Russian Dilemma
Protesters hold a portrait of Vladimir Putin as they march against alleged vote rigging in parliamentary elections in Sakharov Avenue in Moscow, named after Andrei Sakharov, who addressed the People’s Congress as Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev looks on in 1989. The poster makes a reference to Putin’s remarks that he mistook white ribbons worn by protesters for condoms.
Tsarism may have been the most repressive regime of its time in Europe, but Lenin’s Soviet Union was far more violently repressive
THE extraordinary protests that followed Russia’s December 4 parliamentary elections continue to resound.
Still more extraordinarily, the Kremlin refrained from using armed force to put down the massive demonstrations that took place across the country, a week after the disputed vote. And yet nobody can be sure whether these events are signs of deeper change. In the run-up to the balloting, former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev emphasised the challenges facing Russia when he publicly accused the Kremlin of reverting to its old authoritarian habits and predicted that the contest would be rigged (charges that the government quickly denied).
A long and brutal past remains a living force in present-day Russia. The ruling elite are the products of centuries of history, of personal and collective ordeals, of indoctrination, and of the psychological ability to survive those ordeals and accept that indoctrination. Chekhov wrote of Russia’s “heavy, chilling history, savagery, bureaucracy, poverty and ignorance… Russian life weighs upon a Russian like a thousand-ton rock”. At the time, he was looking back on centuries of extreme despotism.
However, in the century that followed his verdict, the country went through much that was even worse. Tsarism may have been the most repressive regime of its time in Europe, but Lenin’s Soviet Union was far more violently repressive than anything the continent had seen in centuries — never mind the greater horrors that followed Chekhov’s death. It can hardly be maintained that Russian communism was merely a continuation of what came before.
Lenin and his successors ruled by consolidating their machinery of power and by subjecting the populace to saturation barrages of propaganda. At the same time the politico-economic apparatus solidified into a new caste. The demonstration of what might be called ideological insanity in practice came with the campaign in 1929-33 to collectivise the peasantry. Lenin invented the term “kulak”, signifying a newly prosperous peasant, in order to wage class warfare and seize the holdings of small landowners. Millions of people perished, and the agricultural economy was wrecked.
After the disaster of collectivisation, the leadership had two options: Either to admit failure and change policy — perhaps even to relinquish total power — or to pretend that success had been achieved. Falsification took place on a barely credible scale, in every sphere. Real facts, honest statistics, disappeared. History, especially that of the Communist Party, was rewritten. Unpersons vanished from the official record. A spurious past and a fictitious present were imposed on the captive minds of the Soviet people.
To focus on the physical manifestations of communist terror — the killings, deportations, people driven to suicide — would be to overlook the larger context: What Boris Pasternak called “the inhuman reign of the lie”.
Before Gorbachev, the country lived a double existence — an official world of fantasy, grand achievements, wonderful statistics, liberty, democracy, all juxtaposed with a reality of gloom, suffering, terror, denunciation, and apparatchik degeneration.
The confrontation with the West was another product of the Soviet order’s mental distortions. The prevailing mindset required an unceasing struggle with other cultures, and spawned what Gorbachev described in his farewell address as an “insane militarisation” which ruined the country.
I learned that something in Moscow had radically changed when I first met Gorbachev. The Soviet leader was on his 1990 visit to the US, and we held a small seminar for him at Stanford.
One of those present was a seismology professor, who asked Gorbachev about the devastating 1988 earthquake that had killed at least 25,000 people in what was then the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. The seismologist noted that the event had been roughly the same intensity as the 1989 California quake that killed 63. Was Armenia’s toll so much higher because its quake had hit ancient villages dating back long before modern earthquake-resistant building codes, unlike most of the structures in California?
Gorbachev’s answer shocked me. No, he said. Both places had laws that set quake-proofing standards for building construction, but in Soviet Armenia these had not been observed. Here was a leader telling the truth, in an abrupt departure from his country’s 70-year tradition of falsehoods.
The decisive step was the launching of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s. Foreign radio broadcasts had already convinced many Russians that their country’s official truths were untenable, but when glasnost hit Russian state television, the effect was stunning. The televised debates in the Supreme Soviet, with Andrei Sakharov standing up to Mikhail Gorbachev and speaking out for democracy, disrupted production at factories all over the country, as workers clustered around the sets.
As crowds filled the streets in August 1991, during the hardline Communists’ last-ditch effort to topple Gorbachev, fax machines helped keep communication open, and copies of declarations from the country’s farthest reaches were plastered all over the lampposts of Moscow and Leningrad.
By then, glasnost had brought a huge mass of officially banned knowledge out of hiding. The first public mention in Russia of The Great Terror, my book on the Stalin era, was when Katrina vanden Heuvel interviewed me for the weekly Moskovski Novosti in the spring of 1989. When I finally arrived in Moscow later that year, it was everywhere. In the preceding decade there had been little reply to the book from the Communist Party, even though copies had been printed for Politburo members. But now, at the final plenum of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, the Stalinist writer Aleksandr Chakovsky denounced me as “anti-Sovietchik No 1”. Too late: The Russian edition was already being serialised in Neva, one million copies per issue.
The Soviet Union had been a vast kleptocracy for years. Money began to play a major role above and beyond the long-standing perquisites of power. The already large criminal element had, in fact, become almost institutionally intertwined with the bureaucracy. There were — and continue to be — stunning illegalities.
To this day, Russian politics have seen a less than a rapid and painless modernisation (putting it mildly), partly because no trained political class existed. The habits needed for good governance were effectively discouraged on a systemic basis.
As David Remnick later noted in The New Yorker, it was typical of the regime that in 1986, following the Chernobyl disaster, nuclear plant director Viktor Bryukhanov, on being told that the reactor’s radiation was millions of times higher than normal, replied that the meter was obviously defective and must be thrown away. Deputy prime minister Boris Shcherbina rejected a suggestion to order a mass evacuation. “Panic is worse than radiation,” he said.
When “conservative” elements within the Politburo launched a military coup to remove Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin was instrumental in spiking the conspirators’ revolt. But a few months later, Yeltsin signed treaties abolishing the USSR, creating in its stead the Commonwealth of Independent States. As Russia’s first post-Soviet head of state he weathered a second mutiny in 1993, and ushered in an era of political and economic reform — and unbridled greed: A handful of oligarchs became billionaires via the privatisation of old Soviet industries. After nine years Yeltsin became the first Russian leader to relinquish power voluntarily, handing over the presidency to Vladimir Putin.
But through it all, the apparatus remained — and in effect, remains. When the socialist order failed, the only class with access to and experience in economic matters was the state bureaucratic stratum. The leading elements used the emergence of the market to loot Russia’s resources.
The present regime may have abandoned the compulsive economic ideologies of the Communist past, but it has not developed anything like an open society.
RUSSIANS are used to electoral fraud. There were never any expectations that the December elections would be carried out with complete honesty. However, this time, instances of ballot irregularity were recorded by mobile devices and posted on the internet, to which more than 40% of Russians now have access. Outrage — and calls to protest — flashed from computer to computer. Political discourse is thriving in blogs, tweets, posts to Facebook, uploads to YouTube — challenging the regime’s old-media monopoly on news and opinion.
One can have “reform” without liberalism, and Russia’s regime remains far from the rule of law — something more important than “democracy”. The Russian bureaucracy has not abandoned its habit of failing to fulfil its contracts and obligations. The problem is not primarily economic or even political. It is a certain lack of much feeling for community in the sense of a civic or plural order.
That may be changing among the young, educated class. Yet Putin has reverted to the Soviet habit of blaming unrest on outside agitators, suggesting that “American partners” are manipulating the protesters.
The question is whether Russia will descend into expansionist chauvinism. Even if it were not of the global type typical of the USSR, it would still be an unwelcome development. Still, the world coped with a much worse Russia. Let us be optimistic.
* (c) 2011 Newsweek/Daily Beast
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