The Penguin History of Modern Russia Read online

  The Penguin History of Modern Russia

  Robert John Service

  Russia’s recent past has encompassed revolution, civil war, mass terror and two world wars, and the country is still undergoing huge change.

  In his acclaimed history, now updated to 2009, Robert Service provides a superb panoramic viewpoint on Russia, exploring the complex, changing interaction between rulers and ruled from Nicholas II, Lenin and Stalin through to Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin and beyond.

  This new edition also discusses Russia’s unresolved economic and social difficulties and its determination to regain its leading role on the world stage and explains how, despite the recent years of de-communization, the seven decades of communist rule which penetrated every aspect of life still continue to influence Russia today.

  Robert Service

  THE PENGUIN HISTORY OF MODERN RUSSIA

  From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century

  THIRD EDITION

  To Adele, with love

  Acknowledgements

  These are unusual times to be studying Russia even by Russian standards. Archives have been opened and contacts with Russian writers are no longer difficult. Important documentary collections have been published. The need exists for the newer items of information to be incorporated in a general description and analysis.

  In picking up this task, I have been very fortunate to have assistance from the following scholars who read preliminary drafts: Francesco Benvenuti, Archie Brown, Bob Davies, Peter Duncan, Israel Getzler, Geoffrey Hosking, László Péter, Silvio Pons, Martyn Rady, Arfon Rees and Karen Schönwälder. Their comments have led to a very large number of improvements, and each of them kindly helped further by replying to my follow-up queries. Also to be thanked are members of the press study group at SSEES and others in London who have alerted me to interesting materials in Russian newspapers and journals: John Channon, Norman Davies, Peter Duncan, Julian Graffy, Jane Henderson, Geoffrey Hosking, Lindsey Hughes, John Klier, Maria Lenn, John Morrison, Rudolf Muhs, Judith Shapiro and Faith Wigzell.

  Nor should I omit to acknowledge the value of discussions over several years with the historians Gennadi Bordyugov, Vladimir Buldakov, Oleg Khlevnyuk, Vladimir Kozlov and Andrei Sakharov. Quite apart from their professional expertise, each of them have shared insights and intuitions about Russian history foreclosed to any foreigner.

  While writing some of the chapters, I had access to the Russian Centre for the Conservation and Study of Documents of Recent History (RTsKhIDNI), to the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and to the Special Archive (OA). In the first two of these three archives I found useful materials in conditions that reflected the recent political changes which have occurred in Russia, and I shall always remember the occasion in September 1991 when Bob Davies and I walked into the Russian Centre for the Conservation and Study of Documents of Recent History as it was being ‘unsealed’ after the abortive August 1991 coup. Equally, I shall not quickly forget the experience shared two years later with Rudolf Muhs in the Special Archive, an institution which gave us material to read in the morning whose existence it denied in the afternoon. But in general the libraries and archives in Moscow have been as helpful as the SSEES Library in London — and this is saying a lot because John Screen, Lesley Pitman and Ursula Phillips could not have done more to facilitate the research on the book.

  My greatest debt is to my wife Adele Biagi, who examined the early drafts and nudged me away from the temptation to take too particularist a viewpoint on Russia. It has also been a pleasure to talk about Russian history with our daughters and sons — Emma, Owain, Hugo and Francesca — as they have been growing up. They read some of the chapters, and their suggestions led to several useful revisions. Russia is a source of changing but perennial fascination — and it is a fascination which I hope this book will do its bit to spread.

  January 1997

  It is five years since this book appeared and much has changed in Russian politics, economy and society. The second edition takes the account into the twenty-first century. Most chapters have undergone minor revision and some recent works have been added to the bibliography. Chapter 27 has been entirely re-written. The Introduction has been overhauled to sharpen the focus on historiographical debate — and here I was helped by comments from Adele Biagi, Archie Brown, Bob Davies, Richard Evans and David Priestland. The main lines of argument in the first edition have been repaired but not replaced.

  November 2002

  The events of the past few years have shaken the kaleidoscope of Russian affairs. In bringing the story and the analysis up to date I have kept the book’s basic line of analysis and have been fortunate in being able to talk this over with Archie Brown, Paul Chaisty and Alex Pravda in the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre at St Antony’s College in Oxford, with Katya Andreyev at Christ Church, Oxford, with Nick Stargardt at Magdalen College, Oxford and with Robert Conquest, Paul Gregory, Amir Weiner, Norman Naimark and Yuri Slezkine while I was working on research projects at the Hoover Institution in Stanford University. I am indebted to the detailed advice given by Archie Brown about the introduction and by Paul Chaisty and Hugo Service about the chapters on the past two decades. Above all, my wife Adele Biagi has given inestimable assistance by going through the entire book yet again and suggesting ways of improving on the previous edition: I am grateful to her for her patience and insight.

  Robert Service

  February 2009

  A Note on Transliteration

  The transliterations in this book are a simplified version of the system used by the US Library of Congress. The first difference consists in the dropping of both the diacritical mark and the so-called soft i. Thus whereas the Library of Congress system has Sokol’nikov and Krestinskii, this book has Sokolnikov and Krestinski. Secondly, the yo sound which appears in words such as Gorbachyov is given as an ë, as in Gorbachëv. Thirdly, the yeh sound is rendered as ye when it occurs at the beginning of proper nouns such as Yeltsin.

  These differences are intended to make the text less exotic in appearance. By and large, I have kept to the Russian version of proper names. But some look so odd in English that I have Anglicized them: thus Alexander rather than Aleksandr. Finally there are several non-Russian names in the text. In the case of Polish, Hungarian and Czech leaders, for example, their names are given in their native version; and the names of Ukrainian leaders are transliterated without the simplification used for Russians. This is inconsistent, but it helps to give a sense of the variety of countries involved in Russian history. A further inconsistency lies in my use of Russian-language names for most places in the USSR: thus Kharkov, not Kharkiv. Until all of us become more accustomed to place-names according to their post-Soviet official nomenclature this seems a decent workable compromise.

  Maps

  1 The Russian Empire in 1900

  2 The Soviet Union, 1924–1936

  3 The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe after 1945

  4 The Commonwealth of Independent States in 1997

  5 The Russian Federation 1997

  Introduction

  The centrepiece of this history of contemporary Russia is the period of communist government. The weight of the Soviet years continues to lie heavily on the country. Before 1917 the Russian Empire was ruled by the tsars of the Romanov dynasty. Nicholas II was overthrown in the February Revolution, and the ensuing Provisional Government of liberals and socialists lasted merely a few months. Vladimir Lenin and his communist party organized the October Revolution in 1917 and established the world’s first communist state, which survived until the USSR’s abolition at the end of 1991. A new compound of politics, society, economi
cs and culture prevailed in the intervening years. The USSR was a highly centralized, one-party dictatorship. It enforced a single official ideology; it imposed severe restrictions on national, religious and cultural self-expression. Its economy was predominantly state-owned. This Soviet compound served as model for the many communist states created elsewhere.

  The phases of the recent Russian past have passed with breathtaking rapidity. After the October Revolution a Civil War broke out across Russia and its former empire. Having won the military struggle, the communists themselves came close to being overthrown by popular rebellions. Lenin introduced a New Economic Policy in 1921 which made temporary concessions, especially to the peasantry; but at the end of the same decade Iosif Stalin, who was emerging as the leading party figure after Lenin’s death in 1924, hurled the country into a campaign for forced-rate industrialization and forcible agricultural collectivization. The Great Terror followed in the late 1930s. Then came the Second World War. After Germany’s defeat in 1945, Stalin brought Eastern Europe under Soviet dominion and undertook post-war reconstruction with his own brutal methods. Only after his death in 1953 could the party leadership under Nikita Khrushchëv begin to reform the Soviet order. But Khrushchëv’s rule produced such political instability and resentment that in 1964 he was ousted by his colleagues.

  His successor Leonid Brezhnev presided over a phase, and a lengthy phase at that, of uneasy stabilization. When he died in 1982, the struggle over the desirability of reform was resumed. Mikhail Gorbachëv became communist party leader in 1985 and introduced radical reforms of policies and institutions. A drastic transformation resulted. In 1989, after Gorbachëv had indicated that he would not use his armed forces to maintain Soviet political control in Eastern Europe, the communist regimes there fell in quick succession. Russia’s ‘outer empire’ crumbled. At home, too, Gorbachëv’s measures undermined the status quo. Most of his central party and governmental associates were disconcerted by his reforms. In August 1991 some of them made a bungled attempt to stop the process through a coup d’état. Gorbachëv returned briefly to power, but was constrained to abandon his own Soviet communist party and accept the dissolution of the USSR.

  Russia and other Soviet republics gained their independence at the start of 1992, and Boris Yeltsin as Russian president proclaimed the de-communization of political and economic life as his strategic aim. Several fundamental difficulties endured. The economy’s decline sharply accelerated. The manufacturing sector collapsed. Social and administrative dislocation became acute. Criminality became an epidemic. In October 1993, when Yeltsin faced stalemate in his contest with leading opponents, he ordered the storming of the Russian White House and their arrest. Although he introduced a fresh constitution in December, strong challenges to his policies of reform remained. Communism had not been just an ideology, a party and a state; it had been consolidated as an entire social order, and the attitudes, techniques and objective interests within society were resistant to rapid dissolution. The path towards democracy and the market economy was strewn with obstacles. Yeltsin’s successors Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev busied themselves with orderly central power at the expense of the constitution and legality. They also cultivated respect for Soviet achievements, calling for an end to denigration of the USSR. Political and business elites benefited hugely from the profits made in energy exports. The Kremlin’s ruling group ruthlessly eliminated opposition. Authoritarian rule was re-imposed.

  This turbulent history led to differing interpretations. Journalists and former diplomats published the initial accounts. Some were vehemently anti-Soviet, others were equally passionate on the other side of the debate — and still others avoided taking political sides and concentrated on depicting the bizarre aspects of life in the USSR. Few foreigners produced works of sophisticated analysis before the Second World War. It was Russian refugees and deportees who provided the works of lasting value. The Western focus on Soviet affairs was sharpened after 1945 when the USSR emerged as a world power. Research institutes were created in the USA, Western Europe and Japan; books and articles appeared in a publishing torrent. Debate was always lively, often polemical. Such discussions were severely curtailed for decades in Moscow by a regime seeking to impose doctrinal uniformity; but from the late 1980s Soviet writers too were permitted to publish the results of their thinking.

  Official communist propagandists from 1917 through to the mid-1980s claimed there was nothing seriously wrong with the Soviet Union and that a perfectly functioning socialist order was within attainable range.1 Such boasts were challenged from the start. Otto Bauer, an Austrian Marxist, regarded the USSR as a barbarous state. He accepted, though, that the Bolsheviks had produced as much socialism as was possible in so backward a country.2 Yuli Martov, Karl Kautsky, Bertrand Russell and Fëdor Dan retorted that Leninism, being based on dictatorship and bureaucracy, was a fundamental distortion of any worthwhile version of socialism.3 By the end of the 1920s Lev Trotski was making similar points about bureaucratic degeneration, albeit with the proviso that it was Stalin’s misapplication of Leninism rather than Leninism itself that was the crucible for the distorting process.4 Other writers, especially Ivan Ilin and, in later decades, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, denounced Leninism as an import entirely alien to traditional Russian virtues and customs.5 This school of thought was challenged by the religious philosopher and socialist Nikolai Berdyaev who depicted the USSR as a reincarnation of Russian intellectual extremism. Berdyaev argued that the regime of Lenin and Stalin had reinforced the traditions of political repression, ideological intolerance and a passive, resentful society.6

  René Fülöp-Miller’s rejoinder was that all this underestimated the cultural effervescence after the October Revolution.7 But Nikolai Trubetskoi, who fled Russia after the communist seizure of power, offered yet another interpretation. He stressed that Russian history had always followed a path which was neither ‘European’ nor ‘Asian’ but a mixture of the two. From such ideas came the so-called Eurasianist school of thought. Trubetskoi and his fellow thinkers regarded a strong ruler and a centralized administrative order as vital to the country’s well-being. They suggested that several basic features of Soviet life — the clan-like groups in politics, the pitiless suppression of opposition and the culture of unthinking obedience — were simply a continuation of ages-old tradition.8 Nikolai Ustryalov, a conservative émigré, concurred that the communists were not as revolutionary as they seemed, and he celebrated Lenin’s re-establishment of a unitary state in the former Russian Empire. He and fellow analysts at the ‘Change of Landmarks’ journal insisted that communism in power was not merely traditionalism with a new red neckscarf. Ustryalov regarded the communists as essentially the economic modernizers needed by society. He predicted that the interests of Russia as a great power would mean steadily more to them than the tenets of their Marxism.9

  After the Second World War the Eurasianism of Trubetskoi underwent further development by Lev Gumilëv, who praised the Mongol contribution to Russian political and cultural achievements.10 E. H. Carr and Barrington Moore in the 1950s steered clear of any such idea and instead resumed and strengthened Ustryalov’s stress on state-building. They depicted Lenin and Stalin first and foremost as authoritarian modernizers. While not expressly condoning state terror, Carr and Moore treated communist rule as the sole effective modality for Russia to compete with the economy and culture of the West.11

  This strand of interpretation appeared downright insipid to Franz Neumann, who in the late 1930s categorized the USSR as a ‘totalitarian’ order. Merle Fainsod and Leonard Schapiro picked up this concept after the Second World War.12 They suggested that the USSR and Nazi Germany had invented a form of state order wherein all power was exercised at the political centre and the governing group monopolized control over the means of coercion and public communication and intervened deeply in the economy. Such an order retained a willingness to use force against its citizens as a normal method of rule. Writers of this persuasi
on contended that the outcome was the total subjection of the entire society to the demands of the supreme ruling group. Individual citizens were completely defenceless. The ruling group, accordingly, had made itself invulnerable to reactions in the broader state and society. In Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany such a group was dominated by its dictator. But the system could be totalitarian even if a single dictator was lacking. Fainsod and Schapiro insisted that the main aspects of the Soviet order remained intact after Stalin’s death in 1953.

  Viewing things from a somewhat different angle, the Yugoslav former communist Milovan Djilas suggested that a new class had come into existence with its own interests and authority. Accordingly the USSR, far from moving towards a classless condition, had administrative elites capable of passing on their privileges from generation to generation.13 While not repudiating Djilas’s analysis, Daniel Bell argued that trends in contemporary industrial society were already pushing the Soviet leadership into slackening its authoritarianism — and Bell noted that Western capitalist societies were adopting many measures of state economic regulation and welfare provision favoured in the USSR. In this fashion, it was said, a convergence of Soviet and Western types of society was occurring.14

  There was a grain of validity in the official Soviet claim that advances were made in popular welfare, even though several of them failed to take place until many decades after 1917. Yet Martov and others possessed greater weight through their counter-claim that Lenin distorted socialist ideas and introduced policies that ruined the lives of millions of people; and, as Solzhenitsyn later emphasized, many features of Soviet ideology originated outside Russia. Berdyaev for his part was convincing in his suggestion that the USSR reproduced pre-revolutionary ideological and social traditions. Trubetskoi was justified in pointing to the impact of Russia’s long encounter with Asia. So, too, was Ustryalov in asserting that the policies of communist leaders were increasingly motivated by considerations of the interests of the USSR as a Great Power. As Carr and Moore insisted, these leaders were also authoritarian modernizers. There was plausibility, too, in Djilas’s case that the Soviet administrative élites were turning into a distinct social class in the USSR; and Bell’s point was persuasive that modern industrial society was producing social and economic pressures which could not entirely be dispelled by the Kremlin leadership. And Fainsod and Schapiro were overwhelmingly right to underline the unprecedented oppressiveness of the Soviet order in its struggle for complete control of state and society.