R.Service

REFORM IN THE SOVIET UNION: A TALE WITH STRUCTURE

Soviet history, from the origins to the state in the October 1917 Revolution to the collapse at the end of 1991, is replete with attempts at reform. The word itself was seldom used. "Reform" was pejorative in the communist lexicon. But the introduction of reforming measures was a frequent phenomenon. The phenomenon invites explanation. There is a need to account not only to the motives for successive reforms but also for the failure of each reform to satisfy the ascendant party leadership. Why were reforms undertaken and why was they undertaken so frequently?

Answers to these questions must start from an analysis of the early Soviet order (Sovetskii stroi). The fundaments of this order were lowered into position of the first year and a half after the October Revolution. By March 1919, when the party held its eight congress, the communists ruled a one-party-state. Their party was organised on centralist principles with a commitment to hierarchy and discipline; it was essentially the supreme agency of state and relayed its directives and appointed its personnel to the government and all other public institutions ¹. Control over the mass media was tight and the beginnings of a one-ideology state were realised. At the same time the party, while issuing decrees, was negligent about the rule of law. The communist dictatorship's survivle took precedence over judicial procedure. Police-state methods were inaugurated; legal nihilism prevailed. Meanwhile the state acted on the premise that it had the political right and ideological duty to command, indoctrinate and mobilise society for the ends prescribed by the ascendant party leadership. The Soviet order was the basic form of state and society for the next seven decades. Invented under Lenin, it lasted until the final couple of years of Gorbachev's general secretaryship.

This is not to say that absolutely every stone in the fundaments was in place by 1919. Rival parties continued to exist, however fitfully, in open politics. The Mensheviks contested some elections to the soviets in the Civil War and the show-trial of the Socialist-Revolutionaries did not occur until 1922. The Soviet state was not strictly a one-party state until these parties had been eliminated. Similarly it took until 1922 for a comprehensive pre-publication authority, Glavlit, to be established ². Until then the communist authorities had relied upon sporadic intervention by the Cheka and upon the vetting of authors by government-owned publishing houses which discouraged approaches from writers overtly hostile to the October Revolution ³. Not all judicial institutions were immediately subverted by communist rule. And the administrative framework in the Civil War was shaky in the extreme. The Kremlin leadership concentrated its resourses upon the conscription of Red Army soldiers and the extraction of food supplies from the countryside; the mobilisation of society for more complex tasks of 'socialist construction' were to a large extent postponed until peacetime — and even in the 1920s it was a task fraught with technical and social difficulties.

All this notwithstanding, the months from October 1917 to March 1919 are reasonably designated as the period when the fundaments of the Soviet order were introduced and consolidated. Within two years that order was already being subjected to reform in the form of Lenin's New Economic Policy, which involved concessions to private enterprise and a tightening of political control inside and outside the party. The New Economic Policy lasted a mere seven years. In 1928 a second great reform was imposed by Stalin. Forced-rate industrialisation; forcible agricultural collectivisation; political terror in town and village; the extention of party and governmental dominance over virtually the entire economy: such were the features of Stalin's abandonment of the New Economic Policy.

Stalin was striving to energise and, at the same time, stabilise the Soviet order. Things did not work out as intended, and — after various attempts to rectify problems as he understood them — Stalin geared up the machinery of state terror. Among his purposes was the reduction of the party's capacity to impede his despotic power and, more generally, to rid politics of the informal methods of obstruction ⁴. The bloody mass purges of 1937 — 1938 were the result. Stalin's despotism was confirmed, but the informal methods proved hard to eradicate; and Stalin subsequently limited himself to occasional attacks on particular groups in public and social life ⁵. Whether he was planning a second Great Terror in 1953 is still unclear. But it is evident that the reform of the late 1930s had failed to eliminate some of the problems Stalin had identified. In the last years of his rule, he opted for a convervative consolidation of his institutional re-arrangements.

In subsequent years the communist party leadership undertook measures to undo the cement of such arrangements at various points. The party was re-elevated. Arbitrary state violence was abandoned (although there was no effort to install genuine constitutionalism and the rule of law). Greater attention was paid to the needs of Soviet consumers. The boundaries of public discussion were widened. Eventually, at Khrushchev's behest, several institutional re-modellings were undertaken. Sovnarkhozy were established. The party was bifurcated. Turnover of party and government personnel was deep and frequent.

This process of reforms was accomplished within the design of the Soviet order inaugurated in 1917 — 1919. But Khrushchev was dismissed in 1964, and his successor Brezhnev tried to sedate party and government by means of a policy of 'stability of cadres'. Tighter controls over political and cultural criticism were introduced. Partial reforms were announced for the economy, but then dropped because they derogated from the party's authority. Brezhnev's measures led to the quietening of politics; but although a reversion to Stalinism was not seriously contemplated, the project of making the post-1953 regime operate without the Khrushchevite idiosyncrasies was unsuccessful: a large number of political, social, economic and national difficulties accumulated.

Finally in 1958 a reform programme was initiated which went still further than Khrushchev. Gorbachev, developing his policies as he went along, introduced ever wider freedom of expression. He installed electoral competition in the party and, in 1989, re-organised the state through the Congress of People's Deputies. A year earlier there had been reforms in the economy permitting a degree of private enterprise. This reform was so drastic that it dissolved the linkages of the entire Soviet order. The USSR, placed under recurrent strain, collapsed more with a whimper than with a bang in December 1991.

Campaigns for large-scale reform recur in the history of the Soviet Union, and the question arises why they were undertaken so frequently. One possible answer lies with the importance of the supreme leaders. Lenin in 1921 argued, plausibly, that the regime would fall without the inception of a New Economic Policy. But for Lenin it is doubtful that the reform would have been accepted by the party ⁶. Likewise there can be little doubt but that the Great Terror of 1937 — 1938 was largely the product of the personal determination of Stalin. He started it, he brought it to an end. With Khrushchev there is a strong case that some reforms after 1953 was certainly affected by his preferences. And it would be difficult to deny Gorbachev his role in the introduction of reform-communist measures in the 1980s. Rival politicians would never have ruled the state in exactly the same way if they had been in power.

This kind of explanation has much merit. But it would be foolish to overlook the significant pressure exerted by contemporary circumstances. In 1921 a peasant revolt in Tambov, paralleled in an increasing number of regions, lit up reality for the Politburo. Refusal to abandon forcible grain expropriations would have the likely consequence of the collapse of communist power ⁷.

In 1928 it was also an environment of an enormous difficulty for the regime. War scares; the moderate pace of industrial growth; the rise in social and nationalist hostility: all these factors had an impact on policy-makers. And in 1937 the regime was confronted by a wave of resentment at its policies ot the previous few years; there was also the widespread sense that the country needed prepare itself for the likely outbreak of a European war ⁸. After Stalin's death, moreover, there was a growing crisis in the communist leadership's to 'normalise' political life, raise economic output and avoid a further deterioration in relations with the USA. Always the policy-makers acted against the background of immence problems. After Gorbachev acceded to power, he talked of 'pre-crisis' phenomena in state and society. The party had lost all verve. The economy was in the doldrums. Regional and national embitterment had grown. The rivalry between the USSR and the USA remained dangerous.

Thus successive reforms were not merely provoked by the whim of rulers. On the contrary, the rulers were usually responding to a specific internal and external environment and developing measures to tackle it. The historiography of reform has attracted many works based on the premise that each period can be understood separately. For some scholars, for example, the Lenin of 1917 was entirely different from the Lenin of 1921 — and the different again from the Lenin of 1922. Equally popular has been the insistence that Leninism and Stalinism are completely dissimilar modes and theories of revolutionary practice. And Khrushchev's attack on Stalin has been widely interpreted as a comprehensive programme of 'De-Stalinisation'. In short, several outstanding works of Sovietology have taken it as axiomatic that a particular period is best studied as a discrete entity.

This is indeed a productive mode of investigation. The history of the Soviet Union offers a remarkably compressed sequence of vibrant stages, each of which contrasts in various ways with the others. Without sensitivity to each period's uniqueness there can be no convincing evaluation. Reforms make sense only when the inherited problems they meant to tackle are put under investigation.

Yet often there is a counterproductive result that the pre-occupation with a given period excludes attention to the chronic problems of the Soviet order. From beginning to end, in fact, the Soviet order was put under strain by them. The problems existed quite independently of period, environment or leader. From Lenin to Gorbachev, the Politburo had difficulties in obtaining the approval of most citizens. Marxism-Leninism was constantly a minority taste ⁹. Furthermore, the Politburo was always aware that the administrative stratum in all public institutions — and communism was essentially an administrative form of politics and economics — was corrupt and untrustworthy. Central and indeed local rulers could never rely on the information coming to them from below. Disobedience of directives, even if it took a passive form, was permanent. The Politburo could not even be sure of the reliability and talent of the administrators it directly appointed, and this uncertainly pervades the whole administrative system.

These were internal problems. But the USSR also existed in a hostile world from which, as its rulers always accepted, it needed to attract technology and political support as well as to borrow ideas. But the problem existed to do this while insulating administrators and society in general from the corrosive effects of contact with the blandishments of capitalism, religion and other political creeds other than communism.

It is through this prism, too, that the successive reforms of the Soviet order need to be examined. The methods used by the rulers were remarkably similar across the decades. The basic problems were permanent and, because of the constraints of the one-party dictatorship, the attempted solutions were akin to each other. Purges did not start with Stalin. They began with the expultion of undesirables from the party in 1919 ¹⁰. The continued through the 1920s and the criteria included political as well as social and moral uncongenial qualities. The difference in the late 1930s was that an individual's expulsion from party or government involved denunciation as an enemy of the people and either execution or dispatch to the Gulag. Purges became peaceful again after 1953 — and they were designated differently: exchange of perty cards was the favourite term. But purging by whatever name it was known remained a recurrent practice of the Soviet order.

Another method was ideological invocation. Lenin called for 'European socialist revolution', Stalin for 'Socialism in One Country', Khrushchev for a 'Return to Lenin'. In each case the summons was sounded for people to aid the state in building the new economy and society within a framework of political consensus maintained by the one-party dictatorship. Not material self-interest but civic commitment was proclaimed as the reason for rallying behind the communist leadership. Even in the lethargic years of Brezhnev the regime laid claim to an ideology superior to anything provided abroad. And under Gorbachev the people of the Soviet Union were — at least initially — told that Marxism-Leninism constituted an unrivalled key to to the door of a better state and society.

Then there were all the experiments with industrial forms. Exasperated by an unreliable state administration, Lenin introduced the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectarate (Rabkrin, and his Testament stipulated the desirability of re-jigging the interrelationships of higher party bodies. Later, in the 1930s, Stalin reduced the powers of the party in favour of governmental agencies. But he never quite settled the relations between party and government — and several further re-organisations took place before 1953. Yet the master of institutional tinkering was Khrushchev. His establishment of sovnarkhozy and his bifurcation of the perty were examples. So, too, was his fiddling with the rules for the holding of Central Committee plenums. Even Brezhnev was not averse to re-arranging the institutional forms of governmental oversight of the economy. And scarcely a month passed in the late 1980s without some initiative from Gorbachev for changes in the structure of state power.

Two further methods deserve consideration. One is the tendency of the Soviet state to effect change by the launching of 'campaigns'. Typically this was done by announcing a particular policy as the current official priority. From the Civil War through to the period of glasnost' and perestroika this enabled the Kremlin to identify matters that lower administrators were obliged to regard as needing urgent attention. There were party recruitment campaigns in the 1920s. There were campaigns for raising steel production in the 1930s as well as for arresting of 'enemies of the people'. In the late 1950s there were campaigns to plant maize and to increase recruitment to the party. In the 1970s there were occasional campaigns to eradicate particular forms of corruption; and in the last half-decade of the Soviet order there were campaigns across the entire range of public policy. Along with this campaigning over the decades, moreover, went a fostering of 'socialist competition'. It began in the Civil War and was never abandoned. Factory was pitched against factory, province against province, republic against republic. Administrators everywhere were put on notice that the careers would be enhanced or damaged by their effectiveness in competing to put official measures into practice.

These and other measures constituted an arsenal of militant techniques to make the Soviet order operate effectively. In the short term, whether individually or collectively, they worked to a certain extent. But across the seven decades of they never — not even once — worked sufficiently well for further measures to be deemed unnecessary. The problem was that lower-level administrators learned how to cope with the pressure from above. They pretended to comply while retrenching the very methods that the Kremlin wished to eradicate. They formed cliental groups ¹¹. They set up local 'nests'. They gave misleading information to the higher levels of the hierarchy. They looked after their own sectional interests at the expense of the officially-designated public good — and, with few exceptions, they refused to take the ideology seriously. The rest of society, observing the privileges of the members of elites, became unamenable to cajolement to work harder and more conscientiously. Soviet citizens were exploited and oppressed, and they knew it.

Sometimes the leadership responded by increasing the sharpness of such measures. When Stalin felt baulked in 1935 — 1936, he threw the country into the Great Terror in 1937. When the early measures of Khrushchev turned out unsatisfactorily, he instigated deeper measures of reform in the late 1950s. When Gorbachev discovered the inadequacy of his initial programme of 1985 — 1987, he drove faster and further into a campaign of transformation.

Yet this was not the sole mode of recurrent reaction. The emergencies set off by the pressurising campaigns sometimes threatened the survival of the Soviet order. The most striking case is the Great Terror, which came near to dissolving the cement of all public institutions. Probably, too, Khrushchev's associates felt that dissolution would follow if he were to be allowed to pursue his increasingly unpredictable policies. As for Gorbachev, there were many in his entourage who sought to deflect him. For some months, in winter 1990 — 1991, he yielded to them. But then in spring 1991 he allied himself with Yeltsin. The consequence was that the entourage mounted the coup attempt of August 1991. Although the coup failed, the doom of the Soviet order was sealed. These are just the starkest instances of pressures being relieved — or of attempts being made to relive them — when the central communist leadership took fright at the scale of the threat to the Soviet order's existence.

Yet this relief of pressure has also been a frequent phenomenon on a more mundane plane. A cyclical trend was observable. When militancy failed, compromise was sometimes tried out. After the conturbations of the Civil War, the Kremlin relaxed its pressure on party functionaries and let them get on with the managemant of local public life as they saw fit. Stalin, too, felt obliged to attract the trust of his functionaries when he brought the Great Terror to an end in late 1938. The use of repressive methods did not cease, but it was much more targeted than previously. Political, economic and military elites were given more comfortable conditions of life and work. Stalin had to settle for a more conservative and informal framework for the Soviet order than he had envisaged.

After 1964, under Brezhnev, the indulgence to incumbent post-holders became a cardinal political doctrine: 'stability of cadres'. It became virtually impossible to lose a post unless an individual had criticised Brezhnev, the Politburo or its policies. Only a few unlucky persons were exceptions. Thus the Georgian party first secretary Mzhavanadze was sacked for corruption; but his dismissal was the exception that proved the rule. Even old age was an insufficient reason for removal from office. From the Politburo downwards there were functionaries of pensionable age left in post. When Andropov briefly held power in 1982 — 1984, there was a swift, peaceful purge of some of the gerontocrates, and many notoriously corrupt officials were sacked. But Chernenko, his successor, restored the doctrine of stability of cadres. Only with his death the chronic indulgence to administrative personnel revoked.

Other manifestations of compromise across the seven decades included the tolerance of 'tails' and 'nests'. Despite his determination to expunge them in 1937 — 1938, Stalin had to relent. He found in fact that the USSR was ungovernable without them. Unless the patronage system was allowed to survive, the entire administrative mechanism of party and government was put at risk. The tolerance was greater at some times than at others. Obviously it was highly developed in this period from 1964, when stability of cadres was practised. But it was a lasting phenomenon.

And such troughs of compromise there was more than usual opportunity for 'the localities' to get on with affairs undisturbed. Centralism remained the Kremlin's proclaimed objective; but during the New Economic Policy and throughout the Brezhnev period there was a resurgence of obstruction from the republics and the provinces. In the Soviet republics there was a creeping 'nationalisation' of public life as the elites of the titular nationality gave preferment to their co-nationals ¹². In the 'Russian' provinces, too, there was local self-assertion. The obkom party secretary became a law unto himself, behaving like a little general secretary — or indeed like a little tsar. The disintegration of the Soviet order that became an inundation in the late 1980s had been welling up steadily in the years before Gorbachev came to power.

Compromises, moreover, did not have an exclusively internal aspect. In various periods of Soviet history the rulers sought to ease their problems by means of international reconciliation. In the NEP years the Politburo signed dozens of trade treaties. In the 1970s the Politburo tried to secure permanent detente with the USA. This was done so as to reduce the necessary commitment to high military expenditure. It was also undertaken as a means of acquiring advanced technology: even Stalin did this in the 1930s when pursuing the objective of 'Socialism in One Country' ¹³. Under Brezhnev not only technological transfer but also grain imports were facilitated by more cordial relations with the West.

The cycle of pressurisation and compromise was structurally determined. So long as the Soviet order endured, the alternation continued. Indeed there was no choice for rulers except to try either pressurisation or relaxation and to use roughly the sort of methods used from Lenin to 'early' Gorbachev. What is evident is that the Soviet order imposed limits on what each ruling group could do in the way of reform unless it was willing to risk the dissolution of the state. The primary features of that order were unchanging: one-party dictatorship; centralised party; one-ideology state; legal nihilism; state economic ownership; mass mobilisation; police intrusiveness; insulation from the foreign models of state and society. Such features fitted together in a tight architecture. Attempts to remove any pillar of the building would risk bringing everything tumbling down. The architecture of liberal-democracy and capitalism in most countries has been looser and opportunities for reform wider. But in the USSR, deep reform was always going to be an exercise of great jeopardy.

Thus the reform processes begun in 1921, 1937 and 1953 each had their dangers — and sooner or later these dangers were recognised as such. The difference with Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika was twofold in nature. Firstly, Gorbachev went faster and deeper than any other reformer of the USSR; secondly, his associates failed to stop the process before the ultimate stage of dissolution came about.

Gorbachev's record as a reformer was impressive. What he did, he did consciously as a reform-communist believer. Yet he did not understand the basic architecture of Soviet state and society. He was a 'holy fool' for communism. And eventually he paid the price of his misperception. Looking back in Soviet history, he identified himself with two figures, Lenin and Bukharin. He failed to understand that neither Lenin nor Bukharin was a humanitarian. It would be difficult to imagine even Bukharin risking the overthrow of the entire Soviet order on the basis of a romantic notion of what kind of reform was practically feasible. But the point here is not to award marks for political theory to past Soviet rulers. Gorbachev's focus was upon the task of making fundamental alterations to a building that was rotten and tottering.

This at least ought to be recognised as a great achievement. Eventually recognising that adequate reform was ultimately impossible in the USSR, he pushed the logic of his career to its conclusion and dedicated himself to his country's transformation. Sad to say, reform since 1991 has not proved any easier than under communism. Constraints of politics, economics, society and culture do not disappear with revolutions. They did not vanished immediately after 1917; they certainly persist in 2001.