It is hard not to see something tragically Russian in this. Having abandoned early hopes of world revolution, the Soviet regime reverted to some deep Russian archetypes: Ivan the Terrible, who created an elite cadre, the Oprichnina, to repress and terrorise the wider boyar class; and Peter the Great, who turned the entire nobility into state servants, and built his new capital, St Petersburg, on the bones of tens of thousands of forced labourers. Indeed, Stalin revelled in comparisons with these earlier figures. And under him the Russian tradition of autocracy was back with a vengeance. The all-embracing system of classification and control of the Soviet Union's people in the 1930s is comparable with nothing so much as the system imposed by Peter the Great 200 years earlier. Nicholas II looks positively liberal by comparison.
For a while it worked, though at an unimaginable cost in human lives. The economy was industrialised and society dragooned in time to defeat the genocidal Nazi invasion of 1941. That success, with the huge accretion in international power and influence it brought, made the Soviet Union the world's second superpower, leading a world communist movement which at its height governed one third of mankind. Even as late as 1956 the leader of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, was able to point to Soviet technological and economic successes and say, plausibly, to the West 'We will bury you.' But stagnation set in. The state-run economy simply couldn't compete in terms of dynamism or innovation with late twentieth-century capitalism. And the Communist Party, as long-serving elites do, became corrupt, sclerotic and conservative. Fitful efforts at reform failed until the final reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, inadvertently and unexpectedly brought the whole system down.
V: TWO REVOLUTIONS COMPARED
The comparison between Gorbachev's 1991 'revolution' and the 1917 revolution which is the subject of this book has a lot to say about what has and has not changed in Russia over the past century. There were of course huge differences. The 1917 revolution came from below, driven by an angry population and political class. The 1991 revolution came from above, driven by an elite effort to make the system work better. The 1917 revolution began with a dysfunctional autocracy and largely peasant economy; it ended with communist totalitarianism. The 1991 revolution began with a repressive and closed communist system; it ended with 'managed democracy' and a recognisably market economy. What then are the common features? Four leap to the eye.
A] THE FRAGILITY OF RULING RUSSIA
The first is that in both cases what looked like a well-established and enduring regime fell with remarkable speed, taking the vast majority of contemporaries by surprise. The Romanov regime, for all its retrospectively obvious weaknesses, had been in power for 300 years. The massive tercentenary celebrations in 1913 gave the strong impression (not least to Nicholas himself) of a nation united behind its sovereign. The patriotic displays at the start of the war in August 1914 seemed to carry the same message. Until the crisis was fully upon them, the tsar, most of the ruling class and most outside observers dismissed outbursts of peasant anger, worker indiscipline and intelligentsia disaffection as untypical of the mass of the Russian people.
Similarly, the Soviet regime of the early 1980s felt rock solid. Certainly it faced economic stagnation, a gerontocratic leadership and the loss of passionate revolutionary belief. But the tiny dissident movement was seen as unrepresentative of a Soviet people who if not enthusiastic were at least submissive. No serious commentator was predicting collapse. What seemed to be needed was evolutionary reform, and the agent chosen for that was a true Leninist believer, Mikhail Gorbachev. Within five years the modest stimuli he introduced, a little more market and a little less repression, ran wild and destroyed the entire system.
Plainly, one cannot draw too wide a lesson from these two examples of unexpected regime downfall. But they do suggest that, in Russia, with its particularly opaque and repressive tradition of public life, an impression of widespread public acquiescence in the way they are ruled can prove, when put to the test, startlingly shallow. Which may help to explain why Russia's present regime follows public opinion with very close attention.
B] THE INSTABILITY OF EMPIRE
The second feature common to the two revolutions is the destabilising role played by Russia's subject provinces - particularly Ukraine. In 1917 one of the immediate consequences of the fall of tsarism was an upsurge of nationalist demands, initially for autonomy but ultimately for independence, in Poland and Finland (then provinces of the empire) as well as Ukraine and the Baltic republics. These demands, backed as they were by the Germans, were among the factors that made a quick peace impossible and so broke the back of the Provisional Government. It was only by 1922, after the Germans had collapsed to defeat in the West and the Bolsheviks had won the Civil War, that Ukraine was reclaimed. But Poland, Finland and (until 1945) the Baltics became independent.
The story in 1991 was different, but the underlying centrifugal forces were the same. As Gorbachev's reforms weakened Moscow's power so, again, demands arose for more autonomy in a number of Soviet republics, most particularly the Baltics and Ukraine. It was Gorbachev's efforts to meet these demands that provoked the fateful coup of August 1991 (conducted by hardliners intent on stopping the breakup of the Soviet Union). Even though the coup failed, it marginalised Gorbachev and so enabled the president of Russia (Boris Yeltsin) to do the deal with the president of Ukraine and others that broke the Soviet Union up into independent states.
Again, it would be a mistake to draw too wide a conclusion from these two particular cases. But plainly, and unsurprisingly, Russia's grip on its subject nationalities diminishes at a time of domestic political turmoil. This generates demands for autonomy/independence, which can add fatally to the pressures that the centre is already under. It is notable that even in post-1991 Russia one of the key challenges for Moscow has been Chechnya's demand for independence, and the destructive impact that has had on domestic security and governance.
C] THE CHALLENGE OF THE WEST
Tsarist Russia's relationship with the Western powers, even when polite, was never entirely comfortable. Many in the West saw Russia as alien and threatening. For its part, Russia, while hungry for Western modernity, mostly remembered regular Western invasions (Poles, Swedes and French, at roughly hundred-year intervals - each with the ambition of destroying Russia), and saw itself as leader of an alternative, and superior, Orthodox and Slavic tradition. Nicholas II was personally sympathetic to some of the most extreme exponents of this view, and it helped lead Russia into the First World War.
The revolution of 1917 was intended to end the old international politics. Russia was now just a station on the road to world communism, and Soviet foreign relations were initially subordinate to that objective. But by the mid 1920s hopes ofworld revolution had been replaced by the grey reality of 'Socialism in One Country'. The messianism of communism accordingly mutated into the straightforward pursuit of Russian national interest (two conspicuous examples: the subjugation of Soviet policy towards the Chinese communists between the wars to concerns about the Japanese threat to the USSR; and the 1939 somersault, again prompted by Soviet security concerns, from total ideological hostility to Nazi Germany to effective alliance with it). The Soviet Union until the end of its days certainly emphasised its role as leader of world communism (as Nicholas II had as leader of Orthodoxy), but pursued a very traditional Russian foreign policy agenda: protection from the threat of Western invasion by extending as wide a sphere of influence as possible, and expansion of Soviet/Communist influence wherever opportunity offered.