Stalin’s personality was perhaps as twisted as his amazing life trajectory of a latter-day catacomb Christian becoming Great Inquisitor and later a Renaissance Pope, too. Yet personality does not explain the leader cults and purges in many situations where Stalin could not be a direct culprit, such as Tito’s Yugoslavia, Maoist China, and Cuba. Or consider, for that matter, Gorbachev’s glasnost campaign that between 1985 and 1989 cost the jobs if not the lives of nearly two-thirds of the Brezhnev-era nomenklatura. From the perspective of bureaucratic victims, the Moscow-mandated democratization amounted to another calamitous purge. This realization, as we shall see, goes a long way toward explaining the desperately defensive and destructive reactions of Soviet nomeklatura that would ruin the state after 1989. All great communist leaders/villains periodically unleashed campaigns of political denunciation because less blunt mechanisms of control were unavailable to them. The suppression of unofficial organizing and information leaves the supreme leader essentially blind to whatever is happening under his feet and rightly suspicious that his commands are not fully implemented.
This ugly feature of Leninist regimes had no direct relation to Russian, Chinese, or any national culture. It would have certainly appalled Karl Marx, maybe even Lenin himself. The problem, however, was rooted right in the geopolitical origins of communist states (and, we may add, their non-Marxist nationalist emulators across the Third World). These revolutionary states were born in deadly confrontations. Great leaders emerged at their summit because the extraordinary national mobilizations called for supreme military, political, and economic commanders. Their genius then appeared validated by their great improbable victories. Napoleon Bonaparte truly served as the historical prototype for all revolutionary emperors of the twentieth century.
The revolutions capturing single states, even as big as Russia, would immediately run into interstate rivalries. Hence the typical modern sequence of successful revolutions followed by external war. Revolutionary transformations provoked military confrontations with other states that were either seeking to preserve the conservative status quo or, as in the case of the Third Reich, intending to remake the world through a war of conquest and extermination. The emergence of communist states in the twentieth century was a major achievement of leftist forces. But, given the terrible wars amidst which the communist and national liberation insurgents could take power, from the inception their regimes grew oppressive and institutionally flawed. The twentieth-century revolutionaries had no other course of action if they intended to defend and consolidate their antisystemic conquests. If one needs a big rationalist argument for curbing militarism, then there it is.
Was the Soviet Union genuinely socialist or was it rather totalitarian? Such exceedingly ideological abstractions are not useful in explaining reality. It was what it was: a huge centralized state with an unusual ideology and a formidable military-geopolitical position achieved as the result of extraordinary industrialization. The geopolitical inheritance of Russian empire, uniquely strong in the world’s semiperipheral zone, made possible the survival of such a state in the first place. The same structural inheritance also suggested the state-driven coercive strategy of industrialization predicated on dispossessing the peasantry and putting every effort into building an up-to-date military force.
The U.S.S.R. was quintessentially modern and self-consciously modernist. It successfully adopted the advanced power techniques of its age: mechanized military, assembly line industry, planned big towns, mass education and social welfare, and standardized mass consumption including sports and entertainment. After the futuristic decade of the 1920s, the Bolsheviks would also recycle as new mass culture the classical music, ballet, and literature inherited from the imperial intelligentsia. The Stalinist state had indeed ended up looking imperial in many respects. Yet the ability of the U.S.S.R. to integrate its numerous nationalities for almost three generations was arguably progressive and modernistic. The Soviets pioneered affirmative action and then proved by development and broad inclusion that they really meant it.
At the time many observers, friend and foe alike, tended to agree that these achievements based on economic planning and the abolition of private property in sum amounted to socialism. The key Soviet features were emulated or reinvented by a broad variety of developmentalist and nationalist regimes because such a concentration of state powers appeared extraordinarily successful for the duration of twentieth century. Here we find a number of former empires whose peoples were hoping to redeem their historical humiliations and claim a better, stronger position in the world: the communist partisan states of China, Yugoslavia, and Vietnam, but also nationalist Turkey and, later, Iran, with its peculiar antisystemic ideology of Islamic nationalism. Even the small, defiant Cuba and, on the opposite side of the Cold War divide, the most peculiar State of Israel added to the variety of insurgent nationalisms adopting the features of “fortress socialism.”
All such states faced hostile geopolitics. After the initial periods of revolutionary romanticism, the world-system’s structural realities kicked in with hard policy choices: spontaneity versus discipline, idealists versus enforcers, inspiring the masses or coercing the peasants, ideological purity fraught with perilous isolation or uneasy international alliances. If communists wanted to be serious players on the world stage, their effective response had to be opportunistic realpolitik. Despite ideological proclamations, communist states could never totally quit the capitalist world-system. Conflict is in fact one of the strongest kinds of ties in social networks, be it at the level of small groups or among the states. The core capitalist states continued to be the main preoccupation and reference point for Moscow. Germany before 1945 and America ever after posed the main military menace dictating the priorities of Soviet industry and science. But the West also remained the vital source for buying advanced machinery and prestigious goods with the earnings obtained mainly from the export of raw materials. The once endless debates about communist alternative have been ultimately ended by the fact that all communist states, one way or another, eventually reverted to capitalism.
THE COSTS OF DEVELOPMENTAL SUCCESS
This brings us back to the old predictions of Randall Collins and Immanuel Wallerstein. Their ability to see the coming end of communism derived from very different theories and focused on different processes: geopolitical overextension for Collins, and the structural imperatives of the capitalist world-economy for Wallerstein. The predictions, however, reinforced each other in interesting ways. Collins saw two dire outcomes to the Soviet dilemma of overextension: imperial disintegration or an all-out war of last resort. Wallerstein identified the third possibility in a pan-European economic and military bloc emerging around the axis of Paris—Berlin—Moscow. This scenario evidently conformed to the long-standing ambitions of Charles de Gaulle and the hopeful spirit of the 1970s German Neue Ostpolitik. Analytically, Wallerstein’s unrealized prediction directs our attention to an important counterfactual. It posits Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika as a viable possibility. Incidentally, this counterfactual still implies that a rebuilt Russia and the EU can find structural reasons to form a military and economic bloc in the near future. The past predictions of Collins and Wallerstein, however, were abstract sketches that left a lot to be filled in regarding the shifting social forces, specific mechanisms, and event sequences leading to the observed as well as aborted historical outcomes.