Welcome to the real Soviet Union – primitive, brutal and racist

For most of us in the West, until the fall of the Berlin Wall “Russia” was synonymous with the Soviet Union. Among the 15 constituent states of the Communist empire, Russia was always the pre-eminent one. It housed the USSR’s capital, Moscow, and its other major city, Leningrad (now St Petersburg); it accounted for the lion’s share of the union’s economic and industrial output.

It did not, however, inevitably supply the leading Soviet figures. Stalin was Georgian. Khrushchev’s family came from, and he spent much of his formative years in what is now Ukraine. Brezhnev’s passport stated his ethnicity as “Ukrainian”. Although Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachevwere all Russians, they were from such distant and provincial parts of the empire – Chernenko from Siberia, the other two from Stavropol on the verge of the Caucasus – that they, and other Politburo figures of similar backgrounds, are classed by the historian Mark B Smith as “outsiders”. Exit Stalin, Smith’s superb new book, is partly about how Sovietism ended badly, in different ways, for most of them.

Stalin, with whose death Smith begins, had become a cult figure of fear and – although it remained well concealed until Khrushchev’s epoch-defining “secret speech” of 1956 – loathing. Khrushchev himself would be deposed by his colleagues in 1964, but was at least allowed to die in his bed seven years later, and not hustled off to the gulag. Brezhnev’s form of repression was milder, at least at home – the Czechs in 1968 would have taken a less charitable view – but he was gaga long before his death in 1982. His own successors, Andropov and Chernenko, assumed power as sick geriatrics and managed just over two years in office between them. Gorbachev, just 54 when he took over, managed to bury the Soviet project.

Looking back on Gorbachev’s six-year rule, it now seems like a golden age, before the USSR collapsed and the drunken buffoon Yeltsin became the first president of Russia. The latter would pave the way for a return to tyranny under Putin. This is a tragic story, and Smith tells it magnificently.

Yet Exit Stalin is not merely a political history of a country that struggled for decades before eventually gaining its place as one of the world’s two superpowers. As the book’s subtitle says, it is a study of the Soviet Union “as a civilisation”. Smith focuses on cultural and social history, ensuring we grasp the dismal conditions in which people existed, and the climate of fear in which, even after 1956 and liberation from the ghost of Stalin, they had to live.

Large families, for example, were piled into jerry-built apartment buildings. Sometimes they had to cram themselves into a couple of rooms, or even share with other families. Smith writes of a Soviet actress who, growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, shared a block and a single bathroom with 43 other people. Dissidents were confined to psychiatric hospitals for no reason other than that they had the temerity to go out and protest. Some, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, were sent to the gulag.

Only in the Brezhnev era would things improve: Andrey Sakharov and his wife, Elena Bonner, were granted internal exile in a provincial apartment. Exit Stalin never leaves us under any impression other than that life in the Soviet Union, whether by absolute or comparative standards, was horrible, and presents Stalin, in particular, as someone who, for the crimes of his rule and for the shadow cast for decades after his death, richly deserves to be equated with Hitler.

By concentrating on the everyday lives of the Soviet people, their pop stars, the films they watched, the availability (or lack of it) of consumer goods and their grim living conditions, Smith depicts a society not so much in the midst of a collective nervous breakdown – though aspects of that seemed to prevail in the last days of the Soviet empire – as in the grip of a chronic collective mental illness.

Everything had to be justified as consistent with the revolution, though no one was precisely sure what the revolution meant. Stalin’s death, and the expunging of his legacy by Khrushchev, at least allowed a relative relaxation of the gulag’s horrors – the carting off to exile or execution of endless ranks of political prisoners – and the acceptance of certain degrees of modernisation.

The most remarkable advance – and such was its remoralising effect on Soviet society that Smith correctly gives it great emphasis – was Yuri Gagarin’s becoming the first man in space in 1961. It was an event that put this otherwise still primitive, brutal, deprived, vicious country at the cutting edge of futurism.

That the Soviets did not also put the first man on the Moon is indicative of how the nature of their society prevented the speedy and effective evolution of technology. Their education system produced a striking number of advanced mathematicians, but the contribution the latter could make to the future was itself suppressed to an extent, not least because the authorities worried that so many of these geniuses were Jewish.

Brezhnev, ruling from 1964 to 1982, had the wit to start worrying about international opinion of the Soviet Union, and the era of détente saw the Helsinki accords, progress towards arms limitation, and the linking up in space of US astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts. But genuine reform was too slow to come. Beyond the Soviet borders, the world was changing rapidly, and inside them, more Soviet citizens were coming to resent what they knew not merely to be the liberties but also the higher living standards of the despised capitalist economies.

Change became inevitable, and the generational shift to Gorbachev accelerated it. He studied Lenin and other revolutionary texts, but gave up attempting to relate them mechanically to the world. When the security forces for which he was responsible applied traditional methods of brutality to the state’s opponents, Gorbachev condemned the heavy-handedness. His economic advisers told him to move towards a market economy. This was not merely a case of the Soviet people wanting more freedom: there were food shortages and technological failures, notably in April 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Lives were endangered by the government’s slowness in admitting the disaster, in keeping with the traditional Soviet way of covering up unpleasant truths. The old model was evidently broken.

Smith’s description of the chaotic and rapid decline of those last years is careful and vivid. Whether it was his intention or not, Gorbachev emerges as a figure of genuine greatness. How deeply depressing that his legacy has been squandered in the way it has. This immensely important book charts a history of idealism that failed because of its inherent lack of liberty, its repressiveness and its corruption. Now, it seems, in Russia at least, history is in the process of repeating itself.

Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953–1991 is published by Allen Lane at £40.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]