[This is the fifth of six articles I am writing on the
respective positions of Britain,
the US, France, Germany,
Russia and China in the
Post-War World]
Leaders of the USSR till 1991 and of Russia thereafter
1925-53 Joseph Stalin 1984-85 Konstantin
Chernenko
1953 Molotov, Beria, Malenkov 1985-91 Mikhail Gorbachev
1953-55 Georgi
Malenkov 1991-99 Boris
Yeltsin
1955-64 Nikolai
Khrushchev 1999-08 Vladimir
Putin
1964-82 Leonid
Brezhnev 2008-12 Dmitri
Medvedev
1982-84 Yuri Andropov 2012- Vladimir
Putin
The USSR
triumphant
After a brutal war waged since the June 1941 Nazi invasion
of the USSR, the Red Army
defeated the Germans on the Eastern Front, most of Eastern Europe was under its
occupation and Berlin
itself fell in April 1945.
 |
| The Red Army storms the Berlin Reichstag |
The cost to Russia
was however horrendous. It is estimated that 26m Soviet citizens died, about
10m in the military and 16m civilians – about 13% of the population. The
devastation in Western Russia and the Ukraine was colossal. Even after
hostilities ended there was more blood-letting. Nationalities deemed to have
been anti-Soviet, like the Crimean Tatars, were deported wholesale to remote
provinces; many died. Returning POWs were called cowards – thousands were shot
or sent to labour camps. The Allies were bound by the Yalta agreements to repatriate any Russians
in their zones. The raggle-taggle followers of Vlasov’s brigade, who fought
with the Nazis, were shipped to Russia,
often to be shot out of hand on the quayside.
Eastern Europe suffered
grievously under Soviet oppression. The Soviet zone of Germany was the scene of
mass rape and murder. Those who could flee, fled West. In Poland, which pro rata had lost more than the USSR
(25% of the population dying) an election won by the Peasant Party was
overturned by the Communists and the opposition purged on Stalin’s orders. The
last vestige of Czech independence ended with the defenestration of foreign
minister Jan Masaryk in 1948. In Hungary,
Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltics (annexed by Russia)
prominent non-communists were exiled or executed; all opposition was silenced.
Stalinism and Terror
Russian dominance was rationalised as a natural wish to
erect a buffer area between Russia
and the aggressive West but the policy had all the hall-marks of a morbidly
suspicious and ruthless mind. That mind belonged to Joseph Stalin. Adulated for
the victory of his armies, he was unassailable in the Soviet
Union and surrounded himself with equally ruthless lieutenants and
many contemptible toadies.
 |
| Joseph Stalin, Dictator and Arch-Criminal |
Nevertheless the full resources of the USSR were
mobilised to rebuild the Soviet economy, which did indeed recover quickly. As
“a command economy” its priorities were decided centrally with no reference to
market demand. Heavy industry and military investment were favoured while
housing and consumer goods were more or less ignored. Partly through the
success of secret policeman Lavrenti Beria’s espionage operations but
mainly through the native skill of Soviet scientists, Russia began to catch up
with the US in the critical nuclear arms race, exploding her first atom bomb in
1949. Beria got the credit, becoming Stalin’s most feared henchman.
Russia
also acquired a significant new ally when in 1949 China became communist under
Mao-Tse-Tung, who deferred to Stalin. Stalin encouraged Kim-Il-Sung to invade South Korea in 1950 and did nothing to stop China
intervening in 1951.
Another prominent Stalinist was Andrei Zhdanov, minister of
culture, who waged war on the intelligentsia denouncing distinguished composers
Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Khachatourian for “formalism”. Lethal power
struggles, engulfed senior ministers, often stirred up by Stalin himself.
Molotov, Mikoyan, Malenkov and Kaganovitch dropped in and out of favour and
feared for their (and sometimes their wives’) lives. In 1948 Stalin was defied
by Josip Tito of Yugoslavia,
the only independent Communist regime in the early post-war years. Stalin
accused some Eastern European communist leaders of “Titoism” and was
instrumental in the fall and execution of the Czech deputy leader Rudolf
Slansky in a 1952 show trial. Stalin was an anti-Semite and only his death
in 1953 forestalled a planned deadly purge of Jews arising from a wholly
fabricated “Doctors’ Plot”.
When arch-criminal Stalin died in March 1953 there was a
short-lived “troika” in the Russian tradition of Molotov, Malenkov and Beria. After
anti-Soviet riots in East Berlin, Beria was
himself denounced by Khrushchev in September 1953, tried by a kangaroo court
and with 5 associates condemned to death. A Russian general despatched the
detested Beria with a revolver shot to the forehead in December 1953.
Thankfully this was the last time a Soviet politician was brutally liquidated.
The worst of the Stalinist nightmare was over.
The USSR
after Stalin
The troika made way for two years’ rule by Georgi Malenkov.
There were tentative moves to relax the oppression by freeing and granting
amnesties to many prisoners in the notorious Gulag forced labour camps. In
Europe the Soviets unexpectedly withdrew from occupied Austria in 1954, though insisting on Austrian
neutrality, possibly a gambit to hinder West Germany’s move towards the
NATO alliance. Malenkov was castigated for failures in modernising the
administration and in 1955 was replaced by Nikita Khrushchev with Nikolai
Bulganin his premier until 1958.
Khrushchev was a vigorous peasant type, with a bloody past
as a commissar in the Ukraine,
volatile and undiplomatic, but often effective.
 |
| Khrushchev wields his shoe at the UN |
Khrushchev and Bulganin tried to put a more human face on Russia by visits to Western Europe and
Khrushchev himself had a vigorous informal debate with Richard Nixon in the US on the
merits of capitalism and communism. “We will bury you”, opined the Russian. The
prestige of the USSR
was enhanced by the launch of the first Sputnik space rocket in 1957 and the
first man in space with Yuri Gagarin’s flight in 1961.
Khrushchev’s major move was his secret speech to the 20th
Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 in which he denounced Stalin,
enumerating his crimes and policy errors. This was a bombshell to many of his
listeners to whom Stalin remained a hero, but the promise of less oppression
and more openness was welcome everywhere. In time opposition to Khrushchev’s
line grew among the Old Guard and plots were laid to depose Khrushchev. In 1957
these senior plotters were denounced as “the Anti-Party Group” including
Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovitch, Shepilov and in 1958 Bulganin; they were
stripped of their offices and expelled from the Party, but at least they died
in their beds.
The Cold War, waged between the West and the Soviet bloc
since the Berlin Airlift in 1948-9, sometimes heated up. When Britain, France
and Israel attacked Egypt over Suez
in 1956, Bulganin threatened all three with a Russian missile attack; it was
bluff and bluster but alarming nonetheless. When also in 1956, Soviet troops
intervened to suppress unrest in Poland
and an insurrection in Hungary,
the West could do nothing. Tensions remained acute, not least after the
erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961.
Khrushchev was contemptuous of Western military
determination and miscalculated badly when he began to station ballistic missiles
in recently communist Cuba.
In October 1962, President Kennedy reacted decisively, throwing a naval
blockade around Cuba
and vowing to stop Soviet ships. Although the European Left supported Russia and nuclear war seemed a possibility,
Khrushchev backed down and removed his missiles in return for the US reducing theirs in Turkey. This rash Russian adventure
humiliated the leadership.
 |
| Mao and Khrushchev all smiles in 1958 |
A more momentous division appeared in the Communist bloc
when the USSR and China became
estranged from 1960 as the Sino-Soviet dispute developed. In part the dispute
was ideological; Khrushchev came to urge “peaceful coexistence” with the West;
Mao only wanted belligerence. Mao was shocked by Khrushchev’s reconciliation
with Tito – “revisionist traitor” in Mao’s Stalinist eyes. Mao lauded the Asian
peasant approach to communism in contrast to the Russian focus on the
industrial proletariat. .Behind the theological jargon there was a power
struggle. The Russians had always feared the Yellow Horde; the Chinese feared
Soviet expansionism in the East. As a measure of the estrangement, the USSR backed India
when a border war broke out with China in 1962 and deplored the
excesses of the later Cultural Revolution and the personality cult of Mao. The
monolithic communist bloc was split forever, opening up diplomatic
opportunities for the West.
On the pretext of agricultural failures but really in reaction
to Khrushchev’s erratic ways, he was ousted and pensioned off in 1964 to be
replaced by a troika. It soon emerged that the real power lay with Party
Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, although he consulted with Premier Kosygin and
President Podgorny, and he dominated the USSR until 1982.
The Brezhnev Era
 |
| Leonid Brezhnev |
The USSR
developed strongly in the early Brezhnev years. Her arsenal of nuclear weapons
steadily grew drawing the West into Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT).
Although the US
got to the Moon first, the Soviet space programme was impressive. The economy
grew at about 4% pa during the 1960s and there was an aura of stability around
Russian society. Russian influence in the Middle East and in Africa
grew apace. The regime pursued notionally a policy of Détente towards the West
but it was assertive in Eastern Europe, not hesitating in 1968 to send in tanks
to overthrow the communist reformist government of Alexander Dubcek in
Czechoslovakia, later proclaiming the Brezhnev Doctrine that socialist
countries could intervene to prevent reversion to capitalism in
fellow-socialist nations. The doctrine was even invoked when Brezhnev
sanctioned an ill-judged expedition to Afghanistan in 1979.
However by the early 1970s domestic problems crowded in on
the USSR.
Managing a vast country on a command economy basis required prophetic talents
which no country, and certainly not Russia, possessed. The internal
contradictions of the communist economic system became apparent. The people
cried out for decent housing and cheap consumer goods – neither was easily
forthcoming. Some 50% of GDP was spent on defence, a colossal proportion, to
the detriment of other areas of the economy. With little incentive to work
hard, as unemployment had been supposedly abolished, the USSR had a
work-shy workforce; productivity fell steadily, industrial discipline weakened
and the growth rate faltered to about 1%. Despite huge, but often badly
targeted investment in agriculture, the USSR became a major importer of
grain and other farming products she should have produced herself. The quality
of health and education services, once a national pride, deteriorated markedly;
alcoholism became an intractable problem. The later Brezhnev years were
characterised as wasted and stagnant. Brezhnev himself was cautious by nature
and he became both mentally and physically immobile as ill-health dogged his
twilight years.
Brezhnev died in 1982 and his two successors Andropov and
Chernenko were old and ill too and soon died in office. In 1985 a new
generation came to the helm with the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev proclaiming
perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness).
Gorbachev and the end of the USSR
 |
| Mikhail Gorbachev |
Gorbachev was a breath of fresh air, outgoing, articulate
and managerial. He was popular in the West, well regarded by Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher. However his period in power was a disaster for Russia. His
policy of perestroika involved the
overhaul of industry, the reduction of bureaucracy, the replacement of
incompetents and the reorganisation of ministries; the command economy
continued and free market forces were not allowed to operate. The Soviet
economy inevitably did not improve and shortages worsened. Glasnost saw the reduction of cultural censorship and a lively free
press emerged. A flood of negative sentiment towards the Soviet Union from its
15 constituent Republics shook Moscow.
The continuing arms race with the US
and rather low prices for oil weakened Russia further.
Gorbachev tried to square the circle between the communist
hard-liners and zealous reformers but it was impossible. Events quickly took
their own course. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the East German regime
collapsed. Solidarity was recognised and soon took political power in Poland.
Communist regimes in Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria had crumbled by 1990.
The USSR
itself started to disintegrate. Boris Yeltsin became president of the Russian Federation
and its parliament passed laws which explicitly superseded Soviet legislation.
Many other Republics followed suit. Hardliners attempted a coup in August 1991
to prevent a break-up, but after 2 days it collapsed, with Boris Yeltsin
rallying the public in Moscow.
Gorbachev returned from confinement in Crimea
but his authority was compromised. The activities of the Soviet Communist Party
were terminated. Over the next months the independence of the following
Republics was formally recognised: Lithuania,
Latvia, Estonia, Moldova,
Armenia, Georgia,
Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan,
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian Federation itself. On 25
December 1991 Gorbachev resigned as President and on 26 December 1991 the USSR formally ceased to exist, with the Russian Federation
becoming the successor state.
Post-Soviet Russia
 |
| Boris Yeltsin in an expansive mood |
Yeltsin became President carrying many hopes but his regime
was a failure. Taking advice from the US, the IMF, the World Bank and
other Western economists he decided on a headlong rush -“shock therapy” – to
abandon the socialist command economy and substitute a free market one. Other,
perhaps wiser, heads advocated a more gradual approach. In early 1992 Yeltsin
introduced by decree his reforms, ending price controls, raising taxes, cutting
welfare and raising interest rates. The economy nose-dived and living
conditions worsened markedly. A scheme involving the universal issue of
vouchers anticipating a huge privatisation programme was frustrated as the
population sold the vouchers for cash, mainly to the so-called “oligarchs” who
subsequently acquired state assets at low prices. Corruption abounded and crime
rocketed.
The Russian parliament opposed Yeltsin’s measures and defied
his decrees. In 1993 Yeltsin called in the army to suppress this opposition and
tanks shelled the parliament building, killing 187. Yeltsin won a
constitutional referendum increasing his presidential powers and was re-elected
in a close race in 1995. The economic shock therapy did not work and the Russian
economy languished, leading to a 60% devaluation of the rouble, the collapse of
some banks and an international default in 1998. Discredited and erratic
Yeltsin resigned the Presidency in 1999.
Putin and Recovery
Vladimir Putin, originally a KGB officer, became Yeltsin’s
senior lieutenant in 1998 and chosen successor. He and his close ally Dmitri
Medvedev have presided over a successful era of growth and prosperity.
 |
| Dmitri Medvedev and Vladimir Putin |
Russia
is an energy superpower, with vast oil and gas resources; the recovery from the
Yeltsin default was much helped by 5-fold increase globally in oil prices.
Debts were repaid and Russia
built up large currency reserves. At last living standards consistently
improved as the economy grew at 8% pa in the early 2000s, real wages more than
tripled, unemployment halved, cheap credit became available. The oligarchs were
reined in and an anti-corruption campaign began. The administration was
streamlined and the courts reformed.
Domestically, Chechnya was pacified after a long
insurrection although Islamic terrorism remained a problem. The West reacted
badly to the brief 2008 South Ossetia war pitting Russia
against an adventurous and provocative Georgia. Putin has been accused of
dictatorial ways: there has been noisy opposition to him and at least two of
his opponents have been murdered. He conducts himself as a quasi-Western
politician, glad-handing the voters, joining in discussions and presenting a macho image.
Medvedev was Putin’s premier and became president in 2008
when Putin was constitutionally barred from a third consecutive term. He
reverted to premier when Putin returned in 2012. A lawyer, Medvedev was rather
more liberal than his mentor, but the extent to which he is his own man rather
than Putin’s alter ego is unclear.
The Real Russia
Communism, especially the Stalinist variety, has been the
bane of Russia.
An immensely talented people lived under an oppressive regime and yet her
spirit was never extinguished. Composers like Shostakovich were denounced but
still produced symphonies. Russian performers like cellist Rostropovich,
violinist Oistrahk and pianists Richter and Ashkenazy delighted global
audiences. Dancer Nureyev thrilled London whence he defected. In literature Boris Pasternak, winning fame with Dr Zhivago, was forced to refuse the
Nobel Prize; poet Yevtushenko heralded The
Thaw of Khrushchev’s years.
A generation of dissident writers followed; Yuli Daniel and
Andrei Sinyavsky were infamously tried for “anti-Soviet activities” in 1966 and
sent to labour camps. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published Cancer Ward in 1967 deploring the Soviet practice of forcibly hospitalising
dissidents as madmen, to be followed in 1973 by the Gulag Archipelago exposing the labour camp system. He was exiled in
1974 but returned in 1994 preaching the merits and values of an idealised Old
Russia. The nuclear scientist turned civil rights activist Andrei Sakharov won
the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 but was sent into internal exile; after a
world-wide uproar, he was rehabilitated by Gorbachev.
In sport Russia
excelled with distance runner Vladimir Kuts winning 2 Olympic Golds in 1956,
gymnast Nellie Kim achieving a perfect 10 in 1976 and Moscow Dynamo thrilling
in the 1950s football world. Maria Sharapova won Wimbledon
in 2004 and Grand Slam titles since, exuding glamour.
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| Maria Sharapova, Tennis Idol |
The Future
Russia
was well described as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The
largest country in the world, with enormous natural resources and untapped potential,
she has suffered a 20th Century of misrule. If her economy is
sensibly run and democratic institutions allowed to perform their function, Russia will add
lustre to the leading nations in the world.
SMD
30.09.12
Copyright Sidney Donald 2012
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