Unholy Marriage:
Ideology, Totalitarianism
and the Soviet Project
In what
may be the most turbulent century human history has known, one drama stands
out above the rest for its power to inspire admiration and revulsion, imitation
and opposition, over the course of decades. The enigmatic, unprecedented
spectacle of the Soviet Union, born of the chaos of the world’s first global
conflict and brought low seven decades later by an era of global prosperity
that left its economy far behind, has captivated historians and social
scientists since its founding. Looking back today, we must ask what
it was about the USSR that inspired so much passion in so many.
The basic
answer was clear from those first heady days in October 1917. At
its inception, the Soviet Union was a unique project in the history of
organized states. It aspired to create a utopian state based on modern
philosophy. For millions around the world, the project embodied the
dreams of the modern age: true egalitarianism, democracy carried to its
logical extreme through the leveling of society.
That the
Soviet project’s grand aspirations failed is clear now, after a long seventy
years of overestimation on the part of the West. A look at the work
of the many historians who chronicled and tried to explain the Soviet project
shows that its collapse is the only thing everyone concedes. On the
rest – the regime’s totalitarian essence, the integrity of the October
“revolution,” the often severe swings in the nature of the Soviet economy,
the inevitability of Stalin’s rise to power and a host of other issues
– historians remain as divided today as they were in the midst of the Cold
War.
To explain
these divisions we must return to what inspired so many so long ago: the
Marxist-Leninist ideology. The guiding force behind the Soviet system,
it promised to release mankind’s best and delivered something much baser.
It still lies at the heart of these arguments. Was the Soviet project
an experiment conducted with the best of intentions, with a workable hypothesis
and encouraging initial results that had to be abandoned in the end because
of factors beyond the control of the Marxist historical scientists who
designed it? Or was the Soviet Union a tragedy in the classic sense,
a noble dream plagued from the start by problems that made its political,
economic and moral decline and fall inevitable?
It would
be nice to say the answer lies somewhere in the middle – that the differences
were academic, that the many historians engaged on both sides of the debate
were all partly right. It would also be wrong. The Soviet Union’s
flaws were fundamental, and doomed it from the start. The two most
profound were inseparable. Soviet ideology, as formulated by the
Bolshevik Party that seized power in October 1917, was unable to create
and order a “really existing” socialist society on its own merits.
This was obvious from the very beginning, and to make up for the official
ideology’s impotence the Bolsheviks created a what was essentially a totalitarian
state years before the term was even coined.
These
two flawed, complementary phenomena formed the Soviet project’s essence.
As long as they were both intact, the Soviet edifice could remain standing.
Ideology was the glove that covered the hand of totalitarian control.
Ideology convinced first a nation and later a wide-ranging captive empire
that a bureaucracy bereft of democratic input or accountability was a legitimate
form of governance. Ideology offered a dream so vivid and compelling
it fooled generations of outsiders into thinking that the Soviet regime
had the best interests of its people and of the world at heart.
Of necessity,
a totalitarian state lay behind it all. The ideology of the Bolsheviks
held out a system that could not possibly exist naturally. It took
a special kind of coercion to drag it into the world, and it took coercion
to hold it up. “Communist totalitarianism was ... a special type
of ‘politically forced development,’ the result of a clash between utopian
project and resistant reality, the ... product of an extraordinary mobilization
of conscious effort to force social life into the Procrustean bed of the
utopian blueprint.”
The term
“totalitarian” is worth discussing briefly, since it alone has been the
source of much conflict. The debate among Sovietologists over the
term revolves around the model created by political scientists in the mid-1950s,
which “defined totalitarian dictatorship as resting on (1) an elaborate
ideology, (2) a single mass party, (3) terror, (4) a technologically conditioned
monopoly of communication, (5) a monopoly of weapons, and (6) a centrally
controlled economy.” Historians seeking to paint the USSR in
a better light seized on this model’s rigidity, arguing that at certain
points in its history the Soviet system did not meet all these criteria
and therefore could not be called totalitarian. By picking holes
in the model, they hoped to make room for a gentler view of the Soviet
system, one that showed it mellowing over time. This is a shallow
approach. For a state to be considered totalitarian it is enough
for it to strive to fit this model.
Ideology
and totalitarianism are crucial to understanding Soviet history, though
a look back through Sovietology’s literature shows this premise to be controversial.
Exploring the major debates over Soviet history a decade after it ended
brings this controversy forward in a variety of guises over and over.
Blessed with hindsight, we can dismiss many of the arguments that rely
on minimizing the importance of ideology or claiming the Soviet system
wasn’t totalitarian.
Naturally,
the first argument is over the Soviet Union’s origins. The birth
of the system in the chaos of October 1917 has been invested with tremendous
symbolic importance. One school of historians characterizes the origin
of the Soviet system as a coup d’etat, carried out by a small, well-organized
group of conspirators, the Bolsheviks. This traditional western view
taints everything that comes after with illegitimacy. The most optimistic
counter-factuals this school puts forward imply that without the Bolsheviks
Russia might have moved towards a democratic system in the wake of the
czar’s collapse.
On the
other side of this debate lies a group that defines itself in reaction
to this traditional view. These revisionists de-emphasize the importance
of state control and ideology and focus more on social and economic factors,
characterizing the events of 1917 as a popular revolution. Putting
events in this light serves several purposes. Most important, it
helps characterize totalitarian policies of later years as departures from
the popular spirit of the revolution. It also makes Soviet Union
look inevitable. With the weight and will of the whole Russian people
behind the Bolsheviks, the revisionists ask, what other direction could
events have gone?
The facts
place the revisionists squarely on the wrong side of this argument.
The guiding philosophy of the Bolsheviks (a minority party whose very name
was a taste of the decades of cannily deceptive propaganda to come) was
conspiratorial and distrustful. Richard Pipes, the staunchest of
anti-revisionists, writes that “Lenin altogether did not believe in popular
revolutions. In July 1917 he wrote: ‘in times of revolution it is
not enough to ascertain the will of the majority ... we see countless instances
of how the better-organized, more conscious, better-armed minority imposed
its will on the majority and conquered it.’ ... October was, indeed, a
putsch by a party bent on monopolizing authority.”
Even
in these early stages, ideology gave the Bolshevik leadership a justification
to move towards totalitarianism, consolidating the reins of power in the
hands of just one party. The crisis of War Communism is tied to October
1917, and represents not a departure from the Bolshevik efforts to create
a benign socialism but an extension of their efforts to consolidate power.
War Communism, the period between 1918 and 1921, was a time of chaos.
The Bolshevik takeover had shattered the Russian social fabric, the new
state was under attack from defenders of the old regime and the deeply
traditional peasantry resisted handing over their production to the party.
Even
revisionists must agree that the Bolsheviks used terror to create order.
A look at the attitude of the authorities towards the peasantry during
this time is a good illustration. Under pressure from the White armies,
the Bolsheviks found that the peasants weren’t as eager to participate
in the great socialist project as they had predicted. Initially,
class warfare was invoked as a way to split peasants and force the richer
ones to hand over their grain in order to support the hungry cities and
military. When it became clear that all peasants were reluctant to
part with their food, the authorities justified the use of coercive force
by once again invoking ideology. “The Bolsheviks managed to convince
themselves that the extreme measures that were partly forced upon them
by circumstances ... were elements of a program for building communism,
forged in a bloody civil war against the class enemy and thus sanctioned
by the laws of history.”
It is
this last, the idea that the Bolsheviks believed in the policies of the
war years, that revisionist historians argue with. Their strongest
position is that the War Communism period is an aberration, and that the
true project of Bolshevik ideology was allowed to flower after the crisis
of those fiery first years. One of the most divisive debates in Sovietology
revolves around the reaction to the catastrophic social and economic results
of War Communism, which showed the Bolsheviks just how intractable peasants
could be. Led by Stephen Cohen, revisionists (in one of their strongest
showings) put forth a powerful case for the moderation of the New Economic
Policy, or NEP, as the true intent of the leaders of an October 1917 revolution.
The NEP, Cohen writes, represented a period of “officially tolerated social
pluralism in economic, cultural-intellectual, and even (in local soviets
and high state agencies) political life.” Cohen points to Lenin’s
writings on the need for “state capitalism” as a transition phase on the
road to socialism to bolster his argument.
Once again,
though, it is the scholars of ideology who come out on top. These
portray NEP as a retreat in the face of peasant opposition, giving the
Party a chance to rest and regroup before striking out towards their version
of socialism once more. Alec Nove points out the fatal contradiction
of the NEP years. The realistic, moderate and humane view of Nikolai
Bukharin (whose biography Cohen wrote) held that the way to increase agricultural
production was to work with the richer peasants, or kulaks, encouraging
them to produce by emphasizing consumer goods. “Yet,” Nove notes,
all the Bolshevik leaders
(including, despite momentary aberrations, Bukharin himself) found this
ideologically and politically unacceptable. A strong group of independent,
rich peasants was ... the Bolshevik’s nightmare, totally inconsistent in
the long run with their rule or with a socialist transformation of ‘petty-bourgeois’
Russia.”
From a
strict economic perspective, Bukharin’s gradual movement towards socialism
might have worked. In the context of the Soviet Union, though, NEP
was the aberration, and its model for socialism with a human face (to borrow
a term from Central Europe) was doomed. Ideology made a reckoning
between the NEP’s moderate, even pluralist, policies and the hard reality
of the totalitarian Soviet state inevitable. “It was wholly implausible
to expect the Leninist Party to capitulate ... to the class enemies [kulaks]
it had been created to destroy,” Malia writes. “In the crisis of
the NEP, such a party ... could only be expected to make a political rather
than an economic decision – or more exactly, to make a political-military
decision (as we must call their reversion to the coercive methods of War
Communism) ...”
The end
of NEP and the decision to collectivize by force ushered in one of the
twentieth century’s most horrific chapters. Stalinism, from the mass
starvation of peasants during the collectivization drive that brought the
NEP to a violent end to the paranoid butchery of the purges to the massive
loss of life Stalin’s incompetence as a military leader caused during World
War II, was a period exceeded in modern history only by Nazism in its capacity
for evil and destruction. The response of some Western Sovietologists
to Stalinism also represents the most shocking failure of the field.
The revisionist attempts to mitigate the catastrophes of the Stalin years
are a moral and intellectual embarrassment.
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