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Chapter 7. The Soviet Union: triumph, decline, and fall. The Second World War and after. The USSR after Stalin
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Chapter 7
The Soviet Union: triumph, decline, and fall
The Second World War and after
The Second World War exemplified in brutal fashion the advantages and disadvantages of Russia’s geostrategic position. When Germany and its allies invaded in June 1941, the Red Army, destabilized by the terror and weakened by poor preparation, suffered terrible early losses, and retreated first of all to the outskirts of Moscow, then as far as the Volga at Stalingrad. The Germans occupied huge areas of the country, killing, enslaving, or deporting the inhabitants. Eventually, though, the strengths of Soviet totalitarian leadership reasserted themselves: the CPSU was able to prioritize the use of resources, shift industry to where it was more secure, and expand the production of armaments. ‘Enemies’ were now all too real, and Soviet citizens were powerfully motivated to fight them. The staunch fighting qualities of the Soviet soldier combined with popular Soviet‑ Russian patriotism, which even most non‑ Russians accepted when faced by German brutality. Recovery was gradual, but in the end, the greater size and resources of the Soviet Union, augmented by Allied aid, ensured victory.
As a result of that victory, the USSR gained an ‘outer empire’ in Central Europe and the Balkans, including part of Germany itself. It set about building Soviet‑ style socialism in its new dependencies, tolerating only minor deviations from the model to accommodate national distinctions. The methods by which pro‑ Soviet regimes were established and sustained alienated most of the local populations. They also alarmed the former Allies. The result was an ‘iron curtain’ running north–south through the middle of Europe. The traditional Russian–Western dichotomy now entrenched itself anew in the form of military alliances, the Warsaw Pact and NATO. The result was an uneasy peace, universally dubbed ‘Cold War’.
The Second World War had changed Soviet society permanently, not necessarily to the benefit of the population. The ruling elite, both military and civilian, had proved their capacity to govern the country and achieve victory at a time of unprecedented danger. They had also become more independent of Stalin and more capable of defending their own interests. After 1945, terror was still applied, but on a much reduced scale compared with the 1930s. As for ordinary people, those who had survived were traumatized, most of them had lost family members, workplaces, and/or homes, and were more dependent on the ruling elite than ever before.
The official ideology had not changed much on the surface, but its inner content and the mentality of its audience had been transformed. The ‘proletarian internationalism’ of 1917 had now finally been replaced by a confident Russian‑ Soviet patriotism. ‘Building communism’ was still the official aim as post‑ war reconstruction got under way. But perpetual change was no longer acceptable, even to the younger generation. On the contrary, the Soviet Union was becoming a deeply conservative society, in which people struggled to acquire the minimum for a decent existence and then preserve it at all costs. Communism became an ever more ghostly aim, receding into an infinite future, whereas victory in 1945 was a definite and remarkable achievement. In subsequent decades, that victory, rather than the 1917 revolution, became the party’s chief claim to popular support. Messianism was increasingly directed to a past event rather than a future one.
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The USSR after Stalin
Stalin died in 1953. His legacy created huge difficulties for his successors. They knew that if another Stalin were allowed to emerge, they would probably be among his first victims. They acted quickly to bring the security police – now renamed the KGB – under the control of the Central Committee, so that it could no longer strike unrestrainedly against the nomenklatura elite.
More than that, however, they realized that mass terror was not in the long term a viable system of rule. But how could they keep control without it? Moreover, without revealing the truth about Stalin’s crimes, how could they restrain terror in the future?
In the event, the new party first secretary, Khrushchev, decided on a limited revelation of the truth. At the 20th party congress in 1956, he denounced Stalin’s repression of leading members of the nomenklatura elite and the deportations of nationalities. But he ignored the dekulakization and the famine of the 1930s – implying that these were entirely acceptable. Both what Khrushchev said and what he left unsaid were to become objects of heated controversy over the next decade, mostly in private and in the underground. What was crucial was that he had irrevocably destroyed the party’s faç ade of unique and total rectitude. If it had made such terrible mistakes and committed such terrible crimes in the past, where was the guarantee it could not do so again? Many long‑ term prisoners were released from labour camps, but the rehabilitation of those unjustly arrested proceeded haltingly and eventually petered out. Stalin’s ghost hung over everybody.
Khrushchev aimed to regain the population’s trust by offering them growing material prosperity. He re‑ emphasized the party’s millennial aims: at the 22nd party congress in 1961, he announced that by 1980 the Soviet Union would overtake the USA in industrial output and thereby create ‘the material prerequisites for communism’. Antagonistic social relationships had already come to an end, he claimed, and there was therefore no further need for the state as an organ of repression; it would ‘fade away’ and be replaced by the party as an agent of popular self‑ government. Khrushchev attempted to democratize the party by limiting the tenure of party secretaries at all levels and stipulating that they should be elected by secret ballot. This infuriated senior officials who since the death of Stalin had become accustomed to regarding their posts as more or less freehold entitlements. It was one reason why Khrushchev fell in 1964, dismissed by the Central Committee.
The new relationship between party and people required a reformed legal system, shorn of catch‑ all concepts like ‘enemy of the people’ and ‘counter‑ revolutionary activity’, which enabled prosecutors to incriminate anyone they chose. In principle, the new ‘socialist legality’ was to require genuine evidence of criminal activity to be produced in court before a conviction could be obtained. Judicial procedures were democratized by the introduction of ‘comrade courts’, consisting of ordinary citizens in the workplace or apartment block, empowered to reach a verdict and pronounce sentence on petty crimes. The idea was that society should become self‑ policing, at least for minor offences.
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Stalin’s successors attempted to increase agricultural production and make consumer goods available. Perhaps most important of all, they embarked on a huge programme of domestic construction, with the ultimate aim of providing each family with its own apartment. During the 1960s and 1970s, sufficient progress was made to turn most Soviet citizens into modest de facto property owners, with therefore a stake in preserving the system, whatever its faults. The Soviet welfare system also functioned well enough by the 1960s to give most citizens entitlements to education, child care, and health care, about whose defects they grumbled, without wishing to abolish them. The collective strength of the ruling elite ensured that Soviet society became unyieldingly hierarchical. For most people, the way to get on in life was to elbow one’s way upwards. The idea of a hierarchy of dwelling places may sound strange, but it was an integral part of Soviet life. For the supply of food, consumer goods, and social benefits in a society of scarcity, the best‑ provided city was Moscow; next came Leningrad and the capitals of the union republics; then towns with enterprises deemed ‘of all‑ Union significance’; then other towns; and finally at the bottom of the ladder the villages. The aim of young people was to rise as far up this hierarchy as possible, using a mixture of educational qualifications and personal connections to obtain employment and a propiska (residence permit) in a higher‑ ranking location.
Those born in the villages tried to leave them. The long‑ term price of collectivization and neglect of agriculture was a poverty‑ stricken and demoralized countryside, populated mainly by women and elderly men who had not been able to escape. Young men found it easier to escape rural life than women, since military service enabled them to leave the village, acquire new skills, and obtain an urban propiska. Agricultural productivity was very low, as one could see in the empty shelves of grocers’ shops. The Soviet state had to expend precious foreign currency importing grain in order to keep up the tacit ‘social contract’ with the urban workers: cheap food in return for low pay.
In the towns, the struggle for life chances became paramount. For many people, their employer was a vital resource person: if he could negotiate favourable deals with Gosplan, the supply of food, fuel, housing, putevki (paid holidays), and consumer goods was likely to be satisfactory for his employees. The benefits of the social security system were distributed at the workplace, through trade union branches. One might argue that every Soviet workplace was a ‘primary collective’, where the ostensible productive function was secondary to enabling people to conduct the normal and essential business of their lives in spite of the omnipresent pressure from the state.
Life inside the collective was fairly easy. One did not have to work too hard: pilfering, tukhta (padding the figures), and mutual cover‑ ups ensured that every employee could cope with life, no matter how deficient the collective’s output. Since neither terror nor a normal market were available, it was impossible to eradicate these practices. On the other hand, talented or unusual people found life in the collective very difficult. To ensure its survival, the collective’s members would band together to discipline or extrude individuals who might threaten its existence through non‑ conformity with prevailing social and political norms. In this way, collectives largely policed themselves: mutual surveillance remained one of their paramount functions.
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In the struggle for life chances, another vital lubricator was blat. This was the unofficial mutual exchange of goods and services: one needed a patron with good access to official sources or a friend with a link to the shadow economy, where ‘illegal’ goods were obtainable. If a water pipe in the bathroom burst, then one needed someone to repair it urgently. The state repair system was usually too cumbersome to react speedily and effectively, so one would hastily ring round among friends and find a fitter who had access to the tools and lengths of pipe necessary to do the job. He would be diverting state property for his own personal profit, but at least he would perform the repair competently and in time to avoid major damage. In return, one would either offer some service or commodity, or pay him at a much higher rate than for state services.
Many forms of non‑ monetary exchange were mediated through personal relationships. If one needed to get one’s son into a good school, one would work through acquaintances who knew the head teacher there. In return, one might be able to provide certain goods or services: a French perfume, an Italian suit, a Japanese tape recorder, or even just regular access to a good car repairer. In the process, one might actually form a good personal relationship. That was not necessary, but it would help to confirm and consolidate the exchange of goods and services. In this way, contrary to the theory of Hannah Arendt, who argued that totalitarianism ‘atomized’ society, new kinds of social bonds were generated, though totally unlike anything envisaged by the party.
This kind of social bonding became crucial in the field of science and culture. The USSR needed highly qualified scientists able to think independently and keep in touch with their foreign colleagues. Their institutes became islands of free thought and exchange of information not available to the ordinary population. Theatres, orchestras, publishing houses, and literary journals had their own tightly knit circles of creative personalities who chafed at party control and pervasive censorship. One of those journals, Novy mir, under its editor, Alexander Tvardovsky, himself a member of the CPSU Central Committee, managed to build on Khrushchev’s revelations and tell more of the truth about the Soviet past. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), which described honestly the routine of a Stalinist labour camp, broke a long‑ established taboo and aroused heartfelt reactions from its readers. Once again, literature was being forced to assume a civic, even a political, role as a kind of loyal opposition. In Novy mir, readers could follow in muffled form a debate which could not be articulated openly in the media.
The USSR was becoming more permeable. Information from the outside world was reaching it from its own ‘outer empire’, from Western visitors, and from Western short‑ wave radio stations. At its best, the Soviet education system produced enquiring minds, eager to absorb this information; and in their new private apartments, Soviet citizens could freely discuss with family and friends information and ideas excluded from the public media.
The result was to perpetuate the 19th‑ century dichotomy between Russia and ‘the West’, only now in a new form. Among free‑ thinking intellectuals reforming ideas took one of two paths. One could be called ‘internationalist liberal’, embodied in the person of the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov. He proposed that the Soviet Union should introduce genuine rule of law, legalize political opposition, reduce its armaments (especially nuclear), and fulfil the international commitments it had undertaken after the war. His position was strengthened by the Helsinki Final Act (1975), which finally confirmed the Soviet Union’s post‑ 1945 territorial gains, but also stipulated that all signatories should respect ‘human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief’.
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The other stream of underground oppositional thinking was Russian nationalist. As we have seen, Russian nationalism can take a mainly ethnic or mainly imperial form, and both trends existed, though the boundaries between them were blurred. What Russian nationalists could agree on was that Russians were a distinctively collectivist people, that unlike individualist, mercenary Westerners, they flourished by mutual support in adverse circumstances. Communist rule had weakened this inherited mutualism, they argued, and it had also reduced the population, blighted the natural environment, undermined the Orthodox Church, and destroyed peasant agriculture. Some, like Solzhenitsyn, thought the solution lay in withdrawing from great power politics, reducing the share of heavy industry in the economy, and returning to a simpler lifestyle based on organic agriculture and artisan production. Others, on the contrary, wanted to augment Russian imperial power by increasing heavy industrial and military production, and to strengthen the position of Russians as the state‑ bearing nationality by reducing the rights of non‑ Russians, especially Jews.
All these attitudes were reflected in the top echelons of the CPSU. The stronghold of the liberal Westernizing outlook was the Central Committee’s International Department. The Russianist outlook was strongest in the military and in the RSFSR (Russian republic) party apparatus. The party’s official position was never clearly defined and wavered over time. On the whole, though, the leaders upheld internationalist Marxism‑ Leninism as the official ideology, while tolerating a simple‑ minded Russian imperial nationalism as a kind of ‘working ideology’ for everyday use. Obviously, this was not wholly acceptable in the party organizations of the non‑ Russian republics, but Leonid Brezhnev, CPSU General Secretary (1964–82), adopted a policy of ‘stability of cadres’ which offered their leaders the chance to devise their own local alternatives. They usually protected indigenous patron–client networks and tolerated a limited revival of local languages, histories, and cultures. As a result, by the 1970s, Russians living outside the RSFSR became gradually aware that being Russian was no longer an advantage in looking for education, jobs, or housing.
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