On Russia, Stalin, and Putin

 

On Russia, Stalin, and Putin

January 30, 2021

Thomas C. Sorenson, PhD

 

On page 25 of the book The Putin Interviews, Oliver Stone Interviews Vladimir Putin,[1] Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the President of the Russian Federation, says, “I think that excessive demonization of Stalin is one of the ways to attack the Soviet Union and Russia, to show that the Russia of today has something originating from Stalinism. Well, of course, we all have these birthmarks.” Putin’s statement here raised a host of questions for me. Earlier in my life I obtained a PhD in Russian history. I was in the Soviet Union for a few weeks in the summer of 1968, then I spent the 1975-76 academic year in Russia, mostly in Moscow, doing research for my PhD dissertation. I’ve been out of the field of Russian history for a long time, but my interest in and much of my knowledge about Russia remain. Putin’s statement to Stone about Stalinism got me thinking about the historical forces that have shaped today’s Russia. I want here to share some of my thoughts on that subject.

We must begin by looking at the whole arc of Russian history. That history begins in what today isn’t Russia at all. Russian political and cultural history begins in Kiev, today the capital city of the independent nation of Ukraine, with a political entity called Kievan Rus. Kiev’s location on the Dnieper River gave it control over a major trading route between Scandinavia to the north and Byzantium to the south. In 988 Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev, known to all Russians as Vladimir the Great or Saint Vladimir, converted his people to Orthodox Christianity, the faith of Byzantium with which Kiev has such important economic connections. Not too long thereafter the Russian lands came under threat of occupation by the Mongols, usually called the Tatars in the Russian context. The center of Russian political and cultural life shifted to the northeast, to the cities of Vladimir, Suzdal, and Moscow. In 1240 the Tatars sacked Kiev, and the region that would become Ukraine passed out of Russian control of for many centuries.

In the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries Moscow became the dominant political and military power in Russia. Moscow did it by first acting as the Tatars’ tribute collector, then as the leader of Russian opposition to what in Russia is called “the Tatar yoke.” Eventually Moscow became the seat of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 that worthy was elevated to the level of Patriarch. Also after the fall of Constantinople the grand princes of Moscow began to call themselves “tsar,” a Slavic version of the Latin Caesar. In 1552 Grand Prince Ivan IV of Moscow, known to the world as Ivan the Terrible, conquered the Tatar stronghold of Kazan, on the Volga River east of Moscow, thereby putting an end to the Tatar period of Russian history.

The Grand Duchy of Moscow was anything but democratic. The Grand Princes of Moscow, who came to call themselves tsars, ran a state as centralized and authoritarian as they could. At first they ruled with the support of a class of nobles called boyars, but Ivan IV suppressed the boyars through force. He used an organization called the oprichnina to do it, a sort of early precursor of the later Russian and Soviet secret police. Thereafter there was no significant opposition to the Muscovite state, nor did the grand princes tolerate any. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Russian peasants were reduced to the status of serfs. The serfs weren’t slaves exactly, but they were legally tied to the land they worked but didn’t own. When the owner sold the land the serfs went with it. They had essentially no rights anyone had to respect. Serfdom wasn’t abolished in Russia until 1861.

Over the centuries the tsars of Moscow increased their power and control. After a chaotic period called in English “the Time of Troubles,” (the smuta in Russian) the Romanov family of nobles assumed the throne. One of the most famous of the Romanovs, Peter I, known to history as Peter the Great (ruled 1682-1725) became a westernizer. He wanted Russia to look and function more like the kingdoms of western Europe, especially France. He adopted western manners of dress. He built the city of St. Petersburg on the Neva River just inland from the Gulf of Finland, to be essentially a western European city. To this day it looks more western than do older Russian cities like Moscow or especially Vladimir and Suzdal. Peter built a summer palace on the Gulf of Finland to rival Versailles, as indeed it does.[2] Yet for all his desire to make Russia more western Peter ruled very much as a Grand Prince of Moscow. He forced western dress on his court. If a man didn’t shave his beard so that he looked more western and less Russian Peter would pull the beard off the man’s face. In 1721 he abolished the Patriarchate of Moscow and replaced with the Holy Synod, a collective body overseen by a government appointee called the Over Procurator. He thus brought the only nominally independent institution in the country under tighter governmental control He had his own son executed. No one in Peter’s Russia had any rights he had to respect.

Subsequent tsars and tsarinas (women tsars), especially Catherine the Great (ruled 1762-1796 (who was German not Russian and probably gained power by participating in a coup against her husband Tsar Peter III) toyed with the rationalism of the European Enlightenment, but they did nothing to extend any political or civil rights to the Russian people, most of whom by far remained in the semi-bondage of serfdom. In 1825, upon the death of Tsar Alexander I (the tsar who defeated Napoleon) a group of Russian military officers known as the Decembrists tried to stage a coup hoping to reform the Russian government along western lines. They were quite easily crushed. Tsar Nicholas I took the throne. He ran a thoroughly repressive regime until his death in 1855.

Reform of a sort came to Russia during the reign of Tsar Alexander II (ruled 1855-1881). He abolished serfdom in 1861. After emancipation the serfs were freer to leave the land than they had been before, a fact that facilitated the grown of Russian industry all the way up to 1914 because many serfs who left the land became industrial workers. Alexander II reformed Russia’s legal system in 1864. Among other things that reform did it introduced the English institution of the jury into Russia for the first time. Also in 1864 Alexander created the first “zemstvos.” A zemstvo (a word based on the Russian word for land) was a more or less independent rural organ of local rule. The national government, however, remained purely autocratic under Alexander II. At the end of his life he apparently was prepared to sign a reform usually called the “Constitution of Loris-Melikov,” which was hardly a true constitution but which would have created a national representative body with consultative but not true legislative power.

Alexander II was assassinated on March 13 (March 1 O.S.), 1881.[3] Upon the tsar’s death Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, the Over Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church at the time and a man who had once been a tutor the tsars in civil law (and the man on whom I wrote my PhD dissertation) got the new emperor, Alexander III, to issue a proclamation that Pobedonostsev had drafted that committed the new tsar to maintaining Russian autocracy unchanged. Alexander III did precisely that.  Alexander was succeeded to the throne in 1894 by his son, Tsar Nicholas II. Nicholas was a much weaker ruler than his father had been, but he had no intention of reforming political autocracy in any meaningful way. Political rights at the national level simply did not exist.

The Russian tsars were autocrats. That meant that they ruled the whole country themselves alone. The law was what the tsar said it was. People did not have individual rights, but the tsars were nowhere near as brutal as the Soviet Communists would become. One reason may be that the ideology of autocracy made the tsar the father of the people whose job was, in theory at least, to protect and care for them. Another reason may be that the tsars were Christians, which the Soviet Communists certainly were not. The tsars could rule with a very heavy hand, and they had no qualms about executing political prisoners. Vladimir Lenin’s brother was hung in 1886 for revolutionary activity, for example. But Christianity values human life in a way that Marxism does not. The tsars’ faith may have acted as a restraint on the amount of  The tsars had a kind of secret police called the Okhrana (from the Russian word for preservation that was part of the organization’s official name). It infiltrated revolutionary organizations and otherwise kept an eye on and tried to subdue any anti-governmental activity. It was in a way a precursor of the KGB, but it was nowhere near as brutal as the KGB (by whatever name it operated at any particular time) would become.

In 1904 Japan dealt Russia a devastating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of that year. Most Russians were shocked to see that their military had lost to what they considered to be an inferior nation of inferior people (which of course the Japanese are not). Popular displeasure and unrest at the lack of needed reforms had been growing for years. On Sunday, January 22 (January 9 O.S.), imperial troops open fire on a peaceful crown that had marched to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg (today the home of the Hermitage Museum) to present a petition to Nicholas II. Nicholas wasn’t there at the time, but the crowd didn’t know that. The petition sought better working conditions and wages for the country’s industrial workers. Bloody Sunday, as this event came to be called, sparked the Russian Revolution of 1905. That first Russian revolution ended with the creation of the State Duma. It was a representative assembly at the national level; but it had no authority to make the tsar do anything, and the tsar could, and did, dismiss it at will.

World War I, which began in 1914, brought the whole Russian imperial system crashing to the ground. The country simply could not deal with the logistic and other demands of the war. The fighting did not go well for the Russians, and Russian soldiers deserted en masse. Those who remained were very poorly equipped. Some of them didn’t even have rifles. Nicholas II abdicated on March 15 (March 2 O.S.). A “provisional government” was formed that was unable or unwilling to end the war, reestablish order, or do much of anything else. The liberals who staffed it kept waiting for a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution for the country, something that didn’t happen until after the Communists were in charge. On November 7, 1917 (October 25 O.S., hence the name the Soviets always gave this event, the October Revolution), the Bolsheviks, a Marxist group led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, seized power in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg (Sankt Peterburg in Russian) had been renamed to make it sound more Russian and less German). A brutal civil war lasting several years ensued. The Communists eventually prevailed. Early on Lenin created a secret police agency call the Cheka (later, after various permutations, the KGB). From the very beginning the Communists ruled through terror in a way the tsars, as nasty as they could be on occasion, never did. The Communist Party came to rule every aspect of Russian life. Anyone perceived to be a threat to the regime was simply eliminated.

Lenin died in January, 1924. Eventually a man with the given name Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili succeeded him as head of the Communist Party. He became in effect the dictator of the Soviet Union, the political structure the Communists had created to replace the Russian Empire, over most of the territory and people of which they ruled. He is known to history by his revolutionary name Josef Stalin. Stalin ruled Russia, but he wasn’t Russian. He was from the Caucasian nation of Georgia, where he had initially studied to become a priest. He became one of the greatest monsters in human history. In the passage I quoted at the beginning of this post Putin refers to “excessive demonization” of Stalin. It actually isn’t possible excessively to demonize Stalin, for just stating the facts of what he did proves that he was every bit as demonic as Hitler—or worse. He gained control of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union primarily by trying and executing opponents on his left (Trotsky and others) and on his right (Bukharin and others), always on false charges of counterrevolutionary activity. He had all of the so-called “Old Bolsheviks,” the men who had been associates of Lenin, killed.

Far worse than that, he created a famine in Ukraine and elsewhere that killed millions upon millions of people as a way of forcing them to accept the collectivization of agriculture, which nearly everyone opposed. The Cheka, then called the NKVD (from the Russian words for National Commissariat of Internal Affairs) or at times by other names, became an instrument of mass terror that cowed the entire population into submission and the mandatory public adulation of Stalin. He vastly expanded the Gulag, the system of forced labor prisons made famous in the west by Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago. (Gulag is an acronym from the Russian for Main Camp Administration, the agency that ran the system.) Perhaps as many as 18 million people went into the Gulag camps. Far fewer came out. Soviet people came to live in terror of the so-called Black Marias, the cars the NKVD drove while making arrests, usually in the middle of the night. Many of the people they arrested were never seen again. People were denounced as counterrevolutionaries who were nothing of the sort. Things got so bad that an ambitious person in any organization could move up by denouncing his or her superior to the NKVD. Of course, that person may in turn have been denounced by someone else in the organization. The Lubyanka Prison, the NKVD’s headquarters in Moscow, became the most feared building in the country. It appears that Stalin killed around 20 million people before Hitler invaded the USSR in June, 1941.

The Soviets lost another 20 million soldiers and civilians in World War II, which the Russians call the Great Patriotic War (or the Great War of the Fatherland, the Russian can be translated either way). People who want to improve Stalin’s image point to the fact that he led the country in the horrific but successful effort to defeat the Germans. He in fact did just that, but most Americans are utterly unaware that it was the Soviets not the Americans or the British who defeated Hitler. With Stalin in charge the Soviets designed and built tanks and aircraft that could compete with the supposedly more technologically advanced Germans. The Red Army turned the tide of the war in the Battle of Stalingrad, perhaps the most brutal battle in the history of warfare. That battle took place long before D-Day and before most of the aid the US sent to the Soviets had arrived.

The achievement of the Soviet people in defeating Hitler is truly monumental, and Stalin led it. Stalin, however, didn’t relent in his terror campaign against the Soviet people even during the war. Even during the German siege of Leningrad, as St. Petersburg had been renamed, in which something like one million people died, many from starvation, for example, the NKVD was at work arresting and executing supposed enemies of the people.[4] I have read of a man whose duty during the war for eight hours a day was to shoot prisoners in the back of the head. Stalin was simply incapable of not inflicting terror on the people he ruled.[5]

Stalin died on March 5, 1953.[6] His propaganda had so distorted the people’s perception of him that most of them mourned him as the greatest friend the Soviet people had ever had. He had created what the Communists who came after him would call a cult of personality. His image was everywhere. They were gone by the time I first visited the Soviet Union in 1968, but I saw a bit of what it must have been like when I was in the then Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia for a few days that summer. That’s where Stalin was from, and his picture was everywhere. I remember seeing it on the wall in the lobby of our hotel and in a taxi cab. Our guide took us to the little town of Gori outside Tbilisi where Stalin had been born. She took us to the little Stalin museum located as I recall in the house Stalin grew up in. I certainly got the impression that the Georgians still adored him fifteen years after his death. I could explain that odd reality only by assuming that the Georgians thought yes, he was a bastard; but he was our bastard, and boy did he kick some Russian butt! And there is of course that little matter of him defeating Hitler.

The cult of Stalin started to fall apart in 1956.[7] That year Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave a secret speech to a Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union titled “The Personality Cult and Its Consequences.” Khrushchev condemned Stalin for his purges of innocent members of the Communist Party. He criticized Stalin for certain policy errors such as weakening the Red Army by purging its best commanders prior to Hitler’s invasion, which Stalin certainly did. Khrushchev did not condemn Stalin for his mass terror against the Soviet people. He did not criticize Stalin for the forced collectivization of agriculture and the famine Stalin induced in connection with it. He did not criticize Stalin for creating a grossly inefficient top down planned economy that did not provide people with many basic commodities. It seems that Khrushchev’s  purpose in this speech was less to free the country from the horrors of Stalinism than it was to consolidate his own hold on power.

The name Stalin disappeared from Soviet life (except in Georgia), but Stalinism had effects on Soviet people long after Stalin’s death. When I was living in a western students section of the dormitory of Moscow State University in 1975 and 1976, every Soviet student who had any contact with us westerners knew that there was a KGB plant named Boris in that part of the dorm. Boris wasn’t there so much to keep an eye on us. I never met him, just heard about him. He was there to report on any Soviets who fraternized with us. Stalinist censorship was in full effect. A journalism student I got to know told me that his studies were hard because he was allowed to write only about things that were good but everything he saw was bad. A second journalism student I got to know stopped seeing us apparently under pressure from the Party. The first student I just mentioned explained her absence by saying only “she is not the person I am.” He didn’t have to say more. He was free to associate with Americans because he had protection from someone sufficiently high up in the Party. She didn’t have that protection. Soviet people envied our ability to live and study in their country when they would never be able to do that in ours.[8] The great city of Moscow was drab and depressed. One night as I was returning to the dorm later than usual a Russian woman on the subway who could tell that I was an American or at least a westerners said to me in Russian “You don’t like it here and want to go home.” I’m sure her comment reflected her awareness that life was harder in Russia than it was for us in the west, which indeed it was. Many, probably most, of the people knew that things in their country were not as they should be. They were, I think rightly, proud of their country’s accomplishments—defeating Hitler and being first in space to name two of them. Yet they knew their lives could and should be easier and freer than they were.

The main reason they were not easier and freer was that the country wasn’t sufficiently over Stalinism. The oppression of individual rights remained. The inefficient economy oriented toward the military and heavy industry rather than toward consumer goods remained. The regime wasn’t nearly as brutal as it had been under Stalin. There were prisons of course, and maybe even still some prison labor camps, but the agency the name of which gave us the word Gulag ceased operations in 1960. People were less terrified of the knock on the door in the middle of the night than they had been in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet the vestiges of Stalinism, the denial of civil rights and the stagnant economy, had rendered the country inert. Later the Russians would call those years under Leonid Brezhnev the “era of stagnation.” In the times that I was there the USSR gave the impression of a huge, inert mass just sitting there that would be there for a very long time. We don’t foresee Gorbachev. We were shocked when the USSR dissolved on December 25, 1991.[9]

But dissolve it did. Each of the fifteen former Soviet republics became an independent nation. Each of them was faced with finding a new way of being. Russia reorganized itself as the Russian Federation. It had, and has, a nominally democratic form of government. The top position is that of the president with a prime minister working under the direction of the president (at least in theory). The KGB morphed into the FSB, the Federal Security Service. Most of the Soviet military became the Russian military. The Lenin Library, where I did most of my work in Moscow, became the Library of the Russian Federation. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union continued to exist as the Russian communist party, but it lost all of its power and most of its influence. Most industrial installations and the natural resources that had belonged to the state were privatized, usually making a very few people, later known as the oligarchs, very rich with the state getting little or nothing out of the deal.

Most importantly, upon the dissolution of the USSR Russian citizens got more personal freedom than any Russians before them ever had. They could vote in elections, and they didn’t have to vote for the government’s candidate. They had more freedom of speech, the press, and assembly than any Russians had ever had before. The Russian Orthodox Church regained a position of visibility and power similar to the one it had under the tsars, not always with constructive results. I have often hoped that those two journalism students I mentioned above finally got to do some travel in the west. Since the collapse of the USSR there have been huge public demonstrations against the government, including some in recent days, unlike anything that would have been tolerated under the Communists. All of these things, except perhaps the way the Orthodox Church can get the government to make its regressive social teachings into law, are very good things indeed.

And yet. Centuries of Russian history void of individual freedom don’t disappear overnight. They don’t disappear even over the course of several decades. Echoes of the old Russian ways of state control remain. The government has taken over every or nearly every television channel. The Soviet Union had a court system that worked reasonably well most of the time, but the Communist Party, usually through the KGB, could determine the outcome of any case in which it had an interest. It appears that the same may be true today. It seems that Vladimir Putin has directed the police to harass Alexei Navalny, his most vocal and visible opponent. (Not to mention the fact that Putin has apparently had him poisoned.) Putin wins elections by suspicious margins, nowhere near as large as the margins the Communists used to get. Not 98%, but still large enough to suggest possible election tampering. So overall things in Russia are hardly perfect, but they are substantially better in terms of freedom and human rights than they have ever been.

So do vestiges of Stalinism remain as Putin told Stone people say they do? Only in a narrow sense. Stalinism, as horrific as it was, was only a brief flash in the pan in the much longer course of Russian history. Stalin has been dead for 68 years. There are only a small number of Russians alive today who remember him. The Communist system he and others created, problematic as it was, was also only a flash in the pan. It existed only from November, 1917, to December, 1991, a span of only just over 74 years, shorter than many human lifetimes.[10] Communism and its Stalinist version were part of Russian history, but the arc of that history covers over a millennium. That much larger arc explains today’s Russia better than does a narrow focus on Stalinism  or even on the larger phenomenon  of Communism.

Respect for human and civil rights was never part of that history. Never in that history was there any significant non-governmental organization that stood in opposition to the state. Yes, there were anti-government voices, including terrorist voices, between 1825 and 1917, a span of less than a century; but the Communists put an end to all open opposition in fairly short order. Before 1825 there had been various populist uprisings against the autocracy, but the forces of the state always suppressed them with relative ease. The Russian Orthodox Church, unlike the Christian churches in the west, always functioned as a bulwark of the state not as an opponent to it. The rationalism of the European Enlightenment, which produced among other things the political philosophy of John Locke and the US Constitution, had little or no effect on the course of Russian history. Throughout its history Russia has experienced wave after wave of foreign invasion. The Tatars, Poles, Lithuanians, Swedes, Turks, French and more recently and disastrously the Germans have invaded from the north, the west, and the south. One consequence of that history has been the creation of a political culture that values security over freedom. Russia is and for centuries has been so vast that only strong centralized authority could respond in any effective way against Russia’s enemies, which seem to the Russians, for good reason, to surround them.

None of that history incubates freedom. Rather, it drives in the direction of a strong centralized state. It has produced a political culture in which people prefer a strong state that can provide order and security to one that respects human rights. Most recently that culture has produced Vladimir Putin and his regime. Putin directs a government with little or no tolerance for meaningful opposition. He advocates for a strong national defense against NATO, which seems to him to be a threat to Russia and that now occupies most of Russia’s western border from Estonia to Turkey, only Moldova to Russia’s west and Finland to the northwest excluded. The Communists made Russia a world power, something that actually did make Russia more secure from attack. Russia lost that status when the USSR dissolved. Putin wants to regain it, something most Russians favor as both a matter of national prestige and of national security. We needn’t look only to Stalin to explain today’s Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin. The broad scope of Russian history gives us today’s Russia, not just its brief if recent and horrific experience with Stalinism.

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[1] Oliver Stone, The Putin Interviews, Oliver Stone Interview Vladimir Putin (New York, Hot Books, 2017).

[2] Peter’s summer palace was massively damaged in the Second World War. By the time I was first there in 1968 it had been restored to its former glory. Pictures were displayed of how badly it had been damaged during the war. Rebuilding it as the Soviets had must have been quite an undertaking. But that palace, known in Russian as “Petrodvorets,” is a treasure of Russian culture and a tourist draw that brought the Soviets much needed hard western currency.

[3] Until after the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 Russia used the Julian calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar used in the west. In the 20^th century Russian dates were therefore several days behind western dates. In my graduate seminar in imperial Russian history my major professor asked us why the tsars didn’t adopt the Gregorian calendar. I said something like “I suppose because they thought it was some kind of Papist plot,” the Gregorian calendar having been introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. My professor said something like “exactly right.”

[4] “Enemy of the people” is what the Stalinists called the people they arrested and executed, almost always grossly unjustly. That fact makes Donald Trump calling the free press “enemies of the people” all the more chilling.

[5] A great many people have asked how so many ordinary Germans could have come to support Hitler and carry out his atrocities. It is a legitimate question. I have never heard anyone ask how so many ordinary Soviets could have come to support Stalin and carry out Stalin’s atrocities, but that is every bit as legitimate a question.

[6] The Soviets switched the country to the Gregorian calendar not long after they came to power.

[7] It was replaced by a cult of Lenin. Lenin’s picture was everywhere the two times I was in the USSR. In some of the Moscow subway stations there were little shrines to Lenin that were modeled on the icon corners many Orthodox Russians maintained in their homes. I once saw a banner that read “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.” Clearly the Communist Party was ripping off Christian sentiments about Jesus and applying them to Lenin.

[8] There were Soviet students in the US at the time. The treaty between the US and the USSR under which we were able to go to and study in the Soviet Union worked both ways. Yet from the Soviet side only highly trusted people were allowed to come to the US. Most if not all of them had to have relatives left in the USSR to assure that the people studying abroad would come back.

[9] December 25 isn’t Christmas day in Russia, not even for Russian Christians. The Russian Orthodox Church has never adopted the Gregorian calendar. Under its Julian calendar Christmas is on December 25, but it’s in our January under the Gregorian calendar.

[10] It strikes me as very strange that I have now lived longer than Communist Russia existed.