicled workers in the October Revolution.19 Francesco Benvenuti inspected the political leadership of the Red Army, Orlando Figes looked at peasants in the Civil War and Richard Stites highlighted experimental and utopian trends throughout society.20 The 1930s, too, were scrutinized. R. W. Davies analysed the dilemmas of policy-makers in Stalin’s Kremlin; Moshe Lewin pointed to the turbulent conditions which brought chaos to state administration.21 Francesco Benvenuti, Donald Filtzer and Lewis Siegelbaum explored the industrial labour force before the Second World War.22 An unknown USSR was hauled into the daylight as the chronic difficulties of governing the USSR were disclosed.

  This line of scholarship was rejected in the USSR until radical political reforms began in the late 1980s.23 Revisionism successfully elucidated some neglected areas of the Soviet past. But it failed to supply a general alternative to the totalitarianist model that it cogently criticized. There were anyhow serious divisions within revisionist accounts. Sheila Fitzpatrick urged that social factors should take precedence over political ones in historical explanation. She and others downplayed the importance of dictatorship and terror and for many years suggested that Stalin’s regime rested on strong popular approval.24 Stephen Kotkin proposed that Stalin built a new civilization and inculcated its new values in Soviet citizens; Joel Hellbeck suggested that a novel ‘subjectivity’ arose in society.25 Such interpretations were contentious. Stephen Cohen, Moshe Lewin and R. W. Davies agreed with Fitzpatrick that Lenin’s revolutionary strategy in the last years of his life broke with his violent inclinations of earlier years; but they objected to the gentle treatment of Stalin and his deeds. Exposing the challenges facing people as they tried to cope with their environment at every level of society, Mark Edele highlighted the systematic use of force in the building of Stalinism.26

  A parallel controversy sprang up about what kind of USSR existed in the decades after Stalin’s death. Jerry Hough investigated the authority and functions of the provincial party secretaries; and Gordon Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths as well as Hough contended that something like the economic and social interest groups that influenced politics in the West also functioned in the communist countries.27 Moshe Lewin argued that the Stalinist mode of industrialization proved unable to resist the influence of long-term trends in advanced industrial society. Universal schooling gave people a better understanding of public life and a higher set of personal aspirations.28 T. H. Rigby maintained that informal organizational links had characterized the Soviet state since its inception and that patronage networks had become strong at every level.29 The effect of such writings was to counteract the notion that no important change happened – or could happen – without being instigated by the men in the Kremlin. Analytical disagreements were less about the trends themselves than about their significance. Stephen Whitefield contended that the economic ministries held ultimate control over politics whereas Archie Brown insisted that drastic reform was possible if ever a dynamic reformer became party leader.30 The diagnoses of recent politics in the USSR were quite as fiercely disputed as those being offered for pre-war history.

  Attempts at a general account of the Soviet period became fewer, at least outside the bickerings among Western communist grouplets, as the concentration on specific phases grew. The trend was towards compartmentalizing research. Politics, economics and sociology were studied in sealed boxes. History, moreover, became disjoined from contemporary studies.

  Supporters of the totalitarianist case took a bleak view of those writings which held back from condemning the Soviet order. Martin Malia and Richard Pipes castigated what they saw as a complete lapse of moral and historical perspective.31 The debates among historians produced sharp polemics. Often more heat than light was generated. What was ignored by the protagonists on both sides was that several innovative studies in the totalitarianist tradition, particularly the early monographs of Merle Fainsod and Robert Conquest, had stressed that cracks had always existed in the USSR’s monolith. They had drawn attention to the ceaseless dissension about policy in the midst of the Kremlin leadership. They had emphasized too that whole sectors of society and the economy in the Soviet Union proved resistant to official policy.32 The history and scope of totalitarianism acquire fresh nuances. Archie Brown argued that whereas the concept was an apt description of Stalin’s USSR, it lost its applicability when Khrushchëv’s reforms were introduced and the state remained extremely authoritarian but was no longer totalitarian.33 Geoffrey Hosking stressed that pre-revolutionary attitudes of faith, nationhood and intellectual autonomy survived across the Soviet decades, even to some degree under Stalin, and functioned as an impediment to the Politburo’s commands.34

  The theory of totalitarianism, even in these looser applications, falls short of explaining the range and depth of resistance, non-compliance and apathy towards the demands of the state. The USSR was regulated to an exceptional degree in some ways while eluding central political control in others. Behind the façade of party congresses and Red Square parades there was greater disobedience to official authority than in most liberal-democratic countries even though the Soviet leadership could wield a panoply of dictatorial instruments. Informal and mainly illegal practices pervaded existence in the USSR. Clientelist politics and fraudulent economic management were ubiquitous and local agendas were pursued to the detriment of Kremlin policies. Officials in each institution systematically supplied misinformation to superior levels of authority. People in general withheld active co-operation with the authorities. Lack of conscientiousness was customary at the workplace – in factory, farm and office. A profound scepticism was widespread. Such phenomena had existed in the Russian Empire for centuries. Far from fading, they were strengthened under communism and were constant ingredients in the Soviet compound so long as the USSR lasted.

  The core of my analysis has always been that these same features should not be regarded only as wrenches flung into the machinery of state and society. They did indeed obstruct the camshafts, pulleys and engine. But at the very same time they were also the lubricating oil that was essential for the machinery to function. Without them, as even Stalin accepted by the end of the 1930s, everything would have clattered to a standstill.

  Thus the Soviet compound in reality combined the official with the unofficial, unplanned and illicit. This dualism was a fundamental feature of the entire course of the USSR’s history. So if we are to use totaliarianism in description and analysis, the term needs to undergo fundamental redefinition. The unofficial, unplanned and illicit features of existence in the Soviet Union were not ‘lapses’ or ‘aberrations’ from the essence of totalitarianist state and society: they were integral elements of totalitarianism. The conventional definition of totalitarianism is focused exclusively on the effective and ruthless imposition of the Kremlin’s commands; this is counterposed to the operation of liberal democracies. What is missing is an awareness that such democracies are by and large characterized by popular consent, obedience and order. It was not the same in the USSR, where every individual or group below the level of the central political leadership engaged in behaviour inimical to officially approved pu
rposes. The result was a high degree of disorder from the viewpoint of the authorities – and it was much higher than in the countries of advanced capitalism. The process was predictable. Soviet rulers treated their people badly. The people reacted by defending their immediate interests in the only ways they could.

  Even so, the communist rulers achieved a lot of what they wanted. They were unremovable from power and could always quell revolts and disturbances and suppress dissent. Only if they fell out irrevocably among themselves would leaders face a fundamental threat to their rule. Or indeed if, as happened in the late 1980s, they opted for policies that undermined the foundations of the Soviet order.

  Alternative terms such as ‘mono-organizational society’, ‘bureaucratic centralism’ (or, for the period after Stalin, ‘bureaucratic pluralism’) are altogether too bland. They fail to encapsulate the reality of the USSR, red in tooth and claw with its dictatorial party and security police, its labour camps and monopolistic ideology. Thus totalitarianism, suitably re-designated as involving insubordination and chaos as well as harshly imposed hierarchy, is the most suitable concept to characterize the USSR. The system of power, moreover, stood in place for seven decades. Undoubtedly the regimes of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchëv and Brezhnev had their own distinctive features. Yet the differences were less significant than the likenesses and this book postulates that the entire period of communist rule had a basic unity. Political dictatorship, administrative centralism, judicial arbitrariness, cramped national and religious self-expression, ideological uniformity and massive state economic intervention were durable ingredients of the Soviet compound. They were put into the crucible by Lenin and his party within a couple of years of the October Revolution; Gorbàchëv’s Politburo started to remove them only two or three years before the whole USSR was dissolved. The list of ingredients was constant from beginning to end.

  Across the years, though, the central political leadership found that these same ingredients produced solvents which modified the original compound. The process was dynamic. Thus the consolidation of a one-party state had the unintended effect of encouraging individuals to join the party for the perks of membership. Quite apart from careerism, there was the difficulty that Marxism-Leninism was ambiguous in many fundamental ways. Nor could even a one-ideology state terminate disputes about ideas if central party leaders were among the participants in controversy. Furthermore, leaders in the localities as well as at the centre protected their personal interests by appointing friends and associates to posts within their administrative fiefdoms. Clientelism was rife. So, too, were attempts by officials in each locality to combine to dull the edge of demands made upon them by the central leadership; and the absence of the rule of law, together with the ban on free elections, gave rise to a culture of corruption.

  Mendacious reporting to higher administrative authority was a conventional procedure. Accounts were fiddled; regulations on working practices were neglected. There were persistent grounds for worry, too, on the national question. Many peoples of the USSR enhanced their feelings of distinctness and some of them aspired to national independence. Official measures to de-nationalize society had the effect of strengthening nationalism.

  The Soviet central authorities repeatedly turned to measures intended to re-activate the compound’s elements. This sometimes led to purges of the party, mostly involving mere expulsion from the ranks but in the 1930s and the 1940s being accompanied by terror. Throughout the years after the October Revolution, furthermore, institutions were established to inspect and control other institutions. A central determination existed to set quantitative objectives to be attained by local government and party bodies in economic and political affairs. The Kremlin leaders resorted to exhortations, instructions and outright threats and gave preferential promotion in public life to those showing implicit obedience to them. Intrusive political campaigns were a standard feature; and exaggerated rhetoric was employed as the regime, centrally and locally, tried to impose its wishes within the structure of the compound created in the first few years after the October Revolution.

  The efforts at re-activation prompted individuals, institutions and nations to adopt measures of self-defence. People strove after a quiet life. Evasiveness and downright disruption were pervasive at every lower level. This in turn impelled the central leadership to strengthen its intrusiveness. Over the seven decades after 1917 the USSR experienced a cycle of activation, disruption and re-activation. There was an ineluctable logic to the process so long as the leadership aimed to preserve the compound of the Soviet order.

  Consequently the rulers of the USSR never exercised a completely unrestrained authority. The jailers of the Leninist system of power were also its prisoners. But what jailers, what prisoners! Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchëv and Gorbachëv have gripped the world’s imagination. Even losers in the struggles of Soviet politics, such as Trotski and Bukharin, have acquired an enduring reputation. And although a succession of Soviet central leaders fell short of their ambition in utterly dominating their societies, each leader wielded enormous power. The political system was centralized and authoritarian. It was also oligarchic: just a few individuals made the principal decisions – and Stalin turned it into a personal despotism. So that the particularities of character were bound to have a deep effect on public life. The USSR would not have come into being without Lenin’s intolerant confidence; and it would not have collapsed when and how it did without Gorbachëv’s naïve audacity.

  The idiosyncratic ideas of leaders, too, left their mark. Lenin’s thinking about dictatorship, industrialization and nationality had a formative influence on the nature of the Soviet state; Stalin’s grotesque enthusiasm for terror was no less momentous. Such figures shaped history, moreover, not only by their ideas but also by their actions. Stalin made a calamitous blunder in denying that Hitler was poised to invade the USSR in mid-1941; Khrushchëv’s insistence in 1956 in breaking the official silence about the horrors of the 1930s brought enduring benefit to his country.

  These were not the sole unpredictable factors that channelled the course of development. The factional struggles of the 1920s were complex processes, and it was not a foregone conclusion that Stalin would defeat Trotski. The political culture, the institutional interests and the course of events in Russia and the rest of the world worked to Stalin’s advantage. In addition, no communist in 1917 anticipated the intensity of savagery of the Civil War. State and society were brutalized by this experience to an extent that made it easier for Stalin to impose forcible agricultural collectivization. Not did Stalin and his generals foresee the scale of barbarity and destruction on the Eastern front in the Second World War. And, having industrialized their country in the 1930s, Soviet leaders did not understand that the nature of industrialism changes from generation to generation. In the 1980s they were taken aback when the advanced capitalist states of the West achieved a rapid diffusion of computerized technology throughout the civilian sectors of their economies. Contingency was an important factor in the history of twentieth-century Russia.

  Even as dominant a ruler as Stalin, however, eventually had to have an eye for the internal necessities of the system. The compound of the Soviet order was continuously imperilled, to a greater or less degree, by popular dissatisfaction. Stabilizing ingredients had to be introduced to preserve the compound, and an effort was needed to win the support from a large section of society for the maintenance of the status quo. Rewards had to be used as well as punishments.

  The attempt at stabilization started soon after 1917 with the introduction of a tariff of privileges for the officials of party and government. Before the October Revolution there had been a tension in Leninist thought between hierarchical methods and egalitarian goals; but as soon as the communists actually held power, the choice was persistently made in favour of hierarchy. Officialdom did not have it entirely its own way. Far from it: in the late 1930s the life of a politician or an administrator became a cheap commodity. But the general tendenc
y to give high remuneration to this stratum of the population was strengthened. The young promotees who stepped into dead men’s shoes were also occupying their homes and using their special shops and special hospitals. Social equality had become the goal for an ever receding future, and Marxist professions of egalitarianism sounded ever more hollow: from Stalin to Gorbachëv they were little more than ritual incantations.

  None the less the central political leaders also ensured that the tariff was not confined to officials but was extended lower into society. As early as the 1920s, those people who enrolled as ordinary party members were given enhanced opportunities for promotion at work and for leisure-time facilities. In most phases of the Soviet era there was positive discrimination in favour of the offspring of the working class and the peasantry. It was from among such beneficiaries of the regime that its strongest support came.

  Yet the nature of official policies meant that not everyone could live a cosseted life. Huge sacrifices were exacted from ordinary people at times of crisis. The basic amenities of existence were unavailable to them during the Civil War, the First Five-Year Plan and the Second World War. Life was extremely harsh for Soviet citizens in those and other phases. But at other times the regime took care not to push its demands dangerously hard. Labour discipline was notoriously slack by the standards of modern industry elsewhere. Quality of workmanship was low, punctuality poor. In addition, there was more or less full employment in the USSR from the early 1930s; and a safety-net of minimal welfare benefits was erected even for the most disadvantaged members of society from the late 1950s. It was not a comfortable existence for most people, but the provision of a guaranteed level of food, clothing and housing helped to reconcile them to life under the Soviet order.