Francis Sufford's USSR

I've been buy packing up my Soviet books again, preparing to take them to their new home.  As I put them away I feel deeply nostalgic.  The books have travelled quite a lot.  These past two years have been difficult ones for them, and for me.  In about twenty-four months my son and I established a new home, and set out to create a new family, a family of two, with surrounding circles of love and support,  but a history of loss and sorrow.  Of course, my son now has two wonderful, and deeply interconnected, families.  What have these two years been like?  My quick-witted, strong-willed son and I have created new rituals, eating patterns, and patterns of work and fun.  We've even thrived.  What's strange is to realize this:  in two years my son and I left a family of three, landed in a family of two (actually, he found himself in two different families of two), and now my son and I are launching into a brand new family of four.  It's amazing how much life can change for a boy of seven.  I take comfort in knowing that my son's journey involves love and growth and family and adventure--all the best parts of living.

But enough about us... We all deal with change, and in many ways change and development are the preconditions of nostalgia.  In the Soviet Union, every man woman and child experienced change on an almost unprecedented level.  The average citizen dealt directly or indirectly with some terrifying combination of war, famine, political terror, and economic revolution.  Francis Stufford's Red Plenty, a book I've discussed previously, captures the essence of this radical change.  Even after the brutal Stalin left the stage of history, the Soviet Union innovated on an unimaginable scale.  According to Stufford, the Party had given its leaders the right to determine almost every aspect of its citizens' lives.  Like Plato's Philosopher Kings, Russia's leaders felt obliged to make decisions about the people's spiritual, cultural, political, military, and economic life.  They believed that Marx had taught them a special theory of social change, and that leaving history to the uninitiated was a ridiculous and even immoral proposition.  History had refuted the quaint nothing that individuals and bourgeois freedom would get a people where it wanted--indeed needed--to go.

To be create a happy civilization, Philosopher Kings needed to ensure that ordinary people weren't allowed to make mistakes, be inefficient, or exercise some kind of misguided and chaotic will to power.  The result was that a very tiny group of people (but primarily Khrushchev,  and later Brezhnev) road roughshod over any pretence of human rights or autonomy.  For a while, the system seemed to work.  Economic centralism produced growth.  Eventually, the limits of Gosplan, and its inherent absurdities, were reached.  The economy began to stall, even grinding to a virtual halt at the end of Khrushchev's rule.  People had little incentive to work.  Notwithstanding the massive planning bureaucracy, the various parts of the economy never seemed to fit together.   Lines and shortages proliferated.  Innovation was rare.  Agriculture fell apart.  The end might have come sooner, but according to Stufford, the USSR's massive oil reserves and new petroleum discoveries during an oil boom hid the underlying sickness of the socialist economic regime.
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The Language of the Revolution

Andrei Sinyavsky's brilliant treatise on Soviet culture, Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History, reminds us that revolutions are linguistic phenomena as much as they are political ones. It's not surprising then that the Bolshevik victory in 1917 led to linguistic changes in the Russian language that rival those of Peter the Great's momentous reign in the early eighteenth century. What were those changes? As a folklorist, Sinyavsky is well-placed to analyze and categorize these changes. He says that the Revolution unleashed a plethora of new words, expressions, metaphors, phrases, slogans, and literary constructions.

The linguistic revolution had both positive and negative implications. On the one hand, it led to new and sometimes startlingly original literature, as exemplified by the Blok's poetry and Zoshchenko's prose. The vernacular, as connoisseurs of Hip-Hop and Rap music know, is alive, endlessly inventive, and refreshingly spontaneous.

But as the language of the street entered into the central discourse of the Russian political and cultural elite, it had a coarsening effect on public life--"[c]rude words corresponding to the language of the street; sometimes very apt and exact, sometimes word monsters." Moreover, the violence and absurdity of the new language were one of the worst aspects of Bolshevik rule, responsible in part for many of its tangible and therefore sanguinary crimes. As Sinyavasky reminds us, the very term, Soviet Union, makes little sense, or worse, is an Orwellian construction signifying the very impotence of the workers' councils, or soviets, that acted as rubber stamps for the Politburo or Party Leader's decisions and played no part in the formulation of Soviet policy at any point in Soviet history.

As a revolutionary state, the U.S.S.R. came up with neologisms for everything. Old terms associated with the bourgeoisie, church, former military order, or tsardom in general, were no longer acceptable. Ministers became people's commissars and almost everything was given the prefix, Soviet, to differentiate the new from the old. Indeed, the term, "man," was now seen to be inadequate, or redolent of everything that was outdated or wrong in the world. In contrast, the phrase "Soviet man" connoted everything that human beings were striving to become through enlightenment, education, industrialization, and socialism. And what of the simple, hoary term, Russia? It too was seen to be inadequate and was of course replaced with the infinitely more complex term, Russian Federated Socialist Republic or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Over time, the language of the Soviet state became almost nonsensical, filled as it was with strange-sounding acronyms, neologisms, and novel new Bolshevik names for ancient Russian cities. Even ordinary Russians were likely to receive new names. In Sinyavasky's example, the Revolution almost put an end to common Russian names such as "Ivan," which seemed too atavistic to be employed by good, future-oriented Bolshevik parents. Better to name one's child after the heroes of socialism such as Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Engels, or even a symbol of socialist accomplishment such as electrification or the tractor.

Other linguistic trends included the new passion for terms associated with modernity, including mechanization, modernization, industrialization, "chemicalization," and electrification, and the creation of myriad scientific-sounding terms for non-scientific phenomena, such as idealism, materialism, Trotskyism, "deviationism," and so on. Sinyavsky sees the strange expression, "I-don't-give-a-damn-ism" was emblematic of Soviet discourse. The term, like so many others, absurd and illustrates his argument that Soviet citizens began to speak in "word signals" rather than words, since no one, "not even themselves," can explain their meaning.

As Soviet rule wore on, Soviet language ossified, its bureaucratic underpinnings becoming ever more apparent. Khrushchev sees to exemplify its increasingly boorish essence. Although both clever and populist, Khrushchev's verbiage was often violent, crude, and semi-literate. Khrushchev also mixed peasant constructions with an impoverished Marxist, sloganeering, brand of agitprop and officialese.

In the end of course Soviet language became so divorced from reality that it practically signified its opposite. In other words, one could often read state newspapers or listen to public broadcasts and determine that the reverse of whatever was said was in fact true. It seems that Soviet language and Soviet reality had, at long last, veered too far apart to be sustainable.

The Physics of Shostakovich

Two weeks ago I decided that my commitment to Russian culture had to extend to Russian composers whose work was being performed at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra--C.S.O. for short. If I didn’t go to see the upcoming performance of Rachmaninoff and Shostakovitch, who would? (I didn’t realize that real Russians had already purchased tickets directly in front of us). No matter than I knew nothing at all about orchestral music, had little appreciation for what is commonly if mistakenly called “classical” music, and dropped out of piano after a single year, my fingers never reaching beyond ten, or perhaps twelve, ivory keys, before my teacher, who I still recall (30 years later) received a paltry five dollars an hour, suffered a nervous breakdown—a term that mean very little to me at the time but, sadly, means more and more to me as I move ever deeper into middle age—and left off teaching altogether.



No matter, I bought the tickets and even attended a pre-performance lecture by a noted musicologist. The historical draw for me, is that Shostakovich had composed this work in memory of Russia’s first modern revolution, that of 1905. According to the program, 1905 was the unifying revolution, the one almost all shades of Russian educated public opinion accepted, whether liberal, socialist, or merely constitutional. The musicologist told us that Shostakovich was Stalin’s composer, as our co-author, Nick, has previously reminded us by posting on a book that explores this complicated relationship in some depth.



In fact, Stalin was a great lover of music and also of Shostakovich for the most part. Shostakovich the composer possessed many of the hallmarks of Socialist Realism, and this generally but not always pleased Stalin. These elements of Socialist Realism, and Stalin’s patronage in general, have had an ambiguous impact on the composer’s legacy in Russia and elsewhere. After Stalin’s death, liberal Russians distained Stalin’s aesthetic judgments, and in any even rightly perceived that Shostakovich had missed out on a few of the most important elements of musical modernism.



Even so, the lecturer told us that “1905” was an excellent piece of music, and one that effectively incorporated many of the Russian songs of rebellion and revolution that were the patrimony of most Russians at the time. He also speculated that the “1905” might have been an oblique critique of Khrushchev’s decision in 1956 to brutally crush a popular revolt against Soviet hegemony in Hungary. The evening also included Rachmaninoff, and the central role of virtuoso piano parts seemed to make this easier to love than Shostakovich.

Yet one couldn’t listen to the Romantic stuff without picturing Liberace in a white, diamond studded outfit on stage. And thus, as I imagine my more musically literature readers can stand more of my uneducated ramblings about music, I shall quit this post. And the reader need not fear that I will decided to analyze the accomplishments of Soviet physicists anytime soon, though I reserve the right to do so.

The Aged

I work at an institution that fetishizes old people. Hardly a month passes without some octogenarian showing up to share memories of the old days and set straight the youth of today. The youth in question are implored to treasure these apostles of "living history" and offer obeisance to their mastery of time. Meanwhile all I see is some guy who used to own a movie theater and once shared an elevator with Duke Ellington and JFK. When asked about the old days they issue a rambling series of pointless anecdotes. At which the youth--the handful in attendence--nod vigorously. But if we had some sharp Ph.D. come talk about the socio-cultural history of the 40s and 50s nobody would come at all. Memory always trumps history.



We seem to have a kind of grandfather complex. People without grandparents think they can erase loss by collecting wisdom from the elderly. This cuts against what we usually think of as the American idolization of the young and new. It also suggests that we have more in common with the Russians, who are among the great worshippers of the aged, than we think. How else to explain the Soviet gerontocracy, ably described in recent posts by Fur Coat by way of Volkogonov, of the 60s, 70s, and 80s? Or Khrushchev's initial contempt for the youthful Kennedy, which provoked the Cuban Missile Crisis? Or those tremendous beards that made even vigorous guys like Tolstoy look prematurely ancient? I suppose it is better to fetishize age than youth, but at some point you have to accept that your own perspective is more real than either what's past or coming.

Volkogonov on Khrushchev

In Stalin’s old age, he told his cronies that they were “Pygmies” who would be eaten alive after he was gone. He’s wasn’t too far wrong, but Khrushchev was at least interesting. He wasn’t an intellectual giant, to be sure, but he was folksy, quick-witted, comical, energetic, flamboyant, and mercurial. Deeply implicated in the horrendous crimes of Stalinism—but what Communist bureaucrat who survived the purges wasn’t?—Khrushchev outplayed and outlasted other Party insiders, especially the notorious Beria, and eventually emerged as the third Communist Leader.



Khrushchev probably owed his survival under Stalin to his working class origins and unassuming, comic persona; he probably owed his rise to power in the wake of Stalinism to his craftiness and reputation as a man who was unlikely to kill off too many rivals. In the event, Khrushchev had Beria killed (as the Thermidoreans had Robespierre killed) but soon emerged as a reformer who, somewhat courageously, overturned much of Stalin’s legacy. Self-serving or not, there is not a little sincerity in Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin and Stalinism.



Volkogonov’s assessment of Khrushchev is of course mixed. As Taubman’s biography also makes clear, there is much to both hate and admire in this complex man. In the “hate” column, Volkogonov stresses Khrushchev’s participation in collectivization, slave labor, and deportation during the 1930s and 1940s. He shows that Khrushchev was an unevenly educated, boorish, anti-Semitic ideologue, who accepted—despite his critique of the “cult of personality”—his own right to make decisions in every arena of Soviet endeavor, including politics, economics, agriculture, technology, defense, and even art.




The First Secretary was an energetic reformer, but his reforms, especially in the area of agriculture, were poorly thought out and frequently disastrous. Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign was a truly earth-shattering event in the life of the Soviet State; even so, Volkogonov asserts that Khrushchev never really upset any of the principles of the Leninist regime. The security apparatus, the expensive military machine, the Gulag, the Communist ideology—everything was kept in working order.

The Communist hierarchy eventually brought Khrushchev down. They blamed him for his erratic behavior, which was perhaps most embarrassing in the arena of foreign policy. Volkogonov supports the criticism and blames Khrushchev almost exclusively for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as for the rupture with China. Even the most critical communications from Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis appear a bit disjointed and rambling, if not deluded. For instance, Khrushchev denied that nuclear weapons in Cuba could be considered as offensive weapons at all.



In his way, Khrushchev was interested in peace, and certainly he promoted detente, but he was a bully too, and threatened Poland with invasion, attacked Hungary, banged his shoe in the UN, and constantly provoked the West in unproductive ways. Khrushchev believed what he said, that socialism would “bury” capitalism, that socialism was inherently peaceful, et cetera.



Khrushchev’s final years gave his life a final dignity. Ousted from power and ostracized, Khrushchev braved Party pressure and wrote or rather dictated his memoirs (published in the West by his son) which Volkogonov assures us are one of the best descriptions of this epoch in world affairs. In the end, it’s a strange comment on world history that this strange “Pygmy” steered the ship of state of one of two superpowers in the age of the space race, detente, the U2 incident, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Hungary, the Suez Canal Crisis, the Sino-Russian split, the Tito reconciliation, the Berlin Blockade, etc.

Volkogonov on Brezhnev

Dimitry Volkogonov comes into his own in the era of Brezhnev, in part because he was already a reasonably important Party apparatchik at the time. In fact, Volkogonov had access to Brezhnev's personel file at the time, and even participated in the early phases of the disastrous and immoral intervention in Afghanistan. Who was Brezhnev? Before the creeping senility and physical infirmity overtook him and turned him into a running punchline of untold political jokes, Brezhnev was an affable man, not well-read or worldly, but good-looking, charming, personally generous, apparently loyal, and well-liked by colleagues and supervisors.

Gradually Brezhnev worked his way up through the ranks of Stalin’s regional and then national political regime. Khrushchev (with Stalin's personal knowledge) tapped Brezhnev for multiple advancements, but was eventually undone by his own protegee. Volkogonov says that Brezhnev never evinced any particular courage other than leading the coup to overthrow Khrushchev, and even mentions that fact that one eyewitness reports that Brezhnev collapsed in fear when he believed that Khrushchev was about to act against him. But Brezhnev was the right man for the job of overthrowing Khrushchev, in that his own personal moderation and penchant for stability helped to galvanize party officials who were disgusted by Khrushchev’s theatrical antics, unending reforms, and enthusiasm for change of any sort.



Where Khrushchev never sat still even in his retirement, and never met an idea he didn’t like; Volkogonov says that Brezhnev craved consensus and the maintenance of the status quo, and never really came up with an original or profound idea. (And obviously, in his later years, Brezhnev could barely speak coherently, and was often physically guided, script in hand, from one appointment to the next, as--to paraphrase Volgonov--a sort of experiment to see how long a dying man could be made to maintain even the pretence of working in an official post.)



The author combed Brezhnev’s voluminous personal records and diaries, and rarely if ever found evidence of creativity, abstract thought, or theoretical sophistication. Brezhnev's diaries reveal nothing so much as the record of his hunting accomplishment, though in his advanced age he was sometimes hurt by the recoil of the rifles he could no longer control. (Near the end, Brezhnev merely supervised the hunting, doing no actual shooting.)



The Brezhnev era, as a whole, was a conservative and stable one, although certain intellectual and cultural trends that had emerged under Khrushchev showed continued vitality beneath the surface of official Soviet life. And Brezhnev's 18 year reign witnessed the "beginning of the end" or at least the "end of the beginning" of Russian communism. Under Brezhnev, who refused or could not reconstitute terror to move the economy forward, the Soviet economy stagnated, awash in corruption, cronyism, regulation, extreme centralization, and bureaucracy. The basic Soviet model of political economy was obviously flawed: the Soviets could not compete with America and the West, and maintaining military parity was helping to bankrupt the system. Indeed, probably only massive amounts of petroleum kept the state adrift. But the Brezhnev regime knew enough to understand that Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe depended on military coercion, so the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the whole Brezhnev doctrine made sense in the context of certain inherent Russian weakneses. Without the invasion, the Soviet system might well have collapsed much sooner than it did.

A Soviet Conception of Time

What’s so interesting about the Soviet Union? The answer is that the regime embodied a unique conception of time. According to Peter Fritzsche at the University of Illinois at Urbana (who has synthesized the work of various social theorists including Terdiman and Kosselleck and Kern), only the German fascists shared the Soviet conception of temporality. For both states, the future was wide open, changeable, and open-ended.

If one asked a typical Russian governmental official from the 19th century what the future would look like, he would probably have answered—with more or less optimism—that one could expect a great deal of progress. There would be more railroads, higher levels of literacy, more agricultural produce, more independent farmers, more territory, and more spectacular cultural achievements. There would be more of the present, in other words, but nothing totally unexpected. (Conservative officials might even have expected less of the same). The Soviets thought about the future differently. They expected the unexpected. They believed they could change everything, and do this almost overnight.

The concept of the five-year plan, designed to skip long phases of ordinary economic development, is typical of the Soviet expectations. The Bolsheviks, as a party, began their career by arguing—contrary to Marx’s own opinions on the subject—that revolutionary action was appropriate even in backward Russia. They soon came to the conclusion that Russia could ignore the ordinary laws of social development and leapfrog past the capitalist economies that had failed to be devoured by Leftist revolt. As late as the 1960s, Khrushchev’s Russia was convinced it could “bury” the West by willpower alone.

In the Soviet worldview, facts and statistics were nearly irrelevant. Soviet Russia could coerce its citizenry as well as the ordinary temporal process to achieve the impossible, such as building an industrial economy where there had hitherto been only an agrarian one, or creating a nuclear program when the country lagged far behind America in terms of its overall scientific establishment.

To some extent, the Soviet approach to the future was part of the zeitgeist. Even F.D.R.’s American believed it could overcome ordinary economic processes. As we all know, F.D.R. was a relentless experimenter who tried to master a Depression through an endless variety of brand new government programs and initiatives. Following World War II, European welfare states took this approach even further, creating super states that attempted to suppress and overcome what had once been seen as iron laws of cyclical economic catastrophe.

The Soviets took this much further. They believed they were creating a whole new human species. Of course, the Nazis also believed this, and took their philosophy to genocidal extremes. But the Soviets weren’t so different. They thought they too were creating a new species of humans, Homo Sovieticus. As a result of education and social engineering, people would cease to be what they had once been: private, selfish, competitive, warlike, uncreative, uneducated, exploitative, bigoted, irrational, and—above all—bourgeois.

End of the World

Whether this book is right or wrong about the fact that Russian soldiers might well have accidentally set off a nuclear war, we know that the Khrushchev brought the world to the brink of nuclear extermination too. So perhaps we do live in a much, much safer world than we did at any point in the Cold War. It's odd that it doesn't feel that way.

We feel as if we live in the scariest world imaginable, with Islamic terrorists and killer flu germs, and global warming, etc. I remember somebody recently noticed a commercial on t.v. that said what has now become a commonplace: "we live in the most stressful age in history." Her response was appropriate: Really? Really??!! This is the most stressful age ever? More stressful than an age that, for example, saw the invasion of the Huns, the bubonic plague, the collapse of the Roman Empire, etc.

It seems obvious that every generation, or at least many generations, have felt that they lived on the brink, almost at the end of the world. In fact, Christian theology seems almost dependent on the notion that the end of the world is at hand, and its interesting to note that the many Christians pointed to the collapse of the Soviet Union as a clear signal that the apocalypse was right around the corner.

The real tragedy of the post-Cold War world is that it seems to have revealed the fact that, psychologically, humans seem to have a basic need to feel as if the world were fragile, whether or not this is indeed the case. For 9-11, that unprecedented American disaster, was indeed nothing in comparison with what the Soviets threatened to do to American for decades at a time.

Yet we're actually in two wars now, each lasting for many years, and we're even apparently at war on the home front, even to the extent that civil liberties are being scaled back (and some of the restrictions made semi-permanent apparently by the Obama administration--see NYRB article on the subject).