Understanding Soviet Politics

The Perspective Of Russian History

Cyril E. Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000011180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

To what extent did the Russian revolution of 1917 bring about the changes wanted by the Bolsheviks? Why did many of these changes fail to materialize? How has the Russian heritage adapted to the challenges facing all modernizing societies? What does Russia's past tell us about the present role of the USSR in world affairs?

In this collection of essays, which includes new part and chapter introductions, Dr. Black discusses these questions, examining the major issues that shape our understanding of Soviet politics. Beginning with a general exploration of the ways the traditional heritage of the Russian empire has both helped and hindered the adaptation of Soviet society to the contemporary world, he illustrates the extent to which the Russian empire was already evolving into a modern society before World War · I. The author analyzes the modernization of the USSR, emphasizing the interaction of tradition and modernity and the ways the Russian heritage of institutions and values has been adapted since 1861 to the needs of political development, economic growth, and social integration. Comparisons are made with a wide range of societies, first in 1967 the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian revolution and again in the 1980s.

The book considers the past and present relations of Russia/USSR with the outside world in the context of universal societal changes. Dr. Black discusses such questions as the differences between the foreign policy objectives of Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union; the degree to which Russia/USSR has been able to influence other countries through means other than military power; and, drawing on his experience in Bulgaria, the origins of the cold war. The book concludes with Dr. Black's personal interview with Nikita Khrushchev, a discussion that provides rare insights into the thought processes of a leading Soviet statesman at the height of his power

PART ONE
Russian History: A Window on Soviet Politics

The four essays in this section deal with Russian history as it illuminates our understanding of current Soviet politics. Russian history, analyzed and interpreted by Western historians, gives us valuable and sometimes surprising insights into the limits the Russian heritage placed on any reform movement. It also helps to explain why the revolution of 1917 failed to produce the sweeping changes that its rhetoric espoused.

In 1917 Lenin and his colleagues led a revolution that, at the level of its legislative program and rhetoric, was the most radical the world had known. It sought nothing less than the abolition of all the inequities that had characterized imperial Russia—and most other countries—and the establishment of a society based on equality and justice for all. Yet some seventy years later, despite changes in institutions and values no less dynamic than those that have occurred in other advanced societies, much of the old Russia is still in evidence, especially in the political sphere. Despite a very significant development of political participation through institutions and organizations, the centralized and autocratic government of the 1980s bears much more than a passing resemblance to the institutions of imperial Russia. This and other elements of continuity raise the question of whether revolution is possible. Can a society be transformed overnight? Can a revolution accomplish any more than bringing to power a new group of leaders who can set a society moving in a new direction but who must work within the constraints of the old system?

A socialist society as envisaged by Marx—to use his terminology-was supposed to emerge in developed capitalist societies in which industrial workers had already gained substantial political influence. Among the West European countries, England and Germany in particular might be said to have met this criterion at the time of World War I. Lenin and his colleagues were well aware that Russia was still predominantly agrarian and by no means ready for a socialist revolution as defined by Marx. Indeed, Lenin was convinced that his revolution would fail if it did not receive the support of socialist revolutions in the West. He feared that if capitalism survived in the countries of Western Europe, they would attack and destroy the revolutionary movement in Russia. Capitalism did survive, and there were limited efforts to support the counterrevolutionary forces in Russia, but at the end of World War I the Western countries were in no mood for another major military effort.

Lenin's revolution retained power after considerable civil strife. The Bolsheviks then faced the problem of implementing their program in a country not only quite unprepared for socialism but also devastated by war, revolution, and civil war. It was not until 1928—a loss of fifteen years—that the Soviet Union achieved the 1913 level of per capita production in agriculture and industry. Under these circumstances, the old regime weighed heavily on the new. After Lenin's death in 1924 most of the Bolsheviks who came to power under Stalin's leadership were individuals whose outlook was formed as much by the old mentality as by the new. The society that emerged from these beginnings was one that Marx would not have recognized as "socialist." Indeed, most West Europeans who consider themselves to be socialists in the Marxist tradition do not regard the Soviet Union as an examplar of their political philosophy.

The disparity between the actual economic and social conditions in the Soviet Union and the claims of the new regime to be in the process of creating the most advanced form of society was the source of many anomalies. Important among these was the self-image of the new leaders as expressed in historical writing. Their rhetoric required that they renounce their roots in the past, but as they gained experience in the Stalin era they came to recognize the significance of continuities with the past and to make use of them in their effort to mobilize domestic support. Among the top leaders, Khrushchev was the last of the romantics, who thought that the Soviet Union could bypass the evolutionary processes of societal transformation. Not until Gorbachev's revised Communist Party Program of 1986 was it officially recognized that socialism was still beyond the horizon.

CHAPTER 1
Russian History and Soviet Politics

This first chapter takes the rather bizarre form of a statement made at a hearing before the Subcommittee on Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of the Committee on Armed Services of the U.S. Senate in March 1970. My invitation to appear before the subcommittee arose from the belief of its chairman, Senator Henry W. Jackson, that "the salient themes of Russian history that bear on her contemporary foreign and defense policy should be explored by the subcommittee." The hearing offered me an opportunity to discuss some of the aspects of Russian history that have continuing relevance to Soviet society and politics. These include in particular the relatively unchallenged role of the state, which under the empire scarcely less than after the revolution may be held accountable for both the achievements and the excesses of public policy. Of comparable significance is the international environment in which Russia/USSR has always found itself, with undefined frontiers and neighbors perceived as real or potential enemies. Similarly, the ethnic complexity of the country, in which Russians have been a bare majority of the population, has been a continuing formative condition.

THE INTERPRETATION OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

In seeking to draw conclusions of contemporary significance from the long historical record of the peoples of Russia, it is important to identify the recurring patterns of behavior that give evidence of the characteristic conditioning of peoples with a common historical experience. To the extent that such patterns can be identified with some assurance, they can provide guidelines of significant value to the evaluation of policy.

Reprinted from Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of the Committee on Armed Services, Ninety-First Congress, Second Session, March 18, 1970 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970), 3-18.

Just as a mature person can alter the habits of many years with difficulty, even in the face of a challenge that may threaten his very existence, so nations with deeply ingrained ways of conducting their affairs change only gradually under the impact of new experiences. In this sense, history is always with us. The leaders of a nation can modify historically evolved institutions and values only to a limited degree, and at any given moment the genuinely new elements in a nation's life are relatively few and those that have deep roots in the past are inevitably much more influential. This very substantial degree of historical continuity in all societies is perceived as an obstacle by those seeking rapid political, economic, and social change, and as a powerful support by those concerned with the stability of institutions and values in times of stress and strain.

Historians who wish to determine the range of variation that a given society is likely to undergo must seek to identify those salient characteristics that are not likely to change very substantially in a decade or a generation, and to distinguish these from the more or less ephemeral policies that men and women in positions of great political authority may be able to change drastically in a short time. To say this is not to minimize the role of individuals in history, but simply to place this role in its social context. Individuals may have great influence in decisions that can be directly implemented, but even a totalitarian government can hope to effect only gradual change when the internalized habits and attitudes of many millions of people are concerned.

It is significant in this connection that Russia is one of the few countries whose peoples have lived together for several centuries as independent states within approximately their present territorial confines. Among the major countries, England, France, Japan, and China share this experience, but most of the other one hundred and fifty in which the peoples of the world live today have been formed rather recently. Most European countries emerged in their present form only in the nineteenth century and several did not gain their independence until after the First World War. In other parts of the world, no less than seventy countries have taken their present form only in this century. In this sense the United States, which will soon celebrate the 200th anniversary of its independence, is one of the oldest and most firmly established countries in the modern world. To the extent that the peoples of a country have a long experience of facing problems together, one can with greater confidence identify those institutions and values that have enduring significance by virtue of having stood the test of time.

While Russia is thus different from most other countries in the age and continuity of its institutions and values, it shares with most other countries the experience of having undertaken the profoundly difficult task of transforming an established agrarian society consisting predominantly of peasants and led by a small minority of landowners, merchants, and government officials, into an urban, industrial society.

Americans seeking to interpret Russian history bring to this subject important advantages, but also serious handicaps. The advantages arise from the relative detachment of a country which has never confronted Russia in war and which in fact has been an ally in the two major wars of our era; which is strong enough to deal with the Russians as an equal at the international level; and which also has the resources and talents to become the principal foreign center for the study of Russian history and institutions. In seeking to understand the Russian historical experience, in other words, Americans do not suffer the handicaps of neighbors who have been engaged in a bitter struggle with the Russians, or of those within the Soviet political orbit who are unable to express themselves freely, or of more distant peoples who have not been able to accumulate libraries of Russian books and journals and train a generation or two of scholars to use them.

At the same time we have some handicaps, and these stem from some of the same sources as our advantages-our historical experience has been so different from that of the Russians, that we have great difficulty in seeing things from their point of view, of overcoming the feeling that we are right and they are wrong. Most of the peoples of the world, from England clear across to China, have faced the problem of transforming deeply imbedded traditional societies in modem times under the impact of the scientific and technological revolution. That is the hard way to do it, but they had no choice except to start with what they had.

We did it the easy way. We started with an empty continent, with bountiful resources, and filled it with vigorous immigrants from across the oceans. We know that some came here unwillingly, but a very significant majority came to the new world for the specific purpose of breaking away from their traditional institutions and starting all over again to achieve a modern way of life. It would of course be going too far to say that they came without traditional institutions and values, but the important point is that we started with a self-selected group of leaders and without a traditional society of landowners and peasants who had lived in the country for centuries. The only other countries that have shared this experience are Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. We are in many respects the most successful country in the world, but the process by which we achieved this success cannot very well be repeated by others.

For reasons such as this there is a sense in which it may be easier for Englishmen, or Poles, or Indians, or Chinese, to understand the process by which contemporary Russian institutions have evolved. Their experience to this extent at least has been closer to the Russian than ours. This is not a fatal handicap for us, but simply one we should be aware of and seek to overcome. So long as we recognize the differences between the way we have developed and the way they have developed and are wary of transferring our assumptions and values to their history, there is no reason we should not study them with confidence that we can reach useful conclusions.

SALIENT THEMES IN RUSSIAN HISTORY

In seeking to identify the salient themes over a period of more than a thousand years in the history of the diverse peoples who comprise the USSR today, a useful approach is to analyze a major turning point in their history as a reflection of both the heritage of historically formed institutions and the legacy that may have a bearing on contemporary problems. Such a major turning point was represented by the emancipation of the serfs by Emperor Alexander II in 1861, which was compared by contemporaries with Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves. Together with related reforms in the 1860's the emancipation was one of the most important efforts at government-administered social change up to that date. This is a useful vantage point from which to view both the historical antecedents of the political, economic, and social patterns characteristic of mid-nineteenth-century Russia and the subsequent transformation of the country from an agrarian to an industrial way of life.

The emancipation and related reforms directly affected no less than 42 million Russian citizens in the 50 provinces of European Russia, of whom about half were held as serfs by some 600,000 gentry landowners, and the balance were held in bondage by the state and the crown. The serfs and state peasants were freed from their obligation to till the soil and perform certain other services for their owners, but the emancipation was not an unmixed blessing. The settlement left the peasants with somewhat less land than they had tilled on their own account under serfdom, it burdened them with quitrents and redemption payments which in the end proved too heavy for them to bear, and it required them to share these burdens collectively within the framework of the village commune so that their individual freedom was still restricted.

The gentry kept more than their fair share of the land and received compensation for the balance, but they too had their problems. Less than 5 percent of the gentry were major landowners who held 45 percent of the serfs. The great majority of them had not owned enough serfs to support them, and had earned their living predominantly as government officials, officers, or professional men. Many of them had been in debt before the emancipation, and many more failed to adapt themselves to the commercialization of agriculture.

The 42 million serfs and state peasants ultimately affected by this settlement comprised 70 percent of the population of the SO European provinces of Russia, which also had another 12 million rural and 6 million urban inhabitants. The Russian Empire included in addition at this time 16 million inhabitants in the Caucasus, the Steppe region, Siberia, Finland, and Poland for a total of about 76 million.

The circumstances in which this momentous body of reforms in the 1860's was carried out, reflect characteristic features of the historical development of Russia that help to explain contemporary Soviet attitudes and policies. These circumstances may be summarized in terms of five themes: the predominant role of the state; values that stress collective at the expense of individual interests; a purposeful economic policy; a multinational society; and an international position of relative insecurity. Since we are particularly concerned with understanding the features of contemporary Russia that seem alien to the experience of the West European and English-speaking countries, the brief discussion of these themes will emphasize the relatively unique features of Russian developments.

It is a striking feature of the emancipation and the accompanying reforms that they were undertaken by the state for reasons of national policy as determined by the emperor and his bureaucracy. Although the Russian autocracy as it existed in the 19th century was not a totalitarian government in the modem sense of the term, for it administered directly only a small share of the gross national product and did not seek to regulate in detail the lives of most of its citizens, it nevertheless played a larger role than any other major government in the 19th century. The Russian emperor could decide on his own authority to change fundamentally the status of 42 million peasants and 600,000 landowners, and possessed the legal and administrative institutions necessary to give effect to this decision. The emperor did not run the country like a dictator, and the bureaucracy was very modest in size by modem standards, but neither was there any alternative political authority in the country that could counterbalance the emperor. There were by this time no regional princes, or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One Russian History: A Window on Soviet Politics
• Part Two Modernization: How Russia/USSR Differs from Other Countries
• Part Three Russia/USSR: How It Relates to the Larger World
• Other Publications by the Author
• Publications of the Center of International Studies
• Index