Leaders of the abortive coup in Moscow have rendered a singular service. They have helped establish it beyond any doubt that the old order is crippled to a point where it cannot possibly be restored. It is rhetoric to go beyond that and proclaim that their remarkably quick collapse represents a victory for freedom and democracy. It can at best facilitate the task of establishing democracy in the Soviet Union. The task itself remains formidable.
In recent history, Gennady Yanayev can bear comparison only with Saddam Hussein. There are, of course, differences between them. But the two men share two important features. Both have helped confirm fully the paralysis of the orders to which they have belonged, Arab nationalism in one case and Communism in the other; and both have lacked the will and the capacity to fight.
If more than a year after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, we are not in a position to analyse Saddam Hussein’s calculations in defying the mighty US-led alliance and also not use his military power, it is obviously premature to speculate on the calculations of Yanayev and his fellow conspirators.
All that we can say right now is that the conspiracy was not well planned. The conspirators had not taken care even to isolate Boris Yeltsin who was sure to serve as the rallying point of opposition to them. They had obviously also not assessed the nature of support they could truly depend on in the army and the KGB.
The alternative view can be that the coup could not have been well planned for the plotters could not risk getting exposed and identified. Why then did they attempt the coup at all? Perhaps they calculated that once they had isolated Mikhail Gorbachov and proclaimed themselves to be in power, the vast majority in the army, the KGB and the Soviet Communist Party will automatically rally behind them.
This calculation has clearly turned out to be misplaced. But only those who have a true measure of the change that has taken place in the Soviet Union in recent years could have said with confidence that this would be the case. Almost certainly, Yeltsin was not one of them. Or else, he would not have told the British Prime Minister on Monday that time was running out for him.
On the face of it, President George Bush appeared more confident. For, on that very day, he said that ‘coups can fail’. But he too was cautious. He used the plural and he spoke in terms of the possible. Then there is the report that, as in the case of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the CIA failed to anticipate the coup.
The dramatic changes in the Soviet Union are generally viewed in the context of the failure of the Communist system to fulfil the minimum expectations of Soviet people and its decay. This is justified. The Soviet system was barbaric under Stalin but it possessed a certain measure of dynamism and legitimacy. Khrushchev exposed its inhuman face but failed to find a new basis to maintain its dynamism and legitimacy. After Khrushchev’s overthrow in 1964, it was a story of stagnation and steady decay till Gorbachov arrived on the scene in 1985.
Gorbachov has doubtless opened up the system; his glasnost can be said to have been a success. But the same cannot be said of perestroika: the attempt to restructure the Soviet economy and institutions has only produced a vast mess. The optimistic view is that the Soviet Union is experiencing the inevitable pains of transition from a closed system to an open one. There is, however, little in Russian history to justify this optimism.
Unlike in the sixties and seventies, it is no longer fashionable to link Soviet Communism with the history of Russia under the Czars and their predecessors, the Mongol Khans. The public discourse in recent years has proceeded as if Soviet Communism is wholly an ideological phenomenon sired up by malignant spirits such as Marx, Lenin and Stalin.
This is understandable in the context of the rhetoric of the cold war which has divorced it from history and of the triumph of the American spirit which is impatient with history. It is only in America that someone could say something so ridiculous that ‘history is over’ and become famous for it.
Fashionable or not, the link is a reality which we can ignore at our peril. Communists and fellow travellers have disregarded it and paid for it. Every disclosure regarding the Soviet reality since Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956 has come as a surprise for them. Now in their anxiety not to allow their joy of triumph to be marred by anxiety regarding the future, anti-Communists and non-Communists are set on the same path.
The history of Russia, it needs to be noted, is above all the product of its geography. That is likely to make it particularly tenacious. To quote the late Tibor Szamuely whom I regard as one of the most perceptive writers on Russia.
“From the point of view of Russia’s history the decisive feature of her geographical environment has been the absence of natural frontiers. This has led, on the one hand, to the expansion of the Russian people over one-sixth of the world’s land surface and, on the other, to a history of armed struggle against invaders that, for length, intensity and ferocity has no parallel in the annals of any other nation. It was this ceaseless and merciless struggle that gave birth to the Russian state.
“Russia had no frontiers: for many centuries she was herself the frontier, the great open, defenceless dividing-line between the settled civilized communities of Europe and the nomadic barbarian invaders of the Asian steppes. One of the keys to the understanding of Russian history is the fact that for a thousand years, until the end of the 18th century, she was always a frontier country.’’
The Mongols were by far the most formidable of these nomadic barbarians of the steppes. The Mongol army, ‘the most fearsome instrument of war yet devised’, in Szamuely’s words, crossed the Volga in 1237 and descended on Russian principalities to become the undisputed master of the whole country. The Mongol Yoke was to press on the Russian people for the next 250 years. As a result despotic rule became part of the Russian psyche just as the conquest and occupation of Central Asia became an unavoidable need of the Russian state centered on Moscow.
A new force emerged in Russia in the 19th century in the shape of the intelligentsia. To quote Szamuely again, “lacking the natural paternal environment of an established bourgeoisie, the Russian intelligentsia was… truly déclassé, a genuinely intellectual proletariat, homeless and unprotected, isolated from the ruling class by its radicalism and from the peasantry by its education”. It became effective only when it acquired an ideological instrument in Marxism-Leninism.
Its leading lights were aware of the conflict between egalitarianism and freedom. But in conformity with their Khan-Czarist inheritance, they opted for egalitarianism.
Two points may, however, be made in this connection. First, a civil society could not have, and has not arisen in the Soviet Union despite its massive programme of industrialisation since 1928; the Soviet Union is best described as a Khanate with nuclear teeth. Second, militarisation of the economy has not been an aberration. It has flowed naturally from Russian history and psyche.
As the leading historian and supporter of Yeltsin, Yuri Afanasyev, has noted in an article in the New York Review of Books (January 11, 1991), accurate information on the Soviet military-industrial complex still remains a state secret.
But according to his own assessment, it employs over half the Soviet Union’s population. He places the figure at 82 per cent in the case of the Russian Federation. These figures should help illustrate what the absence of a civil society implies.
Seen in this context, we may well be witnessing a replay of the drama that began in 1905 with the destruction of the Russian fleet by the Japanese and ending with the revolution in 1917. This view may be deeply flawed. It is possible that Russia is ready to join Europe and build a common ‘European house’, to use Gorbachov’s phrase. But preparation for such a transformation remains obscure unless it is assumed that the devastation of the last seven decades has been that preparation.
Gorbachov is, of course, wholly sincere. But he is not original. Among his ideological forbears, Lenin and his colleagues, with the possible exception of Stalin, preceded him by seven decades; for them the revolution in Russia was acceptable and justifiable only because it was to be no more than a trigger for the revolution in Europe where, by Marx’s logic, it truly belonged. Indeed, Bolshevik leaders too were not original. Peter the Great believed he could push the Russian peasant into Europe by the scruff of his neck. He even built Petersburg (later renamed Leningrad) to serve as the bridge. The result in each case is there for anyone to see.
Gorbachov is sincere in his desire to transform the ‘prison of nations’, which the Soviet Union has been (in Lenin’s own words), into a commonwealth of nations and thus ease, if not end, ethnic conflicts in it. But here again we confront another lesson of history. Land empires are different from overseas empires and can neither be easily wound up or reshaped. The consequences of the end of the Ottoman empire in West Asia are still with us. Arabs have not settled down seven decades after the end of the Ottoman rule. And in West Asia there are no Turkish people and Arabic, and not Turkic, is the language of the intelligentsia.
The general view currently is that things can work out in the Soviet Union if only the West and Japan pour in enough aid and if the Soviets can make the necessary institutional changes. This is a view which believers in end of history alone can accept.
Sunday Mail, 25 August 1991