Let the Bad Times End (4): The Soviet Union

The Road Goes Ever On

One of the longest-running debates among people who study and write about the past, from long before there were people who called themselves “professional historians”, is whether anything really changes over time, whether there is ever anything really new.

There are a few evergreen answers in the affirmative. After 19th Century evolutionary theory—but even in the majority of human religious traditions—we settled on the conclusion that there once were no people as we define them and now there are. In 2024, that seems like a big difference compared to eight million years ago or so when the hominins first appeared in Africa. In human history, there were once no human beings in some places, and now they’re everywhere, even at the edges of Antarctica.

Was the Neolithic Revolution really a one-way ‘event’ after which most human societies were committed to sedentary agriculture and utterly transformed by it into larger-scale centralized states? There are strong arguments against that position—from the Neolithic onward there was agriculture at smaller scales, agriculture in diverse polities, communities that moved in and out of sedentary agriculture and transhumant pastoralism (or foraging/hunting). But yes, agriculture and larger, more centralized human settlements seem to have been a big change at a specific moment in history.

I won’t belabor the point too excessively. There are material and technological changes in human history that are undoubtedly real and momentous in their impact. Where the argument gets harder is to identify when political systems in a particular territory change so fundamentally in a revolution or major reform that there is really very little resemblance between before and after.

Historians in recent years have been trained towards a strong nominalism—believing that most societies are characterized by their particulars rather than as comparative or universal types—and towards a nearly instinctive skepticism towards claims that contemporary conflicts and politics are in any sense “ancient” or unchanging. That latter tendency is sensible precisely because we are so often confronted by aggressive claims in contemporary political life that cite “ancient hatreds” or “national character” as an explanation or a justification that is plainly intended to avoid more recent, more particular kinds of culpability.

Maybe we overdo it now and again.

There do seem to be sociopolitical formations that have both specificity and persistence within particular regions, within particular sharings of culture, language, and historical experience. Even after sharp disjunctures—revolutions, civil wars, new configurations of belonging and identity, sudden in-migrations of new populations—in some places there are cores that “snap back” to established repertoires of power, practice and process. In such a region, it’s harder to feel confident about saying that anything ever really begins or that anything ever ends.

That feeling can be an illusion, as Russian history taken as a whole demonstrates. The historical distance between Kievan Rus’ late in the first millennium CE and Tsarist Russia on the eve of its ending in the early 20th Century is vast and full of discontinuity and change. In a narrower time span, however, it’s perhaps not so wrong to think that there is considerable continuity between 19th Century Tsarist political systems, Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet Russia and Putin’s regime in Russia after the end of the USSR.

So once again, I’m grappling in this series whether bad times ever do end. I think it’s important to imagine that they can and sometimes have. I do think the Bolshevik Revolution, one of the most heavily studied and discussed events in modern global history, was a real change—that there was political and social novelty to the Soviet state that it created. For the same reason, I think the Soviet Union really did end, and some of the specific bad times that were deeply encoded into it ended with it. Putin’s Russia is deeply oppressive, but its oppressions have different emphases, different techniques, different ideological precepts. Moreover, while you might hire the Wagner Group to kill your enemies, no other country is going to adopt Putinism as a transnationally salient ideology.

So if the Soviet Union did end, why? It’s becoming hard to remember how astonishing and momentous the years 1989-1992 really were, and how unheralded they seemed. In 1998, few of us realized that apartheid would start to crumble in 1990, that the United States would lead a multinational coalition with restraint to successfully undo Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait, that the Berlin Wall would fall in 1989 and the Soviet Union itself would end only three years later. Looking back, you can forgive some of the hubris of Fukuyama’s The End of History, since these were all developments that seemed impossible, that many of us were raised to think simply wouldn’t change in our lifetimes—none more so than the sudden and peaceful end of the Soviet Union after so much proxy struggle in the Cold War, after so many moments of near-catastrophe for the entire planet.

There was a lot of discussion then about what caused this momentous series of events. Many historians and social scientists still debate the generalities and the particulars. Broadly speaking, there are two major ways to come at the end of the Soviet Union: as the result of internal changes and pressures that are best understood by specialists in Soviet or Russian history, and as the result of pressures brought to bear on the Soviet leadership by NATO, by the Cold War, by Reagan’s leadership in particular, by globalizing capitalism.

At this point in this series of essays, I’m sure many readers can see this as a general theme. Bad times end, often suddenly, because of a combination of pressures from outside and inside, and that up until the moment where the bad times end, it’s often hard to see the impact those pressures are having. That’s part of what makes bad times bad, what makes authoritarian misrule a blight on human life. Authoritarianism in all its forms lies, it conceals, it bluffs. It lies to the world, it lies to its people, it lies to itself. It creates false fear about phantom dangers in order to avoid talking about its lethal accumulation of banal shortcomings.

Expertise about Soviet politics was always hard to come by from outside and within. Who was really in charge, what did they really talk about in their rooms where it happens, what did they really want? (That was the basis of a great joke in a Doonesbury strip after the invasion of Afghanistan, where the Soviet ambassador to the U.N. confides to his Vietnamese counterpart that what they want is to rule the world, provoking the incredulous response: “You mean it’s true???”.) But there was a brief window before Putinism set in where the scholars pouring into the suddenly open archives, and much of that activity put triumphalist claims about Western containment and Reagan’s confrontational policies more specifically into a less determining role alongside long-developing problems that had their roots in the 1970s.

The pressure to compete with the West was plainly a big part of the ultimate failure of the Soviet system: its relative inflexibility at many levels and across many dimensions of that competition eventually cascaded into serial failure. Far more importantly, however, the USSR was an empire, not a nation. Skeptical as I might be about whether empires and nations are in fact radically different types of things rather than variations along a spectrum, the fact is that the Soviets did not aim to integrate the country’s diverse peoples and cultures into a single unified national identity, which meant that once the metropole was at all visibly weakened, its peripheries were ready to peel away. In two different directions, in fact, since the Soviet Union was both an “internal” empire and an “external” one, where its Eastern European satellites suffered from some of the same administrative afflictions but also had even stronger impulses to breakaway from imperial control.

I think the wrong lessons were learned from the end of the Soviet Union by some of its peers and its successor Russian state. Putin—along with a fair number of Russians—has obviously believed from the outset of his rule that it was the loosening up of authoritarian control under Gorbachev that was the proximate cause of Soviet collapse. I think you have to see Gorbachev as symptom, not cause. Like many other kinds of “reformist authoritarians”, he was trying to save the existing order from itself—but by the time that ambition is a speakable and public objective, it’s usually and thankfully too late. (Cracking down on a surging desire for change, as the last of the ancien regime in Europe tried in 1848, only succeeds for a short moment at best.) I think on the other hand that post-Deng Chinese rulers have decided that if one of the vulnerabilities of the Soviet Union was its internal empire, it’s best to liquidate all sources of internal linguistic, culture and subnational difference with even more methodical violence and coercion than Western European states employed in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

I wouldn’t quite call the end of the Soviet Union inevitable in a grand teleological sense, but I do think it’s hard to imagine that its repressive complexity could have withstood grand geopolitical pretentions indefinitely. Putin’s Russia is in that sense a much simpler and more familiar kind of autocracy and its global ambitions are far cruder, centering on unpretentious and direct suppression of dissent, the accumulation of wealth, the maintenance of influence through the infiltrating tools of secrecy and criminality, a sort of pseudo-religious nationalist mythography, and personal vengeance against whomever crosses the Big Boss. Putin’s Russia is Tsarist absolutism injected with mafia blood.

The Soviet Union ended in part because it was still trying to pretend to be something more than that, something other than what it plainly was. It was still trying to play out the game that the Bolsheviks initiated in 1917. It wobbled on top of a convoluted, complicated and contradictory mess that was thoroughly infested with oppression and injustice at every level, the hideous offspring of Tsarism and high modernist technocracy. It ended because no house of cards can go up forever, not the least when its supervisory architects in its most towering moment are wheezy old men whose main distinction is that they were canny enough as youngsters to move up a few places during a decade of dictatorial murder. I am not sure what we can learn from its end except perhaps that tyranny is its own worst enemy. Then again, these days, democracy is not exactly looking like the most resilient of systems either.

Image credit: Leonid Brezhnev, by Anefo - http://proxy.handle.net/10648/abec18ec-d0b4-102d-bcf8-003048976d84, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73770619