History of the Soviet Union. Geoffrey Hosking
Adapted from Martin Gilbert, Russian History Atlas (1972)
Viewed from the West, the peoples of the Soviet Union tend to seem grey, anonymous and rather supine. When we see them on our television screens, marching in serried ranks past the mausoleum on Red Square, it is difficult to imagine them as more than appendages–or potential cannon fodder–for the stolid leaders whom they salute on the reviewing stand. This is, of course, partly the image the Soviet propaganda machine wishes to project. But is it not also partly the result of our way of studying the country? So many general works on the Soviet Union concentrate either on its leaders, or on its role in international affairs, as seen from the West.
There is plenty on the Soviet leaders in this book, too. No one could ignore them in so centralized and politicized a society. But I have also tried to penetrate a little more into their interaction with the various social strata, the religious and national groups, over which they rule. Fortunately, in the last ten to fifteen years, quite a large number of good monographs have been published in the West and (to a lesser extent, because of censorship) in the Soviet Union itself, which enable us to say more about the way of life of the working class, the peasantry, the professional strata, and even the ruling elite itself. In addition, many recent émigrés have, since leaving, given us candid accounts of their lives in their homeland, and these have afforded us a much more vivid insight into the way ordinary people think, act and react.
In order to focus on this material and give, as far as possible in brief compass, a rounded picture of Soviet society, I have deliberately said little or nothing about foreign policy or international affairs. There are already many excellent studies from which the reader can learn about the Soviet Union’s role in world affairs: to add to them is not the purpose of this book. I have, however, given some consideration to the Soviet Union’s relationship with the other socialist countries lying within its sphere of influence. As I argue in Chapter 11, developments in those countries have a claim to be considered almost as Soviet internal affairs; besides, East European efforts to discover their own distinctive ‘roads to socialism’ have brought out elements in the socialist tradition which have been obscured or overlaid in the Soviet Union itself. These elements may yet be of great importance, and therefore it is essential to give them due weight.
I have, moreover, again in the interests of concentration, consciously laid the strongest emphasis on the years of Stalin’s personal rule–roughly from the start of the first Five Year Plan in 1928 until his death in 1953–because this seems to me the most crucial period for understanding the Soviet Union today. It is also the one on which recently published works throw the greatest light.
In order to avoid cluttering the narrative and to allow a smoother flow of argument, I have dealt with some individual topics–such as literature, religion, education and law–not within each chapter, but in large sections confined to a few chapters. Thus, for example, the reader interested in the Russian Orthodox Church will find most of the material on it concentrated in Chapters 9 and 14. The index indicates these principal sections in bold type.
This history is the product of some fifteen years’ teaching on the Russian Studies programme at the University of Essex, and it reflects the often stated needs of my students on the post-1917 history course. I owe a considerable debt to them, especially to the inquisitive ones, who tried to encourage me to depart from vague generalization and tell them what life has really been like in a distant and important country they had never seen. I have also learnt a great deal over the years from my colleagues in the History Department and in the Russian and Soviet Studies Centre at Essex University. The marvellous Russian collection in the Essex University Library has provided me with most of the materials I needed, and I am particularly thankful to the collection’s custodian, Stuart Rees, for his unfailing attention to my wants.
I am most grateful to my colleagues who have read all or part of an earlier draft: the late Professor Leonard Schapiro, Peter Frank, Steve Smith, Bob Service and, the most tireless of my students, Philip Hills. At crucial stages of the writing, I have benefited from conversations with Mike Bowker, William Rosenberg and George Kolankiewicz. Where I have ignored their advice and gone my own way, I acknowledge full responsibility.
I am much beholden to the support and encouragement of my wife Anne, and my daughters Katherine and Janet. Without their endless patience and indulgence, this book would have been abandoned long ago, and then they might have seen more of me.
School of Slavonic Studies,
University of London,
July 1984
Preface to Second Edition
By a strange coincidence, the first edition of this book was published on the very day that Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. That made for good publicity, but it meant that the text rapidly became overtaken by the remarkable events which began to take place under the new leadership. It is true that in the last pages of the old edition I remarked that change, when it came, would be rapid and far-reaching, and that the Soviet public would prove to be more ready for it than we were then accustomed to think. As a pointer to the future, that now seems to have been reasonably apt, but all the same, a mere four years into the new era, a generous extension of the last chapter seemed essential to give some idea of the momentous changes which have been occurring and to relate them to earlier Soviet history. I have taken this opportunity to correct a few errors earlier in the text, and thank those reviewers and readers who have pointed them out to me.
School of Slavonic & East European Studies,
University of London,
July 1989
Administrative Divisions
Often in the text I refer to one or other of the main administrative divisions of the Soviet Union. These may be schematically laid out as follows:
‘The philosophers have only explained the world; the point is to change it.’ This famous dictum of Marx invites us to judge his doctrine by its practical consequences, in other words by examining the kind of society which has resulted from its application. Yet, paradoxically, many Marxists themselves will deny the validity of such a judgement. They will dismiss the example of Soviet society as an unfortunate aberration, the outcome of a historical accident, by which the first socialist revolution took place in a country unsuited to socialism, in backward, autocratic Russia.
It is important, therefore, to begin by asking ourselves just why this happened. Was it indeed a historical accident? Or were there elements in Russia’s pre-revolutionary traditions which predisposed the country to accept the kind of rule which the followers of Marx were to impose?
It is true that Russia was, in some ways, backward and it was certainly autocratic. Economically speaking–in agriculture, commerce and industry–Russia had lagged behind Western Europe from the late Middle Ages onward, largely as a result of two centuries of relative isolation under Tatar rule. There is, however, no single track along which history advances, and this backwardness had positive as well as negative features. It made the mass of the people more adaptable, better able to survive in harsh circumstances. It may also have helped to preserve a more intimate sense of local community, in the peasants’ commune (mir) and the workmen’s cooperative (artel).
Politically, on the other hand, nineteenth-century Russia might