Russia

by Philip Longworth

  In Poland the sense of common purpose between the leadership and the masses was lowest of all. Poles had lost nothing of their nationalist pride and became the most demanding of the satellite populations. After an unsuccessful attempt to impose collectivization in 1948, the policy was abandoned. So deep an emotional issue had it become that even Stalin dared not insist on it. Shortages of consumer goods and meat, particularly pork, could provoke serious protests, and so Poland was eventually allowed to run up substantial foreign debts and thereafter the Soviet worker in effect subsidized Polish living standards. 26 But though Moscow indulged the Poles, it could act harshly if others overstepped the line.

  It did so in August 1968, when Leonid Brezhnev, who now presided in the Kremlin, reluctantly authorized Soviet forces to suppress the ‘Prague Spring’. Liberalization in Czechoslovakia had produced a ferment there which, it was feared, might lead to disturbances and, given the country’s geographical position, pointing as it were to the heart of the Soviet Bloc, invite Western military interference. Albeit by the narrowest of votes in the Politburo, pre-emptive action was taken. No matter that the operation was designed to avoid casualties and was implemented reluctantly, alongside contingents from other members of the Bloc (but not Romania), it seemed shocking that the Soviet Union should have used violence against an ally of such long standing, the only country in Eastern Europe, apart from Yugoslavia, which had freely voted the Communists into power. Leonid Brezhnev took care to explain the action to the world, proclaiming a Soviet equivalent to America’s Monroe Doctrine. But, rather than straightforwardly delineating a sphere into which other powers must not intrude, he chose to dress the message up in the awkward language of Party principle:

  The Communist Party of the Soviet Union has always advocated that each socialist country determine the concrete forms of its development … but when deviation from common laws of socialist construction and a threat to the cause of socialism in that country arises … it is no longer just a problem for that country’s people but a common problem for all socialist countries. 27

  Washington reacted by assuring Moscow that American ideological objections to the action would not be allowed to interfere with negotiations between the two nuclear superpowers. And the Czechs themselves — more pragmatic and less romantic than the Poles — soon diverted their energies from the public to the domestic sphere.

  In the Soviet Union itself, Party membership offered a promising career path to aspiring youth and the Party not only served to co-ordinate policy, it offered means of social interaction through mutual visits and conferences, and provided a kind of social glue. Party functionaries, like ministers and senior police officials, got to know each other, to take each other’s measure, to share a sense of common purpose. Other Soviet Bloc organizations served similar social as well as political ends. The Warsaw Treaty Organization was formed in May 1955 in response to the rearming of West Germany and its inclusion in NATO, and came to mirror NATO to a great extent. The supreme commander was invariably a Russian general, as NATO’s was an American, and the equipment followed the standards set by the alliance’s leading partner. Meetings not only thrashed out differences and provided a forum for the statement of national wishes, they were also occasions for the exercise of charm and persuasion and encouraged a spirit of comradeship in arms. The Poles, whose army was second only in size to the Red Army, found the WTO somewhat reassuring because it constituted a guarantee against a German resurgence, for many Poles felt that they had suffered even more at German than at Russian hands. Yet when Khrushchev had proposed integrating most of the member forces under Soviet command with standardized uniforms and ranks as well as arms, Romania baulked. Such conformities denied Romania’s distinctiveness.

  COMECON, which promoted economic co-operation within the Bloc, pre-dated the WTO. In 1954 it was given the task of co-ordinating the national plans of the member countries, and it soon assumed other roles, developing a common electricity grid and sharing a pipeline which gave members access to Soviet oil. It seemed to be imitating the West’s European Economic Community (now the European Union): the design of its Moscow headquarters seemed to have been inspired by the EU building in Brussels. But its philosophy was different. Its strategic aim, agreed in 1962, was to ‘eliminate technical and economic backwardness … [chiefly by means of] socialist industrialization with the principal emphasis … on heavy industry and its core, engineering’. 28

  It also tried to encourage specialization and a division of labour within the Soviet Bloc, but to this Romania objected. Its leaders objected to being split between two great regional zones as had been suggested. The economic planners had classified Transilvania, the northern third of the country, as semi-industrial, along with Hungary and Poland, but zoned the southern regions of Moldavia and Wallachia as agricultural, along with Bulgaria. This seemed to threaten the country’s national integrity. True, Romania was a backward Balkan country, predominately peasant both in social structure and in outlook, but its leaders were economic Stalinists whose Communism was intertwined with nationalism. For them the development of heavy industry was more than an element in economic modernization (one which even at that stage was beginning to seem outdated): it was a measure of Romanian achievement.

  Soviet leaders had long since abjured Stalinist methods, so Romania was given sufficient latitude to thwart COMECON plans for economic integration. However another — voluntary — approach was to achieve limited success. By 1976 COMECON had promoted specialization in machine-building, created a large pool of railway rolling stock, and built a gas pipeline through the Bloc. It had also founded a joint nuclear research institute, a Bank for Economic Co-operation and had set up organizations to modernize the region’s steel industries and to co-ordinate the manufacture of ball-bearings and chemicals. The fact that the headquarters of these new organizations were allotted to Budapest, Warsaw and East Berlin, rather than being retained in Moscow, mirrored EU practice and suggested that the dirigiste character of the Bloc had given way to a freer form of cooperation.

  As for Romania, it continued to find occasion to defy Moscow. It was an effective way for leaders to advertise their patriotism to a population most of whom either resented Communists or were politically innocent. Unlike Czechoslovakia, Romania escaped punishment for stepping over Moscow’s line, but then it did not border a NATO state and it remained stable internally under the oppressive Ceausescu. It is curious, however, that after thirty years of Communism the economic pecking order of the East European countries was the same as it had been half a century, and indeed a century, earlier. The richest countries, in terms of average income per head, were still Czechoslovakia and East Germany; and the poorest were still Albania, Romania and Russia itself.

  By 1970 the Soviet Union matched the United States in the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles deployed. The balance of nuclear power had reached the point of perfection. In these circumstances neither side wished to risk their use for fear of reprisal, and both now moved towards detente and to limiting the spread of nuclear weapons to other states. Anticipating this change in strategic circumstances, in 1969 both sides signed a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and talks began on Strategic Arms Limitation. 29 Only China, jockeying for a better position in the race for world power and trying to seize leadership of the Communist movement from the Soviet Union, objected vehemently both to detente and to the Brezhnev Doctrine, viewing them as breaches of Marxist principle. Ideological purity had only ever had brief tenure in the Kremlin. Indeed, reasons of state had long since tended to shape the ideological line that Moscow laid down.

  Despite detente, however, competition between the Soviet Union and the USA continued. During the 1960s Moscow’s influence in Africa had waned. The ousting of Kwame Nkrumah in 1966 meant the loss of Ghana as a client; Soviet influence in the Middle East diminished sharply after Egypt’s defeat in the Six-Day War with Israel in 1967; and after Nasser died in 1970, Egypt ceased to be an ally. Yet Soviet influence
in other regions grew. Concern about Washington’s courtship of Pakistan and fear of China prompted an intensification of relations with India. This culminated in a treaty of considerable strategic significance signed in 1971. It made port facilities available to Russian ships at Bombay, Goa, Cochin and the Andaman Islands, and opened up an air corridor for Soviet aircraft from Tajikistan in Central Asia down to the Bay of Bengal. 30 The Soviet Union thus became a power in south Asia and the Indian Ocean.

  At the same time Moscow was securing new allies on the very doorstep of its Marxist rival, China: North Korea and North Vietnam. It gave the latter significant economic and diplomatic support for its fight against the US-backed regime in South Vietnam, but gauged it carefully so as not to disrupt detente with Washington. But economic aid and a model of development that seemed more effective than market forces were not the only attractions that won new allies and friends. The Soviet Union represented an opposite ideological pole to the United States and, as such, exerted an attractive force around the world. So it was that not only Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique aligned with Moscow, but close ties were developed with the Chile of Salvador Allende.

  Competition in some parts of the globe contrasted with detente in Germany, however. In 1970 Moscow granted recognition to the Federal Republic of Germany in response to friendly overtures from its leader, Willy Brandt — a development which helped to change the tone of East—West relations in central Europe from confrontation to co-operation. In Asia, however, as in Africa, competition remained the norm, and it was to become particularly fierce over Afghanistan. Russia had been anxious to secure a position there since the later nineteenth century, in order to insulate and secure her territories in Central Asia against attack and gain a lever in southern Asia. This interest was to be maintained. As early as 1927 Soviet engineers had begun work on a road through the Salang Pass over the high Panjshir range to link Samarkand and Dushanbe with Kabul, but the project had been thwarted by the Afghani revolt in the following year. Progress was resumed in the 1950s, when Moscow provided aid to develop the country’s communications infrastructure by building bridges, roads and an airport at Baghram in the east of the country, on the route to Kandahar. In this fashion the Soviet Union had built a dominant influence in Afghanistan and a strong position in the heights of Asia, with access to both friends and potential enemies to the south. The position was not yet impregnable, however. In September 1979 Hafizullah Amin was to stage a bloody coup in Kabul and prepared to switch sponsors. This prompted the Kremlin to order intervention. Soviet special forces stormed the presidential palace and, after heavy fighting took it, killing Amin in the process. A Communist, Babrak Karmal, became president, and Afghanistan changed its status from protege to satellite. 31

  The Kremlin had been helped in the immediate post-war era by the prestige it had won in the Second World War, by the worldwide ramifications of the Communist Party, and by the effectiveness of its intelligence service. The Soviet spy network had succeeded in penetrating the secrets of the ‘Manhattan Project’ at an early stage, thanks to agents like Klaus Fuchs and Alan Nunn May in Britain and Theodore Hall and David Greenglass in the United States. At the same time the celebrated and notorious ‘Cambridge Five’ (Philby, Maclean, Burgess, Blunt and Cairncross) had penetrated the British Foreign Office and security agencies, including MI5, SIS and SOE. This had allowed them to convey essential information not only about the atom bomb, but about other weapons, codes and ciphers, and top-level political and military intelligence. 32 The idealism which led so many brilliant young people to serve what they took to be the cause of Communism rather than their own countries was a major asset to Soviet intelligence. It gave the Kremlin significant advantages from the later 1940s, and was probably decisive in eliminating the scientific and technological gap between the Soviet Union and the Western Powers so quickly. Yet the Soviet Union was not devoid of native dynamism in these areas.

  Apart from the occasional quack, like Stalin’s protege the geneticist Lysenko, it made use of many scientists who were leaders in their fields. They included the famous biochemist Aleksei Bakh, the ground-breaking physicist Petr Kapitsa, the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, and the inventor of the best small arms in the world, Mikhail Kalashnikov. The roots of the first-rate Soviet scientific establishment stretched back through two centuries of Academy of Science traditions to the Enlightenment, and its fruits were to include the development not only of the first space ships and astronauts but of the first safe heart drug. But for a strange accident at a Paris air show, when another aircraft on an unauthorized flight crossed the flight path of a prototype Tupolev supersonic airliner, causing it to crash, the Soviet Union might also have led the world in commercial supersonic intercontinental flight services. Yet the great sophistication in science and technology coexisted with simple forms of collective human life which had changed little with the passage of centuries, and the Soviet regime’s concern to ‘civilize’ native peoples stemmed from the same burning sense of mission that had fired missionaries everywhere.

  All these contrasts were represented in Siberia. On the banks of the great river Ob, upriver from the ancient city of Tomsk, lies Akademgorodok -as its name suggests, a town founded for the specific purpose of serving the most sophisticated scientific research. Siberia was a land of great riches as well as tundra desolation: of diamonds, gold and oil, and great hydroelectric schemes, as on the Yenisei and Angara rivers, models for famous ‘Third World’ projects like the Aswan Dam. But Siberia was also home to peoples who, for all the ministrations of tsarist missionaries and earnest Communist educators, had hardly advanced from the Stone Age in material culture or understanding of the modern world. Although the processes of adjustment and absorption usually proceeded quietly, there were occasions when the two worlds clashed. There was the occasional squalid fight in dreary Siberian towns between drunken natives and Russian louts yelling racist abuse, and one fracas in Yakutsk was serious enough to bring troops out on to the streets. Nor were well-meaning attempts to inform native peoples always welcomed by them. ‘“What is the October Revolution?” Evenk reindeer-herders had plaintively enquired, “Who are the bourgeois elements? What is technology? What is industry?”‘ When a community of Chukchi were invited to elect a committee they resisted on the reasonable ground that ‘if they elected one, the number of walrus would not increase.’ 33 It was native practicality rather than innocence which spoke. Soviet values did not resonate with Chukchi mentality.

  Despite rumblings of discontent in one or two COMECON countries, the Soviet Empire in 1980 seemed stable and reasonably successful. The Soviet Union itself had not caught up with the United States in terms of economic output as Khrushchev had boasted, but it was incontestably a world power, its peoples more prosperous and freer than in the 1950s. True, the Communist movement was no longer a dynamic force in the world, but Moscow was still a beacon of hope for poorer countries, and also for some less poor that wished to distance themselves from American culture and the embraces of capitalism. Even though the system had not yet quite succeeded in replacing nationalism with a supranational Marxist faith, no informed observer seriously expected the vast and powerful Soviet fortress, with its huge outworks of control and influence spreading halfway round the world, to suffer any marked decline in the foreseeable future. Yet within a dozen years, as if subjected to some potent combination of strange chemical forces, it simply evaporated. The fourth, and greatest, Russian Empire was gone, never to be resurrected.

  14

  Autopsy on a Deceased Empire

  A

  T MIDNIGHT ON 31 December 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The satellite states had gone their separate ways two years earlier, but now the Baltic states regained their independence and Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and all the other constituent republics started out on a new existence as sovereign states. The red flag with the hammer and sickle was run down the Kremlin flagstaff, and a blue, red and white tricolour was run up instead. Russia had ag
ain been shorn of empire.

  The reasons why the Soviet Empire collapsed have been disputed ever since. Many believed that dissident activity and popular protest had brought the regime down. Others argued that President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative — otherwise known as ‘Star Wars’ — had established an unchallengeable American superiority in the arms race, and that this had forced the Kremlin to admit defeat and wind its empire down. Some who resented the passing of the old regime explained its fall in terms of conspiracy theories; economists attributed it to industrial obsolescence, political scientists to advances in computer technology which made it impossible for the regime to control the dissemination of information. Other theorists ascribed the collapse to the rigidity of Soviet institutions and their inability adapt to new conditions. (However, it seemed odd that none of the experts who explained the inevitability of Communism’s collapse had actually predicted it.)