Communism in Russian History

George F. Kennan

From Foreign Affairs, Winter 1990/91

Summary:  Examines the challenges now facing the Russian people after the collapse of communism, in terms of the calamitous loss of entire generations of a free-thinking intelligentsia, first the 'bourgeois', then the Marxist -- a loss which now deprives them of the patience, understanding and articulateness needed to establish and secure democratic rule. Western help should be not merely financial, but intellectual and cultural. To be read with this author's 1947 forecast, under the pseudonym 'X', of the reasons and character of the collapse of communism. The analysis of the 'calamity' of Stalinism acknowledges a debt to Robert W Tucker 'Stalin in power: the revolution from above' (WW Norton, 1990).

George F. Kennan is Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Copyright (c) 1990 by George F. Kennan.

Not content with these heavy blows to the country's intellectual and cultural substance, Stalin, as soon as his power was consolidated in 1928, turned to the peasantry and proceeded to inflict upon this great portion of the population (some 80 percent at that time) an even more terrible injury. In the Stolypin reforms, emphasis had wisely been placed on the support and encouragement of the most competent and successful segment of the farming population. Stalin, in his sweeping campaign of collectivization launched in 1929, did exactly the opposite. He set out to eliminate precisely this element (now referred to by the pejorative Russian term of "kulaks"), to eliminate it by ruthless confiscation of what little property most of its members possessed, by deportation of a high proportion of those and other peasant families, and by the punishment-in many cases the execution-of those who resisted.

The results were simply calamitous. They included a major famine in certain key agricultural regions of the country and the loss, within a short time, of some two-thirds of the country's livestock. Through these cruel and ill-considered measures, a blow was dealt to Russian agriculture that set it back by decades, and from which it has not fully recovered to the present day.

The collectivization campaign roughly coincided in time with the First Five Year Plan, the announcement of which in 1928-29 made so deep and so favorable an impression upon many well-meaning people in the West. Actually, the plan as announced, and later the claimed statistics on its completion, masked a ruthless and reckless program of military industrialization. This program did indeed provide certain basic components of a great military industry, but did so in an extremely hasty and wasteful manner, at vast expense in human deprivation and suffering, and with reckless abuse of the natural environment. Despite limited improvements in later years, these same features were destined to mark much of Soviet industrialization down through the ensuing decades.

It was on the heels of these early Stalinist efforts at revolutionizing the Soviet economy that there was then unleashed upon Soviet society that terrible and almost incomprehensible series of events known historically as "the purges." Beginning with an obvious effort on Stalin's part to remove from office and destroy all those remnants from the Lenin leadership in whom he suspected even the slightest traces of resistance to his personal rule, these initial efforts, savage enough in themselves, soon grew into a massive wave of reprisals against a great portion of those who at that time were taking any part in the governing of the country or who enjoyed any prominence as members of the cultural intelligentsia. So terrible were these measures, so arbitrary, indiscriminate and unpredictable was their application, that they culminated, in the years 1937 and 1938, in a deliberately induced mass frenzy of denunciation-a frenzy overcoming millions of innocent but frightened people who had been encouraged to see in the reckless denunciation of others, even others they knew to be as guiltless as themselves, the only possible assurance of their own immunity to arrest and punishment. In the course of this hysteria, friend was set against friend, neighbor against neighbor, colleague against colleague, brother against brother, and child against parent, until most of Soviet society was reduced to a quivering mass of terror and panic. In this way a very considerable proportion of the administrative and cultural elite of the Soviet Union-tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of them-were induced to destroy each other for the edification, perhaps even the enjoyment, of a single leader, and this, while lending themselves to the most extravagant demonstrations of admiration for and devotion to this same man. One searches the annals of modern civilization in vain for anything approaching, in cynicism if not in heartlessness, this appalling spectacle.

So preposterous, so bizarre, so monstrously destructive, and so lacking in any conceivable necessity or advantage to anyone at all were these measures that it is impossible to imagine any rational explanation for them, even from the standpoint of the most fearful, jealous and suspicious of tyrants. What, in these circumstances, explained Stalin's motives in launching and directing them? And how was it possible that an entire society could submit passively to so dreadful an abuse of its social intactness and moral integrity? These are crucial questions.2

Suffice it to say that when Stalin finally perceived that things had gone too far, when he realized that even his own interests were being endangered and finally began to take measures to dampen the terror and the slaughter, several million people were already either languishing or dying in the labor camps, and a further number, sometimes estimated in the neighborhood of a million, had been executed or had died of mistreatment. To which tragic count must be added those further millions who had themselves escaped persecution but who cared about the immediate victims-their parents, lovers, children or friends, and for whom much of the meaning of life went out with the knowledge, or the suspicion, of the sufferings of the latter. Bereavement, in short, had taken its toll on enthusiasm for life. Fear and uncertainty had shattered nerves, hopes and inner security.

III

It was, then, on a shaken, badly depleted, socially and spiritually weakened Russian people that there fell, in the first years of the 1940s, the even greater strains of the Second World War. Russia, to be sure, did not become formally involved in that war as such until June 1941. But the interval had been in part taken up with the war with Finland, which alone had caused some hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties. And what was then to follow, after the German attack, was horror on a scale that put into shade all the sufferings of the previous decades: the sweeping destruction of physical installations-dwellings, other buildings, railways, everything-in great parts of European Russia, and a loss of life the exact amount of which is not easy to determine but which must have run to close to thirty million souls. It is virtually impossible to envisage, behind these bare words and figures, the enormity of the suffering involved.

It will of course be observed that, if the tragedies of the 1920s and 1930s were brought to Russia by its own communist regime, the same cannot be said of those of the 1940s. These were the doing of Hitler; Stalin had actually gone to great lengths to appease Hitler with a view to diverting the attack; it was not his fault that he did not succeed.

There is much truth in this statement. Nothing can diminish Hitler's responsibility for bringing on what the Soviets have subsequently referred to (ignoring most of the other theaters of operation in World War II) as the Great Patriotic War. But it was not the whole truth. Stalin himself heightened in many ways the horrors of the struggle: by the cynicism of his deal with Hitler in 1939; by the subsequent treatment of Russians who had become prisoners of war in Germany; by his similar treatment of those civilians who had found themselves on territory that fell under German control; by the brutal deportation of entire subordinate nationalities suspected of harboring sympathies for the German invader; by the excesses of his own police in the occupied areas, of which even the appalling Katyn massacre of Polish officers was only a small part; and by the liberties allowed to his own soldiery as they made their entry into Europe. More important still, one will never know what might have been the collaboration in the prewar years between Russia and the Western powers in the confrontation with Hitler, had the regime with which those powers were faced on the Russian side been a normal, friendly and open one. Instead, to many in Europe, the Soviet state looked little if any more reliable and reassuring as a partner than did the Nazi regime. Let us, however, leave such speculations aside and proceed with our recitation of the miseries that overtook the Russian people in these seven decades of communist power.