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 things are not quite like that. The people we now have before us in Russia are not those who experienced the events of 1917; they are the children and grandchildren of the people of that time-of those of them, at least, who survived enough of the horrors of the ensuing years to leave progeny at all. And these children and grandchildren are divided from their parents and grandparents by something more than just the normal generational change. The intervening events, primarily Stalinism and the carnage of the wartime battlefields, were decisive, each in its own way, in their legacy for future generations. Certain people were more likely than others to survive them; it is to these latter that the next generation was born. We have already noted the decimation of much of the prerevolutionary Russian intelligentsia in the early years of communist power. This has had its effects; of those who saw something of Russia before that decimation was completed, this writer surely is not alone in noting a certain comparative brutalization in the faces one now encounters on the Moscow streets-a result, no doubt, of long exposure to not only the exactions of a pitiless dictatorship but also the ferocious petty frictions of daily life in a shortage economy.

Nor may we ignore the social effects of all these upheavals. Political persecution and war left tragic gaps in the male parental population, particularly in the villages. Family structure was deeply destabilized, and with its stability there were forfeited those sources of inner personal security that only the family can provide. As so often before in the more violent passages of Russian history, it has been the broad and long-suffering back of the Russian woman, capable of bearing a great deal but also not without its limits, on which an inordinate share of the burdens of the maintenance of civilization has come to rest. The effects are painfully visible in a whole series of phenomena of that woman's life: the weariness, the cynicism, the multitudinous abortions, the fatherless families.

Particularly distressing is the fact that so many of the present younger generation have very little idea of what has happened to Russia in these past decades, of why it happened, or of its effects. With the lives of the tens of millions who perished in the earlier vicissitudes went also their memories and the lessons learned from the events of those times. This younger generation has been thrust with little parental guidance and almost no historical memory into a world whose origins it does not know or comprehend.

It was inevitable that this state of affairs should have had its effects on intellectual outlooks. It is true that a larger part of the population than was the case at the time of the revolution has now received at least a grade school education and some technological training. But on the philosophical, intellectual and economic sides the picture is a disturbing one.

The governmental structure to which the center of gravity of political power is now being transferred from what was formerly the party's political monopoly may adequately serve as the outward framework for a new and democratic form of political life, but only that. It will have to be filled in at many points with an entirely new body of methods, habits and-eventually-traditions of self-rule. For this, the minds of the younger generation are poorly prepared. It is not too much to say that there was much more real understanding for the principles and necessities of democratic rule-for the compromises, the restraints, the patience and the tolerance it demands-in the Russia of 1910 than is the case today.

And the same applies when it comes to an understanding of economic realities. Seven decades of relentless suppression of every form of private initiative or spontaneity have left a people trained to regard themselves as the helpless and passive wards of the state. Seven decades of economic hardship and low living standards have largely destroyed good-neighborly relations, and have produced an atmosphere in which a great many people peer spitefully and jealously every day over the backyard fence to assure themselves that their neighbors have not contrived to get something they themselves do not possess, and, if the neighbors have done so, to denounce them. All this has encouraged the prevalence of a sweeping and exaggerated egalitarianism, under the influence of which it is sometimes held to be better that all should continue to live in a state of semi-poverty and abject dependence upon centralized power than that any should be permitted to take the lead, by their own effort and initiative, in elevating themselves even temporarily over the living standards of others.

Faced with such attitudes it will not be easy to make quick progress in the systemic changes Gorbachev and others are trying to bring about. These are not the only handicaps of this sort, but they will perhaps prove the most recalcitrant and long-lasting. For what will be required for their correction will be a long and persistent educational effort-an effort for which, in many instances, a new generation of teachers will have to be provided, and one that will presumably have to proceed in the face of much instability in Russian life.

If the full seriousness of the problem is recognized and taken into account, and if the requisite patience and persistence can be mustered, there is no reason to preclude the possibility of eventual success. But the effort cannot be other than a long one; until it is completed, the prejudices and the forms of ignorance just described will continue to lie heavily across the path of Gorbachev's efforts at reform.

We come now to the third of the great elements in the process of change in which Russia is now involved: the readjustment of the interrelationships among the various national and ethnic elements that have heretofore made up the tsarist/Soviet state.

This readjustment is inevitable. The complete maintenance in any of its former forms of the multinational and multilingual empire of past decades and centuries is incompatible with the powerful force of modern nationalism. Most of the other empires of this nature have already been compelled to yield to that force. Russia, too, had begun to yield to it in 1917; but here, too, the process was interrupted and long postponed by the establishment of communist power. Now the demand for it has reasserted itself with redoubled vigor, and not all of it, surely, is to be withstood. But this is a highly complex and even dangerous problem, which even the benevolently inclined outsider should approach only with greatest circumspection.