The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  Gorbachëv did the groundwork and put up the scaffolding when reconstructing the USSR. Then Yeltsin built up the new Russian edifice. Russia remained a great power possessing and brandishing nuclear weapons but was no longer a superpower that appeared likely to endanger peace in distant continents. The countries of Eastern Europe, so long under the USSR’s heel, enjoyed their hard-won freedom in the 1990s.

  Not everything gave reason for cheer, and in some respects the situation was worse under Yeltsin and his successors than under Gorbachëv. In 1993 Yeltsin reintroduced violence to political struggle in Moscow; and in 1994 and 1999 he ordered the attacks on Chechnya. It is far from clear that Yeltsin and his group would have stood down if he had lost the election of 1996. National elections were conducted with blatant unfairness. Enormous power is concentrated in the Russian presidency and it has not been exercised with decreasing restraint. The use of military force against Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 was a flagrant breach of international law. At home, democratic and legal procedures were treated with contempt by politicians in Moscow and the provinces. Public debates were strident and unbecoming. Administration was conducted on an arbitrary basis. The judiciary lost much of its short-lived semi-independence. Criminality became rife. Ordinary citizens had little opportunity to defend themselves against the threats of the rich and powerful. Impoverishment remained wide-spread. Programmes of social and material welfare were patchy and the economy has yet to surmount the effects of de-industrialization and environmental pollution.

  Despite the popularity of the administration’s turn towards a nationalist agenda, a widespread cynicism has persisted about politics and politicians. Russians agree more about what they dislike than about what they like. The price they are paying comes in their diminutive impact on the government and other state agencies even at elections.

  The burden of the past lies heavily upon Russia, but it is a burden which is not solely the product of the assumption of power by Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries. Under the tsars, the Russian Empire faced many problems; approval of the state’s purposes was largely absent from society. The gap in industrial productivity was widening between Russia and other capitalist powers. Military security gave rise to acute concern; administrative co-ordination and educational progress remained frail. Political parties in the State Duma had little impact on public policy. Furthermore, the traditional propertied classes made little effort to engender a sense of civic community with the poorer members of society. And several non-Russian nations had sharp feelings of national resentment. The Russian Empire was a restless, unintegrated society.

  Nicholas II, the last tsar, had put himself in double jeopardy. He had seriously annoyed the emergent elements of a civil society: the political parties, professional associations and trade unions. At the same time he stopped trying to suppress them entirely. The result was that there was constant challenge to the tsarist regime. The social and economic transformation before the First World War merely added to the problems. Those groups in society which languished in poverty were understandably hostile to the authorities. Although other groups had enjoyed improvement in their material conditions, several of these constituted a danger since they felt frustrated by the nature of the political order. It was in this situation that the Great War broke out and dislodged the remaining stays of the regime. The consequence was the February Revolution of 1917 in circumstances of economic dislocation, administrative strains and military emergency. Vent was given to a surge of local efforts at popular self-rule; and workers, peasants and military conscripts across the empire asserted their demands without impediment.

  These same circumstances made political liberalism, conservatism and fascism unlikely to succeed for some years ahead: some kind of socialist government was by far the likeliest outcome after the Romanov monarchy’s removal. It was not inevitable that one of the extremist variants of socialism – Bolshevism – should mount to power. What was scarcely avoidable was that once the Bolsheviks made their revolution, they could not survive without making their policies even more violent and regimentative than they already were. Lenin’s party had much too little durable support to remain in government without resort to terror. This in turn placed limits on its ability to solve those many problems identified by nearly all the tsarist regime’s enemies as needing to be solved. The Bolsheviks aspired to economic competitiveness, political integration, inter-ethnic co-operation, social tranquillity, administrative efficiency, cultural dynamism and universal education. The means they employed inevitably vitiated their declared ends.

  After 1917 they groped towards the invention of a new kind of order in state and society, an order described in this book as the Soviet compound. Theirs was not a pre-planned experiment. Nor did Bolshevik leaders expect the outcome that they achieved; on the contrary, they proclaimed a utopian prognosis of a world-wide community of humanity emancipated from all trammels of state authority. Instead they strongly increased state authority. They should have and could have known better; but the plain fact is that they did not. Their policies quickly led to the one-party state, ideological autocracy, legal nihilism, ultra-centralist administration and the minimizing of private economic ownership. Assembled by Lenin, the Soviet compound underwent drastic remodelling by Stalin; and without Stalin’s intervention it might not have lasted as long as it did. But Stalinism itself induced strains which were not entirely relieved by the adjustments made after his death in 1953. In their various ways Khrushchëv, Brezhnev and Gorbachëv tried to render the compound more workable. In the end Gorbachëv opted for reforms so radical that the resultant instabilities brought about the dissolution of the compound and an end to the Soviet Union.

  But why did the compound survive so long? Ample use of force was certainly a crucial factor, and fear of the communist state was always a powerful deterrent to opposition. But force by itself would not have worked for decade after decade. Another reason was the creation of a graduated system of rewards and indulgences which bought off much of the discontent that had accumulated under the tsars. The promotees to administrative office were the system’s main beneficiaries; and there was just enough benefit available to others to keep them from actions of rebelliousness. Rewards were a great stabilizer. But even the combination of force and remuneration was not enough to make this a durable system. There also had to be a recurrent agitation of the compound’s ingredients. Expulsions from the party; quotas for industrial production; inter-province rivalry; systematic denunciation from below: these were among the techniques developed to keep the compound from internal degradation. They served as solvents of the tendency of the stabilizers to become the dominant ingredients in the compound.

  Soviet communism had several advantages when consolidating itself in power. Firstly it worked with the grain of many popular traditions; in particular it used the existing inclinations towards collective welfare and social revenge. This enabled communists to strengthen the existing state forms of repression, state economic intervention and disrespect for due legal process. At the same time it promised to deliver material prosperity and military security where the tsars had failed. To this extent the communist order found favourable conditions in Russia in the early part of the twentieth century.

  Moreover, the Soviet order had achievements to its name, achievements that were indispensable for its long survival. Communism deepened and widened educational progress. It spread respect for high culture, especially literature; it subsidized the performing arts; it increased the official commitment to science. It broadened access to sport and leisure activities. It eradicated the worst excesses of popular culture, especially the obscurantist and violent features of life in the Russian countryside. It built towns. It defeated Europe’s most vicious right-wing military power, Nazi Germany. In subsequent decades, at last, it succeeded in providing nearly all its citizens with at least a minimal safety-net of food, shelter, clothing, health care and employment. It offered a peaceful, predictable framework of people to liv
e their lives.

  There were other achievements of a more objectionable quality which allowed the communists to perpetuate their regime. The USSR made itself the epicentre of the world communist movement. It also became a military superpower. It not only imposed its authority throughout the outlying lands of the tsars but also acquired a vast new dominion over Eastern Europe. This inner and outer empire was not formally acknowledged as such; but Russian popular pride in its acquisition was a stimulus to the belief that Soviet communism was part of the normal world order.

  The costs of communist rule greatly outweighed the advantages. The state of Lenin and Stalin brutalized politics for decades. It is true that the communists made many economic and social gains beyond those which Nicholas II’s government attained; but they also reinforced certain features of tsarism which they had vowed to eradicate. National enmities intensified. Political alienation deepened and social respect for law decreased. As the dictatorship broke up society into the tiniest segments, those civil associations that obstructed the central state’s will were crushed. The outcome was a mass of intimidated citizens who took little interest in their neighbours’ welfare. Selfishness became more endemic even than under capitalism. What is more, as the state came close to devouring the rest of society, the state itself became less effective at securing co-operation with its own policies. In short, it failed to integrate society while managing to prevent society from effecting its own integration.

  Even as a mode for attaining industrialization and military security it was a failure in the longer term. Stalin’s economic encasement made it unfeasible to attempt further basic ‘modernization’ without dismantling the Soviet order. His institutions acquired rigid interests of their own and a severe repressive capacity. His rule scared the wits out of managers, scientists and writers, and the freedom of thought vital for a self-renewing industrial society was absent. There was also a lack of those market mechanisms which reduce costs. State-directed economic growth was extremely wasteful. The control organs that were established to eliminate inefficiency became merely yet another drain on the country’s resources. Worse still, they made a bureaucratic, authoritarian state order still more bureaucratic and authoritarian. With such an economic and administrative framework it was unavoidable that Stalin’s successors, in their quest to maintain the USSR’s status as a superpower, continued to divert a massive proportion of the budget to armaments.

  The cramping of public criticism meant that the state’s objectives were attained at an even greater environmental cost than elsewhere in the advanced industrial world. Only the huge size of the USSR prevented Soviet rulers from bringing about a general natural calamity which even the dimmest of them would have had to recognize as such.

  Gorbachëv was the first Soviet leader to face up to the interconnected difficulties of political intimidation, economic inhibition, militarist organization and environmental pollution – and he failed to resolve the difficulties before he was overwhelmed. The fundamental problem for any gradualist reformer in politics and the economy was that the Soviet compound had eradicated most of the social groups and associations whose co-operation might have facilitated success. By the 1980s, reform had to come from above in the first instance and could be implemented only by a small circle of reformers. A further problem was that radical reform dissolved the linkages of the Soviet compound – decomposition was always the likely result of Gorbachëv’s entire project. Those organizations based on politics, religion or nationality which had previously been cowed had no objective interest in conserving the status quo. The campaign by Gorbachëv to eliminate the one-party state, ideological autocracy, arbitrary rule, ultra-centralist administration and a predominantly state-owned economy was bound to release such organizations into conflict with his government. The only wonder is that he did not see this from the beginning.

  As the signs of collapse increased, many beneficiaries of the Soviet compound sought to make the best of a bad job. They quietly abandoned communist ideology. They engaged in private business. They became more and more openly corrupt. As they flourished locally in both political and material respects they flaunted their disobedience of the Kremlin. Having started by opposing reform, they ended by exploiting it to their advantage.

  This happened in many other communist countries which rejected communism in 1989–1991. But de-communization was more difficult in the former USSR than elsewhere. Soviet political and economic interest groups had been consolidated not merely since the Second World War, as in Eastern Europe, but since the establishment of the communist regime through the October Revolution of 1917. Consequently, not only in Russia but also in Ukraine and Uzbekistan there were long-installed groups of officials who had plenty of experience and cunning to see off any new opposition. And whereas communism was imported by the Red Army to Eastern Europe, it had been invented by revolutionaries in the former Russian Empire. In rising up against communism, the Eastern European peoples were simultaneously shaking off foreign domination. In the Soviet Union, communism was a native product. Indeed Lenin retained a remarkable popularity in opinion polls in Russia even after 1991. No wonder that the banner of anti-communism attracted few active followers there.

  The question of Russian nationhood aggravated the dilemmas of reform. Before the First World War there had been a fitful privileging of the Russians over the other nations of the empire. This was eliminated under Lenin but resumed under Stalin and prolonged with modifications under successive communist rulers. Nevertheless Russians were confused by the contradictory messages they received. What they had thought of as peculiar to them before 1917 – especially their Orthodox Christianity and their peasant customs – was rejected by the official communist authorities; and Stalin’s highly selective version of Russianness was virtually his own invention. Russian national identity under tsars and commissars was cross-cut by an imperial identity. At least until the mid-1960s, moreover, various alternative versions of Russianness were banned from public discussion – and even through to the late 1980s, debates had to steer clear of overt hostility to Marxism-Leninism. Russians emerged from the communist years with a vaguer sense of their identity than most other peoples of the former USSR.

  The Russian Federation received an unenviable legacy from the USSR. The creation of an integrated civic culture had hardly begun. The emergent market economy evoked more popular suspicion than enthusiasm. The constitutional and legal framework was frail. Russians had not had a lengthy opportunity to decide what it was to be Russian. All former empires have been afflicted by this problem. The Russian case was acute because even the borders of the new Russian state were not uncontroversial. Russia’s basic territory was never defined during the Russian Empire and was redrawn several times in the Soviet period. And by 1991 twenty-five million ethnic Russians found themselves living in adjacent, newly independent states.

  Hopes for democracy and the rule of law were disappointed. Rulers from Yeltsin onwards used a range of dirty methods to exercise their power. The new capitalism brought a windfall of profits to the few, leaving the many – tens of millions of them – to fend for themselves. Reform of police, armed forces and judiciary was not seriously attempted. Multi-party competition was hemmed in by restrictions. Brutal military campaigns took place against Chechen rebels; and Russian forces intervened violently in Abkhazia and Georgia and annexed Crimea. The President and the rest of the executive exerted dominance over parliament. Elections to high central office were marked by egregious skulduggery. The abuses were not peculiar to the Kremlin. Local politicians and business barons made a mockery of popular choice outside Moscow. The campaign against terrorism was made into a pretext for interfering with civil liberties. Dissent in the media attracted punitive sanctions. Political assassinations were not uncommon. Russia in the twenty-first century became an authoritarian state which has yet to find a settled purpose for itself in its region and in the world and was again regarded as a menacing power in the eastern half of Europe.

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p; Must the forecast for the country be pessimistic? Not entirely. The very political passivity that was earlier mentioned as a problem is also an asset. Few Russians have gathered on the streets in support of demagogues of the far right or the far left. Most citizens are tired of turmoil. Even after the disintegration of the USSR, furthermore, Russia retained a cornucopia of human and natural resources at its disposal. Russia has gas, oil and gold in superabundance. It lacks hardly any essential minerals or metals; it has huge forests and waterways. Its people have an impressive degree of organization, patience and education. Russia has learned from experience about the defects of the alternatives to peaceful, gradual change: it has recent experience of civil war, world war, dictatorship and ideological intolerance.

  Yet the preconditions for even a cautious optimism have yet to be met. Time, imagination and will-power will be required if progress is to be made; and peace with neighbouring countries will be needed. Russia in the twentieth century was full of surprises. It gave rise to a wholly new way of ordering political, economic and social affairs. Dozens of states adopted the Soviet compound as their model. Russia was the wonder and the horror of the entire world. That single country produced Lenin, Khrushchëv and Gorbachëv; it also brought forth Shostakovich, Akhmatova, Kapitsa, Sakharov and Pavlov. Its ordinary people, from the piteous inmates of the Gulag to the proud Red Army conscript-victors over Hitler, became symbols of momentous episodes in the history of our times. Russia over the past hundred years has endured extraordinary vicissitudes. It became and then ceased to be a superpower. It was once a largely agrarian and illiterate empire and is now literate, industrial and bereft of its borderland dominions. Russia has not stopped changing. There is no reason to assume that its record in astounding itself, its neighbours and the world has come to an end.