Russia : Class and Power, 1917-2000

259 Pages·2002·6.5 MB·English

by  Mike Haynes

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MIKE HAYNES
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BOOKMARKS
PUBLICATIONS
London & Sydney
Russia: Class and Power 1917-2000 — Mike Hgnes
First published 2002
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have been thinking of writing this book for a long time. I was finally pro-
Ivoked by someone I have never met. I was asked to read a long manu-
script by Goretti Horgan on Ireland. Having read much on that subject, I
did not look forward to it. When I finally plucked up courage I was transfixed.
Every page seemed to sparkle because Goretti avoided simply recycling old
arguments and familiar facts. It was not that the arguments were not there —
they appeared with new life and force, illustrated by a wealth of things I did
not know, because she allowed what she wrote to grow out of them but not be
bound by them. This, I thought, was the way I should try to approach Russia.
I wanted to stand on what had been done in the past but not be limited by it.
If I have not detailed the origins of every argument this is not because I do not
recognise my debts. They are there, but the tribute that is paid is my attempt
to build beyond the foundations.
Whether I have succeeded or not is not for me to say. But this work would
have been the worse without the help of many people. Pete Rooney made my
work easier by passing on a mass of material. Similarly I have been fortunate
to work with Rumy I-Iusan on the general transition in Eastern Europe. I have
benefited from the help of many Russians, especially those whose work has
forced them to share my company. They patiently allowed me to discuss much
with them, and they tolerated what sometimes seemed my strange lines of
argument. I will not embarrass them by naming them. Suffice it to say that I
learned much, and my greatest pleasures were when I felt my argument was
making sense to them. Emma Bircham began work on this book and Dave
Waller took over at an early stage. Both commented on it and shared many of
my enthusiasms, if not all of them. Marcie I-Iaynes, Ian Birchall and Chris
Harman also made detailed comments on drafts from which I have benefited,
IIIJSSIA - IIIIEFAEE
and which have saved me from error. A special word of thanks must go to Pete
Glatter. By good fortune I was asked to help supervise his doctoral work on
Russia, some of which has since appeared in print, and hopefully more of
which will follow. He came late to academic life with a wealth of experience,
and quickly gained an enviable command of Russian. I have often depended
on him for help. This book is not only the better for the care with which he
worked on the manuscript and the suggestions he made — some of its argu-
ment leans heavily on discussions we have had over several years. Usually I
have felt myself resisting his views, only to see that he was right. The one argu-
ment that I continued to resist was his suggestion that this was not the book
to write on Russia. I hope he now feels that in this instance I was right. But, if
I am, much is due to his continuing help. Needless to say, none of those men-
tioned above share responsibility for the faults that remain.
Finally, all authors have a problem over what to call Russia in the 20th cen-
tury. Formally from the 1920s to 1991 it was the Soviet Union or the USSR,
but essentially from 1928 onwards it was an empire under the control of
Moscow — Russia writ large. This was one reason why it broke up in 1991.
After 1928 there were no genuine ‘soviets’ in the sense that there had been in
1917. I have not rigidly avoided the terms ‘Soviet Union’ and ‘USSR’. It would
be too complex to do so — especially in quotations. But I have tried to minimise
their use to better reflect the real situation.
Transliterating from Russian is rarely error free or consistent. I have kept
older forms for the best known names but tried to follow modern practices for
less familiar ones.

l. INTIIIIIDLIETIIIIN
This book is an attempt to settle accounts with the history of the Soviet
Union. In 1917 a first revolution in February overthrew the Russian
Tsar, and then in October a second revolution brought the Bolshevik
Party to power. The Bolsheviks were committed to changing Russia, and to
inspiring an international revolution that would help build a world free of
inequality, war and class conflict. Yet within a decade most of the revolution-
ary generation were marginalised, and the revolution turned on its head.
Under Stalin Russia re-emerged as a Great Power. The regime called itself
‘socialist’ and ‘communist’, it built statues to Marx and Lenin, but in its inter-
nal organisation it remained undemocratic and repressive. Externally Russian
actions blocked or hindered the possibility of wider social change. This not
only helped to set the pattern of the history of the 20th century, but it also
trapped the larger part of the international left, who identified themselves
more or less critically with the Soviet Union and its satellites. Here, they
believed, was a system superior to capitalism — even if parts of it deserved
sharp criticism — and here were, at least, some elements of the future. The col-
lapse of the Soviet system in Eastern Europe in 1989 destroyed these illusions.
It seemed to many as if a new epoch had arrived. What they imagined to be
some form of socialism had turned to dust — ‘capitalism’ and ‘the West’ had
won. In the United States Francis Fukuyama had already declared that the
days of the great ideological challenges to liberal capitalism were over. The
IIIJEEIA - INTHHDHETIDN
alternatives had been defeated and history, as the story of a battle between
grand alternatives, was over. The future now lay with the global market and
multinational firms under the benevolent eye of the US, the only remaining
superpower. The US president, George Bush Sr, speaking to the International
Monetary Fund in September 1990, said: ‘Today leaders around the world are
turning to market forces to meet the needs of their peoples... The jury is no
longer out. History has decided’.‘ Then in 1991 the Soviet Union itself disin-
tegrated after a failed coup in August that year. The rout of the system was
complete. ‘History will record [that] the 20th century essentially ended on 17
August...to 21 August 1991,’ Boris Yeltsin later saidf
The disorientation of the international left was real. Communist parties col-
lapsed, or reformed as Social Democratic parties. But rarely has such an
apparent epochal shift had such a short life. Within a few years, across the
globe, new waves of protest began to merge into an anti-globalisation and anti-
capitalist movement. This movement was astonishingly broad. Churches chal-
lenged the debt mechanisms of the global economy. Environmentalists took
on the great polluters. Consumers worried about the power of the great cor-
porations to modify food or to profit from medicines desperately needed by
the poor. The challenges are also deep — here is a world where the basic mech-
anisms seem out of control, where the few ride roughshod over the wishes of
the many even when they have received clear expression in democratic elec-
tions. The word ‘anti’ is a strong one. It does not suggest equivocation — it
stands for against, opposed to. It reflects the strength of feeling — sometimes
moral, sometimes theorised — that there is something fundamentally wrong
with a world order that gives so much to so few, but denies the most basic
things to so many. Perhaps no calculation of the 1990s more clearly expressed
this than that of the 1996 United Nations Human Development Report:
‘Nearly 90 countries are worse off economically than they were IO years ago...
the gap in per capita income between the industrial and developing worlds
tripled from 1960 to 1993, from US$5.7oo to US$15,4oo... Today the net
worth of the world’s 35 8 richest billionaires is equal to the combined income
of the poorest 45 percent of the world’s population — 2.3 billion people’.3
But ‘anti-globalisation’ and ‘anti-capitalism’ are also terms of weakness, for
they are both negative — you know what you are against, but what are you for?
It is this question that makes the issue of the Soviet Union one that continues
to have such contemporary political importance. Standing stark in the middle
of any discussion of a possible better world is the history of the USSR. While
the Eastern Bloc existed, sooner or later any discussion of an alternative to
Western capitalism led there. ‘Doesn’t this show where revolution leads, espe-
cially when centralised parties take control?’ the sympathetic would ask. For
the hostile it was simpler to shout: ‘Get back to Russia’ to still criticism of the
societies in which they lived. The biggest argument for Western capitalism
IILIEEIA - INTRDDUETIDN
seemed to be the Russia of Stalin and his successors. If this was what social-
ism was like, who would want it? Not a lot of people who lived there, it seemed.
One old joke in Russia asked: ‘Is it possible to build socialism in one country?
Answer: it is — but it is better to live in another country.’ The joke gives the lie
to the image of the Russians as stereotypical Communists — emotionless, obe-
dient, and capable of anything in the name of ‘progress’. But it confirmed the
idea that there was something fundamentally wrong with the nature of Russia
as a society of the future.
And so there was. But some were still attracted because of illusion. Others
were attracted because of power. The tanks and rockets that rolled through Red
Square on the great holidays were certainly impressive, and they helped to
legitimise the system for many on the left. And in the Cold War the dominant
view was that you either had for be ‘for Washington’ or ‘for Moscow’. That an
alternative anti-Stalinist tradition existed on the left that denied Russia the title
socialist was seen as no more than an annoying quirk. It counted for little and
was best ignored.
Then in 1989-91, when it all began to collapse, the vision of Russian power
no longer legitimised anything. ‘I have seen the future and it works,’ the
American journalist Lincoln Steffens famously said after a visit to Russia at
the time of the civil war. But it is clear now that it did not work. Its failure was
dragged out, but finally became complete in 1991. Triumphalism in the West
grew to a crescendo. Western capitalism had proved itself the only viable sys-
tem, and people in Eastern Europe were rushing towards it. It was time to give
up illusions. But even at this early stage it seemed a bit more complicated to
those who looked. People in the former Eastern Bloc were certainly rejecting
the old, but they seemed less than enthusiastic about the new. Instinctively
many recognised the limitations of the ‘transition’:
As she contemplated today’s regcled Communists, who miraculously have discovered the virtues ofpluralism,
one Polish lad}g ave me thefollowing definition ofher erstwhile homeland’sgovernments throughout this cen-
tug): 'Same shit, differentflies!"r
How we make sense of the failure of Russia is therefore important for the pol-
itics of the future as well as our understanding of the past. Clearing away illu-
sions helps us not only to move forward, but it helps to see how we should
move forward. Not least it shows the danger of identifying an alternative world
with a reliance on state power from above to solve our problems. There is a dif-
ference between amnesia and memory. Amnesia is about forgetting, and some
of the left would prefer to forget Russia. Memory is about retaining and
analysing the past so that it can help inform our present and our future.
All the best accounts of the history of Russia link past, present and future, but
they do it in quite different ways. Take the example of some of the ways it oper-