Some
New Reflections on Russia
January
8, 2022
I have a PhD in
Russian history. My major professor, Donald Treadgold, was one of the top names
in the field and editor of the Slavic Review, the leading journal of Russian
and East European studies at the time I studied with him. In spent the 1975-76 academic
year in Russia, then of course the dominant part of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. I was there under IREX and Fulbright fellowships to do
historical research in libraries and archives mostly in Moscow but also for a
time in what was then Leningrad. I have self-published a book based on my PhD
dissertation with the title Reflections on a Russian Statesman. I readily concede that I have not been
professionally active in the field of Russian studies for a long time although
I retain my interest in Russia and have followed events there perhaps more
closely than have most Americans. On the basis of that background I offer these reflections on Russia today.
Events in Russia
since I was there so many years ago have taken a course we Americans who were
there when I was never thought we’d live to see. The Soviet Union dissolved on
December 25, 1991, (which is not Christmas in the calendar of the Russian
Orthodox Church). Each of the fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics that made up
the USSR became independent nations. Russia ended up with all of the USSR’s
nuclear weapons after Ukraine and Kazakhstan gave up the Soviet weapons in
their territories. Russia lost control of regions that had been part of the
Russian Empire before the Communist takeover of the country. The world of the
Soviet Union essentially no longer existed, and Russia’s sphere of influence
was substantially smaller than it had been in Soviet times.
To many of us who
had known the USSR through study and travel, the collapse of that enormous
political entity came as quite a shock. In the mid-1970s at least the Soviet
Union seemed to us Americans to be a huge, inert mass that wasn’t going
anywhere but which was stable and solidly entrenched on the world stage. We
thought that if the USSR was ever going to change, it wouldn’t do it for a long
time yet. The whole structure seemed to be so massive and so static that we
couldn’t understand how it would ever change.
There were some disturbing
things about the USSR that we knew in addition to the political oppression and
the repression of freedom of speech that were everyday realities for the Soviet
people. The country’s economy was a mess. The centralized economic planning done
in Moscow for the whole nation had rendered Soviet industry obsolete and unable
to respond to changing circumstances the way western economies can. People at
the US embassy in Moscow understood that there were actually three economies
operative in the USSR. There was the official planned consumer economy run
through successive five year plans.[1]
There was the black market economy, which is where most Soviet people operated.
Then there was the military economy. It had first call on the nation’s
resources both material and human. The military got what it wanted. It isn’t
hard to understand why. Russia has a centuries long history of foreign
invasions. The Nazi invasion of 1941, which had cost something like twenty
million Soviet lives, was still a living memory for people in the 1970s. The
Soviet leadership also believed it had to keep up with the United States in an
insane arms race between the two countries. The result of the military
dominance of the economy was a pathetically poor consumer economy. Soviet
people went into the illegal black market because things they needed that were
supposed to be available in the consumer economy rarely were. Back in 1975 we
knew all of that about the USSR. We never thought, however, that the difficult
economy would lead to country’s collapse.
There was another
issue in the USSR that many experts on the Soviet Union thought might, in the
very long run, lead to the country’s demise. It was the nationalities issue. Geographically,
the Soviet Union was the old Russian Empire absent Finland, part of Poland, and
until 1939 the Baltic republics of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. As had been
true of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union had within its borders so many
different nationalities that I’m sure I ever even heard about only a small
percentage of them. The so-called republics were organized along the lines of
the dominant nationality in their part
of the world. They had this national identity in their names—the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic, the Kazakhstan Soviet Socialist Republic, and the
others. The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (Federated because it
had so many different ethnic groups within it) was by far the biggest of the
fifteen republics and dominated all the others. Not every ethnic group had its
own republic. Not by a long shot. That there were many non-Russian people in
the Russian republic would lead to immense problems for the Russians after the
collapse of the Soviet Union.
We knew that
there were strong nationalist sentiments among many of the country’s
nationalities. We knew that the Russians were concerned about certain aspects
of their domination of other peoples. The Russians knew, for example, that the
birth rates in the five central Asian republics were substantially higher than
was the Russian birth rate. Some Russians worried that they might lose their
status as the country’s largest ethnic group. We knew all that back in the
1970s. We thought the nationality issue might be the one someday to lead to the
breakup of the USSR. Yet the USSR seemed so inert, and the Communist Party’s
control of the people through the KGB and otherwise seemed so solid that we
couldn’t imagine ever actually witnessing the collapse of the USSR.
Then the totally
unexpected happened. Mikhail Gorbachev, pronounced Gorbachov with the stress on
the “ov,” became leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and head of
the Soviet government as well. In the 1980s he tried to turn the USSR into more
of a social democratic state than it had even been. He set out to restructure
the nation’s economy at least a little bit in the direction of a market driven
economy. We learned that those efforts collectively were called “perestroika,”
a Russian word that means restructuring. Gorbachev also eased the Party’s control
of the intellectual and artistic life of the nation. He introduced a freedom of
speech in a way no Soviet leader had ever done before. We learned that these
efforts collectively were called “glasnost’,” and essentially untranslatable
Russian word built from the word “golos,” the Russian word for voice. It means
something like “voicedness.” The Russian people were gaining a voice in the
life of their country that they had never had before.
Gorbachev didn’t
know what he had unleashed. He thought his policies would lead to a freer, more
open Soviet Union. Instead they led in quite short order to the collapse and dissolution
of the whole Soviet order. What had been the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist
Republic became the independent nation called The Russian Federation. A period
of near anarchy ensued. Boris Yeltsin, once the mayor of Moscow, became the
president of the new Russian state, but he never succeeded in establishing a
new economic and political order in the country. He named the head of the KGB
as his successor, giving him the post of prime minister. That’s how, in 1999,
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin became president of the Russian Federation by operation
of law when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned.
Putin is a
thoroughly Russian man who came of age during the Cold War between the USSR and
the USA. He was not a prominent figure in Russian politics when Yeltsin anointed
him his successor, and that is probably why Yeltsin chose him. He has
transformed Russia from a fledgling democracy into an authoritarian state with
a patina of democracy. Although a communist party still exists in Russia,
Russia is no longer communist and hasn’t been for some time now. Putin has,
however, created a nation that has many of the characteristics of the late, unlamented
USSR. Let me explain.
Russia has a
constitution that appears to create a democratic republic. Elections are
regularly held as required by law, but their outcome is rarely if ever in
doubt. Using violence, trumped up criminal charges, and many other means Putin
has firmly established his personal power. There is some freedom of expression
in Russia, certainly more than there ever was under the communists. Yet media
outlets that criticize Putin too much are likely to find that the government
has shut them down and perhaps arrested their leading figures all on false
charges of criminal activity. Putin allows freedom of expression only up to the
point where it could conceivable threaten his power. He has even ordered the
killing of opposition figures outside of Russia.
Compare these
characteristics of today’s Russia with the ways of the USSR. The USSR too had a
constitution that appeared to create a democratic republic and provide for the
protection of individual rights. In truth the USSR was a totalitarian state run
by the KPSS, the initials for the Russian words that translate as The Communist
Party of the Soviet Union. It had a patina of democracy even thinner than the
one Putin’s Russia has, but it had one. There were elections in the USSR.
Voting was mandatory, but the voter always had essentially only one choice, the
candidate chosen by the Communist Party. The Soviet Union’s elections were even
more of a sham Putin’s elections are. Their outcomes truly never were in doubt.
The USSR’s constitution may have nodded in the direction of individual
liberties, but the USSR in fact honored
such liberties not at all.
There is another
significant way in which Putin’s Russia is similar to Soviet Russia. For all
its existence (except to a lesser extent during World War II) the Soviet Union
engaged in an ideological battle with the west. The USSR presented to the world
and claimed to operate under a Marxist-Leninist ideology that directly
contradicted the systems and claimed values of the western democracies, the USA
chief among them. The Soviet Union understood freedom differently than we do in
the west. In the west freedom means primarily freedom of the mind and the
spirit. It includes freedom of speech and freedom of religion among others. The
USSR understood freedom as being freedom from physical want. The Soviets would
say, See? We’re a free nation. We provide medical care and education without
cost. Everyone has government run pensions. We sell consumer goods at prices
much lower than those in the west. They would claim that these aspects of
Soviet life made Soviet people freer than we are in the west. Never mind of
course that the quality of essentially everything in the Soviet Union fell far
below western standards and the people had no freedom of expression at all.
So what has Putin
done? He has created an authoritarian government that bears more resemblance to
the USSR than most people realize. Putin’s Russia is the USSR light without the
communists running everything and imposing their will on the country. Putin’s
Russia looks as stable and inert as the USSR did in the 1970s. Only time will
tell if it really is that stable or if it will unexpectedly dissolve the way
the Soviet Union did.
Russia is no
longer communist. The old ideological battles with the west are no more. Putin,
however, is nonetheless engaged in what he sees as an ideological struggle with
the west. Just as the Soviet Communists advocated values different from those
of the western democracies, Putin presents Russia as standing for values
different form those of the west. Today the ideological battle that Putin sees
himself and his country waging is not between Soviet communists and western
liberals. It is between the values of western liberalism like individual civil
rights and free elections usually decided as much by money as by anything else
and a Russian social conservatism grounded in the teachings of the Russian
Orthodox Church.
Whereas Soviet
Russia was aggressively atheistic, Putin has cozied up to the Russian Orthodox
Church. (I once saw a picture of an Orthodox priest blessing a Russian rocket
that was about to take off for the International Space Station, a sight you
most certainly would not have seen in the Soviet Union.) The social beliefs and
moral teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church are and always have been
extremely conservative. Putin had adopted them and used them for his own
purposes. A prime example has to do with the rights of LGBTQ+ people. Like all
conservative churches, the Russian Orthodox Church considers all same gender
sexual acts to be profound sins. So in 2013 Putin put through the country’s
legislature a law with the awkward title “for (sic) the Purpose of Protecting
Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values.”
I suspect todays conservative American Christians would be surprised to find
that they shared views like these with the Russian Orthodox Church and Vladimir
Putin, but they do. This law essentially requires LGBTQ+ people to stay in the
closet. They are not permitted to advocate for their own rights as human
beings. Putin sees the liberal social values and morals of many people in
western democracies as leading to sinful behavior and social disruption. So he
advocates the social teachings and morals of Russia’s largest religious
institution. Just as the USSR touted communism as better than western
democracy, so Putin has made Russia the champion of traditional religious
social and moral beliefs against what many of us westerners see as just being
part of a free society. The issues are different, but Putin is setting up
Russia as an ideological opponent of the west much like the USSR was.
Putin then has
turned Russia into as much of a clone of Soviet Russia as he could. That’s not
really surprising given both Russia’s lack of any liberal political tradition
and the fact that Putin considers the collapse of the USSR to be what he has
called the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century. One
wonders if he has forgotten World War II, but never mind. Appealing to Russian
rather than Soviet nationalism, he has called the collapse of the Soviet Union
the collapse of historical Russia. He works as hard as he can to restore Russia’s
standing in the world, seeking to regain the status Russia lost when the Soviet
Union collapsed.
Does Putin’s
Russia appear to be a heavy, insert mass the way the USSR did in the 1970s? I would
say yes though not quite as inert as the USSR seemed to be back then. Though
Putin has thrown in his lot with a disreputable bunch of billionaire oligarchs
who are stripping the country of much of its material wealth, there is much
free economic activity in Putin’s Russia whereas in the USSR there was none
that was legal. Dissent is tolerated as long as it doesn’t really threaten
Putin’s hold on power. Dissent was hardly tolerated in the USSR at all. The
Russian Orthodox Church has regained much of the position it had in imperial
Russia but lost under the communists. The various national Orthodox churches
have an unfortunate history of supporting the governments of nation states no
matter how oppressive those states may have been. Still, an active and visible
Russian Orthodox Church is a nation-wide institution whose aims are, in theory
at least, not those of the national government. Will Putin’s Russia
unexpectedly collapse the way the USSR did? There is no way to know, but for
now Putin’s Russia looks like it will be around for a very long time.
[1] We
saw propaganda banners saying “We will complete the five year plan in four
years!” I never understood how completing a five year plan in four years was
considered a good thing, but never mind.
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