Russia

Apart from the occasional quack, like Stalin’s protege the geneticist Lysenko, it made use of many scientists who were leaders in their fields. They included the famous biochemist Aleksei Bakh, the ground-breaking physicist Petr Kapitsa, the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, and the inventor of the best small arms in the world, Mikhail Kalashnikov. The roots of the first-rate Soviet scientific establishment stretched back through two centuries of Academy of Science traditions to the Enlightenment, and its fruits were to include the development not only of the first space ships and astronauts but of the first safe heart drug. But for a strange accident at a Paris air show, when another aircraft on an unauthorized flight crossed the flight path of a prototype Tupolev supersonic airliner, causing it to crash, the Soviet Union might also have led the world in commercial supersonic intercontinental flight services. Yet the great sophistication in science and technology coexisted with simple forms of collective human life which had changed little with the passage of centuries, and the Soviet regime’s concern to ‘civilize’ native peoples stemmed from the same burning sense of mission that had fired missionaries everywhere.

All these contrasts were represented in Siberia. On the banks of the great river Ob, upriver from the ancient city of Tomsk, lies Akademgorodok -as its name suggests, a town founded for the specific purpose of serving the most sophisticated scientific research. Siberia was a land of great riches as well as tundra desolation: of diamonds, gold and oil, and great hydroelectric schemes, as on the Yenisei and Angara rivers, models for famous ‘Third World’ projects like the Aswan Dam. But Siberia was also home to peoples who, for all the ministrations of tsarist missionaries and earnest Communist educators, had hardly advanced from the Stone Age in material culture or understanding of the modern world. Although the processes of adjustment and absorption usually proceeded quietly, there were occasions when the two worlds clashed. There was the occasional squalid fight in dreary Siberian towns between drunken natives and Russian louts yelling racist abuse, and one fracas in Yakutsk was serious enough to bring troops out on to the streets. Nor were well-meaning attempts to inform native peoples always welcomed by them. ‘“What is the October Revolution?” Evenk reindeer-herders had plaintively enquired, “Who are the bourgeois elements? What is technology? What is industry?”‘ When a community of Chukchi were invited to elect a committee they resisted on the reasonable ground that ‘if they elected one, the number of walrus would not increase.’ ³³ It was native practicality rather than innocence which spoke. Soviet values did not resonate with Chukchi mentality.

Despite rumblings of discontent in one or two COMECON countries, the Soviet Empire in 1980 seemed stable and reasonably successful. The Soviet Union itself had not caught up with the United States in terms of economic output as Khrushchev had boasted, but it was incontestably a world power, its peoples more prosperous and freer than in the 1950s. True, the Communist movement was no longer a dynamic force in the world, but Moscow was still a beacon of hope for poorer countries, and also for some less poor that wished to distance themselves from American culture and the embraces of capitalism. Even though the system had not yet quite succeeded in replacing nationalism with a supranational Marxist faith, no informed observer seriously expected the vast and powerful Soviet fortress, with its huge outworks of control and influence spreading halfway round the world, to suffer any marked decline in the foreseeable future. Yet within a dozen years, as if subjected to some potent combination of strange chemical forces, it simply evaporated. The fourth, and greatest, Russian Empire was gone, never to be resurrected.

14Autopsy on a Deceased Empire

AT MIDNIGHT ON 31 December 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The satellite states had gone their separate ways two years earlier, but now the Baltic states regained their independence and Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and all the other constituent republics started out on a new existence as sovereign states. The red flag with the hammer and sickle was run down the Kremlin flagstaff, and a blue, red and white tricolour was run up instead. Russia had again been shorn of empire.