Part I The Politics of Soviet History

Part I The Politics of Soviet History

2 The Politics of Soviet History INTRODUCTION My earlier volume dealt with the Soviet historical debate in the period from Gorbachev's election as General Secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985 to the immediate aftermath of the XIX Party Conference, held in June-July 1988. 1 In these years, and particularly in the eighteen months after the beginning of 1987, a vast change took place in Soviet perceptions. By the summer of 1988 the Soviet press discussed the Stalin period quite frankly and freely from many different perspectives. This phase in Soviet intellectual development was more or less complete in itself. I have not returned to it here. Between the party Conference and the unsuccessful coup of August 1991, the debate about the origins of Stalinism entered a crucial new phase. In 1989-91, disappointed or encouraged by the growing political, economic and social crisis confronting Gorbachev, many writers strongly challenged the whole Leninist heritage, and argued that the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 was neither inevitable nor justified. They were supported by the overwhelming majority of the active and vocal intellectuals in Moscow and Leningrad. While the debate of 1987-8 was intertwined with Gorbachev's successful struggle for glasnost' against Ligachev and the conservatives in the party, the debate of 1989-91 was an intimate part of the struggle between what might be called the 'freemarket democrats' and the Communist Party. The free-market democrats favour parliamentary democracy and Western-style private capitalism, whereas many party officials and ordinary party members sought to maintain their political power, to continue some kind of socialist economic system, and to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union as a coordinated group of republics. A third force, or middle way, of which Gorbachev was the most prominent representative, advocated a democratic 'socialism with a human face'. In the course of the battle between free-market democrats and orthodox Communists, the third force disintegrated. Following the defeat of the August 1991 coup, when the old leaders tried to seize power, the Communist Party was temporarily banned and the Soviet Union collapsed. In the Russian Federation the Yeltsin government embarked on its heroic attempt to stabilise the currency and to transform the economy into a capitalist system modelled on the United States and Britain - or on what the economies of these countries were presumed to be. For a fairly short time - until about the end of 1992 - a euphoric and

The Politics of Soviet History 3 total repudiation of the Soviet past dominated the media. Apart from a few eccentrics, the publicists who had gained fame as advocates of the New Economic Policy and the Leninist road to socialism now took it for granted that in 1917 Russia had left the road which all civilised countries had to follow. The only question worth discussing was whether it had taken the wrong turning when the February-March Revolution overthrew the Tsar or when the October-November Revolution overthrew Kerensky and the Provisional government. A tremendous nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary past coloured most popular writings about history. But shock therapy failed - some of my economist colleagues would say 'only partly succeeded' - and widespread disillusionment set in. Yeltsin forcibly closed down the Supreme Soviet in October 1993 and replaced it by a Federal Assembly. The elected Chamber was appropriately named the Duma, after the pre-revolutionary 'parliament' which existed uneasily from 1906 to 1917. Paradoxically, the results of the elections in December were ambiguous. Critics of the free market and nationalists obtained unexpectedly high votes. In 1993-6, against the background of political pluralism, a genuine pluralism of historical views was again expressed in the media. The whole range of Russian national history was re-examined. A single issue in 1995 of the most popular history journal, Rodina, which still has a circulation of 90 000, dealt with Thirteenth-Century art, Catherine the Great, Eighteenth-Century popular prints, peasant life at the end of the Nineteenth Century, the dearth of food during the second world war, the filming of Sholokhov's novel of the Civil War 'Quiet Flows the Don' in the 1950s, and the failure of Kosygin's economic reform of 1965.2 Russian history is only one stream in the teeming flow of accounts of the past which have appeared on the territory of the former Soviet Union. Within the Russian Federation, Tatars, Bashkirs, the peoples of Dagestan and others (including Chechens... ) are all writing their own history. An acrimonious literature has appeared about the pre-revolutionary and Soviet history of the Cossacks. The fourteen newly-independent republics which have broken away from the Russian Federation are each re-creating their own national history. Until 1985 the story of the annexation of formerly independent countries by the Tsars was coloured by the knowledge that the Russian Empire was to become the Soviet Union - the model for the future of the world. Russia - with its dominant language, officials and economy - was first among equals, both before and after the Bolshevik Revolution. Most of the new histories naturally emphasise the struggle of the smaller nations against Russian domination. In Ukraine, the resistance of Bohdan

4 The Politics of Soviet History Khmel'nyts'kyi against Russia is emphasised rather than his eventual capitulation to Tsar Aleksei in 1654, the central event in the Soviet histories.3 And in many Ukrainian accounts Stepan Bandera and his followers turned from villains into heroes. The Banderivtsi were Ukrainian guerrillas, strongly anti-semitic, who were allied with Hitler for much of the second world war and then fought against Soviet occupation after the war. Statues of Bandera were erected, particularly in Western Ukraine, and literature favourable to him was widely on sale in Kiev. This intense nationalism lost favour after President Kuchma was elected with the support of most of the Russian-speaking population, but continued to dominate the Western Ukrainian view of the past. In the Crimea the situation is the mirror image of that in the rest of Ukraine. In honour of the 300th Anniversary of the annexation of Ukraine by Russia the Crimea was transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954, in spite of its majority population of Russians. In Crimea the Russian national banner is waved in support of Crimean autonomy. The statue of Catherine the Great was restored in Odessa, and unveiled with great pomp. Pro-Russian history textbooks are used in Crimea and in largely Russianspeaking Donetsk. In Kazakhstan the story is more complicated. In June 1991 a very senior Kazakh historian visited my university and spent best part of a day explaining that Russian influence had been harmful to Kazakh progress from the earliest times to the present day. The new textbook on Kazakh history is not so one-sided. It describes the colonial regime established by Tsarism in blunt terms, dwells enthusiastically on anti-colonial Kazakh revolts, and brings out the horrors of the 'totalitarian system' under Stalin, which were particularly frightful during the collectivisation of nomad agriculture in the early 1930s. But its account of cultural and economic progress and setbacks under both Tsars and Bolsheviks is quite detailed and objective. 4 In neighbouring Uzbekistan changes have been much slower. According to an American historian, school history textbooks 'still rely to a great extent on historiography mapped out by Russian and Soviet scholars'. While the 1873-6 anti-russian revolt is described in much more detail than in the Soviet textbooks, the new histories still take the line that in the long run Russian occupation was good for Central Asia. 5 In Belorussia the writing of history has undergone two sharp changes since 1991. In the first years of independence, nationalist interpretations of the pre-revolutionary and Soviet past were almost universal. But a pro Russian president, Lukashenka, was elected in 1995. He promptly stigmatised 51(!) post-1991 textbooks on history and literature on the grounds that they were nationalistic, 'biassed and politicised', and announced that

The Politics of Soviet History 5 for the time being the pre-1991 Soviet textbooks should be used. 6 In practice, an outright ban was not imposed, owing to the textbook shortage. Instead a committee was established to review the textbooks. 7 In the Transcaucasus, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia are each producing their own histories; and the Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), which lost their independence only at the beginning of the second world war, have quickly restored their national pre-1940 histories to centre stage. In the account which follows I shall not attempt to deal with history in the former Union republics, or on the territories of national minorities within the Russian Federation. And it is possible to offer only brief glimpses of the considerable efforts now being made in many different Russian regions to re-examine their own history. But the reader should be aware that the Moscow and St Petersburg-centred Russian national and nationalist variants of the Soviet past are just one major example of the dozens of national and regional histories which now abound in the former Soviet Union.