Soviet Politics

In Perspective

Richard Sakwa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415071536
• eBook ISBN: 9781134909964
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Soviet Politics in Perspective is a new edition of Richard Sakwas successful textbook Soviet Politics: an introduction. Thoroughly revised and updated it builds on the previous editions comprehensive and accessible exploration of the Soviet system, from its rise in 1919 to its collapse in 1991.

The book is divided into five parts, which focus on key aspects of Soviet politics. They are:

* historical perspectives, beginning with the Tsarist regime on the eve of Revolution, the rise and development of Stalinism, through to the decline of the regime under Brezhnev and his successors and Gorbachev's attempts to revive the system

* institutions of Government, such as the Communist Party, security apparatus, the military, the justice system, local government and participation

* theoretical approaches to Soviet politics, including class and gender politics, the role of ideology and the shift from dissent to pluralism

* key policy areas: the command economy and reform; nationality politics; and foreign and defence policy

* an evaluation of Soviet rule, and reasons for its collapse.

Providing key texts and bibliographies, this book offers the complete history and politics of the Soviet period in a single volume. It will be indispensable to students of Soviet and post-Soviet politics as well as the interested general reader.

Part I

History

1 The Russian Legacy

Revolutions destroy the old and yet are forced to build on the foundations established by their predecessors. The Bolshevik revolution was unprecedented in its depth and its explicit repudiation of not only the Russian past, but much of the European tradition as a whole. The rhythms of time, of geography and of peoples, however, stamped the communist regime that came to power in October 1917. Russian traditions and communist innovation fused in unexpected and disturbing ways. The attempt to build a society on new foundations in Russia profoundly affected the course of the twentieth century and shaped the destiny of the planet.

The Old Regime

The adoption of what was to become the Orthodox form of Christianity by Prince Vladimir in Kiev, then the centre of the Russian lands, in 988 stamped Russia with a Byzantine form of religiosity which stood in sharp contrast to that of the Roman Catholic countries of Europe. The capture of Constantinople in 1453 by the Ottoman empire isolated Russia from its religious roots, and the Mongol occupation for some 240 years from about 1240 to 1480 further estranged Russia from the West and contributed to the creation of a unique culture. The struggle against the Mongols contributed to the emergence of the strong centralised state of Muscovy. Religious and political isolation encouraged ideas of Russia’s unique mission in the world, manifested in the concept of Moscow as the ‘third Rome’, to supplant Constantinople and Rome itself. Under Ivan the Terrible (1533–84) the power of the monarch was extended in a system termed an ‘autocracy’ to emphasise the personalised system of rule. The fusion of temporal and secular power in the person of the emperor as head of both church and state, avoiding the conflicts between the two that were typical of Europe, gave rise to a distinctive Russian form of ‘caesaropopism’.

The dominance of the state was to remain and gave rise to another distinctive feature of Russian history. Russia’s geopolitical location on the vast Eurasian landmass with few natural frontiers other than the Volga River and the Ural Mountains encouraged a preoccupation with defence and the maintenance of a powerful army. Russian history was marked by national consolidation and the occupation of adjacent territories or, as the great Russian historian Vasilii Klyuchevskii put it, ‘Russia’s history is that of a country colonising itself ’. From the conquest of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in 1552 and 1556, respectively, Russia expanded at the astonishing rate of about 50 square miles a day for some three centuries across Siberia as far as the Pacific Ocean in the east, into Central Asia in the south, and pushed back the borders of the Turkish Ottoman empire to reach the Black Sea and the Balkans to the south-west. European fears of Russian expansionism provoked the Crimean War of 1854–56, when Britain and France sent their troops in defence of an increasingly decrepit Ottoman empire. At the onset of the Second World War in 1939–40 Soviet territories were further extended to the west with the incorporation of parts of Finland, the three Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), eastern Poland and Bessarabia. At its peak the Soviet state covered 8.6 million square miles, or one-sixth of the world’s land surface, extending over eleven time zones stretching 5,600 miles from east to west.

The Mongol occupation turned Russia on to a divergent path of development from that pursued in the rest of Europe. In economic and administrative terms Russia lagged behind the more developed countries. As if to compensate, Russian history was punctuated by periodic attempts to catch up. Peter the Great (1682–1725) launched a development programme designed to graft on to Russia the latest technological developments of England and Holland. Peter established a precedent for furious state-sponsored modernisation imposed on a battered society, which (as Lenin put it later) tried ‘to defeat barbarism by barbaric means’. The pattern was established of a Russia selectively borrowing from the outside world while jealously defending its independence and uniqueness. The West was, on the one hand, a model of development and a source of ideas and, on the other, a warning and a potential threat to the Russian state. The receptivity of Catherine the Great (1762–96) to the ideas of the Enlightenment can be understood in these terms. The concept of enlightened despotism in particular combined Russian hopes for social development while preserving the powers of the monarch and the state. The ideas associated with the revolution in France from 1789, however, posed a much more formidable threat. Victory over Napoleon in 1812 boosted the monarchy’s self-confidence but unleashed forces that the autocracy ultimately could not contain. The nineteenth century for Russia was a period of great achievements, especially in the industrial and cultural fields, but also one of accumulating tensions that were ultimately to destroy the old regime.

The dominance of the state was accompanied by the weakness of social estates. Western feudal ideas of the rights and duties of monarchs as well as of subjects made little headway in Russia. Max Weber talked of certain countries where there was a patrimonial relationship between the state and society in which the rights of sovereignty and the rights of property became indistinguishable. The land and the people were treated as the property of the monarch or, in modern parlance, the property of the state. The Russian patrimonial state stood in sharp contrast to the Western system where feudalism stressed a sharp demarcation between the state and society, expressed in conflicts between the monarch and the aristocracy. The counterpart of the dominance of the state was the weakness of representative institutions. Their development was stifled by the Mongol invasions and in their place the cruel tyrannies of the type of Ivan the Terrible emerged. It was Ivan who in the 1580s put an end to the alternative pattern of development represented by the Novgorod republic and its popular assembly, the Veche. The germs of Russian representative institutions such as the Duma of Boyars, the Veche, and the broader body, the Zemskii Sobor (Assembly of the Land), had disappeared by the end of the seventeenth century. The rapid advance of serfdom further undermined the roots of popular representation.

A ubiquitous state bureaucracy was created which tried to run society as the general staff runs an army. Peter the Great systematised the Russian scheme of government into an elaborate Table of Ranks, with carefully defined gradations for government officials, and at whose head stood the autocratic monarch. The centralised Tsarist bureaucracy exerted a powerful influence on the country’s social, political and economic life. The Russian nobility was never able to establish a degree of autonomy based on independent land ownership or administrative authority but instead was bound to the monarch. Furthermore, the state stifled the emergence of an indigenous mercantile bourgeoisie by relying on state monopolies. From the time of Peter the Great the Russian Orthodox Church was thoroughly subordinated to the crown, with its Patriarch abolished and affairs run by a synod responsible to the Tsar. According to Richard Pipes the patrimonial state was converted into a ‘bureaucratic-police state’ from the reign of Nicholas I (1825–55).¹ The dominance of the Russian state hampered the development of civil society, the social arena of independent economic activity, social movements and civil associations. The distinctive pattern of Russian development also hindered the emergence of a middle class, or indeed of a bourgeoisie, that could effectively challenge the state. There was little tradition of autonomous group activity, including trade union activity. The conduct of politics, defined as the attempt to influence the distribution of power, was forced into oblique if not into outright subversive forms.

Alexis de Tocqueville in his The Old Regime and the Revolution pointed out the continuities in French political culture after the revolution of 1789. Similarly, in Russia these six features of Russian political culture – a distinctive religion, isolation, an expansionist drive, the dialectic between backwardness and modernisation stimulating the dominance of the state, the weak development of representative institutions and society, and the bureaucratic attempt to replace politics by administration – to varying degrees link the Soviet regime with its Tsarist predecessor. As we shall see, however, 1917 marked a sharp break in continuity and the roots of the Soviet system were to be found as much in the ideological and organisational principles of Marxism–Leninism as in the patterns of history or of a distinctively Russian political culture.

Not least of the differences were the strict limits to autocratic power, termed ‘constrained autocracy’ by Nicolai Petro.² Tsarist authoritarianism was limited by private property, foreign travel and the inhibitions of the government itself. Klyuchevskii pointed out that the Tsars of Moscow might well have been all-powerful with regard to the people but they had no power to modify social relations. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, set themselves precisely the task of remoulding all of society. Furthermore, the traditional picture of the ‘peculiarities of Russian history’ was changing rapidly in the half-century before the revolutions of 1917. The legal reforms of Alexander II (1855–81) of 1864 established an equitable system of courts and provided for independent judges and a twelve-person jury, although the peasantry retained its customary law. In the same year Alexander systematised the system of local government with the creation of zemstvos (representative institutions responsible for local health, education and so on) in rural areas. However, the great reforms in the era of Alexander II were limited, and in some cases rolled back in his later years and by his successors Alexander III (1881–94) and the last Tsar, Nicholas II (1894–1917). In political trials there were major violations of the principles of the 1864 reform, prompted in part by the terrorism launched by sections of the radical intelligentsia. In nationality policy the earlier ‘imperial’ or supranational approach to the non-Russian nationalities in the 1880s changed to a more narrow ‘Great Russia’ policy of Russification. The Poles, Jews and Muslims were especially harshly treated.

Not all was lost of the great reforms, and Alexander III came into sharp conflict with his own officials when he attempted to reverse them. The bureaucracy and the government were able to resist the monarch’s authority because of respect for established traditions and the monarch’s need for professional expertise. The zemstvos and municipal authorities survived the reaction, though not unscathed, and were responsible for a wide range of medical and social improvements by the eve of the revolution. An educated and critical public opinion emerged, symbolised by the spread of ‘thick journals’ (tolstye zhurnaly), read throughout the empire by concerned citizens. The last years of Tsarism were marked by a religious renaissance and a cultural ‘silver age’ whose luminaries included Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva. The system of orders was disintegrating to be replaced by the emergence of distinct social classes. Russian society was looking more and more modern on the eve of the revolution.

Social and Economic Developments to 1917

The Crimean War starkly revealed the disparity between Russia’s great power pretensions and its actual military and economic capacities when faced with more modern armies. Russia’s defeat demonstrated that its great power status could not be sustained without the modernisation of the economy, and in a sense this was the theme of Russian and Soviet history thereafter. However, the options open to a country on the verge of reform are never so clear-cut as they appear to posterity. Three times in modern Russian and Soviet history the government and intelligentsia have been racked by a debate about the means and paths of economic modernisation. The first was in the second half of the nineteenth century, the second was in the 1920s, and the third rumbled on from the death of Stalin in 1953 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and in a sense is not yet resolved.

The basic questions in the nineteenth century were a combination of economic and political issues: the nature of the Russian state and its role in economic development; the degree of capitalist development in Russia; did Russia have to undergo the transitional phase of a bourgeois system or could it pass directly to socialism; what role could the Russian peasant commune (the mir) play in this transition; and could the peasantry, rather than the working class, act as the major revolutionary class? Underlying our understanding of these debates is the question of the prospects for an evolutionary outcome to Russia’s development if the country had not entered the First World War in August 1914. Would Russia have been able to settle down to a path of capitalist development and bourgeois dominance? The debates over the nature of the Tsarist economy and over appropriate economic policies had a continuing relevance as the peasant societies of the ‘Third World’ sought viable patterns of development.

Russia in the nineteenth century was balanced between capitalist development and the patriarchal economy. The chief feature of Russia’s economic retardation was the large and unproductive agricultural sector. Serfdom, long a symbol of Russia’s backwardness, had been consolidated by the state in the seventeenth century as a military and civil measure rather than as a privilege granted to the nobility. The peasant emancipation of 1861, introduced in response to the shock of defeat in the Crimean War, was only partial and did not bring into being a prosperous peasantry which could have stimulated economic development. Its economic effects were largely negative: either the peasant received too little land or was burdened by redemption payments on a larger parcel. The peasantry received only about half of the land that it had cultivated earlier. The emancipation depressed the peasant’s purchasing power and hence undermined the development of a domestic market for manufactured goods. It failed to provide a cheap mobile labour force for the factories. A key anomaly of the emancipation was the retention of the communal system, the obshchina, organised on the basis of the mir. Most peasant land was held collectively and periodically redistributed to take into account changes in the size of a family. The communal structure discouraged the development of modern farming methods and depressed productivity. By the turn of the century the shortage of land, caused by a rapidly expanding population, generated enormous social discontent.

The pattern of industrialisation which followed the Crimean War was designed, in part, to enhance Russia’s military potential. The involvement of the state in the industrialisation process was a legacy of the Russian tradition of state prominence, but it was also a sign of backwardness. The only way for Russia to catch up with the advancing economies of Western Europe was for the state to take a leading role. There was considerable economic development from the 1830s with the construction of the railways, designed primarily to export grain. In a programme devised by the minister of finance, Sergei Witte, in the 1890s Russia embarked on a vigorous attempt to stimulate industrial expansion by liberalising credit facilities, allowing expanding state budget deficits, taking foreign loans (especially from France), and imposing protectionist tariff barriers. The casualty of industrial expansion was, as usual, the peasantry as they were ‘squeezed’ ever harder through heavy taxes and high grain exports, even when famine struck the villages in 1891 and 1896, to service the debt and loans and maintain Russia’s credit-worthiness. A massive state-sponsored industrialisation was grafted on to a peasant economy, causing untold social strains. The economic results, however, were impressive, with an average annual growth rate of over 8 per cent in the 1890s.

Economic and social developments began to change the old pattern of autocracy to allow the emergence of a quasi-capitalist state. An essential feature of modernisation theory is the stress on the links between self-sustaining economic growth, reforms favouring social mobility and political modernisation incorporating the aspirations of groups in society. These conditions were developing, if only slowly, in Tsarist Russia. Private initiative played an important and often underrated part in Russian economic development. The role of the state was balanced by a strong autonomous domestic contribution to economic development. Paul Gregory has provided higher estimates of the independent contribution of agriculture to the industrialisation process, while Olga Crisp demonstrated that from the eighteenth century there was a spontaneous stream of industrialisation, notably in the textile and food industries. Furthermore, the degree to which Witte’s industrialisation drive was consciously state sponsored has often been exaggerated. There is much evidence of bitter conflict in the government, and the industrialisation-inducing measures were not so much part of a consciously planned programme but the result of bureaucratic in-fighting. The state played a key role, but the pattern of industrialisation differed markedly from that established by Stalin from the late 1920s. The consumer-goods industries developed together with heavy industry, and the municipalities took an increasingly important role. By 1914 only 8.3 per cent of total estimated wealth was in the state sector, whereas over a quarter was in the public co-operative sector.

Alexander Gerschenkron argues that after the state-sponsored industrialisation drive of the 1890s the state could afford to take a less prominent role. Reforms from 1907 pushed through by the prime minister, Peter Stolypin, allowed peasants to move out of the communes to set up separate farms to create an expanding domes...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Part I History
• Part II Government
• Part III Politics
• Part IV Policies
• Part V Perspectives
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index