As collapse approached it was unsurprising that many beneficiaries of the Soviet compound should seek 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-established 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 revolting against communism, the peoples of Eastern Europe were struggling against 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. Thus Russian national identity under tsars and commissars was cross-cut by an imperial identity. At least until the mid-1960s, moreover, the 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 are 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 lived 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 were started against Chechen rebels. 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.
Must the forecast 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 was left with 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. 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.
Notes
Short titles are used in the notes. Full references will be found in the bibliography. The following abbreviations are used in notes and bibliography:
GARF — Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii
IA — Istoricheskii arkhiv
ITsKKPSS — Izvestiya Tsentral’nogo Komiteta Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soyuza
OA — Osobyi arkhiv
PSS — V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii
RTsKhIDNI — Rossiiskii Tsentr dlya Khraneniya i Issledovaniya Dokumentov Noveishei Istorii
SEER — Slavonic and East European Review