Other titles in the series:

A Concise History of Australia, 3rd Edition Stuart Macintyre

A Concise History of Austria Steven Beller

A Concise History of Bolivia, 2nd Edition Herbert S. Klein

A Concise History of Brazil Boris Fausto, translated by Arthur Brakel

A Concise History of Britain, 1707–1975 W. A. Speck

A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd Edition R. J. Crampton

A Concise History of the Caribbean B. W. Higman

A Concise History of Finland David Kirby

A Concise History of France, 2nd Edition Roger Price

A Concise History of Germany, 2nd Edition Mary Fulbrook

A Concise History of Greece, 2nd Edition Richard Clogg

A Concise History of Hungary Miklós Molnár, translated by anna magyar

A Concise History of Modern India, 2nd Edition Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf

A Concise History of Italy Christopher Duggan

A Concise History of Mexico, 2nd Edition Brian R. Hamnett

A Concise History of New Zealand Philippa Mein Smith

A Concise History of Poland, 2nd Edition Jerzy Lukowski and Hubert Zawadzki

A Concise History of Portugal, 2nd Edition David Birmingham

A Concise History of South Africa, 2nd Edition Robert Ross

A Concise History of Spain William D. Phillips Jr. and Carla Rahn Phillips

A Concise History of Sweden Neil Kent

A Concise History of Wales Geraint H. Jenkins

Russia is not an idea. It is a specific country, with a particular place on the globe, a majority language and culture, and a very concrete history. Yet for most of the twentieth century, outside of its boundaries, it has been an idea, not a place – an idea about socialism. Tremendous debates have raged over its politics, economics, and culture, most of them conducted by and for people who did not know the language, never went there, and knew very little about the country and its history. Even the better informed wrote and spoke starting from presuppositions about the desirability or undesirability of a socialist order. Some were crude propagandists, but even the more conscientious, those who learned the language and tried to understand the country, began by posing questions that came from their assumptions about socialism. The result was a narrow agenda of debate: was a planned economy effective or not? How many political prisoners were there? How could the Soviets put a man in space? Should the system be called socialism, communism, or totalitarianism? Was “communism” a result of Russian history? Did the Russian intelligentsia prepare the way for communism, unintentionally or not? Did the gradual modernization of Russia make 1917 inevitable? In all these debates the history of Russia up to the moment of the revolution was just a preface.

In Russia the collapse of the Soviet Union brought to light a flood of historical publications. These publications include numerous monographs on a great variety of topics, many biographies, and a massive quantity of publications of the various records of the Soviet regime, including the deliberations of its leaders. The aim of these publications was to illuminate the areas previously closed to investigation, and naturally the first post-Soviet writings were devoted to the most controversial or mysterious issues. Books on the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939, collectivization, and famine; publications of Stalin’s private correspondence; and other issues were first on the agenda. Western historians participated in these publications, which gave a whole new understanding of the contentious issues of Soviet history. Yet the result is far from perfect. As the document publications and monographs continue to pour out in Russia and abroad, they pose more and more questions that historians used to the politicized debates of the Cold War era never thought about. Paradoxically, it seems harder rather than easier to understand the story of the Soviet era of Russian history. The present work reflects this difficulty, and the reader will find many questions left unresolved.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, paradoxically, has had as much or more effect on the writing about Russia’s history before 1917. Now the earlier history is not just a preface but a millennium of time that no longer ends in the Soviet experience, however important that may be. The flood of new publications, in this case mainly from historians in Russia, includes virtually every period and aspect of Russian history before 1917. There are now not just biographies of tsars and empresses, but also of major and minor political figures and fairly ordinary people. Local history has come into being, providing the kind of concrete knowledge of the variety of the country’s history that has been routine in other countries for a long time.

1 Russia before Russia

Russian history begins with the polity that scholars have come to call Kiev Rus, the ancestor of modern Russia. Rus was the name that the inhabitants gave to themselves and their land, and Kiev was its capital. In modern terms, it embraced all of Belarus, the northern half of the Ukraine, and the center and northwest of European Russia. The peoples of these three modern states are the Eastern Slavs, who all speak closely related languages derived from the East Slavic language of Kiev Rus. In the west its neighbors were roughly the same as the neighbors of those three states today: Hungary, Poland, the Baltic peoples, and Finland. In the north Kiev Rus stretched toward the Arctic Ocean, with Slavic farmers only beginning to move into the far north.

Beyond the Slavs to the east was Volga Bulgaria, a small Turkic Islamic state that came into being in about AD 950 where modern Tatarstan stands today. Beyond Volga Bulgaria were the Urals and Siberia, vast forests and plains inhabited by small tribes who lived by hunting and gathering food. The core of Kiev Rus was along the route that ran from northern Novgorod south to Kiev along the main rivers. There in the area of richest soil lay the capital, Kiev. Even farther to the south of Kiev began the steppe.

The lands of Kiev Rus lay in the forest zone of the great East European plain. There are no mountains or even large ranges of hills to break this plain between Poland and the Urals. The forest zone is deciduous in the south around Kiev – oak, beech, chestnut, and poplar trees, while farther north the predominant forests were and are composed of the northern coniferous trees: pine, fir, and birch. The best soil, dark and moist, was in the south, where fields opened out among the trees closer to the steppe. In the northern part of the forest zone the soil was sandy and marshes were frequent, thus agriculture was rarer and concentrated around lakes and along the great rivers. The great rivers were the arteries of life. The Dniepr, Western Dvina, Volga, Oka, and the smaller rivers around Novgorod (the Volkhov and others) provided routes to the south and east via Lake Ladoga to the Baltic Sea. Along them princes and warriors, merchants and peasant farmers could move freely, at least in the summer months when the rivers were not frozen.

In the west and east of Kiev Rus the boundaries were those of political control and ethnicity. In the south the ethnic and political boundary was at its basis an ecological boundary. South of the Kievan lands to the Black and Caspian Seas lay the great steppe – flat grasslands with few trees and the “black earth” – dry but not arid. The long grass concealed enormous numbers of animals, including antelopes, wild horses, and even panthers, while the rivers supported myriad ducks and wild geese as well as sturgeon and other fish. Centuries later, the Russian writer Gogol wrote of the steppe: “The farther along in the steppe the more beautiful it became…The plow had never touched the infinite waves of wild growth. Only the horses that hid in the grass as in a forest had stamped it down. Nothing in nature could have been better. The whole surface of the earth was like a green and gold ocean, on which millions of various flowers splashed” (Taras Bulba). This steppe was actually the western extension of the great Eurasian steppe that extended all the way to Manchuria, which covers today’s Mongolia, northern China, Xinjiang, and Kazakstan. From time immemorial it was the land of the nomads and the great nomadic empires – first the Iranian Scythians and Sarmatians of classical antiquity, who were then later replaced by the fearsome Huns and then wave after wave of Turkic peoples. These nomads did not wander aimlessly over the landscape, but instead they followed a regular annual migration over a greater or lesser area. They kept close to the valleys of the great rivers – the Danube, Dniepr, Don, and Volga – where they found winter and summer pastures for their animals. The nomads did not try to settle in the forests, but they used them as a source of booty and slaves, and when they could, they also laid tribute on the settled peoples. For centuries this had been the relationship of nomad and farmer throughout northern Asia and beyond. The steppe and its nomads were to form a crucial element in the history of Kiev Rus, and later Russia, into the eighteenth century.

Archeology tells us a great deal about the settlement and life of the early Eastern Slavs. They were certainly the predominant group along the central axis of Rus from Kiev to Novgorod by at least AD 800, and were still moving north and east, settling new lands. They had built many villages and fortifications of earth with wooden palisades, and they buried their dead with the tools and weapons necessary for life in the next world. From other sources we have some idea of their gods: Perun, the god of thunder and the sky, was apparently the chief god, but there was also Veles, the god of cattle; Stribog, the wind god; and the more shadowy fertility gods, Rod and Rozhanitsa. Around Kiev there were round spaces formed of stones that seem to have been sites of the cult, but Slavic paganism never had any written texts (or none that survived) to give us a glimpse of their actual beliefs.

Reconstructing the political history of the early Slavs is equally complicated. Legend says that the Viking Rurik came from over the sea with two brothers to rule Novgorod in AD 862. This is a classic foundation legend found in many cultures and as such was crucial to the self-consciousness of the subsequent ruling dynasty. The text, the Kievan Primary Chronicle of 1116, which recounts the legend, is vague about the establishment of Rurik’s descendants in Kiev. Supposedly the Viking Oleg went down the rivers and took the city in 882, but his relationship to Rurik was not specified. Did either of them even exist? Prince Igor, allegedly Rurik’s son, was a real person who did rule from Kiev (913–945), until a rebellious tribe killed him. The clan ancestor remained Rurik, who thus gave his name to the ruling dynasty, the Rurikovichi.

The Rurikovich dynasty was originally Scandinavian, as legend and the early names suggest: Oleg from Norse Helge and Igor from Ingvar. Our unique written source, the Primary Chronicle, called them Varangians, one of the names for Scandinavians used in Byzantium. In other places it said they were called Rus, not Varangians. Further on, the text localized Rus in the Kiev area, but most it often called the whole state and people Rus. The author was serving his rulers, identifying princes and people, and leaving the historian with a muddle virtually impossible to sort out. In any case the first Rurikovichi were undoubtedly Scandinavian and their appearance in Rus was part of the expansion of the Scandinavian peoples in the Viking age. Unfortunately the archeological evidence does not fit the legends in the Primary Chronicle very well. Viking finds are concentrated for these early centuries around the southern rim of Lake Ladoga and in the town of Old Ladoga. The chronicle stories tried to place them in Novgorod, but Novgorod did not even come into existence until about AD 950, after the dynasty of Rurik was already established in Kiev. And in Scandinavia itself there were no sagas of Viking triumphs and wars in Russia to match those recounting the conquest of Iceland and the British Isles. In the lands that were once part of Kiev Rus, there are no runestones memorializing the great warriors and their deaths, such as those that cover Scandinavia and the western islands where the Vikings roamed. All we can say for sure is that a group of warriors whose base was probably Ladoga, with its Scando-Slavic-Finnish community, came to Kiev around AD 900 and began to rule that area, quickly establishing their authority over the whole vast area of Kiev Rus.

The world of AD 950 looked very different from how we might imagine it today. Western Europe was an impoverished collection of weak petty kingdoms and local dynasties. The great Carolingian Empire was now a century in the past and the classic feudal society of medieval Europe was just coming into being. In France the great regional lords and barons owed only the most theoretical obedience to their king. The greatest power in the north for the moment was Denmark, as the Danish kings controlled much of England and the Vikings had small kingdoms in Ireland and Scotland. The Emperor still reigned in Germany, and in Italy the papacy was still under his thumb, while the regional rulers of Germany and Italy grew more and more independent. Most of the Iberian Peninsula was under Arab rule, with a few tiny Christian principalities hanging on in the north.

The great powers and centers of civilization were the Arab Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire. Only a few centuries earlier the Arabs had taken Islam to the far corners of western Eurasia, to Central Asia and Spain, and the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad was now the center of that world. These were the great centuries of medieval Arab culture – the time of the translations of Aristotle and other works of Greek learning and of the Islamic commentary and development of Greek ideas and Greek science. The Caliphate was immensely rich, and the many coin hoards found on the Rus lands testify to its trade with northern neighbors. Even more important to Kiev Rus was Byzantium. The Greeks had recovered from the immense shock of the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, and by AD 900, a revived Byzantium was master of Anatolia and the southern Balkans. Theirs was a complex civilization, a Christian society with a rich monastic culture and at the same time the heir of classical antiquity. While monks spent their days in liturgy and contemplation, their relatives and patrons were reading Homer and Thucydides, Plato and Demosthenes. Laymen wrote the empire’s history not as monkish chronicles in simplified language like those of Western Europe, but in pure Attic Greek following the models of the ancients. The Byzantine Empire was also a bureaucratic state on the late Roman model, dependent on written Roman law and paper documentation. Boys were set to learn all this material from a young age, following the sequence of subjects and texts already laid down in Roman times. For the Byzantines did not call themselves Greeks but Romans, Rhomaioi, and their country was to them still Rome.

The Byzantines were not the immediate neighbors of Kiev Rus and communication was difficult. The most intimate contact was with the Turkic nomads of the great steppe. From about AD 750, the steppe was ruled by the Khazars, a nomadic people whose center was on the lower Volga and who laid tribute on the southern Rus tribes. The Khazars were a unique people, for their rulers, their kagans, had converted from Turkic paganism to Judaism and had copies of the Hebrew Bible. Nomadic empires were short-lived, and in the middle of the tenth century the Turkic Pechenegs replaced the Khazars, only to be supplanted about a century later by another Turkic people, the Kipchaks – or Polovtsy, as the Rus called them. In the steppe the Kipchaks lived in a series of large groups, each on one of the main rivers, the most important to Rus being those on the Dniepr, Northern Donets, and Don. Their annual migration between winter and summer pastures involved great herds of horses, cattle, sheep, and even camels, with the Kipchaks following them in felt tents mounted on carts. Their religion was the ancient Turkic paganism centered on the sky and the ancestors. Farther east the Kipchaks spread to the lower Volga and the Caucasus and traded with the Byzantine cities in the Crimea. For long periods the Rus and the Kipchaks raided one another’s lands almost annually, each group seizing animals, slaves, and hostages from the other. Relations were not only hostile, for the Rus princes took wives among the daughters of the Kipchak chiefs, who in turn took an active part in the internal feuds of the Rurikovich dynasty. Some of the Kipchaks eventually adopted Christianity, apparently from Rus or the Greeks.

2 Moscow, Novgorod, Lithuania, and the Mongols

After the gradual disintegration of Kiev Rus, the regional powers that supplanted it began to grow apart. In these centuries the territories of Novgorod and the old northeast began to form a distinct language and culture that we can call Russian. Though the older term Rus persisted until replaced by Russia (Rossiia) in the fifteenth century, for this period we may begin to call the area Russia and the people Russian. In these centuries, Russia, like the other territories of Kiev Rus that would fall to Lithuania, experienced a cataclysm in the form of the Mongol invasion, one that shaped its history for the next three centuries.

3 The Emergence of Russia

At the end of the fifteenth century, Russia came into being as a state – no longer just a group of related principalities. Precisely at this time in written usage the modern term Rossia (a literary expression borrowed from Greek) began to edge out the traditional and vernacular Rus. If we must choose a moment for the birth of Russia out of the Moscow principality, it is the final annexation of Novgorod by Grand Prince Ivan III (1462–1505) of Moscow in 1478. By this act, Ivan united the two principal political and ecclesiastical centers of medieval Russia under one ruler, and in the next generation he and his son Vasilii III (1505–1533) added the remaining territories. In the west and north, the boundaries they established are roughly those of Russia today, while in the south and east the frontier for most of its length remained the ecological boundary between forest and steppe. In spite of later expansion, this territory formed the core of Russia until the middle of the eighteenth century, and it contained most of the population and the centers of state and church. The Russians were still a people scattered along the rivers between great forests.

In the south and east, mostly beyond the forests and out in the steppe, Russia’s neighbors remained the Tatar khanates that emerged in the 1430s from the breakup of the Golden Horde: Kazan, Crimea in the Crimean peninsula, and the Great Horde ruling the steppe. The Great Horde in turn broke up around 1500 to form the khanate of Astrakhan on the lower Volga and farther east the Nogai Horde. Farther east the khanate of Siberia held sway over the tiny population of the vast plain of the Ob’ and Irtysh rivers. These states were complex social organisms. Kazan’ was the only one to occupy part of the forest zone, and its people settled along the rivers and farmed the land like the Russians but with a nomadic appendage where the steppe began to the southeast. The Nogais were pure nomads. Crimea and Astrakhan’ were somewhere in between, their population made up of mostly steppe dwellers, but Astrakhan’ was a town and Crimea had towns and garden agriculture. Its location meant that it had a lively trade and close political ties with its great neighbor to the south, the Ottoman Empire.

At this moment the Ottomans were at the peak of their power, for in 1453 Mehmed the Conqueror, already master of most of Anatolia and the Balkans, took Constantinople, the ancient capital of Byzantium. In 1516 the Turks moved south, quickly capturing the Levant and Egypt, north Africa and Mesopotamia. Thus the last great empire of western Eurasia was born, and it soon turned its attention to central Europe. In 1524 the defeat of Hungary at the battle of Mohacs laid open the road into Germany and in 1529 the Ottomans laid siege to Vienna itself. For the moment, the Ottoman Turks paid little attention to Russia. Their great opponents were Iran and the Holy Roman Empire, and in any case the Crimeans, from 1475 Ottoman vassals, stood between Russia and the Turks. The Sultans in Istanbul wanted the Crimean cavalry for the Turkish wars in Hungary and Iran and did not want to waste them in raids against a minor state far in the north. At the same time the Sultans gave their Crimean vassals considerable freedom of action, and Ivan III was able to establish an understanding with the Crimeans that lasted into the sixteenth century. Russia continued to play a major role in the politics of the steppe, sending and receiving envoys back and involving itself in the endless feuds and rivalries among the ruling dynasties and clans.

To the west Russia had only one major rival, Lithuania, now united with Poland. The resultant Polish-Lithuanian state was the hegemonic power of Eastern Europe, more populous than Russia and more powerful than any of its neighbors. Poland, having vanquished the Teutonic Knights and fended off the Tatars and Turks to the south, had only Russia as a rival left. Poland’s power came not only from the weakness of most neighbors, but also from its political structure, for the growing role of the diet provided a major role for the magnates and nobility. The diet gave its elites an important stake in the prosperity of the state but a strong king still guaranteed basic order and direction. That constitution would lead to ruin later, but in 1500 it was more durable than that of its neighbors’, and Poland’s armies could dominate the field against most enemies.

Russia’s other neighbors to the west were of little account. The Livonian Order was too small and too decentralized to matter much in political affairs, and Sweden (including Finland) was part of the united kingdom of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden until 1520. The center of gravity of the three kingdoms was in Denmark, which was too far to the west to pay much attention to the remote border of Finland and Russia. Trade continued through both Livonia and Finland, and even increased in importance, but with little overall political effect.

The situation of its neighbors allowed Russia to emerge onto the stage of European politics at an exceptionally favorable moment. The Tatar khanates were preoccupied with one another and the Ottomans, while Livonia and Sweden for very different reasons scarcely impinged on Russia’s consciousness. Russia had only one important rival, Poland-Lithuania, the primary focus of its foreign policy. That rival was powerful enough to provide a challenge to the new state of Ivan III, a challenge which he handled with great skill.

4 Consolidation and Revolt

The end of the Time of Troubles brought peace to Russia and a new dynasty of tsars, one that would remain on the throne until 1917. The decades that followed the Troubles saw the restoration of the social and political order that had existed before, so that Russia looked very much the same as it had on the day that the Assembly of the Land elected Boris Godunov tsar. Yet under the surface of restored customs and institutions, earlier trends gathered speed and new developments appeared. Serfdom provided a rigid framework that determined the life of most Russians and slowed, but did not preclude, economic changes and growth. At the other end of Russian society, at the court and among the higher clergy, shifts in religious sentiment and cultural changes were taking place that would have far-reaching effects.

Rapid population growth meant greater prosperity and also made it possible for Russia to absorb and preserve the new acquisitions in Siberia and on the southern steppes. Growing integration into the burgeoning European markets meant wealth for merchants and townsmen. The rebuilding of the government was not limited to the restoration of the old system and old institutions. The creaky apparatus of the Moscow offices of state managed more or less to maintain control over a huge area and an unruly population. Control, in the Russian context, was always a relative matter, for this was also the “rebellious” century of Russian history: with not just the Troubles but urban riots in Moscow and elsewhere, the first great Cossack and peasant revolt of the legendary Stenka Razin, and the politically crucial revolts of the musketeers at the end of the century. Each time, however, the authorities eventually restored order and, after 1613, the state did not collapse.

In the long run, more important even than economic growth or political success were the cultural changes. These are difficult to describe, for they lack the drama of the later transformation under Peter, and they were all still within the limits of a predominantly Orthodox culture. These changes within Orthodoxy were a response to Russian religious, social, and political needs, but they came by way of close interaction with the Orthodox church of Kiev, with mainly Ukrainian monks and clergy and the books and new ideas they brought to Moscow. For half a century, from the 1630s to the 1690s, Kiev was a major center of influence on Russian thought and life. At the same time, political events in Poland – the revolt of the Ukrainian Cossacks – brought Russia into war with Poland and ultimately changed the political balance in Eastern Europe in Russia’s favor. For most of the seventeenth century the politics and culture of Poland and its peoples were crucial to Russian affairs.

None of these developments were visible in the years immediately after 1613 at the court of the first Romanov, Tsar Michael (1613–1645). Michael resumed appointments to the duma and other offices following the precedence system, as did his predecessors. The court was not quite the same, for the experience of the Time of Troubles seems to have taught the boyars the need for consensus, and for sixty years the court intrigues lost the desperate and murderous quality that had marked the previous century. Michael’s father Filaret returned from Polish captivity in 1619 and was immediately named Patriarch of the church. Within a few years he was the de facto regent of Russia, co-sovereign with his son. Patriarch Filaret’s main goal was to exact revenge on Poland, a goal that the boyars did not share. At his urging in 1632 Russia tried to retake Smolensk by relying on mercenary regiments hired in Western Europe. The war was a disaster and in 1633 Filaret died, allowing the tsar and the boyars to end the war. Tsar Michael, now ruling without his father’s supervision, turned to other matters.

The restoration of order and peace allowed the countryside to recover, and by Michael’s death, most of the damage from the Troubles had been repaired. The great accomplishment of the reign was the construction of several lines of forts at the main river fords and on the hills along the southern frontier. In the woods between the forts, workmen felled trees and left them in a tangle to keep out the Tatar cavalry. The defenses were a huge undertaking running over a thousand miles from the Polish border to the Urals. The purpose was to keep out the Tatar raiders, and it worked well enough to allow the peasantry and gentry to move south, for the first time farming the rich black earth of the steppe in large numbers. The tsar gave land to the settler-soldiers to maintain the line of fortifications. A whole society of petty gentry and peasant-soldiers grew up along the line of forts, and beyond the new line, out in the steppe facing the Tatars, were the Cossacks along the southern rivers, the Don, the Volga, and the Iaik farther east. A hundred years after Ivan the Terrible’s conquests, the southern steppe finally began to add to Russia’s wealth and power.

5 Peter the Great

The reign of Peter the Great saw the greatest transformation in Russia until the revolution of 1917. Unlike the Soviet revolution, Peter’s transformation of Russia had little impact on the social order, for serfdom remained and the nobility remained their masters. What Peter changed was the structure and form of the state, turning the traditional Russian tsardom into a variant of European monarchy. At the same time he profoundly transformed Russian culture, a contribution that along with his new capital of St. Petersburg has lasted to the present day.

6 Two Empresses

With the restoration of autocracy, Anna came to the throne as Empress of Russia, and after a time she sent the leaders of the Golitsyn and Dolgorukii clans into exile. The ten years of Anna’s reign in the memory of the Russian nobility was a dark period of rule by Anna’s German favorites – particularly her chamberlain – Ernst-Johann Bühren (Biron to the Russians), who was allegedly all-powerful and indifferent to Russian interests. That memory was a considerable exaggeration. After a brief interlude, Empress Elizabeth, Peter the Great’s daughter and a capable and strong monarch succeeded her (1741–1761). Underneath all the drama at court, Russia’s new culture took shape, and Russia entered the age of the Enlightenment. In these decades we can also get a glimpse of Russian society that goes beyond descriptions of legal status into the web of human relations.

Politically Anna’s court was not a terribly pleasant place, though the story of “German domination” is largely a legend. Anna was personally close to Biron, who had served her well in Courland, where she had lived since the death of her husband the duke in 1711. She entrusted foreign policy to Count Andrei Ostermann and the army to Count Burkhard Christian Münnich, but the three were in no sense a clique. Indeed, they hated one another and made alliances with the more numerous Russian grandees in the court and in the government. The truth was that Anna relied on them and a few others and she did not consult with the elite as a whole. The Senate languished. Not surprisingly, Anna was terrified that there would be plots against her in favor of Elizabeth, Peter’s eldest surviving daughter, or other candidates for the throne, and she used the Secret Chancellery to try to uncover them. The darkest episode of the reign was the trial and execution of her minister Artemii Volynskii in 1740 on the charge of insulting the Empress. This was an excuse: the real reason for his death was Volynskii’s loss of favor with Biron and Ostermann and his own ambitious plans, which frightened Anna and many others in her entourage.

Anna’s reign was by no means a failure. She restored much of Peter’s work that had been rejected by the oligarchy in the time of Peter II. She returned the capital to St. Petersburg and abolished the Supreme Privy Council. She did not restore the Senate to power, ruling with a Cabinet of Ministers dominated by her favorites. Her government tried to reduce the burden on the country of the large military and naval establishment that Peter had created, but found that they could not. Instead, Russia fought a successful war in Poland to keep France from placing a king on the Polish throne who would be hostile to Russia and Austria – and then Russia went to war with Turkey. Münnich proved a highly capable commander, and Russia was able to return the fort at Azov that was lost in 1711.

Since Anna’s husband had died before they could produce children, she remained childless. In accord with Peter’s 1722 succession law she chose her heir, albeit on her deathbed: a two-month-old infant who was given the name Ivan VI. The baby’s connection with the Russian throne was remote. He was the grandson of Anna’s elder sister Catherine, who had married the Duke of Mecklenburg in 1716. Catherine’s daughter, also named Anna, in turn married the Duke of Brunswick-Bevern-Lüneburg, and Ivan was their first son. In other words, the tsar of Russia was actually a minor German prince with only the most tenuous connection to the country he was supposed to rule. The baby tsar obviously had to have a regent to rule for him, a fact that brought the conflicts among the grandees into the open. At first Biron was in charge, but Münnich quickly ousted him, only to fall victim to Ostermann and the infant tsar’s parents. Complicating matters was a Swedish declaration of war during the summer of 1741, an attempt by the Swedes to get revenge for their earlier defeats. Not surprisingly in this situation an elaborate plot came into being with all sorts of international ramifications (the French ambassador was one of the leaders) and in November 1741, the guards overthrew the regency and carried Elizabeth on their shoulders into the Winter Palace. Ivan VI and the Brunswick family were sent into exile in northern Russia, Ivan to perish in the Mirovich affair of 1764 and his family to be released only some twenty years later.

Elizabeth’s reign brought a renewed sense of normalcy to Russia. The remaining Golitsyns, Dolgorukiis, and alleged confederates of Volynskii were returned from exile, their lands and position restored. The Senate was restored to the position that it had under Peter. The Russian army defeated the Swedes, quickly ending the war in 1743. Elizabeth was intelligent and capable, but rather lazy and self-indulgent. The number of her dresses was legendary, and in a modest way she followed her father’s taste for banquets and drink. Secretly she married her lover, originally a Ukrainian choir-boy named Aleksei Razumovskii, who became a major figure at court. He was clever enough to not try to overshadow the others, and for most of the reign affairs were in the hands of the Shuvalovs, the brothers Peter and Alexander, and the chancellor (foreign minister) Aleksei Bestuzhev-Riumin. All of these men, like their rivals the Vorontsovs, came from families of ancient nobility but far from the great aristocracy, who now settled into secondary positions in government and diplomacy. Elizabeth’s grandees were relatively new men who owed their positions to Peter’s promotion of talented young men from outside the small circle of old aristocratic families. Bestuzhev-Riumin was an experienced diplomat, and the Shuvalovs had been part of Elizabeth’s personal entourage in the 1730s. Though they owed their rise to their personal connection with the new empress, they proved energetic and intelligent. They were the first since Peter’s time to systematically turn their attention to the economic development of Russia, primarily toward strengthening its commerce. In 1752 they convinced Elizabeth to abolish all internal tolls and modestly raise the tariff, so that trade would be freer but the state revenue would not suffer. Less happy was their scheme to increase revenue through the state vodka monopoly by raising the price. There were other ideas, the most important to produce a new law code, and the plan to secularize monastery lands, though neither were realized. They also introduced their young cousin Ivan Shuvalov to Elizabeth, and he became a major force in Russian culture.

Elizabeth’s decision to join Austria against Prussia in the Seven Years War (1756–1763) put any reform plans on the shelf. Russia’s army performed well against the supposed military genius of the age, Frederick the Great, and even briefly occupied Berlin in 1760. The death of the Empress on Christmas day 1761 in the Julian calendar, however, put an end to Russia’s participation in the conflict, and simultaneously set the stage for yet another drama.

7 Catherine the Great

Catherine’s first task on ascending the throne was to secure her power and deal with the unfinished business of her husband’s reign. She quickly confirmed his decree abolishing compulsory service for the nobility, but she delayed the decree confiscating monastery lands. She had proclaimed herself the defender of Russian interests and of Orthodoxy, and she knew that the church was not happy with the move. Furthermore count Panin had plans to reorganize the central government around a state council that would have some sort of power alongside the monarch. The new empress, after a delay of more than a year, and after deposing the obstreperous and very rich bishop of Rostov, decreed the secularization of church lands in 1764. Nearly a fifth of the Russian peasantry ceased to be serfs. Regarding Panin’s plans she was more cautious, merely ignoring them and keeping him to head the College of Foreign Affairs and supervise the education of her son and heir Paul.

Foreign policy demanded Catherine’s attention for much of the first decade of her reign, even though she had been preoccupied with notions of reform of state and society from the time of her reading of Montesquieu and others in the 1750s. Unfortunately, Catherine could not control events and in the autumn of 1763 the king of Poland died. His death created a serious problem and Catherine had to act. From the last years of the Northern War, Poland, the onetime great power of Eastern Europe, had succumbed to a declining economy and population and an anarchic constitution. It had a weak elected king, all-powerful magnates, and a diet of nobles whose main aim was the conservation of traditional law and privileges above all else. Its neighbors, Prussia, Austria, and especially Russia liked this situation, and however absolute at home, their rulers were intent on preserving the “Golden Freedom” of the Polish nobility. A weak Poland with a tiny army suited them all and their ambassadors directed the Polish state.

The death of the king in 1763 came at a time of slowly returning prosperity and calls for modest constitutional reform. Catherine decided to support some of these calls, and with the aid of Polish allies, intimidation of their opponents, and simple bribery, placed her former lover, Stanislaw Poniatowski, on the throne of Poland. Poniatowski and his allies were able to enact some of their very modest proposals, but Catherine wanted a practical guarantee of continued Russian influence, and she found it in the issue of political rights of dissidents (non-Catholics) in Poland. Poland possessed a sizable Protestant minority (who mostly spoke German) in the northwest and a more numerous Orthodox minority in the east and southeast. The Protestants included a number of noble families as well as townsmen, but were excluded from political representation and most offices. The Orthodox were mostly Ukrainian peasants, and had no spokesman but the one Orthodox bishop, a Ukrainian from the Russian side of the border. Both groups, but especially the Orthodox peasants, were subject to continuous harassment from Catholic clergy and nobles. Catherine, through her ambassador, ordered Poniatowski and his allies to enact legal toleration of the religious dissidents. The ultimate result in 1768 was a revolt of Catholic nobles against the Russians and the king, and this involved the Russian army in the internal dissensions of Poland. Catherine knew that her intervention in Poland could have dangerous consequences, but she had formed a firm alliance with Prussia and hoped for the best. Unfortunately the Ottomans, prompted by France and understandably disturbed by the specter of even greater Russian influence in Poland, declared war on Russia at the end of the year. Russia was again at war with a major power possessing a huge – if sometimes unwieldy – army; this was a war that would have to be fought across vast and largely empty steppes very far from Russia’s home bases.

The war with Turkey also put an end to one of Catherine’s pet projects, the Legislative Commission. For decades the government had been aware of the confused state of Russian law, based as it was on the 1649 law code, Peter’s legislation, and hundreds of decrees on particular issues that often contradicted more general statutes. Catherine saw the opportunity to carry out a thorough review and revision and to establish some general principles. To this end in January 1765, she began to compile an Instruction, a guideline for reform. The result was a volume of several hundred pages, compiled (as she freely admitted) of passages translated from her beloved Montesquieu; the Italian law reformer Cesare Beccaria; and German writers on finance and economics, such as the now forgotten Baron J. F. von Bielfeld. In the text she began with the principle that Russia was a European state, and it was a monarchy, not a despotism. That is, its government was based on law, not the arbitrary will of the monarch. At the same time, following Montesquieu, she argued that a state the size of Russia required an absolute monarch who would have the necessary vigor and power to rule effectively. Without that, lawlessness and chaos would ensue. The Instruction was not a series of specific recommendations about particular issues but a description of general principles for laws regulating social status, law courts, and the encouragement of population growth, agriculture, commerce, and industry. It concluded with a series of principles for what was then called “police” in Europe. These principles were ordinances not concerned so much with crime as they were with cleanliness, communication, fire prevention, and general good order in town and country. The text was remarkable enough, but even more remarkable was the use to which she put it.

At the end of 1766 she issued a manifesto that announced that various local communities were to choose representatives to come to Moscow to discuss the reform of the law, and a few months later she published her Instruction and ordered it distributed throughout the country. Thus an extensive compilation of Enlightenment political thought was to be distributed openly to the population at large, and this was to be the basis for the deliberations of the Legislative Commission in Moscow.

The Commission opened on July 30, 1767, with 428 of the 564 delegates already present. The most important group comprised the 142 deputies from the nobility and the 209 deputies from the cities (many of them also noblemen). There were also 29 delegates from the free peasants and 44 Cossack deputies. From the various Volga peoples, Tatars and others came 54 deputies – 22 deputies represented the Ukrainian Cossack nobility of the Hetmanate, and the Baltic provinces had their deputies among the nobles. Even the free Finnish peasants of the Vyborg area had their representatives. Some nobles tried to challenge their presence, but Catherine upheld them on the basis of the Swedish law of this conquered territory. The only group that was not represented consisted of the serf peasants of Russia and the Baltic provinces, who together made up more than fifty percent of the population of the state.

The process of choosing representatives was hardly a modern ideal election, for in many remote areas the nobles simply failed to show up or did so in very small numbers. In the towns it was hard to achieve consensus, and the free peasants also seem to have seen the process as a chance to petition the monarch rather than to suggest law. Nevertheless, they all did show up in Moscow and with some prompting from the empress, got down to work assembling and examining existing legislation and compiling proposals that would serve as the basis of general statutes for regularizing the status of the various groups in society in judicial institutions. The delegates were not a parliament and were not there to pass laws – they had assembled to make proposals to Catherine that she could choose to follow or not. They were also supposed to follow the guidelines of her instruction, and they generally did, but not without considerable discussion. Opinions were exchanged remarkably freely, and some of the more conservative nobles rejected the implications of the Instruction that were favorable to peasants and townspeople. As time passed, the various subcommissions deliberated slowly and Catherine decided to move them to St. Petersburg. By the summer of 1768, the nobles were ready with a proposal, itself the object of considerable wrangling, especially over issues like the conditions for promotion of commoners to noble rank and crimes against nobles by serfs. Catherine was getting a very rapid lesson in the values and ideas of the various classes of Russian society, and it was fairly clear that reform of state and society would meet considerable obstacles among a large part of the nobility. The Turkish declaration of war intervened before she had to make difficult decisions. Most of the noble deputies were also army officers, and now full mobilization was necessary to deal with both Turkey and the Polish situation. The Commission was dissolved. Its work, however, was not in vain, as later events would prove.

The war with Turkey was the first serious test of Catherine’s government, for the Ottoman Empire was still a formidable opponent and the Russians would have to cross vast expanses of southern steppe even to engage the enemy. In the end, the Russian army proved itself capable of the task, slowly but systematically advancing into Crimea and the Balkan Peninsula. The Russian navy sailed from St. Petersburg around Europe under the command of Aleksei Orlov and the British Admiral John Elphinstone, destroying the Turkish fleet in the harbor of Chesme in 1770. In spite of the distraction of the Polish conflict, Catherine’s forces made their way into Bulgaria and forced the Ottomans to make peace on her terms at the small village of Kuchuk Kainardzha in 1774.

The treaty came just two years after a seemingly permanent settlement of the Polish situation. With Russia fighting two wars at once, Frederick the Great of Prussia saw his chance and proposed to Catherine that they both solve the problem by taking Polish territory. Austria would have to be conciliated as well, and the result would be a smaller Poland that would be less threatening, should reform succeed. Catherine agreed to this proposal after some hesitation, for she still hoped to maintain influence over the whole of Poland, but eventually she gave in. The result was the partition treaty of 1772, which gave large and valuable districts to Austria and Prussia. Catherine took a large but thinly populated slice of eastern Belorussia that provided better Russian river communications with Riga. A byproduct of the new border was the inclusion of Jews in the Russian state for the first time. For Catherine the outcome was a qualified success, as Poniatowski remained king and made modest reforms that strengthened the state and Polish prosperity while ultimately remaining subservient to Russian interests.

Two years later Catherine was ecstatic with joy to learn of the peace with the Ottomans, for it came at a difficult moment. The victory itself was reason enough to celebrate, for it brought great prestige and power to Russia and to its empress, but there was more. Russia received huge territories in the south all the way to the Black Sea coast and Crimea ceased to be a Turkish dependency, instead becoming nominally independent under Russian control. Russia’s ministers and Catherine herself had been aware for decades of the economic potential of the area both as a site for new commercial ports and for agricultural settlement. The treaty not only gave the area to Russia, but also granted the right to commerce in the Black Sea and to build a navy there. Russia’s position on the southern border had changed radically: there were no more Tatar slave raids and a vast territory was ready for development. The legislation for the new lands, to be called Novorossia, or “New Russia,” was carefully worked out to encourage settlement but discourage the spread of serf agriculture. The new lands were to be a settler colony with flourishing cities and ports, not just an extension of the backward agriculture of the serf estates of Central Russia. Catherine had not read her Enlightenment writers for nothing.

Her right arm in transforming the new lands was to be her new lover, general Grigorii Potemkin, whose instant rise to favor took place in the first months of 1774. Potemkin was the only one of Catherine’s many lovers who was her mental and political equal. If less intellectual, he was well enough educated to understand her and had the political skills to work with her. It was a great partnership and lasted long after the passion had cooled, until Potemkin’s death in October 1791.

For the time being both the empress and her favorite faced daunting challenges. Ever since Catherine’s coup of 1762, there had been symptoms of discontent. The first had been the Mirovich affair. The former baby Tsar Ivan VI of 1740–1741 had grown up, and Elizabeth had confined him in the fortress of Schlüsselburg in the hope that he might some day enter a monastery, and if not, he would be politically harmless. Peter III had confirmed her decisions, including the secret order to kill him if an attempt to free him was made, and Catherine confirmed these orders as well, though the codicil with the order to kill bore only Panin’s signature. In July 1764, a restless and probably somewhat unstable Ukrainian guards officer named Vasilii Mirovich made a mad attempt to free Ivan and proclaim him emperor, and the soldiers guarding the ex-tsar carried out their standing orders. Mirovich’s execution put an end to the affair, but it was not a good sign. Over the years there were a series of incidents, all involving small numbers of officers and nobles who spoke of replacing Catherine, but they were quickly exiled and their talk came to nothing. The background to these incidents, however, was the worrisome issue of the heir to the throne, Tsarevich Paul. Paul was nineteen in 1773, and thus in principle old enough to reign, but his mother had no intention of giving up power. Part of her reason was her increasing disappointment with her son and his association with the Panin party at court, whose cautious foreign policy had not provided the expected dividends. Catherine proclaimed her son an adult and began marriage negotiations, but kept the throne. This step terminated Panin’s role as the heir’s tutor, and the count gradually withdrew from the court in disfavor.

The new star, Potemkin, came at just the right time, for Russia was now in the grips of the greatest popular upheaval it would experience before the twentieth century. The source of the uprising lay in the Cossack frontier of the southeast, as it had so often before. This time it did not begin on the Don but on the Iaik, the smaller river flowing from the Ural Mountains into the Caspian Sea to east of the Volga. In these decades the Russian government was trying to establish greater control over the Cossacks, restricting their privileges and particularly their custom of electing their officers. Recent measures to this end seemed successful, until Emelian Pugachev appeared in the settlements near the provincial capital of Orenburg early in 1773. He had served in the wars, deserted, and had various adventures when he arrived and told the people that he was actually Catherine’s husband Peter III. He had come to restore justice to the Cossacks and protect the Old Belief. The Cossacks believed, or professed to believe him and he quickly assembled a band of several thousand men, reinforced by the neighboring Bashkirs and Tatars as well as the peasants attached to the Urals iron works. They laid siege to Orenburg and other larger forts without success, but they overran the lesser stations and massacred all who refused to join them. A huge area, most of the Urals and the Volga basin, was now in rebel hands. The reaction was swift. An army came from Moscow to suppress the revolt, and by the end of the year it was largely successful, though Pugachev himself had eluded the army. Then the next year he made a comeback and even managed to seize the important town of Kazan’ for a few days. This was the high point of the rebellion, for Russian regular troops reached the town after a desperate forced march and crushed the rebel army. Pugachev now turned south toward the Don, and to reach it he passed through areas of serf agriculture. Here the region exploded; the serfs with rebel help exterminated the local nobility, including women and children. Unfortunately for Pugachev, the Don Cossacks did not move, and he recrossed the Volga, escaping to his base among the Bashkirs. There the troops finally caught up with the rebels and crushed them. Some of the Bashkirs remained loyal to Pugachev to the end, but the Cossacks eventually betrayed him. The revolt was over, and in 1775 Pugachev was executed in Moscow. Peace had finally come, at home and abroad.

8 Russia in the Age of Revolution

On his mother’s death Paul came to the throne, the first undisputed and male inheritance in seventy years. His first act was to rebury Peter III, whom he believed to be his father, in the church of St. Peter and Paul with the other rulers of Russia from Peter onwards. His next act was to replace most of Catherine’s ministers and officials, and send a number of them into exile. Thus began the brief and often bizarre reign of Tsar Paul.

Paul’s reign began just at the moment that the French revolution, having passed through its most radical phase, began to turn outward, and the new tsar had to respond to the apparent danger from his first days on the throne. Far more conservative than his mother, he made it his priority to strengthen the power and authority of the state. He recentralized the government, reestablishing some of the colleges and reviving the Council of State. He also enlarged the Senate, and saw to it that it exercised more effective supervision of law and administration. To this end he issued an enormous number of new laws, orders, and regulations. In Paul’s mind, everything needed a regulation and his job was to compose one where it did not already exist.

Even greater than the changes in institutions were the changes in style. Paul took every opportunity to assert his personal authority in matters no matter how petty. From his youth he had spent much of his time drilling the troops under his personal control, living away from his mother in the suburban palace of Gatchina, which he turned into a military camp on the style of the Prussian army so beloved by his father. Thus his reassertion of authority began with the army. He ordered the Russian army to switch to uniforms on the Prussian model and adopt Prussian drill and training, to the intense irritation of officers and soldiers alike. The French revolutionary armies had already shown the old Prussian methods to be outmoded, but Paul did not see this in his pursuit of strict hierarchy and mindless obedience. His new orders went far beyond the military, for he required anyone, of any age or sex, who encountered any member of the imperial family on the street to dismount and kneel no matter what the weather. Officers were cashiered or even exiled for minor cases of neglect of duty, details of drill, or even just court etiquette. He prescribed the details of dress for court and other occasions and enforced them with pedantic thoroughness. To many noblemen and officers, his behavior was both insulting and bizarre, but to Paul the enforcement of regulation was part of the restoration of discipline and morality that he regarded as crucial after the laxities of Catherine’s rule and the threat of revolution from France. With these ends in mind he revoked many of the provisions of the Charter of the Nobility and reduced and downgraded the elective element in provincial government. Part of this program of counter-reform was the restoration of the old privileges of the nobles of the Baltic provinces and the Ukraine, and an attempt to reach some reconciliation with the Polish gentry. Thus Kosciuszko and other Polish prisoners of war were released, and the legal system of the formerly Polish provinces was maintained. He did not notice the contradictions.

Perhaps the contradictions came from his obsession with reversing the actions of his mother. Though terrified of the French Revolution and convinced that “Jacobinism” was multiplying everywhere in Europe and Russia, he released Radishchev from exile and Novikov from prison. At the same time Paul prohibited the wearing of clothing in the new French style, requiring the old three-cornered hat and knee breeches for men. Enamored of European notions of medieval knighthood and chivalry, he distrusted the self-indulgent and greedy gentry that, he thought, his mother’s reign had created. Thus he decreed a limit of three days per week that serfs could be required to perform labor services. It was typical of Paul’s measures that it was largely useless, for in many parts of the country the new limit was actually higher than the norm. One of the actions of his mother that he did not reverse was the establishment of state censorship, which restricted Russian publications and the importation of Western books. On Paul’s orders even French music fell under suspicion.

Had Paul reigned in calmer times, he might have lasted for years as an irritating and petty despot who aroused contempt more than fear. The times, however, were anything but calm, even though Russia was far from the center of the drama in Paris. Since the fall of the Jacobin dictatorship in 1794 the Directory had directed the energies of the French nation outward to the conquest of Belgium, the Rhineland, and northern Italy. Just as Paul came to the throne, Napoleon Bonaparte was winning his first victories against Austria in northern Italy and instantly became a great hero in France. His next project was the conquest of Egypt, which brought Russia into the war. It was not that St. Petersburg had any particular interest in Egypt, but for a few months the Russians thought that he was really going not to Egypt but to Constantinople, which was an obvious threat. Paul was also enraged by Napoleon’s capture of the island of Malta on his way east in 1798. Malta was just as far as Egypt from Russian interests but the rulers of the island, the Knights of Malta, had just sent a mission to the tsar. They appealed to Paul’s ideals of chivalry and his desire to combat the hydra of revolution, so he became the protector of the Order of Malta. With the island in French hands, some of the knights even offered to make Paul the commander of the order. Contrary to papal wishes, the Orthodox tsar now led the exiled Catholic order, but with the French army at his door the pope was in no position to object. The Malta incident and other French actions led Paul to join Austria, Britain, and other powers in a coalition against the French. General Suvorov was called out of forced retirement (Paul had rightly associated him with Potemkin and Catherine) and sent to Italy to command an Austro-Russian army. This he did with such force and energy that he chased the French out in a few months, and stood ready to invade France. Instead, defeats on other fronts and Austrian insistence on invading France from Switzerland forced Suvorov to move north and then retreat through hostile French forces in an alpine winter to safety in southern Germany. Enraged by these events and a botched Russian-British attempt to invade the French-dominated Netherlands, Paul broke off all relations with the coalition and made overtures to France. With Napoleon’s coup d’etat in November 1799, Paul felt that France had a ruler committed to order, not further revolution, and with whom he could talk. By the end of 1800, war with Britain seemed a real possibility. Events dictated otherwise.

Discontent with Paul had been growing almost since he came to the throne among the court and military elite of St. Petersburg. Paul had several sons, the eldest Alexander, born in 1777, was an agreeable and well-educated young man. Furthermore, Paul had replaced Peter the Great’s succession law with his own in 1797, a law that prohibited women from taking the throne and specified primogeniture in the male line. Thus in the event of Paul’s removal or death, the succession was secure.

Paul himself was afraid of assassination, and he built an entire new palace – the Castle of St. Michael – on the bank of the Fontanka River and surrounded by newly dug canals to make it inaccessible except by drawbridge. The “castle” was a strange combination of classical style and elements meant to recall a medieval Western castle, a conceit that delighted the tsar. He moved in at the end of 1800. In one sense, his fears were not in vain, for removal of the tsar was exactly what several of the officers of the guards had in mind. Their leader was the Baltic German Count Peter von der Pahlen, whom Paul had earlier exiled for trivial offenses, then forgiven and appointed military governor of St. Petersburg. Paul was too self-centered to realize what others thought of him, and regularly took friends for enemies and vice versa. In this case his mistake was to be literally fatal.

Pahlen had long harbored resentment and fear of the tsar since his earlier disgrace, and he had like-minded associates, chief among them Count N. P. Panin, the nephew of Paul’s old tutor. Panin was in disgrace for opposing the rapprochement with Napoleon and Pahlen was afraid not only for himself but for the rest of the imperial family. He believed that Paul was so far alienating the nobility that disorder might ensue, a frightening possibility in the unstable condition of Europe. As the plot thickened, Alexander became aware of it and did nothing to stop it. On the night of March 11, 1801, after an evening of heavy drinking, the conspirators made their way into the Castle of St. Michael. They found Paul after he tried to hide and arrested him: a struggle ensued and one of the officers strangled the tsar. It was the last and most violent palace coup in Russian history. A public announcement asserted that Paul had died of apoplexy and Alexander was now the tsar. The rejoicing was universal throughout St. Petersburg.

9 The Pinnacle of Autocracy

The first acts of the new reign were the capture, investigation, and trials of the Decembrists, as they were known immediately and for ever after. Several hundred officers and men of the rebel regiments, as well as a few civilians, were immediately arrested. Tsar Nicholas appointed a court of numerous officials and high officers, the most distinguished being Michael Speranskii, who had returned from exile and was now again in favor. The investigation was long and detailed, conducted in secret, and eventually ended in the execution of five of the rebels, including Pestel’ and the poet Ryleev, for the crime of plotting against the life of the tsar. Thirty-one others were sentenced to death as well for the same crime, but Nicholas decided to ignore their obvious guilt and commuted the sentences to labor and exile in Siberia. All together one hundred twenty-one of the rebels made the long journey east. Another four hundred fifty were either released without punishment or demoted and transferred to line regiments in the Caucasus.

In Russian history the punishment of the Decembrists became a classic example of official cruelty, but the most striking aspect of their treatment was its lenience. The number of death sentences was about the same as in the reprisals for the Italian constitutionalist revolts of 1820–21 and far less than for similar actions in Spain. Nicholas chose to hold back, perhaps because he still held a very old-fashioned conception of the tsar as the stern father of his people. In any case the Decembrists in Siberia had various fates. Eight of the most “guilty” actually worked in an open-pit silver mine for several months, while others had lighter tasks. The labor sentences were lightened by the 1830s. A number of the Decembrists’ wives were allowed to join them, and as the years passed the labor sentences were entirely commuted to simple prison and eventually exile (outside of prison). Many of the former rebels were given positions in the local administration. In Siberian towns the Decembrists and their wives provided the first glimpse of European culture, for they set up schools and orphanages, put on amateur theatricals, and became the centers of local society. What they were not allowed to do is publish anything or even to return to European Russia. A blanket of silence descended around them, to remain until the death of Nicholas thirty years later.

The new tsar could now turn to ruling the country, which he did with an iron hand. Nicholas was nearly twenty years younger than Alexander, for he was born in 1796. Thus he entirely missed the reign of his grandmother Catherine, and his formative years were those of the defeat of Napoleon. His upbringing was narrowly military and he was not educated as a future ruler. Personally he was convinced that only autocracy could prevent the spread of revolution, liberalism, and constitutional government, all of these essentially the same in the minds of European and Russian conservatives. He relied on the ministries to provide his government with a trained staff to execute the laws, but increasingly he centralized decision making and in particular directed any new initiatives from his personal chancellery using men, mostly with military backgrounds, who were personally close to the tsar himself.

One of his first acts was to add a “Third Section” to his personal chancellery, one that was to keep track of potential political opponents through the Corps of Gendarmes and their network of agents. The new organ removed political police from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and subordinated it directly to the tsar through its head, General Alexander Benckendorf. The Third Section reflected in its actions the conceptions of the tsar, for in addition to looking for “secret societies” of revolutionaries it was to track insults to the tsar and imperial family, counterfeiters, and religious sects, especially the Old Believers. It was also supposed to collect news of peasant discontent and rebellion, a new note from a government hitherto only concerned about liberal ideas among the nobility. The Gendarmes who were its main agents were also to look out for corruption among government officials, especially in the provinces. In the mind of Nicholas, paternalism and the repression of revolution were two sides of the same coin. Though the actual agents of the Third Section were few and it continued to rely heavily on denunciations, it was large enough to become a major factor in the life of Russia’s small political and cultural elite.

Nicholas was not in theory opposed to all reform, and he set up a series of committees to consider the needs of the country and even to wrestle with the issue of serfdom. None of the reform programs came to anything, for the tsar believed serfdom to be an evil, but also that any attempt to change the system would lead to a massive revolt like that led by Pugachev in the previous century. Perhaps the only important positive measure of the reign was the codification of Russian law, a massive task entrusted to the capable hands of Michael Speranskii. In 1835 his committee published a code of law derived from carefully collected Russian precedent. Speranskii and his staff also compiled codes of local law from Finland, the Baltic provinces, and the formerly Polish provinces in the western part of the empire. Speranskii’s code remained the basis of Russian law until 1917. Nicholas was himself enthusiastic about the project, as it fitted his image of himself as the stern yet just monarch, careful of the law as well as of his own authority.

The utter stagnation of government was not matched by stagnation in Russian society, slow as it was to develop. The colonization of the southern steppe continued, and Odessa emerged as a major port, exporting the growing surplus of Russian grain to Europe. In the interior of Russia all was not stagnant either, for within and around the serf system industrial capitalism made its first appearance. In the villages of Ivanovo and Voznesenskoe, Sheremetev estates northeast of Moscow, textile factories powered by steam engines were built starting from the 1790s. The entrepreneurs who bought and imported English steam engines, however, were themselves serfs who only gradually bought themselves out in the course of the early nineteenth century. The workers were also mostly Sheremetev serfs, though they worked for the factory owners and only paid the count, their owner, a yearly rent. Peasant entrepreneurs, some of them serfs, and townsmen began to start small enterprises in and around St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other towns and villages of the Russian interior. In St. Petersburg many of the businessmen were foreign or non-Russian citizens of the empire – Germans, Swedes, Finns, Englishmen. In Moscow many of the richest textile manufacturers came from Old Belief groups, and thus for religious reasons were treated with some suspicion by the authorities. By the standards of Western Europe all this activity was small, labor was expensive, and industry was usually technically backward, but it was a beginning. The overall prosperity of the Russian Empire also benefited from the beginnings of industrialization in Russian Poland, the Baltic provinces and Finland.

Figure 9. A village council from John Augustus Atkinson, A Picturesque View of the Manners, Customs, and Amusements of the Russians, London, 1803–04.

The attitude of the tsar and his government toward industrialization was highly ambiguous. On the one hand he supported it, if modestly, establishing the first commercial high schools and maintaining a protective tariff. Nicholas played a major role in the construction of Russia’s first railroad, the line from the capital to the Tsarskoe Selo (1837) and then in a much more important project, the line from St. Petersburg to Moscow that opened in 1851. Russia acquired its first engineering school in 1828 with the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, but the builder of the Moscow-Petersburg railroad was the American engineer, G. W. Whistler, the father of the famous painter. Russia simply did not have the trained specialists for the project. Nicholas supported the railroad, but at the same time he did not want Russia to acquire a large industrial base, as he saw that as the seedbed of revolution as well as fundamentally unnecessary. The most basic issue was, of course, serfdom, for as long as that lasted Russia was saddled with increasingly backward agriculture, a highly restricted labor market, and capital tied up in serfs and noble estates. Russia could not hope to move forward until that system was removed, but that act would entail fundamental change in society, the legal system and the state. Nicholas would not have that.

10 Culture and Autocracy

One of the ironies of the reign of Nicholas I is that his unrelenting autocracy presided over the first great age of Russian culture. Nicholas realized to some extent the growing importance of Russian culture and the extremely high level it achieved in a short time, but he was more concerned to direct it in the proper conservative channels than to celebrate it. He abrogated the more tolerant censorship system of Alexander I in favor of one with the emphasis on combating subversion in religion and politics while retaining the paternalistic aspects of the older laws. The new structure remained under the Ministry of Education, but included a greater role for the bureaucracy and the more ominous Third Section. Its head, Alexander von Benckendorff, exercised erratic and arbitrary authority over publications while clumsily trying to encourage the appearance of pro-government material. Even with writers and artists well disposed toward the state, this policy was largely a failure, for Russian society was beginning to grow away from court and state tutelage, a process too fundamental for the actions of the tsar to stop. Some of the changes were even the result of state policy, particularly the support of the universities and the gymnasia, which produced a much larger and educated public, eager for the products of the new Russian culture. Another factor was the growth of commercial capitalism, which gradually brought into being a market for books and journals, concentrated in Petersburg and Moscow but slowly spreading to the provinces as well.

The cultural explosion took place in a number of areas. Painting and the visual arts remained largely bound to the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg and thus indirectly to the court and its network of patronage. The Academy continued to favor large historical, classical, and Biblical canvases over the increasingly popular landscape and genre painting. It continued to supply paintings for official building projects like St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg, or the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Nevertheless the Academy also offered for its students and graduates some possibility of travel and long residence in Italy, and many painters and sculptors took advantage of the opportunity. Karl Briullov, the best of the academy painters, returned from Italy and obtained many contracts for the decoration of churches and palaces as well as acquiring court and aristocratic patrons. Alexander Ivanov, in contrast stayed in Italy to avoid the halls of the Academy and fell under the influence of German romantic painting in its religious guise (the “Nazarenes”). The main result of his Italian years was an enormous painting, “Christ Appearing to the People,” which showed Nazarene influence but rejected the pseudo-medievalism of the Germans to depict the people whom Christ saved rather than a hieratic portrait of the Savior. Ivanov’s innovations seem minor today, but in the world of Nicholas I he had a great impact.

Music, especially opera and ballet, remained to a large extent within the court sphere. Catherine had built an opera theater in 1783 outside the palace to provide public access to the performances, and it quickly became the center of operatic and social life. The court did not let go of the opera, however, for the Ministry of the Court acquired control over all theaters in 1802. Thus the repertory of the Petersburg theaters was the result of the taste of the Ministry’s officials and even of the tsar himself. Originally Alexander I had set up four opera companies – Italian, French, German, and Russian – according to the language of the libretto and the singers, more than the nationality of the composer. The Italian company soon faded out, leaving the French company dominant until 1811, when it was closed in the patriotic atmosphere leading up to the war with Napoleon. The German and Russian companies continued, performing Italian operas as well as German with translated librettos. The Russian opera company could present only a few original works and relied largely on the European repertory.

Instrumental music flourished outside of state sponsorship, as much of Russian musical culture in these years was the product of aristocratic amateurs and private societies. The court banker Alexander Rall helped found the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Society in 1801 and the aristocrat V. V. Engelhardt’s concert hall on Nevskii Prospect provided much needed performance space for a generation. In the salon of the Russian-Polish Counts Mikhail and Matvei Wielhorski, Russian and foreign musicians met, played, and made the personal contacts that took Russian music forward. Count Matvei (1794–1866) was a superb cellist who earned praise from Hector Berlioz, and his brother Mikhail (1788–1856) was not only a gifted performer but a composer as well. Both brothers had studied with Luigi Cherubini in Paris in their youth, returned to Russia and eventually received high positions at the tsar’s court. The Wielhorski house stood on the same square as the palace of Grand Duke Michael, where his wife Elena Pavlovna held her own musical and political salon. The Philharmonic Society and the salons brought most of European music to Russia – Mozart and Beethoven being particular favorites of the Wielhorskis. Count Mikhail even performed Beethoven’s first seven symphonies at his wife’s country estate with an orchestra composed of their own and their neighbors’ serfs. Later on it was Count Matvei who introduced the young Anton Rubinstein to Elena Pavlovna, a meeting that was to bear fruit in later years.

With no professional conservatory yet in existence in Russia, musicians relied on private teachers and trips to Europe for their training. Out of this semi-amateur musical world came Russia’s first major composer, Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857). After some training in Italy, Glinka wrote a patriotic and very monarchist opera, A Life for the Tsar, first performed in 1836. The story was the suggestion of the poet Zhukovskii, who also found a librettist in Baron G. F. Rosen, a Baltic German turned Russian writer who also tutored the heir to the throne, the future Alexander II. The Wielhorskis and other aristocratic patrons of the arts provided rehearsal space. There was some quibbling from the director of the imperial theaters, but the support of Zhukovskii and the Counts Wielhorski, given their positions at the court, meant that any objections were ultimately irrelevant. The opera’s premiere enjoyed an authentic success. Glinka’s success did not, however, inaugurate a new age for Russian opera, for in 1843 Nicholas I was entranced and delighted by a traveling Italian company. He immediately hired them as a permanent troupe and gave them the facilities of the Russian opera company, which moved to Moscow. The result was two decades of brilliant performances of Bellini, Rossini, Donizetti, and their lesser contemporaries in St. Petersburg while Russian opera languished.

If music and theater remained tied to the court, Russian literature began to emancipate itself with the spectacular brilliance of the first wave of Russian writers, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, and the critic Vissarion Belinskii as well as numerous lesser but still highly skilled writers and critics. Emancipation from the court coincided with the emergence of Russian literature as a mature and original literature, the first contribution of Russia to the culture of the world. The emergence of Russian literature also brought to the fore the old issue of Russia and the West in a new form. This issue had lain dormant in the eighteenth century, when Russia’s cultural products were heavily imitative of Western models in form and content. Now a vibrant and original Russian literature, even as it followed Western trends and used them, had created a peculiarly Russian culture, one that was part of Western literature but not identical with it. The old question of Russia and the West now had a major cultural component.

Such a spectacular debut could not have been easily predicted in 1820, so closely had Russian literature continued to follow its European models. It was competent, occasionally inspired, but ultimately modest in achievement. In the early years of the nineteenth century the leading figures were Nikolai Karamzin, who had turned his attention to Russian history after 1803, and Vasilii Zhukovskii. Zhukovskii had a marvelous way with language, and his poetry remains to this day part of the heritage of Russian verse, but his best works were translations of the German and English poetry popular in the Romantic era – Goethe and Gottfried Bürger, Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Campbell. Through Zhukovskii European Romanticism came to Russia. To be sure, Karamzin and Zhukovskii were creating an audience for Russian literature that began to spread beyond the court and the capital cities, but it was an uphill battle. The Russian nobility, especially after the founding of the universities and gymnasia under Alexander, was much better educated than before, but it also knew French even better than before and often better than Russian. The main reading matter of many gentry families was French novels, and the latest fashionable novel in Paris was widely read in St. Petersburg in a few weeks. The numbers of the educated public were still small, and thus Karamzin’s and Zhukovskii’s journals, with their selection of new Russian poetry and prose among articles on history or occasionally politics, were thin small-format volumes with a circulation that rarely went much beyond a thousand copies. In this situation writers needed the patronage of court and state to survive. Much verse circulated in aristocratic drawing rooms, in the notebooks of young men and women, and only in manuscript, even when it had no political content. Zhukovskii came to play a key role. Already the most prominent poet of the age, he took up a position at the court teaching Russian to Nicholas I’s Prussian wife Alexandra and then in 1819 became the principal tutor to Nicholas’s son Alexander, the future Tsar Alexander II. For the next two decades Zhukovskii continued to live in the Winter Palace and served as the main patron for Russian literature and art.

Zhukovskii spotted Pushkin’s talents as early as 1815, when the young poet was still a pupil at the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée. On leaving the Lycée in 1817, Pushkin took a very junior position in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Though he came from an ancient noble family (his ancestors had served in the boyar duma of the Moscow princes in the fourteenth century), his fortune was limited and the tradition of government service meant that he, like other writers of his generation, started out as an official. He also spent much of his time carousing in the demi-monde of St. Petersburg with his old Lycée comrades, and participating in a number of literary societies (including Green Lamp and Arzamas). All of these groups included many future Decembrists, though none of them thought he was the type to be recruited for their revolutionary activities. To be sure Pushkin was sympathetic to many of the political goals of his friends, and occasionally wrote poems expressing these views, which circulated in manuscript. These came to the attention of the Special Section of the Ministry of the Interior early in 1820, and Pushkin was sent into exile to the south, first to Kishinev and then to Odessa. A few weeks later his first major poem appeared in print, a fairy tale called “Ruslan and Liudmila”.

In the next decade, one of the most remarkable in the history of Russian culture, Pushkin published poem and after poem: “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” from the events of the Caucasian Wars, “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” with its Crimean background, “The Gypsies,” “Poltava” from Ukrainian history in the time of Peter the Great, and others. From his reading of Shakespeare he was moved to write a verse drama, “Boris Godunov,” a tragedy of ambition and power that served as the basis for Modest Mussorgskii’s later opera. Pushkin’s masterpiece was the novel in verse Evgenii Onegin. On the surface the story of a bored young nobleman’s flirtation with Tatiana, a country girl brought up on French novels, it provided a portrait of Russian gentry society. Onegin emerges as a man with no purpose in life, neither a career nor an absorbing occupation, well educated in European culture but contributing nothing to the Russia around him. In contrast Tatiana, for all her girlish naivité, is the deeper and stronger character, the prototype of many of the women in Russian literature. The book had phenomenal success and later Tchaikovsky was to turn it into his own greatest opera. The echoes of European Romanticism were apparent in almost all these works, but Pushkin was no imitator, alongside the echoes from his reading was a powerful melody all his own.

Pushkin’s astonishing creativity was not alone. The decade saw an explosion of Russian poetry and a gradual transformation of the audience. Normal commercial publication was still barely profitable, but innovative booksellers found a new genre, the almanach. Small format volumes with fancy bindings and paper, they were designed as New Year’s presents, especially for young ladies. They normally included only Russian authors with few translations, all of them new. Poets competed to be published in them, and they were guaranteed an audience, for part of the appeal of the format was that they could be easily carried in a lady’s purse. In aristocratic drawing rooms the French novel now had a competitor.

In 1824 Pushkin received permission to return to his estate near Pskov, south of St. Petersburg, but not to the capitals. The Decembrist revolt complicated his attempts to restore his position, and the newly founded Third Section sent agents to observe him. They were particularly concerned to discover if he talked to the peasantry, and about what. Their findings were meager: the worst they could discover was that he wore a straw hat and a Russian traditional shirt with a pink sash around it. The point was that his dress could be construed as an attempt to mix with the people to stir up revolution, but his neighbors reported that he never talked about politics or even went out much. Finally Pushkin, with encouragement from Zhukovskii, appealed directly to tsar Nicholas, who granted him an interview in Moscow in 1826. After a long conversation, Nicholas agreed to end the exile, to allow Pushkin back to St. Petersburg, and to help him with his problems with the censorship. Henceforth his censor would be the tsar himself.

Pushkin returned to the capital still closely observed by the authorities, but also with the court title of kammerjunker and a direct relationship to the tsar and to the head of the Third Section, Benckendorf himself. Pushkin chafed at Benckendorf’s philistinism, but he admired Nicholas and remained loyal to the monarchy, if critical of its officials and many of its policies. He received an official appointment as historian and wrote a history of the Pugachev rebellion as well as a novella on the same subject, The Captain’s Daughter. Pushkin even borrowed money through the Third Section, and eventually received permission to found a journal, The Contemporary. This was in part a commercial venture, for the economic circumstances of literature were rapidly changing. In 1834 the Polish conservative turned Russian writer Osip Senkovskii founded the Library for Reading, which quickly outsold any other Russian journal with its thick issues that contained a mixture of light fiction, serious literature, non-fiction, and much chitchat from the editor himself. Pushkin was hoping to move into this market while offering more sophisticated material for the reader when fate intervened.

Pushkin had married a woman of great beauty, limited intelligence and depth, and great social ambitions. Her life centered on the houses of the great aristocracy, the court and its entertainments, its balls and intimate gatherings, which she attended as lady-in-waiting to the empress. There she met Georges-Charles D’Anthès, a young Alsatian-French nobleman serving in the Russian guards, a monarchist refugee from the French revolution of 1830. Adopted as a son by the Dutch ambassador Baron van Heeckeren, he revolved in the highest society and was utterly unscrupulous. He began a flirtation with Natalia Pushkina (how serious it was remains unclear to this day), and in November 1836, Pushkin received an anonymous letter that asserted the flirtation to be a real affair. He challenged D’Anthès to a duel, but Zhukovskii and others managed to patch up the quarrel. It erupted again a few months later and on January 27, 1837, it ended in a duel. In the snow on the outskirts of St. Petersburg the two opponents faced each other and D’Anthès fired first. Fatally wounded and bleeding profusely, Pushkin raised himself on his elbow and fired, but only inflicted a slight wound. His second brought him home where Zhukovskii got the best doctors in the city, those who treated the tsar, but they could do nothing. Pushkin sent a message to Nicholas, asking him for forgiveness (dueling was a crime) and Nicholas granted it, but advised him to take the last rites like a Christian, and promised to take care of his family. Count Mikhail Wielhorski, the poet Prince Peter Viazemskii, and Zhukovskii visited and stayed with him until he died. D’Anthes was expelled from Russia, and went on to a long career in his native France. Nicholas paid Pushkin’s debts and took care of his family and Natalia soon remarried.

Pushkin’s death was a huge event in the history of Russian culture, soon mythologized into martyrdom at the hands of an unfeeling aristocracy and court, but his death was the result of his deep roots in precisely that milieu. Though most of the later Russian writers were still noblemen, none were as much part of the court circle as was Pushkin. The closest to Pushkin’s social position was the poet Mikhail Lermontov, also a nobleman but without distinguished ancestors like Pushkin’s. His political views were not really radical, but his poetic reaction to Pushkin’s death earned him a transfer to the Caucasus, the scene of his greatest work, A Hero of Our Time. An interconnected series of stories, the book’s hero Pechorin is a sort of Onegin, this time serving in the army in the Caucasus but again placed between European education and the limits of Russian reality. On Lermontov’s return to St. Petersburg in 1838 he, too, frequented aristocratic salons if not the court, and as if repeating Pushkin’s fate, got into a duel over a woman with the son of the French ambassador. The duel ended in reconciliation, but Lermontov was sent back to the Caucasus. There he met his end in yet another duel in July 1841.

Pushkin and Lermontov were typical of the writers of their age though far more talented. Both noblemen, with many friends and relatives in the court, the government, and the army, they lived as did the men of their social rank. They were present at the great social events of the capital and spent much of their time playing cards, drinking, hunting, and occasionally visiting their country estates. The next generation of writers, though also noblemen, lacked the connections at court and experienced St. Petersburg less as the home of the court than as a great modern city.

The first of this new generation to emerge was Nikolai Gogol’. Gogol’ was the son of a provincial Ukrainian landowner, and on his father’s side even the noble ancestry was rather recent. He attended the lycée in nearby Nezhin, an institution of the highest educational quality but lacking the connections with the court and the high aristocracy of Pushkin’s school in Tsarskoe Selo. On graduation the young Gogol’ found a position in St. Petersburg at a school for the daughters of military officers. His livelihood came from the school and soon from his writings after his first great success, a series of comic stories from Ukrainian life, Evenings on a Farm near Dikan’ka. Gogol’ eventually met Pushkin, who published some of his stories, and Zhukovskii, who appreciated his talent but never played the role of patron with Gogol’ that he had in other cases. Gogol’ was something of a loner, and at first he did not need Zhukovskii’s patronage. There was already enough variety of outlets for his work and they paid enough to keep him going. Nevertheless, the Russian market was still too narrow to provide more than a modest living and Gogol’s poor health left him vulnerable. The solution found by Zhukovskii and others of his friends after 1840 was a series of direct grants from the tsar himself, one of the last examples of court patronage of literature. Nicholas I liked most of the work done by Gogol’, and the grants came regularly until the writer’s death.

Gogol’ brought new themes into Russian literature. His stories of St. Petersburg, often fantastic and grotesque, introduced an urban theme into Russian literature that was previously absent. The capital was growing, both because of the expansion of the central bureaucracy and because of the city’s role as a port and an industrial center. The St. Petersburg that Gogol’ knew was the city of the impoverished clerk and the lonely wanderer in a vast and cold mass of huge buildings, not the city of glittering balls and brilliant salons. The heroes of these stories were such little people as the clerk in “The Overcoat,” but St. Petersburg also inspired the fantastic strain in his writing, with stories such as “The Nose,” in which the nose of a minor bureaucrat leaves his face and roams around the city in a carriage wearing an official uniform.

Gogol’ remained all his life the product of the Ukrainian provinces, deeply religious, nationalistic, and conservative in his political views. He took the conservative ideal for Russia seriously and realized that the reality was different. His first play, “The Inspector General” of 1836, was a scathing satire of provincial life and official corruption. Poorly performed at first, it was not a success until much later, though it showed the direction in which he was heading. Nicholas I liked it, as he saw himself struggling with the corruption and incompetence of the Russian bureaucracy, and found an echo of that effort in the play. His greatest work, the novel Dead Souls (1842), was a picaresque account of the adventures of a swindler traveling through provincial Russia. Again Gogol’ saw Russia’s shortcomings from the point of view of a conservative ideal of autocracy and Orthodoxy, but it was a sign of the times that reaction to the novel divided very much along ideological lines. The pro-government conservatives Bulgarin and Senkovskii hated it. More independent conservatives, the Slavophiles, and the Westernizer Vissarion Belinskii loved it, but for different reasons. The Slavophiles saw it as an apotheosis of Russia and its mystical future, while Belinskii praised it for its unvarnished portrayal of Russia’s present.

The debate over Dead Souls was a harbinger of the future: literature was fast becoming a battleground of political and cultural ideology. It was changing in other respects, for Zhukovskii left for Europe in 1842 in search of better health and never returned to Russia. He had no replacement at the court, and Russian literature no longer had a patron with the ear of the tsar himself. By the 1840s the “fat journals” pioneered by Senkovskii and Pushkin fought lively and vituperative battles over Gogol’, Lermontov, Goethe, and Georges Sand. The most powerful of the younger writers was Fyodor Dostoevskii, whose early works took up the thread of Gogol’ in his Petersburg stories, with his own tales of impoverished seamstresses and other little people of the great metropolis. The commanding figure of the decade in criticism was the critic Vissarion Belinskii, the main spokesman of the Westernizers.

Belinskii came to be seen in Russia as the archetypical “committed” critic who judged works of art by largely utilitarian standards and by their significance for the reformation of Russian society. This judgment placed him in the straightjacket of the conceptions of a later generation, for Belinskii’s view of art was essentially historical, a view derived from his Hegelian youth. Belinskii got from Hegel the idea that art was one of the many manifestations of the Idea in history, alongside philosophy or the development of the state. Art was, in his words, “thinking in images,” and thus was the equivalent of political or social thought in another form. Since the development of the Idea in society was the progress of freedom, art in Russia should reflect the movement of the country toward that ideal. Art that did not was condemned to ultimate insignificance and was considered bad art to boot. This theoretical framework gave him a basis for his total rejection of older Russian culture, his qualified approval of the eighteenth century, and his enthusiastic approval of Pushkin, Lermontov and particularly Gogol’. In Gogol’ he saw a relentless critic of the existing order of Russian society, the satirist of nobility and state alike. His appreciation of Gogol’ was only partly correct, for Gogol’s satire came from a conservative position with a religious basis, the idea that Russia was not yet living up to its potential to create a society profoundly different from the West. Here Belinskii parted company with Gogol’ entirely, for the critic was a firm Westernizer. To him Russian society was only acceptable insofar as it approached the standard of an idealized West, a West that itself needed to be transformed by the French utopian socialism that became Belinskii’s credo.

The discussion of literature was to a large extent a discussion of political and social issues that could not otherwise be aired in print. Eventually they broke out into the open, or partly so. Gogol’s publication of his conservative manifesto, Selections from Correspondence with Friends, in 1847 created huge controversies, muffled by censorship, for he seemed to be not just supporting the existing state and church but losing faith in literature itself. Belinskii’s response, the letter to Gogol’ in 1847, became a classic example of liberal and radical thought in Russia for the next two generations. “The public…looks upon Russian writers as its only leaders, defenders, and saviors from the darkness of autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality.” In Belinskii’s mind, “Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism…but in the successes of civilization, enlightenment, and humanity.” The Russia of his day needed to start with the abolition of serfdom and corporal punishment and the establishment of legal order. Belinskii’s life was perhaps as important as his views, for he was the first important example of the Russian intelligentsia, the educated stratum of society that took Russian culture out of the hands of the nobility. Himself the grandson of a priest and the son of a military doctor, he was only technically a noble because of his father’s promotion in the army. He survived, and survived very poorly on his income from his articles and editiorial work in the journals where he published, most importantly The Contemporary, originally Pushkin’s journal and a publication that would have a remarkable future.

Belinskii’s literary tastes and views pointed to the future in other ways. One of his early friendships was with Ivan Turgenev, again a writer of noble origins and some wealth. Turgenev had come to Moscow from his provincial estate and made acquaintance with the Stankevich circle that included Herzen and Bakunin, whom Turgenev came to know better when he studied in Berlin. On his return to Russia in 1841 Turgenev became close friends with Belinskii, a friendship that lasted until the critic’s death in 1848. Turgenev shared Belinskii’s support of Western culture and his critical view of Russia, if not the critic’s radicalism. The great event of Turgenev’s youth was his meeting with the Spanish opera singer Pauline Garcia-Viardot in 1843, who came to St. Petersburg as one of the stars of the Italian company that was to have a major effect on Russian opera. The passion seems to have been mainly on Turgenev’s side, but it unlocked his creative powers. In his middle thirties he found his voice, first in his play “A Month in the Country,” and then in his series of stories of rural life, A Hunter’s Sketches (1847–1852). The Sketches, with their portraits of eccentric and domineering nobles and their very human (but unsentimentalized) serfs, caused a sensation. Turgenev’s were the not the first attempts to describe the life of the peasantry, but they were both the most effective by far and under their mild surface they conveyed the poverty and humiliation in which the great mass of the Russian people, the peasants, lived. The son of a despotic and sadistic mother who mistreated her serfs as well as her children, Turgenev knew what it meant to live under arbitrary power. The publication of such work in the darkest period of the reign of Nicholas was a major act of civil courage, but ironically it was not the Sketches that earned him his first brush with the authorities.

In 1852, just as the publication of the Hunter’s Sketches was proceeding, Gogol’ died. Turgenev had been acquainted with Gogol’ but was not a close friend. As a fellow writer, however, he admired him intensely, and was so moved by his death that he quickly wrote a short essay about Gogol’ and his significance for Russia and its literature. In St. Petersburg the publisher was afraid it would not pass censorship for there were many conservative officials who did not share the tsar’s approval of Gogol’. Turgenev sent the essay to Moscow, where it was approved and appeared in print. Turgenev was then arrested for violating the censorship rules, a charge that was legally dubious, but convincingly presented to Nicholas by the Third Section. The punishment was a month in prison followed by exile to his estate, time that he used to write another novella. The incident only confirmed Turgenev’s oppositional attitude to the autocracy.

11 The Era of the Great Reforms

Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War caused a tremendous political shock in the country. It was not the scale of the defeat but its revelation of the weakness of a political system that prized its unique conservatism on the European scene and its supposed military might above all. It was the autocracy that was defeated, all the more so because the long siege of Sevastopol demonstrated to many Russians that the army still had the spirit to fight, a spirit hampered by the backwardness of society and government. Russia’s backwardness was not only the result of the slow evolution of economy and society under the tutelage of Tsar Nicholas. The greatest problem was that the world was changing very quickly in the middle years of the nineteenth century, and the most rapid changes were taking place in Great Britain, Russia’s primary imperial rival. Railroads were transforming the landscape in all of Western Europe and the United States, building on and stimulating the rapid modernization of iron and steel production, thereby raising output to new heights. Besides railroads, all sorts of machines came into existence – improved steam engines, telegraph equipment, and huge metal-hulled ships. Britain and other powers imported increasing amounts of food and raw materials from colonies and distant countries in the Western hemisphere, sending out masses of cotton and wool cloth, machinery, and innumerable consumer goods. Society evolved to support all this growth, with high-speed presses to produce daily newspapers and rapidly expanding educational systems to produce engineers, lawyers, politicians, and an educated public to use the new products. In this new world, Russia was lagging behind. The reformers in the government realized all this and saw that Russia needed the new production techniques and a new economy simply to survive as a major power. They also realized that technology alone was not enough: Tsar Nicholas had built railroads, but had not succeeded in transforming the Russian economy. Russia would need a new legal system, a modernized and expanded educational system, and even some forms of public discussion of major issues. What Russia could not stand, the reformers believed, was a new political system. Most of them admired the emerging constitutional regimes in Europe, but believed that Russia was far too primitive with its illiterate peasantry, outmoded agriculture, and thin layer of educated people. Such a society could not sustain a free, constitutional government. For the foreseeable future, it would have to remain an autocracy.

12 From Serfdom to Nascent Capitalism

The city of St. Petersburg exemplified the transformation of Russia in the decades after the emancipation of the serfs. As the nineteenth century progressed, it changed from an administrative capital of government buildings and aristocratic residences with a seaport into a major industrial center served by railroads as well as the ever-expanding port and the older canal system.

Though built as a seaport on the Baltic, the shape of the older St. Petersburg was created by the Winter Palace and the ring of military and government buildings around it. Most of these were classical in style, and three or four-stories high at most. Peter had wanted to concentrate the actual government on the north side of the Neva River, on Vasil’ev Island, but the site was too remote in the absence of permanent bridges, and in any case the government needed to be near the center of power, the tsar. Thus the Winter Palace, on the south side of the river and near the western end of Nevskii Prospekt, the main street, quickly became the center of the city. The General Staff of the army and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were right across the Palace Square, the Ministry of Finance nearby, as well as the Senate, the Council of State, and other major offices. Only the expanded Ministry of the Interior came to occupy new buildings on the Fontanka River farther to the south. Trade and commerce, until mid-century, were concentrated along Nevskii Prospekt and on Vasil’ev Island, the latter home to the city’s large German and foreign merchant population.

The transformation of the city began to speed up after the Crimean War, as railroad building and new industries began to change the landscape. In these years St. Petersburg’s port was a great asset, for much of the equipment and raw materials for the new industries came from abroad. The great industrial boom of the 1890s changed all that, as Russia began to rely more on internal resources. Metallurgy and machine building became the city’s biggest industries. Located primarily on the outskirts, the huge factories with smoking chimneys replaced the suburban villas, forests, and villages of former times. The port turned into a giant ship-building yard. Factories with newer technology, such as the electric industries, were built in the center of the town, so that the city never acquired the radical social segregation characteristic of Western cities at the time. The industrial boom also brought a tremendous expansion in banking and finance, centered still on Nevskii Prospekt and the adjoining streets.

The economic boom changed the city in other ways. The population doubled between the 1890s and 1914, from about a million to around two million. Most of these new residents were workmen, living in barracks near the main factories, often without their families who remained back in their native villages. At the other end of the social scale, the newly rich bankers and railroad kings bought or built grand mansions on the river near the center of town. Many of the great aristocrats were heavily invested in the new industries, and their increased wealth showed itself in ever more luxurious residences in and around the city. The boom also brought a new middle class into being, employees of the new businesses, engineers and technicians, and the many schoolteachers, doctors, and retailers who served them. The burgeoning population and its needs brought a boom in construction, especially along the central streets and on the northern edge of the city. The new buildings displayed the architectural fads of the time, neo-Renaissance, neo-Baroque, and often the Russian versions of art nouveau. The strictly classical St. Petersburg was becoming a much more eclectic city, but the classical core remained. Builders were not allowed to build higher than the Winter Palace, so there were limits to the scope of change. The result was also a city very much less densely built up than Paris or Berlin, even if much of it lacked formal public parks.

Daily life changed, especially after 1900. New department stores sprang up around the city, one off Nevskii Prospekt even built as an investment by the Imperial Corps of Guards Regiments. Farther down the street were the new Singer Sewing Machine building and the Eliseev Delicatessen, with its imported and domestic stocks for the wealthy gourmet. The city sponsored or built telephone service, and new sewer and water systems were financed through loans from foreign banks. In 1907 Westinghouse and Russian investors opened the city’s first electric tram lines, which quickly came to cover most of the city. Electric lights lit up the main streets in the center and more and more gas lights in other parts of town illuminated the winter dark and fog. New bridges across the Neva contributed to the charm of the city’s waterfront but also made communication among its various parts easy for the first time.

The social life of the city was centered on the court. Until the 1890s the court balls and other grand events provided a glittering backdrop to the dramas of life and politics in the capital. The great aristocratic houses were not far behind. They too put on magnificent entertainments, some of them in private theaters in their palaces, like the one in the Yusupov palace, with professional artists. The great imperial theaters, especially the Mariinskii, were another venue for the display of wealth by the old aristocracy and the newly rich as well. For the intelligentsia and the middle classes, the legitimate stage, state financed and private, provided the more “advanced” culture they craved. On the edges of the city where the working people lived were popular theaters, many of them outdoors in the summer, which provided cheap entertainment for the masses. A whole range of restaurants, from the elite establishments off Nevskii Prospekt to the lowest dives on the edge of town, filled the various needs of a variegated population. St. Petersburg was very much the artistic center of Russia. The imperial ballet at the Mariinskii Theater was the darling of the aristocracy, but the opera and stage flourished as well. Most of the new trends in Russian painting, from World of Art to suprematism, came into being in St. Petersburg, and the major writers from the 1890s onward were almost all based in the city.

For all its artistic glory, St. Petersburg remained quintessentially a center of political power. After 1905 the main newspapers of the legal political parties were published in St. Petersburg, reporting on the government as well as the new Duma. The Duma occupied the old palace of Catherine’s favorite Potemkin, to the east of the main center of power. Politics remained the principal concern of the tsar, and his presence in the city was essential to the functioning of the state. In actual fact Nicholas II spent relatively little time in the city itself, preferring a quieter life at nearby Tsarskoe Selo or Peterhof, or even his Crimean estates. He rarely attended the theater, restricting his social events to court balls and a few other crucial ceremonies, a practice that did not win the approval of the aristocracy. The tsar and his advisors were nervous about public appearances in the face of the persistent terror campaign waged by the populist revolutionaries, and Nicholas personally preferred a simple life with his family. These were understandable decisions, but they contributed to the drift and instability of power at a time of rapid social and political change. The state had been central to Russian development for centuries, and suddenly the ship seemed to have no pilot.

13 The Golden Age of Russian Culture

The development of Russian society in the reform era profoundly affected Russian culture, both by changing the institutional environment of culture and by calling forth new intellectual and artistic impulses. For almost all spheres of thought and creation, the period was the first great age of Russian culture, and the first one to bring that culture an audience beyond its boundaries. By the 1880s Russia had become part of the world, not just as a major political power but as a major contributor to the arts and even to science.

14 Russia as an Empire

The Russian Empire’s foreign wars over the centuries laid the foundation for its expansion to include the whole of northern Eurasia. Of course by British standards, the results were not impressive. Most of the Russian Empire lay in Siberia, the largest part of which was seemingly impenetrable forest and tundra. Russia’s newest acquisitions in Central Asia were small in population and were poor – no equivalent to India or even Burma. The resultant state included extensive areas on its borders with non-Russian populations, effectively two empires, a traditional land empire in Europe and an attempted imitation of the British example in Central Asia. In both west and south internal and foreign politics were inextricably intertwined.

Nicholas I had understood that Russia’s empire had very limited possibilities for expansion. After 1828 its main effort went into subduing the Caucasian mountain peoples already within Russia rather than the conquest of new territory. In Central Asia the army also concentrated on strengthening the existing frontier and control of the Kazakhs of the steppe while making no serious attempt at expansion. Even in the Balkans, Nicholas had pursued a status quo policy, preferring to maintain Russian influence in a unitary Ottoman state rather than run the risks of partition schemes. Even this modest policy had been too much for Britain and France, but it reflected the tsar’s strategic prudence as well as his tactical blunders. The new situation after Crimea brought different possibilities.

The treaty of Paris not only ended the Crimean War but put an end to hopes of Russian influence on the Ottomans, leaving Russia with only the local nationalist movements in Serbia and Bulgaria as potential allies. Bands of insurgents with plans for democratic republics, the Balkan nationalists were unlikely allies for the Russian empire, and the international and military position of Russia, weakened by defeat and saddled with debts and an enormous deficit, rendered Russia’s European policy essentially passive. The need for stability on the European border also arose from the feeling that the Russian Empire’s boundary in the west was very difficult to defend, running an enormous length through territories poorly served by communications. The answer would be railroads, but they took a long time to build. Threatening noises from Britain and France during the Polish revolt in 1863–64 caused nightmares in St. Petersburg, but they came to nothing, in large part because of the firm Russian alliance with Prussia, now under its new chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. The Prussian alliance meant that the western boundary was largely secure, especially as Bismarck defeated Russia’s rivals, Austria and then Napoleon III, establishing in the process a powerful new state in the unified imperial Germany, for the time being Russia’s friend.

Preoccupation in Europe with Germany and Italy and the pacific policies of Russia’s foreign minister, Prince Gorchakov, secured peace in the 1860s. Russia could gradually reform itself and also begin to rebuild its army on more modern lines, but crisis in the Balkans soon created a new dilemma. The Serbian and Bulgarian revolutionaries had repeatedly attempted insurgencies inside Ottoman territories, calling on the Slavic and Orthodox peoples to rise against their Turkish masters. The response was increasingly savage reprisals, until in 1875 the Serbs of Bosnia revolted again and were able to hold their own for several months before the Ottomans crushed the revolt, in the process perpetrating the largest genocide in modern European history up to World War I. The next year the Bulgarians rose as well, and Turkish irregular units exterminated entire villages, causing even English public opinion to waver in its support of the Turks. Here was a chance for Russia to reassert itself and secure influence in the Balkans, and in 1877 Russia proposed to the Turks an autonomous status for the rebel areas. The Ottomans refused, and Russia declared war. The war that ensued was bloody but relatively short. The Turks had first-class fortresses, were well supplied with European weapons, and fought with their usual courage and determination. The Russian army, though larger, was still in the process of reformation and hampered by old-fashioned and unimaginative generals. After a series of bloody assaults on the Turkish forts, the Russians finally pushed their way over the mountains and arrived near Istanbul in 1878. They then made a treaty with the Turks that established Bulgaria as the main Slavic state in the Balkans, one that would presumably become a Russian client. This alarmed Britain and Austria, and the result was the treaty of Berlin, which created a much smaller Bulgaria with a German monarch. Austria was allowed to take Bosnia as a protectorate. This was Bismarck’s work, and it was a qualified defeat for Russia after all the sacrifices and heroism of the war.

The Russian Empire had become a conglomerate of two very different sorts of empire, each posing its own problems for St. Petersburg. At the same time as the failure in the Balkans, a new empire arose in Central Asia, where Russian generals overwhelmed the local khanates of Kokand, Bukhara, and Khiva. The first was entirely annexed to the empire, while the latter, much reduced in territory, became Russian protectorates. By the 1880s all of Central Asia was directly or indirectly under Russian rule. In explicit imitation of British India, Russia set out to build a modern colonial empire.

On the western border, the issues were mainly those of nationality, not colonialism. The Poles posed the chief national issue throughout the nineteenth century and, after mid-century, it was the Jews. For quite different reasons, neither Poles nor Jews fit well into the imperial structure. The Poles were seen in the government as a hostile element, and for many government officials the Jews were not able to assimilate and exploited the local peasantry. The Polish revolts and the pogroms directed against Jews added an element of violence absent in relations with the other European minorities of the empire. Finland, in contrast, was quiet and largely loyal to the tsar until the 1890s. Both Poland and Finland were important to a large extent for military reasons, as they both formed part of the crucial western frontier. The economies of both western borderlands contributed to the overall prosperity of the empire, but Russians had few investments there in either land or industry. In population together the Poles and Finns were less than ten percent of the total population of the empire. The largest non-Russian group in the European part of the empire was actually the Ukrainians (about seventeen percent), whose ambiguous ethnicity and national consciousness kept them on the margins of Russian politics until 1905.

The integration of the western borderlands of the Russian Empire had depended since the eighteenth century on the inclusion of local elites in the imperial power structure. The ruling circles of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg were very far from uniformly Russian. Prominent Germans included Nicholas’ minister of finances Georg Kankrin, his foreign minister Karl von Nesselrode and the head of the Third Section, Alexander von Benckendorf. Among the Ukrainians in the imperial elite were minister of internal affairs Viktor Kochubei and the victorious field marshal Ivan Paskevich, the viceroy of Warsaw after 1830. Finlanders were important in the army and navy, and two of them (Arvid Adlolf Etholén and Johan Hampus Furuhjelm) were governors of Alaska in its Russian period. The diplomatic core had several princes Lieven, Baron Nicolai, and a host of others, as did the court and the army. Only the Polish nobility, loyal to its traditions of Polish statehood, held back from Russian service, aside from a few prominent exceptions.

The reliance on noble supporters of the Romanov dynasty, so successful earlier on, had one shortcoming. In the course of the century the development of commercial and then industrial capitalism, however slow by European standards, changed the society of the empire. In the western borderlands the result was the declining economic fortunes of the nobility, the principal support of the empire. Businessmen, on the other hand, in Finland, Poland, and other western areas benefited considerably from the imperial market and were willing to cooperate (within limits), but the aristocratic conservatism of the court and most of the ruling elite made an arrangement with newer social groups difficult or impossible. The Russian empire could not fully abandon its alliance with the local nobilities, nor could they survive without the tsars, and they all went down to destruction together in 1917.

15 Autocracy in Decline

The quarter of a century from the assassination of Alexander II until the 1905 Revolution was one of political stagnation. The response of the new government to the assassination was to stop the process of reform, to publicly affirm the necessity of autocracy, and to formulate plans for counter-reforms. The latter came to little, but the government took advantage of every possibility to block criticism, political discussion, and organization among the public. Though it returned to sponsoring economic development in the 1890s under Minister of Finance Sergei Witte, it refused to recognize the implications of the further modernization of society that resulted in part from its own measures. The increasing isolation of the government and its own internal lack of coordination led to the botched attempt at modern imperialism in Manchuria, an attempt resulting in a failed war with Japan that nearly brought down the monarchy.

16 War and Revolution

The Russian revolution of 1917 was one of the many consequences of the First World War. The war placed strains on the Russian state and society that neither could withstand. The result was six years of war and upheaval that created the Soviet Union.

17 Compromise and Preparation

The end of the Civil War presented the Soviet leadership with a whole series of new issues, some immediate and some more long term. If the White armies were defeated, internal discontent was growing rapidly, fueled by the catastrophic economic situation and resentment of the party dictatorship. In 1920 in the Tambov province in central Russia a major revolt of the peasantry broke out, largely unpolitical but no less fervent. It required major army forces under Tukhachevskii to suppress it. As the army moved into Tambov province, the sailors of Kronstadt rose in revolt. The revolt at the naval base in the harbor of Petrograd was much more visible and more political. The sailors had been crucial supporters of the Bolsheviks in 1917, and now they were calling for Soviets to be elected without Communists, a direct challenge to the emerging Soviet system. At the end of March, 1921, Trotsky sent troops across the ice to retake the fort with much loss of life, the whole event illustrating the fragility of Soviet power. The revolts and the obvious failure of War Communism led to a sharp turn in economic policy. As the fighting raged in Kronstadt, Lenin and the party abolished the system of compulsory grain deliveries, substituting a tax in kind and permitting the peasantry to trade freely in the products left after the payment of the new tax. This step was the foundation of the New Economic Policy, known as NEP. A return to a money economy soon followed, and with it came permission from the state, even encouragement, for private individuals to trade and set up businesses to supply a population starved of the most basic consumer goods. Socialism was no longer on the immediate agenda. Industrial recovery would eventually provide a basis for further development, and at an indefinite point in the future peasant agriculture would be drawn somehow into the socialist system (a process called “collectivization”).

The next immediate issue was the famine that appeared in 1922, the result of years of devastation, neglect of equipment and infrastructure, the absence of peasants from the fields while fighting in the various armies during the Civil War, the Soviet grain requisitions that discouraged farming, and general death and destruction. The Soviets took up the offer of the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover, fresh from relief operations in Belgium, to provide food to stricken areas in the south and the Volga region. Relief and the return of peace could contain the famine, but longer-term issues remained. The outcome of the revolution and civil war was that the peasantry finally controlled virtually all arable land in Russia. With the urban economy devastated, however, they at first had little incentive to sell their grain to the cities. Yet NEP depended precisely on the peasant sale of grain for consumer goods, and eventually it worked. The peasants now had cloth, industrially manufactured consumer goods, and some farm equipment to buy in return for their grain. At this point, the party did little to advance any sort of socialist agriculture. It abandoned the experiments with the “communes” of the Civil War era, and settled for modest cooperatives among the peasants while trying to build a basic party network among them, especially from younger peasants who had served in the Red Army.

The result was a certain return to normalcy on the part of urban society, but that was very much a matter of the surface of things. In reality, all had changed. The old state, upper classes, and much of the intelligentsia were gone, dead, marginalized, or abroad. In their place was the new party-state, the core of which was the Communist Party. In the old palaces of the nobility the Party set up museums and kindergartens, party offices and schools, and Cheka headquarters and administrative offices. Interspersed among drab new institutions were the more garish shops and restaurants of the Nepmen (as the new businessmen were called) with their hints of luxury and hedonism. Bright lights reappeared and private restaurants featured jazz bands and European cabaret acts. Advertisements for privately manufactured rubber boots and champagne hung alongside banners calling for world revolution. Prostitutes and smugglers rubbed shoulders with German Comintern agents and Latvian Cheka officers. Workers were enrolled in instant higher education projects (the “Workers’ Faculties”) and peasants came to the cities looking for unskilled work as before.

The Soviet Union of the 1920s was a colorful place, but there was more than an easier daily life in the cities. The economy revived from the catastrophic situation of 1920; indeed it revived much faster than the party leadership expected. Instead of decades of rebuilding, production in almost all areas had rebounded by 1926 to pre-war levels, in some areas exceeding them. Of course this was merely a revival, and in the years since 1914 the world had not stood still. Especially in the United States and Germany, new technologies were changing the landscape, and the Soviet Union had merely rebuilt the pre-war world. Automobiles, new chemical industries, aircraft, and radio technology were all new and growing rapidly in the West. The USSR would have to move very fast just to catch up. Unfortunately one crucial area lagged behind: agriculture. The problem was not total production, for the country produced almost exactly the same amount of grain – the crucial commodity – as in 1914, but now much less came to market. On average the peasants marketed only a bit more than half of the amount of grain marketed before the war. Explanations for this phenomenon vary, but it seems that it was the result of land seizures in the summer of 1917. Large estates, which had been market-oriented, disappeared, and the distribution of land among the peasants was radically equalized. Well-off peasants (the kulaks) did remain in the villages, but most land went to middling producers who consumed more of their harvest than before the war. Soviet pricing policies increased the problem, as the peasants thought the state purchase prices were too low. Here was the dilemma: if the country was to continue to industrialize, and to keep up with the West, it would need vast new industries and new cities, and their workers would need food. How to get it? Agriculture would have to become more productive, but how and how fast? Thus the rather technical questions of balancing industrial growth rates and modernizing agriculture became the object of increasingly acrimonious debate and vicious internal struggles inside the leadership of the Communist Party. The outcome of these debates and struggle was the supreme power of Joseph Stalin.

The Civil War had further centralized an already centralized party and also imbued it with a civil war mentality. All disagreements became necessarily matters of life and death – all opponents were covert enemies of the entire revolutionary idea. Lenin and Trotsky defended and practiced terror against the Whites and other enemies. The remaining moderate socialist parties, the Mensheviks and Left SRs as well as the anarchists were suppressed. Not surprisingly, the end of the Civil War had no effect on the Bolshevik mentality, and the demands for ideological unity, if anything, became sharper. Personality clashes and differences in strategy, however, militated against unity. Lenin, in his last writings, was critical of all of the major figures – Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin, and others – but offered no clear choice among the leadership. The first major dispute broke out in 1923, as Lenin’s health deteriorated after several strokes. Trotsky and a number of his allies from the Civil War began to criticize the “bureaucratic tendencies” in the party. Then in January 1924, Lenin died. The mantle of leadership was not passed on to any one man: Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were the dominant figures. In 1922 the Party Congress had appointed Stalin General Secretary of the party, a position he held until his death. It gave him control or at least knowledge of all appointments in the party to any positions of significance. Bukharin, as editor of Pravda, the party newspaper, was their most important ally. Trotsky still possessed great power and prestige but the others did not trust him. As the Commissar of War for many years, he seemed the most likely to become the Bonaparte of the Russian Revolution. If not as well educated as Bukharin, he was sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and arrogant – too aloof to form powerful allies. Trotsky’s Menshevik past continued to haunt him. He also seriously underestimated Stalin, thinking him a provincial boor who was only good at bureaucratic maneuvers. Stalin, as a Georgian with a heavy accent, was in some ways even more of an outsider than Trotsky, but he had to his credit long years of faithful service to the party and an unflinching loyalty to Bolshevism. He had not spent long years abroad before 1917, and in that sense was more part of the Russian scene and more familiar to the party rank and file than the other leaders. Unlike Trotsky, he did not read French novels when bored at party meetings.

These biographical details would be only curiosities of the time if they did not come into play when real and basic issues arose in the party leadership over the future of the country. The most important of these was the controversy over “socialism in one country,” both for its own sake and for the implications it had for decisions in so many areas.

The struggle began in the last years of Lenin’s life, the first major one being Trotsky’s 1923 opposition platform. Trotsky’s main point was that the party was becoming less democratic and more bureaucratic through the practice of appointing its officials through Stalin’s secretariat rather than by election. His letter to the party leadership on this issue sparked an intense discussion that eventually came out into the open just on the eve of Lenin’s death on January 21, 1924. His opponents were Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev on this issue, the three forming a triumvirate that ruled the party and the country after Lenin’s death. Trotsky’s opposition for the moment produced some concessions, but the triumvirate remained in control. In any case the dispute was not as radical as it might seem, as Trotsky was a principled supporter of a centralized and authoritarian party. All he wanted was a little room for maneuver. More basic disagreements quickly emerged. Trotsky believed that the revolution could not survive, and socialism could not be built in the Soviet Union unless there were revolutions in the advanced countries of the West. Only fraternal socialist aid could overcome Russia’s backwardness. In the meantime, the USSR needed to pursue a policy of super-accelerated industrialization. The economist Evgenii Preobrazhenskii supported Trotsky on the issue of party structure, but also propounded a more detailed economic platform. His idea was simply to strip resources from the countryside by confiscations and other methods reminiscent of War Communism and use them for extremely rapid industrialization. The dilemma, as Preobrazhenskii saw it, was that the existence of private, small-scale peasant farming would lead to the strengthening of capitalism within the Soviet Union. He shared with Trotsky the idea that the Soviet Union could never survive as a socialist society encircled by capitalism: revolution in the advanced countries was essential to the building of socialism in the USSR, but in the short run extreme measures were necessary to ensure that the country would still be around when the revolution came in the West. This was the platform of the Left Opposition, as it came to be known.

This perspective met furious rejection from Bukharin, whose position as editor of Pravda meant that his views would receive wide circulation. Bukharin’s platform was a strident defense of NEP. He ridiculed the super-industrialization schemes of the opposition and explained that the crucial issue was the recovery of agriculture and the gradual enrichment of the peasants. As long as the party controlled the state and industry remained in state hands, there was nothing to fear from the peasants and the country would move rapidly toward a socialist industrial society. Stalin allied with Bukharin and himself began to formulate the notion of “socialism in one country,” the idea that the USSR alone could totally transform its society, including its agriculture, before the ultimate triumph of socialism in the West. For Stalin did not reject the prospect of world revolution, as he was convinced that the capitalist powers would eventually unleash a new world war and that revolution would come out of it if not earlier. Where he differed from Trotsky was in the belief that the Soviet Union could manage to build a socialist society on its own while waiting for revolution abroad.

The effect of the struggle was first to marginalize Trotsky, who lost his position as head of the War Commissariat and other offices in 1925. In that same year Zinoviev and Kamenev switched their allegiance, coming out in opposition to Stalin and Bukharin. For Zinoviev and Kamenev the main issue before had been fear of Trotsky: now they feared Stalin more. The now united opposition failed to win much support in the party and in 1926 Stalin had Zinoviev removed from his position as head of the party in Leningrad (Petrograd had acquired another new name on Lenin’s death). Thus the opposition had no longer any substantial base in the organization of the party. Stalin and Bukharin triumphed at the end of 1927. The NEP policy triumphed, it seemed, if with an increased push toward industrialization. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were expelled from the party along with their followers. Zinoviev and Kamenev soon recanted their errors and were readmitted, but Trotsky went first into exile in Alma-ata, and then was expelled from the country in 1929. Stalin had utterly defeated the opposition, and it seemed that NEP might continue.

Stalin’s victory went along with increasing prohibitions on dissent in the party and particularly on the formation of factions and oppositional platforms. Before the principle of absolute ideological unity could triumph, one last major dispute shook up the party leadership. Starting early in 1928, Stalin and his supporters changed their plans entirely. The cause was a drop in grain procured by the state agencies to feed the cities at the end of 1927. Stalin believed that the peasantry, mainly the kulaks, were simply holding grain back in the hopes of better prices or even to harm the Soviet state. His response was to organize an expedition of party officials led by himself into the Urals and Siberia early in 1928 to seize the grain. His expedition returned with freight cars loaded with grain, and he proclaimed it a success. Stalin and his allies now moved toward a policy of rapid industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture, effectively the end of NEP. The new policy provoked opposition from Bukharin as well as from Mikhail Tomskii, the head of the trade unions, and Aleksei Rykov, the Soviet Prime Minister. Basically their platform was simply that NEP was working out well, in spite of occasional problems, and that there was no need to force the pace, either in industry or the countryside. The Right Opposition was less of a defined group than the Left and had much more support in the party than the small group of Trotskyists and followers of Zinoviev and Kamenev. Nevertheless, Stalin fought it to extinction, expelling the Rights from the leadership and from the party by the end of 1929. Their many followers, especially in the party organization in Moscow, followed them into defeat. Stalin now had complete control over the central leadership of the party.

18 Revolutions in Russian Culture

Unlike Russia’s state and society, its culture did not experience such a sharp break in 1917. The period from about 1890 to the middle of the 1920s was full of artistic revolutions, happening simultaneously and in entirely different directions. These revolutions shared many characteristics with artistic movements in the rest of the world, but paradoxically the Russian culture of the Silver Age, as it is known (by comparison to the Golden Age in the nineteenth century) has never acquired an audience outside of Russia comparable to that which the writers and musicians of the earlier period secured. Perhaps one of the main reasons is that most of the truly talented writers of the Silver Age were poets, masters of that most untranslatable of art forms. The natural scientists, in contrast, began to acquire an international audience, in large part because of the efforts of the Soviet regime to encourage and use the sciences to build a new society.

19 Building Utopia

Starting in 1929, the Soviet leadership began to transform the society of the USSR, to build an industrialized modern state, but not a capitalist state. The new society was to realize the old dream of socialism, a place without private property where the state ran and managed production of goods and services for the benefit of everyone. This was the idea. The reality that emerged after more than a decade of upheaval served as the framework of the Soviet Union until its demise two generations later.

The basic outlines were in place at the end of 1927 with the first five-year plan and the course toward collectivization of agriculture. The plan was to last from the beginning of 1928 to the end of 1932, and called for a twenty percent annual increase in industrial production, a rate of growth that was unheard of at the time. Such a growth rate implied a huge increase in urban population, and that required much more food than the country produced with its backward peasant agriculture. To complicate matters, grain exports were the Soviet Union’s main source of hard currency to buy the new industrial equipment abroad that was essential for rapid industrialization. The solution was to be the collectivization of agriculture, which would increase per acre yield and free millions of hands to work in the new industry. The original plan for the pace of collectivization was moderate, with about a fifth of peasant households to be collectivized by the end of 1932.

The first thing that went wrong was the crisis in grain procurements early in 1928. The response of Stalin and the leadership was to return to grain requisitioning such as they had practiced in the Civil War. In 1929 the food supply situation was so serious that local authorities began to introduce rationing, soon established throughout the country. The crisis also stimulated Stalin and his supporters toward faster industrialization, for they felt that it showed that the kulak was getting stronger and could eventually make socialism impossible. The solution was to change the first five-year plan in 1929, with vastly increased production targets for state industries and huge construction schemes. These were the decisions that led to the opposition of Bukharin and the “rights,” so that the plan was also political. To fulfill the targets and discredit the “rights,” Stalin also had to make the speeded up plans work at whatever cost. The result of the speedups was that the plan ceased to work: managers in the targeted areas took supplies and workers wherever they could get them at whatever cost, wrecking the balances in the plan. The quality of production suffered as the physical output target consumed all attention. As food supplies decreased, the factories began to find their own sources, making semi-legal deals with farms to supply the factory dining rooms, which quickly became the main sources of food for their workers.

The plan called not just for more production but also for a total modernization of the key industrial sectors. The Soviet engineers and planners wanted to follow American industrial models such as Henry Ford’s River Rouge auto plant, which relied on a moving production line rather than on many highly skilled workmen as was the case in Europe. To the Soviets, with millions of unskilled workers, this seemed to be the solution and the great Soviet tractor (and tank) factories were set up on these lines. The tractor factories were crucial to the collectivization plan, but for them as for everything else the country needed far more iron and steel for machines. Throughout the world this was the great age of metal and machines, and if the USSR was to have them, it would have to build huge new complexes. A giant dam on the Dniepr River was built to provide electricity for Ukrainian industry. In the Urals a great industrial base began to grow with whole new cities like Magnitogorsk built from scratch in order to mine iron ore. These were what were called “shock construction” sites, and resources were pulled from everywhere to supply them. The party mobilized youth to work there – the youth lived in tents and mud huts – as a grand campaign to continue the work of the revolution. The press plastered their achievements all over the country, and the most successful “shock workers” saw their pictures in Pravda and on billboards.

The first five-year plan was to be the great turning point in the building of socialism, the decisive break with the past, and Stalin and his allies saw it as a class war. The organs of the state and party under the Georgian Bolshevik Sergo Ordzhonikidze turned their fire first on industrial management, enlisting former Trotskyists to ferret out alleged bureaucratism. Workers and local party committees were encouraged to inform on their bosses, accusing them of incompetence, or even worse, “wrecking.” Anyone responsible for a factory where production flagged or accidents were frequent could be accused of consciously trying to stop the building of socialism by sabotage. Local activists and the GPU (Main Political Administration, successor to the Cheka) also went after Communist managers with enthusiasm, but anyone from the old order was a particular target. During these years the GPU staged show trials of “enemies,” engineers and managers from the pre-revolutionary elites, Menshevik economists, agrarian experts who had supported the SRs or liberals before 1917, and other “former people.” The attack on the old intelligentsia went far beyond the economic sphere: historians and literary scholars, even some natural scientists were arrested and tried. In the non-Russian republics the authorities went after the local intelligentsia as well, accusing them of links with foreign states and various separatist schemes. Most of the managers and engineers were accused of “wrecking”; that is, intentionally causing accidents and slowing down production, usually on the orders of émigré organizations and foreign intelligence agencies. By 1930 these methods had discredited much of the existing administrative units, and Stalin placed Ordzhonikidze in charge of the Supreme Economic Council, where he brought his staff, many former Trotskyists among them, to manage the speedup of the plan.

The ever-increasing plan targets and the chaos that resulted from collectivization meant that millions of people were displaced, roaming the country from one construction site to another. Housing became an acute problem, especially in Moscow and other big or new cities. Most of the urban population came to live in communal apartments, usually older apartments cut up into several rooms with a common kitchen and bathrooms. Whole families lived in one room or two small rooms. In many places workers lived in barracks or “temporary” housing. Initially the plan had called for rapid expansion of at least basic consumer goods, but the increasing targets for heavy industry gutted the production of textiles and other basic commodities. To make things worse, the series of war scares in the late 1920s encouraged massive investment in the military industry until 1934, and this investment reached levels not seen again until the eve of World War II. The standard of living of the population began to fall precipitously. In a few places strikes even broke out over the shortages of food supplies. The managers in the crucial industries could not maintain their workforces without radical measures, and they went beyond supplying food in the factory cafeterias to building apartment houses and schools, tram lines, and clinics for their workers. A whole new type of hierarchy appeared in Soviet society, which put not just the party elite but also entire factories and industries above the rest. Workers in priority industries like the auto and tractor factories or the defense complex managed to get through these years with at least the basic needs of life supplied, while at textile factories or other light industries, many of them with predominantly female work forces, the workers had too little food even to work a full day.

City life meant intense privation, even for the youthful enthusiasts at shock construction sites. These hardships were nothing compared to the disasters of collectivization. At the beginning the party was not even clear what the new collective farm was to look like: was it to be some sort of association of peasant households for common planting and harvesting, or was it to be a total commune with farmers living in communal housing and eating together, as well as farming all the land together? And how fast was it to proceed, and how? In any case, it was in the autumn of 1929 when Stalin decided to go for as much collectivization as he could get. To prepare the ground the leadership decided on the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” and the GPU set out to round up and deport the kulaks. Several thousand were executed, but nearly two million were deported to the north, the Urals and Siberia, where they were put in “special settlements” to cut timber or sometimes to work in the mines or on construction. They arrived in remote areas where they had to build their own houses, often in the dead of winter without any facilities, medical care, or established food supplies. Thousands escaped and thousands died, until in 1931 the GPU took over the special settlements, the first large group to come under the auspices of the GULAG. For the time being, the special settlers vastly outnumbered the prisoners in actual concentration camps.

With the kulaks out of the way, collectivization went on at top speed. Under intense pressure from rural party officials as well as emissaries sent from the cities, the peasants were convinced to abandon their strips of land and combine them, in theory at least, into one huge farm to be worked together. To make matters worse, the authorities in some areas tried to push the peasants not just into collective farms but even into communes, the super-collectivized units with communal living and eating arrangements. By early 1930, almost half of the peasants had agreed to join a collective, but they also slaughtered their livestock, not wanting to waste them in the new order. There was as yet no equipment to work the farms beyond the old plows and horses, whose numbers were rapidly decreasing. Opposition was rife, with thousands of “incidents,” ranging from real rebellions to minor objections blown up into anti-Soviet demonstrations by the GPU. Early in 1930 Stalin realized that he had to pull back. The economic results of forcing the peasants into collective farms were becoming serious, and he published an article in Pravda under the title, “Dizzy with Success.” Local party members were getting too enthusiastic, he wrote, and were pursuing target numbers for their own sake, not paying enough attention to local circumstances and the mood of the peasantry. After the article, the number of collective farms fell rapidly and the communes were abandoned, but the process did not stop, it only paused and then resumed at a slower pace. In the meantime, disaster struck.

As collectivization continued, with all the disruptions that it caused, the weather played a cruel trick. In 1931 and 1932 bad weather struck – cold in some areas and drought in others – in the Ukraine and southern Russia, the main grain producing areas. By the summer of 1932 this meant famine that spanned a wide belt running from the Polish border into Siberia. The authorities reacted slowly, keeping up their collections of grains at the amount fixed in better years. Only toward the end of the year did they begin to ease off, but it was already too late, and famine had spread taking with it some five to seven million peasants throughout the southern regions of the USSR, about half of these in the Ukraine. The casualties of the famine, not the kulaks, turned out to be the principal victims of collectivization. The drought hit the peasants when the numbers of livestock had fallen, on average, by half and they had no reserves of grain; all of this was the result of the chaos of collectivization and the relentless collection of grain for the cities. The famine disturbed the authorities, but they did very little about it. Stalin did not take any extraordinary methods against the famine, which crushed opposition to collectivization. Not until better weather in 1933 produced a better harvest did the famine come to an end.

By the middle of the 1930s the basic outlines of the Soviet collective farm, the kolhoz, were in place, for the notion of setting up communes had been abandoned. The Russian village had always been a community, with houses clustered in the village surrounded by the fields. What was new was that the fields were now under the control of the kolhoz (actual property rights were still vested in the state). The kolhoz had a chairman and a governing board that set the farming tasks, which the peasants carried out together, plowing and sowing, harvesting and taking care of the livestock. For their work on the farm the peasants received payment, not in money but in the form of part of the harvest calculated by a system known as “labor-days.” The bulk of the harvest went to the state at a fixed price, one that favored the state and the cities over the kolhoz.

The kolhoz rarely owned its own machinery. As the new tractor factories came on line, the tractors went to a new institution, the Machine-Tractor Station, some eight thousand of them by the end of the decade. These were state operations, and they rented out the tractors and other machinery with the drivers and workers, providing the essential equipment for the kolhoz as well as assuring state control over the collective farms. If the machinery put the state into farming directly, the market did not disappear entirely in the countryside. Unlike the cities, where all retail trade was in state hands by the early 1930s, the peasantry was explicitly granted the right to farm small private plots alongside their houses. They used them primarily for vegetables and smaller livestock and took the produce to the peasant markets that reappeared in all Soviet cities. Though the private plots were only about four percent of the kolhoz land, they produced forty percent of vegetables and potatoes and over sixty-six percent of the meat coming from the collective farms. Their products were sold at prices much above those fixed in the stories and factory cafeterias, but at least they were available.

From 1933 to about 1936 the tension and upheaval in Soviet society lessened considerably. The rightists in the party had capitulated and publicly recanted their errors as had the Trotskyists, and Bukharin became the editor of Izvestiia. In 1932 the government abolished the Supreme Economic Council, replacing it with a series of People’s Commissariats for different branches of industry. The most important was the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, headed by Ordzhonikidze. It seemed that a more rational style of economic management had triumphed, for Ordzhonikidze took with him to the new organization many of the former Left Oppositionists and even many “bourgeois specialists” like those whom he had harassed in 1926–1929. New methods of increasing productivity in the work force emerged. In 1935 the Donbass miner Aleksei Stakhanov managed to produce fourteen times his norm of coal and was proclaimed a national hero. Other workers tried to imitate the simple reorganization of work methods that he used to achieve the goal, and were rewarded as Stakhanovites. Work gangs and shops within factories announced “socialist competition” contests to over fulfill the plan, earning brief fame as well as more concrete benefits. In themselves these campaigns, heavily sponsored by the party, achieved little, but labor productivity managed to grow anyway. The extreme shortages of food and consumer goods began to abate and in 1935 the rationing of food and other consumer goods ended. Nevertheless, many basic commodities would be periodically or permanently in deficit. Elaborate systems of informal supply among the population formed to deal with these shortages, ranging from crude black market operations (strictly illegal and widely punished) to relatively harmless exchanges of goods among families and friends. The population was learning to cope. Unemployment had disappeared, to be replaced with a permanent labor shortage, though real wages were well below those of the late 1920s for the great majority of workers.

In these somewhat brighter years, the seeds of destruction were already sown. On December 1, 1934, an assassin killed the leader of the party in Leningrad, Sergei Kirov. The authorities proclaimed the murder to be the work of unrepentant Trotskyists, though the most likely theory is that it was the result of Kirov’s romantic entanglements. In public the uproar died down quickly, but in the ensuing months the NKVD (in place of the GPU from 1934) began to search for enemy agents, particularly among the former oppositionists working in Soviet institutions. By 1936 they were ready to bring Zinoviev and Kamenev together with other old Bolsheviks, mostly former oppositionists, to trial. The charges were the murder of Kirov, a conspiracy to kill Stalin, and treasonous arrangements with fascist agents. The defendants all “confessed” in a carefully staged public trial and were mostly sentenced to death. In January of 1937, another trial followed, and this time the main defendants were Karl Radek, a journalist and Comintern official, and Georgii Piatakov. Both were former Trotskyists, and Piatakov had in recent years been the right-hand man of Ordzhonikidze in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Ordzhonikidze seems to have been the only one in the leadership to resist the coming terror – at least as it applied to the institutions he headed at the time. On February 17, after a long conversation with Stalin, Ordzhnokidze committed suicide. His death was announced as the result of sudden illness, and he received a grandiose state funeral.

In late February 1937, the Central Committee of the Party met in plenary session, its agenda being to discuss the new constitution about to be promulgated for the country. The new constitution replaced the formal institutions formed in the Civil War with ones that looked more like those of a normal state, though it had no impact on the actual relations of power, dominated as they were by the party. A rather dull meeting seemed to be in prospect. Early in the proceedings Molotov and other confidants of Stalin arose to add to the deliberations the need to “unmask the Trotskyist agents of fascism” whom they asserted to be hiding in large numbers in the party and state apparatus. By the end of the meeting the unmasking of traitors had become the main task proclaimed by the Central Committee. In the ensuing months the NKVD, under its new head Nikolai Ezhov, began to arrest tens of thousands of people as enemies of the people. In May the NKVD ordered the arrest of nearly the whole of the high command of the Red Army. Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven others, almost all Red Army heroes of the Civil War, were accused of treason and confessions were extracted by torture. They were tried in secret, and quickly executed. Some forty thousand officers perished or went to prison in the wake of the Tukhachevsky trial. At the ranks of brigade commander and above nearly ninety percent were executed, altogether some eight hundred men. The terror was not confined to such elite groups, for other and larger classes of victims accompanied them to the camps and the firing squads. In July the Politburo issued order 00447 (the 00 signified top secret) providing each regional unit of the NKVD with a quota for arrests and executions. The total for the country in this order alone was to be seventy-two thousand. The victims were to be, in principle, all known former kulaks, White officers, Mensheviks or SRs, and a multitude of lesser and vaguer categories. Each office of the NKVD began frantically to search through its card files for anyone ever arrested or under suspicion in any of the relevant categories. Regional NKVD units wrote to Moscow begging to be allowed to over fulfill the plan for executions and arrests. Their requests were granted, and similar orders followed. These orders at least targeted (mostly) real potential enemies of the Soviet order.

Stalin also struck at the party apparatus with the NKVD, again by torture extracting confessions from party members that they were wreckers and Japanese or German spies. To enforce the terror, Stalin sent trusted deputies, Kaganovich, Georgii Malenkov, and others, to republican and provincial capitals to “unmask” the enemies in the party hierarchy and order their arrest. Ezhov presented Stalin with long lists of enemies and wreckers, some forty-four thousand in all, and Stalin personally checked off the names, presenting them to Molotov and others in his inner circle for confirmation. Molotov and Stalin even added comments in the margins of the list: “Give the dog a dog’s death,” or “Hit them and hit them.” Most of the members of the central party leadership, including the Central Committee of the Party, People’s Commissars, and other high government officials perished. The same occurred at the republican level, and even reached down to provincial and city party and government circles. Thus most of the party apparatus perished. The names of the dead and imprisoned simply disappeared from public documents, and they were erased along with Trotsky from the history books.

The last of the show trials took place in March 1938, and featured the former rightists, Bukharin, Rykov, and others, as well as Ezhov’s predecessor as head of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda. The usual confessions and violent denunciations from the prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinskii (himself an ex-Menshevik), were the highlights. This lurid spectacle was the last of the show trials, and though it and its predecessors attracted world attention, it served mainly as a background to the real killing. In the course of 1937–38, the NKVD executed some three quarters of a million people, including the bulk of the military and political elite, all former oppositionists from within the party, but the majority of the victims, however, were people in all walks of life who fit into the prescribed categories of enemies such as former nobles or Mensheviks. To top all this off, the NKVD also decided to deport the entire population of the so-called “western national minorities”: the Poles, Latvians, Germans, Finns, and others who lived near the western boundary of the USSR. Hundreds of thousands perished in transit. When the NKVD ran out of people in the assigned categories, they rounded up common criminals, executed them, and listed them as political. In the two years, the total who were executed or died of privations in transit came out to a million people. Finally, the blood came to an end. Through 1938 Stalin gave increasingly frequent signals that “excesses” had been committed, putting the blame on the NKVD, and Ezhov himself was soon executed. By 1939, the wave had passed. A semblance of peace descended on a terrorized society.

After the end of the terror, the subject passed entirely from Soviet public discourse. Stalin soon ordered the composition and extensive publication of the Short Course of the History of Communist Party and ordered all members of the party to study it thoroughly. It became a compendium of the official line, and offered a wholly falsified history of Bolshevism and the 1917 revolution, with Trotsky and other leaders omitted except to vilify them for their opposition in the 1920s and their alleged later roles as spies and traitors. Its centerpiece was a simplified sketch of Marxism authored by Stalin himself though not publicly acknowledged as such. The book offered no explanation of the events of 1937–38 other than to describe the results of the show trials. The actual terror never received any public explanation then or later in Stalin’s lifetime. Though the specific charges at the show trials and in secret arrests normally had been manufactured, Stalin, Molotov, and the others around them seem to have seriously thought that they were fighting and destroying real and dangerous enemies. Such, at least, is the language of their surviving private correspondence with one another. Their public statements in 1937 asserted that the successful building of socialism only “sharpened the class struggle,” which seems to have meant that Stalin’s policies, especially collectivization, produced more and more doubters, whom Stalin and his circle interpreted as conscious enemies suborned by foreign intelligence services. In addition they feared that such internal enemies might try to strike when the inevitable war in Europe broke out and involved the Soviet Union. The mentality of Soviet leaders, and particularly the NKVD, encouraged such conclusions. NKVD officials during collectivization regularly interpreted objections by the peasants to minor aspects of the new order as conscious political opposition to the Soviet system. In their minds and in Stalin’s, if someone disagreed with some details of the plan targets for the aluminum industry, that person must be a secret opponent of the regime, and as the Short Course taught, all enemies of socialism are ultimately in league with one another.

Not everyone who was arrested was shot, and as a result, the population of the prison camps boomed. In the 1920s the prison camps had been relatively small and organized around the main camp on the Solovki Islands in the White Sea. In those years just over one hundred thousand people languished in Solovki and various other prisons, in cold, insect-infested cells, required to work cutting peat or felling trees. In 1929 Stalin and the security police decided to turn the prison system into a network of labor camps on the Solovki model, and common criminals were placed in the same camps. The great expansion came with the collectivization of agriculture, for those kulaks considered especially dangerous were sent to camps rather than to the special settlements. By 1934, when the GULAG, or the Chief Administration of Camps, under the OGPU/NKVD came into being, there were half a million prisoners. By 1939 a million-and-a-half prisoners lived in camps and “labor colonies,” which had a somewhat less strict regime. Though plenty of people died in Soviet camps, they were not death camps, but labor camps, and the GULAG took the labor component quite seriously. At first they even advertised their “successes,” such as the building of the White Sea Canal in 1931–32, touted as an example of labor successfully re-educating class enemies. From 1937, however, the camps were in principle secret. The system was a complex hierarchy, ranging from “special settlements,” where the prisoners lived in fairly normal housing or minimally livable barracks, to horrific mining settlements like Vorkuta or the Kolyma gold fields on the east coast of Siberia, reachable only by ship. Most prisoners were assigned labor in forests, cutting trees for the timber industry with primitive tools, or were assigned to mine, or work in construction. Death was the result of disease, accidents, and general privation, for the GULAG needed labor to meet its own plans. Most deaths occurred during the shipment out to the camps in 1937–38 when hundreds of thousands were shipped east and north in unheated boxcars to places where facilities for the prisoners were almost non-existent. In the Stalin years, failure to meet the plan could be fatal, so the camp commandants engaged in a complex juggling game to keep the prisoners well-enough fed and housed to be able to work while not expending too much on them. With the special settlements, some four million people lived “under the jurisdiction of the NKVD” by 1941. Of these most were not political prisoners in the usual sense. In the camps and colonies, only about twenty percent had been convicted of “counter-revolutionary actions” or other political offenses, and the rest were a mixture of common criminals and those who fell afoul of increasingly strict laws on labor discipline, hooliganism, or “theft of state property,” a particularly murky area given the realities of Soviet life. Many were imprisoned for passport violations after the introduction of internal passports in 1932. Even the “political” prisoners included many classified as political only in the super-politicized categories of Stalin and the NKVD. The camp system under Stalin was primarily a system of convict labor into which political prisoners were added.

20 War

From the very beginning the Soviet leadership expected an invasion sooner or later. This conviction grew from the actual situation of the Soviet Union since the revolution, the experience of intervention and hostility of almost all other states, and also from their analysis of the world. For they expected not just an attack on their own country but a war among the western powers as well, and thought it likely that the war in the West would come first. Their analysis of the world came from Lenin’s view of the most recent stage of capitalism, which he understood to be the period of imperialism. He believed that the First World War was the result of the increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a small number of massive semi-monopolistic corporations and banks, which in turn led to a speeded up competition for markets and resources. The result was the division of the world among great empires, and the desire of the late-comers in that process, Germany in particular, to re-divide the world. Thus, even without the existence of the USSR, another war was inevitable. Stalin and the Soviet elite accepted this conception of the world without any doubts, and their own historic experience in the First World War, as well as their observation of the various rivalries in the world after 1918, only strengthened their conviction. At the same time they realized that the differences (“contradictions”) among the capitalist powers might be temporarily shelved in an anti-Communist alliance or that one or more of the western powers might be strong enough to attack them on its own. Until 1933 the principle threat seemed to come from the British Empire, the apparently hegemonic power of the time. The Red Army constructed its war plans on the assumption that an attack would come from Poland and Rumania with British (and perhaps French) backing or even participation. The de facto military arrangements with Weimar Germany were designed in part to obstruct such an eventuality. When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in January of 1933, the Soviets confronted an entirely new situation.

At first the Soviets were not excessively concerned. Since 1928 the Comintern had predicted a new crisis of capitalism, and the Depression seemed to bear out that prediction. The Soviet leadership, like many other observers, was not convinced that the Nazis were really much different from other reactionary German groups that had supported restoration of the Kaiser and suppression of the left parties. Anti-Semitism, the parades, and the uniforms, all seemed to be just trappings to deceive the naïve, not symptoms of a more serious and sinister purpose. Though Hitler eliminated the German Communist Party (and the Socialists) in a matter of months, the Soviets were still convinced that Hitler’s support was limited and his regime unstable. The 1934 purge of the Storm Troopers seemed to confirm this picture, and Soviet propaganda as well as internal discussion stressed the alleged unpopularity of Hitler’s economic and other programs with the German working class. At the same time, the Soviets noted the rearmament of Germany and its increasingly aggressive tone in international affairs. Late in 1934 the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations, a step both symbolic and practical, especially as Hitler had taken Germany out of the League the year before. Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov used the League as one of his principle stages on which to proclaim the need for the Western powers to make an agreement with the USSR to oppose Hitler.

Talk of opposing Hitler from the Soviets was not merely a gesture, for the Soviet Union now possessed a new army, much more powerful than the old-fashioned Red Army of the 1920s. Two factors were crucial in the transformation of the army. One was the pre-1933 cooperation with the army of the Weimar republic, which provided the Red Army with a complete picture of the most recent developments in military technology and organization. The turn of Western armies toward motorized units, tanks, and aircraft was perfectly clear, yet in 1928 the Red Army still relied on cavalry and infantry armed with rifles and machine guns. Even artillery was inadequate. The second factor was the first five-year plan. The five-year plan originally called for quite considerable increases in military production, but the highly charged atmosphere of world politics (the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931) impelled Stalin to raise the targets for military production even higher. In the next year, the Soviet Union produced four thousand tanks, an immense number by the standards of the time, and they reflected sophisticated designs, both foreign and Soviet. The same enormous effort was put into aircraft production, particularly of heavy bombers. These modern weapons reflected the military doctrine of the Soviet army staff, particularly that of Tukhachevskii, who believed that modern wars would be decided by fast mechanized and armored units as well as long-range aerial bombing. By 1935 the USSR had one of the most advanced armies in the world. Its only limitation was size, for budgetary constraints kept the standing army relatively small.

With this new army in the background, Stalin and the Soviet leaders still had to confront an increasingly dangerous world situation. The most important consequences of the new situation created by Hitler and his allies were the new policies enunciated at Geneva by Litvinov and also a sharp turn in the strategy of the Comintern. At the Seventh Comintern Conference in 1935 the Bulgarian Communist leader Georgii Dimitrov announced the new policy: the Popular Front. The new policy abandoned the attacks on the Socialists as agents of the ruling class and the orientation toward revolution, putting in its place the demand for Communists to make an alliance with the Socialists and indeed any group opposed to fascism for the purpose of preventing the extension of fascist power. At the same time the Soviet state began to try to form alliances with Western powers, signing mutual aid pacts with France and Czechoslovakia in May of 1935. Soviet relations with Britain, however, remained poor, and Hitler was on the march: in 1936 he remilitarized the Rhineland to thundering silence from London and Paris. A few months later the Civil War broke out in Spain with General Francisco Franco’s revolt against the Republic, now governed by a popular front elected by the people. Soviet reaction was initially cautious, as they feared that overt aid to the Republic would provoke intervention by the Western powers on the side of the monarchist-fascist rebels. Hitler and Mussolini soon solved that problem, for their supplies of troops and munitions gave the Soviets an opening. Stalin also sent tanks, aircraft, and many officers to Spain through the dangerous waters of the Mediterranean. In Spain, Stalin and the Comintern followed the popular front strategy, the Spanish Communists being instructed that they were not to make revolution but to continue to ally with the Socialists and Liberals to support the Republic. The Spanish situation revealed the limits of that strategy, for Stalin also wanted the Communists to control things as much as possible and insisted on eliminating the Trotskyists and Anarchists, powerful especially in Barcelona. In the long run, neither the Popular Front strategy nor Soviet aid and interference made much difference. The Spanish Republic succumbed to brute force and was extinguished by the end of 1938.

The defeat of the Republic only increased the danger for the USSR. The lack of enthusiasm on the part of Western powers for the Spanish Republic only revealed – in Stalin’s mind – the increasing chances of his nightmare scenario, a four-power pact that included Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, which would be directed against the Soviet Union. And Hitler continued to move. In 1936–37 Germany, Japan, and Italy signed the “Anti-Comintern Pact,” forming the alliance that came to known as the Axis. In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria, again causing no reaction from Britain and France, and soon began to make demands on Czechoslovakia, the only power in Eastern Europe with a substantial and modern armed force. For the Soviets as well as Europe as a whole, this was a crisis.

Soviet actions were stymied by two factors. One was the generally pro-German policy of Poland, which controlled the corridors through which any Soviet aid to Czechoslovakia had to pass. The other factor was the suspicion on the part of the Western powers, especially Britain – both of the Soviet Union in general and the capacities of the Red Army in particular. The Soviet mutual assistance pacts with France and Czechoslovakia hinged on cooperation, which was not forthcoming from Paris. In the days leading up to the final crisis at Munich, the Soviets did actually begin to mobilize the Red Army in secret, but all was in vain. Chamberlain surrendered the Czechs to Hitler in what from the Soviet point of view was a four-power pact. Such a pact, in their view, must be directed against the Soviet Union.

In this situation the Soviet leadership, convinced that war was coming, moved to its other possible strategy, making a deal with Hitler. Off and on since 1933 the Soviets had put out feelers to Berlin, but nothing had come of them. Early in 1939 discussions with the Nazis suddenly became serious, and the attitudes in London and Paris propelled them forward. Though Chamberlain began to realize that Hitler was a threat, he was not willing to discuss a serious agreement with Stalin. In the summer of 1939 a British mission to Moscow explored the possibilities of cooperation, but when Commissar of Defense Voroshilov asked for specifics on military cooperation, the British could reply only that they had no instructions. The result was the German-Soviet pact of August 23, 1939, signed in Moscow by Ribbentrop and Molotov, now Litvinov’s replacement as Commissar of Foreign Affairs.

The pact unleashed Hitler to attack Poland, which brought declarations of war against Germany from Britain and France. The German invasion of Poland was so successful and so quick that Stalin was caught off-guard. He was also preoccupied with the Japanese probing attack on Mongolia at the end of August, thrown back at Khalkhin Gol by some hundred thousand Soviet troops. Though the pact implied a partition of Poland, it had not included any delimitation of frontiers. The Red Army hurriedly marched into the eastern territories of the Polish state inhabited mainly by Belorussians and Ukrainians, annexing the new territories to the respective Soviet republics. The Communists quickly established Soviet institutions and deported the Poles in the area. Most went to camps or as “special settlers” to Siberia and Kazakhstan, but the army officers, police, and other officials were executed in the camp at Katyn forest and elsewhere early in 1940.

The pact also put the Baltic states into the Soviet sphere of influence. Stalin moved quickly to assert control over the area, in the process awarding the city of Vilnius to Lithuania, a city then almost entirely Polish and Jewish in population. By 1940, control was sufficient that the three states were incorporated into the USSR as Soviet republics, after “popular assemblies” went through the ceremony of “requesting” incorporation. Stalin thought his western border was now secure except for one area: Finland.

The Finnish-Soviet border was the result of the internationalization of an internal border of the Russian empire. When Russia annexed Finland in 1809, the Karelian isthmus to the west of St. Petersburg had been part of the Russian Empire for a hundred years, but in a concession to the Finns, was reunited with the rest of Finland. By 1918, at the time of Finnish independence, this meant that the border was only a short tram ride away from the center of Petrograd. The border had been a problem for Soviet military planners ever since, and Stalin decide to fix it. He proposed to the Finnish government a deal, giving the USSR control of strategic islands near the coast and moving the border some kilometers west in return for territory in the far north. The Finns decided that this was a ploy to take control of the country and refused. Thus began the Winter War, in which the small but well-trained and enthusiastic Finnish army held off the Soviets for several months, eliciting support from Britain and other Western powers that allowed them to draw public attention from the “phony war” along Germany’s western boundary. After many setbacks and heavy casualties, the Soviets finally got their army together and defeated the Finns, leaving an impression of incompetence that only encouraged their future enemies in Berlin. In the wake of the war, Stalin replaced the Commissar of Defense, his old Civil War crony Voroshilov, with S. T. Timoshenko, a professional military officer who quickly proceeded to reform the army and speed up its re-equipment.

Thus by 1940 the Soviet western frontier had moved hundreds of miles west, and Stalin and Timoshenko had bought some time to put the armed forces in order. This was a huge task, one that had many complications. In 1935 the Soviets had realized that they had the ability and need to finally turn the Red Army into a mass army with a peacetime strength of one-and-a-half million men; in 1939, Stalin ordered an increase in the size of the army to three million. The expansion followed in short order, but the inevitable result was that the soldiers, and particularly the officers, were poorly trained and inexperienced. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and junior officers were only a step away from the villages. For many soldiers, their rifle was the first really modern piece of equipment that they had ever seen. The army purge of 1937–38 only made things worse, especially at the level of high command. Here lay the explanation of the army’s poor performance in the Winter War. Furthermore, the army’s equipment was no longer up-to-date. After the great push in the early 1930s, Soviet military production had stagnated and new designs were not forthcoming. Thus the appearance of the German Messerschmidt fighter over Spain in 1937 was a great shock to the Red Air Force, for their best planes were no match for it. German tank technology was moving quickly as well, and all this came at just the moment when the Soviet design bureaus and the armed forces were paralyzed by the purges. Starting in 1938, new designs came into being, but they had to be tested and then put into mass production. Thus by the summer of 1941, the USSR had the first of its modern weapons, the Ilushin-2 ground attack fighter, the T-34 and KV tanks, and the Katiusha rocket artillery. The tanks and rockets were way ahead of the German equivalents, but there were not nearly enough of them or of any modern aircraft.

As the Soviet factories furiously put the new weapons into production and the army struggled with the problems created by rapid expansion and new borders, Hitler was planning his assault. In 1940 he had overrun France and the Balkans. He had failed in the Battle of Britain to bring the English to their knees, but the British Empire, dangerously overstretched by the need to defend the Far East and the Mediterranean as well as the home islands, seemed to the Führer doomed. He would turn his attention to Russia.

All through the winter Wehrmacht units moved east into Rumania, Finland, and what had been Poland. Hitler’s tactical intelligence was excellent, for he knew exactly where the Soviet units were stationed, their strength, and their defensive positions. What he did not know, or even care about, was the economic and military potential of the USSR. To Hitler, the Soviet state was simply a Jewish-Mongol horde that would fly apart at the first blows. His generals, who thought in terms of the Russia of 1914, were only slightly less contemptuous of the enemy. Stalin was perfectly aware of the German moves, for his spy network was just as good as Hitler’s. His interpretation of the German moves, however, was completely wrong. Stalin never fully grasped the radicalism of the Nazi regime, still seeing it in the light of older German rightist movements, or perhaps as a German version of Mussolini’s fascism. He also was convinced that Hitler would not invade the Soviet Union until he had defeated Britain, for Stalin could not imagine that Hitler would be stupid enough to repeat the Kaiser’s mistake and fight a war on two fronts at the same time. Thus Stalin interpreted the troop movements as a bluff: he expected that Hitler would hold off for a year or two, and in the meantime perhaps try to bluff the Soviets into delivering much needed raw materials to the Reich. His worst fear was that Soviet troops along the border might provoke Hitler too soon; hence he ordered them to ignore German overflights and other suspicious actions. Soviet military intelligence believed differently, but when their reports reached their top commanders, they were shelved as not consistent with the policy and analysis that emanated from the Kremlin. Nevertheless, in April 1941, Stalin ordered nearly a million additional men mobilized under the cover of large-scale maneuvers and he moved more troops west. The Red Army now had a theoretical strength of some five million men. Only in the last days before the war were orders issued to put some of the troops into a state of greater readiness: the night before the invasion Timoshenko ordered the air force to disperse the planes on the air strips so that they would not make an easy target. Only the Odessa military district obeyed the orders, for even in Stalin’s Russia, commands from the center did not necessarily get through in time or call forth instant obedience.

On Sunday, June 22, 1941, at first light – 3:30 in the morning – Hitler launched the invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, named after the medieval German warrior emperor. Some three million German soldiers crossed the border, together with nearly a million allies, Finns, Rumanians, Slovaks, Hungarians, Italians, and small volunteer and collaborationist units from nearly every country in Europe, including neutral ones like Sweden (SS Nordland). Hitler’s army was fresh from victory all over the continent, from Norway to Greece, backed by an economic machine greater than that of the USSR (if not by much) and the resources of occupied Europe. Facing them were the five million men in the Soviet armed forces, but almost half of them were either deployed far in the rear or were still only in the process of formation and training. In addition to being caught in the middle of mobilization and learning to use new equipment, the Soviet forces were placed too close to the border and were easy targets for the Luftwaffe and the German armor. The placement was a relic of the long-standing offensive orientation of the Soviet army, which assumed that soon after an attack the Soviet forces would move to make a series of deep incursions into enemy territory to spoil the attack as the Red Army moved to full mobilization. To make things worse, the Soviets erred in predicting the main direction of the German attack. Until 1940 all Soviet war plans had assumed that the German army would attack directly east through Belorussia toward Moscow, as indeed turned out to be the case. In 1940, however, Timoshenko, the new chief of staff general Georgii Zhukov, and Stalin had decided that Hitler would more likely strike south into the Ukraine. Along the central axis there were only farms and large forests, while the Ukraine was still the most important industrial area of the USSR and a major agricultural region to boot. Surely Hitler would go for needed resources. Thousands of troops were moved south into the Ukraine.

Instead the main blow came directly forward the east. German armor repeated its tactics from France and slashed through Soviet defenses along the main roads and rail lines, pushing deep into the country. Lithuania and much of western Belorussia fell in days. The Luftwaffe destroyed most of the Soviet air force on the ground in the first few days, leaving the army with no air cover and no ability to move without German knowledge. With the weight of the German advance directed toward the center, the Soviet front was overrun within weeks and nearly a million and a half Soviet soldiers found themselves in captivity. Almost none of them survived, for the Germans, as part of their racial policies, chose not to feed them and simply let them die. To the north and south, the Germans advanced almost as swiftly, and by the end of the summer they were at Kiev and the gates of Leningrad.

Conditions on the Soviet side of the front were chaotic as poorly designed communications collapsed under the onslaught, command posts were destroyed, and large bodies of Soviet troops desperately tried to retreat east. The Soviet commander in Belorussia was out of communication with his men as well as with Moscow for days. The orders from Moscow at first followed the old and now utterly irrelevant scheme of counterattack against the invaders. Local commanders were lucky if they never got the orders and just followed their instincts. Some units fought to the end, others until food and ammunition ran out. The next orders from Moscow were to hold on long after the situation was hopeless, and commanders who led their troops out of entrapment found themselves under suspicion or worse for retreating without orders. In July Stalin ordered the trial and execution of a number of the generals whose armies had been destroyed in the first weeks of the war.

Fortunately Stalin and army leadership did more than look for scapegoats. On the second day of the war Stalin set up a State Defense Committee headed by himself, soon replacing Timoshenko with himself also as People’s Commissar of Defense, and additionally he became the head of the High Command and formal supreme commander of the armed forces. Zhukov remained as chief of staff. Stalin thus took personal responsibility for the whole conduct of the war. He learned to work with Zhukov and the other generals, but his was the final decision in all matters. Sometimes his orders led to more defeats, but ultimately they led to victory. He had, more than ever, supreme power. The mobilization of the army continued, and became even more essential with the loss of millions of men over the first summer of war. As the situation at the front deteriorated, the government began to evacuate industry from the Ukraine and Leningrad and other areas threatened by the advancing Nazis. In the short run this meant a fall in military production just as the Wehrmacht was capturing and destroying masses of Soviet equipment. Ultimately it was a crucial and a heroic effort, for tens of thousands of men and machines and their families had to move thousands of miles east to the Urals and Siberia, and then build factory buildings to house the equipment, build housing for themselves, and start production on vital goods as quickly as possible. Not just factories were evacuated: the kolhoz and state farms were ordered to move their cattle and other larger animals to the east as well. Huge herds of thousands of cattle moved through the cities, prodded along by women from the villages heading toward the east.

In September the Germans began the final advance toward Moscow, sure of victory. Hitler even considered that he could soon send troops to help Mussolini in the Mediterranean. As the Nazis advanced, Soviet armies to the west of Moscow were ordered to hold on and hundreds of thousands were encircled and perished, but their deaths bought time. Time was of the essence, for the Germans had no conception of Soviet resources. Their pre-invasion intelligence had underestimated the size of the Red Army at the moment of the attack by nearly a third, by one hundred divisions. Even in the first weeks German commanders in the field were surprised to find that new Soviet units suddenly appeared where they thought that resistance had been smashed. Yet as the autumn advanced, German victory seemed assured: in October the foreign embassies and most of the Soviet government evacuated east to Kuibyshev (Samara) on the Volga. Only the announcement that Stalin was still in Moscow and did not intend to leave staved off panic in the capital. On November 7, he appeared on the Lenin Mauseoleum on Red Square as in previous years to review the parade in honor of the October Revolution, a major Soviet ritual. This time the soldiers marched past in the snow straight to the front. German reconnaissance units began to appear on the outskirts of the city, around and inside the ring highways that encircle it today. The government formed volunteer units of students, older office and factory workers, and sent them to the front to fill the gaps torn by the attackers. Yet the situation was better than it appeared. As the Germans plowed on toward Moscow, the Soviets had formed a substantial strategic reserve, part of which now moved west of the city to meet the Nazis. Now for the first time the Germans were halted, for the apparently seamless advance to the east had in fact cost the Wehrmacht dearly. German casualties were greater than the German losses for all campaigns of the war until the invasion of the USSR. German armor had lost thousands of tanks to enemy fire, and many were inoperable from the wear and tear of Russian conditions or out of ammunition. German engines and automatic weapons froze in the cold. Unlike the Russians they had not thought how to keep them working at night temperatures of forty below freezing. Even the Luftwaffe, which had ruled the skies in the first months, was taking rapidly mounting losses as newly built Soviet aircraft with newly trained pilots filled the gaps left by the massive losses of the summer. In early December, the Red Army counterattacked, pushing the Germans away from Moscow and far to the west, inflicting (and taking) massive casualties. By the end of January 1942, the Nazis had lost nearly a million men and four thousand tanks, half of them in the final battle for Moscow. The Soviets had stopped the Wehrmacht, the first time any army had done so since 1939.

While the Red Army’s losses were horrific, the German losses were ultimately crippling. Germany lacked the population of the Soviet Union, and its superbly functioning industry had not been used to prepare supplies for a war on this scale. The German army at Moscow lacked winter clothes not just because Hitler had assumed a rapid victory but also because he had not counted on the massive expenditure of supplies and the need to fully mobilize to counter Soviet industry. He had no idea that the Soviets could produce far more tanks and aircraft than Germany from a smaller industrial base. By early 1942 the evacuated Soviet industries had come back into production and began to turn out equipment in numbers Germany could not match. This equipment was also superior to the German, especially the tanks, the rocket artillery and many of the aircraft. Now the Soviets had to learn how to use it properly, but they had already inflicted a major strategic defeat from which Germany did not have the resources to recover. Germany could no longer defeat the Soviet Union, although Hitler had no intention of stopping.

21 Growth, Consolidation, and Stagnation

The Soviet Union emerged from the war victorious but with tremendous population losses and economic damage. The number of dead was at least twenty million, twenty-seven million by some estimates, including three million prisoners of war, some seven million soldiers killed in battle, two million Soviet Jews, and at least fifteen million Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian civilians. All areas occupied by the Germans were devastated, including the USSR’s richest agricultural land and the whole Ukrainian industrial complex, which had supplied the country with almost half of its products on the eve of the war. Housing stock and city services were smashed, and even in unoccupied areas the strain of the war showed everywhere. To make things worse, a bad harvest in 1946 led to famine conditions in much of the country. Soviet reparations from Germany and Eastern European countries helped somewhat, but the scale of loss and destruction was so great that even such measures provided only small recompense for the losses.

At the same time, the victory brought with it a new order in the Kremlin. Soon after the war, Stalin ordered the People’s Commissariats to be called Ministries, for he announced (in private) that such names had been appropriate to a revolutionary state, but that the Soviet Union had now consolidated itself enough to operate with more permanent institutions. For the first time Stalin and his inner circle began to delegate power to a series of state committees, usually headed by the principal ministers who managed the main areas of the economy. In principle, Stalin was no longer going to monitor all the details of government and economic activity, and some new faces joined the pre-war leadership. Beria and Zhdanov (until his death in 1948) continued on in Stalin’s inner circle, while Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov remained from the pre-war years but were less powerful, especially Voroshilov, disgraced by his military failures. New faces in the top leadership were Malenkov (vice-chairman of the Council of Minsters under Stalin’s chairmanship), Nikolai Bulganin (minister of defense and a longtime economic manager), and Khrushchev, until 1949 head of the Ukrainian party organization and then of the Moscow city party. To a large extent the system did work in a more regular fashion for the last eight years of Stalin’s life, but at the same time he did not refrain from scolding and bullying his closest collaborators and from directing a series of political “cases” with murderous results. The cult of Stalin reached its apogee in the post-war years. Besides the ubiquitous portraits and statues an official adulatory biography appeared on his seventieth birthday. The press produced endless accolades to the “great leader of peoples,” the great Marxist, and the genius military commander Stalin. As much as he may have realized that the USSR needed a more normal mode of government, Stalin could not let go of the reins of power, and continued to behave like a revolutionary commissar of the civil war era, jumping into the middle of the fray with a firing squad ready.

The main task before the Soviet leadership was first of all reconstruction of the war damage, and then the continuation of “socialist construction,” including the progressive technical modernization of industry.

In some ways reconstruction was the easy part, for it meant the rebuilding of previously existing plants and infrastructure, and it was largely completed by 1950. The expansion and modernization of industry was more complicated. It is the case that the growth rates of the post-war era were some of the highest (actual) growth rates in Soviet history. In those years many of the pre-war investments began to pay off, with huge growth in the Urals-Western Siberian metallurgical and mining areas. To a large extent the crucial Soviet industries came up to world standards, and an enormous nuclear industry came into being, at this time largely for military purposes but with planning for power generation and other civilian uses in the future. What did not happen was proportionate investment in consumer goods or agriculture, the latter still hampered by the leadership’s fascination with agronomic fantasies such as the “grass-field” system of crop rotation. Reconstruction brought housing only to the pre-war level, with most people living (at best) in communal apartments. A rare improvement of the post-war years was in medicine, for the number of doctors grew again by seventy-five percent, and the 1946 famine did not lead to massive epidemics, as had occurred in 1932–33.

Stalin’s insistence on centralized discipline and his assumption that all disagreement masked political subversion created a series of incidents among the leadership that terrified even Stalin’s allies. The first sign was Marshal Zhukov’s demotion in 1946 to commander of a local military district. This and later incidents fell in a period of intense ideological campaigning that affected more than just cultural life. The party issued reproofs to composers, poets, and biologists, but it also launched campaigns to celebrate Russian culture and its importance (as well as selected aspects of the non-Russian cultures) as part of a closing-off of Western influence wherever possible. After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the Soviet authorities suddenly launched a campaign against “cosmopolitanism” that was in fact directed against the many Jews prominent in Soviet culture as well as the state and party apparatus. The campaign soon died down, but not without casualties. The wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved and its leading members – Yiddish poets, Jewish scientists, and party officials – were arrested and shot. On Stalin’s orders the security forces killed the famous actor and director of the Moscow Yiddish theater, Solomon Mikhoels, in a faked auto accident in Minsk. It is in these years that travel and correspondence abroad became essentially impossible for almost all Soviet citizens. The irony of these campaigns and repressive measures was that the war had for the first time given the Soviet Union legitimacy in the eyes of millions of its people, but rather than relying on that new found legitimacy, the party simply tightened the screws.

Potentially even more serious was the Leningrad affair of 1949. Arising from an arcane dispute over a trade fair held in Leningrad, it soon turned into the dismissal of several thousand party members in the city and the secret trial of nine local party leaders, charged with treasonable offenses. Six were executed and three sent to camps, their real crimes apparently being the creation (in Stalin’s mind) of a sort of local fiefdom that did not consult the central leadership. Another victim was Nikolai Voznesenskii, who had headed Soviet planning since 1938. Peripherally involved in the Leningrad affair, his actual crime seems to have been concealing information from Stalin about the 1949 plan, something the aging dictator would not leave unpunished. Voznesenskii also perished. In 1952 Stalin called a Congress of the Party, the first since 1939, where Georgii Malenkov presented the main report on Soviet achievements, including a wildly inaccurate account of the supposed progress of agriculture. This sort of public spectacle gave an appearance of unity in the party leadership, but in reality Stalin’s behavior was beginning to worry his comrades. In 1951 the Ministry of State Security forces arrested more than a dozen Georgian party officials, charging them with nationalism and spying for the West (the “Mingrelian affair”), resulting in the exile of over ten thousand people from Georgia. Late in 1952 a new “conspiracy” surfaced, in which a supposed plot of Kremlin doctors, most of whom were Jewish, planned to murder Stalin. The horizon was darkening.

In the background of these lurid and sinister events, the party leadership was beginning to realize that some changes were needed. Malenkov and other leaders knew perfectly well that agriculture was not prospering. The collective farms managed to produce enough to feed the people at a sufficient but low level. Every harvest was still a gamble, and meat and dairy products came overwhelmingly from the collective farmers’ private plots. Another area of crisis was the GULAG. By 1950 the special settlements had two and a half million people, most of them from various national minorities deported for unreliability: Germans, North Caucasian peoples, Crimean Tatars, as well as some remaining kulaks. The camp system had about the same number, in this case heavily Russian, including political prisoners from the 1930s, Nazi collaborators real and mythical, and a great majority of people convicted of non-political crimes and common murderers and thieves. For the GULAG administration the problem was that prison labor was no longer economically effective. Though prisoners made up some ten percent of the work force in logging and construction and were used in projects where ordinary labor seemed too expensive, the costs of the GULAG were too great. The expenditures on administration and hundreds of thousands of guards were just too high, and to make matters worse, the prison labor system rested on unskilled labor. Even in logging, mechanization was beginning to penetrate Soviet industry, and prison laborers lacked the skills and motivation to use the new equipment. By 1952 the GULAG officials and Beria himself were considering some sort of changes in the system.

Then Stalin died at his dacha on March 5, 1953. The response of Stalin’s inner circle was to declare collective leadership, with Khrushchev (now made first secretary of the party) and Malenkov (now made chair of the Council of Ministers) as the main figures. The immediate problem they faced was Beria. Since 1946 Beria had not headed the security police, the Ministry of State Security or the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but he did have Stalin’s ear. He was also head of the Special Committee within the defense network that ran the increasingly important nuclear industry, at that time still almost entirely working for military production. In the new division of power after Stalin’s death Beria obtained the united Ministry of Internal Affairs and State Security. Once again, as in 1938, he was in charge of all police functions. The first political crisis of the new regime came at the end of June, when Malenkov raised the issue of Beria at the Presidium of the party (the new name for the Politburo). The meeting on June 26 was actually a conspiracy, for Beria was not told that his fate was on the agenda. Right in the meeting Marshal Zhukov and a group of officers arrested him. A week later Malenkov and Khrushchev explained their actions to the Central Committee, claiming that Beria was trying to control the party through the security police and was aiming for absolute power. He was an intriguer who had poisoned Stalin’s mind against the other leaders and ultimately was an agent of Western imperialism. He was presenting himself as a reformer to create a political base in the party. After a closed trial, Beria was executed in a military bunker by the Moscow River.

The removal of Beria solved only one problem. Even before his arrest the new leadership knew that some changes had to take place. Agriculture was in poor shape, the camp system was in crisis, and ferment in eastern Germany was creating a problem in Eastern Europe. Khrushchev sponsored a series of agricultural reforms, higher purchase prices for kolhoz products and lower taxes on the peasants’ private plots. After Stalin’s death Khrushchev had acquired the position of first secretary of the Communist Party, but Malenkov was the prime minister and Molotov still a powerful minister of foreign affairs. Both sat on the Presidium of the party and all of its members, with Khrushchev leading the chorus, proclaimed that the party and country now had collective leadership. To carry out his plans, however, Khrushchev needed to eliminate potential rivals. First he managed to convince his colleagues to demote Malenkov from the position of prime minister to minister of electrification and replace him with Bulganin. He then moved to sideline Molotov, though the latter remained foreign minister. By the time of the 1955 Geneva Conference it was clear that Khrushchev was the most powerful, not Bulganin or Molotov.

While these maneuvers in the Kremlin were bringing Khrushchev to the top, the leader was carrying on in secret a complete revision of the Stalin era policies of repression. The news of Stalin’s death and the first reforms provoked revolts in the GULAG in 1953 and 1954 that were put down by the military, but the process of release began, from the camps and labor colonies as well as from the special settlements. Almost a million were released by the beginning of 1955. Equally important were the various investigations that the authorities launched under the aegis of the USSR Supreme Court to examine the more egregious cases of execution and imprisonment back to the 1930s. Their findings were overwhelmingly that in the cases of these victims they found “an absence of the components of a crime” (otsutstvie sostava prestupleniia), leading to their release and the posthumous rehabilitation of the dead. Rehabilitation was not merely symbolic, for it meant that the families of those who perished were no longer enemies of the state, and if they had languished in the camps, they were released. All over the Soviet Union hundreds of thousands of people found themselves with a ticket home and papers allowing them to live normal lives, returning to families some had not seen for fifteen or more years, and whose families did not even know if they were alive. For the time being, the release and rehabilitation of the prisoners and the dead took place in silence. Nothing appeared in the newspapers.

At the end of 1955 Khrushchev convinced his colleagues, even those who had been Stalin’s closest associates like Molotov and Kaganovich, to establish a party commission to look into Stalin’s “violations of socialist legality,” particularly the extermination of most of the party elite in 1937–38. The head of the commission was P. N. Pospelov, a former editor of Pravda and to all appearances a fervent Stalinist. His commission’s report became the basis of Khrushchev’s famous “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in February 1956. Khrushchev’s speech, with additions from himself and editorial work by another party ideologist, M. M. Suslov, came at the end of the Congress. As everyone was packing to go home, the announcement came to the Soviet and foreign Communists that there would an additional session. There, Khrushchev read his speech for four hours (with a short break) to a stunned and silent audience. In it he blamed all the crimes of the 1930s and after on Stalin personally, with some room for Beria. He focused primarily on the destruction of the Central Committee in 1937–38, seventy percent of whose members had perished, and on Stalin’s conduct of the war. Neither of his accounts was fully honest, for in blaming Stalin for the terror he omitted the role of Molotov and other leaders, including himself, to say nothing of the thousands of enthusiastic denouncers of wreckers and spies from among the population. Khrushchev’s account of Stalin’s role in the war was simply wrong, giving rise to numerous legends that came to be refuted only after 1991. He said almost nothing about collectivization, which ultimately involved more people and more deaths than the terror. The point, however, was to shift the blame onto Stalin for all the crimes of the past and to underscore the importance of the collective leadership of the party, to avoid “the cult of personality” that surrounded Stalin in his lifetime. To prevent a recurrence of such horrors, the need was for collective leadership and the preservation of “socialist legality.”

The leadership had debated how much to publicize the speech, and the result was a compromise. It was not published in the Soviet Union (it appeared only in 1989) but was circulated among party organizations where it was read in its entirety to party members, some seven million people, and the whole of the Komsomol, more than eighteen million. As it was also circulated to foreign Communists, the speech got to the West through Poland and was quickly printed in many translations. Khrushchev’s lurid depictions of torture and execution (taken directly from Pospelov’s report) were a tremendous shock to foreign leftists, especially in the West, but elsewhere reaction was mixed. In China Mao Tse-tung never really approved of it, and Stalin’s works remained canonical in the Chinese party. In the Soviet Union itself the report produced pro-Stalin riots by thousands of students in Tbilisi and Gori in Stalin’s native Georgia, and it caused outbursts of violent criticism of the regime among Moscow intellectuals. Mostly, however, the population was more concerned with meat prices and accepted the new policies, even if many harbored more positive views of the Soviet past than those now propagated by Khrushchev.

The main effects of the secret speech were in Eastern Europe, leading to riots in Poland and the Hungarian revolution in the fall of 1956. Khrushchev survived these threats with his power intact, and moved on with more reform projects. In the late 1950s the release of prisoners and special settlers grew to a flood. The deported nationalities from the North Caucasus returned home, their autonomous republics restored. (Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, and some other groups, however, did not return, though their personal legal statuses were restored.) By 1960 the GULAG had come to an end. More change was in the works. Soviet industry was doing much better than agriculture, but the pressure to build a fully modern society, now in competition with the United States, mandated greater progress in both manufacturing and agriculture. Khrushchev publicly called on Soviet agriculture to surpass US production in meat and milk products. For industry the solution he adopted early in 1957 was to decentralize the economy, creating “Councils of the National Economy” on the regional level instead of the central industrial ministries that had managed the economy since the 1930s.

Before this plan could be implemented, a new crisis arose, this time in the central leadership of the party. Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich had been discontented with Khrushchev for some time. Molotov was unhappy with the partial reconciliation with Tito, the increasing talk of peaceful coexistence with the West, and with the increased priority given to agriculture and consumer goods. His allies shared these doubts, and also opposed the growing personal power of Khrushchev. Behind these particular concerns was the looming issue of de-Stalinization: how far would Khrushchev go? The lesson of Hungary was that the process could get out of hand, and even without that, as the main survivors of Stalin’s old guard they were themselves acutely vulnerable. In the early months of 1957 they lobbied the members of the Presidium, gaining seven votes – themselves, the aging Voroshilov, Bulganin, and two important economic managers – out of eleven for ousting Khrushchev from power. The plotters then told Khrushchev that they needed to meet to discuss a joint appearance in Leningrad for its anniversary, but when he arrived on June 18, he learned that they wanted to replace him as the leader of the party. Furious debate raged and Mikoyan, alone of the Stalin old guard in support of Khrushchev, left the room briefly and went to Leonid Brezhnev and Elena Furtseva (the only woman ever to play a role in Soviet leadership), both candidate members of the Presidium. He told them to contact the Minister of Defense and a candidate member of the Presidium, Marshal Zhukov, who was absent because the plotters had sent him off on maneuvers. Brezhnev raced to the telephone and summoned the Marshal, who arrived in the Kremlin while the debate still raged. Molotov had his seven votes, but all but one of the candidate members stuck by Khrushchev. Mikoyan and others had also contacted the Central Committee members resident in and near Moscow, and by the party statute the ultimate arbiter of such decisions was the Central Committee (CC). Molotov and the others at first refused to meet with the CC members, but soon realized that they had no choice, especially with Zhukov unwavering in opposition to their plans. He had been the man who had arrested Beria and had the loyalty of the armed forces. The full Central Committee convened on June 22, 1957, the sixteenth anniversary of Hitler’s invasion.

These events had taken place in secret, and only a very few were aware that something was up. For a week the CC, some two hundred strong, lambasted Molotov and his allies, accusing them of mistaken policies, splitting the party, trying to seize power, ignoring the Central Committee, and bringing up the behavior of Molotov and Kaganovich in the great terror. The party elite did not want a return to the fear and despotism of the Stalin era. One of the most outspoken was Brezhnev, a provincial party leader from the Ukraine who had only recently entered the ranks of the party’s central elite. Finally Khrushchev and his supporters denounced the three main plotters as an “anti-party group” and expelled them from the Presidium, replacing them with Brezhnev and Furtseva. In Stalin’s time the plotters could have expected only death: instead they received minor appointments, Molotov going as ambassador to Mongolia. He and his allies had grossly underestimated the new party elite that had come into power since the 1930s – people with a great deal of experience in wartime and economic management and who were appalled at the prospect of a return to the Stalin era. These younger people were Khrushchev’s base in the party, and they would remain in power until the 1980s.

Molotov had criticized Khrushchev for trying to create a new “cult of personality” and run everything himself, but the Central Committee had taken that charge as mere demagoguery. They were to be proved to a large extent wrong in the coming years. Only a few months later Khrushchev arranged the demotion of Marshal Zhukov, accusing him of ignoring party control of the armed forces and despotic behavior. These charges had some truth to them, but his removal from the Ministry of Defense and the Presidium meant that Khrushchev now had no rivals at the top. He was not a dictator like Stalin, but he alone was at the pinnacle of power in the USSR.

Khrushchev used his power to conduct a foreign policy that increasingly involved bluffing his way through crises, alternating cautious diplomacy with wild risks, the most famous being the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. He also faced the increasing disintegration of the Soviet bloc, as Albania and Rumania gradually turned into independent Stalinist states, and most important, China moved inexorably away from the USSR toward the Cultural Revolution. Mao and his allies in the Communist movement saw Khrushchev as the embodiment of “revisionism,” of a turn away from the true revolutionary path. Khrushchev’s colleagues in the Kremlin most certainly did not share Mao’s views, though they did think that Khrushchev had frequently exacerbated the conflict by his clumsy personal style. All of these events undermined his standing with the party elite, but equally problematic were the economic policies he pursued.

The problem here was not Khrushchev’s goals. The party elite clearly agreed that the country needed a radical improvement in agriculture. In the late 1950s the urban population still lived largely on black bread, sausage when it was available, and whatever could be afforded from the peasant market. Consumer goods were far more available than earlier but hard to actually obtain. Hence Khrushchev’s desire to put more resources into agriculture, consumer goods, and even housing, was extremely popular not just with the people but with the party leaders. They realized that they could not maintain stability if living standards did not improve radically.

The biggest problem was agriculture. One of his first acts was to abolish the machine–tractor stations set up in the 1930s and transfer their machinery to the kolhozes, a move that meant much greater autonomy for the farms. More was to come. On his 1959 trip to the United States he caused a considerable stir by his visits to American farms in Iowa and his meetings with American farmers. From this experience he seems to have been confirmed in his belief in large-scale, higher-technology farming, for American agriculture was already turning from family farms toward agribusiness. He realized that the USSR was way behind in the production and use of chemical fertilizer. The Stalinist industrialization model had consciously favored metallurgy and coal over chemicals and oil, as they were more suited to the then level of economic development as well as more important for defense production. This decision meant that increases in agricultural production, which did occur after the mid-1930s, came from mechanization, hybridization of plants, and more systematic crop rotation, rather than from the use of fertilizer or pesticides. None of these methods did more than keep pace with rapidly increasing urbanization, and to make matters worse Stalin and his agricultural bosses had accepted various crank schemes in agronomy like the notorious “grass-field” system. This was the notion, accepted by the authorities from the late 1930s, that food grains should be rotated with grasses rather than clover or other plants that aid nitrogen fixation. The system became a major bugbear for Khrushchev, who demanded that Soviet agriculture follow the rotation patterns accepted in American and other agricultural systems, and in 1963 he got his way.

Unfortunately Khrushchev’s programs combined solid planning with dubious schemes like the virgin lands project. Khrushchev, who considered himself something of an agricultural expert because of his years in the Ukraine, was aware that there was a great deal of uncultivated land in Western Siberia and Kazakhstan. To him the solution was obvious: the Soviet Union’s low yield in grain could be solved by sending thousands of settlers to these areas to put the steppe under the plow. The result was a 1930s-style mobilization, with the Komsomol in the lead, sending young people out to live in tents while they sowed grain and built houses. The overall size of the Soviet harvest did increase rapidly as a result, but the program also took resources from modernizing the collective farms and it turned out that much of the land was indeed fertile but too arid for continuous cultivation. Environmental degradation was the inevitable result, with falling output. The Kazakh leadership had warned Khrushchev that there was not much suitable new land, but he simply replaced these naysayers with his cronies from Kiev and Moscow.

Besides the virgin lands, his other agricultural obsession was corn. Khrushchev knew even before he went to America that corn was a major component of animal feed throughout the world, and he decided that the Soviet Union should produce corn. Most agronomists thought that it was not a suitable crop outside of some small areas in the far south of the country, but Khrushchev would not agree, even trying to force the authorities in the Baltic republics to grow corn in place of the more traditional crops. Much time and money was expended trying to find a hybrid that would grow well under various conditions, but the project just turned into another centrally sponsored campaign with no major results. Khrushchev, however, would not give up.

Khrushchev’s record in industry was mixed. The 1950s were a period of very high growth rates, even after the end of post-war reconstruction. Soviet achievements in technology, such as the building of a nuclear industry and rockets that could go into space were visible symbols of a modern state. Most of the nuclear development was still secret, but the Sputnik launch in 1957 was a worldwide event. Even more spectacular was Iurii Gagarin’s flight into space in 1961, followed by a whole series of space flights. Until the American moon landing in 1969, the Soviets seemed to be way ahead in the space race. Along with these very real achievements there were persistent problems. The new decentralized management system was no better than the old one, and in many areas it simply added a new layer of bureaucracy. More promising was the decision, which Khrushchev enthusiastically supported if he did not originate, of turning massive resources toward the chemical industry and the production of oil and natural gas. The two were related, as much of the raw material for the chemical industry would be petroleum byproducts. The Soviet Union would have plastic. For Khrushchev, the chemical industry was also to be a panacea for agriculture, as he did realize that corn and the virgin lands were not enough.

Unfortunately none of these plans addressed immediate problems. The decisions made in 1959–1960 did lay the basis for subsequent massive developments that shifted the energy base from coal to oil and gas by the 1970s and created a huge chemical industry, but there was little to show for it in the short run. Perhaps his most successful program for the average person was the first attempts at mass housing, the five story (with no elevator) small apartment houses that mushroomed around Moscow and other large cities. These were no longer communal apartments and although they were small they had the usual modern conveniences.

Khrushchev kept tinkering with agriculture and proclaiming grand goals. In 1961 he held another party congress in which he announced that the Soviet Union was going to “build communism,” Marx’s second stage beyond socialism in which the state would wither away among a universal abundance of all possible goods and services. For a population that was still struggling with deficit goods, long lines at stores, and high prices at the peasant market, this program tasted of megalomania. In the next year the authorities even faced a riot in the southern town of Novocherkassk – a riot entirely with economic causes that was harshly repressed.

Coming on top of the Cuban missile crisis, the economic problems were increasingly disturbing. To top it off, Khrushchev did seem to be constructing a “cult of personality.” Movies appeared chronicling his trips abroad in loving detail with titles like Our Nikita Sergeevich. With his son-in-law Aleksei Adzhubei controlling Izvestiia, one of the two main newspapers, his doings were spread all over the country. He appeared at various meetings with writers and artists, lecturing them about politics and art, the most famous being his performance at an exhibit of mildly modernist art in 1962, where he told the artists that their work looked like a donkey’s tail had painted it. The party leadership did not necessarily disagree, but disliked his practice of dealing with these issues off the cuff and without consultation. It was too much like Stalin’s incursions into economics and linguistics. Khrushchev also antagonized large numbers of people by a new campaign against religion. After Stalin’s recognition of the Orthodox Church and most other religions at the end of the war, the churches gradually began to acquire a modest position in Soviet society. Khrushchev decided to change that, and embarked on another massive wave of persecution. Fortunately it lacked the murderous results of the 1930s, but it did result in the closing of many churches, arrests, and the virtual proscription of religion from Soviet life. The party elite was certainly not in favor of religion, but like Stalin, they no longer thought it was a major issue and preferred simply to control it. Khrushchev’s campaign was unnecessary and was the result of his personal quirks imposed on the country.

Ironically the straw that broke the camel’s back for Brezhnev and the other party leaders came from the intersection of agriculture and science, for a long time one of the chief sore points of the Soviet system. Khrushchev, for all his anti-Stalinism, remained a convinced supporter of Trofim Lysenko and his officially sponsored 1949 condemnation of modern genetics. Lysenko had his own fiefdom in the network of agricultural research institutes, but the Academy of Sciences kept most of his cronies out. Early in 1964 Khrushchev tried to get a number of these cronies elected to the Academy of Sciences, but the physicists, led by Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm, mobilized so much opposition that the prospects were voted down. Khrushchev was furious, though his own scientist daughter tried to persuade him that Lysenko’s work was simply wrong. At a full meeting of the Central Committee in July, after a long rambling speech about agriculture, Khrushchev suddenly announced that part of the problem was with the scientists, with Sakharov’s and the Academy’s meddling in politics, as he saw it, to reject the Lysenkoites. Then he announced that they should just abolish the Academy as a relic of the nineteenth century.

Brezhnev and his colleagues decided that the time had come. The Academy issue was only one of many, but it was just too much. As they were struggling to modernize Soviet society, here was their leader trying to wreck the principal source of innovation, their only hope of catching up to the West. In October 1964, the Central Committee met again, presenting a whole list of charges against Khruschev, including the Academy affair. He did recognize his “rudeness” about Sakharov and the Academy and his obsession with corn, but he continued to defend this behavior in the Cuban missile crisis (“the risk was inevitable”) and in the various Berlin crises. The Committee voted him out, placing Brezhnev in the position of head of the party and Aleksei Kosygin, an economic manager, in the position of Prime Minister.

The new regime largely continued Khrushchev’s policies without his erratic style. The regional Economic Councils were quickly abolished, and the more exotic agricultural campaigns ceased. There was no return to Stalinist methods of rule. Stalin remained unmentionable in most contexts, though some of the World War II generals did describe aspects of his wartime leadership in memoirs, mostly rather negatively. In history textbooks and public statements the achievements of the Stalin era were attributed to “the party and people,” and accounts of his crimes remained as they stood in 1964. Further revelations ceased. The new policy produced some disquiet in the intelligentsia, but for most of the population Stalin was no longer an issue. If anything, popular estimation of the former “great leader of peoples” was more positive than the official line. In two important respects the Brezhnev era actually brought further liberalization. The campaign against religion came to an end, establishing a modus vivendi with the Soviet Union’s various religions that lasted until the 1980s: religion was discouraged, but not prohibited, and the artistic heritage of Orthodoxy in icon-painting and architecture became the object of extensive study for the first time. In science the new regime totally abandoned Lysenko and restored genetics to Soviet biology. The last remnant of Stalinist science disappeared.

The first decade or so of the Brezhnev era was a period of enormous economic growth. Plans laid under Khrushchev came to fruition, as vast new fields of natural gas went into production. In only twenty years gas production increased tenfold, with about half coming from Siberia and a quarter from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Whole new cities sprang up, like Navoi in Uzbekistan, named in typical Soviet fashion for a medieval Central Asian poet. New oil fields opened up, mainly in Western Siberia, and production nearly doubled by the 1980s. The Soviet Union launched a huge program in nuclear power, starting with the Beloiarsk station in the Urals. Beloiarsk followed a largely experimental reactor built near Moscow in the 1950s. It employed a slow-neutron reactor, a design not later used in the Soviet Union, and it produced its first electricity in 1964. Eventually the Soviet Union built nearly fifty nuclear power plants with pressurized water or graphite moderated designs, the latter being the version that failed at Chernobyl. By the 1980s nuclear reactors produced around a quarter of the country’s electricity.

The huge growth in the energy sector signaled a shift from coal to petroleum-based energy sources and nuclear power. It also changed the distribution of energy among the republics, for coal had been mined mainly in the Ukraine until World War II, then increasingly in the Russian republic and Kazakhstan, although the Ukraine still produced almost half of Soviet coal. Oil, by contrast was ninety percent the product of the Russian republic and gas was nearly eighty percent. To some extent nuclear power reset the balance, for the policy was to build nuclear power stations where other resources were absent or in decline. Thus the Chernobyl graphite moderated reactor began to produce electricity in 1977, and the Ukraine came to depend on nuclear power for half its electricity, in contrast to only twenty percent for the USSR as a whole. The southern Ukrainian city of Zaporozhe received the largest nuclear power facility in Europe, whose reactors came on line starting in 1985, fortunately with the safer pressurized light water reactors. The other effect of the massive increase in the energy base was that the Soviet Union began to export oil and gas to Eastern Europe and the world in general. Trade with the West as well as Asia began to increase rapidly in the 1950s, but oil and gas exports were in a whole different league. In Eastern Europe, the new exports sped up the transition inaugurated under Khrushchev from one in which Soviet satellites subsidized the USSR with low resource prices to the reverse. In the 1960s Soviet gas and oil went to “fraternal” socialist countries at considerably below market price. The export of oil to the West compensated for these subsidies by bringing in large amounts of hard currency that allowed the Soviets to make much needed purchases of technology and grain abroad.

As elsewhere, the nuclear industry was also tied into military production, which allowed the Soviet Union to reach rough parity with the United States in the late 1960s, for the first time. The foundation of this parity was the development of nuclear submarines and of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), which now could actually strike the United States from the USSR in the event of war. Long-range bombers were no longer necessary. The result was an increasingly expensive arms race that absorbed huge amounts of capital and trained personnel, which the USSR could not afford as easily as its American rival. The arms race was only part of the social and ecological cost of the final decades of Soviet industrialization. Rivers and forests were polluted with nuclear waste, leading to serious health problems in the affected areas. The oil and gas fields disturbed the fragile sub-arctic ecology, and hydropower meant the flooding of large areas, removing the inhabitants and causing all sorts of changes in the environment, many of them totally unanticipated. This was not merely the story of arrogant party officials pushing scientists and engineers to construct shoddy plants in pristine nature: the scientists were convinced that their designs were perfectly safe and the ecological effects were minor. Indeed it was the physicists who most consistently pushed for more nuclear power plants, convincing party officials who worried about the massive costs.

The early Brezhnev years also saw a radical transformation of Soviet agriculture, at least of its technology. The same collective farms that had operated for decades without enough fertilizer and pesticides were using three to five times as much as American farms by the late 1970s. In 1966 the authorities abolished the labor-day system, and collective farmers received their share of the proceeds in money. Agricultural production expanded rapidly, freeing up millions of peasants for industrial work. The migration to the cities in the last thirty years of Soviet power was so great that large areas, especially in central and northern Russia, began to empty out, leaving thousands of abandoned villages dotting the landscape. For the first time in Russian history, the city population outnumbered the country residents, rising to more than two thirds of the total in the USSR by 1990.

These massive increases in production, the creation of a nuclear industry and a more or less modern chemical industry, also brought a wave of consumer goods for the first time in Soviet history. Food stores began to display some variety, both of Soviet products and canned goods imported from Bulgaria and elsewhere. Dairy products appeared in modest variety. To make up the needs in grain and fodder, the Soviet Union imported grain from Canada and the United States regularly. The result was a massive improvement, but not universal prosperity. Supplies were irregular, and one or another food item was in deficit every year. Carrots disappeared in one area for several months, and returned while beets disappeared from the stores. Workplace distribution continued, if on a lesser scale, to supply hard-to-find items like chickens. Consumer electronics became nearly universal in cities and television even appeared in the villages. At the same time actually buying a television set was a major operation. Telephones came mostly from Poland in exchange for cheap Soviet gas and were notoriously unreliable. The housing crisis eased as thick rings of pre-fabricated high-rise housing surrounded Soviet cities. Finally, most urban residents left the communal apartments for new apartments with their own kitchens and bathrooms. Unfortunately, the other necessary facilities, such as schools and stores, often failed to appear in the new neighborhoods for decades. Production boomed, but distribution remained in a state of permanent disorder. With all the problems, however, the first decade or so of the Brezhnev years was in many ways the high point of the Soviet Union. Not only had it achieved superpower status but the population also finally acquired the basic elements of a modern standard of living. There were two problems with that standard of living. One was the post-war boom in Europe and America that created a whole new world standard of living, and news about that seeped across the border. The USSR was chasing a moving target. The other problem was that the rise in Soviet living standards stalled after the middle of the 1970s. More housing appeared, but virtually all consumer goods gradually entered a permanent state of deficit, which meant that they were available but increasingly difficult to actually find. The struggle of daily life was the background to the malaise that settled over Soviet society.

This malaise was not explicitly political, outside of small dissident groups in the intelligentsia. The first dissidents had appeared in the 1960s, when it was finally clear that openly opposing the Soviet system would lead to harassment and even prison in some cases, but not death or long incarceration. The KGB under Yurii Andropov changed its mode of operation. It no longer looked for organized opposition groups tied to émigrés in the West and instead tried to police society with a combination of persuasion and selective force. For most people who fell afoul of the system, the KGB brought them in for a “conversation” and reminded them of the possible consequences of persistent action, and then left it at that. A very small minority of intellectuals continued to protest and went to prison or to psychiatric hospitals. The dissidents mostly came from highly privileged positions in Soviet society. Intellectuals continued to have apartments, privileged access to goods, and a select few maintained opportunities for foreign travel. Writers lived in dachas in the Peredelkino and other writers’ colonies, while ordinary citizens struggled with long lines and mass-construction housing. Scientists, especially those in strategic areas like physics, lived in similar places, and also had contact with power on the basis of their utility to the military and the civilian nuclear industry. Not surprisingly some began to chafe at this privileged but ultimately powerless role. In 1968 Andrei Sakharov moved from criticism of nuclear weapons testing and Lysenko’s biology to criticizing the whole system and formulating notions of convergence that would produce a society more like the West than the Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn moved from fictional and non-fiction accounts of the Stalinist GULAG to a Russian nationalist position that criticized equally Western and Soviet society in favor of an authoritarian religious state based only on the Slavic peoples of the USSR. The phenomenon closest to widespread dissent was the emigration of almost a million Soviet Jews, some forty percent of the Jewish population, between 1970 and 1990. The first wave consisted of more or less committed Zionists who moved to Israel, but the by the 1980s that stream had dried to a trickle, and most Jewish emigrants had moved to the United States and Germany in search of better economic conditions.

The dissidents attracted enormous attention in the West during the Cold War, and their ideas and writings were well known in the Soviet intelligentsia. Some other intellectuals supported them but the dissidents had no popular following. Nevertheless the authorities saw them as a threat to their utopian conception of a unified society, exiling Solzhenitsyn to the West in 1974 and Sakharov eventually to Gorkii (Nizhnii Novgorod), east of Moscow. Needless to say their works were published only underground or in the West, and they were never mentioned in public. More serious was the general sense that the country was somehow on the wrong track, a feeling that crystallized with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. The most common reaction to the invasion was neither patriotism nor indignation, but the sense that the leadership had made a serious mistake. For most people the Soviet Union remained a legitimate state, but one that was most definitely in the hands of incompetent and short-sighted leaders.

In 1982 Leonid Brezhnev died. The generation that he represented, the young party leaders promoted in the late 1930s, was now a group of elderly men who simply could not understand why things had not come out as they had expected or even how bad the situation remained for the mass of the people. The world had also changed outside the USSR and they failed to grasp the challenge created by mass prosperity not only in the United States but also in post-war Europe and Japan. On Brezhnev’s death the Central Committee put in his place Yurii Andropov, the head of the KGB since 1967. Nearly seventy and in poor health, Andropov never had time to formulate a new policy, but he did bring to Moscow Alexander Iakovlev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and other future reformers. On Andropov’s death in 1984, the CC appointed the seventy-two year old Konstantin Chernenko to succeed him. Chernenko had been Brezhnev’s director of personnel for decades and the appointment allegedly came against Andropov’s wishes. If Andropov really did prefer Gorbachev, his wishes were fulfilled in 1985 when Chernenko died in turn, and Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party. He was to preside over its demise.

22 Soviet Culture

With the end of NEP and well before the war, the Soviet Union entered a new period of its history, with profound cultural implications. The first phase of that new period, from about 1928 to 1932, saw major upheavals in every area of culture, science, art, literature, and the humanistic disciplines. It was a “cultural revolution” in the phrase of the time, though one neither so deep or thorough as the much later Chinese events that borrowed the name. For the people involved, it was certainly traumatic, for it was not merely a new ideological campaign. In those years the party authorities carried out a systematic attack on the leaders of virtually every field of culture, accusing them of failure to live up to the demands of “socialist construction” and of harboring old-regime views and hostility to the new order. These attacks came in the press and in meetings held in various institutions and workplaces, where mostly young and enthusiastic Communists were encouraged to attack their elders and teachers in the name of the revolution. In addition, the OGPU carried out systematic arrests of leading intellectuals – historians, engineers, writers, and some scientists. Most were accused of participation in various, presumably mythical, underground organizations aimed at undermining or overthrowing Soviet power. Compared to later times, the treatment was relatively mild: some were executed, more went to prison camps, but many were simply exiled to provincial towns to teach or work in local institutions. Some professions suffered more than others: the scientists were less commonly victims, but even for them there were consequences. At the same time as the old authorities were removed, all sorts of radical super-Marxist notions achieved brief fame and dominance, along with the ideas of various cranks who presented themselves as new proletarian voices.

For the writers this period meant the virtual monopoly of the Proletarians connected with the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP in Russian) and their leader, the critic Leopold Averbakh. The Proletarians assailed nearly all of the major writers of the 1920s as counter-revolutionary, particularly those from the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia and the “fellow travelers.” Many major writers, including Evgenii Zamiatin and Mikhail Bulgakov, were the objects of furious attacks. Zamiatin was allowed to leave the country, but Bulgakov was not and for a while had almost no possibility to work. Other writers like the poets Akhmatova and Pasternak, escaped attacks because they published little or nothing during those years. The Proletarians were almost as savage with Communist writers who did not toe Averbakh’s line. What the Proletarians wanted was a literature that engaged itself in the struggle for the building of socialism, and in this sense some of their productions were quite critical of bureaucratism and passivity in the party and the state. Their ideal novel featured heroic workers overcoming tremendous obstacles to construct a new town or collectivize a village, changing themselves in the process. In reality, these stories were rarely successful, and the only readable works to come out of the movement were about the Civil War and were mostly written before 1929. The best by far was Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Don, and the RAPP leaders were uncomfortable with this volume.

Music as well had its proletarian radicals, who attacked the young Shostakovich and virtually every other composer, whatever the aesthetic. For the Russian Association of Proletarian Music, the only “proletarian” musical culture had to be “mass songs,” performed by semi-amateur choruses, preferably made up of workers. The proletarian musicians relied on the network of factory clubs and other amateur organizations to spread their work and doctrines, but most of their songs found little favor with the workers, who preferred a more traditional repertory. The Proletarians were allowed briefly to rule the conservatories, but in 1932 the party ended their monopoly as it did for the proletarian writers.

Even in the sciences meetings took place in research institutes, meetings that would have ominous consequences later on. In Nikolai Vavilov’s botanical institute radical graduate students criticized his leadership, political views, and scientific work. In the sciences these attacks were not yet primarily ideological, the chief charge being that the scientists were “cut off from life” and paid insufficient attention to the implications of their work for technology and thus “socialist construction.” It was at this time that Trofim Lysenko, a Ukrainian plant breeder, first came to the attention of the public and the authorities with his theories about breeding strains of wheat that were resistant to cold. Lacking the proper scientific training needed to develop his occasional practical insights, Lysenko was more of a crank at first, but he quickly learned to drape his claims in references to his plebeian origins and assertions that his was “proletarian” biology. The party authorities listened to him because his discoveries, real and imagined, seemed to promise much greater harvests very quickly, something the Soviet Union desperately needed.

After several years of chaos in many fields, the campaign came to a swift end in 1932. The exiled scientists and historians returned to their jobs, some returned from the camps, and generalized public attacks on the intelligentsia gradually ended. Thus began a new phase, one in which the party leadership, which increasingly meant Stalin alone, constructed the framework for what they considered a Soviet culture. In literature the Proletarians had alienated the party leaders, and in 1932 all literary groups were banned, a move mainly directed at Averbakh and his Proletarians. The pressure on non-party writers like Bulgakov and Pasternak eased. Bulgakov went to work for the Moscow Art Theater, writing original plays and adaptations that provided him with a livelihood even though they were often banned. He continued working on his masterpiece The Master and Margarita in private. Pasternak published prose and poetry in those years, becoming one of the country’s best-known poets, in spite of being out of step with Soviet ideology. In the new situation Stalin set up a single Writers’ Union, which met for the first time in a Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. It was to include writers of all types, non-party member writers and Communists in one group, again a move in large part directed at taming the Proletarians. The Writers’ Union was the prototype for a series of unions of creative intellectuals, for composers, painters, architects, and others, that dominated the daily life of Soviet literary and artistic culture until the end, in many ways parallel to the structure for the natural and social sciences and the humanities found at the Academy of Sciences. The Writers’ Union had two functions. One was to provide ideological and artistic direction to the writers. At the head of the union was a committee whose membership was chosen by the Central Committee cultural apparatus and cleared with Stalin himself. These were the men who were to declare the party line in art and enforce it. The other function was to take care of the needs of writers in daily life. The Writers’ Union controlled apartments and dachas in the countryside, had a privileged distribution center for scarce consumer goods, and the best restaurant in Moscow. Its headquarters was a nineteenth century Moscow palace supposedly the prototype of the Rostov house in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Similar unions of artists and composers were formed and took on similar functions.

The party now intended to give literature and art firm direction. Stalin told the writers that they were the “engineers of human souls,” but he did not give them the blueprint. That was to come from the method of “socialist realism,” and at the first Writers’ Congress in 1934 A. A. Zhdanov and Maksim Gorkii, assisted by the former oppositionists Bukharin and Radek, tried to define what that was. The idea was to “reflect reality in its revolutionary development.” The implication was that the writer needed to show the great changes in Soviet life, but avoid concentrating on mistakes or shortcomings, and indicate how society was moving forward. The result was to demand a kind of official optimism that was very hard to provide in practice, as it would lead to flattened characters and unconvincing conflicts. The other side of socialist realism was that it was to become the art of the people and as such had to be accessible. This issue peaked in 1936, not over literature, but as a result of the staging of Dmitrii Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The composer thought that he had made a good Soviet opera, based on a story by Nikolai Leskov that showed the dark, oppressive world of pre-revolutionary Russia. Instead he met savage criticism for his adoption of modernist musical language similar to that found in Western music of the time. In the minds of his critics, the opera was cacophonic and incomprehensible. It was “formalist,” a term that immediately became one of the most serious charges an artist could face. The writers as well understood the implications of the attack on Shostakovich, and realized that their styles would have to change. Many of them, even the most loyal supporters of the revolution, had employed style and narrative techniques that were innovative and modern in the 1920s, but now they were supposed to construct a novel much as Turgenev had done in the nineteenth century.

Besides mandating the correct direction in the arts, the party leadership in the later 1930s moved to expand and subsidize artistic institutions, and indeed the intelligentsia as a whole. The great theaters, the Bolshoi in Moscow and the Mariinskii (Kirov) in Leningrad, no longer scraped by on small budgets. The opera and ballet became central parts of Soviet culture, and although they were concentrated in the two main cities, they were not restricted to those places. Older cities such as Kiev and Tbilisi, now serving as republican capitals, also found their theaters with more solid budgets. In provincial cities and new republican capitals large theaters for musical performances and concerts sprang up. The great companies were encouraged to do provincial tours. Budgets for dramatic theaters also increased, as did the number of theaters in provincial and republican capitals. The theaters and orchestras supported a great many actors and musicians and in a style that became increasingly removed from that of the Soviet population. The Writers’ Union actually spent most of its effort in the 1930s not on ideological issues but on securing control of superior housing in the cities and the dacha districts, and even building them when it could. Pasternak was able to acquire a two-story house in Peredelkino – a dacha village for writers near Moscow – to use as his home for the rest of his life. Writers had access to the Union’s closed food and consumer goods distribution service. By the war, Shostakovich had a multi-room apartment, servants, and a car with driver. Thus the artistic elite came to match the scientists in standards of living, remaining only slightly less well off than the party elite itself.

Perhaps the central art form of the 1930s was film. During NEP, the necessary resources were simply unavailable for mass production and circulation of movies, and Hollywood productions filled the theaters. The cultural revolution tried to change this situation, but the works of that era were as shallow and short-lived as they were in other art forms and they came under heavy criticism, to boot. In the course of the 1930s the Soviet film industry changed radically. The state devoted increasing sums to the production of film stock and studio facilities, and bought expensive equipment abroad, including the entire technology for sound films acquired from the United States. Unlike all the other arts, cinema was a state industry under the state film committee, which answered directly to the central government, not a branch industrial unit. In keeping with its central status, it also received personal attention from Stalin himself. Most of the new films were shown in the Kremlin in the presence of the heads of the film industry, who received extensive comments from the leader. Stalin’s views of cinema were surprisingly sophisticated: he found most of the early films on revolutionary or other political subjects boring, and told the filmmakers that the country needed more comedies. That was a tall order, since the scriptwriters and directors were mostly afraid to satirize Soviet institutions, even mildly, though Stalin told them directly that they should do so. Ultimately the result was a series of authentically popular musical comedies, many of them starring Liubov’ Orlova, who became the leader’s favorite actress.

The expanded institutional base in film and theater came with much greater ideological demands on the arts. All forms of art were to be accessible as well as politically correct. The 1936 attack on formalism led to particular kinds of productions. In the ballet the many small experimental studios of the 1920s closed, and in their place came the large ballet companies that presented a basically classical choreography but with new sorts of ballets. There were attempts at “revolutionary” content, but very quickly Soviet dance moved toward story ballets, which were often based on literary classics and performed with undistinguished music – Boris Asaf’ev’s Fountain of Bakhchisarai (based on Pushkin) became the most popular of all. Shostakovich turned to more accessible musical styles, and Sergei Prokofiev, back in the Soviet Union since 1935, did the same. His music for Romeo and Juliet gave the repertory at least one ballet that fit the required esthetic but provided great music, as did his film music for Eisenstein’s two masterpieces, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. No one escaped criticism: Eisenstein had two movies banned in the 1930s and returned to favor only in 1938 with Alexander Nevsky.

In this situation the scientists were – most of them, at least – in a better position. Their institutes also received improved funding, which was even more generous than for the arts. The new situation came at a price, for starting in the early 1930s the scientific institutes were required to come up with five-year plans like those in the economy. In part, this move was to increase their usefulness to industry, but for that aim the ultimate means was the creation of a large network of specialized institutes for different branches of technology, while basic research remained in the hands of the older institutes. Gradually all basic research was centralized under the Academy of Sciences during the cultural revolution, was brought under party control, and then subordinated directly to the central government, bypassing the various People’s Commissariats. The Academy also had to leave its Leningrad headquarters for Moscow, which now acquired a new battery of scientific institutes to rival those of Leningrad. Thus in 1934 the Soviet government took advantage of the visit of the physicist Piotr Kapitsa from England to force him to remain in the country, and then set up the Moscow Institute of Problems of Physics under his leadership. The Soviet Union now had two world-class research institutes in physics. The scientists were also less often than writers and artists the object of ideological campaigns after the end of the cultural revolution. Abram Ioffe was the object of heavy criticism in 1935, but the charges were only that his Leningrad Physical-Technical Institute did not do enough to provide industry with new technology. The decade was in many ways the great age of Soviet physics. Some six Nobel prizes eventually went to Soviet physicists and chemists, all of them for discoveries made in the Leningrad and Moscow institutes during the 1930s. Biology was a different story. Throughout the decade Lysenko maintained a continuous assault on his opponents, spearheaded by his ideological spokesman, Isaak Prezent. The campaign culminated with Lysenko’s promotion to the leadership of the Agricultural Academy, but the party did not proclaim his doctrines to be the sole truth, and classical genetics survived, if under something of a cloud, until 1948.

The terror of 1937–38 hit the arts hard but not evenly. Musicians and composers seem to have suffered relatively little. Among the critics connected with the party, like Leopold Averbakh and his Proletarians, almost all perished. Surprisingly the writers from that group did much better, though many of them, even Sholokhov, lived those years in daily fear. Stalin did not carry out a mass purge of writers, but he and his agents did arrest and imprison many of them. For whatever reason, many of the most famous victims were arrested at the very end of the terror, Osip Mandelstam in 1938, followed by Isaac Babel, and later Meyerhold. Mandelstam died in prison, while Babel and Meyerhold were shot. At the same time, Pasternak spent the years of the terror working on translations from Shakespeare in his Peredelkino dacha, and Bulgakov continued at the Moscow Art Theater, dying of kidney failure in 1940. The sciences endured similar trials. On the whole the physicists escaped lightly: the few party members among them perished, and a few non-party scientists were arrested, Lev Landau among them. He spent months in prison only to be released without explanation. Kapitsa had interceded for him and Kapitsa’s institute survived intact. Biology was a different story. A denunciation from Lysenko’s spokesman Prezent led to the arrest of Nikolai Vavilov, the Soviet Union’s greatest biologist. He died in prison, as did several other important geneticists. The eve of the war was a dark time, both in the USSR and Europe. Stalin had decided by 1938 that the Soviet Union needed a fundamental ideological schooling, the beginning of a new and even more intrusive policy in culture. The basis of the new ideological campaign was to be the Short Course of the History the Communist Party, with its chapter on Marxism from the pen of Stalin himself. Yet the approaching war overshadowed even ideological efforts. The Soviet film industry’s annual plans stressed the “defense theme” and epics from the history of the revolution and Civil War. Movies on “socialist construction” and “friendship of peoples” were few in number and did not have big budgets.

When the war actually came, it created an entirely new situation, and Stalin had to quickly adjust. The preservation of cultural institutions was a priority. As the Germans advanced, orders came to evacuate cultural institutions as well as factories. Science research institutes, ballet companies, and writers were evacuated to the east. Eisenstein went to Alma-ata, and Shostakovich went to Kuibyshev on the Volga. The purpose was both to conserve the personnel of Soviet culture and to preserve some sense of normalcy during the war. Intellectuals joined the war effort with famous results such as the Leningrad symphony of Shostakovich, first performed in the besieged city. The physicists lobbied Stalin on behalf of an atomic bomb, as well as devoting their energies to more conventional weapons in factories and research institutes. For many engineers their war work took place as prisoners in NKVD laboratories, the most famous prisoners being the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev and the later rocket designer Sergei Korolev. The war also created ideological problems for the party leadership. To mobilize as many people as possible meant including sectors of the population whom the official ideology had not reached or had even repelled. The answer was nationalism. After Stalin’s early pronouncements about the virtues of the German working class ceased, the official line began to stress Russian heroes and Russian accomplishments. Historians dusted off manuscripts on Peter the Great or Kutuzov, hitherto unpublishable. Eisenstein made one of his classic films on the life of tsar Ivan the Terrible, a film designed to glorify the tsar’s conquests and portray him as fighting for the unity of the land. Even Marxism had to be rethought: in 1943 the leading party journals declared that formerly there had been far too much emphasis on Hegel as the background to Marxism and he needed to be deemphasized. The result was an inaccurate history of the thought of Marx, but it made Marxism seem less German. For much of the intelligentsia, the new line on culture meant more breathing space, and many of them hoped that it would continue after the war. They were to be disappointed. Even as the fighting raged there were incidents: Mikhail Zoshchenko, a popular satirical writer, found his introspective autobiographical novel Before Sunrise banned after the first chapters were published in a leading literary magazine.

The return to orthodoxy came swiftly after the war, and the years from the victory until Stalin’s death were the darkest and dreariest in the history of Soviet culture. The first signal was the attack mounted in 1946 by Andrei Zhdanov, one of Stalin’s closest collaborators, on Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova. Stalin himself regularly read the literary journals, and the judgments were ultimately his. Zoshchenko’s work was trite and lacking in ideas, Zhdanov said, and the novella written during the war was “disgusting” and had no relationship to the conflict with Hitler. Akhmatova’s poetry was pessimistic, oriented toward the past, and was a relic of a decadent aristocratic salon culture. Soviet literature was supposed to educate the reader and make the reader a fully conscious member of a socialist society who did not dwell on problems and shortcomings or on the details of individual psychology. It was also not to imitate Western literature, and indeed Stalin did not want too much Western literature translated: “Why do this?” he asked at one of the dressings-down for the writers. “It gives the impression that we Soviet people are second class, and the foreigners are the only first class people.” The result was a long series of dull chronicles of Soviet life, fantastic in their sanitized depiction of everyday life. Even Stalin realized that they were dull, but continued to blame the writers for their lack of talent and mastery of their art.

In 1948 it was the turn of the composers Prokofiev and Shostakovich, attacked for supposedly dissonant music that was too far removed from folk music and inaccessible to the masses. In many ways a repeat of the 1936 attack on formalism, this new campaign had behind it both the rivals of the serious composers among the writers of popular songs and the party authorities. In the same year Lysenko was able to crown his long fight for power in biology by his appearance at a “discussion” on genetics, where he declared genetics to be a reactionary and “idealist” science and his own ideas progressive and “materialist.” Stalin took a direct hand in this affair as well. Lysenko sent him his speech for criticism, and the General Secretary read it carefully. Lysenko originally wanted to contrast his own “proletarian” biology to the “bourgeois” biology of the geneticists and make a general pronouncement that scientific thought reflected class interests. Stalin crossed out that passage, writing in the margins, “Ha ha! What about mathematics?” He required Lysenko to drop the class terminology and substitute “progressive” and “reactionary.” The result, however, was to destroy genetics for nearly twenty years and do enormous harm to Soviet biology. There were plans to hold a similar “discussion” to provide an ideological framework for physics, but for whatever reason, it never materialized.

In the last years of Stalin’s life the official Soviet ideology was a strange mixture of dogmatic Marxism and nationalism. There were campaigns to prove Russian priorities in science, the most famous being the claim that the Russian engineer Alexander Popov had invented the radio in 1900 (Popov was in fact one of several pioneers in this area.) Pre-revolutionary Russian writers, composers, and artists became the object of mini-cults, with endless statues, films, and publications made in their honor. The promotion of Russian culture was largely aimed at the West, to show Russia to be equal to Western culture, if not superior. At the same time the party leadership continued the promotion of culture heroes from the other Soviet nationalities. The Politburo ordered celebrations of the work of medieval Muslim poets claimed as ancestors of Soviet nationalities, Alisher Navoi in Uzbekistan and Nizami of Gandzha in Azerbaidzhan. Russian poets were paid to translate their works and they were the objects of fulsome official praise in the central press. In these years, Shevchenko or the medieval Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli loomed larger than Shakespeare or Goethe. In every Soviet republic the authorities assigned composers, usually Russians or Caucasians, to help local talent produce “national” ballets and operas to provide repertory and prestige for the newly opened theaters. At the same time as the activity on the periphery, in Moscow and Leningrad the ballet struggled with the restrictions of Soviet esthetics. The sheer genius of the dancers like Galina Ulanova kept it alive. The anti-cosmopolitan campaign directed against Jews in 1948 only further poisoned the cultural atmosphere since so many musicians, writers, and artists were Jewish. The main Yiddish writers were imprisoned or shot. The intelligentsia remembered the 1930s and the various ideological campaigns seemed to be leading to another mass terror. That never materialized, and the number of actual arrests among the intelligentsia in those years was small, but for Shostakovich or Akhmatova, the fear in those years was real.

The death of Stalin changed the whole atmosphere. Within a few months prisoners began to return from the camps, and the intelligentsia sensed the possibilities. Ilya Ehrenburg, mainly known as a war correspondent and author of mildly modernist novels of the 1920s set in Western Europe, quickly produced a short novel called The Thaw, which gave its name to the whole period. The villain of the story is a factory director, a classic Stalinist boss. Attacked at first, the story set the tone for a whole series of writings that tried to deal with the past, if within definite limits. Khrushchev’s secret speech gave another great impulse to this sort of literature, as well as relaxing the demands for orthodoxy in music and art. By the early 1960s a number of works had appeared describing the camp system that had just come to an end, the most famous being One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The novella appeared in the literary journal Novyi Mir, which gained huge popularity for its publication of many works in sympathy with the program of destalinization. Some writers, especially young poets like Evgenii Yevtushenko, acquired enormous popularity at this time, even reading his poetry in sports stadiums that filled to capacity. Shostakovich used Yevtushenko’s poem “Babii Yar,” about the wartime massacre of Jews in Kiev by the Nazis, in his Thirteenth Symphony. The ending of the post-war cultural policies and the rehabilitation of imprisoned and executed writers meant a sudden boom in the republication of the literature of the 1920s with its frequently modernist styles. Soviet publishers began to put out a wave of translations of Western authors: William Faulkner, John Updike, and many European writers. Soviet opera and ballet moved away from the Stalinist canon toward styles that were less narrative and more innovative, a compromise style that still required elaborate sets and more “acting” than was then popular in the West, then at the height of fascination with abstractionism in all the arts. The Khrushchev era was not all liberalism, however. The renewed campaign against religion affected many areas of culture indirectly, making impossible the republication of nineteenth century classics like certain works of Dostoyevsky or the expression of religious themes. The great event of the decade was the scandal around the award of the 1958 Nobel Prize to Pasternak for his novel Doctor Zhivago, a clearly anti-Soviet account of the revolution and Civil War. A huge propaganda success for the West, the book was prohibited in the USSR and Pasternak became the object of press attacks and official condemnation. This was not Stalin’s time, however, and Pasternak continued to live quietly in his dacha in Peredelkino.

Perhaps the most striking relic of the Stalin era in Khrushchev’s time was his refusal to accept modern genetics. Lysenko remained king in biology, primarily because of Khrushchev’s support of him. At the same time science expanded enormously during these years. By the 1960s only the United States outranked the USSR in the number of publications in the natural sciences, and by the 1980s the Soviet Union had the largest number of natural scientists per capita in the world. The sciences had whole complexes at their disposal, like Akademgorodok (“Academy Town”) near Novosibirsk in Western Siberia. Started in 1958 at the inspiration of Academy scientists, this entirely new town came to have some fifty thousand scientists and their families, with new and comfortable (by Soviet standards) housing and privileged access to a whole range of consumer goods. For the party leadership, science was not only the basis of a “scientific” worldview but also the key to economic growth, the path to victory in the rivalry with the capitalist world. The ability to concentrate resources on crucial areas had brought spectacular successes in rocketry and the nuclear industry, both military and civilian, and the idea was to broaden the base so as to ensure a more thorough modernization of industry and agriculture.

With the removal of Khrushchev the new leadership quickly moved to end the anti-religious campaign and allowed the churches to continue a modest and heavily supervised existence that lasted until the 1980s. Lysenko finally lost his monopoly of power in biology, his work was repudiated and genetics reappeared as a recognized discipline. Until the end of the Soviet Union the relationship of the authorities to the science community was polite and collaborative, though not without tensions under the surface. For the writers, however, the new regime was less positive. The young poet Joseph Brodsky had been sent into northern exile for “parasitism” in the last months of Khrushchev’s leadership, and in 1972 the KGB threw him out of the country for publishing his work abroad. Brezhnev never repudiated the condemnation of Stalin, but he put an end to the toleration and encouragement of writing, historical or literary, that exposed the repressions of that era. Thus Solzhenitsyn’s work could no longer be published, and appeared only in the West, leading to his expulsion from the Soviet Union. Cultural policy was essentially frozen in time, for the works of many writers repressed under Stalin continued to appear, but Bulgakov’s unpublished writings or Doctor Zhivago could not. Large numbers of translations of Western literature appeared in translation, but major writers like Marcel Proust (published in the Soviet Union in the 1930s) or James Joyce could not. Soviet writers began to write in a mildly modernist vein, and avoided the classic subjects of socialist realism. Some, Vasilii Belov and others, began to turn in different directions, influenced by Solzhenitsyn. They wrote romanticized accounts of village life with a strong nationalist undertone, the idea being that the peasantry had once had true Russian values, patriarchal and religious, which the Soviet order had destroyed. They were highly critical of the kolhoz, and their historical stories described a harmonic village destroyed by urban outsiders, often Jewish, in the 1930s. The critical edge and the nationalist tone gave them wide popularity among the intelligentsia in the later Brezhnev years. The village writers and their ideology shaded off into the dissident movement, which was heavily nationalistic in its outlook, though a minority of dissidents shared the more westernizing approach of Andrei Sakharov. Both tendencies were actually well known among the elite intelligentsia from underground manuscripts, but more than the dissidents it was some of the “bards,” the singers like Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotskii, who performed their songs on the guitar and who most accurately reflected the mood among educated people. Vysotskii rarely gave public concerts, for no state agency could permit that, but his songs performed in small gatherings or Moscow apartments quickly spread all over the country in tape recordings and amateur performances, again behind closed doors. Not quite political enough to be overtly anti-Soviet, the songs and their lyrics reflected a kind of introspective alienation characteristic of the time. Above-ground recordings of Okudzhava’s songs appeared in the Soviet Union only in the later 1970s, and one recording of Vysotskii’s surfaced only shortly after his death in 1980.

Soviet filmmakers followed similar trends. The breakthrough of Christianity and Russian nationalism in film was Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev of 1966. Rarely shown in the Soviet Union, the film depicted the fifteenth century icon painter Rublev as a man who survives the disasters of his time by faith and art. Tarkovsky later moved on to more psychologically introspective themes, usually with religious overtones, in his later works such as Stalker (1979), more or less science fiction. Though the film was seen in the Soviet Union, its showings were extremely limited. Tarkovsky had had enough and moved to the West, dying in Paris in 1986. Other film directors also divided their time between historical epics (Siberiade, also made in 1979 by director Andrei Konchalovsky) and mildly modernist films from the private life of the Soviet intelligentsia.

One of the most striking features of Soviet life from the 1960s onward was the emergence of popular culture. The beginnings lay in the Stalin era, and to a limited extent were there even before the revolution. In those years, however, the audience of popular culture was mainly the thin middle layer of urban society, with some extensions into the working classes. The main examples were the musical stages (estrada in Russian), which featured Soviet jazz bands and comedy routines, and film. The boundaries with the culture of the intelligentsia were fluid: Prokofiev and Shostakovich wrote film music, and major writers produced scripts as well. Some writers produced science fiction and detective stories, though both were under a cloud after the middle 1930s. The more liberal atmosphere of the Khrushchev era brought about a revival of popular fiction, especially science fiction, and jazz came back onto the radio and into musical theaters. What really changed Soviet popular culture, however, were television and the availability of Western popular music, not just jazz but eventually some forms of rock and roll. Television took popular music out of the theaters and into everyone’s apartment. While Soviet television put on some culture programs, it was the popular entertainment that made a mass audience, like Iulian Semenov’s World War II spy story, Seventeen Minutes of Spring, the hit miniseries of 1973 that so impressed the young Vladimir Putin.

Popular music had a complex history. As elsewhere, the jazz audience was increasingly elite after the 1960s, and American rock took its place. Soviet youth heard rock music on foreign radio stations, but also massive amounts of tape recordings began to circulate, many homemade, as tape recorders and players became widely available. The Brezhnev regime did not prohibit rock music. It tried to restrict what it saw as the more erotic and wild versions, but much rock music circulated openly, and the state began to sponsor rock bands and popular singers with eclectic styles. Some of them, like Alla Pugacheva, became wildly popular. Parallel to these more official versions of popular music were underground bands like Aquarium in Leningrad that also relied for a long time on taped recordings but by 1980 had acquired some state recognition. All late Soviet popular music was derived from Western models, even if modified with a local twist, and it also imitated Western music in creating a series of rapidly changing generational subcultures. Each new moment, from jazz to the disco craze of the late 1970s, had its own audience that often did not extend to listeners even a few years younger. Soviet popular culture, at least the musical variants, now had very little to do with “Soviet reality.” It also had little to do with the culture of the intelligentsia, official, critical, or dissident culture, though it did share in the sense of alienation of much of the intelligentsia. It also shared a social background as many of the popular musicians, even rockers, came from privileged backgrounds in the intelligentsia or even the party elite.

By the 1980s most of the great writers and artists of the early Soviet days were gone: Pasternak died in 1960, Shostakovich in 1975, and Sholokhov in 1984. Almost all of the first wave of film directors and actors of the 1920s were gone. The newer generation of writers and artists was not in the league of their predecessors, no more than their counterparts in the West were in the league of Proust or Joyce. Soviet writers and artists had the additional burden of an ossified but obligatory cultural policy, one that no longer attracted the new generations among the intelligentsia. Even if the dissidents seemed to many educated people shrill and unconvincing, their own views of the Soviet system were scarcely enthusiastic. The official cultural line and its products became more and more a fantasy world that ignored what the public actually read or watched. For the intelligentsia, Gorbachev’s Perestroika was an earthquake – a welcome earthquake, as they were sure that political freedom and a market economy would produce a great flowering of culture. They were sure that the time for the intelligentsia had finally come. They would find out otherwise.

23 The Cold War

The Cold War lasted for the whole of the last forty-six years of Soviet history. It was an epic contest, ranging over the whole world, from Berlin and Peking to the most distant parts of Africa and Latin America. For much of the time the Soviet Union seemed to have a good chance of “winning” in some form, and indeed the more hysterical of its opponents were convinced that it was immensely powerful. In reality, the Soviet Union came from behind in the struggle and was never close to defeating its new enemy, the United States. For most of the time, it struggled just to keep up and survive with its newfound power more or less intact.

At the end of the Second World War the two new powers seemed relatively evenly matched, for both were industrial powers and similar in population, the United States at 151 million and the Soviet Union at 182 million. The population figures were an illusion, however, for the Soviet figure was the result of concealment of war losses and may have been as low as 167 million. Soviet industry, however, had been only third in 1940 behind the United States and Germany and much of it was now in ruins. The devastation of the country was unparalleled, even in Germany, and the United States had suffered no war damage at all, outside of Pearl Harbor and the Aleutian Islands. The war had restored American prosperity after the Depression and was a huge boost to American technology and industry, as the rapid success of the atomic project demonstrated. At the time Stalin was convinced that after the war the “contradictions” between the United States and other Western powers would grow, especially as he anticipated a rapid recovery and rearmament of Germany and Japan. Eventually there could be another war among the Western powers. Some in the Soviet hierarchy questioned this view, pointing out that England, for all its differences with the United States, was fundamentally dependent on American money and power, and so would be Germany and Japan. Stalin simply suppressed such dissent.

In spite of his optimistic assessment of the world, Stalin took no chances. During the war he had paid little attention to the construction of an atomic bomb at first, in spite of repeated warnings from Soviet scientists, who were concerned both about Germany and the United States. Soviet intelligence had actually acquired some very valuable information early in the war from Britain, but it sat in Beria’s files unused. As always, he was afraid it might be just clever disinformation. Soviet physicists wrote to Stalin lobbying for action, for they realized that the Americans were working on a bomb (all publications by the relevant physicists in the United States had disappeared from science journals) and were fearful that the Germans might make a bomb first. Finally in 1943 Stalin decided to establish a research unit to build a reactor and put Igor Kurchatov in charge, one of the talented physicists to come out of Ioffe’s Leningrad Physical-Technical Institute. Starting in a small building in the south of Moscow, Kurchatov and his group were able to make the reactor, but only with the news of Hiroshima did Stalin put the bomb project into full gear, establishing a laboratory south of Moscow called Arzamas-16 in the buildings of the famous nineteenth-century Sarov monastery. Beria was in charge of the bomb project, as well as the whole nuclear industry that was extracting and processing uranium in the USSR, eastern Germany, and Czechoslovakia. There remained the problem of the exact design of the bomb, and this time intelligence from Klaus Fuchs at Los Alamos and the mere fact of American success helped Soviet scientists to gain at least a year in time. In 1949 they exploded their first atomic bomb in secret. The US government learned of it only from analyzing atmospheric fallout.

The construction of the bomb was an immense technological feat for a relatively backward country, one that came at equally immense cost in capital investments. The mere existence of the bomb did not solve all Soviet military problems. No Soviet bomber then existing could fly from the Soviet Union to strike the United States, and bombers were the only delivery vehicles then available. To make things worse, the Soviets did not have aircraft engines big enough to power a large bomber. The United States maintained a network of bases in Western Europe and Turkey from which aircraft could strike virtually any important target in the USSR, but the only reply or preventive action would have to target those bases, not the United States itself. The Soviet air force had been primarily a ground support weapon, having abandoned strategic bombing before the war to build smaller bombers to support the infantry. Thus Stalin had to order the construction of long-range bombers and a massive air defense network to defend the main Soviet target cities, all at colossal expense. By the time of his death the foundations of these forces were in place.

Military power was all very well, but Stalin and his circle realized that their greatest advantage was in the political sphere, in the prestige of the Soviet victory over Hitler and of the Communist movement in the world generally. Spreading Communist rule and the socialist system, they assumed, would also spread Soviet power. The first arena in which they saw possibilities was quite naturally in Eastern Europe, which had been liberated from the Nazis and was now under Soviet occupation.

The Soviets hosted many exiled Communists in Moscow during the war, and came into contact with the underground as they advanced into Eastern Europe. The strategy that Stalin developed and required the local Communists to follow was the establishment of a regime of “people’s democracy.” The Communist party was to make a coalition in each country with other leftist and agrarian groups rather than seize power in its own name. New constitutions were to be worked out with new elected governments (a change from pre-war dictatorships) and in the one previously democratic country, Czechoslovakia, the old constitution was restored. Stalin, however, was by no means relinquishing the opportunity for control provided by the victory in the war. In all of the liberated countries the Communists were to be a major partner in the government, and if they could not do that honestly, then by manipulation of the elections. The local Communists everywhere took charge of the ministries of the interior that controlled the various police forces, and those ministries were effectively controlled by the Soviet security forces. Further, the local Communists consulted the Soviet authorities, either the Soviet ambassador or Moscow directly on virtually every issue of importance.

This situation was not stable in the long run. It had the same problems that the Popular Front did in the Spanish Civil War, the incompatibility of the Communist parties with their coalition “partners” in methods and aims. The disastrous economic situation of most East European countries added more instability, and the war had left a residue of violence and hatred that further complicated matters. Even the Soviet ambassadors were shocked at the amount of anti-Semitism in post-war Czechoslovakia and other countries, and were nervous at its exploitation by local Communists. As they came to realize, nationalism was just under the surface even in the Communist parties, for all East European countries had a modern history where nationalist movements predominated, not liberalism or socialism, and the war had only exacerbated the situation. The non-Communist coalition parties were determined not to surrender complete control to the Communists, something they found increasingly difficult. Finally, the Soviets were not popular everywhere, even if they had defeated Hitler. If the Yugoslavs and the populations of Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria greeted the Red Army as liberators, Hungary and Rumania were a different matter. The nationalist dictatorships had been popular until Hitler began to lose the war, and both were stridently anti-Soviet and anti-Russian. In Poland the Communists were a minority in a mass resistance movement that was also anti-Communist and anti-Russian, and the Warsaw uprising remained a bone of contention. Germany was especially difficult, as support for Hitler had been nearly universal and the victorious Red Army had behaved as conquerors toward Germans civilians, not as liberators, looting houses and raping women.

The turning points came late in 1947, when Stalin created the Communist Information Bureau as a smaller successor to the Comintern, signaling his intention to maintain formal control over his comrades. In February 1948, a government crisis in Czechoslovakia led the Communists under Klement Gottwald to form “action committees” and with some Soviet prompting, to seize power. The constitutional president Edvard Beneš soon resigned and the Communists were now in complete control. By various devices the Communists took power in all the other East European countries. The new governments then moved way beyond the original slogans of “people’s democracies” (though officially the term remained) toward full nationalization and collectivization of agriculture. The new Communist governments also deployed the full arsenal of terror against their opponents, executions and imprisonment for hundreds of thousands. Show trials of allegedly dissident Communist leaders, like that of Rudolf Slansky in Czechoslovakia, imitated earlier Soviet show trials. With opposition cowed, the East European states began huge construction projects on the Soviet model, relying on very real enthusiasm for socialism, especially among youth, but nowhere did they approach a level of support large enough to maintain themselves without the threat of force and Soviet backing.

The one exception to many of these rules was Yugoslavia, which provided Stalin with a challenge from within the Communist movement that he never succeeded in crushing. Unlike his neighbors, Josip Broz Tito had come to power with considerable mass support, the fruit of his years leading the partisans against German and Italian occupation. In the postwar years Tito was more Stalinist than Stalin, and also had tactical disagreements over post-war Balkan structures and over the Greek Civil War, where Stalin ended his support of the Communists and thus enraged Tito. Finally in 1948 Stalin condemned Tito’s “deviations” and tried to isolate Yugoslavia, without much success given tacit Western support. Later Tito came up with the idea that his socialist industries would be “self-managed” to differentiate them from Soviet practice, but fundamentally the issue was simply that Tito was not dependent on the Soviets for survival and did not see any reason to follow orders.

The other area in which Stalin was at least partially stymied was Germany. The four-power occupation gave the Soviets control over the eastern part of the new Germany and the eastern part of Berlin. As in Eastern Europe, the Soviets set up a people’s democracy in the eastern zone with the Communists at the center. Otherwise the situation was somewhat different from East Europe. Germany was an industrialized country with much of that industry in the Soviet zone. The German Communists before Hitler had been a major political force and the tiny anti-Nazi resistance in Germany was heavily Communist. At the same time almost all of the Communists’ pre-1933 supporters had enthusiastically embraced Hitler. The new German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht and his comrades were generals without an army. Furthermore, Stalin wanted to solve the German problem as a whole, not just set up a rump Communist state, so that all the decisions about the eastern zone were in effect temporary measures. He seems to have hoped for a united neutral Germany with major Soviet influence. Part of his reasoning was that such a policy would be a successful propaganda ploy, but he also seems to have believed that a neutral Germany would necessarily differ in its interests from the United States and Britain and even come into conflict with them. Molotov would stick to this policy well after Stalin’s death. It was not until western Germany began to coalesce, starting in 1947 with the Marshall Plan, then the establishment of a common west zone currency, the failure of the Berlin blockade (1948–49), and finally the foundation of the Federal Republic in the West that Stalin accepted the inevitable. He allowed Ulbricht to form the German Democratic Republic in 1949, though even then it remained somewhat provisional into the 1950s.

Thus Europe was divided by 1949. Stalin had already abandoned the Greek Communists just as the West abandoned its allies in Eastern Europe, for both sides realized that Soviet and Western power were unshakeable in their respective spheres of influence. Stalin discouraged any adventures by Italian or other Communist hotheads in Western Europe, telling them instead that their goal was to maintain their structures intact and fight for peace against the possibility of a Western attack on the Soviet Union. As it turned out, events were unfolding in Asia that would come to put European affairs in the shadow.

Stalin had not paid much attention to Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communist party for years. After the Communist defeat in 1927 the party had spent years forming a guerilla base around Yenan, remote from the centers of the country. The Japanese invasion had led to a sort of Popular Front with Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and in the course of the war the Communists grew immensely in numbers and strength. With the defeat of Japan, Chiang’s troops moved into northern China and Manchuria, where the Communists had strong bases in the countryside. Initially Stalin assumed that the Communists would not be able to match Chiang’s professional army and were too weak politically to matter, but by 1947 Mao had proved his ability to hold off the apparently superior forces of the enemy. The Soviets upgraded their support, and Stalin began to send the Chinese telegram after telegram with advice on how to organize power as well as answers to questions of Marxist ideology. By the summer of 1948, the Communists were clearly winning, but even Mao thought victory might come in only three to five years. Even he did not expect the decisive Communist victories ending with the rout of Chiang’s troops at the giant battle of Huaihai at the end of the year. The battle smashed the corrupt and incompetent Nationalist regime and the People’s Liberation Army entered Peking in January 1949, sweeping on into southern China. Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on October 1. The Communist world had more than doubled in size.

One of the first international consequences of Mao’s victory was in Indochina. Since 1940 the Vietnamese Communists under Ho Chi Minh had been battling first the Japanese occupation and then France, which was trying to rebuild its colonial empire. The Vietnamese Communists followed a variant of the people’s democracy strategy, stressing opposition to colonial rule and land reform rather than an immediate transition to socialism. Ho’s bases were in the north, and with the Chinese Communist victory he turned to link up with China, a ready source of supplies. The French fought on, but in 1954 made a fatal error in establishing a base in the mountainous northwest of the country to cut off Ho’s links with Laos. The Communist army, no longer just a guerilla force and now equipped with heavy guns, surrounded the French and forced the garrison to capitulate after a siege of several months. The Geneva settlement divided the country at the seventeenth parallel, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam now held the north. Vietnam would come to play a crucial role in the Cold War, but the most important immediate consequence of the Chinese Communist victory was in Korea.

In Korea events had moved very much as in China and Vietnam. Soviet troops had briefly occupied the north, giving a boost to the Communists under Kim Il Sung. Kim too followed the line of people’s democracy rather than proletarian dictatorship but found himself stopped in the south, occupied by American troops. In 1948 American-sponsored elections led to the formation of the Republic of Korea under the despotic Syngman Rhee. From 1949 Kim began to press Stalin to allow him to invade the south, where Communist guerillas were active and victory seemed within grasp. Stalin was initially very skeptical, but in 1949 changed his mind, in part because of the Chinese revolution and in part as a response to the formation of NATO in that year. Mao had similar doubts, but both approved the plan. The Soviet Union provided North Korea with massive military aid and in June 1950, Kim’s troops invaded South Korea, quickly defeating both American and South Korean troops. Soviet confidence in victory was such that they continued to boycott the UN Security Council over American policy toward Taiwan, allowing the United States to fight an American war under the UN flag. Stalin monitored the war’s progress in detail, sending regular advice and instructions until the American landing at Inchon in September 1950, which turned the tide against the Communists. It seemed that Kim would go down to defeat, for Stalin had no intention of sending in Soviet troops. A request for Chinese troops met with refusal, to the surprise of both Stalin and Kim, and Stalin ordered the Korean leader to prepare for guerilla warfare and evacuate to the Soviet Union. Then the Chinese changed their minds, apparently in response to General Douglas MacArthur’s bellicose talk of “rollback” and its implied threat to China. Chinese “volunteers” poured across the border, pushing the Americans and their allies back to the thirty-eighth parallel, more or less the starting point. By 1951 the war was at a stalemate, to be resolved only by the truce concluded a few months after Stalin’s death. Kim had failed to conquer the south, but the Chinese and North Korean armies, barely out of their own revolutions and with only backward economies (and some Soviet aid) had held off the United States for three years.

At the time of Stalin’s death in 1953 the Soviet Union had a great deal to show on the international stage for the years since the Second World War. There was now a “socialist camp” that included China and the northern parts of Korea and Vietnam as well as most of Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union did have an atomic bomb and was about to acquire a hydrogen bomb. These successes were also the reasons that galvanized Western opposition, in the process negating Stalin’s belief in the inevitability of conflict among Western powers. The United States was now completely committed to prevent any more Communist successes, and it possessed resources that the Soviet Union could not match. Furthermore, Eastern Europe was a mixed blessing. None of the new regimes except (ironically) Yugoslavia had enough popular support to stay in power without Soviet backing, and the German problem remained unresolved. The German Democratic Republic had not been able to produce a stable economy and the open border with the West meant that thousands of people, mostly highly trained professionals, left every year. The emerging Cold War prevented the final resolution of the many problems created by the post war four-power occupation, the most explosive being the status of Berlin.

Behind the back and forth of Cold War diplomacy, with its periodic crises, loomed the larger issue of Soviet military power. The mere possession of an atomic bomb did not render the country invulnerable, much less equal to the United States. By 1953 the Soviets had gone a long way toward fending off the potential threat of US strategic bombers, but the world was not standing still. The United States realized that the next stage would be the construction of missiles and as such was working on them. Soviet scientists and military planners had come to the same conclusions, and thus missile construction proceeded, if slowly. The launching of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957 created the impression that the Soviets might be way ahead in missile design and construction, and set off a frantic search by the CIA for information about Soviet capabilities. In reality, the rocket that launched Sputnik was highly successful but useless for military purposes. It required a huge launching pad and several days’ preparation time, besides being too expensive to manufacture in large numbers. The Soviets would not have even twenty or thirty ICBMs until the early 1960s, and rough parity with the United States did not come until after the fall of Khrushchev. The United States did not know this until relatively late, however. The notorious U-2 flight of 1960 was an attempt to find out just what the Soviets had, but it was, of course a failure though it did demonstrate the abilities of Soviet air defense. It was not until 1961, after the United States deployed its first spy satellites that the American government was able to determine just how weak the Soviet missile program was. Thus, for most of the 1950s Khrushchev could continue to bluff his way through a series of crises.

The absence of the ability to strike the continental United Stares during those years did not remove the problem created by nuclear weapons. The Soviets most certainly could destroy Western Europe in any nuclear exchange, and Washington could not be sure that some sort of weapons could reach farther. Fortunately in both the Soviet Union and the United States, political leaders, generals, and scientists were becoming increasingly concerned that the weapons were too destructive to be easily or even usefully deployed. Stalin had resisted this conclusion, but once he was gone, even his inner circle began to have doubts. When Eisenhower remarked in a speech at the end of 1953 that atomic weapons could end civilization, even Malenkov echoed the idea, though Khrushchev initially rejected it. Nevertheless they also began to move toward the idea of international cooperation in developing peaceful uses for atomic energy. For the scientists, led by Kurchatov, the 1955 Soviet hydrogen bomb test was a turning point. Still the scientific head of the Soviet nuclear project, Kurchatov began to speak in favor of peaceful coexistence and warning of the dangers of nuclear war. He and the other physicists also pushed for more contact with Western colleagues, and Soviet and Western physicists began to meet fairly regularly. This was important for science, and in addition the involvement of so many scientists east and west in weapons programs meant that an informal channel existed on nuclear issues. Even before the hydrogen bomb test, Khrushchev had Marshal Zhukov mention the possibility of peaceful coexistence in his May Day speech of 1955, in spite of Molotov’s objections. Thus by the Geneva conference of 1955 the limitation of nuclear weapons became a major part of Soviet diplomacy, a concern shared by Eisenhower and most other Western leaders. Khrushchev’s further proclamation at the Twentieth Congress in 1956 that war was not inevitable and peaceful coexistence between capitalism and socialism was possible had many dimensions, but one of them was to justify the need and possibility for talks on weapons limitations and disarmament. The continuous crises of the Cold War played out against powerful counter-currents in both the United States and the USSR, pushing both sides toward some sort of agreement on nuclear weapons. Fortunately these countercurrents were at least to some extent present in the minds of most of the political leaders on both sides. Ultimately they would lead to the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban treaty, which eliminated atmospheric and undersea testing of nuclear weapons. The treaty did nothing to stop the arms race, but it did sharply curtail the damage to the environment and public health caused by the testing of nuclear weapons.

With the knowledge that their nuclear arsenal was inferior to that of the United States and that American military doctrine in the 1950s included the first use of atomic weapons, Khrushchev was in a difficult position. The issues that mattered to him the most, at least at first, were the European issues that centered on Germany. For the Soviets there were three basic problems. First were the economic problems in East Germany and the resultant series of political crises, starting with the June 17, 1953, disorders in East Berlin that were put down by force. Second was the status of West Berlin, a thorn in the side of both the Soviets and the GDR, even if also a major inconvenience to NATO. Finally there was the problem of West Germany. After Stalin’s death the Soviet leadership realized that the Federal Republic was not going to turn against the United States, and indeed early in 1955 it joined NATO and began to build an army. The Soviet response was to establish the Warsaw Pact with its East European allies and put an end to any ideas of a neutral Germany. Though Molotov stuck to older policy, he had no support in the Politburo and from this moment on the Soviet leadership was committed to the division of Germany and full support of the GDR.

The particular fear of Germany was largely a relic of World War II and the inability of Khrushchev and many others of his generation to realize how much Europe, including Germany, had changed after 1945. West Germany’s chancellor of those years, Konrad Adenauer, while violently anti-communist, was also not interested in provoking conflicts and wanted much better trade relations with the Soviet Union than his American allies would permit. The immediate irritation for the Soviets was West Berlin, mainly because it created a threat to the GDR, where most of the Soviet Union’s troops facing NATO were stationed. To make matters worse, no final resolution of the outstanding issues of the occupation or any other matter concerning Germany was possible without including Berlin, an issue on which Soviet and American views were completely incompatible. A solution of sorts came in 1961, as East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht urgently requested Khrushchev for help in yet another economic crisis that led to a big increase in emigration from the east. Ulbricht suggested that somehow they close the border and Khrushchev responded with the idea of building a wall around West Berlin. The result was the Berlin Wall, put up in the early hours of August 13, 1961. Khrushchev was careful to make it clear that the access of the soldiers of the Western powers would not be affected, thus eliminating the incentive for Kennedy to respond with anything other than condemnation and more aid. Though it was a huge blow to the prestige of the socialist bloc, the wall defused the Berlin problem for the next decade.

European affairs had been at the center of Soviet attention for most of the time since 1945, but as the years passed China and what became known as the Third World came to take a larger place. The Third World meant the vast majority of the globe that in 1945 was still part of one or another European empire or (in the Western hemisphere) dominated by the United States. It was here that the Soviet Union was gradually able to challenge the West with increasing success until the 1970s. From the outset the Soviet leadership had assumed that sooner or later they would find allies in the colonial world, and their own policies in Central Asia were, in their minds, an anti-colonial revolution. The first Comintern Congress in 1919 had proclaimed the alliance of Communists and anti-imperialist nationalists, but the policy had little impact outside of China, and there it seemed a failure after 1927. The Second World War changed all that, and not only in China but also with its neighbors. In most other colonized countries the Communists were not strong, but virtually everywhere nationalist movements grew much more powerful than they had been before the war, which so weakened Britain and France that neither could put up much resistance. In 1948 the centerpiece of the British Empire, India, became independent, and by the 1950s it was clear that Britain would have to give up its empire sooner or later. France fought on in Indochina until 1954 and then in Algeria, but there too it went down to defeat. A whole host of new states came into being. Stalin had been skeptical of these new states, but his successors were not so wary.

The first Third World country that came into the good graces of the Soviet Union was Nasser’s Egypt in 1955. After some debate among the leadership Khrushchev agreed to supply Nasser with tanks and planes, marking the USSR’s first major entrance into the Middle East. When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Khrushchev supported him during the ensuing crisis, though he had little real leverage over the area. In any case, the week that the Suez crisis peaked, the Soviet leadership was absorbed with a far more serious issue in Eastern Europe. The beginnings of de-Stalinization in the USSR had a prompt echo in Poland, where riots led to the installation of Wladyslaw Gomulka as party leader. Gomulka had been a victim of Stalinist purges in Poland and now steered the country on a course that was loyal to Moscow but differed in its social and other policies: most notably, Polish farmers received land on the breakup of the collectives and remained owners until the fall of communism. More serious was the challenge in Hungary. Here the local Stalinists tried to hang on, provoking the collapse of the regime, and the emergence of a new leader in Imre Nagy. Nagy announced that Hungary would have multi-party elections and leave the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet leaders, including Khrushchev, hesitated. They had moved troops near Budapest, but only after days of indecision did they finally move in and suppress the revolt, installing Janos Kadar as the new party leader. Nagy was taken to Rumania and executed.

After 1956, relations with all the socialist brothers became increasingly complicated. Kadar retained collective farms but permitted and even encouraged small businesses. Both Poland and Hungary (after initial repression) permitted oppositional opinion to express itself in ways that were generally modest but not seen in the USSR or other Communist ruled countries. Other East European countries began to exert much more independence, though not necessarily accompanied by more liberal policies. Albania’s Enver Hoxha had opposed de-Stalinization from the first, and gradually built a Stalinist mini-state featuring crank economic schemes. Rumania became increasingly critical of Khrushchev and Soviet leadership generally, but also moved in a much more authoritarian direction than the USSR, and accompanied this course with super-industrialization schemes that impoverished the country by the 1980s. None of these changes in East Europe, however, were as significant as the growing break with China. Mao Tse-tung was not happy with Khrushchev’s secret speech, claiming later that Stalin was seventy percent good and only thirty percent bad. With some ambiguity, Mao backed the Soviets in Hungary, but relations deteriorated in subsequent years. Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) reflected the growing radicalization of Chinese policy, establishing gigantic communes in the place of Soviet-style collective farms and promoting back yard blast furnaces to make steel. Mao was also increasingly unhappy with Khrushchev’s attempts at peaceful coexistence with the United States, in his mind a fundamental impossibility. Khrushchev, as elsewhere, exacerbated the tension with his clumsy diplomacy, but totally different visions of socialism were at the heart of the dispute. The Soviet Union had spent a great deal of money in aid to China, especially after 1953, and sent many advisers on technical matters. Then in July 1960, Khrushchev ordered them all home. The final split came with the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, for Mao saw the resolution of the crisis as a surrender to the United States. Open polemics in the Chinese press calling Soviet policies “revisionist” made the split obvious for all to see, and continued until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China (1967). Now the Chinese leadership was claiming capitalist restoration in the USSR, and entered into a mad world all of its own. Border clashes only made things worse, but China was too absorbed in its own upheaval to make problems for the Russians. Nevertheless, the only major ally of the USSR in the Cold War was now gone, right at the time when Moscow had finally achieved strategic parity with the United States.

The rivalry with America moved more and more to the center of Cold War politics. Khrushchev continued to make attempts at promoting understanding, symbolized by his trip to the United States in 1959. The Soviet leader saw more than farms, for he toured the country extensively, meeting with Hollywood stars (though he was prevented from seeing Disneyland) and speaking with Eisenhower and other American officials. In spite of the ongoing Berlin problem, there seemed to be some progress, and more meetings were scheduled in Europe. Then in 1960 the Soviet air defense tracked a U-2 spy plane over Sverdlovsk and shot it down, ending any hope of talks on arms control or easing of tensions for the time being. The construction of the Berlin Wall the next year did not help either, but Khrushchev had much riskier plans in mind.

The Cuban revolution of 1959 had found a lukewarm reception in Moscow. Fidel Castro was not a member of the Cuban Communist Party, which had in fact opposed his movement until the last minute. Castro’s orientation was nevertheless both against American dominance and toward socialism. The many US moves against Cuba, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, covert operations, and threatening talk in the US Congress, convinced the Soviets that they should support him. Khrushchev thought that he could solve two problems at once by placing Soviet missiles in Cuba. One was that he had only a half dozen ICBMs, and the rest of his missiles were not yet big enough to reach the United States from the Soviet Union, leaving his country at a serious disadvantage. The other aim was to provide Castro with a serious defense against a possible invasion. Khrushchev made the decision largely on his own, with little consultation with the Soviet elite. Once the United States detected the missiles by U-2 overflights, Kennedy decided that they had to be removed. The outcome was inevitable, given that the USSR lacked a nuclear arsenal with the size and range of US equipment. Khrushchev had to withdraw, and to make matters worse the one US concession (removing US missiles from Turkey) remained secret. The humiliation was complete, and the internal repercussions were the beginning of Khrushchev’s ultimate fall.

With the arrival of Leonid Brezhnev as Soviet leader, the bluff and risk-taking came to an end, and the USSR concentrated on building up its military so that the Cuban debacle could never be repeated. Its foreign relations with the United States remained central, but as the Americans were increasingly preoccupied with Vietnam, Brezhnev had a bit of breathing room. He certainly needed it, for the descent of China into the Cultural Revolution was followed in 1968 by crisis in Czechoslovakia. In many ways the “Prague Spring” was a repeat of Hungary with the same outcome: Soviet troops restored the rule of the Communist party in a spirit in accord with Soviet conceptions of socialism. Ultimately it was not Eastern Europe but Vietnam that became the main focus of the Cold War for a decade.

The Soviet leadership had never seen Vietnam as an important front of the Cold War, and regarded the United States as too powerful in Southeast Asia to challenge. To make things worse, the Vietnamese Communists generally supported China after 1956, in part because the policy of peaceful coexistence undermined their desires for a war in the south to reunify their country. Khrushchev largely ignored them. He scarcely had the time to react to the Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964, for he was soon out of office, but Brezhnev quickly decided to respond to American escalation of the war by sending large quantities of Soviet aid, including anti-aircraft missiles capable of hitting American bombers, even B-52s, over North Vietnam. Unlike Khrushchev’s quixotic pursuit of Third World nationalist leaders like Nasser or Patrice Lumumba to almost universal failure, the support of North Vietnam led to the biggest defeat for the United States in the Cold War. By 1975, the last Americans had fled from the roof of the US embassy and the Vietnamese Communists ruled in the whole country, even if one devastated by war with a million and a half dead.

The victory of the Vietnamese Communists and the continued alliance with Cuba were certainly successes, even if neither country was large enough to make much difference in the geopolitical balance. In Europe the Soviet position seemed stable. The increasing economic problems in Poland were balanced by the restoration of normal relations with West Germany, the result of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik in the early 1970s. This rapprochement defused the European Cold War’s most serious conflict – the German problem. Brandt’s new turn was possible because Communism was no longer an issue in Western Europe. The post-war economic boom combined with a solid welfare system produced a generation of satisfied consumers, so far from the desperate masses of the first half of the twentieth century. The West European Communist parties ceased to grow, and the smaller ones faded into obscurity and the larger ones, such as the Italian Communist Party, grew increasingly critical of the Soviets, if more so of China.

Though no one knew it then, the Vietnamese victory was the last Communist success. No Communist revolution materialized from Che Guevara’s attempts in Latin America, and the mildly reformist Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup most contemporaries believed to have been masterminded by the CIA. In Africa, the radical regime of Colonel Mengistu of Ethiopa (1974–1991) was a Soviet ally, but its land reform hardly made it a socialist country in the Soviet sense, and in any case was too poor and small to make much of a difference. Africa, like most of the Third World, evolved in various ways, some countries becoming relatively prosperous capitalist economies, others moving toward even more desperate poverty, but none of them toward socialism as Moscow understood it. The rhetoric of people’s liberation that came from the Soviets rang increasingly hollow.

The first American response to its defeat in Vietnam was to move toward some sort of accommodation, the policy that was known as détente. The Nixon administration, knowing that the Soviets had rough parity in nuclear weapons and weakened by the war in Vietnam, decided to respond to Soviet overtures on arms limitations, the result being the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) limiting strategic weapons. The next stage was the 1975 Helsinki accord that recognized the post-World War II boundaries for the first time and also included generalities about mutual consultations and human rights, the latter soon to become a bone of contention. Discussions continued through the decade, ending finally with SALT II in 1979, limiting the number of delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons.

While limiting the hitherto frenetic pace of construction of nuclear arsenals and thus reducing the risks of annihilation, these moves did not end the Cold War, nor were they intended to. In many ways the more important move was the rapprochement with China that Nixon and Henry Kissinger inaugurated in 1971. With Nixon’s visit to China the next year the Soviet Union found itself facing both China and the United States as rivals. China, of course, was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, with all its murderous effects and political and economic chaos. The US-Chinese arrangement coincided with the rise of the Gang of Four, who ruled China with terror until Mao’s death in 1976. Only then was Deng Xiaoping able to restore some sort of normalcy, so that China was able to provide the United States with important support. During these years the United States and China traded intelligence on the Soviet Union. In public, the United States denounced the exile of Soviet dissidents and restrictions on Jewish emigration in the USSR while remaining silent about the thousands of people who perished in China during the last phases of the Cultural Revolution. The Soviets lambasted US imperialism while allying with Third World countries whose socialism or even nationalism was strictly nominal. Once the United States had played its “China card,” the US-Soviet contest gradually ceased to be a struggle for socialism or democratic capitalism and turned into yet another superpower rivalry.

The aging leadership around Brezhnev did not perceive these deeper shifts in society and politics in the world. It still lived in the world of revolutionary struggles and the building of socialism, even if their tactical orientation meant that revolutions abroad were rarely a priority. Their last move in that struggle was to be fatal, the involvement in Afganistan. The USSR had always had relations with its Afghan neighbor and occasionally provided aid and considered various schemes of meddling in Afghan politics, but the country was too poor, too traditional, and too marginal to the great power conflicts, especially after the end of British India. Then in 1973 a military coup overthrew the monarchy, and five years later it, in turn, fell to another group of army officers with more or less Marxist views. The new rulers passed various measures to destroy “feudalism,” the many traditional customs which they viewed as oppressive, provoking massive discontent. The Soviet leadership took the Afghan government seriously, as Communists moving toward a society on the Soviet model, and the challenge to the regime as another US-sponsored revolt. The latter belief was correct, as the CIA had started to aid the rebels by mid-1979, in part in the hope that the Soviets would be forced to intervene. To make matters worse, the Soviets feared that the Afghan leaders at the moment might go over to the United States or China. Thus on December 27, 1979, Soviet troops seized Kabul, placed a more loyal government in charge, and the invasion began. The United States provided aid for the rebels through Pakistan, thus laying a foundation for the rise of Islamic extremism. This fighting led to massive destruction and casualties in Afghanistan, and the death of some fourteen thousand Soviet soldiers. For the next six years, until the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Afghan war was the main issue of the Cold War as well as being an enormous drain on the resources and morale of the USSR. It also speeded up the collapse of the Soviet order.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the reappearance of Russia were momentous events, but events that are difficult to describe in any depth. The main outlines are clear, as much of its fall took place in public under intense scrutiny by the Soviet population, Russian and foreign journalists, and the governments of the world. Yet many of the crucial decisions took place behind closed doors and are too recent to be the object of study by historians. Many of the major events of the time have already fallen from memory, and others have been probably exaggerated in popular accounts as well as in the few academic attempts at analysis. Real sources scarcely exist, and sensational memoirs and fragments of information do not make good history. To complicate matters, perceptions of the events outside Russia and among the Russian and most former Soviet populations differ profoundly. All that is possible is a sketch of the events and of some of the more obvious social, political, and economic trends of a quarter of a century of upheaval, with some attention to the understanding of these events and trends by the Russians who lived through them.