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.

1 My reflections have been stimulated by Professor Robert C. Tucker's new study of the crucial and formative years of the Stalin dictatorship (Stalin in Power: The Revolution From Above, 1928-1941, W. W. Norton, 1990). For anyone who, like the writer, lived in Moscow through parts of the period he describes, Tucker's account was bound to stir many reflections about the place of those terrible years, and indeed of the entire communist epoch now coming to an end, in the historical development of the Russian state. Some of these reflections find expression in the present article.

2 Insofar as the historical evidences provide answers, Tucker has given them in his book, and they richly deserve reading. But they are extraneous to this bare listing of the misfortunes endured by the Soviet peoples under communist rule.