Yves here. Satyajit Das reviews three books that claim to offer new insights into the Russia now by looking at Russia past. But all of the works, as Das points out, are colored by Anglo-American predispositions.
By Satyajit Das, a former banker and author of numerous works on derivatives and several general titles: Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006 and 2010), Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011), (2022). His latest book is on ecotourism and man’s relationship with wild animals – Wild Quests (2024). Jointly published with the New Indian Express Online
Pieces on Russia frequently cite Winston Churchill’s well know epigram: ‘… a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. The lazy formulation reflects the former British politician’s Kiplingesque view that civilisation was white and English-speaking. Even superficial understanding of countries, especially one as big as Russia with its different languages, idioms, cultures and societies, requires patient effort. It is best studied through their rather than oureyes, to avoid conscious or unconscious biases.
Analysis of Russia must incorporate its vast size (spanning more time zones that any other country), resource richness, ethnic mix and complicated history, especially the transformation from monarchy and feudalism to a socialist state. There is an underlying inferiority complex which comes from its late emergence as a world power. There are grievances about the lack of external appreciation about its contribution to the world. There are problems of identity with Europeans regarding it as Asian while the latter regard it as Western. Its institutions, traditions and approaches often seem alien to outsiders.
During the Cold War years, Kremlin-watching was a large industry. It did not diminish after the demise of the USSR although the focus changed. In recent years, a revanchist Russia, has generated a vast literature. The following fine recent books are well worth reading for the knowledge they offer the interested:
To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power by Sergey Radchenko, Cambridge University Press, 2024
Memory Makers The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia by Jade McGlynn Bloomsbury, 2023
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans, Princeton University Press, 2024
Each deals with different subject matter and offers diverse perspectives of Russia’s past and present.
Sergey Radchenko, a respected scholar, provides a deeply researched work which benefits from access to recently declassified Cold-War documents. To Run the World seeks to understand Russia’s central interests in the post World War 2 era. He uses studies of Soviet leadership from Stalin through Gorbachev to Putin to explore this question. Robert Conquest writing in The Great Terror thought that the Lenin-Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev sequence illustrated the evolution of homids, read backwards. There are solid portraits of the main Russian players and their American and Chinese counterparts. The book of necessity covers the Korean War, the Berlin confrontation, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the six-day war in the Middle East etc, all of which have been extensively analysed elsewhere.
Unsurprisingly, Radchenko finds that the principal driving factors wasn’t ideology or economics. Political philosophy was constantly mangled to justify expedient actions and maintain the Communist Party’s grip on power. Western fears of Soviet economic prowess seem laughable with hindsight. Black humour provided a clear assessment of the USSR’s economics. One joke stated that workers pretended to work just as the state pretended to pay them. The central planned economy mainly entailed cheating at work or swindling the boss.
The ineptitude extended into the post-Soviet era. Advisor Igor Gaidar was scathing about President Boris Yeltsin’s knowledge or more accurately lack of knowledge about economics and democracy. Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin summed it up succinctly: ‘We wanted the best, but it turned out as always’.
To Run the World comes down on the side of Russia being motivated by a desire for legitimacy, recognition and power. While true in part, the argument is not entirely convincing. The text does not fully support the thesis. For example, Stalin was hesitant in trying to turn the world red, a significant difference from Lenin’s plans to export socialism.
Radchenko perhaps underestimates Russia’s innately chaotic nature and developmental struggles. In the 1920s, Lenin was acutely conscious of the state’s ‘deformities’, which reflected Tsarist structures and institutions covered by a thin coating of Soviet paint. That deficiency has carried over into the present. Karen Dawisha in Putin’s Kleptocracy quotes Russian political analyst Yevginy Gontmkaher: ‘there is no state in Russia…there is a certain structure in which millions of people who call themselves bureaucrats work…but they do not perform the function of a state…instead of a state as an institution implementing the course of a developing country, there is a huge uncontrolled private structure which is successfully diverting profits for its own use’.
An added consideration is the sheer difficulty in holding together a vast state, which was highlighted by the breakup after 1991. It might explain the tendency towards tyrannical authoritarianism. It created a particular leadership style which persists. Stalin preferred people to support him from fear rather than conviction because convictions could change. Fyodor Dostoevsky writing in The House of the Dead caught its essence: ‘tyranny is a habit; it grows upon us, and in the long run turns into a disease…’
Radchenko ends with the collapse of the Soviet Union. He sees it as economics catching up with the country’s superpower ambition. While certainly a central factor, other observers, especially the Chinese Communist Party have a more nuanced view – Gorbachev gravely miscalculated in prioritising political over economic reforms.
To Run the World suggests that the collapse of the USSR did not end Russian ambitions. President Putin, Radchenko argues, believes in his country’s prominence in the international order. But as the author himself admits, Putin’s election and support derived from the population’s desire for order, stability and improvements in living conditions. While Putin has been clever in using history to buttress his positions, it is worth noting his views on the past: ‘Anyone who does not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union has no heart, but anyone who wants it restored has no head’.
If there is a weakness in To Run the World, it is that the author does not attempt to contrast Russia’s ambitions and motivations from that of other great powers. How is Russian exceptionalism different from that of America or China? Ultimately all nation states play the hand they are dealt as best they can to survive and further their interests.
Radchenko or perhaps more likely the publisher bombastically pronounces that the book is a radical new interpretation of Russian history. While impressive and readable, that may be an overstatement similar to the proposition that Russia sought to run the world.
In the complementary Memory Makers, historian Jade McGlynn presents an analysis of Russian propaganda and its use in reshaping national identity. The focus is on how Russia under President Putin has used the media, education and cultural events to shape the public’s view of the country’s history.
Memory Makers opens with a military parade in Red Square, to commemorate the 1941 Battle of Moscow. Complete with carnival paraphernalia, military displays and political theatre, the spectacle is epic memory making around the Great Patriotic War. McGlynn uses similar episodes, such as the contrasting coverage of Ukraine’s maidan uprising by Western and Russian media, to make the case for how Russian propaganda misrepresents the past. She cites the use of Nazi-era footage of Stepan Bandera and the Ukrainian Waffen SS Division as evidence of how events were manipulated.
While Russia undeniably uses these events in a specific way to define itself, the problem is that in both cases the portrayals are factual if exaggerated. Russia’s prominent if frequently poorly acknowledged role in the defeat of Germany is undeniable. Similarly, the history of collaboration of Ukrainians with the Nazis is correct. McGlynn’s assertion that the invasion of Ukraine was the result of Russia’s preoccupation with policing the past is weak.
The official narratives are also consistent with how the majority of Russians view their position in the world and especially their nation’s perceived treatment by Europe and America. In effect, the constructed history is intended for a receptive Russian audience Pure falsehoods, such as the blatant lies about living standards and economic performance during the Soviet era, were generally ignored and debunked. Ben Lewis’s Hammer and Tickleprovides multiple examples of this gallows humour.
There is nothing new in any of this. Francis Fukuyama thought that in his mythical post-ideological world the fight for the future would be replaced by a battle to define the past. As an old Soviet era joke states: ‘It is difficult to know what happened yesterday’.
Moreover, interpretations evolve. As Kathleen Smith’s Mythmaking in the New Russia and Thomas Sherlock in Historical Narratives in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia pointed out, President Boris Yeltsin sought to denigrate and discredit the Soviet past, changing the flag, introducing a new Russian anthem and repurposing Soviet holidays. McGlynn accepts the shift under Putin was not coercive but an inclusive and participatory project meeting a genuine public appetite for a more patriotic history after the chaos of the immediate post-collapse period.
McGlynn is correct in her argument that these shifts reflect particular pressures – economic weakness, political challenges and concerns about corruption or fraud. But politicians everywhere reimagine history and strategy when circumstances dictate. That may be perhaps the most troubling aspect of the book. There is little comparison of the Russian approach to its history with that of other countries. America, France, Germany, Britain, Israel, Japan, China and India have all, at various times, sought to rewrite their own past. In Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman, Edward Said and Noam Chomsky showed how American mass communication was a powerful propaganda tool which was highly effective in shaping public opinion. McGlyn makes an oblique gesture to this problem when she admits that the phenomenon is not uniquely Russian but without elaboration.
Memory Makers’ concluded that manipulation of a nation’s history can have real world spill overs such as kinetic wars. Given that all nations have propagandised their past to manipulate and motivate their population through the centuries, that proposition is not particularly insightful. Truth has always been a casualty of politics and nationalism.
Benjamin Nathans’ monumental To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause mines a very different aspect of Russia’s past – the history of dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn as well as many unknown others.
Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and recently available KGB records, Nathans creates a sympathetic portrait of the human-rights dissidence movement in the USSR. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause meticulously documents the fight against the government via unauthorized public gatherings, petitioning in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulating banned samizdat texts.
After Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev promised a new Russia which was interpreted by intellectuals as a shift away from the terror and tyranny under the Georgian dictator. Writers, scientists, intellectuals and students sought to publish plays, novels, essays and articles critical of the government and system.
The dissidents devised a novel strategy – to try to force the Kremlin to obey its own laws.
Gathering annually on 5 December (Soviet Constitution Day) at the monument to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, they demanded that the regime obey the 1936 Constitution’s guarantee of basic rights and the Code of Criminal Procedure. When Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were tried for publishing anti-Soviet literary works abroad, dissidents demanded the proceedings be open to the public, as the law required.
They were aware that their actions, no matter how clandestine, would attract the attention of the authorities and collide with the apparatus of Soviet power. In the Stalinist period, such activity would have ended in mass purges, show trials, forced confessions, the gulags or death sentences. But knowing that the state was unlikely to respond in this way due to external pressure, this strategy was, as one of them put it: ‘simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people’.
They pursued this strategy resigned to the risk of prosecution where the verdict and sentence were pre-determined by the government. Nevertheless, the dissidents bravely sought to use the system to draw attention to their views and captured the world’s imagination. Perhaps they were driven by what Fyodor Dostoevsky called ‘the most basic, most rudimentary spiritual need of the Russian people… the need for suffering, ever-present and unquenchable’.
Dissidents were arrested, subjected to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced to labour camps or psychiatric hospitals or sent into exile. The government’s actions transformed them into martyred heroes, some of whom like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn became well known in the West. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and hastened its collapse.
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause takes its title from the toast routinely made at dissident gatherings. Benjamin Nathans has written a remarkable history of protest in Russia but whose implications are wider, especially on how to can use the law of a state to contain its power.
The books have appeared at an interesting time. The world’s relationship with Russia for the last century and a half has been one of large shifts. The nation once played an important part alongside the West in winning the two twentieth century world wars. But since 2007, when Putin gave an important but ignored speech to the Munich Security Forum articulating Russia’s place in the global order, the relationship with the West has steadily deteriorated. Today, a new cold war is under way.
Where used, Churchill’s quote is usually truncated. In its complete form, it ends with an important qualification: ‘…but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interests’. All three books provide important insights into those shifting and complex concerns.
Ultimately, better mutual understanding rather than agreement on all things is the key to coexistence. As Dostoevsky well knew ‘we are people from the same madness’.
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It’s remarkable how shallow the analysis of Russia is in the West. Das doesn’t seem to be a fan of Russia at all, but even in this brief overview he identifies disastrous and completely obvious ideology-driven errors in the books he cites.
The post might as well be called “Westerners impose Their Mistaken Visions on Russia”.
One additional point: Russian Cold War dissidents were often interesting people, but a large number of them rapidly morphed into stooges for either kleptocapitalism or Western imperialism. It seems that they had little understanding of what was going on in Russia other than that they didn’t like the Communist Party — and often they didn’t like it for questionable reasons.
Reading Politkovskaya, for instance, she is torn between “Look what these horrible Communists did!” and “Look how terrible things are now that the horrible Communists are gone!” without noticing that there might be a connection or that things might have been done differently.
For some reason I have been unable to comment on this thread; two of my attempts have failed. But I also noted that the themes emphasized by Das in each of the three books seem to emphasize common derogatory Western stereotypes – insecure leaders utilizing propaganda and power projection, bureaucratic corruption and ineptitude, dissident repression, etc. And while I acknowledge the truth content of these themes, I cannot tell from the review if these books adequately discuss them in comparative and historical context, or if they simply reinforce our already common condescending views from our supposedly superior perspective. Das implies that they lack such comparative context, but then to what extent are they “fine books… well worth reading”?
Thanks for the reviews and so I hope no one object to mine of Francis Spufford’s 2012 fascinating book “Red Plenty” which through a series of novelistic personal vignettes goes into the economic reforms that were discussed or attempted during the Khrushchev years. During the late 50’s the Soviet economy was estimated to have been growing at 6 percent per year which was second only to that of Japan.
A key idea was to make central planning rational and for this computers were identified as having an important role. This led to efforts to have a native computer industry which produced some designs which were unlike any elsewhere. One was for a computer with trinary logic with which I recall that a prototype was constructed. Timely information was also identified as something that a working central planning required and setting up what we know as the internet was very much discussed. As it was realized by some, the computers of the time were inadequate for the most ambitious of plans. I suspect that economic planning may become one of the first uses of quantum computers.
All this ended when Brezhnev came to power because these ideas were identified as a threat by the powers that be. The work on setting up an indigenous computer industry was officially abandoned and they went with IBM. That is an IBM 360 was stolen and then reversed engineered to produce copies.
There is a recent youtube interview of the author titled “Comrades, Lets Optimize” which refers to a banner from that time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Hghul4oEI&t=12s
The Allende government in Chile did the second round of this evolution in governance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
The Soviets ripped off all of the major Western computer architectures. A friend learned computers in India in the 1970s on a “Minsk-2”, which was a copy of the DEC PDP-8. This was a “minicomputer”, which cost around $50k and was a big as a refrigerator.
Thank you for the reviews. I plan to pick up a copy of ‘To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause’, and not just for the perfect title. A friend has me reading Turchin’s ‘War and Peace and War’ which has a chapter on the early development of what became Russia. A couple of years ago, another friend had me read Wouk ‘The Winds of War’ and ‘War and Remembrance’ which does a decent job of illustrating how much Russia had to sacrifice during WW2. And Orlov’s ‘Reinventing Collapse’ and reading here makes me aware that the 90’s were a difficult decade there.
All of which leads to this question: What have you read, and what would you suggest reading, to help you understand Russia?
I would also recommend one of Orlov’s other books – “The Five Stages of Collapse”. He was a frequent visitor to Russia and what he saw there of what the Russians were dealing with gave him a lot of material for this book. Russia, as a country, almost went out.
Agree with you on Wouk’s book as it does try to give a view of what it was like back then. I find it ironic now that when they not long ago had the commemoration of the freeing of Auschwitz extermination camp, that German representatives were invited who had run that camp but Russian reps weren’t who were the ones to free it-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp#Liberation
Even though my background is in history, if you want to understand Russia, I would suggest reading its great writers. Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov (the world’s finest short story writer), Gogol, Gorky, Blok, Mayakovski, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn. The list goes on and on. That is where you will find Russia.
I’ve read ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ and am working on an anthology of Checkov’s stories. ‘War and Peace’ glowers at me from the bookshelf.
My reading tends more toward non-fiction than to fiction, though I take that statement to be as much a confession as a preference. I’ll spend some time with your author list, sifting into a ‘to read’ list.
Thank you.
Let me add Lermontov, Babel, Sholokhov, Bulgakov, and Mamin-Sibiryak to the list.
Also Bitov, Platonov and Vysotsky.
As for the original question, there’s too many to list. Paul Robinson has written good books about Russian Conservatism and Liberalism. Serhiy Bilenky’s “Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations” is a good introduction to the antipathies and sympathies between main “Slavic groups”. Philip Longworth’s “Russia’s Empires – Their Rise and Fall” does a decent work of squeezing 1500 year into 300+ pages.
Don’t touch anything by Anne Applebaum, unless you want to study raw, unhinged Russophobia.
May I add Andrey Bely and his novel Petersburg? Even Nabokov, particularly Glory. I second the Bilenky too! Also a read-up on mediaeval Poland-Lithuania since not only Belarus and Ukraine but even parts of Russia itself have their histories tied thereto.
And maybe a Tarkovsky film here and there.
Add Nikolai Leskov too please.
One should not forget Ilf & Petrov….
Hoo, boy, I did see 12 chairs (youtube) in a movie theater way back when!
I would recommend Gogol’s ‘Dead Souls’ (1842) and Ilf and Petrov’s ‘The Twelve Chairs’ (1928), both of which are not only fun reads but also describe the bureaucratic corruption and general disdain for rules that pervade Russia (then and now — little has changed since 1842, in my experience). ‘The Twelve Chairs’ is also a hilarious movie (and easily found online). The scene where Ostap Bender (the story’s anti-hero) pretends to be a chess grandmaster is a classic.
Agree with the list of Russian authors above, but missing is Vasily Grossman, whose ‘Life and Fate’ is one of the great works of 20th century Russian literature, and has remained strangely neglected in the West, though that’s beginning to change. For an understanding of the Soviet Union, Grossman is essential. In writing ‘Life and Fate,’ he set out to write a ‘War and Peace’ for WWII, and it’s not saying too much to affirm that he succeeded, blending historical commentary and personal narrative seamlessly. And like Tolstoy, in the end his subject transcends Russia and asks what is it to be human. A later book, ‘Everything Flows,’ includes two essays on modern Russian history and the Russian ‘soul’ that are well worth reading. He makes a compelling case that Stalinism was a continuation of Leninism, not a corruption of it, and that both have to be understood within the larger context of the Russian character and its long historical development, sandwiched between Europe and Asia, ruled over by the Tartars for many centuries.
For non-fiction, Orlando Figes ‘A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891 to 1924,’ provides an excellent account of the state of Russian society at the end of the 19th century. It gives detailed descriptions of the rural, urban, political, bureaucratic and ideological conditions that gave rise to the revolution. Reading about the dysfunction of the Tsarist bureaucracy and the short-sighted in-fighting and jockeying for power between the governing elites, it’s hard not to be reminded of our own contemporary reality here in the West.
Thank you for the reviews. I hope for an opportunity to get these books through my local library system.
My academic background is in Russian and East European history but I seldom comment about that part of the world at NC since we have so many experts here with knowledge far greater than mine. I always appreciate their insights. It is an area of study that remains close to my heart.
I have viewed Radchenko’s oeuvre with an element of circumspection, because it often appears that in his eyes contemporary Russia can do no right and is almost always in the wrong. He therefore sometimes seems to be operating in the no man’s land between history and polemic. Perhaps I am being unfair.
However, where I do agree very strongly with his new book, which I read earlier this year, is in the Soviet leadership’s craving for legitimacy, acceptance and respectability within the international community. In this way Radchenko’s works complement other recent groundbreaking publications on the waning Soviet system that I feel compelled to alert people to, including those by Oscar Sanchez-Sibony which note that the USSR chafed against its quasi-exclusion (partly self-imposed) from the international financial institutions forming the BWS, and from much of the economic dynamism which characterised the European recovery between the establishment of the European Payments Union in 1950 and the early/mid 1960s. In actual fact the USSR insinuated itself into much of that system, notably via the Eurocurrency markets, and learned how to play Western economic/financial diplomats with a degree of ruthlessness which might have impressed the most hardened and cynical Wall Street player: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/red-globalization/DAE3ADBABBEF84748E9E14D4BE9C82A2 and https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/soviet-union-and-the-construction-of-the-global-market/B0D0D14FAD034EB785B3F9CBCC5F66F2 (the UK had the largest bilateral trading relationship with the USSR until the early 1970s, but the Soviets were pretty candid – to an extent they could not be towards Gosplan and their own domestic manufacturers – about British shoddy goods). After Ike reacted badly against the crushing of the Hungarian uprising the Soviets had perforce to turn to the London market in order to obtain dollars lest their holdings in the US be blocked; the quantity of dollars held outside the US thus grew in parabolic fashion, eventually overwhelming not only the BWS but also the capital controls which had regulated banking systems in developed countries since the 1930s.
Thus the Soviets played a large role in the construction of an international market characterised by footloose financial capital. It was therefore all the more ironic, as Fritz Bartel noted recently, and brilliantly, that Comecon was eventually overwhelmed by the liabilities which it contracted with international finance capital: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674976788 (this new work by Michael de Groot also amplifies some of Bartel’s themes: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501774119/disruption/). Indeed, a case can be made that the debts contracted by the eastern bloc between c. 1970 and 1982 (the Mexican default) were arguably far more consequential in putting the Soviet system on the slide than such cold war follies as the Reagan/Weinberger SDI.
Faced with escalating liabilities amongst its satellites which could no longer be financed following the ‘counter-shock’ in the oil markets in 1986 (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/countershock-9781838605827/), the Soviets turned rapidly to the adoption of market incentives within the parameters of a command economy and struggled to increase the provision of consumer goods in order to head off failing domestic legitimacy (an especially difficult task in a system geared towards primary production and heavy industry). This merely resulted in the rapid rise in prices which could only be covered by the printing press, as Yakov Feygin has recently described: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674240995. This struck at the heart of the system, and resulted in a fatal loss of discipline, which completed the coup de grace as Mark Harrison’s secrecy/capacity trade-off failed:https://www.sup.org/books/history/secret-leviathan. As Isabella Weber has suggested, the Soviets taught the Chinese what not to do: https://www.routledge.com/How-China-Escaped-Shock-Therapy-The-Market-Reform-Debate/Weber/p/book/9781032008493?srsltid=AfmBOooY19gJU9BBKLb_nLy-2FLE3kqnivFWTs017CQTLh9Hycb_1QVm
Therefore, the failure of the Soviet system may have been prompted by certain exogenous factors, but was largely endogenous. Ultimately, per Bartel, an authoritarian system is paradoxically more sensitive to heavily regulated domestic opinion than ‘democratic’ systems, which have the safety/pressure valve of elections. Many authoritarian systems therefore feel constrained to improve living standards (or do their utmost to conceal the decline in living standards) as part of a desperate bid for recognition and legitimacy. The urgent quest for external recognition and legitimacy noted by Radchenko therefore parallels a similar domestic quest. Kissinger once remarked that detente had become possible because the USSR had become a stable and conservative player of the game of international relations, as if it were a great power of the 18th or 19th centuries. Given the proclivities and preferences of the ageing and ailing Soviet leadership under Brezhnev, and their fetishising of continuity and comfort, I daresay they would have taken it as the highest compliment that any US leader could have bestowed upon them.
“As Isabella Weber has suggested, the Soviets taught the Chinese what not to do…”
Isabella Weber is excellent, but quite incorrect in this instance. China learned what to do by being “socialist.” A game western economists play with regard to China is to continually claim China is capitalist, as though a 5,000 year old civilization has no intellectual leaders who could currently define it. China was from 1945, and is socialist (with Chinese characteristics).
Sort of like Branko Milanovic, who I think the world of, writing “Capitalism, Alone.” No, there is China.
Many thanks! Perhaps China is neither fish nor fowl, being a ‘socialist market economy’ (per Jiang Zemin in 1992). The main difference, it seems to me, between the Soviet and Chinese experiences in the second half of the 1980s is that whilst both the CPSU and CCP advanced in an ado hoc manner, Gosplan seems to have comprehensively lost faith in its own prescriptions by about 1986-87 (as Feygin notes, especially following the unexpected fall in industrial output in early 1987) whereas in China, despite the searing experiences of the Great Leap Forward, planners under Chen Yun retained a degree of self-confidence. Also, in the USSR, once the flawed enterprise law of 1987 had been implemented, the Soviet authorities got carried along by its own momentum even as it led them towards disaster. In China, by contrast, the party essayed price liberalisation in 1986 and 1988 but then drew back quickly when it was seen to have undesirable effects. The Chinese authorities therefore proceeded with caution, and the experiences of 1989, led to a far greater premium being placed on party discipline than had become possible in the USSR by that stage. Another factor which may need to be stressed is the long shadow cast by the ‘century of humiliations’; forestalling a recurrence of that has been key to the CCP’s legitimacy, so avoiding the sort of debt peonage into which the central European satellites slipped in the 1970s or the USSR itself by the end of the 1980s was of fundamental importance, and helps to explain the quest for the creation of a 180 degree rampart against foreign imperialism. Many thanks again!
“Perhaps China is neither fish nor fowl…”
https://www.chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/584312
May 28, 2024
China is a socialist market economy
By Ho Lok-sang
* https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html
“As Isabella Weber has suggested, the Soviets taught the Chinese what not to do…”
Letting a Western-grown economist define China, just will not do, even if the economist is sympathetic to China. As for the bulk of Western economists who lack all sympathy:
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/04/must-read-i-do-not-understand-china-but-it-now-looks-more-likely-than-not-to-me-that-xi-jinpings-rule-will-lose-china.html
April 5, 2016
I do not understand China. But it now looks more likely than not to me that Xi Jinping’s rule will lose China a decade, if not half a century… *
* http://www.economist.com/news/china/21695923-his-exercise-power-home-xi-jinping-often-ruthless-there-are-limits-his
I would add another remarkable book: Alexievich’s book of narratives from Russians, “Secondhand Time.” The book comprises self-reports by ordinary Russians about their experiences and reactions during the collapse of the 90’s and the restructuring. Their narratives also often give heart-tearing accounts of personal experiences earlier in time, such as World War II, or the Stalinist period in general. It was often an emotionally difficult book to read, but for Russia in particular, that is extremely appropriate.
The famous Russian saying «Хотели как лучше, получилось – как всегда» should more accurately be translated as “Hoped for better, turned out as always.” Mechanical translation not withstanding. But that doesn’t convey the deep irony of the statement. To a Russian, как всегда–“as always” means worse, because everything is always getting worse. But also, trying improve things frequently ends up in the wrong direction, which Russians expect as the normal case. This can be used to justify inaction. When Chernomyrdin spoke these words after rubles were devalued, it also justified the deep pessimism of the Russian soul. Our expectations came true.
Simultaneously Russians are great dreamers, and constantly making improvements. If you walk along a path today with a deep mud puddle, tomorrow you will find that someone has ambitiously found a log or a plank to make it easier to cross. If the highway department blocks a favorite route with a 1000 kg concrete barrier, a few days later it will mysteriously have been moved out of the way as if by magic. When a Russian decides that a route should be open, then open it will be–whether blocked by 1000 kg or 10,000 kg.
If you’re interested in Russian culture and history, but prefer video to books, may I recommend https://sovietmoviesonline.com/. There are a vast number of insightful movies and mini series, from the Soviet era as well as the modern day. Some of them are truly outstanding.
Indeed, and as you note that saying was deployed following the botched currency reform of 1994, when many Russians lost much/all of their savings. It became almost emblematic of the hopelessness of that epoch. See here for a recent discussion of that reform, in the epilogue: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-ruble-9780197663714?cc=us&lang=en&
I would also recommend this for cinema: https://www.youtube.com/@Mosfilm_eng. As you will know very well, Soviet cinema was frequently of exceptional quality, and not merely that produced in Russia, but in Georgia and Ukraine also.
An interesting overview. I don’t plan to read the first two books (by Radchenko and McGlynn). The one by Nathans (on the dissidents) looks intriguing, but the Soviet dissidents were a mixed bag and did not always fit neatly into western notions of ‘freedom and democracy’. Solzhenitsyn (arguably the most famous of them all) had a prickly relationship with the USA (his Harvard commencement speech in 1978 went over like a lead balloon), and he was an open admirer of Putin. He was above all a consummate Russian nationalist, much like Alexander Dugin. One can only wonder what he would have said about today’s ongoing Ukraine conflict.
Historians like Radchenko have a tendency to think too much and ignore the human factor. The USSR had many internal problems, but its abrupt dissolution was due largely to the fact that Yeltsin despised Gorby (and vice versa) and was determined to exact his revenge for Gorby’s having fired him in 1987. Hence the Belovezha Accords of 8 December 1991, which stranded Gorby without a country to govern. Absent this very personal spat, the USSR (or at least most of it, without the Baltic and Caucasus triplets) would have almost certainly lasted much longer. Personalities matter.
We’ll have to wait a few years (or even decades) until the dust settles, but someday there will be a good book written about Putin (one of the most consequential historical figures of the early 21st century) and about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. My guess is that 2022 will be eventually be seen as the year that Russia broke decisively with the west, ending a cycle started by Peter the Great roughly 300 years earlier.
The dissidents devised a novel strategy – to try to force the Kremlin to obey its own laws.
This strategy has not met with great success in the US–so far–and has been unevenly applied. Perhaps that is because its politics is in thrall to a corporate economic death grip. That blood-soaked, dollar-dripping clenched fist is, a la Michael Hudson, “killing the host.”
Nevertheless, the US government needs more pressure put upon it to honor freedom of speech and press, the right to assemble, not providing arms to those engaged in genocide.
I have always questioned the effectiveness of the historicist approach to understanding other nations. The influence of history in the formation of national identity is overestimated. For many people, the history of their country is just knowledge they learn in school, which does not replace their personal experience in the formation of their character. And if a nation is regarded as the sum of its people, how can the study of its history be a way of learning about its true nature?
Because people are socialized and habituated in certain ways? If history be more than King X wages War Y and loses Battle Z (Poltava, say, or Kursk), the social and cultural history–or that which it studies at least–is going to matter.
The comments have it covered already, I’m always late to the party since I’m in the PDT time zone.
Any discussion of westerners writing about Russia would be remiss without mentioning Stephen F Cohen.
Many would consider the late prof. Stephen F. Cohen to be the most objective “Western” scholar with expertise on the subject of the USSR and Russia. He was an outspoken critic of US/UK policy toward Russia for years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_F._Cohen
I had noticed that he appeared regularly on some so-called alternative media outlets like Democracy Now, shortly after the Maidan coup in 2014. After he pointed out inaccuracies and even bald-faced lies about Putin, Russia etc., and criticized US policy, he no longer was invited. Sadly, he died in 2020. Ironically, he was married to Katrina van den Heuvel, a CFR member. She is also an apologist for the D faction, which is also ironic.
“Many would consider the late prof. Stephen F. Cohen to be the most objective ‘Western’ scholar with expertise on the subject of the USSR and Russia…”
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/opinion/a-russia-scholars-views.html
A Russia Scholar’s Views
To the Editor:
“Russia Experts See Ranks Thin, and an Effect on U.S. Policy”: * I protest the way my views and I were characterized in your article. I am called the “dissenting villain” in today’s media commentary on Ukraine who presents a “perspective closer to that of Mr. Putin.” This may have the effect (intended or not) of stigmatizing me and discrediting my views.
For more than 40 years, I have taught thousands of undergraduates and trained scores of future Russia specialists at Princeton University and New York University. My many scholarly books, articles and media commentaries have been published in diverse mainstream places, including The New York Times many years ago. And my views are based on my years of study, not on what President Vladimir V. Putin or anyone else thinks.
Indeed, my current perspective is similar to what Henry A. Kissinger wrote ** in The Washington Post this month: “The demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.”
I would go farther: The Ukrainian crisis, the worst and most fateful of the 21st century, is the outcome of Washington’s 20-year bipartisan policy toward post-Soviet Russia, spearheaded by NATO’s eastward expansion. I have been arguing this since the early 1990s, long before Mr. Putin appeared on the scene.
In this regard, I am a true patriot of American national security — perhaps a heretic, but certainly not the “villain.”
* https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/07/world/europe/american-experts-on-russia.html
** https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/henry-kissinger-to-settle-the-ukraine-crisis-start-at-the-end/2014/03/05/46dad868-a496-11e3-8466-d34c451760b9_story.html
STEPHEN F. COHEN
New York, March 7, 2014
An upcoming book that some readers might find interesting, due out in April 2025 is Paul Robinson’s Russia’s World Order: How Civilizationism Explains the Conflict with the West.
From the Amazon blurb:
Canada has a Foreign Interference Commission set of hearings going on and Robinson has been a witness. His testimony about how wild accusations of being a “Putin puppet” or worse combined with government sanctions makes studying anything about Russia either impossible, dangerous or both is rather interesting.
He is the first witness of the day . There is an interesting postscript at the 3:59:55 mark as a lawyer tries to get some or all of his testimony striken from the record.
I believe that the Commission has been mainly concentrating on China and Russia but things may get even more interesting as Canada has just kicked out 6 Indian diplomats, including the High Commissioner, accusing them of being involved in illegal activities ranging from harassment to homicide
It’s not a riddle that the Brits have always wanted to loot the place.
The most interesting Russian history I’ve read recently (sorry, cannot dredge it up) was about the period before 1700. Roughly: west of the Urals was the Russian Empire, a large land mass from the Caucasus etc. north to the Arctic Circle, fairly well populated. East of the Urals was very different, mainly a colonial trading empire with trading posts cities on the Arctic Circle. Every spring the soldiers and traders went south (upriver) from these port cities to buy furs and whatnot from trappers, and shipped the goods out east and west. Every fall, they went back to the port city and hunkered down in their barracks and houses over the winter. Southern Siberia was empty, with people living in tents and migrating like North American Plains Indians. Some of them still do!
Good review and very useful comments and the list of books I need to read has become a little bit longer. My introduction to the Russian world occurred when I was in my O level year and the libtarian at my local public library recommended that I supplement my reading of Kafka and F Scott Fitzgerald with Constance Garnett’s translations of what are the obvious masterpieces of Russian literature. Didn’t do much for my O levels but gave me different eyes through which to see the world.
The West attempted to strangle the early Soviet state by intervening in their civil war. The early state was also surrounded by hostile powers that cut if off from world trade. Despite that, the economy was develped at a very quick pace and Soviet Russia became an industrial power that enabled it to fight off and then crush the Nazis backed by the collective industrial might of Europe and even European military support. After the war which left half the country in shambles, they then were forced to compete with the US which survived the great war relatively unscathed. Still, the country was rebuilt and living standards continued to improve up until recent times. All pretty amazing considering what an incompetent pack of fools so many consider the Soviets to have been