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Week 5
'Soviet Politics in Perspective'
Chapter 17: Rise and…
Week 5
'Soviet Politics in Perspective'
Chapter 17: Rise and fall of the Soviet System
Richard Sakwa 1998
International Relations
- Leninist revolutionary socialism believes communism as a world system is viable
- 'the contradiction between the universal ideology of revolutionary socialism and the form in which it was contained, an isolated nation-state was never resolved despite the expansion of communism into Eastern Europe, China and elsewhere after the Second World War' - 277
- after Lenin died, Stalin claimed the doctrine 'socialism in one country': 'insisting that Soviet Russia could not only begin the building of socialism but could go on by its own efforts to complete it without the help of the developed west' - 278
- far from Lenin and Marx views
- Stalin went further by 'announcing that the interests of the Soviet Union were the interests of socialism thus preventing a creative partnership with the international socialist movement' - 278
- 'the soviet bloc states soon moved from being a security and economic asset into becoming a liability, sowing mistrust between the USSR and the rest of the world and ultimately destabilising the Soviet Union itself' - 278
- 'Bolshevik militancy became soviet militarism, marked not so much by external expansionism as by the militarisation of Soviet society and external relations' - 278
Economic Development
- 'the planning system was designed less to match resources to capacity as a way of stimulating economic growth by setting targets' - 278
- 'this was not a planned economy but a command economy' - 278
- 'the emphasis was less on balanced growth than on the development of heavy industry' - 278
- Oskar Lange argued that 'communism was the war organisation of capitalism' - 278
- Stalinist industrialisation however, led to an extremely unbalanced pattern of economic development: agriculture remained no more than a tributary of industry; heavy industry was privileged over light industry; the service sector was neglected; and innovation in science and technology was inhibited' - 278
National Policy
- USSR combined the principles of national autonomy with federalism
- 'by the end were 15 union republics enjoying many of the privileges of sovereign states, including the formal right to secession; a number of autonomous republics with rather fewer rights; and a various smaller autonomous provinces and regions' - 279
- 'the 5th point of the internal passport system forced people to state their nationality and fostered an ethnicised sense of national identity that might otherwise have been eroded' - 279
- nationhood was 'institutionalised in 2 ways: territorial and political on the one hand and ethnocultural and personal on the other' - 279
- 'the emphasis on Soviet citizenship ultimately proved insufficient to compensate for the lack of a Soviet national identity' - 279
- 'the forced incorporation of the Baltic republic, Moldavia and the western regions of Ukraine during and after the second world war, moreover, added peoples to the USSR who proved impossible to assimilate' - 279
Politics and the state
- Marx never anticipated the dominance of a single party
- 'the creation of the party as an instrument of rule on behalf of the working class was what turned Marxism into Marxism-Leninism' - 280
- the issue wasn't that it was a one party system, it was that the party was 'a fiction: all major decisions were taken by its staff of full time functionaries'
- ' power was concentrated in the hands of the general secretary, officially designated by the central committee' - 280
- 'despite the Marxist view that under socialism, the state would 'wither away' in practice, all twentieth century revolutionary socialist systems have increased the powers of the state' - 280
Leadership
- 'the Soviet years are stamped by the character of individual leaders' - 281
- 'politics was dominated by an oligarchy composed of a narrow range of elite interests operating, in public at least, according to the principle of unanimity' - 281
Models and Modernity
- 'while fascism sought to reject modernity, communism represented an attempt to reforge modernity' - 281
- according to Friedrich and Brzezinski, totalitarianism requires a single ideology and the dominance of a single mass party with the leadership principle, party control over the military, monopoly of communication and technology and total control of the economy
- 'the concept of totalitarianism reflects the ideology and not the system , the aspiration and not necessarily the achievement' - 282
- after Stalin died, terror was relaxed and there was less control over society
- 'when Gorbachev relaxed the totalitarian impulse, society found itself ill prepared for the relatively liberal regime, lacking a structured civil society and unaccustomed to the conventions of pluralistic social life or a competitive political system' - 282
- 'there was no shadow democratic political order waiting in the wings to take over. This was to cast a long shadow over post-communist politics' - 282
Patterns of Soviet Rule
- system building 1917-53 where main outlines of political and economic organisations of society formed
- faced technological innovation
- attempts at system consolidation 1953-85
- failure to 'find an effective form of polity', failure to remobilise society and stagnation yet with bursts of reform under Khrushchev
- 'while there were notable advances in these years in terms of standards of living and the achievement of strategic parity with the US, the whole post-Stalin period is sometimes characterised as 'neo-Stalinist compromise' - 282
- 'suggests that in return for the state promising an end to indiscriminate mass terror and improved welfare, the people would limit their political demands such as elections with a free choice of candidates' - 282
- 1985-91 characterised as a 'dual process of system dissolution and national disintegration when the fundamentals of the regime were radically transformed and then destroyed' - 283
- Gorbachev's attempt to unlink ideology from state organisation proved fatal' - 283
Reasons for the Fall
- 'the size of the soviet economy masked major distortions, above all the distribution between defence and consumer goods, raw materials and energy extraction compared to manufacturing output'
'the soviet economy increasingly looked not so much an advanced economy as a less developed one' - 283
- 'soviet growth rate was falling and there were deep structural problems that suggested continued decline and probably stagnation' - 283
- 'declining productivity was depressing the economy, reducing living standards and exacerbating the widespread cynicism about the system' - 283
- 'the attempt to eliminate capitalism during war communism gave way to the reformist period of the new economic policy (NEP) 1921-28
- the success of the NEP led to it's downfall, 'having helped achieve economic recovery at the price of social inequality and unemployment' - 284
- Khrushchev's 'experimentation with popular participation and economic deconcentration was hostage to the changing fortunes of soviet political leadership' - 284
- 'Gorbachev's attempts to restructure the system alienated conservatives in the bureaucracy and a large part of the intelligentsia while failing to deliver the economic results that might have sustained political support' - 284
- failure of soviet politics (structural flaws)
- 'as western societies moved towards post-industrial service economies, the Soviet system still concentrated on supplying producer goods and meeting centrally formulated targets that bore little relation to the needs of society' - 285