The collapse of the Soviet State, as we have known it, clearly represents a great victory for the West. It is comparable perhaps to the discovery and colonisation of the American continent and the conquest of India. Unlike the earlier triumphs, however, this is not so much a victory for the western man or leadership as for the western spirit and example.
Neither credit nor discredit is due to the West for what has happened in the Soviet Union. It has done nothing in recent years which can genuinely be said to have produced the disintegration of the Communist regime in Moscow and the rush towards independence by its constituent republics. On the contrary, it could not even anticipate these developments.
Indeed, the Soviet system might not have collapsed so easily, quickly and completely if it was under external pressure. It had been designed to cope with such pressures and it had done so successfully, as should be evident from Moscow’s military intervention in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The failure in Afghanistan belonged to a different category, as did America’s in Vietnam. Afghanistan was not vital for the security of the Soviet Union just as Vietnam was not for the United States.
The Soviet system has disintegrated under the weight of internal contradictions which have been inherent in it from its very birth in 1917. We cannot grasp the deeply contradictory nature of the Soviet system unless we recognise that what took place in Russia in 1917 was at once a revolution and a counter-revolution. Both terms, I would emphasise, can make sense only in terms of the dramatic scientific-technological and related changes that have been taking place in the West, beginning principally in Britain and France, from the 17th century onward.
The Bolshevik takeover in 1917 was a revolution inasmuch as it was intended to force-march Russia into some kind of parity with the West in the scientific-technological field. Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and radicals of other varieties were all agreed that Russia was extremely ‘backward’ and needed to be pushed into the 20th century. Lenin was a true successor to Peter the Great. Unlike in the West, it was to be a revolution from above, a revolution by decree at the point of the bayonet, and in that sense a parody of the process in the West. But that is another matter.
More pertinently, the Bolshevik seizure of power was also a counter-revolution inasmuch as its architects were determined to suppress free inquiry and competition in ideas and ideals which were the fundamental sources of European creativity in science and technology as much as in other fields of human endeavour. Lenin claimed not only a monopoly of truth for himself but also the right to enforce it ruthlessly on supporters and opponents alike.
The brief and half-hearted western intervention and the civil war that followed the 1917 coup could at worst have reinforced him in his dogmatism and ruthlessness. They could not have accounted for the deeply ingrained anti-Westernism of this great Westerniser.
Students of Russia (and the Soviet Union) are aware of the intense debate between the so- called Westernisers and Slavophils among the country’s intelligentsia in the latter half of the 19th century. But the point is generally missed that even if Lenin may be said to have remained ambivalent in his response to these dominant themes of the political discourse, both found eloquent expression in the personality of Stalin.
Stalin could not have synthesised them; they did not admit of synthesis. Surprising though it may appear, he allowed full free play to both. Thus while as a moderniser he mounted a relentless assault on all that was Russian (the Orthodox Church and the peasantry), as a Slavophile he proclaimed Russia’s right to lead the international communist movement and sought to subordinate it to Russian purposes and needs. Mother Russia with her messiah-ism was back by the backdoor.
Stalin acted as if he were a schizophrenic. On the one hand, he sought to promote science and technology on a massive scale in ‘backward’ Russia and, on the other, he prohibited all contact with the West and denounced “rootless cosmopolitanism”, a euphemism for western culture. He was about to launch a new terror and anti-Jewish campaign when he died in 1953. This was not an individual’s aberration. Schizophrenia was built into the psyche of the Russian intelligentsia as a whole just as counter-revolution was built into the October revolution. That is why it could speak of Russia’s backwardness and uniqueness at the same time.
Viewed in this context, the Stalinist concept of ‘revolution in one country’ was not just the product of a desperate situation resulting from the failure of the ‘revolutionary’ effort in Germany and the defeat of the Red Army in Poland. Its sources lay deeper in the Russian intelligentsia’s belief in the uniqueness of holy mother Russia and the possibility of making Moscow into a third Rome
Stalin laid down the ‘holy law’ through his interpretations of Marxism-Leninism and engaged in the most ruthless and extensive form of ‘inquisition’ and heresy hunting known in history and he also pronounced final verdicts on subjects as varied as linguistics and biology.
Such a system could have been held together mainly on the strength of terror and ‘legitimised’ on the basis of the Russian people’s deep sense of insecurity arising from their geography and history.
It is generally either not realised, or remembered, that when, towards the end of the first millennium AD, the last sorting out of communities on the Eurasian continent ended, the Eastern Slavs (Great Russians) found themselves with the last and least attractive ‘choice’ – the land in the north-eastern limits of Europe. Their home, throughout the formative period of their state and therefore political culture and psyche, was not the steppes and the black soil region which they occupied only in the 18th century, but a much more northern, poorer and less hospitable land.
To return to the present, this sense of insecurity, which had provoked Russian expansion in the past and led to the occupation of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, could not possibly be eliminated by the victory over Germany and the development of nuclear weapons. Mother Russia had finally become invulnerable but she could not see herself as such. Bitter memories do not disappear quickly. That would partly explain the military intervention in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968.
The involvement in Eastern and Central Europe, however, created new problems. It, of course, led to the cold war. Equally important, it made it impossible for Stalin to insulate the Soviet Union, as he could before World War II. The Berlin blockade should be seen as part of a desperate move to insulate the region. It failed, leaving Stalin clueless in a fundamental sense. With Stalin also ended the regime of terror. It had to.
Khrushchev tried to restore some kind of openness and idealism into the system. He failed. It is cold war rhetoric solely to blame Brezhnev and fellow coupists for his overthrow in 1964. They were, of course, anxious to preserve their privileges. But above all, they acted out of the fear of uncertainty and possible chaos. The system itself did not admit of reform. It was like a huge and powerful body without a spirit. Self-renewal was out of the question for it. Gorbachov’s failure after six years of dexterous efforts should clinch the issue.
The disintegration of the Soviet State has understandably caused grave anxiety among Chinese leaders. They have reason to feel lonely. It is now pointless to detail their contribution to the Soviet denouement, though it may be recalled in passing that they were among the first to denounce Khrushchev as a ‘revisionist’, a cardinal sin against the Communist Church, and that in the seventies they made common cause with the United States against the Soviet Union so much so that they called themselves ‘the eastern arm of Nato’ with pride.
Under the leadership of the ‘great helmsman’ Mao Zedong, they too have played havoc with their cultural inheritance. If anything, Mao outdid Stalin in his anti-Confucian campaign. But China stands both subverted and self-subverted and can at best postpone the day of reckoning.
Sunday Mail, 8 September 1991