The late American historian of Russia, Martin Malia, wrote a book a few years after the USSR’s collapse entitled The Soviet Tragedy. It is one of the best books on the USSR I have read, together with Nekrich and Heller’s Utopia in Power. It’s a very detailed, scholarly work of historiography that I would not recommend to beginners in Soviet history, but as someone fairly well-versed in it I had no problem following Malia’s sophisticated arguments. Malia is a competent prose writer and he is able to make a very complex subject fairly accessible. It was written primarily as a polemic against Malia’s fellow Sovietologists, whom he derides throughout for their ignorance of the nature of the USSR. Left-liberal academics, blinded by their sympathy for the utopian ideals of the Soviet experiment, and naive liberal ‘realist’ diplomats, fooled themselves into believing that the USSR wasn’t really serious about all that communism stuff, that it had found an ‘alternative’ path to modernisation and that it would ‘converge’ with the West and perhaps even become a democracy, perhaps involving the restoration of capitalism but perhaps with the maintenance of the socialised economy, what left-wing apologists for the Soviet system called the ‘gains of October’. It was also seen as a near-indestructible behemoth, an essential part of the global system that had to be tamed and negotiated with rather than destroyed, in the hope that the process of internal transformation could be speeded up.
Malia’s main point throughout this book is that the Sovietologists were naive and wrong. Soviet leaders meant what they said. They were serious about communism. The USSR was not a ‘normal’ regime, but an ideologically-driven state trying to spread revolutionary socialism worldwide. It was not simply propaganda for domestic consumption. They genuinely, sincerely believed that their system was not only superior to the West, but was destined to triumph over it. As time went on it became harder for them to maintain this belief, but they convinced themselves that nothing beyond some mere reforms of the existing system were necessary. They were not prepared to liquidate the state. Throughout Soviet history, the regime took decisions which can only be explained with reference to ideology – war communism, forced collectivisation, support for fraternal regimes abroad that had little or nothing to give the USSR in return, etc. Gorbachev may have been the darling of the liberal intelligentsia in the West, but he wanted merely to reform the system, not to destroy it altogether. His reforms developed a momentum of their own and brought about the collapse of the regime. It turns out there was no means of reconciling communism with liberal democracy. It was a straight-forward case of either-or. Malia demonstrates how all attempts at reform, whether they took place under Khrushchev, or Brezhnev, or Gorbachev, were doomed to fail, for the simple reason that the system was unreformable. Khrushchev’s failed reforms paved the way for the conservatism of Brezhnev, the representative of the bureaucratic apparatus which feared for its privileges. The years of stagnation led the bureaucracy to gamble on the young reformer, Gorbachev, who turned out to be an even bigger disappointment than Khrushchev, and oversaw the complete disintegration of the state.
There is a particularly interesting discussion of the 1920s and the question of ‘alternatives’ to Stalinism. Malia demonstrates, as others have, that forced collectivisation was the only means of accomplishing socialism. Any leader would have inherited the same situation Stalin did, and it is unclear what other measures could have been used to accomplish the work of socialist transformation. Trotsky’s proposals were fulfilled in spirit if not in form by Stalin. Malia also dismisses the idea of a Bukharinite alternative, pointing out that Bukharin’s proposals, far from being the sort of ‘mixed economy’ we might imagine, would still have involved massive state control over the non-agricultural sector of the economy (the ‘socialist sector’ of the economy), with all the inefficiencies that meant, along with one-party dictatorship. It is unclear how it could have worked in practice, and even if everything had gone as planned, it would have taken decades for the country to transition to socialism. All the while, the kulaks would gain in strength thanks to the concessions to the free market such a plan would entail. The impatient militants of the party rank-and-file were beginning to ask, ‘Is this what we fought for?’ Neither Trotsky’s plans nor Bukharin’s provided a quick solution to the problem. In the end, one is forced to conclude, as Kolakowski and others concluded, that Stalinism was the logical conclusion of Bolshevism, and indeed, of Marxism.
For Malia, Stalinism explodes the Marxist base-superstructure model. Here we have a regime which voluntaristically built a new kind of economy, from scratch, in the name of an ideological crusade against capitalism and feudalism. Marxist categories are of no help whatsoever in helping us to make sense of this phenomenon. When Trotsky had the brass neck to claim in ‘Stalinism and Bolshevism’ that the Stalinist degeneration had been anticipated by the Bolsheviks using the ‘Marxist method’, and thus could not be blamed on Bolshevik ideology, he was being utterly disingenuous. Even if we accept that this was true, it speaks volumes that Bolshevism was powerless to prevent the degeneration of the revolution. It also ignores the fact that it was anticipated by people who weren’t Bolsheviks (like anarchists and conservative critics like Nietzsche). Trotsky simply could not bring himself to accept that the USSR was a phenomenon that could not be grasped in all of its horrible reality by Marxist dogmas and obscurantist social-scientific categories devised by two nineteenth-century German dilettantes. Malia rejects the whole notion of ‘Russian backwardness’ causing the failure of the revolution. Not only is this a cop-out to ignore the role of Bolshevik ideology, it assumes too linear a connection between the Tsarist regime of old, and the regime founded by the Bolsheviks and consolidated under Stalin. If one looks hard enough, one can find superficial connections of all sorts. One can even link Stalin to Peter the Great. But they self-evidently were not trying to achieve the same goals. Peter the Great was trying to construct a European state modelled on the Enlightenment absolutisms of the West. Stalin and the Communists sought to build a state never before seen in history, with no models to guide them, but entirely on the basis of the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin, plus Stalin’s own interpretations of these thinkers. Naturally they had to adapt this to the specific conditions of Russia, but to blame everything that went wrong on Russian backwardness neglects the ideological component to Communist thinking. Peter the Great wished to strengthen the state for very limited goals. Stalin wanted to create a state that would not only transform the backward lands of the old Russian Empire, but spread world revolution. Stalin’s state would not settle merely for extracting resources from the population or employing it in its armies, but would actively seek to create a new kind of human being, Soviet man.
Malia has no time for the idea that Stalinism was in anyway necessary. After all, countries with far fewer resources than the USSR managed industrialisation without slaughtering millions of their own people and squandering their most precious resources, human, animal and otherwise. Only ideological fetishes explain why the USSR took such a destructive route to modernisation. In any case, it did not create a truly ‘modern’ Russia, but a lopsided economy with a bloated industrial sector, a terminally inefficient agricultural sector and a minuscule services sector, with a population that enjoyed lower living standards than the West. Malia makes the telling observation that had the USSR not been such a massive country with such a massive population, the communist experiment could hardly have survived. No regular-sized country could have suffered the demographic tragedy the USSR did under Stalin and still had enough people left to complete the project. This is also a reason why the USSR was able to withstand Nazism, along with Nazi blunders, Western aid and Russian patriotism. Had Stalin not made his foolish pact with Hitler, and attacked Germany in 1939, a Soviet victory with far fewer casualties was eminently plausible.
Malia’s book is an in-depth discussion of what happens when an entire population is held hostage to a utopian delusion for decades on end. The results are utterly tragic, hence the title of the book. We do not need to ‘try Marxism again’, we need to learn from history, especially from Malia’s brilliant book, and reject this false and murderous ideology once and for all.