Gorbachev's Russia And American Foreign Policy

Seweryn Bialer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429718649
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Soviet post-Stalin period is examined in its economic, political, and foreign policy dimensions, stressing the factors that provided the gestation environment for Gorbachev's reforms. There follows an analysis of the nature, sources, and plausible outcomes of Gorbachev's "revolution" and the strategies he is applying to it. A separate part of the book examines the changing goals of past U.S. policies toward the Soviet Union and their effectiveness in influencing Soviet behavior. The final part puts forth suggestions and prescriptions for a U.S.approach to the changes in Soviet economic, security, and foreign policies. The East-West Forum is a New York-based research and policy analysis organization sponsored by the Samuel Bronfman Foundation. Its goal is to bring together experts and policy leaders from differing perspectives and generations to discuss changing patterns of East-West relations. It attempts to formulate long-term analyses and recommendations. In preparing the chapters of this book, the authors drew upon the work of a series of workshops initiated by the Forum.

Part One
Patterns of Change

1
The Changing Nature of Change in the USSR

S. Frederick Starr

Introduction

The problem of change has preoccupied Russian thinkers for nearly three centuries. Experiencing change around them, they have tried to characterize it and analyze its sources. A Russian's position with respect to the sources and processes of change has always been a key to his world view as a whole and remains so today. Both before and after the brief period on the eve of the 1917 Revolution when political parties were legal, groupings of intellectuals on issues of change represented the main factions within educated society. A "Slavophile" or "Westernizer," Menshevik or Bolshevik, Stalinist or Bukharinite, Gorbachevian or Brezhnevite—each represents a different attitude towards change. Considering the impact of these alignments on Russian and Soviet life, it is clear that differing approaches to change have dramatically altered the very process of change in that country.

Foreign observers have been similarly drawn to the problem of change in Russia. Concentrating mainly on political and economic institutions, Western writers from Leibnitz's day to our own have put forward schemes for the improvement of Russia—roadmaps, as it were, for change. Few Western statesmen in the twentieth century have failed to ground their actions vis à vis the USSR in some implicit assumptions of how change occurs in the Soviet state and how such change affects Soviet international behavior.

This chapter seeks to identify the sources of change in Russian and Soviet history, the bearers of change, and the opponents of change. It will range freely over several centuries of Russian and Soviet history, and will treat change both as the product of deliberate policies— "innovation" would be a good synonym—and as the consequence of demographic and other more spontaneous processes. It will seek generalizations at the expense of the often-revealing exception or nuance. This will be justified by any perspective it lends to our understanding of contemporary developments and especially to the question of whether fundamental alterations in the very process of change are occurring today in the USSR.

The problem of change in Russia and the USSR assumes great importance in part because so many have felt that genuine change there is at best incomplete and at worst nonexistent. A century and a half ago the Marquis de Custine charged that Russians were barely disguised Tatars, while his contemporary, Baron Haxthausen, revelled in what he considered Russia's "timeless" quality.¹ Following the October Revolution, Nicolas Berdyaev was quick to find Muscovite qualities in the new Soviet regime, just as Arnold Toynbee was eager to trace the sources of Stalinism to Byzantium.² More recently, the debates between Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Richard Pipes have addressed the same proposition that however much the USSR may have developed, it has not really changed at all.³

I will note the various continuities that pervade the political and economic development of Russia and the USSR but, while recognizing these, I will give due emphasis to the fact that, according to most indices pertinent to the social sciences, the society occupying the present territory of the USSR has changed dramatically over the centuries. Even within the memory of people alive today, the USSR has evolved from a predominantly rural society to an urban one; from agrarian to industrial; from illiterate to literate; from a nation of high birth and high death rates to one of low birth and low death rates; from an economy based on inanimate sources of power to one dependent upon steam, petroleum, and nuclear energy; and from a people whose values were dominated by the culture of the traditional village to one open to stimuli from around the planet and brought to them by modern technologies of communication.

It would be unnecessary to emphasize this point had the USSR not recently passed through a period of great caution, if not outright opposition to deliberately induced change. This has led some observers to infer that the processes of demographic, social, economic, and even political change that have obtained in every other industrial society have somehow been interrupted in the USSR, and can only be restarted through some exceptional act of leadership.⁴

As will be clear from the concluding section of this chapter, I believe this misstates the case. To reach this conclusion, however, I will first examine the present era in the context of the most recent epoch in Russian and Soviet history, namely, the decades between the rise of Khrushchev and the death of Brezhnev, and see that era in turn against the background of the two main earlier phases of Russian development. I will then identify some of the major forces that have triggered innovation in all three stages of Russian development. Finally, I will discuss the main social bearers and opponents of innovation, not as permanent factors operating steadily throughout the historical evolution of Russia and the USSR, but as forces specific to defined phases, appearing on the scene and then passing from it. This is not to ignore the undeniably important role of ideas in bringing about change in Russia. It merely acknowledges that such ideas are brought to bear through the agency of specific persons and groups in society.

Three Phases of Change

The USSR is among some two dozen organized political communities that have successfully transformed themselves into industrialized, urbanized, and educated societies, and one of even fewer large scale societies to have done so. The process of that transformation can be divided into an almost limitless number of phases.⁵ For the sake of simplicity, however, I will reduce that number to three.⁶

The Pre-Industrial Base for Successful Change

First, a pre-industrial phase extended from the formation of the Muscovite state in the fifteenth century to the third quarter of the nineteenth century. By the end of this period, Russia had acquired many attributes essential to its attainment of rapid development later. Thus, it gained a centralized government capable of imposing its decisions on a large and ethnically diverse population. That government, in turn, commanded the loyalty of a large corps of civil servants and an even larger body of service gentry. In comparison with most other traditional societies, this elite was relatively large, constituting nearly four percent of the population.⁷ Moreover, the government ruled from a large capital city that maintained contact with the nation's periphery through regular mail service and, by the end of the period, railroads and telegraph lines. Modern knowledge readily entered the country through the Academy of Sciences and a system of universities, and was disseminated among the elite through a unified language capable of expressing the full range of modern ideas. Finally, the government proved itself capable of defending its territory by means of a relatively modern army, and of imposing its will on its principal neighbors by force when necessary.

While this period did not witness the beginning of the drive to industrialize, it provided the base from which that transformation could be launched. Pre-industrial Russian history was "... not so much an unmoving line or point as ... a dynamic continuum in which trends [were] set in motion that greatly affect the modernization drive."⁸

Political and institutional innovations introduced by Peter I, Catherine II, and her successors did not cause the rapid economic transformation later, but rather rendered it possible. No act of will by subsequent rulers could have unleashed the rapid development reached in late nineteenth-century Russia had these earlier rulers not so fully paved the way. Anomalies and problems in the subsequent drive for economic and social change may be explained as much by shortcomings in this pre-industrial phase of development as by any tactical errors on the part of the later leadership.

The Period of Transformation

The second and most dynamic phase in Russia's development extended from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s. During that era the state changed, first through reform and then through revolution, into an instrument dedicated above all to the economic and social transformation of the society. The notion of state-guided industrialization recalls the experiences of Prussia, France and other earlier models, not to mention the practice of tsarist Russia itself in the era of Peter I. But the pace in nineteenth and twentieth century Russia was different. Industrialization in Russia after the 1880s occurred at a rate surpassing that of the earlier developing countries of Western Europe and equalled only by that of Japan in the same years.⁹

The old elite was either absorbed into the new system or eliminated, and a much larger new elite created in the 1930s through the mobilization of heretofore marginal social groups. Using quasi-military means—a forced modernization—the Communist government, like that of the tsars, shaped the application of new technologies. Where the imperial government had co-opted the printing press and steam engine, the government of Lenin and Stalin seized control of electricity, the radio and telephones, and channeled the application of the internal combustion engine into the service of state industries rather than private citizens. Parallel to these political and economic innovations, the demographic transition from a rural to an urban population occurred, as did a massive increase in the population itself, as a result of reduced mortality. Thanks to state control, literacy and education were placed in the service of the overall process of industrial development.

This description would be incomplete without noting the sharp differences between the political institutions that fostered rapid change in the USSR and the West, and also the suppression of liberal economic institutions in the USSR. Still more striking are the exceptionally high levels of coercion employed in the USSR, and the great loss of life caused by international and civil wars, as well as by collectivization and the purges of the 1930s.¹⁰ At no period of Russia's history was the link between violence and innovation closer. In acknowledging these grim realities, however, one must also concede that, first, very high rates of mobilization and change were sustained, and, second, that the indices by which such changes were measured in the USSR— industrial productivity, educational and demographic shifts, among others—came to be the same ones by which the advanced industrial societies of Western Europe and North America evaluated themselves. Stated differently, however distinctive the political and social process of innovation and change in the Soviet Union during this period, its contents were similar in many respects to economic and social transformations elsewhere.

The Period of Advanced Development

The chief characteristic of deliberately induced change in late imperial Russia and the USSR through the 1950s was the extensive utilization of resources under the centralized guidance of the state rather than their intensive exploitation through decentralized and smaller-scale instruments of control. For example, rather than extracting greater yields from the same acreage through more efficient farming, Soviet leaders increased yields by placing more land under relatively primitive cultivation. The essential difference between the era of transformation— the second phase—and the age of advanced development is the shift from extensive to intensive exploitation, and all its political, organizational, sociological, and psychological concomitants.

This strategic shift did not advance significantly during the period of 1955-1985. The victory of the USSR in World War II not only vindicated Stalin's rule but also strengthened the entire nexus of organizations and practices created during the period of transformation— precisely at the time when they should have been replaced by structural and behavioral arrangements more appropriate to an advanced industrial society. Russians refer to the post-1956 era as a "thaw," especially in the easing of repression and opened channels of expression. But in terms of other fundamental needs of the society no such thaw occurred. The patterns of forced modernization that contributed to effective change between the late nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth, became the chief impediment to further development.¹¹

These considerations help to define the problem of change today. The challenge facing the Gorbachev government is not merely "to get the country moving again," but rather, to institute the fundamental innovations that should have been introduced a generation ago.

To understand the depth of the present predicament, it will be helpful to identify the triggers for change in the past and to enumerate the social forces that have served as the bearers of change, as well as those that have thwarted it. Although brief, this summary will indicate the ways in which the processes of change are themselves changing in the USSR today.

The Triggers of Change in Russia

Leaders as Innovators

Change in Russia and the USSR has rarely been as discontinuous as it appears to those who are interested in politics. For example, social and economic change went forward briskly during the years before World War I when the imperial court was moribund, while the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP) was not as stagnant as later Stalinist critics claimed. Indeed, the genuine torpor that set in in the late Brezhnev years represents an unprecedented discontinuity in twentieth-century Russia. Even then, however, demographic processes were proceeding apace, with important implications for the succeeding era.

To the extent that discontinuity is perceived as characteristic of Russian development, it is generally linked with the rise and fall of strong leaders. The role of indivi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART ONE PATTERNS OF CHANGE
• PART TWO RUSSIA AFTER STALIN
• PART THREE GORBACHEV'S RUSSIA
• PART FOUR RUSSIA AND THE WEST
• PART FIVE GORBACHEV AND THE UNITED STATES
• Index