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.

But it is impossible, in the view of this writer, to review the history of communism-in-power in Russia without recognizing that the left-extremist wing of the Russian revolutionary movement, as it seized power in 1917 and exercised it for so many years, was the captive of certain profound and dangerous misconceptions of a political-philosophical nature, revolving around the relationships between means and ends, between personal and collective morality, between moderation and unrestrained extremism in the exercise of political power-misconceptions that were destined to have the most dire effects on the nature of the authority it was assuming to itself. It was the Russian people who had to pay the price for these misconceptions, in the form of some of the most terrible passages in their nation's long and tortured history. Seen in this way, the October Revolution of 1917 cannot be viewed otherwise than as a calamity of epochal dimensions for the peoples upon whom it was imposed.

IV

And what of the future?

It is not easy, in any discussion of Russia's future, to avoid preoccupation with the distressing and dangerous state of disarray that prevails in that country today, and to distinguish the short-term aspects of this situation from those causal features that may be expected to have determining significance in the longer future.

The postcommunist Russia we now have before us finds itself not only confronted with, but heavily involved in, the Herculean effort to carry out three fundamental changes in the national life of the country.

The first of these changes is the shift of the vital center of political power from the Communist Party, which has had a monopoly on power for so many years, to an elected and basically democratic governmental structure. The second is the shift of the economy from the highly centralized and authoritarian administrative basis that has governed it since the 1920s to a decentralized free-enterprise system. The third is the decentralization of the structure of interrelationships among the various national components, originally of the tsarist empire and more recently of the Soviet Union, that has generally prevailed over the last three centuries.

These three changes, if successfully implemented, would represent in many respects an alteration of the life of the Russian state more fundamental than that which the communists endeavored to introduce into Russian life in 1917-more fundamental, because whereas the communists' changes purported, rather vaingloriously, to deny, ignore and consign to oblivion the Russian past, the present efforts at change are linked, consciously or otherwise, to that past, and reflect an inclination not only to respect but in part to resume the struggles for modernization that marked the final decades of tsardom. If successfully carried through, these changes would constitute the greatest watershed in Russian life since the Petrine reforms of the early 18th century.

What are the chances for success in this momentous effort? Many factors would have to enter into any adequate answer to that question; they cannot all be treated here. But certain outstanding ones may well deserve attention in this context.

First, in estimating the chances for success of the first two of these efforts at change-the basic reforms of the political and economic systems-one has to take account of the enduring effects of seven decades of communist power. One is obliged to note that, when it comes to the bulk of the population, the state of preparedness to meet these challenges is smaller than it probably would have been in 1917. It is sad to reflect that among the many other disservices that the Soviet regime did to traditional Russia, not the least was the fact that it left, as it departed, a people so poorly qualified to displace it with anything better.

It would be easy to regard the communist decades as a tragic seventy-year interruption in the normal progress of a great country and to assume that, the interruption now being over, the country could pick up where things left off in 1917 and proceed as though the interruption had never occurred. The temptation to view things that way is heightened by the evidence that many of the problems the country now faces, as the heavy communist hand withdraws, represent the unfinished business of 1917, existing much as it then did because so little of it was, in the interval, sensibly and effectively addressed.