Newsweek
January 2, 2012
International Edition
Halfway To Where?
In the aftermath of Russia’s elections, there are hints that things
may finally be changing. the question is what the final outcome will
be.
By Robert Conquest / Photographs By Kirill Ovchinnikov
The extraordinary protests that followed Russia’s Dec. 4 parliamentary
elections continue to resound. Still more extraordinarily, the Kremlin
refrained from using armed force to put down the massive
demonstrations that took place across the country, a week after the
disputed vote. And yet no one can be sure whether these events are
signs of deeper change. In the run-up to the balloting, former Soviet
president Mikhail Gorbachev emphasized the challenges facing Russia
when he publicly accused the Kremlin of reverting to its old
authoritarian habits and predicted that the contest would be rigged
(charges that the government quickly denied).
A long and brutal past remains very much a living force in present-day
Russia. The ruling elite are the products of centuries of history, of
personal and collective ordeals, of indoctrination, and of the
psychological ability to survive those ordeals and accept that
indoctrination. Chekhov wrote of Russia’s “heavy, chilling history,
savagery, bureaucracy, poverty and ignorance.” As he put it, “Russian
life weighs upon a Russian like a thousand-ton rock.” At the time, he
was looking back on centuries of extreme despotism.
But in the century that followed his verdict, the country went through
much that was even worse. Czarism may have been the most repressive
regime of its time in Europe, but Lenin’s Soviet Union was far more
violently repressive than anything the continent had seen in
centuries–never mind the greater horrors that followed Lenin’s death.
It can hardly be maintained that Russian communism was merely a
continuation of what came before.
Lenin and his successors ruled by consolidating their machinery of
power and by subjecting the populace to saturation barrages of
propaganda. At the same time the politico-economic apparatus
solidified into a new caste. The central, classical demonstration of
what might be called ideological insanity in practice came with the
campaign in 1929-33 to collectivize the peasantry. Lenin invented the
term “kulak,” signifying a newly prosperous peasant, in order to wage
class warfare and seize the holdings of small landowners. Millions of
human beings perished, and the agricultural economy was wrecked.
After the disaster of collectivization, the leadership had two
options: either to admit failure and change policy–perhaps even to
relinquish total power–or to pretend that success had been achieved.
Falsification took place on a barely credible scale, in every sphere.
Real facts, honest statistics, disappeared. History, especially that
of the Communist Party, was rewritten. Unpersons vanished from the
official record. A spurious past and a fictitious present were imposed
on the captive minds of the Soviet people. To focus solely on the
physical manifestations of the Communist terror–the killings, the
deportations, the people who were driven to suicide–would be to
overlook the larger context: what Boris Pasternak called “the inhuman
reign of the lie.” Until Gorbachev came to power, the country lived a
double existence–an official world of fantasy, grand achievements,
wonderful statistics, liberty, democracy, all juxtaposed with a
reality of gloom, suffering, terror, denunciation, and apparatchik
degeneration.
The confrontation with the West was another product of the Soviet
order’s mental distortions. The prevailing mindset required an
unceasing struggle with other cultures, and spawned what Gorbachev
would later describe in his farewell address as an “insane
militarization,” which ruined the country.
I learned that something in Moscow had radically changed when I first
met Gorbachev. The Soviet leader was on his 1990 visit to America, and
we held a small seminar for him at Stanford. One of those present was
a seismology professor, who asked Gorbachev about the devastating 1988
earthquake that had killed at least 25,000 people in what was then the
Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. The seismologist noted that the
Armenian event had been roughly the same intensity as the 1989
California quake that killed 63. Was Armenia’s toll so much higher
because its quake had hit ancient villages dating back long before
modern earthquake-resistant building codes–unlike most of the
structures in California?
Gorbachev’s answer shocked me. No, he said: both places had laws that
set quake-proofing standards for building construction, but in Soviet
Armenia these had not been observed. Here was the leader of the Soviet
Union telling the truth, in an abrupt departure from his country’s
70-year tradition of falsehoods! (And in the process, conceding that
the supposedly powerful Soviet state failed to deliver on its promises
to citizens.)
Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslavian former Communist who became one of the
best-known critics of the system, wrote that the rule of Soviet
leaders was “anchored in Ideology, as the divine right of kings was in
Christianity; and therefore their imperialism, too, has to be
ideological or else it commands no legitimacy.” This, he added, was
why Westerners were mistaken in hoping the Kremlin might be pressed or
humored into a truly comprehensive datente: “No Soviet leader can do
that without abdicating his title to leadership and jeopardizing the
justification of Soviet rule”–which is precisely what finally
happened.
The decisive step was the launching of glasnost and perestroika in the
late 1980s. Gorbachev and the brighter of his colleagues had at last
seen that his predecessors’ policy of massive and continuous
falsification was not only ruinous to morale, but also incompatible
with economic success–and even that the prevention of free speech was
stultifying the whole political and social order.
When your inland seas begin to dry up–as the Aral Sea did under
Soviet rule–it’s hard to stomach a government-issued fantasy of
beaches and breakers. So as glasnost grew, the struggle became ever
more intense. Foreign radio broadcasts had already convinced many
Russians that their country’s official truths were untenable, but when
glasnost hit Russian state television, the effect was stunning. The
televised debates in the Supreme Soviet, with Andrei Sakharov standing
up to Mikhail Gorbachev and speaking out for democracy, disrupted
production at factories all over the country, as workers clustered
around the sets.
Modern technology greatly encouraged the emergence of civic
connections in place of the country’s previous social atomization. As
crowds filled the streets in August 1991, during the hardline
Communists’ last-ditch effort to topple Gorbachev, fax machines helped
keep communication open, and copies of declarations from the country’s
farthest reaches, from Pskov to Vladivostok, were plastered all over
the lampposts of Moscow and Leningrad.
By then, glasnost had brought a huge mass of officially banned
knowledge out of hiding. The first public mention in Russia of The
Great Terror, my book on the Stalin era, was when Katrina vanden
Heuvel interviewed me for the weekly Moskovski Novosti in the spring
of 1989. When I finally arrived in Moscow later that year, it was
everywhere. In the preceding decade there had been little reply to the
book from the Communist Party, even though copies had been printed for
Politburo members. But now, at the final plenum of the Communist
Party’s Central Committee, the Stalinist writer Aleksandr Chakovsky
denounced me as “anti-Sovietchik No. 1.” Too late: the Russian edition
was already being serialized in the literary monthly Neva, a million
copies per issue.
The Soviet Union had been a vast kleptocracy for years. Money began to
play a major role above and beyond the longstanding perquisites of
power, foreshadowing what Alain Besancon called a sort of “savage
capitalism.” The already large criminal element had, in fact, become
almost institutionally intertwined with the bureaucracy. There
were–and continue to be–stunning illegalities.
To this day, Russian politics has seen something less than a rapid and
painless modernization (putting it mildly), partly because no trained
political class existed. In fact, the habits necessary for good
governance were effectively discouraged on a systemic basis. Sakharov
described the problem in the late 1970s: “A deeply cynical caste has
come into being, one which I consider dangerous (to itself as well as
to all mankind)–a sick society ruled by two principles: blat [a
little slang word meaning ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch
yours’], and the popular saw: ‘No use banging your head against the
wall.’ But beneath the petrified surface of our society exist cruelty
on a mass scale, lawlessness, the absence of civil rights protecting
the average man against the authorities, and the latter’s total
unaccountability toward their own people or the whole world.”
The Soviet bureaucracy’s reaction to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster
demonstrated what Sakharov had been talking about. As David Remnick
later noted in The New Yorker, it was typical of the regime that plant
director Viktor Bryukhanov, on being told that the reactor’s radiation
was millions of times higher than normal, replied that the meter was
obviously defective and must be thrown away. Deputy Prime Minister
Boris Shcherbina rejected a suggestion to order a mass evacuation.
“Panic is worse than radiation,” he said.
Gorbachev was certainly an improvement, at least able to see that the
system was unworkable. When “conservative” elements within the
Politburo launched a military coup to remove him, Boris Yeltsin
–supported by 100,000 Muscovites who formed a human barrier around
the Russian White House–was instrumental in spiking the conspirators’
revolt. But a few months later, Yeltsin signed treaties abolishing the
U.S.S.R., creating in its stead the Commonwealth of Independent
States. As Russia’s first post-Soviet head of state he weathered a
second mutiny in 1993, and ushered in an era of political and economic
reform–and unbridled greed: a handful of oligarchs became
billionaires via the privatization of old Soviet industries. After
nine years Yeltsin became the first Russian leader to relinquish power
voluntarily, handing over the presidency to Vladimir Putin.
But through it all, the apparat remained–and in effect, remains. When
the socialist order failed, the only class with access to and
experience in economic matters was the state bureaucratic stratum. The
leading elements used the emergence of the market to loot Russia’s
resources. Lesser bureaucrats continue to parasitize the economy by
demanding bribes for permits and so on. The country remains, as
described by Larisa Piyasheva (then a consultant on economic issues to
Russia’s Council of the Federation) in a 1995 interview, “a limited
democracy with a semistate, semiprivatized economy … anarchic,
corrupt and oligarchic.”
The present regime may have abandoned the compulsive economic
ideologies of the Communist past, but it has not developed anything
like an open society. And yet the case for freedom is about far more
than abstract morality. It’s a practical matter, as the communist
heroine and martyr Rosa Luxemburg explained in 1918 when she argued
against Lenin’s suppression of hostile opinion, and against the closed
society: “Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of
press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out
in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in
which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element … [S]uch
conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life.”
Subsequent decades proved how right she was.
Russians are used to electoral fraud. There were never any
expectations that the Dec. 4 elections would be carried out with
complete honesty, any more than Russia’s past votes were. But this
time, instances of ballot irregularity were recorded by mobile devices
and then posted on the Internet, to which more than 40 percent of
Russians now have access. Outrage–and calls to protest–flashed from
computer to computer. Political discourse is thriving in blogs,
tweets, posts to Facebook, uploads to YouTube–challenging the
regime’s old-media monopoly on news and opinion.
One can have “reform” without liberalism, and Russia’s regime remains
far from the rule of law–something even more important than
“democracy.” The Russian bureaucracy has not abandoned its habit of
failing to fulfill its contracts and obligations. In democratic
countries, contracts are enforced, delinquents fined or dismissed, and
when we speak of the rule of law, we mean contract law as well. But
Russians remain justifiably skeptical about the political process. The
problem is not primarily economic or even political. It is a certain
lack of much feeling for community in the sense of a civic or plural
order.
That may be changing among the young, educated class. Yet Putin has
reverted to the Soviet habit of blaming unrest on outside agitators,
suggesting that “American partners” are manipulating the protesters.
The question, especially from the West’s point of view, is whether
Russia will descend into expansionist chauvinism. Even if it were not
of the global, absolutist type that was typical of the U.S.S.R., that
would still be an unwelcome development. Still, the world coped with a
much worse Russia. Let us be optimistic.
From: A. Papazian