The Soviet Colossus

History and Aftermath

Michael G. Kort

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351171861
• Edition: 8
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Teoría económica

The Soviet Colossus revisits the turning points in Russia's modern history, from the fall of the tsarist regime to the establishment of the Bolshevik dictatorship and Stalinist totalitarianism; the reforms and counter-reforms of Khrushchev and Brezhnev to the reform program of Mikhail Gorbachev and the resultant collapse of the Soviet Union; and from the effort to build a democratic and free-market Russia under Boris Yeltsin to the political authoritarianism and the establishment of a state capitalist economy under Vladimir Putin.

This eighth edition has been revised and updated to cover the latest developments from the Putin administration. These revisions include added emphasis on the increasing authoritarian nature of Russia's political system, the serious challenges posed by the country's unsolved economic and social problems, and the growing tensions between Russia on the one hand and the United States and the European Union on the other as a result of Moscow's aggression against Ukraine. Kort combines this updated account with a broad exploration of Russia's political history, examining how the Soviet past has been woven into the fabric of the modern Russian state, a state which plays such a major, assertive role in global affairs, but which simultaneously remains an allusive, secretive entity.

With Russia's increasing influence on the global stage and the controversies that often accompany this, The Soviet Colossus is an invaluable resource for students of history, politics, and international relations.

Part I

The Fundamentals of Russian History

Dedicated to Peter the Great, Falconet’s 1782 statue of the Bronze Horseman, in St. Petersburg Senate Square, was commissioned by Catherine the Great. (Painting by Vasily Ivanovich Surikov, image from The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

1 Prologue

There was a dreadful time,

That is fresh in our recollection…

Of it, my friends, for thee,

I begin my narration.

A somber tale it will be.

—Alexander Pushkin

For seven decades during the twentieth century, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union, was the colossus among the nations of the world. It sprawled over 6,000 miles from Central Europe across the breadth of Asia to China and the Pacific shore, and well over 2,000 miles from the hot deserts of the Asian heartland in the south to frozen Arctic wastes extending toward the North Pole. Its influence stretched yet further into Europe, Asia, Africa, and even the Americas. Like the Russian Empire it succeeded, which an enthusiastic Russian nationalist once called “a whole world,” the Soviet Union, whatever one thought of it, surely was more than just another country. It stood like a giant astride the frontier between Europe and Asia and, although at its core European, was geographically and culturally a part of Asia as well. By the 1980s, over 280 million people lived within its vast borders, about 51 percent of them ethnic Russians, or “Great Russians,” as they are sometimes called. The Russians are the most numerous of a group of peoples known as the East Slavs, who have lived in the region that eventually became the European part of the Soviet Union for well over 1,000 years. Aside from the Great Russians, the Soviet Union was populated by two other East Slavic peoples, the Ukrainians and the Belarusians; by Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Armenians, Georgians, Azeris, Moldovans, Jews, and others in Europe; and by Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Tatars, Turkmen, and many others in Asia—well over 100 distinct national and ethnic groups in all. Its expanse was considerably more than twice that of Canada, its nearest competitor: over 8.5 million square miles, comprising one-sixth of the world’s land surface. And the Soviet Union’s power dwarfed even its size. Armed with a hydra-headed nuclear arsenal, it was the second-greatest military power in history, possessing an ability to annihilate that, while calculable, was unimaginable.

The Soviet Union’s core, like that of the fallen empire upon whose foundations it was built, was Russia and the Russian people, and its size and strength in many ways were a tribute to the Russian people’s ability to endure and survive an almost endless gauntlet of hardships. Nature has imposed the most constant and inescapable of these. Most of Russia lies within the central and eastern portion of the great Eurasian plain. It is the largest such feature on the globe, stretching from Western Europe deep into Asia and Siberia, broken only by a low mountain range—the Urals—that is more of a landmark than a barrier to human or natural forces. The plain’s major geographic feature is an extensive river system that for centuries was the region’s main highway. Along the rivers laced between the Baltic and the Black seas, the East Slavs, ancestors to the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, first developed their civilization and national life.

To the north of the Eurasian plain are Arctic wastes whose winter winds annually sweep over the land to freeze most human activity no less than they freeze the rivers and lakes. A succession of mountain ranges—from the Caucasus in the west to the ranges of central and eastern Asia—demarcate the plain’s southern boundary. To the east lie the highlands and mountains of eastern Siberia, where some of the coldest temperatures in the world have been recorded. The plain itself is divided into four main vegetation zones: the frozen, scrubby tundra in the far north; the largest forest in the world, amounting to 20 percent of the world’s total timber resources, in the center/north; the steppe, the windy, often dry prairie containing Russia’s richest soil, in the center/south; and the semi-desert and desert in the far south.

Overwhelming in size and potential, this is a harsh land, a northern land too distant from the Atlantic Ocean to benefit from the moderating Gulf Stream breezes that waft over the western fringes of the plain inhabited by other nations. The resulting climate is as severe as it is extreme. Winters are long and frigid. Summers are short and hot. The resulting brief agricultural season is made even more precarious by other natural idiosyncrasies. In the spring the accumulated winter snows melt rapidly and run off as floodwaters, inundating rather than irrigating the farmers’ fields. Rain falls most plentifully on the poor, thin soils of the forest zone, while the rich, black earth to the south must rely on sparser and often unreliable or ill-timed allotments. Although Russia is endowed with a treasure trove of natural resources, like most treasures these resources have been to a large extent out of reach, either too remote or too poorly located to be put to use. Only modern technology has made them exploitable. All this has forced the Russian people to expend their energies to produce a precarious existence that in the best of times generally meant a tolerable poverty. Bad times often have forced them to endure the intolerable.

Nature has placed at least one other crushing hardship on Russia. The Eurasian plain has no natural borders to separate its rival peoples or block invaders from the east or west. Russian history therefore is scarred with wars and invasions that repeatedly exacted their price in human misery when the Russians either fought each other, attempted to expand at the expense of their neighbors, or themselves were the victims of intruders. The period after the founding of the first East Slavic state—the tenth through the twelfth centuries—witnessed a cycle of ebb and flow, with the East Slavs cast both as aggressors and as victims. The next era was much crueller, as nomadic invaders from Asia increasingly pressured and eventually destroyed the weakened East Slavic state. From the middle of the thirteenth century until well into the fifteenth century no formally independent East Slavic or Russian state existed. By contrast, between 1700 and 1900 Russia was on the offensive in a large majority of its wars.

Most other nations, at least those that have survived, have enjoyed greater respites from the battlefield. Western Europe suffered through waves of invasions, but each wave was comparatively short-lived. By the eleventh century they had subsided, leaving most major European nations to develop in relative safety, sheltered by a semblance of natural boundaries and their own balance of power. The most favorably located were the English, whose ability to develop institutions of self-government owes a considerable debt to the narrow but stormy channel that insulated them from their neighbors.

Most fortunate of all were the ex-Europeans and their descendants who became citizens of the United States. America and Russia did have one thing in common: an open frontier. The American West and Russian Siberia were both sparsely populated lands inhabited by technologically backward, poorly organized peoples unable to offer serious resistance to colonization. But here the similarity ends. No powerful enemy lurked behind America’s western frontier or, for that matter, its eastern border. Thousands of miles of ocean protected the new nation to the east—and once it reached the Pacific, to the west—during its early stages of development. The frontier and the riches it contained meant only opportunity, and if conquering it imposed hardships and sacrifice on settlers and pioneers, this was only a price that individuals had to pay in order to take possession of the new land. One may not agree with the famous thesis of historian Frederick Jackson Turner that the frontier created American democracy, but it is hard to deny an important link between the nature of that frontier and the economic, social, and political achievements of the American people.

How different was the Russian experience. No oceans protected it, nor for long periods could its various rulers. The road was always open for invaders from Asia and Europe, and it was often taken. The invasions from the east reached a macabre and ferocious crescendo with the Mongol conquest of the thirteenth century. The descendants of these conquerors—whom the Russians called Tatars—settled on the southern portion of the steppe and made Russia’s southern frontier a source of unrelieved misery. For centuries the Tatars, who established a state called the Golden Horde, ravaged the Russian land and its people. Not even Moscow in the distant northern woods was safe. As late as 1571, when Ivan the Terrible, one of Russia’s most powerful rulers, was at the height of his power, a huge Tatar force besieged Moscow, burned down most of the city, and carried off tens of thousands of prisoners.

Even after Moscow was made safe from the Tatars, the conflict with them did not end. The struggle against the Tatars and later the Turks for control of the rich black soil of the steppe consumed 300 years. Meanwhile, in the west there were other formidable foes, including the Poles, Lithuanians, Swedes, and Germans. Between the mid-thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, besides 45 wars with the Tatars, Russia fought 41 wars with the Lithuanians, 30 wars with the German crusading orders, and a total of 44 more with Swedes, Bulgarians, and other enemies. The approximate total of foreign invasions during this period was 160. In the 200 years that followed, fully 85 were spent in 6 wars with Sweden and 12 with Poland.

All this the Russians endured, and more. In doing so they saved more than themselves; they helped save the centers of Western civilization that so frequently ignored or despised them. Already at the dawn of Western culture and even before there were people known as Russians, in 512 b.c. the inhabitants of the Eurasian plain made the region’s first contribution, however reluctantly or unwittingly, on behalf of the West. These accidental allies were the Scythians, a nomadic warrior people with an artistic flair that they expressed in magnificent works of gold, who controlled the steppe for about 500 years. The Scythians indirectly helped a struggling Athens when the armies of Persia’s Darius the Great pursued them deep into the endless plain. In the intervening centuries, much of the fury of invading Asian nomads was spent in Russia, sparing the luckier Europeans to the west. The Russians to an extent also protected their neighbors to the west from themselves. Russian endurance and the terrible winter of 1812 destroyed Napoleon’s Grand Army and helped restore the balance of power fundamental to the European state system. In 1914, in the opening days of World War I, the Russian thrust into eastern Germany forced the Germans to transfer troops to that front and left them unable to mount sufficient force in the west to take Paris. And in World War II, once Hitler finally turned his Nazi war machine against his former Soviet ally, the hard-pressed Western democracies received vital help when two-thirds of the German army first became bogged down and then was bled, frozen, and eventually crushed in the heart of Russia.

Russia had to build its state and institutions during centuries of conflict and calamity. Those who are critical of the form these took are missing the point; it is a tribute to the Russian people’s courage and tenacity that they had the time and energy to build anything at all. Russia by its very setting was a land of extremes. No less than the extraordinary precautions they have always taken as individuals against the harsh weather, the Russians as a group had to use extreme measures to survive as a people. The institutions they eventually created for this purpose extorted a terrible payment from the nation they preserved: the political, civic, and economic freedoms that Westerners have come to take for granted.

Russia, then, was different from the West in many important ways. Among the critical European historical developments Russia missed were the Renaissance and the Reformation, both so important in shaping Western culture. All subsequent Western achievements were regarded in Russia with a mixture of fascination and fear—stopped at the border, so to speak, and searched for possible subversive qualities. Even in the periods when some Western ideas and institutions were embraced by certain Russians, their impact was limited. Russia’s traditions remained dominant, transforming imports, sometimes beyond recognition, to conform to local conditions.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was supposed to fundamentally change Russian life. But any revolution, no matter how drastic its ends or means, inevitably reflects the historical legacy of a nation’s culture, customs, attitudes, and institutions. In Russia that harsh legacy undoubtedly shaped the Bolshevik Revolution, even as the revolution so painfully transformed Russia itself. That is why, before examining the history of the Soviet Union, we turn to a brief survey of the historical legacy inherited by the nation—or world—that was Russia before 1917.

2 The Autocratic State

The Tatars did not resemble the Moors. Having conquered Russia, they gave her neither algebra nor Aristotle.

—Alexander Pushkin

In modern times Russia has been thought of as a monolithic colossus, weighed down by its oppressive social structure and autocratic government and therefore forever lagging socially, politically, culturally, and technologically behind Europe. It was not always so. During the ninth century the first East Slavic state developed along what was called the river road, a web of rivers forming a natural link between the Baltic and Black seas. A rather loose association of principalities with its center at Kiev on the southern reaches of the Dnieper River, Kievan Russia, as that state is usually called, flourished by virtue of its control of major trade routes linking Europe with the civilizations to its east, especially to Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. These routes became important after Arab expansion in the Mediterranean region cut Europe’s traditional means of access to the Middle East and the lands beyond. By the eleventh century, Kiev was the largest city in Eastern Europe, a city of sufficient size, culture, and beauty to rival Constantinople.

Because of the importance of foreign trade, Kievan culture was, for its day, relatively cosmopolitan and urban. Most of the population earned its living from subsistence agriculture, and, although there was a large number of slaves in Kievan Russia, the bulk of the peasantry was free. Kiev was only one of numerous well-developed East Slavic towns that, like their European counterparts, had developed organs of self-government. Called veches, these councils shared power with assemblies of nobles and the princes of Kievan Russia. There were some significant regional political differences. Nonprincely authority was strongest in the more developed areas of Kievan Russia; the veches enjoyed their greatest influence in the northwest and the nobles theirs in the south and southwest. In the northeast, a less-developed frontier area, princely authority predominated. This regional division became important later when foreign invasions shifted the center of gravity in Russia to precisely those areas where centralized princely government was strongest.

Religion was another factor that eventually assumed political importance. Late in the tenth century, Kievan Russia adopted Orthodoxy, the eastern branch of Christianity imported from the Byzantine Empire to the south. Most of Europe at that time followed Roman Catholicism. Those countries, like Russia, that were Orthodox found a major barrier separating them from their Catholic neighbors.

Whether measured by economic development, cultural achievement, or political institutions, Kievan Russia compared favorably with most of Europe. Although a frontier between Europe and Asia, Kievan Russia was not a backwater. Its culture carried most of the same seeds for growth as the European states. But in Kievan Russia these still-tender shoots were under the constant pressure of the nomadic peoples pushing into the European steppe from central and eastern Asia. By the twelfth century the disunited Kievan polity, weakened by internal feuding and warfare between contending princes, was unable to stem the invaders. They swept across the southern steppe, rendering both the trade route to Constantinople and the farming population of the southern steppe increasingly insecure. Trade and the cities dependent on it declined, and the population itself began to migrate to the relative security of the northeast. Another blow to Kievan Russia was the opening of a more direct trade route to the east via the Mediterranean Sea, a process that began as early as the eleventh century and accelerated after the Fourth Crusade of 1204.

The Mongol Conquest

Catastrophe followed decline. After an exploratory campaign, the Mongol armies, ruthless masters of cavalry warfare, burst out of Asia in 1237 to deliver to the Russians the worst blow they would ever receive. It would take them more than 200 years to recover their independence.

The actual conquest took three dreadful years. In Ryazan, the first city to fall, a witness recorded that “not an eye was left open to weep for those that were closed.” Six years after Kiev was burned to the ground, a papal envoy found only 200 houses standing amid a landscape of wreckage and ruin. Many other cities suffered a similar fate. As much as 10 percent of the entire population may have been enslaved. The region’s best craftsmen and artisans were deported thousands of miles to the east to serve the Mongol ruler, the dreaded khan. At home the quality of crafts and buildings dropped precipitously.

The Mongol conquest played a role in several long-term developments. Battered by the wholesale destruction of the conquest and bled by generations of subsequent exploitation, the Russian economy fell behind the economies of the West. Since the thirteenth century Russia has labored with a legacy of economic backwardness. Once independence was regained in the fifteenth century, a fundamental task of the state became to catch up with a rapidly advancing Europe. It has been a centuries-long chase that is far from over. The Mongol conque...