The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  Even so, revolts occurred at the end of the Civil War and at the end of the 1920s, and urban disturbances took place sporadically in the mid-1960s, the 1970s and the late 1980s. But, on the whole, rebellion was rare. This infrequency resulted not only from the state’s ruthless violence but also from its provision of primitive social security. There was a tacit contract between the regime and society which endured to the end of the communist era, a contract which has proved difficult for the country’s subsequent government to tear up.

  Russians and other peoples of the USSR had always had ideas of social justice and been suspicious of their rulers, and the Soviet regime’s repressiveness fortified this attitude. They also noted the communist party’s failure, from one generation to another, to fulfil its promises. The USSR never became a land of plenty for most of its citizens, and the material and social benefits bestowed by communism could not camouflage the unfairnesses that pervaded society. In time, moreover, a country of peasants was turned into an industrial, urban society. As in other countries, the inhabitants of the towns directed an ever greater cynicism at politicians. The increasing contact with Western countries added to the contempt felt for an ideology which had never been accepted in its entirety by most citizens. Russia, which was hard enough to tame in 1917–1918, had become still less easy to hold in subjection by the late 1980s.

  The rulers anyway faced problems which were not simply the consequence of 1917. The heritage of the more distant past also bore down upon them. Russia’s size, climate and ethnic diversity greatly complicated the tasks of government. It also lagged behind its chief competitors in industrial and technological capacity; it was threatened by states to the West and the East and its frontiers were the longest in the world. Arbitrary state power was a dominant feature in public life. Political interest always took precedence over legality and the political and administrative hierarchy was over-centralized. Russia, furthermore, had an administration which barely reached the lower social classes on a day-to-day basis. Most people were preoccupied by local affairs and were unresponsive to appeals to patriotism. Education was not widely spread; civic integration and inter-class tolerance were minimal. The potential for inter-ethnic conflict, too, was growing. Social relationships were extremely harsh, often violent.

  Lenin and the communists came to power expecting to solve most of these problems quickly. Their October Revolution was meant to facilitate revolution throughout Europe and to re-set the agenda of politics, economics and culture around the globe. To their consternation, revolution did not break out across Europe and the central party leaders increasingly had to concentrate on problems inherited from the tsars.

  In reality the behaviour of Lenin and his successors often aggravated rather than resolved the problems. Their theories even before the October Revolution had an inclination towards arbitrary, intolerant and violent modes of rule. While proclaiming the goal of a society devoid of oppression, they swiftly became oppressors to an unprecedented degree of intensity. Soviet communists, unconsciously or not, fortified the country’s traditional political postures: the resort to police-state procedures, ideologicàl persecution and anti-individualism derived as much from tsarist political and social precedents as from Marxism-Leninism. What is more, the concern that Russia might lose its status as a Great Power was as important to Stalin and his successors as to the Romanov dynasty. The appeal to Russian national pride became a regular feature of governmental pronouncements. Office-holders thought of themselves as Marxist-Leninists; but increasingly they behaved as if Russia’s interests should have precedence over aspirations to worldwide revolution.

  Russia, of course, was not the entire USSR and not all Soviet citizens were Russians. Furthermore, it was party policy throughout the USSR’s history to transmute existing national identities into a sense of belonging to a supranational ‘Soviet people’. This was part of a general endeavour by the state to eradicate any organizations or groupings independent of its control. The central politicians could not afford to let Russian national self-assertiveness get out of hand.

  But what on earth was Russia? And what was Russia’s part in the Soviet Union? These are questions which were much less easy to answer than they superficially appear. The borders of the Russian republic within the USSR were altered several times after 1917. Nearly every redefinition involved a loss of territory to the USSR’s other republics. The status of ethnic Russians, too, changed under successive political leaderships. Whereas Lenin was wary of Russian national self-assertiveness, Stalin sought to control and exploit it for his political purposes; and the Soviet communist leadership after Stalin’s death, despite coming to rely politically upon the Russians more than upon other nationalities in the Soviet Union, never gave them outright mastery. Nor was Russian culture allowed to develop without restriction: the Orthodox Church, peasant traditions and a free-thinking intelligentsia were aspects of Mother Russia which no General Secretary until the accession of Gorbachëv was willing to foster. Russian national identity was perennially manipulated by official interventions.

  For some witnesses the Soviet era was an assault on everything fundamentally Russian. For others, Russia under Stalin and Brezhnev attained its destiny as the dominant republic within the USSR. For yet others neither tsarism nor communism embodied any positive essence of Russianness. The chances are that Russian history will remain politically sensitive. This is not simply a case of public figures whipping up debate. Russians in general are interested in discussions of Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin and Gorbachëv; and the past and the present are enmeshed in every public debate.

  Russia is under the spotlight in this book. But the history of Russia is inseparable from the history of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and its group of independent successor states. It would be artificial to deal exclusively with Russian themes in those many cases in which these themes are knotted together with the situation in adjacent areas. My rule of thumb has been to omit from the account those events and situations that had little impact upon ‘Russia’ and affected only the non-Russian areas of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States. On the other hand, the chapters are not designed as an account of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States with the ‘Russian factor’ being addressed only glancingly. For the general history of this huge area of Europe and Asia can be understood only when Russia’s history is thrown into relief.

  In still broader terms, the plan is to treat Soviet history as a unitary period and to explain the inner strengths and strains of the USSR. Recently it has become fashionable to assert that communism in Russia could easily have been eradicated at any moment in its seventy years of existence. This is just as exaggerated a notion as the earlier conventional notion that the regime was impervious to any kind of domestic or foreign pressure.

  But what kind of regime was the USSR? Continuities with the tsarist years are examined in the following chapters; so, too, are the surviving elements of the communist order in post-Soviet Russia. The shifting nature of Russian national identity is also highlighted. And an account is offered not only of the central political leadership but also of the entire regime as well as of the rest of society. This means that the focus is not confined to leading ‘personalities’ or to ‘history from below’. Instead the purpose is to give an analysis of the complex interaction between rulers and ruled, an interaction that changed in nature over the decades. Not only politics but also economics, sociology and culture are examined. For it is an organizing principle of the book that we can unravel Russia’s mysteries only by taking a panoramic viewpoint.

  Greater attention is given to politics than to anything else. This is deliberate. The Soviet economic, social and cultural order in Russia is incomprehensible without sustained attention to political developments. The policies and ideas of the party leadership counted greatly; it also mattered which leader was paramount at any given moment. Politics penetrated nearly all areas of Soviet soc
iety in some fashion or other; and even though the purposes of the leadership were frequently and systematically thwarted, they never lost their deep impact on society.

  Russia has had an extraordinary history since 1900. Its transformation has been massive: from autocratic monarchy through communism to an elected president and parliament; from capitalist development through a centrally owned, planned economy to wild market economics; from a largely agrarian and uneducated society to urban industrialism and literacy. Russia has undergone revolutions, civil war and mass terror; its wars against foreign states have involved defence, liberation and conquest. In 1900 no one foresaw these abrupt turns of fortune. Now nobody can be sure what the rest of the twenty-first century has in store. Yet few Russians want to repeat the experience of their parents and grandparents: they yearn for stability and peaceful, gradual change. Among the factors that will affect their progress will be their degree of ability to see the past through spectacles unblurred by mythology and unimpeded by obstacles to public debate and access to official documents. The prospects are not very encouraging. Official Russian policies since the start of Putin’s rule have unfortunately been aimed at inhibiting open-ended research and debate.

  Winston Churchill described Russia as a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. As many obscurities are being dispelled, we have never been in a better position to take the measure of a country whose history after 1917 turned the world upside down. For seven decades Soviet communism offered itself as a model of social organization; and even in transition from communism Russia has kept its intriguing interest. It has been a delusion of the age, after the dissolution of the USSR, to assume that capitalism had ready-made answers to all the problems faced by our troubled world. Communism is the young god that failed; capitalism, an older deity, has yet to succeed for most of the earth’s people most of the time.

  1

  And Russia? (1900–1914)

  No imperial power before the First World War was more reviled in Europe than the Russian Empire. Generations of democrats hated the Romanov dynasty. Neither Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany nor Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary rivalled Russia’s Emperor Nicholas II in notoriety. Repression of Russian parties and trade unions was severe. In 1905 Nicholas reluctantly conceded a parliament (or Duma) after months of revolutionary turmoil; but the First Duma, which met in 1906, proved unable to stand hard against the monarchy. Manipulating the new Basic Law to his advantage, the Emperor dispersed the Second Duma and redrew the electoral rules so as to obtain a more compliant Third Duma.

  Yet the Russian Empire had weaknesses. Although in 1812 its troops chased Napoleon’s troops back into France, its subsequent embroilments were less impressive. In 1854–6, confronting British and French expeditionary forces in Crimea, it failed to drive them into the Black Sea. Russian pride was retrieved to some extent by victory over the Turks in the war of 1877–8. But there was no room for complacency; for the Ottoman Empire was generally recognized as being in a condition of irreversible decline. Successive Romanov emperors, whose dynasty had ruled Russia since 1613, saw that much needed to be done to secure their frontiers. And two powers were thought extremely menacing: Germany and Austria-Hungary. They were expected to take military and economic advantage of Ottoman decline; and, in particular, Berlin’s plan to construct a railway from the Mediterranean seaboard to Baghdad was regarded with trepidation in St Petersburg.

  An anonymous picture of the structure of Russian Imperial society circulated before 1917. The workers at the bottom declare how the other layers of people relate to them. From top to bottom, the statements are as follows:

  ‘They dispose of our money.’

  ‘They pray on our behalf.’

  ‘They eat on our behalf.’

  ‘They shoot at us.’

  ‘We work for them while they …’

  Nicholas II’s problems did not exist solely in the west. The Russian Empire, covering a sixth of the world’s earth surface, was a continent unto itself. Its boundaries stretched from the Baltic and Black Seas to the Pacific Ocean. In the late nineteenth century, the government in St Petersburg – which was then the Russian capital – joined in the international scramble to expand imperial possessions in Asia and, in 1896, compelled Beijing to grant a profitable railway concession to Russia in northern China. But Japan’s rising power gave cause for concern. In January 1904 Nicholas ill-advisedly decided to declare war on her: the result was humiliating defeat both on land and at sea. Japanese military power remained a menace to Russia for the ensuing four decades.

  Japan ended this particular war in 1906 through the treaty of Portsmouth on terms generous to Nicholas II. Central Europe, however, remained dangerous and Russia had to cultivate a friendship with France in order to counterbalance the Germans. A Franco-Russian security agreement had been signed in 1893, and this was followed in 1907 by an Entente involving both France and Britain. Meanwhile conciliatory gestures continued to be made to Germany. For Russia, while being a rival of Germany, also benefited from trade with her. Grain, timber and dairy products were exported to Germany; and German finance and industry were important for the growth of manufacturing in St Petersburg. Russia had reason to avoid any closer alliance with Britain and France. Britain competed with Russia for influence in Persia and Afghanistan, and France made occasional demands infringing Russian interests in the Near East. Yet Russia’s financial well-being depended more heavily upon France and Britain than upon Germany; and in the longer run the rivalry with Germany and Austria-Hungary would be hard to restrict to the modalities of diplomacy.

  Russia’s very vastness was more a problem than an advantage. Only Britain with her overseas domains had a larger empire; but Britain could lose India without herself being invaded: the same was not true of Russia and her land-based empire. Russia had prospective enemies to the west, south and east.

  The link between industrialization and military effectiveness had been recognized by Peter the Great, who reigned from 1689 to 1725 and set up armaments works in Tula and elsewhere. But Peter’s fervour for industrial growth resulted more from a wish to improve his armies’ fighting capacity than to achieve general industrialization. In any case, his keenness to establish factories was not emulated by his immediate successors. Even so, railways had started to be built in the 1830s, and in the 1880s and 1890s governmental policy became favourable again to rapid industrialization. Sergei Witte, Minister of Finances, zealously promoted the case for factories, mines and banks as the Russian Empire pursued its capitalist economic development. Nicholas II gave him his support at home, and Witte relayed his own message to the world’s financiers that the profit margins in Russia were huge and the workers obedient.1

  And so manufacturing and mining output rose by an annual rate of eight per cent in the last decade of the nineteenth century and of six per cent between 1907 and the outbreak of the Great War. Fifty thousand kilometres of rail-track had been laid by 1914, including the Trans-Siberian line which linked Moscow to Vladivostok on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. State contracts were vital for this purpose. The armaments factories were sustained by the government’s determination to become secure against Germany and Austria-Hungary in the west and Japan in the east. Investment from abroad was also crucial. Nearly half the value of Russian securities excluding mortgage bonds was held by foreigners.2 Metallurgical development was especially dynamic. So, too, was the exploitation of the empire’s natural resources. Alfred Nobel turned the Baku oilfields into the world’s second largest producer after Texas. Timber was also an important export; and coal, iron and gold were extracted intensively.

  Russia’s domestic industrialists and bankers, too, were highly active. In the Moscow region in particular there was a growing number of large textile plants. At the same time there was an increased output of consumer goods. Clothing, which was manufactured mainly for the home market, was easily Russia’s largest industry and, in combination with food-processing, amounted to half of the empire’s i
ndustrial output (while metal-working and mining enterprises contributed about a seventh).3 Not only armaments and railways but also shoes, furniture and butter were vital elements in the Russian Empire’s economic transformation. Her industry was by no means neglectful of the market for goods of popular consumption.

  Although industry led the advance, agriculture was not motionless. Grain harvests increased by an annual average of roughly two per cent from the beginning of the 1880s through to 1913. This change was not smooth and there were several set-backs. The worst was the great famine which afflicted Russia’s Volga region in 1891–2, and droughts remained an intermittent problem across the empire. Yet the general situation was moderately positive. For example, cereal production per capita rose by thirty-five per cent between 1890 and 1913. The Russian Empire’s exports of wheat and rye made her the world’s greatest grain exporter, and roughly 11.5 million tons of cereals were sold abroad each year in the half-decade before the Great War. In the villages, moreover, there was a growing willingness to experiment with new crops: the acreage of sugar-beet was expanded by two fifths between 1905 and 1914.4 There was success with the attempt to expand the production of potatoes and dairy products in the Baltic region, and areas of ‘Russian’ central Asia were given over to cotton-growing.

  This diversification of crops was facilitated by the use of factory-produced equipment. Such machinery was found mainly on the large landed estates where the hired hands were the principal section of the labour-force; but peasants, too, bought metal ploughs, corrugated-iron roofs and wire fences as well as leather shoes, nails and greatcoats whenever they could afford it.