Unholy
Marriage:
Ideology,
Totalitarianism and the Soviet Project
Part III
The idea
that the Soviet Union and its totalitarian system was disintegrating and
not evolving goes far towards explaining its last years. Most
scholars overestimated the last decades of the system in one of two ways.
Either they saw the system as evolving of its own accord towards a more
democratic structure or they saw it as a static totalitarianism, the “evil
empire” of the Reagan years, in control of its destiny and capable of choosing
when and how reforms would come. Those who argued the latter case,
historian and Reagan administration member Richard Pipes chief among them,
are often credited with the policies of “arms race” escalation that pushed
the regime up against a wall and forced them to democratize.
Though
external pressure was one of the factors that brought about the final collapse,
the reality was that by the end the regime had few choices left.
Years of uninspired command economics had left the country’s production
capacity in ruins; ethnic tensions were at a boiling point; and perhaps
most importantly the ideology that had given people something to believe
in for so long was utterly bankrupt. Nothing was left to divert attention
away from the failings of the Party. By the end of the Brezhnev era,
“the belief that there was a single ‘correct’ position for nineteen million
people and on all questions was on the point of appearing implausible.”
It was
the Gorbachev era of optimistic reform that finally brought the last remnants
crashing down. By most accounts a true believer, Gorbachev failed
or refused to see the necessity of a pervasive, coercive state apparatus
in propping the ideology up. In a complementary relationship, ideology
justified the use of totalitarian means to control the state and at the
same time needed that control to stay on top. Glasnost and perestroika
took the party’s claim to exclusive control away. “Gorbachev put
an end to the claim that there was one single truth and therefore one single
party that was its carrier ... all this brought about a remarkable sense
of having been lied to. ... This in turn opened the floodgates to massive
and varied grassroots organization and articulation outside the party.”
To the surprise of those in the West who had imagined the reform process
as an evolution towards democratic socialism, the bottom fell out.
As in
any good tragedy, the causes of the Soviet Union’s dramatic end were there
from the start. That its professed ideology was so appealing went
a long way towards obscuring the fundamental problems of the system.
Appealing as it may have been, the dreams of the Bolsheviks weren’t enough
to create and order a “really existing” socialist society on their own
merits. To make up for the ideology’s unreality the Bolsheviks created
a what was essentially a totalitarian state years before the term was even
coined. It was the unnaturally strong combination of the two that
kept the Soviet project going so long.
For those
coming of age in a resolutely self-confident era of judgmental hindsight,
at a time when “The End of History” refers not to the grandiose endpoint
of Marx’s dialectic but rather to the final victory of the Western liberal
democracy, understanding how so many were deceived by the Soviet Union
for so long is tough. If we are to see the former Soviet Union evolve
towards a more democratic, economically and politically sound and stable
region in the coming years, the lessons of the Soviet era and the impact
it had on the society it ruled must be learned.
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