regime Stalin created made it possible for a single man whose outstanding characteristics were deviousness and crudity to bring an entire country to its knees. The Soviet Union after 1930 gave the impression of a land of total unanimity in which Stalin’s wishes were law. Stalin chose to eliminate even the possibility of opposition and elements of the realm he created are clearly visible in Soviet life today.
The Soviet political system concentrates power today as effectively as it did in Stalin’s day. The last policy debate inside the party occurred under Stalin, in 1929. It was on collectivisation and Nikolai Bukharin, the Politburo member who argued for a moderate approach, was tried nine years later as a German spy and shot.
The present Politburo meets in secret; 26 years after Stalin’s death, there has not been a single case of a policy being debated in the lower party ranks. Even when Khrushchev was removed from power in 1964 and the charges against him were read out at local party meetings, people were not allowed to discuss the charges but only to ask questions. The notion of the party as the all-powerful instrument of a ruler or ruling elite comes from Stalin.
Stalin both realised Marxist ideology and discarded it, and this pattern too has become characteristic of the Soviet State. The development of the Soviet Union’s “productive forces” predicted by Marx did not happen of its own accord, so he strengthened the repressive power of the State, which—also according to Marx—was supposed to fade away. He then pretended the repression did not exist.
Stalin greatly intensified the system of censorship established by Lenin and sought through it to control all published or broadcast information. He wanted to eliminate any research which directly or indirectly cast doubt on the value of the Soviet system and he wanted all art to reflect his personal taste.
Today this system has been liberalised. Foreign radio broadcasts are no longer jammed. Some previously banned poets, such as Mandelstam, Tsvetayeva and Akhmatova, are now published in limited form. Information remains curbed but the goal now is not to programme individuals but simply to make it impossible for the average citizen to form a coherent view of the outside world.
Stalin also affected the structure of Soviet ambition. The old Bolsheviks who were shot in 1937–38 were replaced by cadres completely loyal to him personally. Each of the old Bolsheviks had a long political biography, but the young men promoted rapidly to take their places had little political experience and were in no position to gain any under the conditions of terror. Their satisfaction came from career advancement; and Soviet careerism has proved as apolitical and ideologically indifferent as any in the West.
In the final analysis, perhaps the most important and the most ominous aspect of Stalin’s legacy is that he chose to fall back on the Russian tradition of progress through terror and force. Stalin’s apologists, both in Russia and the West, frequently refer to the difficult conditions he faced and the tangible gains the Soviet Union achieved. These calculations fail to consider the fact that Stalin set a pattern which may claim victims for many generations to come.
Stalin’s rule left behind political passivity, because Soviet citizens came to take it for granted that all major decisions would be taken without their participation. It also left behind an abiding fear of the state machine on which the present Government freely draws.
Soviet leaders now want stability. After Stalin’s death they took a number of steps to dismantle the terror apparatus he set up. The KGB, which was a parallel system for arresting, trying, and killing those thought guilty of political crimes, was reduced to an investigative body which must turn over its information to the prosecutors and the courts. Several KGB functions were given to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and both the KGB and Ministry were put under the control of the Party.
It is too soon to say whether these changes will forestall a new wave of terror. The Soviet form of government is a centralised, one-party system with extraordinary government powers. If opposition arises, there is a built-in tendency to eliminate it. At the same time the torpor of Russian life too often shows that a nation accustomed to being bullied can lose the ability to act on its own.
There is likely to be no honest attempt to understand Stalin in the Soviet Union. The silence may be convenient but it is far from neutral, because against the reality of state achievements it implicitly supports the notion that the interests of the state justify any human cost.
The tragedy of the Stalin era is that once again Russian leadership was cast in the mould of Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible, reinforcing the worst aspects of the Russian state tradition at the very moment when the legatees of serfdom were seeking a new way forward.
Financial Times, Wednesday, January 23, 1980
Sakharov’s Arrest Links
Dissidence with Detente
The arrest of Dr. Andrei Sakharov1 shows that the Soviet Union is prepared to add a cynical linkage principle of its own to the East-West struggle to define the terms of detente.
Soviet authorities have stressed that Moscow has no intention of retaliating against the United States for the grain embargo or the proposal to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics. But the arrest and exile of Dr. Sakharov cannot be understood as anything but a direct reflection of the present conflict between the two super-powers.
The Soviet Union depicts itself as the victim of US punitive measures but, as the seizure of Dr. Sakharov shows, a decision has been taken at the highest level to strike back at the US. This will be done not through diplomatic action but through retaliation against the Soviet Union’s own citizens.
The USSR has consistently rejected any linkage between detente era agreements and Soviet military expansion in the Third World, but for several years it has tacitly agreed to the linkage between detente’s advantages and its treatment of its own people.
Dr. Sakharov, more than any other Soviet citizen, has represented opposition to totalitarianism and the desire of some Soviet citizens for democratic freedoms. There have been Press campaigns against him and he has been warned by state prosecutors that he was “abusing their patience.” But the Soviet desire for international acceptance always prevented his arrest.
In early 1977, the KGB began an unprecedentedly thorough crackdown on dissent which included the almost complete suppression of the various dissident groups which were formed to monitor the Soviet Union’s observance of the Helsinki Accords. But Dr. Sakharov remained untouched.
This was important because, by his very presence, Dr. Sakharov afforded a measure of protection to all other Soviet dissidents. They benefited from the fact that his international stature as a scientist and recipient of the highest Soviet academic honours leant status to the dissident movement as a whole.
Dr. Sakharov’s position came to symbolise the Soviet reluctance to offend the West. But now that the international situation has changed dramatically and U.S.-Soviet relations have sunk to their lowest point since the Cold War, Dr. Sakharov has been seized. He has been sent into what may be permanent exile in a city where no foreigner can reach him, and where he will be remote from his friends.
With Dr. Sakharov removed from Moscow, the Soviet authorities will have all but achieved their goal of eliminating active dissent. The past three months, which have witnessed a steady deterioration in U.S.-Soviet relations, have also been marked by over 40 arrests including those, of Tatyana Velikanova, who helped put out the “Chronicle of Current Events,” Father Dmitri Dudko and Father Gleb Yakunin, two dissenting orthodox priests, and Antanas Terleckas, a Lithuanian nationalist.
