Travelling Through Time and the USSR

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is, to me, one of the most fascinating political aberrations of the 20th century. And I deliberately use the term aberration, because it represented an attempt to construct a state from nothing; its revolutionary leaders tore down the existing structures of the centuries-old Tsarist state, seeking to rebuild without reference to what came before. It was not of nature. But, despite this and the tumult of its creation, the Soviet state changed and evolved through the years shifting from one thing to another less subtly than modern observers acknowledge with hindsight. Indeed, many observers, lay and expert alike, maintain a monolithic view of what the USSR was, or, if any evolution is acknowledged, it is generally a misguided, haphazard exercise in chronology relating to the economic and geopolitical context. This misses the mark, in my view.

§1. Hypothesis and the Leninist State, 1917–24

It is my hypothesis that the Soviet state evolved as a political structure almost entirely within the context of the nationalities question, something which Lenin & Co struggled with in the very earliest days of the revolution. This question concerned the historically multiethnic nature of the Russian Empire, and how this character would be managed under a Bokshevik state. In the earliest days (~1922–24), not only was the mainstream Bolshevik attitude towards the nationalities question distinctly internationalist, but the very leaders themselves were a cosmopolitan bunch composed primarily of people of Jewish extraction, alongside the occasional Georgian, immigrant-descended European and a token Russian or two. This is understandable from an ideological perspective, given the primacy of internationalism in the nascent theoretical framework of Marxism as applied to the real world. It is true, also, that many staffers of the Bolsheviks' security (read: terror) apparatus were not ethnic Russians, but minorities. The reasons for this are another question entirely, and beyond the scope of this essay.

This internationalism enacted by cosmopolitan political commissars led the initial act of creation to produce a cosmopolitan state which resisted the natural dominance of the Russian over the empire. Letters between Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin from this period demonstrate this view quite clearly. Lenin and his inner circle viewed the Russian, in a political sense, as an historic oppressor who must undergo an artificial weakening to the benefit of the minority nationalities. The Union, therefore, was to be a union of equal partners with equal representation in the soviets and a rotating presidency of sorts. We can see, here, the reflection of the state's top cadres in the policy of the state itself.

§2. Stalin and the Cosmopolitan Inheritance

Interestingly, the Man of Steel took a contrary viewpoint, which is all the more surprising given his Georgian background. Stalin preferred a policy of nominal autonomy for the nationalities, without equal representation or the right to secede from the Union. This peculiarity is not strictly important to the categorisation of this temporal region of the USSR, but it is worth elucidating to aid our understanding of the state's evolution during the Stalinist period. Notwithstanding his disagreement, however, Joseph Stalin broadly continued the cosmopolitan composition of the state during his earliest years in power. One brings to mind Yakov Yakolev (born Yakov Epstein), the agriculture minister of the early 1930s who hopelessly mismanaged the collectivisation of the Union's farms, alongside the sadistic, zealous Georgian, Beria, amongst many, many others.

This state under Lenin and, then, Stalin, operated with a sociopathy typical of a cosmopolitan elite ruling a majority population with whom they had no affinity beyond trite notions of working class solidarity. This period can be called the Cosmopolitan Period, encompassing the time from the consolidation of state power in 1922 up until 1936.

§3. From Georgian Malcontent to Russian Patriot

The latter stages of the 1930s are fairly uneventful in terms of the nature of the state, Stalin's purges aside. It is, though, during wartime that the Soviet state began to evolve quite considerably, a shift brought about by the personal strength of Stalin himself alongside the natural evolution enforced on a national consciousness by immense hardship. Stalin was genuinely surprised by the German invasion. The mythology describing him sitting alone in stunned silence upon being informed of the German invasion is probably true, and for a fleeting moment it appeared that the Man of Steal would lose his nerve. As the hour of judgement drew nearer, however, and with the Wehrmacht charging towards the gates of Moscow as summer turned to fall, he displayed a rallying composure that had seismic consequences for the state itself. By choosing to remain in Moscow and direct the defense of the city, Stalin re-energised the front lines and had at least some influence in the army's successful stand against the German forces.

This relative pinpoint in time, followed by the protracted attrition of World War II, enforced the aforementioned evolution of the Soviet state. Suddenly, patriotism took the place of internationalism, brotherhood instead of cosmopolitanism. It is no coincidence that Russia still refers to WWII as the Great Patriotic War. The efforts of the war galvanised a population around the defence of the motherland, but this period should not be seen as the reassertion of nationalism over internationalism, considering its limited affect on the short-term operational activity of the state and the inability for such reforms to be introduced during wartime. It did, however, lay the foundations of what was to come.

This period we may call the War Era, signalling an end to Soviet internationalism.

§4. The Russian Bear and the Post-Jewish Era

We begin to see signs of a state policy volteface during the immediate post-war era, still defined by Stalinism, in the subtle alterations witnessed in the social context. In particular, we may reference the overt campaign against the "Rootless Cosmopolitans", a state campaign from 1948-53 that many regard as anti-semitic. The overrepresentation of Jews in the early leadership positions of the Soviet state enable the observer to view them as a proxy of state policy towards cosmopolitanism in general.

The final years of Stalin's leadership marked the death knell for cosmopolitan governance in the Soviet Union. The anti-semitic campaign against the Rootless Cosmopolitans, along with the appointment of the Russian-Ukrainian Zhdanov as Head of Soviet Cultural Policy and the patriotic afterglow of the war, showed that such governance had run its course in the USSR. Indeed, the purges and charges related to this era specifically began to take action against elements of society that represented cosmopolitan values, and the accusation of being unpatriotic became as ominous as that of being a bourgeois counter-revolutionary in the 1920s. Many Jews emigrated to the United States and Israel during this period, while positions of power at the head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were filled almost exclusively by ethnic Russians.

Ironically, it required the de-Stalinisation era if the late 1950s to complete this evolutionary shift in state ideology. Nikita Khrushchev became General Secretary upon Stalin's death in 1953, following which he and Malenkov, amongst others, began the process of destalinisation which marked, in my view, the end of the revolutionary era and the establishment of normalcy in the context of state policy. Khrushchev's USSR no longer operated as an absolute dictatorship under a warlord like Stalin, and it discarded much of the tyrannical apparatus of the Stalinist state – both aspects of more oriental political life – in favour of a more consensus-based outlook and greater legalism. This period also marked the assertion of Russian dominance within the USSR and Moscow's role as the highest authority of the overall Eastern Bloc, (see: Hungarian Uprising and the Cuban Missile Crisis.), as well as the tentative reintroduction of Orthodox Christianity in Russia.

§5. Brezhnev: A Conservative Bolshevik

Leonid Brezhnev ascended to the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – a de facto Head of State equivalent – in 1964, and held the position for 18 years. Within Russia he is often regarded as leader whose conservative tendencies resulted in the stagnation that lead to the Gorbachev-era economic instability, and there is some plausibility to this argument. The charge of conservatism is definitely accurate. It might strike the Western read as something of an oxymoron to refer to an individual or institution rooted in Bolshevism as conservative, but the USSR during this period would qualify as a state enthralled to conservatism by any definition of the term.

It is during this period that the Soviet Union found its level in the sense of political stability. It is also a period during which Moscow increasingly asserted its dominance over the wider Union, and within the Communist Bloc at large. There is a little know incident from 1969 that exemplifies this latter point, when a border incursion by the People's Republic of China was met with a deadly response from the Soviet side, later de-escalated only by Brezhnev's blazé threat to fire nuclear weapons at Beijing.

We see further examples of this Russian assertiveness over the period, a notable example familiar to many Western readers being the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. The purpose of this intervention was to preserve what we might call Orthodox Bolshevism in the border regions of the Eastern Bloc, but by this stage the term Bolshevism, if it even applies, meant something very different from the revolutionary zeal and tyranny of the 1920s. Indeed, the highest preoccupation of the Moscow leadership during this period was to conserve the post-war consensus against reformist tendencies. This was driven by party officials who were almost exclusively of ethnic Russian extraction, and who considered their duty of conserving the state as a matter of patriotism as opposed to the advancement of Marxist-Leninist utopianisn.

§6. Resurgent Nations

The obvious drawback of Russian assertiveness during this period, from the perspective of a Soviet conservative, is its alienation of the USSR's constituent republics. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Soviet Union had taken on the character of a Russian Empire administered centrally from Moscow, in a world moving firmly away from this kind of state structure. And so, we can trace a broadly direct line of causation from Russian nationalism, as well as the inherent conservatism of CCCP bureaucrats, to the eventual breakup of the Union. The stagnation caused by conservative bureaucracy presented a moment of weakness during which the nationalist resentments of the constituent republics could manifest in independence movements – naturally supported by Western money and soft power.

In this sense, the breakup was inevitable. But even in its death throes we can see the conservative urges of Muscovite Sovietists, exemplified by the coup d'état attempt of 1991 perpetrated by the Orthodox Bolsheviks in an unsuccessful attempt to halt Gorbachev and Yeltsin's exercise in national suicide. The coup was motivated by what Orthodox Bolshevism had become; Russian chauvinism – and I use that word in a purely technical sense – and the conservation of the traditional state apparatus of the Soviet Union. As we well know, this attempt was in vain and Russia today is still coming to terms with the traumatic disintegration of its empire.

§7. Conclusions

In this piece, I hope I have demonstrated with sufficient clarity and persuasion the many faces of the USSR. I believe the history of that state can be broadly defined into the periods elucidated above, and that its final form represented a sort of nostalgic-conservative Sovietism that was both nationalistic and very Russian. It was, in a way, an inevitable progression of events, given the unsustainability of rule-by-foreigner and early Stalinist state terrorism, that the USSR would be mailed to a very Russian sensibility, much in the way China is now evolving from Maoist insanity to 'Socialism with Chinese Characteristics' – a clear way to incorporate the natural urges of conservatism and nationalism into a Communist framework.

It is a great shame, in many ways, that the USSR ended the way it did, particularly because this eventuality could've been avoided. It does not logically follow that an all-Russian empire must necessarily oppress its subject nations. Nevertheless, combining this nationalism with a set of conservative-orthodox institutions is a recipe for disaster in any empire – as we saw in Yugoslavia in the aftermath of Tito's death.

Finally, I wish to state that this essay and the analysis provided therein does not necessarily demonstrate value judgements, nor the ideological positions of its author.

Thank you.