Air University Review, November-December 1982

The Legacy of Stalinism

In the October Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko was one of Leon Trotsky’s chief lieutenants. In February 1938, he was pronounced guilty of treason and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment; in fact, he was executed later that same year. He was posthumously rehabilitated by Anastas Mikoyan at the 20th Party Congress in 1956.

His son Anton was expelled from the Komsomol immediately after the father’s purge trial. In 1941, Anton was arrested, and he spent most of the next twelve years in the Gulag (Vorkuta). His method in these memoirs is largely that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Roy Medvedev; i.e., he makes use of oral history in the form of his interviews with victims of the Stalinist terror. Also like Medvedev, especially in his recent study Philip Mironov and the Russian Civil War (1978), Antonov-Ovseyenko seems to have some means of penetrating secret and carefully guarded party archives. Both Medvedev and Antonov-Ovseyenko, for example, make reference to the archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. In addition, Antqnov-Ovseyenko has evidently had some kind of access to the multivolume study—never published—of the Sergei Kirov assassination produced by an investigating commission set up by Khrushchev after the 20th Party Congress.

* Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, The Time of Stalin-Portrait of a Tyranny, translated by George Saunders (New York: Harper & Row, 1981, $19.95), 375 pages.

Unfortunately for the historian, Antonov-Ovseyenko approaches the subject with the intemperance only natural to so heavy a sufferer of the terror, and hence he is not as cautious, systematic, or scrupulous as Medvedev. He does not document his work as satisfactorily. He is often content to accuse, not pausing to provide the evidence to make his accusations plausible: As a consequence, what is most interesting here, what might have been a real contribution if it could be sustained, is doubtful or worse. Let us consider several examples.

Antonov-Ovseyenko relates the now very old story that Stalin was a tsarist police agent in the Caucasus before 1912. Edward Ellis Smith (The Young Stalin, 1967) has much more information on this subject than Antonov-Ovseyenko, and Roy Medvedev (Let History Judge, 1972) and Robert Tucker (Stalin as Revolutionary, 1973) have left the idea pretty much discredited. Antonov-Ovseyenko emphasizes the likelihood of foul play in the surgical death of Commissar of War Mikhail Frunze in 1925. But Trotsky told the whole story of Frunze in the early 1930s, and we have no more information on it now than we had then. AntonovOvseyenko details Stalin’s destruction of persons close to Lenin, persons, who could presume to speak of Lenin more authoritatively than Stalin could, but he fails to mention one remarkable survivor: Lydia Aleksandrovna Fotieva was one of Lenin’s four secretaries and was perhaps closer to his work and legacy than anyone else except his wife Krupskaia. Fotieva died in Moscow in 1975 (see Pravda, 28 August 1975, p. 2, for her obituary). Antonov-Ovseyenko alleges one scandal against Stalin that I have not seen reported elsewhere, that he raped a 13-year old girl. As in the case of most of the other exposés in the book, there is not enough evidence on the point to warrant entertaining it seriously.

There is a series of more substantive points on which he makes original allegations. He says, for example, that Lenin was ill disposed in 1920 to Stalin’s having the position of Commissar of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. That may be, but it is a matter of record that Lenin defended Stalin’s work in that office in a speech to the 11th Party Congress in March-April 1922. Of course, by January 1923, Lenin had turned against Stalin, but for a long time prior to the fall of 1922 Lenin had been his staunch defender, and it is hard to accept Antonov-Ovseyenko’s account without more documentation.

Similarly, Antonov-Ovseyenko suggests that Stalin cheated his way into the position of General Secretary in April 1922 in the face of Lenin’s opposition. He offers no new documentation to force a change in the conventional interpretation of that point. Tucker and Medvedev have it otherwise, and even the hostile biography of Stalin by Trotsky (1941) is in agreement with them.

Antonov-Ovseyenko repeats the story of the 17th Party Congress (February 1934) previously told by Roy Medvedev, that there were an embarrassing number of votes against the reelection of Stalin to the Central Committee. Lazar Kaganovich, so the story goes, decided to destroy most of those ballots and gave orders to have them burned. Antonov-Ovseyenko gives a few new details on the assassination of Kirov, but the essence of the story is that of Medvedev, and Medvedev identifies his sources more fully.

Finally, there is one really sensational allegation here. It is that Krupskaia, Lenin’s widow, with whom Stalin was on bad terms, was poisoned by him in 1939. It is clear that he mistreated her, neglected her, kept her out of the limelight, and spoiled her as an authoritative interpreter of Lenin, but no one has previously suggested foul play in her death. The standard work here is Robert H. McNeal, Bride of the Revolution (1972). McNeal says that she died of "an abdominal embolism in connection with general arterial sclerosis."

In summary, what is reliable here is not new, and what is new is not reliable. Of course, it does not hurt to be reminded every so often of the work done by Uncle Joe Stalin, but the historian turning here for source material will find very little.

On the other hand, Seweryn Bialer has produced a work worthy of our most serious attention.* It is a conscientious and thoughtful performance, a broadly conceived and ambitious effort. So far as I am aware, it is the most assiduous and impartial work of its kind. It is in a class quite by itself, and it is to be highly recommended to anyone interested in the subject.

* Seweryn Bialer, Stalin's Successors: Leadership, Stability, and Change in the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980, $19.95), 312 pages.

Bialer characterizes the Brezhnev regime, in contrast to that of Khrushchev, as one averse to fantasy, voluntarism, and great leaps of any kind. It has been dedicated, he says, to delovitost’ (businesslike-ness), and in order to make the administrative apparatus more secure and presumably better able to do its job, Brezhnev has been concerned to protect it from the impulsive shocks to which Khrushchev was inclined to subject it. The political ground rules prevailing among the contemporary administrative elite are consonant with this concern: respect for job security and an aversion to the use of violence; insulation of the decision-making processes from pressures by the masses; generous rewards of privilege and status as fair compensation for the requisite qualities of leadership. These rules may not long prevail, however, for a far-reaching succession crisis is imminent.

Bialer makes some interesting points about the nature of this succession. He divides succession in the Soviet Union into two kinds: Succession of the individual leader and his immediate entourage on the one hand and succession of the whole upper stratum of the administrative elite on the other. He notes that there have been three previous cases of the first kind of succession (1924, 1953, 1964) but only one of the latter kind, i.e., only at the end of the 1930s was there a wholesale change of the personnel of leadership. We are now about to witness for the first time in Soviet history both kinds of succession at once. It is precisely due to the purge of the late 1930s that the leader and the entire elite with him are about to pass from the scene, because Stalin made a clean sweep around 1938 of virtually everyone of significance in Soviet administration. The imminent succession, then, will be the most dramatically comprehensive succession in Soviet history. What do these simultaneous successions portend for Soviet politics?

The outlook of the new generation, Bialer maintains, is different from that of the old. The new generation is scarcely touched by the traditions of populism or egalitarianism. It is strictly materialistic. It is condescending toward older colleagues. It is quite self-confident, much less characterized by feelings of inferiority.

It is a generation that perceives the inability of the Brezhnev administration in recent years to lay out a direction for Soviet development. It is a generation that deplores the backwardness of Soviet society, the functional deficiencies of the system, the inability of the present administration to make progress in rectifying the situation, and at the same time it probably stands confident in its own ability to do so. It is a generation that is less likely to accept actual or potential international achievements as substitutes for internal development. It is a generation that may be willing to pay a higher price in terms of political and social change if persuaded that such a price would assure substantial improvement in the growth and efficiency of the productive and distributive processes. . . . I do not suggest the existence of a new generation of Soviet party officials from whom one can expect reformist tendencies similar to those of Dubcek in Czechoslovakia. Nor do I expect them to be favorably disposed to the highly ideological, frantic, and campaign-like type of reforms associated with Khrushchev. At the same time I should be surprised if they were not reform minded in the Soviet framework, if they were satisfied with the thoroughly conservative attitudes toward innovation which pervade the present Brezhnev administration. (pp. 106-7)

However, this rising generation will need all the expertise and confidence it can muster, for it faces formidable problems. For example, there is the notoriously slow rate of economic growth and the fundamental decisions on economic reform that must be faced in the l980s. The new generation must define, among other things, a basic policy on investment options, and the choices it faces are as complex as they are consequential. It may opt for Central Asia, where most of the growth in labor supply will occur, and from which area, for national and cultural reasons, workers are not likely to want to move. It may decide for European Russia, which is poor both in new labor supply and in raw materials but where existing plants could be renovated more cheaply and perhaps more efficiently than they could be built elsewhere. Or it may dare to turn to Siberia, where raw materials are abundant but labor is scarce (population is declining), the administrative infrastructure is inadequate, and operating costs are twice as high as in central Russia.

The well-known problems in Soviet nationalities policy are no less forbidding, but here Bialer presents a remarkably fresh outlook. The genuinely puzzling feature of the situation, he says, is not why it causes trouble but rather why it has not caused more trouble than it has. "The Soviet Union is almost the only state which after World War II has been able to thwart the successful global trend of national and ethnic self-assertiveness against central authority." (p. 211) He suggests that the reason lies in an intelligent combination of repression and concession. There are conspicuous numbers of the minority nationals in the administrative apparatus of their own republics, but in the crucial central organs of the all-union party and the all-union government, there are very few non-Slays. In addition, the security apparatus is dominated by Russians. In most republics, the head of the KGB, the commander of the army, and the second secretary of the party are Russians.*

*There have been important developments in this area of Soviet politics since this article was written. During the last week of May 1982, Yurii V. Andropov, chief of the KGB, was made a member of the Party Secretariat, filling the position left vacant by the death of Mikhail Suslov. Andropov then resigned his position as head of the KGB and was replaced by Vitalii V. Fedorchuk, former head of the Ukrainian KGB and a Ukrainian national.

One of the more striking and valuable parts of the book is Bialer’s argument that the Soviet regime is accepted as legitimate by the mass of the people. This is an idea that will disturb many American readers, but in my opinion, he is undoubtedly right, at least among that part of the mass that is Slavic.

The world of privilege may separate [elite] and [mass] in Soviet society, but origin and culture unite them. It is in this sense and only in this sense that one should understand the observation of a Russian writer in conversation with me, "Our power is a genuinely popular power." (p. 182)

As the official Soviet slogan goes, "The party and the people are one." And, as the dissident intellectual adds, "Yes, but they shop in different stores." The important point here is that although they shop in different stores, they really are one.

The Soviet regime has evolved in the course of its development a base of mass, popular support. This base consists in a combination of the existence of a relatively large stratum which actively identifies with the system together with a public which recognizes as legitimate and "natural" the freedom of the regime to act on its behalf. Both of these elements are evident in the phenomenon of mass political participation in the Soviet Union which is central to an evaluation of the regime’s popular legitimacy. (pp. 185-86)

The elements of the popular consensus which sanctions the nature of the government, Bialer suggests, include hostility to liberal democracy, commitment to a one-party state, fear and mistrust of spontaneity in political and social behavior, the desire for strong government to maintain public order, the decline of utopianism, and a commitment to rationalizing the system. It is useful for the Western reader to be reminded as articulately as Bialer does that the political values of their public and ours are as incommensurable as are the two styles of leadership.

His final judgment is a sobering one.

Time is not running out on the Soviet system. The regime still possesses enormous reserves of stability, but adjustments have to be made if the system is to remain effective. Yet if the combination of the economic emergencies facing the Soviet Union in the l980s together with the openings afforded by the approaching succession of leadership and elites do not yield serious efforts to reform the traditional economic system, then I do not know what may and will. Should actual Soviet growth and energy shortages in the 1980s fall within the range of the most pessimistic projections, the Soviet Union, without the reform and a successful one at that, is condemned not simply to a process of "muddling through" but a process of "muddling down." (p. 305)

I find several flaws in this otherwise outstanding work. On the standard of living of the population, Bialer gives the Brezhnev regime higher marks than I have seen elsewhere. He cites evidence of enormous efforts and investments in the consumer economy, and he shows, by Soviet statistics, an impressive growth of per capita levels of consumption. He concludes that the Brezhnev administration "has generally been able to satisfy popular expectations for higher standards of living." This may well be what Soviet statistics show, but almost no one who lives in the Soviet Union, or inquires of those who live there, has any reason to believe that standards of living and consumption there are improving. There is in fact a great roaring rage of discontent with the consumer economy. (Since the appearance of Bialer’s book, there has been a good deal of discussion of evidence—presented especially by Murray Feshbach—that life expectancy has declined seriously in the Soviet Union since l959.)*

*For this unusually import work, see especially Murray Feshbach, "Between the Lines of the 1979 Soviet Census," Problems of Communism, January-February 1982, 27ff., and Christopher Davis and Murray Feshbach, Rising Infant Mortality in the USSR in the 1970's, Series P-95, No. 75, Washington, D.C., Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, June 1980.

Similarly, Bialer fails to note the pervasive feeling of cynical pessimism more and more evident in Soviet society. Sometimes, it is articulated explicitly. Sometimes, it seems to take the form of passive-aggressive resistance to the system through absenteeism, drunkenness, hooliganism. By the same token, there is a vast disillusionment with the official ideology, and there is an enormous growth of alternative ideologies, especially of Orthodox Christianity and neo-Slavophilism. Neither the old nor the new generation in Soviet leadership can be unaware of it.

Though Bialer deals both with the problem of the nationalities and with the problem of the tailspin of the economy, he does not suggest how much each of these two problems might potentially aggravate the other. There is a Russian saying to the effect that "the shortage will be divided among the peasants." More to the point is the question how the shortage will be divided among the nationalities. There is among Russians today—of almost all persuasions, Communists and Christians and others— an opinion, not borne out by the statistics, that the Russian nation lives worse than the others, that it somehow sacrifices for the others. It is often spoken of with resentment, as if it is a Communist stunt, unworthy of Russians. The nationalities may well think just the contrary. In any event, the political problem of economic distribution and/or discrimination has every prospect of becoming a serious one, particularly as the Asian population grows much faster than the European population.

Bialer does not deal with some of the more articulate émigré commentaries on present Soviet problems of administration. For example, he ignores Andrei Amalrik’s ideas of the "paradox of the regime" and "unnatural selection." The bureaucracy, Amalrik argued (Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? 1970), must justify its grip on the policy process by providing leadership that is imaginative, creative, and progressive, leadership that is demonstrably successful; yet it must also reduce bureaucratic risks and save its own skin by pursuit of politically prudent, low-risk options, and it must thus weed out individuals challenging its own bureaucratic inertia. A recent suggestion by Alexander Yanov (Détente after Brezhnev, 1977) is a variation on the theme of "unnatural selection." Though bureaucratic efficiency demands the career open to talent, the present administrative apparatus is making every effort to render its privileged status hereditary. Yanov calls the tendency "the aristocratization of the elite." It would have been interesting to have Bialer’s comment on these ideas.

Consideration of these two books together naturally suggests the question whether the changes on the Soviet political scene since Stalin’s time preclude the possibility of the return of Stalinism. Though Bialer does not deal explicitly with this question, the general drift of his presentation argues against it. The Brezhnev regime, he emphasizes, means delovitost’, and from the new generation, he expects more of the same. If future developments hold to this standard, then a return to Stalinism is out of the question because Stalinism was intrinsically fantastic and irrational. Let us consider just two striking examples: the purge of the Soviet officers’ corps on the eve of the war with Germany and the deification of the utterly unscientific notions of T. D. Lysenko in biological science, to the long-term detriment of Soviet agriculture. Bialer would seem to be sure that such irrational phenomena as these are incompatible with the grey-flannel-suited mentality of the present apparatchiki. And he favors the likelihood of reform instead.

On this point, in spite of the authority of Bialer, his impressive scholarship, and his extensive contacts and conversations with representatives of the coming generation of Soviet elite, not all Sovietologists would agree. There is the well-argued view of Yanov that the pressure of food shortages, international debacles, social and political stress in general, and perhaps ethnic problems in particular, might provoke the formation of an ugly coalition of Russian chauvinists and neo-Stalinists, an unholy amalgam of all that is most frightful from both the imperial Russian and the Soviet past, a prospect that Yanov denominates "the black revolution."

While most American scholars lack Yanov’s characteristically émigré verve and hyperbole, many of them are more and more inclined to think that the next generation of leadership in the Soviet Union must either engage in a genuine reform of the economic system by liberalizing it or that it must crack down hard and restore something like a neo-Stalinist system. Delovitost’ notwithstanding, one Soviet reality that is not easily measured by the standards of political science and academic rationalism, but that is nevertheless very live and real today, is the traditional Russian disposition to myth and fantasy, to what Dostoevski called "miracle, mystery, and authority." There are cults and faiths enough to fill an Aristotelian catalog, but at the bottom of most of them is a strident spirit of ethnic culture and nationalism. If they find a common denominator and the proper precipitant, then delovitost’ has a serious rival, to say the least.

Hugh Ragsdale (A.B., University of North Carolina; M.A., Ph.D., University of Virginia) is a professor of history at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He has traveled and studied in the Soviet Union as a visiting scholar for the Hoover Institution and as a Fulbright-IREX Fellow. Dr. Ragsdale is the author of Paul I: A Reassessment of His Life and Reign (1979) and Bonaparte and the Russians: Détente in the Napoleonic Era (1980) and has lectured widely here and abroad.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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