Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

The other stream of underground oppositional thinking was Russian nationalist. As we have seen, Russian nationalism can take a mainly ethnic or mainly imperial form, and both trends existed, though the boundaries between them were blurred. What Russian nationalists could agree on was that Russians were a distinctively collectivist people, that unlike individualist, mercenary Westerners, they flourished by mutual support in adverse circumstances. Communist rule had weakened this inherited mutualism, they argued, and it had also reduced the population, blighted the natural environment, undermined the Orthodox Church, and destroyed peasant agriculture. Some, like Solzhenitsyn, thought the solution lay in withdrawing from great power politics, reducing the share of heavy industry in the economy, and returning to a simpler lifestyle based on organic agriculture and artisan production. Others, on the contrary, wanted to augment Russian imperial power by increasing heavy industrial and military production, and to strengthen the position of Russians as the state-bearing nationality by reducing the rights of non-Russians, especially Jews.

All these attitudes were reflected in the top echelons of the CPSU. The stronghold of the liberal Westernizing outlook was the Central Committee’s International Department. The Russianist outlook was strongest in the military and in the RSFSR (Russian republic) party apparatus. The party’s official position was never clearly defined and wavered over time. On the whole, though, the leaders upheld internationalist Marxism-Leninism as the official ideology, while tolerating a simple-minded Russian imperial nationalism as a kind of ‘working ideology’ for everyday use. Obviously, this was not wholly acceptable in the party organizations of the non-Russian republics, but Leonid Brezhnev, CPSU General Secretary (1964–82), adopted a policy of ‘stability of cadres’ which offered their leaders the chance to devise their own local alternatives. They usually protected indigenous patron–client networks and tolerated a limited revival of local languages, histories, and cultures. As a result, by the 1970s, Russians living outside the RSFSR became gradually aware that being Russian was no longer an advantage in looking for education, jobs, or housing.

The end of the USSR

By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union faced a serious internal crisis. It was failing to sustain the two major ‘social contracts’ on which its townsfolk depended: cheap food in return for low pay, and give and take between Russians and non-Russians.

The man who became CPSU General Secretary in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev, took over the views of the International Department. He had become convinced that the USSR was not increasing its security by accumulating nuclear and conventional weapons, but on the contrary undermining it by presenting to the outside world an ‘enemy image’, which provoked other powers to rearm against it. His ‘new thinking’ in foreign policy led him into a series of agreements with US President Reagan, in which both sides made deep cuts in their nuclear and conventional arsenals. At the United Nations, he explicitly renounced the ‘primacy of the class struggle’, which had hitherto been at the core of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and called for ‘a world without violence and wars’ and ‘dialogue and cooperation for the sake of development and the preservation of civilisation’.

Internally, he launched a campaign against corruption and criminality in the nomenklatura elite. He encouraged glasnost (openness), so that ordinary citizens could denounce the misdeeds of their superiors. As his campaign advanced, he became convinced that his efforts were being resisted by what he called ‘a managerial stratum, a ministerial and party apparatus which . . . does not want to give up its privileges’. The Chernobyl nuclear explosion of April 1986, whose seriousness officials tried to conceal from him, confirmed his suspicion. Within a few months, he had broadened glasnost into something more like freedom of speech. He also instituted perestroika (political reform), allowing oppositional political movements to disseminate their ideas, and eventually to take part in elections too. Newspapers began openly to criticize government policy. Sakharov was permitted to propagate his ideas freely, but so were nationalists, Russian and non-Russian. Solzhenitsyn published his three-volume Gulag Archipelago, which gave a fuller account than ever before of the terrible truth about Stalin’s penal empire. A climax was reached in May 1989, when a new Congress of People’s Deputies opened: one after another, speakers denounced the ruling class’s abuses of power. It was televised live, and much of the population took time off work to watch, fascinated and appalled by the spectacle.