u/Plane_Importance_740

The disintegration of the Soviet Union not only destroyed the socialist economy and the social system but also inflicted colossal damage on the rich Russian culture and the language. The new ruling  class and its associates who took control of the country’s economy opened the door for uncontrolled penetration of English words in the Russian language under the pretext of necessity to introduce market economy and integrate with the Western world. Widespread use of English-sounding words led to displacement of original Russian words. Over the past three decades since Russia’s ruling class decided to break with their Soviet past, the language of Tolstoi, Pushkin, and Dostoyevski changed unbelievably due to wilful use of foreign language words. In the race to borrow English words, none in Russia’s upper class – government bureaucrats, political leaders, business people and even the scientists and academicians wanted to be left behind. 

Those, including us, who had the opportunity of learning the Russian language in the country of its origin during the Soviet era know the vitality of the Russian language lies in its words. Inject in it a foreign word and the sentence instantly loses its flow.  Let’s illustrate the process of the “weedification” of the Russian language. When we studied, the university area was called “студенческий городок or студгородок” (student township). Now, it is rarely used; the most common is the russified version of “campus” in the form of “кампус”. The place where we used to ride a bus was called “остановка автобуса”. Now it is the English word “Stop” written in Russian “Стоп”. When the MBA courses were first introduced in educational institutions, it was called "Магистр делового управления" (which is Russian)  at the beginning. Later it was renamed in its anglicized version “Магистр бизнес администрации (Master of Business Administration). “Investment” in the Soviet period was called “Вложение “, now it is borrowed from English “Инвестиция”.  “Покупка” (shopping in Russian) is now called in its English version “Шопинг”. There are hundreds of such examples. 

The Government had to step in with control measures to protect the Russian language from excessive foreign borrowing. The State Duma adopted a law in February 2023 which, among others, stipulates  that when using the Russian language as the state language of the Russian Federation, the use of words and expressions that do not comply with the norms of the modern Russian literary language is not allowed, with the exception of foreign words that have no commonly used analogues in the Russian language and the list of which is contained in the specified normative dictionaries. However, without provisions for enforcement with punitive measures for non-compliance, the law remains symbolic and there is little change on the ground. People’s mindset has to change, specifically the mindset that the more of the foreign words are borrowed, the greater is the chance for acceptance and recognition in the Western world. But it is unlikely to happen on its own. It requires an aggressive campaign in support of the usage of original indigenous Russian words. In other words, a new version of the Cultural Revolution needs to be launched to protect Russia from invasion of foreign culture and traditions. But it is hardly an option with the social and administrative system now present in Russia. 

What is Marxism? The simplest answer – it's a trove of knowledge and ideas that Karl Marx created in collaboration with his friend Friedrich Engels. Such was the bond of friendship that Engels voluntarily refrained from hyphenating his name with Marx to claim joint ownership of the new ideology. How Marxism changed the world? It provided an alternative worldview on how human societies and economies can be reorganized so that inequalities disappear, justice prevails, and all members of the society have the opportunity to realize their full potential. 
Marxism, first of all, is about economics. The book “Das Kapital”, written in four volumes, containing a critical analysis of capitalism is the main pillar of Marxism. Karl Marx invented the famous theory of “Surplus value of labour” in which he showed how owners of the means of production force labourers to work in excess of the worth of their labour (paid as wages) and appropriate the excess of the new value created (known as profit), a process widely known as exploitation of workers by owners.  Dialectic materialism and historical materialism provide the philosophical basis of Marxism. But Marx didn’t stop at just analyzing capitalism and predicting its future.  He  also charted a blueprint for replacing it through socialism by accomplishing revolution powered by class struggle. And that was the manifesto of the communist party, the key element of Marxism supposed to change the world.
Marxism has been in existence since the middle of the nineteenth century. As it was then, it continues to inspire millions of working people around the world in their struggle for emancipation from capitalist exploitation and changing society toward social justice and equality. Hardly there is any political slogan other than “Proletariat of all countries unite” that had survived centuries, rallied billions of working people in all corners of the world. They  passionately shout this slogan in their own languages.  To them, it doesn't matter the epochal changes that have happened and it still remains relevant even today. Its underneath strength to inspire and rally behind a just cause is far from being exhausted. During the period the Soviet Union had been in existence, Karl Marx, for obvious reasons, was ignored in the Western world and rather treated as an adversary deserving scorn and humiliation.
But after the disintegration of the country, which many in the West equated as invalidation of the political part of Marxism and thus posing no threat to their social order, there was a remarkable resurgence of Marxism as an economic ideology in the Western world. Many academicians and intellectual protagonists of capitalism have discovered that Karl Marx was right in making predictions about the future of capitalism. Many predictions came true. We can cite a few: periodic crisis in capitalism which in the most recent past was manifested in global financial crisis of 2008 and the bank failures that had happened in the US; movement of capital across borders in search of cheap labour to maximize returns from investment (which is globalization); consolidation of capital through concentration of productive assets and national resources in the hands of a few to assert control (deepening of social stratification and the emergence of the top 0.1 percent and 0.01 percent income  groups); capitalism’s quest for profits and increased productivity through new technologies and innovations (which is production automation, digitization, robotization and the most recent introduction of artificial intelligence) aimed at eliminating workplaces where the labourers physically work. It is thus evident, more than two centuries later Karl Marx’s work remains relevant with lessons for both capitalist owners and the workers. While the capitalist owners look for clues in Marx’s work on what kind of preventive measures can be taken well ahead of time to contain the negative impacts of their innovations so as to continue accumulation of wealth and the assertion of political control at the expense of the workers; the looming challenge for the workers is one of survival. The way Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging and finding application in industrial production is already leading to elimination of many jobs that workers perform using physical labour. Many people will be thrown out of work. What would they do then? Revolting? Capturing political power? and digging the grave for capitalism which also Marx predicted? This is how Marxist ideology will remain relevant until capitalism is replaced by communism. 

Karl Marx’s 200th birthday was celebrated in 2018.  He was born on 5 May 1818 in Trier (now Chemnitz), a small German town. Those who  think this landmark event was celebrated by Communist and leftist parties alone, are mistaken. Many intellectuals and academics in the western world showed extraordinary generosity in endorsing much of what Marx said and predicted about the future of capitalism. In a way, they are rediscovering Marx and wondering how he could predict the fate of capitalism at its infancy.  For example, the UK daily “the Independent" carried a front page article on 4 May 2018 “Karl Marx 200th anniversary: The world is finally ready for Marxism as capitalism reaches the tipping point.” The New York Times (30 April 2018) said “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!” The Washington Post dedicated an opinion piece “Why the Specter of Marx still haunts the world” on 4 May 2018. Prestigious British weekly The Economist published an editorial on 3 May 2018 “Rulers of the world: read Karl Marx! On his bicentenary Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism’s flaws is surprisingly relevant.” 
While Karl Marx continues to be admired and his thoughts borrowed for application in contemporary politics in western countries, another revolutionary no less genius, Vladimir Ilych Lenin is largely ignored. The 101th anniversary of the October Revolution on November 7, 2018  passed quietly. Even in Moscow and other provincial towns of Russia, it was a low-key event observed by the communist and smaller leftist parties. No major newspapers in the West made even a passing remark about this event. It was celebrated only by the communist and leftist parties. 

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One reason Marx is admired is that for all his call “Proletarians of all countries, Unite!”, he was mostly an analytic-theoretician and didn’t present any real danger to capitalism. He analyzed it, spotted its weaknesses and predicted its eventual downfall, but didn’t do anything by himself to destroy it. He was mostly a dreamer. Lenin, however, was a practitioner. He attempted to transform Marx’s dream into reality. He did the real thing. He was a path breaker. He destroyed capitalism, possibly in a way Marx wouldn’t have agreed. Even in death Lenin presents danger to capitalism and so he is hated more than admired. But working people around the world would keep the ideals of the October Revolution alive.

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In our previous writings about the Soviet Union, we skipped how in post-revolutionary Russia education among the masses spread at a faster pace and widespread illiteracy was abolished in a couple of decades. In imperial Russia, the overall literacy rate in 1914 stood at approximately 30 percent. The programme was officially launched on 26 December 1919 with the decree issued by the Council of People's Commissars on 26 December  1919, titled "On the Eradication of Illiteracy Among the Population of the RSFSR." Six months later, on 19 July 1920, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Elimination of Illiteracy (Всероссийская чрезвычайная комиссия по ликвидации безграмотности) was established. Its Russian acronym was Likbez (Ликбез- Ликвидация безграмотноти). It took charge of organizing courses, training teachers, and publishing educational materials. Local extraordinary commissions were also created that operated at “Volost”, “Uezd”, and “Governorate” levels. These units handled outreach, the opening of learning centers, and the resolution of organizational matters.

Likbez became one of modern history's most successful mass educational campaigns. It was a multipronged  organizational effort employing many traditional and non-traditional methods of teaching and learning, including revolutionary approaches. The results were reflected in impressive growth in literacy: 41.7 percent in 1920 and 51.1 percent in 1926. But Likbez was much more than just spreading literacy. The mass educational programme was also about mass awakening and cultural empowerment of the poor and the neglected. 

This aspect was brilliantly captured in the first hand accounts of the great Indian Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore, the 1913 Nobel Prize winner in literature, who visited Soviet Russia during 11–25 September 1930. His visit was arranged  by  VOKS, the Russian acronym  (Всесоюзное общество культурных связей с заграницей) for the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries) on behalf of the Soviet Government.  During his stay in Moscow, the poet met with a cross-section of Soviet writers, artists, scientists, teachers as well as common people. He visited  a Pioneer Commune (child orphanage), Tretyakov Art gallery, met a group of peasants, and had other engagements. Upon conclusion of his visit, the poet started writing letters to his friends and relatives, in which he detailed his impressions about what he saw and experienced in Soviet Russia. These letters were later compiled and printed as a book named “Letters from Russia”. In these letters, the poet shared exceptional characteristics of the mass educational campaign and the results achieved over the past eight years (1922–1930). Excerpts from his writings (translated from Bengali) are shown below.

“One is amazed to see the astonishing zeal with which education is permeating every stratum of the society here. Education is measured not merely in numbers, but in its completeness and its scope. One is thrilled to see what immense arrangements  and tremendous zeal are being focused so that no one remains helpless or idle! Education is spreading not merely within White Russia; it is also spreading like a flood even among the semi-civilized peoples of Central Asia. They are sparing no effort to ensure that these groups gain access to the very latest fruits of scientific advancement. A large number of people are flocking to the theatre here, but the audience consists entirely of peasants and workers. They are not denigrated anywhere.  In the few institutions I have visited so far, I have consistently observed an awakening of the spirit and the joy of self-respect among them. There is no need to even mention the masses of our own country. When compared with the working class of England, the difference is vast, like that between heaven and earth”.
“I visited an agricultural centre in Moscow; it looks much like a club. Such centres are scattered across cities and villages throughout Russia. They offer instruction on subjects like agricultural science and sociology, and provide facilities for teaching literacy to the uneducated; specialized classes also demonstrate scientific farming methods and explain them to the farmers. Each such centre  houses a museum featuring educational exhibits on natural and social topics; furthermore, facilities are provided to offer farmers advice tailored to all their needs. Whenever farmers visit the city from their villages, they can stay at these centres for at least three weeks at a very low cost. Through this far-reaching institution, the Soviet government has awakened the minds of once-illiterate peasants and laid the broadest possible foundation for establishing a new life throughout society”. 
“ I visited Russia to observe their educational system.  I was truly amazed. Within a span of eight years, education has transformed the very mindset of the entire people. Those who were voiceless have found a voice; the dormant spirits of the mute have been awakened; the helpless have discovered their inner strength; and those once crushed by humiliation have emerged from the dark corners of society to claim a place of equality alongside everyone else. It  is difficult to imagine that such a profound transformation could occur so rapidly among so many people. The mind is gladdened to see that through their stagnant society, a flood of education is sweeping. It is flowing from one end to the other. An avenue of new hope lies wide open before them, stretching beyond the horizon,  the pulse of life is surging everywhere with full vigour.”
“A great merit of the school here is that whatever the students study, they simultaneously illustrate. This allows the subject matter to become vividly imprinted in their minds, hones their artistic skills, and blends the joy of learning with the pleasure of creative expression. One might suddenly get the impression that the focus here is solely on practical work and disdaining fine arts. That is not the case at all. We have come across numerous drawings by the schoolboys. We were truly amazed by them. These are genuine works of art; they are not copies of others' work, but original creations. It is reassuring to see that attention is paid to both craftsmanship and creativity here.”
“Upon arriving in Russia, the first thing that caught my eye was the community of peasants and workers. These  people were like the masses in India just eight years ago – helpless, starving, oppressed, and illiterate. Their burden of suffering was certainly no lighter than ours. Yet, the progress made in the spread of education among them within these few short years surpasses what has been achieved in our country over a century and a half, even among the upper classes. Here, I witnessed the tangible reality of a vision for national education. It is spanning from horizon to horizon. It went far beyond the wildest dreams we, in our poverty, had ever dared to conjure up. It was here in Russia that I felt the touch of a truly magnificent spirit. Nowhere else have I seen an educational undertaking of such colossal scale; the reason being that, elsewhere, the fruits of education are reaped solely by those who pursue it.”
“Here, the education of each is the education of all. A lack of education in one individual is a deficiency felt by everyone; for it is through collective education that they seek to harness their united mind for the service of humanity at large. They are disseminating education among the masses through various methods, one of which is the museum. They have woven a network of diverse museums that encompasses every village and town. These museums are not passive like the library at our Santiniketan. They are  active. Had I not witnessed it with my own eyes, I could never have believed that, within a mere decade, they have lifted millions of people from the lowest depths of ignorance and indignity. They not only taught them the alphabet but also elevated them to a state of dignified humanity.”

The beginning of the end started when the Soviet Union derailed from the revolutionary path of waging a relentless struggle with capitalism to score the final victory of socialism over capitalism. That happened following the death of Yosif Stalin in 1953, the leader who ruled the country for three decades and transformed it into a kind of global power that was adored, respected and feared across the world. The global capitalist system during this period saw for it an existential challenge in the Soviet Union-led socialist system. The transition of power in the wake of Stalin’s death didn’t happen in the way that would have maintained continuity in the Soviet Union’s socialist construction both at home and abroad. 
Stalin didn’t have time to groom his successor although often he uttered preferences for several leaders. 

In that list, the name of Nikita Sergeievich Khrushchev, the leader who prevailed in the power struggle that broke out in the CPSU after Stalin’s death and succeeded in capturing power, was missing.  Having emerged as the top leader, Khrushchev turned his focus on consolidating his grip on power by killing and sidelining veteran party leaders who were close associates of Yosif Stalin. An abrupt break from Stalin’s course of development, dismantling his legacy and casting his three-decade rule  largely in a negative light became Khrushchev’s  main platform for setting a new course for the Soviet Union’s own development as well as its leadership in its global outreach. The 20^(th) congress of the CPSU held in February 1956 formalized this platform into a state policy that continued till the fall of the Soviet Union. .

This paradigm shift was a watershed moment for the global socialist movement as well as the Soviet Union’s own development. The leadership of the Chinese Communist Party called it betrayal and broke ranks with the CPSU. It triggered the division of the world socialist movement which weakened the ideological struggle between capitalism and socialism globally and benefitted the capitalist world. It also created a golden opportunity for the world capitalist system to sow seeds of further discord in the socialist camp and turn the ideological rivalry between the Soviet Union and China into outright hostility. It  caused further damage to the world socialist movement. The division of the world socialist camp also sowed discord in Soviet society paving the way for emergence of fault lines in the society of which we talked in the foregoing. The credibility of the CPSU leadership was called into question.  

Many equated official denial of the legacy of Yosif Stalin with delegitimizing the rule of the CPSU in the public eye. Many believe the decisions of the 20^(th) congress of the CPSU pivoted the country away from the revolutionary path. It triggered such changes in the economy and the society that actually set in motion the process of USSR’s disintegration. The opposite camp, the US-led global capitalism, took note of the fateful changes for the country that took place at the 20th CPSU congress. Discrediting the architect of the Soviet Union’s decisive victory over German fascism and tarnishing his legacy of state building by his own party came as a wonderful opportunity for the West to double down on its propaganda efforts to discredit the socialist system and drive wedge in Soviet society. As a result, the image of Yosif Stalin that was imposed on the society from the top was one of a cruel, blood-thirsty executioner. This image narrowed the essence of Stalin’s rule to killing many innocent people, torturing and sending people to labour camps (gulags) and ignored his contributions to building the USSR and transforming it into a superpower. 

 During the Stalin-era, the Soviet Union’s strength was perceived worldwide both economically and militarily. It was a counterweight to the world capitalist system not only in terms of military might but also economic power deriving strength from its centrally planned economy and societal ownership of the means of production. The Soviet model of economy demonstrated its superiority during the 1930s, the period of socialist industrialization when the capitalist world was mired in a deep recession. It demonstrated excellence during the WWII and also during the period of post-war reconstruction. The key source of strength of the centrally planned economy was the selfless labour of the working class, the spirit of mobilization, efficient supply chain management, strict discipline across the line of management of the production chain and accountability from production managers at all levels for outputs produced against consumption of resources; and above all, strict oversight to eliminate corruption, which was rare in those days. The state-controlled publicly-owned means of production were treated as truly belonging to the people serving in the interests of all. Government officials responsible for running the economy couldn’t think of themselves other than custodians of public property and managers of socialized production. The Soviet Union during Stalin’s rule didn’t have to rely on selling natural resources to generate revenues for funding its budget. In 1950, the share of oil and gas in the Soviet Union’s export trade was less than 4 percent. 

As we have noted in the foregoing, discarding governance mechanisms that Yosif V. Stalin put in place over the years including those to make the economy work for the benefit of the people and the country’s rapid socialist development robbed the planned economy of its advantage over the capitalist market economy. Khrushchev’s turn around drew a limit to the ideological battle between socialism and capitalism on the question of economy, which was not in favour of socialism. At that time, the key strength of the planned economy - mobilization and selfless labour of citizens - was approaching limits with the ending of the extraordinary times the country went through.  The challenge then was to find additional tools, sort of Marxist socialism’s own answer to sustain growth momentum of the planned economy and ensure its competitive edge over the capitalist market economy. 

That wasn’t an easy task. It required innovative thinking and bold leadership from the CPSU. Because the Marxist ideology has no ready-made answers on how to manage the economy after the proletariat conquers political power and private ownership of the means of production is abolished.  Immediately after the revolution, war communism was put in place as an approach to run the economy which was consistent with Marxism in letter and spirit. But the approach didn’t work because the consequences were contrary to expectations. The Bolshevik Government led by V.I. Lenin abandoned war communism in 1920 and introduced in its place New Economic Policy which was restoration of capitalism. It was billed as a necessary measure for an interim period to use capitalism to create the ground for building socialism, in other words, building socialism with the help of capitalism. After Lenin’s death, Stalin rolled back NEP and proceeded to build socialism through mobilization of domestic resources which he accomplished in the mid-1930s through socialist industrialization, Cultural Revolution and collectivization of agriculture. It was all about the Soviet experience of management of a socialized economy. 

But as indicated above, in the 1950s, there was a need to do more in terms of innovation of concepts and methods to upgrade those aspects that could sustain dynamic growth of the planned economy. These include, among others, supply chain management, rational consumption of resources, increasing productivity of labour, introduction of new technologies and production processes to remain globally competitive, etc. The Soviet Union then had everything needed to cope with this challenge - developed industrial base, formidable pool of scientific talent, a well-trained workforce with advanced skills and knowledge. But Nikita Khrushchev chose not to travel along this path.  Instead, he chose the one that he thought would be risk free to his leadership. It was bringing back concepts of capitalism in disguise using different names to run the economy. It was inherently contradictory because in the Soviet economy, private ownership, which is the engine of growth of capitalism, was non-existent and all productive assets and resources of the country belonged to the people. It did more harm than good because it deprived visible advantages of central planning over market economy. 

As expected, Khrushchev’s experiments to adapt capitalism to run the socialized economy ended in failure.  The turn-around impacted the morale of Soviet society and the cause of ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism globally. Ideologically, it was an acknowledgement that Marxism had little to offer apart from abolishing private ownership, nationalization and state-control of all productive assets and resources on behalf of the people and promoting the spirit of collectivism and self-sacrifice in the society. It was a major defeat on the ideological front also because it signalled Marxist socialism had exhausted potential for being a viable alternative to capitalism in the long term. Instead of developing Marxism from where Karl Marx left it to prepare the economic base for transition to communism, the doctrine was transformed into a kind of religious dogma under the pretext of defending the purity of Marxism from the attack of revisionists.  Khrushchev thus effectively lost the real ideological battle of socialism to capitalism. And probably, unknowingly, set the stage for deepening contradictions of Soviet society which for many years lay dormant to the point that the existence of the Soviet state would one day be threatened. Apart from the setback in the economy, Khrushchev’s paradigm change also demoralized politics by turning Stalin-era CPSU’s ironclad commitment to socialism into a sort of formality, a mere slogan. Honesty, devotion and dedication to Marxist socialism in CPSU’s rank and file were replaced by duplicity and double-speak. 

People quickly realized what party leaders utter in meetings and public gatherings, they don’t actually mean it. As a result, the CPSU took the turn to convert from being a party of passionate believers in the ideals of Marxist socialism to opportunity seekers with little faith in ideology and even hostile to it. With time the CPSU lost its original revolutionary character and became an administrative-cum-party bureaucracy. To get an entry into this system, the key requirement was membership in the party and the opportunists took this advantage. Gradually they moved upward in the party bureaucracy resulting in the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin at the helm of power in the mid-1980s. In the management of the economy, concepts of capitalism adapted to run industrial enterprises also introduced “greed” named as “material interest” (материалная заинтересованность) as an incentive for higher production. It also fostered a sense of ownership among officials who were responsible for management of socialized production.  

It was in stark contrast with the Stalin era, when government officials in charge of running the economy couldn’t think of themselves other than custodians of people’s property. The competition between the socialist camp and the capitalist camp that was visible in the outside world was in effect military confrontation for expanding each other’s sphere of influence. However, despite all these changes, the Soviet economy still grew. The Soviet Union had many achievements to impress the world and also for its people to feel proud. For much of the outside world, the Soviet Union continued to remain a success story despite all its internal weaknesses. How could this happen? 

The simplest explanation was “Inertia of motion.” The giant industrial, scientific and technical base that Yosif Stalin created and left behind in the beginning of the 1950s had enough residual strength to push the country along the path of glory, growth and prosperity. The major achievements that brought fame for the country in atomic energy, nuclear weapons and space exploration in the 1950s and onward were made possible thanks to the material and technical foundation created in the Stalin era. The declining contribution of the industrial sector to gross national income was compensated by rising share of export of natural resources, principally oil and gas. In its global outreach, the Soviet Union maintained its influence by supporting anti-colonial national liberation movements; promoting socialist revolutions where possible and patronizing local communist and leftist parties adhering to Marxist socialism. 

Despite heating up military confrontation with the US-led Western block, which reached climax in 1962 with the Soviet Union stationing nuclear missiles in Cuba, the Soviet Union also worked toward an accommodation with the West that wouldn't allow cold war turning into a real full blown war.  Following the Cuban missile crisis and the ouster from power of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 in a palace coup, the new CPSU leadership headed  by General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev adopted a more conciliatory approach seeking an accommodation with the West. This approach was met with enthusiastic support from then Chancellor of West Germany, Willy Brandt, who unveiled his own “Ostpolitik (Eastern Policy)” and pressed ahead with the opening of  a new chapter in dealing with the Eastern bloc. 

As a result, a number of agreements were concluded that led to thawing of frozen relations  between the two sides engaged in the Cold War. This period, the end of the 1960s, is known as “detente” from the Western perspective” and “relaxation of international tensions (Разрядка международной напряжённости)” from the Soviet side. To further advance the process of easing hostility, which was the official foreign policy objective, the Soviet Government came up with a new initiative known as “Peaceful coexistence of states with different different social systems  (Мирное сосуществование государств с различным общественным строем)”.
 
Apparently, the Soviet Government’s effort to tone down the tensions and lower the risk of nuclear confrontation with the West looked like a responsible act in international relations during that period which benefited the world. But from the perspective of socialism’s victory over capitalism, which the USSR symbolized, it was a setback and another moment of defeat. Because the US-led Western alliance didn’t buy into the Soviet concept of “Peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems” . In contrast, it assiduously pursued  the goal of destroying socialism as an alternative to capitalism and the USSR as well. Interestingly, it is global capitalism led by the US which fought the true class struggle against socialism as opposed to the USSR, that was supposed to take the fight to capitalism and achieve victory for socialism following the rules of class struggle consistent with Marxist doctrine. 
 
If we look into the question which side had a bigger stake in detente, it was not the US and the Western alliance. It was the Soviet Union. For the Western alliance, detente was an opportunity to engage with the Soviet Union and the Eastern block and develop cooperation only in those areas that would give advantage to it in its cold war/class struggle with the Soviet Union. It included  arms control, cooperation in space exploration, and most importantly, launching psychological war against  the core values of the Soviet society using all opportunities of direct interaction with the Soviet civil society, which in the USSR  was known as people’s intelligentsia ( народная интелигенция) - academicians, scientists, representatives of art and culture, economists, etc. 

The goal of this psychological war  was to turn people’s intelligentsia as much as possible into anti-people’s intelligentsia. It was done by promoting dissidents, sowing suspicions in the society about supremacy of socialist values and the Soviet way of life. It fostered  a sense across the Soviet society that the socialist  way of life was inherently inferior to capitalism and the society of consumerism. Academic exchanges and visits by government officials, economists to Western institutions at different levels were used as opportunities to further discredit Marxist socialism. 

Most Soviet counterparts used to return home from such exchanges with their Western counterparts convinced that Marxist socialism exhausted its potential in the USSR and the future lies with capitalism. Soviet national culture, the brightest aspect of socialist construction in the USSR, was also infiltrated by local agents of Western pop culture and rock music. The broad consensus among a section of the ruling party elites  since the mid-1970s was  carrying forward the policy of peaceful coexistence  with the West to full integration with the West as an equal partner. But that was something the West was unwilling to do. Its goal was complete destruction of the socialist system and the Soviet Union which it accomplished in 1992 with help of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. 

However, as we have emphasized before, despite all its internal weaknesses and shortcomings, the Soviet Union’s destruction wasn’t preordained. It was the cowardly leadership that was in place then that wilfully gave up on its key constitutional duty – protecting the state and securing the welfare of its citizens. 

The Soviet Union is not a reality at present. Yet it survives in the collective memory of millions of people inside and outside the country and continues to stir passions around the world. Where this memory rings the most is the Russian Federation, the former RSFSR, in which the Soviet Union quietly dissolved with all its institutions and all the glories that this internationalist state once symbolized. The Russian Federation became the legal inheritor of the Soviet Union minus its ideology. As discussed in the previous chapters, the USSR was created not only as a nation state but also as the centre of global proletarian revolution, which gave it immense global outreach. While as a state USSR’s stakeholders were its citizens, world working classes were stakeholders in its global outreach. For the latter group of stakeholders, the Soviet Union’s disintegration came as a net disaster. A large number of poor and exploited people in the developing world tied their hopes of emancipation with the existence of the Soviet state. Many of them passionately believed the dream for a classless, exploitation-free society would come true one day with the support of the Soviet Union.  

People who were born and grew up during the period USSR was in existence associate their memories with the role the country played on the global stage, with how it influenced and shaped international relations during the cold war era, and opened new horizons in science and technology, for example, space exploration.  People in many developing countries remember the Soviet Union through the prism of assistance it provided to their countries ranging from supporting their national liberation movements to providing wide-ranging economic assistance that helped build national capacities in crucial sectors of the economy. A large number of foreign citizens from developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America studied in the USSR as part of its solidarity with these countries in their socio-economic development through providing their citizens educational and training opportunities in its higher educational institutions. The Soviet Government established in 1960 a new university, famously known as the “Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University”, purpose-built to train students from developing countries. 

This group of foreign citizens had a unique opportunity to directly experience Soviet society by being a part of that society despite being foreigners. It was largely a result of acceptance by common Soviet people, the mainstream of the society. Immersion of foreign students in the Soviet society was facilitated by respective higher educational institutions by assigning dedicated groups of Soviet students to groups of foreign students who frequently organized various events to expose foreign students to different aspects of public life in the host country. These included trips to collective farms and state farms in rural areas, industrial units, schools, libraries, movie and drama theatres, summer resorts; celebration of national holidays; participation in subbotniks (voluntary labour) and many other events that provided opportunities for foreign students to closely interact with common Soviet people. Each of these encounters had its own charm. They were also wonderful opportunities for learning beyond classroom lessons. All of these left a deep imprint of that country and its people in the memory of the graduates (Vipuskniki) of Soviet higher educational institutions. Upon return home, no matter which country they were from, these graduates established alumni societies in their respective countries and continued maintaining close relationships  with Soviet alumni societies of other countries by organizing conferences, meetings, and other events. What continues uniting them even after the passage of five decades is the memory of unique experiences of living and studying in the Soviet country and many moments of feeling the warmth of friendship and solidarity transmitted during mingling with common Soviet people in numerous events. 

The Soviet Union’s disintegration sent a massive shock to the economies of many developing countries. The poor developing world lost a reliable friend in dealing with any unexpected emergencies. The principle of proletarian internationalism showed its best in USSR’s existence beyond its border, in its global outreach. Officially, the principle of proletarian internationalism in its global application was known as “fulfillment of international duty”. The overwhelming majority of citizens in developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have mostly positive views of the USSR and many cherish fond memories of the country. That positive view of their citizens also influences current policy making of their governments with regard to the Russian Federation, the inheritor of the USSR, in international relations. It was the key reason that the United States had limited success in building a global anti-Russia coalition in response to Russia’s military operation in Ukraine launched on 24 February 2022. Majority developing countries refused to enlist in the group of countries that the US cobbled together to impose punitive sanctions on Russia. 

But as we have discussed at the beginning, the USSR didn’t resonate with their citizens in the same way as it did with people from other countries. It was on display when more people took the side of counter-revolution led by Boris Yeltsin than those who supported the last-ditch attempt taken by a group of patriotic leaders during 18-21 August 1991 to protect the Soviet Union from disintegrating. In Russia, many people at that time became confused and were largely indifferent to rapidly unfolding political developments that were leading the country to an uncertain direction. Yet, they believed, based on past experiences, that the collective leadership of the CPSU would somehow bring the political turmoil under control and succeed in keeping the country together. But when eventually the Soviet Union fell apart, the response was mixed. While there was an undercurrent of sadness at the loss of a single great country which was also a superpower, many accepted it as a fait accompli and had no alternative but to sail with the wind. 

The reality that unfolded in the immediate aftermath was brutal. It was like a dream cherished and nurtured over the past seventy years shattered overnight. As we have discussed in the beginning, many of the third-generation Soviet citizens emotionally couldn't relate with their country the way their grandparents and parents did. Their understanding  of the virtue of living in a socialist society wasn’t entirely unquestionable.  It was balanced by growing difficulty the state experienced  in fulfilling their aspirations. Those aspirations long passed the threshold of the generation of their grandparents who were just happy with their status of proletariat transformed into collective owners that allowed them break free from abject poverty with their basic requirements fulfilled. As a result, socialism as a concept lost its original shine to the new generation of Soviet citizens. Many were open to changes, but few were prepared to see those kinds of changes that washed away their country. The new reality that dawned sharply contradicted all values and societal relations the Soviet Union stood for. The state which was omnipresent in citizens’ everyday life suddenly disappeared. People were forced to fend for themselves for which few were prepared. There was an enormous psychological toll on the society when the scale of betrayal by the leadership of the CPSU became apparent. Many leaders shed the ideals of socialism; chose to leave the CPSU in droves; changed colours and emerged as the new leaders of a changed country. 

Without any explanation for why it was so, people were told that the market economy was better than the planned economy. Liberal democracy was better than socialism and individualism was better than collectivism. All values, ideals that common Soviet people were born into and brought up were invalidated. In the vacuum that was created, lawlessness, crime and  criminal enterprises mushroomed. The country was set on course to degradation and moral bankruptcy.  Rural life centered on collective farms and state farms broke down when state support for these farms was withdrawn and the agriculture sector de-collectivized. The next big step toward dismantling socialism and demoralizing the Russian working class was privatization of the vast publicly-owned assets of the country – industrial enterprises and its natural resources, land, mines, etc. The scale of privatization and the way it was done was more about grabbing the country’s resources by a few who later emerged as a new class of super rich, known as oligarchs. 

When all production assets and capacities created through decades of socialist industrialization at enormous cost and collective sacrifices made by generations of the Soviet working class were sold or otherwise incapacitated, the country was effectively deindustrialized. It also had a tremendous impact on society.  It destroyed the bond that held its citizens together in a relationship of mutual support and interdependence symbolized by collectivism (one for all and all for one) that gave them confidence in the future. In all cities and towns, there were mills, factories and other publicly-run enterprises and facilities with a decent workplace for everyone. Every day, people used to wake up in the morning knowing that they had a place to go for work without having to bother about the whim of the employer and the prospect of being laid off. They used to ride public transit at a nominal cost where they could easily mingle with each other, spending time talking with each other and exchanging laughter and jokes. In a broad sense, Soviet society was equal, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t income gaps between different groups in the population. But those income gaps were small and far from creating social stratification into rich and poor. No one had a feeling of inferiority while mingling with each other. All public places used to bustle with life. Everyone had a sense of belonging to a greater entity for a great purpose which was the collective. It gave citizens a sense of security, confidence, and pride in their country. 

A key goal of privatization was to destroy the social bond, which was collectivism that drew millions of individuals in a relationship akin to a large family. It was the strength that was behind the miracle in socio-economic development that the Soviet Union accomplished in its brief lifetime. The ideologues of privatization had their target of eliminating societal ownership of all means of production. The ultimate goal was to rupture production relations which was characteristic of the socialized production system. They believed it would nullify the prospect of reverting back to socialism. Privatization, carried out like an economic blitzkrieg, drastically changed the society that took shape over the seven decades of socialist construction. Millions of ordinary working people were thrown out of their jobs. They struggled to find alternative livelihoods. Faced with the brutal reality of survival, many became self-centered, cynical and prone to drug and alcohol addiction. 

By the end of 1992, the country’s population was sharply divided into rich and poor. Almost half of Russia’s population was living below the poverty line. For post-Soviet Russia, the entire decade of the 1990s was a period of economic decline, sharp polarization of the society into rich and poor, and outbreak of violent inter-ethnic conflicts. Many citizens of the Russian Federation today look back at this period as a horror and nightmare. The political part of post-Soviet Russia’s enthusiastic embrace of the West, as has been discussed in introduction, also failed to materialize. All attempts by Russia to be a part of the West by finding a place in its security and economic alliances as an equal partner were rebuffed. Instead, the country was shown its place as a vanquished in the Cold War.  Earlier verbal promises that the Western leaders made to the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to not expand the NATO alliance that could pose a threat to Russia’s security were also broken. It was a tough lesson for the people of post-Soviet Russia. Many of them supported Boris Yeltsin to break free from communism and embrace liberal democracy and market economy in the hope of a better tomorrow from their perspective. But their illusions quickly evaporated against the reality of post-Soviet Russia’s slide into anarchy, degradation and economic decline. It ended in the melting down of its financial system at the end of 1990s. President Boris Yeltsin, whose popularity by that time hit the bottom, having realized that his time was over handed over power to his hand-picked successor, Vladimir V. Putin.  

The change of leadership at the beginning of the 2000s marked a turning point in the evolution of post-Soviet Russia. As we have indicated at the beginning, the second period was also about Russia’s coming back, rebuilding the society and reclaiming its status on the world stage. This part of the second period began with assumption of power by President Vladimir Putin. Contrary to the 1990s, this sub-period brought back hope, ignited optimism and charted a new path for independent  development. It sharply deviated from the course pursued by Yeltsin that effectively turned Russia into a vassal of the West. Yeltsin handed over to Putin a country lying in ruins, morally devastated, and Putin had to essentially start from zero. All he could marshal at the beginning of his rule were the nuclear arsenal inherited from the Soviet Union, the country’s status of permanent member at the UNSC with a veto power, and its abundant natural resources including oil and gas. Capitalizing on these three pillars of strength, the new leadership during its 23-year rule transformed Russia again into a world power, an independent power centre with the autonomy of strategic decision making and a credible counterweight to US dominance. The economy was revitalized. Yeltsin-era oligarchs wielding enormous control were suppressed and the state came back. It led to an expanding role of the state in a shift from market economy to state capitalism. 

But how relevant the Soviet Union is to the Russian Federation during the second period? How does an average citizen look back at the USSR?  In the immediate aftermath of the country’s disintegration, many people supported Boris Yeltsin, the leader of the counter-revolution. The  attitude to the USSR was mostly hostile. Rolling back its values, symbols, icons, wholesale denial of Soviet heritage; and an awkward aspiration to connect with the Russian empire negating the Soviet period became the cornerstone of the beginning of Yeltsin’s rule in post-Soviet Russia. The statues of the founding leaders of the Soviet state - Lenin, Stalin, Dzerzhinski and many others  - were dismantled in many places of the country. The citadel of the Great October Socialist Revolution, which bore the name of Lenin, the architect of the revolution, was renamed as “Saint Petersburg” (the city of Peter in German language). The zeal to reconnect with the glory of historical Russia symbolized by emperor Peter the Great was so primitive that the city’s Russian name immediately before the revolution “Petrograd (the city of Peter in Russian)” was ignored in renaming the city of Lenin (Leningrad). The names of dozens of Soviet cities, townships as well as thousands of streets were changed. Even the great Soviet writer, Maxim Gorky, wasn’t spared from this spree. Moscow’s central street bearing his name, Gorky Street, was also renamed. But time puts everything in its place. Thirty years later, many wonder whether committing those excesses were appropriate in the light of the lessons learned, particularly when gains were compared with losses. Nostalgia about the Soviet period grips a significant part of Russia’s population today. Many feel disappointed and pain at the loss of a great country, which was their Motherland. This feeling is unlikely to ever leave them. 

At the official level, too, there has been reassessment of the USSR. President Putin called the disintegration of the USSR a great tragedy for Russia. The President, in fact, echoed a sentiment shared by millions of citizens of his country. Soviet-era symbolic, rituals, and practices have also started creeping back into the mainstream of the society. As has been stated in the foregoing, the Soviet Union’s national anthem reworded by poet Nikita Mikhalkov is now the national anthem of the Russian Federation. The Soviet Union’s national flag is widely displayed alongside Russia’s tricolour. In many parts of the country authorities aren’t averse to local citizens’ initiatives to restore the glory of the past by erecting monuments to Lenin and Stalin. Since 2005 about one hundred monuments to Yosif Stalin have been erected in Russia. The Soviet Union’s emblem is still in place in many government buildings. The Soviet-era practice of fostering patriotism through “military-patriotic upbringing (военно-политическое воспитание)” has also come back. The State Duma took a decision in June 2022 to start an All-Russia movement of children and youth patterned on the Soviet era Pioneer organization. Most recently, the Soviet-era system of higher education which was discarded in favour of the Western system in a wild race to embrace the West has been restored. In short, wholesale rejection of the Soviet past has ended.   Many even dream of the seemingly impossible – getting back the Soviet Union.

After the exit of Khrushchev, Leonid I. Brezhnev, the next Soviet leader, further relaxed administrative controls that, among others, impacted inter-ethnic relations in the USSR. In this regard, Philip Bobkov, the long-term head of the Fifth Department of the KGB which oversaw tackling of nationalism wrote “By the end of the sixties, the problems of Armenian-Azerbaijani relations became most acute, along with the problems of the Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans and Meskhetians. Those in power stubbornly drove the process deeper; they were more concerned about suppressing it; devoted all efforts to maintaining silence, drowning out national contradictions, caring little about the future. For many years, hotbeds of national strife broke out in various regions of the USSR, which could be extinguished if the state really dealt with these problems. However, the loudly sounding slogan of "indestructible friendship of peoples" imposed a taboo on the slightest attempts to raise this issue. "

The apprehension of national security agencies with regard to negative trends taking root in Soviet society came true when inter-ethnic conflicts escalated into real civil wars at the turn of the 1990s. Proletarian internationalism along with its brainchild “Soviet people (Советский  народ)” was burnt in the flames of bloody civil wars that erupted in Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh and elsewhere following disintegration of the Soviet Union. The other grand idea “USSR - family of fraternal peoples” also quickly fizzled out. It was replaced by animosity and outright hostility among peoples, particularly directed toward Russian people who settled in national republics to carry forward the task of Soviet nation building in those republics. 
Interestingly, the very reason why V. I. Lenin abandoned Stalin’s idea of incorporating national Soviet republics into the existing Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and instead pushed for creating a new state, which the USSR, on the basis of equality of all component republics, did not materialize.  Instead, it validated his worst fears. As discussed in the foregoing, Lenin feared that Stalin’s proposal would lead to restoration of the Russian empire in all but name; the Russians would be viewed by other ethnic groups in the same way as the oppressive Tsarist Regime. But exactly that happened after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was an irony that so much accommodation of legitimate concerns of national republics was made from Russia’s side including voluntarily giving away historical Russian lands to some of them to avoid being labelled as dominant or oppressive that at the end that fear materialized. 

Decades-long material-technical assistance by Russian people to national republics for their fast-paced socio-economic and cultural uplifing at the expense of Russia’s own development was equated with colonial rule. Russian communities settled in those republics suddenly became strangers. They ceased to be viewed as “brothers”, who moved from their birth places and chose to live among them to carry forward the task of nation building in their societies. It was kind of a reawakening to a cruel new reality for Russian-origin people to find themselves as foreigners in those places which they considered as their motherland.  In many republics they became targets for persecution by locally empowered ethnic groups. All former national republics except Byelorussia set a course on breaking from the shared “Soviet legacy” and reinventing their historical roots and associated with it tribal nationalism. 

The Baltic republics were quickly absorbed in the Western political and military alliances. Russian-origin people settled in those republics were stripped of citizenship of their new countries and subject to discrimination and humiliation in all walks of life. Gradually, these countries became more hostile to the Russian Federation, Russian language and culture. The Asian republics didn’t have the same opportunity, but they also pursued the incremental path of distancing from post-Soviet Russia; forcing Russian-speaking people to leave; bringing back their tribal affiliations. In almost all republics, Russian language, which was the lifeblood for their modern-era civilization, was deprived of official status and its use was discouraged. In many of those republics, where Cyrillic alphabet was the script of their written languages, steps have been taken to replace it with Latin. 

In short, the sequence of events that unfolded in the aftermath of disintegration of the Soviet state proved the ideological premise of the USSR as a state was more of a delusion than a basis for creating a viable multinational state. If we go back to the question that we posed at the beginning of the paragraph whether the Soviet Union was destined for extinction because of the “defects” in its construction, the answer would be negative. They might have contributed to weakening the Soviet society from within in absence of focus of the authorities on addressing real contemporary issues affecting economic growth, welfare of people and inter-ethnic relations. But they weren’t enough to trigger the downfall of the country. The missing element was loss of determination of the central leadership to apply force to subdue rebel leaders much in the same way as it was done during the Stalin-era.  Stalin’s use of repression and force was not a goal in itself. It was a tool in absence of other viable options to achieve political objectives of Soviet nation building. 

The state had everything in its possession. It had powerful internal security forces, awesome military capabilities and, above all, organizational strength of the CPSU to exert authority and bring order even at the last moment.  But the leadership that was in place then was cowardly. It was afraid of doing what was needed to protect the state and secure the people, which was a constitutional duty. For the president of a country, wilful abdication of the most important constitutional duty amounts to treason. In all countries such action is prosecuted.  For some mysterious reasons, nothing of the sort happened and the counter-revolution led by Boris Yeltsin was allowed to cruise to victory. 

Following disintegration, the USSR didn’t vanish from the world. It shrank in size and dissolved in the natural country which was its nucleus and which meant everything for the collective “Soviet” identity. That was Russia within the borders of the former Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). The only other republic that absorbed the USSR along with many of its attributes was the Republic of Belarus. In the new era, the RSFSR was renamed as Russian Federation (RF). The newly born state abandoned  Marxist socialism and embraced its historical Russian identity. Much of this identity was wilfully dissolved in the collective “Soviet” identity in the interests of promoting unity and brotherhood across diverse nationalities and ethnic groups in the USSR. 

All USSR central-level government institutions were converted into national All-Russian institutions. In many government buildings USSR’s state emblem “sickle and hammer” was retained. In 2000, the music of USSR’s national anthem with new lyrics written by Nikita Mikhalkov became Russia’s national anthem. The USSR was dissolved in the Russian Federation much in the same way it was created out of Russian SFSR in 1922. It validated what was obvious during the entire Soviet era. Unlike other constituent Union Republics, the RSFSR was as much a Republic as it was the whole of the country. It remained semi-dissolved in the USSR. A new organization called the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was created to manage inter-relationships among the former constituent republics in the post-Soviet era. 

Applying hindsight it is fairly easy to say the USSR was destined for extinction because of “defects” in its construction, some which we have discussed before. But that would be simplistic. What we have labelled as “defects” in the wake of USSR’s disintegration were, in fact, great ideas which its founders laid in its construction. The country’s disintegration largely invalidated the way those ideas were used in Soviet nation building. Proletarian internationalism, the key idea, was supposed to bind diverse nationalities of the country in an enduring relationship of friendship and harmony. However, its effectiveness in blunting nationalism as a centrifugal force in a multinational state was limited. As the country developed, society matured, and generations changed, the spirit of solidarity and convergence embodied by proletarian internationalism faded away. 

Even the success that was credited to proletarian internationalism was mainly due to other factors. It was strong central leadership and its readiness to exert authority to subdue expression of tribal nationalism, including the use of force should the situation so demands. It was a key feature of three-decade rule by Yosif V. Stalin. He was the most consequential Soviet leader who took charge of the USSR in 1924 when it was just born and upon exit (caused by death in 1953) left it as a developed, prosperous, and mighty superpower. 

Stalin’s governance style was a strong backup to proletarian internationalism as an idea to hold the diverse, multinational country together around a strong central authority. During his rule, USSR’s internal territorial divisions into Union and Autonomous republics and regions, at some point 53 in total, mattered little in decision making and were mostly symbolic. The Article 72 of the Soviet constitution that gave the right of secession to Union republics was lying dormant. No regional leader had the courage to even remember that such a provision exists in the constitution, let alone invoke it. All regional leaders had to take cue from Moscow to make any major policy decision for their republics. 

Stalin succeeded in overcoming structural defects in USSR’s construction thanks to the governance system that he put in place. It combined ideology with real administrative controls at vulnerable spots in the power structure for maintaining unity and integrity of the Soviet state. The USSR, despite being inherently a weak federation, was transformed in essence, into a strong unitary state with all real decision making affecting the destiny of the entire country located in Moscow, the national capital. Stalin’s rule was more about governance than about mere harping on the merits of Marxist socialism.

For his successor, Nikita S. Khrushchev, “trying not to be Stalin '' became the centrepiece of the governance agenda. It was not just course correction. It was an elaborate state policy formalized at the 20^(th) congress of the CPSU.  It came to be known as “exposing the cult of personality (pазоблачение культа личности)”. In effect, it dismantled the legacy of Stalin’s rule casting it largely in a negative light in the public eye. The consequences of this paradigm shift in the governance system were far-reaching for the Soviet state. Many historians believe the outcome of the 20^(th) congress of the CPSU actually set in motion the process of USSR’s disintegration. Because it reversed many important policies and relaxed administrative controls that helped contain ambitions of regional leaders and transformed a federation of independent states in all but name, which was the Soviet Union, into a powerful single country with a strong central government in Moscow. The regional leaders realized the element of fear in their dealings with Moscow had gone and they could now bargain with the Centre to advance their interests rather than simply take orders from it. The status of Moscow was gradually transformed from an authoritative central decision maker as well as enforcer into mainly a maintainer of balance among regional interests. The ground that the central authority in Moscow voluntarily ceded to the republics paved the way for centrifugal tendencies in Centre-Republic relations to accumulate strength and beco

Sustainable Agriculture (SA) is a well-known concept today. Although approaches and practices consistent with SA were  known to  farmers and agricultural practitioners in the Western world in the 1970s, it entered as a concept in international agricultural development thinking in the late 1980s at the initiative of the UN.  But long before, in the late nineteenth century the world’s first model of sustainable agriculture was developed in Imperial Russia and in the Soviet Union by Vasily V. Dokuchaev, widely regarded as the father of modern soil science, and fellow soil scientists, P. A. Kostychev and V.R Williams. The book discusses how the first model of SA evolved and implemented in farm production. It shows how the modern concept of SA has adopted ideas and approaches from the first model and reframed it in the light of current challenges of agriculture and food production. 

With the rapid fall of the central authority and fast-spreading separatist movements in the union republics, the USSR was sliding into chaos. Its collapse was on the horizon. During the first half of 1991, political initiatives from the leaders of constituent republics started coming out to preserve the existence of the USSR as a unified country rewriting the Union treaty. It was basically aimed at turning the USSR into a loose confederation of independent and sovereign states. To prevent this from happening, on 19 August 1991, key figures of the CPSU including some supporters of Gorbachev, who still retained faith in Marxism, put up their final resistance in the battle to save the country from falling into pieces. They established the “State Committee on Emergency Situation (SCES)” and demanded that Gorbachev, then vacationing in Crimea, either declare a state of emergency or temporarily transfer power to Vice-President Gennady Yanaev. Gorbachev declined the demand and was forced into isolation. But none of the members of SCES could summon the courage to take responsibility by ordering military intervention that could lead to blood spilling and possibly escalating into civil war. 

Taking advantage of this situation, Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s long-time political nemesis and then elected president of the Russian Federation, emerged as the leader of counter-revolutionary forces and with help of military units loyal to him easily quelled the SCES. From this moment all political authority in the country came under the firm control of Boris Yeltsin. On 23 August 1991, Yeltsin signed the order for banning the activities of the Communist Party in the Russian Soviet Socialist Federation and on 6 November 1991, the CPSU was abolished. When Gorbachev returned from Crimea, he was effectively sidelined by resurgent Yeltsin and rendered into titular head of the country. Soviet Union’s final moment arrived on 8 December 1991. On that day, meeting at Belovezhskaya retreat in Belorussia, the leaders of the Byelorussian SSR (Stanislav Suskeyevich), Russian SFSR (Boris Yeltsin) and Ukrainian SSR (Leonid Kravchuk), representing the states that signed the “Treaty on formation of the USSR” in 1922 declared their agreement on cessation of the existence of USSR as a “subject of international law and geopolitical reality” and replaced it with an agreement on formation of a “Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).” Thus without a shot being fired, the USSR disappeared from the map of the world ending 70 years of its existence and deeply influencing the course of human progress throughout the entire twentieth century. But the consequences for many people who once lived in this country would be tragic, continuing for decades. The Great October Socialist Revolution and its ideals which were the ideological basis of the Soviet state lost its significance and disconnected from the mainstream politics in post-Soviet Russia.

Was the demise of the Soviet Union inevitable? The answer is no. But as discussed in the chapter “Soviet nation building in the era of mature socialism” there was always risk for the Soviet state to disintegrate because fraternity and internationalism couldn’t be an antidote to nationalism for long. This risk emanated from nationality-based federal design of the USSR conceived by V.I. Lenin. The Soviet state that was established in 1918 as inheritor of the Russian Empire was already a federal state called “Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR)”.  The other “republics” could be incorporated into RSFSR as federal regions enjoying wide ranging autonomy. Adding another layer of federalism in the name of the USSR on top of what was in existence plus injecting a hefty dose of nationalism, albeit with good intention, was a colossal mistake. On one hand, it increased the layers of bureaucracy, unnecessary duplication of functions; and on other hand, made the state vulnerable to manipulation by regional leaders which the central leadership often tackled by reaching unofficial understanding with them on many sensitive issues.  Thus apparently a strong powerful state, the second superpower, USSR was, in effect, a confederation of sovereign national republics with constitutional right to secede from the Union. But for a long time none of the republics did give serious thought to exercise this right so long as the country was ruled by strong patriotic leaders like Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev. And for the republics also, there was a lot to benefit in terms of socio-economic development from being inside the Union than outside it. To drive home this point, the constituent republics used to highlight their status to the outside world as a fraternal republic in the family of equal Soviet nations. But as discussed before, the glue for holding the national republics together was the central authority exercised by the CPSU and economic subsidy from the central budget for regional development. 

Beginning in the 1970s, when L.I. Brezhnev relaxed political control, centrifugal tendencies started creeping up in the republics and many regional leaders were thinking about striking new bargains with Moscow. Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost added fuel to this process and in 1990 the issue of renegotiating the contract came on top of the political agenda. On 17 March 1991, an All-union referendum on preservation of the USSR was held in which majority of Soviet citizens (76.4%) voted in favour of preservation of USSR as a “renewed federation of equal sovereign republics”. 

Clearly the Belovezhskaya initiative of Yeltsin-Kravchuk-Suskeyevich troika for tearing apart the Union treaty was unconstitutional and contrary to popular will expressed in referendum. So, even at the final moment, Gorbachev could do a lot to prevent this from happening. He could order the arrest of the leaders of brewing counter-revolution and take necessary military measures to quell armed uprising. But he didn’t. This amounted to abrogating his key constitutional duty to protect the state, which is a criminal offence of the highest order. When Soviet Union’s friends all over the world were anxiously waiting for Gorbachev to take the last emergency measures to save the USSR, the citadel of world socialism, he was busy then reporting to his handlers “Mission accomplished.” He would take some time to negotiate his future with the coup plotters before walking into sunset. On 25 December 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation as President of the USSR, the country no longer in existence, and went into political oblivion. 

The Soviet Union’s sudden demise came as a bolt from the blue to many in the world. The Western governments who were working toward the goal of destroying the USSR were also not expecting to reap such a windfall so soon. The western academicians who were watching events in the Soviet Union knew of the problems of its economy – sluggish growth, structural imbalance, falling revenues from oil and gas export – were also baffled. Even the CIA failed to forecast the impending demise of the Soviet Union. As mentioned in all previous chapters, the Soviet Union’s economic problems didn’t arrive all of a sudden in the mid 1980-s. They started arising since the Soviet leadership decided to leave behind the glorious chapter of its development by disavowing Stalin’s legacy. Problems were accumulating largely because of CPSU’s aversion to addressing the root causes and embarking on meaningful reforms. 

Even then, those problems were not cataclysmic. If economic reforms and reestablishment of political control initiated by Yuri Andropov were consistently followed, there was a fair chance of significant improvement toward the mid-1980s. It was Gorbachev’s criminal self-delusion that the Soviet economy was in a disastrous shape and to salvage it, wholesale socio-political transformation (codeword for dismantling socialism) was needed. Far from being any kind of solution, Gorbachev’s misconceived perestroika and glasnost deepened the Soviet Union’s economic problems and moved the society to a tipping point. To be fair, no economy is immune from crisis. We knew in the 1930s, when the Soviet Union was undergoing rapid industrialization and its economy was growing in double-digits, the advanced capitalist economies in the US and Europe were in the longest deep recession. In recent times, the great recession again hit developed capitalist economies during the late 2000s and early 2010s. To limit the pitfall of the crisis, Governments across the capitalist world increased state intervention in the economy by injecting billions of public funds into the economy; providing banks, financial institutions and industrial enterprises with subsidies and concessional loans, issuing restrictions on banking and financial markets, etc. But no western government was on record saying “let us dismantle capitalism because these problems would come up again”.

To protect himself,  Gorbachev would later say he was well meaning and a victim of unintended consequences; he didn’t resort to repressive military measures because that could ignite a civil war with devastating consequences. But few are impressed with this argument, because indeed a bloody civil war engulfed parts of the ex-USSR in the immediate aftermath of its demise. Tackling a civil war was not something new to the Red Army, because the Soviet Union was not built in a day. After the Great October Socialist Revolution in 1917, it took five years for the Red Army to quell armed rebellions in the regions and consolidate Soviet power. But in the era of “mature socialism”, after having siphoned off large chunks of national budgets depriving civilian needs for decades, the powerful Soviet Army failed to show its patriotism by deciding not to intervene and sitting on the fence as counter-revolution was in full swing before its eyes.

 It fought a shadowy war for decades on many fronts with its adversary in the cold war. But when the country was standing on the brink of the abyss, a little help from it like the one it staged in Prague Czechoslovakia in 1968 could still save the country. Military leaders probably didn’t want to get their hands bloodied by killing their own people. But shamelessly they did exactly that a few years later taking orders from Boris Yeltsin by launching a cruel military operation for suppressing armed rebellion in the province of Chechnya. Merciless carpet bombing reduced the historic capital city of Grozny into rubble much in the same way allied forces carpet bombed the German city of Dresden in the final days of the Second World War just to extract revenge by killing civilian population. 

In this context, it is important to note what the other great socialist country, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), not a friend of the USSR since Stalin’s death, did to limit the spreading of “Perestroika and Glasnost” virus into the country. Consistent with his new foreign policy Gorbachev rapidly moved to ending decades of hostility with China. He accompanied by his wife, Raisa, travelled to Beijing on 16 May 1989 and held a summit meeting with the country’s leader Deng Xiaoping. Gorbachev was flying high at that moment. The stark contrast between the 84-year-old frail Deng delivering a stumbling speech and the 58-year-old Gorbachev with his strength and vigour was visible. This was an embarrassing moment for the Chinese leadership forcing them to keep a low profile and adjusting the Soviet leader’s itinerary so as to shield him away from enthusiastic crowds who flocked to the streets to greet him and express solidarity with his reform programme. The student movement was rapidly gaining strength demanding similar reforms in China. But the Chinese leadership backed by their patriotism and experience drew quick lessons from the mess that Gorbachev created by 1989 in the USSR. The octogenarian Deng was astute enough to foresee the chaos and uncertainty in which the USSR was sinking as Gorbachev was pressing ahead with his reforms. In a marked contrast with the Soviet Army, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) demonstrated its patriotism by deciding to nip in the bud *Perestroika-*like counter-revolutionary movement which was gathering strength on the Tiananmen Square in Beijing, which drew the attention of the world. Martial law was declared in the early morning hours of 20 May 1989. Ending a prolonged stand-off with protesting students, Chinese troops entered the Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989 opening fire on the protestors. Estimates of the death toll ranged from several hundred to thousands. Several dozen people had been executed later for their parts in the demonstrations. This was a sad moment and the whole world united in censuring China. 
But this brave decision of the Chinese leadership saved the country from sinking into a Soviet-like abyss and set the stage for phenomenal economic growth. In just two decades, China emerged as the second-biggest economy in the world. Had the remnants of the Soviet Union’s political leadership and its military rise up to the challenge the way the Chinese leaders did, the twenty-first century could have been the Soviet story as well and the world could have been a very different place than it is now. 

The shortest statement is “destruction of the USSR”. Reaching this conclusion isn’t difficult if one tries to read between the lines of what we wrote in many policy papers and said in his numerous interactions with the public at home and abroad and then tries to glean into his worldview. It would be evident he was no longer a believer in the ideology that was the bedrock of the Soviet state. His contempt for the ideals of Marxism was hardly disguised. He set his sight on dismantling Marxist socialism and replacing it with liberal social democracy as practiced in Western Europe. But he awfully lacked the wherewithal to do that, though apparently it seemed he was blessed with essential leadership qualities. In the capacity of a long-serving bureaucrat responsible for the agriculture sector, he read a lot because he had access to books and articles written by Western ideologues as well as Soviet dissidents residing abroad. In this process, he was gradually converted into their ideology, and frankly, he was not alone. 
This virus was spreading into the top ranks of the CPSU leadership. It didn’t evade the watchful eyes of western analysts who detected long before the trend of ideological debasing and defeatism in CPSU leadership and bidding time to pick a suitable one. And that moment came with the rapid exit of ailing senior leaders and emergence on the scene of Mikhail Gorbachev. But Gorbachev was far more ambitious. His goal was not only the dismantling of socialism in the USSR but the destruction of the country where he was born and brought up. The determination with which he was working toward this goal was evident in how he sequenced his economic and political reforms paving the way for deepening chaos and crisis setting stage for a political Tsunami. 

Were he honest in his designs like his reformer predecessor Nikita Khrushchev, he could have adhered to policy reforms initiated by late Yuri Androprov and carried them forward with consistency and determination. It would have been a painful process, would have taken years for the positive results to be felt but, at the minimum, the USSR as a country could have been saved. What Gorbachev offered as a remedy to cure the economic woes of the Soviet Union was nothing new. These were the same time-tested and consistently failed economic reform programmes initiated and pursued to different degrees by all Soviet leaders in the post-Stalin era. Gorbachev repackaged those policy prescriptions for experimenting in a fast-evolving context which later would be branded as “Perestroika.”

The coining of the term Perestroika illustrated the scale of Gorbachev’s ambitions signalling that he won’t be limited to just economic reforms but would proceed deeper to change the political landscape of the country and its governance system. The term Perestroika in Russian language cannot be exactly translated into other languages. It is not just about modernization, reconstruction, reform, and transformation. It includes one or all of these elements at the same time. To understand the depth of the changes sought through Perestroika, it is helpful to look at the syntax of the Russian word Perestroika (pere + stroit), which means build again. Therefore, what is in place must be destroyed and built again from scratch. 
This is where Gorbachev started looking like someone betraying the ideals of communism.Because as a seasoned bureaucrat and administrator and having access to KGB-collected information about the real state of the country, it shouldn’t have been difficult for him to predict the consequences of his political adventurism. He shouldn’t have been oblivious of the simple fact that he was a part and also beneficiary of the system he was trying to reform and reinvent. He could go with the reforms only that far that won’t challenge his own power as General Secretary of the CPSU. To a lay person, it was evident that CPSU in the mid-1980s was a far cry from what it was in the early days of the revolution and construction of socialism. As discussed in the Chapter “Soviet society and the political system in the 1970s”, continued infiltration of CPSU by individuals seeking personal gains and advancement with no faith in Marxist ideals gradually gutted its revolutionary spirit. As a result, from a revolutionary party built from the grassroots, CPSU was effectively converted into a conventional political party and in the eyes of a large section of people it lost the moral claim to monopoly of political power. His reforms were more likely to contribute to weakening the CPSU rather than strengthening it. 

Whether Gorbachev was acting at the behest of western agencies as hinted above remains a great unknown. Until resolved, this suspicion will not go away. Many CIA operatives stationed in Moscow at that time had boastfully hinted at their roles in bringing down the Soviet Union. Domestically, debates on Gorbachev’s role are not dying away. In 2014, a group of parliamentarians in the Russian State Duma undertook a legislative initiative asking the Attorney General to start criminal procedures against the “Soviet Separatist” Gorbachev. To be sure timing is the key prerequisite for any reform programme to succeed. As stressed in the chapter on “Missed agriculture sector reforms” Soviet Union missed the chance for implementing deep economic reforms aimed at evolution into state-directed capitalism in the 1960 during the rule of Nikita Khrushchev. At that time the Soviet society was more cohesive, still rallied around the party and the control of the CPSU on the political processes was beyond doubt. The society could have absorbed the shock without any political turmoil. But the mid-1980s was a more difficult period. The chronic inability of the authorities to bridge the widening gulf between the demand for quality consumer goods and its supply led to emergence of difficult to conceal black markets and private economy. The country was ill-prepared to withstand such a paradigm change in its socio-economic system.

Gorbachev’s perestroika programme unfolded in three stages: 1985–1986; 1987–1988; 1989–1991. The first stage of the programme was officially given green light at the April 1985 plenary session of CPSU’s Central Committee. Discussions centered on the urgency of bringing about profound changes in all spheres of the society. Those changes were supposed to be propelled by accelerated socio-economic development of the country. Acceleration was supposed to be driven by more rapid introduction and active utilization of modern production technologies and scientific knowledge; decentralization of the management of national economy; introduction of cost accounting or (economic accountability); and strengthening discipline in production. State control was introduced for improving the quality of products. Priority was given to development of the social sector. Permission was given for undertaking both individual and cooperative activities. In the rural sector, the equality of all forms of management  – state farms, collective farms, agro-enterprises, leasing collectives and commercial farms was recognized. 

Many elements of perestroika were tried by Gorbachev’s predecessors but abandoned due to poor results. Particularly miserable was Gorbachev’s obsession with cost accounting/economic accountability (a Soviet-style approach to integrate market mechanisms in planned economy) given its consistent record of failure since Brezhnev’s time. In Russian, xозяйственный расчёт, this means a method of business management of enterprises and enterprise management based on achieving conformity between costs of production and the revenue stream of the enterprises which allows full recovery of the costs incurred. But this market-based approach was consistently failing because the Soviet centrally planned economy didn’t meet other requirements for this approach to succeed. Then is decentralization of economic management, a policy which Khrushchev tried with great fanfare but abandoned because of its disruptive effects on the overall economy and poor results.

Therefore, there is reason to believe that Gorbachev by repackaging failed economic approaches set the stage not for accelerating socio-economic development of the country but for its rapid degradation and downfall. No one would have blamed Gorbachev had he successfully steered the USSR on course to state capitalism in incremental steps (and that was the real prescription at that time) solely focusing on the economy without any political missteps that could have compromised the political authority of the CPSU.. It was obviously the path for Gorbachev to follow. But, as stated above, his agenda was far reaching and went into implementation at the second stage of perestroika (1987–1988). 

The changes in the socio-political sphere began with implementing the policy of Glasnost, which means openness. Bluntly speaking, Glasnost was supposed to herald the transition of Soviet society to western-style liberal democracy. Press censorship was lifted and publication of new newspapers and journals was allowed. This new environment of greater freedom paved the way for emergence of multiple social organizations and associations in the country in support of perestroika, which Gorbachev sought to use as his power base independent of the CPSU. Many individuals who were oppressed and jailed during 1930–1950 were rehabilitated. The role of the press and mass media increased, opening the gate to wholesale revisiting the historic memory of the people, opening the “white spots” of history. Even criticism of V.I. Lenin was no longer a taboo. This policy of Glasnost, which Gorbachev tried to benefit his perestroika, was enthusiastically embraced by the enemies of the USSR both inside and outside of the country to accelerate the process of dismantling socialism and eliminating the single-party system dominated by the CPSU. 

But economic reforms didn’t lead to positive changes. It was not unexpected given the experience of Gorbachev’s predecessors and discussed in the chapters “Soviet society and the political system in the late 1970s” and “Soviet economy under the new leadership”. The people are becoming impatient and no longer ready to give the party much time to deliver the promised results. The planned economy with a rapidly disintegrating chain of command and discipline supplemented with limited market-based approaches was nowhere near to fulfilling the magic promised by perestroika. The necessity to transition to full-scale market mechanisms became obvious. It was something long overdue and could be done incrementally had they been launched in the past. But, as mentioned in the chapter on “Soviet economy under the new leadership”, CPSU dithered and when the crunch time came in the late 1980s, hardly any option was left for incremental steps without recourse to oppressive measures. Despite investment of millions of roubles in the economy, no substantial improvements in increasing the economic output could be made. Even the cooperatives, semi-capitalist enterprises, established within socialist economic management failed to deliver expected results. Gorbachev’s initiatives of political liberalization under Glasnost became a sort of genie which came out of the bottle and took its own life setting the stage for crushing his leadership. It set the stage for CPSU’s dethronement. The demand to end the monopoly of CPSU on political power and empowering the Soviets became irresistible. 

The third period of perestroika became the most turbulent, drawing common people from indifference and fence-sitting to unprecedented activism on the streets. The guns were targeted at the nucleus of Soviet power. In 1989, the democratic opposition (Interregional Deputies Group) began to take shape in the country, which advocated the need not for reforms but for changes in the entire social system that existed in the USSR. Amid domestic political turmoil, the Soviet Union was rapidly withdrawing from its global engagement which it built over the post-war years with investment of enormous resources neglecting the needs of its own people, which in essence was all about the cold war. By 1989, it completed the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. It also ceased supporting the world socialist system leaving its allies in Eastern Europe to their own devices in facing counter-revolutions in their countries. The Berlin wall, a key structural landmark in the East-West divide, fell on 9 November 1989 setting stage for unification of Germany. Vladimir Putin, the current president of the Russian Federation, was serving in East Berlin at that time as KGB official in the rank of a colonel. He remembered when ebullient crowds were attempting to storm his office; he had to come out firing blank shots from his pistol threatening this was Soviet territory. When he called East German authorities for help, they declined saying, “they could do nothing without Moscow’s consent and Moscow was silent”.
The CPSU was losing real power and its unity. Criticism was directed at not only the situation prevailing in the USSR, but also at the very foundations of the Marxist ideology and  the October Socialist Revolution of 1917. 

Soviet Union’s heightening of the arms race, its sustained engagement in the outside world for projecting power and challenging the US on all theatres of military confrontation during the 1970s came to an end with defeat of the Democratic Party candidate, the sitting president Jimmy Carter, a moderate and more accommodative of USSR, in US presidential election held in November 1980. The victory of the Republican Party and election of Ronald Reagan as president and George H. W. Bush as vice president heralded a new turn in the approach of the US in handling the ongoing cold war with the Soviet Union. The Reagan-Bush duo adopted an openly aggressive and hawkish approach toward the USSR. In the United Kingdom, too, heavily defeating the Labour Party in parliamentary elections held in 1979, Conservative Party leader, Margaret Thatcher became the prime minister.  She would go down in the history of British politics as “Iron Lady” because of her determination and consistency in pursuing domestic economic reforms aimed at revitalizing capitalist economies, downgrading the state's role in the economy and shrinking the size of the welfare state. In the US, President Reagan also proceeded to pursue similar domestic economic reforms. Ideological closeness of both leaders was also reflected in their foreign policy particularly with regard to challenging and containing the Soviet Union. 

In 1983, Ronald Reagan declared the USSR as the “Evil Empire.” It drew a line under “detente,” which characterized East-West relations during the 1970s. Reagan’s castigation of the USSR as “Evil Empire” and enthusiastically endorsed by Margaret Thatcher set in motion a sequence of well-orchestrated actions aimed at annihilation of the USSR. Hardly this sort of brinkmanship by an American president would have been possible had someone like Stalin been in charge of the USSR at that time. A Stalin-like Soviet leadership’s response to such an open and vulgar challenge to the existence of the USSR would have sent an appropriate message to American presidents. But choosing the time for openly targeting the Soviet Union was not accidental. The beginning of the 1980s was indeed the most fateful time for the country witnessing successive funerals of experienced second-generation leaders, who, despite their many faults and incompetencies, were patriots and could still identify them with the ideals of the October revolution. There was none who could come forward and throw an equally nihilist counter challenge at the US. The US and UK had full knowledge of who was coming and so started the ground work to destroy the USSR. Before 1985, Gorbachev frequently visited western countries and met government leaders and influential politicians there. He was able to forge good relations with then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Below is an excerpt from Thatcher’s assessment of the Soviet political scenario.

“However, soon we received information about the impending death of the Soviet leader and the possibility of a man coming to power, through which we will be able to realize our intentions. This was the evaluation of my experts (and I always formed a highly qualified group of experts on the Soviet Union and, as necessary, contributed to the additional emigration of the necessary specialists from the USSR). This man was M. Gorbachev, who was characterized by experts as an imprudent person, instilled and very ambitious. He had good relations with the majority of the Soviet political elite and therefore his coming to power with our help was possible”
It  illustrates how carefully western leaders plotted for Mikhail Gorbachev’s assumption of Soviet leadership in 1985.  Gorbachev also introduced a new concept in Soviet foreign policy by rejecting the idea of “class struggle” and advancing the concept of “interrelationship of all world phenomena.” By signalling reconciliation with the West, Gorbachev succeeded in boosting his global image as a peacemaker bent on bringing the world back from the dangerous escalation of the half-century cold war.

Gorbachev’s rule was brief but momentous, full of political adventurism. At home, initial euphoria turned into disillusion as people’s expectations quickly dashed with each of his ruinous policy innovations. But abroad he became a hero full of determination to transform his country in a way that fits Western concept of democracy. Carefully choreographed by Western agencies, an unprecedented wave of adulation and craze surrounding Gorbachev’s personality swept the streets of Western capitals. Mass demonstrations by young people carrying festoons and placards and chanting “Gorby, Gorby” on the streets of Washington, New York, London, Paris, Bonn and other cities were very common in the late 1980s.

Such adulation and embrace by the West of a Soviet leader was unprecedented in the history of East-West relations since officially the Soviet Union was the opponent of the West in the still raging cold war. In contrast, for a brief period during the Second World War, when Soviet Union was an ally of the US and UK, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin far from being shown a degree of respect and admiration for his decisive leadership in crushing fascist Germany was admonished and denigrated in the West in all possible ways. 

Gorbachev was markedly distinct from all previous Soviet leaders not only in age and youthful vigour but also in other respects. He had an attractive physical outfit and demeanour beaming with western-style smiles as opposed to boring and disgruntled physical appearances of old traditional Soviet leaders. He was an outstanding communicator capable of captivating audiences by the charm of his personality, frankness in expressing opinion and eagerness to listen. To his advantage was a law degree from the country’s most prestigious university. He endeared himself to many by his fresh thinking on the relevance of Marxist ideology to contemporary Soviet society and new approaches to many issues that bedevilled East-West relations. His great asset in craze building around his personality in the West was his smart fashion-savvy wife Raisa. Her attire matching the latest world fashion drew attention in the western world. Gorbachev in his student life fell in love with and married Raisa Maximovna Titarenko, a student one year senior to him studying in the faculty of philosophy at the same university. Raisa Maximovna in her entire life would greatly influence the political activities of her husband. 

Gorbachev highly valued her advice and help even when these were harming his policies. The young, intellectual and beautiful “Gorbachev-Raisa” couple easily outmatched the old “Ronald-Nancy” Reagan couple in the US. Like her husband, Raisa was also showered with admiration for her taste and appreciation of western-style fashion designs and the western media started portraying her as the “First Lady”, a status unthinkable in the Soviet socialist society. Suddenly, this well-managed campaign of Gorbachev-Raisa’s image building abroad baffled many seasoned watchers of Soviet Union’s development in the post-Brezhnev era. Because they knew the Soviet Union’s political system and the society was not prepared to absorb the shock of fast-coming tectonic changes. But equally a large section of the Soviet society was duped to believe that despite many shortcomings of their society, there are still certain things that make them look at par with the West if they break free from the conventions and traditions of the outmoded Soviet system and so they decided to stick with Gorbachev. 

To understand Gorbachev and his policy agenda, it is helpful to look at how the third-generation Soviet leaders were picked, trained and groomed for future leadership. In general, much of what any revolution means is about its leaders who accomplish it. They embody its ideals; firmly believe in validity of its goal and despite zigzags in travelling the charted development path they never deviate from their coveted goal. When the first-generation leaders who accomplish the revolution leave the political stage, with them also disappears a big chunk of revolutionary enthusiasm. The second-generation leaders who grow up under the shadow of the first-generation leaders usually don’t enjoy the same kind of authority and endorsement in the eyes of the people. To these leaders, revolution still makes sense but they seek to temper it with existing realities and strike a new deal with the public to address emerging concerns. To the third-generation leaders, revolution is mostly memory and having grown up in a changed context, they don’t see the same kind of moral obligation to remain committed to revolution’s original goal as did their predecessors. They don’t shy away from making drastic course corrections and attempt to add new content which they think relevant to sustaining their hold on to power. 

In the USSR, the first-generation leadership disappeared with the death of Lenin in 1924 and Stalin in 1953 having ruled the country for 36 years since the victory of the October Socialist Revolution. Nikita Khrushchev, the first of the second-generation leaders, in an attempt to signal that he indeed represents a new generation publicly disavowed Stalin’s legacy while remaining loyal to Leninist teachings. Under his watch, policy reforms were sought and implemented in management of the national economy to accelerate socio-economic growth of the country. However, no serious disconnect was made from the key ideological premises of the October revolution. But the context was entirely different for the third-generation Soviet leaders including Mikhail Gorbachev. These leaders emerged from the ranks of Komsomol not so much based on their leadership qualities demonstrated through their connections with common people and endorsement by the electorate. 

Neither was it possible because when this generation of Soviet leaders stepped in, the ideals of the October revolution underpinning revolutionary consciousness almost entirely evaporated in the CPSU’s top policymaking circles. As mentioned in foregoing chapters, the party lost its connection with the people. So, other qualities such as seeking to enlist in good books by party higher ups and leveraging relationships with this or that party bosses became most important in moving up the political career. The Great October Socialist Revolution was a distant memory to this generation of leaders, to some it was even a burden. Because if they were to remain true to the ideals of moving toward the goal of building a truly equal and classless communist society, they needed to make difficult choices and tremendous sacrifices as did the founders of the Soviet state. 

But having in possession of the world’s second most powerful state, built and protected by Lenin and Stalin and handed over to them and with no obligation to face the public in general elections, these leaders were desperate to find a risk-free middle-of-the road approach that won’t upset the comfortable status quo. Very few of the ruling elite, Gorbachev foremost among them, retained faith in Marxism. Partly it was a result of a long process of CPSU’s self destruction by opening the gate for admitting into its rank almost everybody who could draw the attention of an influential party boss by any means and convince the leader that once in the party, they are going to do his bidding and remain loyal to him. A good educational background including smartness to grasp and propagate official interpretation of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and sloganeering (such as “creation of a new human being”) was an asset in this process. This was how the likes of Gorbachev entered the party beginning the 1950s and started moving up paving the way for CPSU’s rotting from within. When such leaders with no faith in the revolutionary ideology that underlies the state and the society ascend to the top of the power, it is only a matter of time before the edifice comes down. The Soviet Union’s predicament was becoming obvious to its ideological adversaries. 

The beginning of the 1980s witnessed quick succession in Soviet leadership. Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the CPSU since 1964, died on 10 November 1982. His 18-year rule was second only to Joseph Stalin in duration. It was marked by an almost similar cult of personality built around the leader and which left a legacy as distinct as Stalin’s. It is true toward the end of his rule; he was leader in name only because of prolonged sickness. The country was effectively run by a group of party bureaucrats loyal to him. In hindsight, Brezhnev’s death spelled the end of stability, setting stage for descent of the country into the brewing political storm. A country must have to be lucky to have the kind of political leadership needed to steer and navigate at difficult turns in its course of development. It was ironic that the top brass of the Soviet leadership in the early 1980s was mostly old, suffering from various kinds of chronic diseases that constrained their ability to remain effectively in charge. Soviet leaders’ poor health in no small measure contributed to decline and eventual demise of the Soviet Union. 

Yuri Andropov, next influential CPSU politburo member and longtime head of the KGB, was elected as General Secretary of the CPSU. At 68, he was not a young leader but sufficiently active to take on the challenges of governing the country. We remember when this news broke out; people on the street celebrated in the hope that things would take a better turn under his rule. As head of KGB, he was the most informed among all top leaders about the real state of the Soviet economy and the society at the grassroots level. He vigorously proceeded to implement genuine course corrections which were long overdue, mainly fighting rampant corruption and bringing back order and discipline in running the economy. Few in the country knew the new general secretary was seriously ill. 

But Andropov didn’t give cause for concern. His dynamism and decisiveness in undertaking genuine reforms drew sympathies of the society and ignited hope for a better future. The emergence of Yuri Andropov as saviour of the country was destined to be short-lived. Beginning the summer of 1983, the health of the general secretary seriously deteriorated. He was rarely seen in public. In August 1983, Yuri Andropov was admitted to hospital for treatment of multiple illnesses. From his hospital bed he used to provide guidance and make important policy decisions. He spent the remainder of his life there until his death. The Soviet Union’s fate was sealed with the premature exit of Yuri Andropov from the political stage. He was replaced by Konstantin Chernenko. At 72, his state of health was extremely poor due to incurable illnesses. He ruled much less than Andropov did – 13 months. 

Following Chernenko’s death, intense power struggle broke out in the CPSU politbureau.  Because the field was now open to third-generation leaders who were relatively young and expected to lead much longer, providing new directions to the evolution of the Soviet state and the society. In fact, long-term growth prospects of the country were hanging in the balance because of stalled reforms initiated by Yuri Andropov. There was a search for someone in the party top ranks who could carry forward those reforms. There were a number of contenders for the top post in the party and state leadership. But Mikhail Sergeievich Gorbachev, then the youngest member in the politbureau at age 54, was able to draw the spotlight upon him not least because he was a confidante of Andropov. It was Andropov who helped Gorbachev quickly rise to the top through the party ranks. 

But Gorbachev also had a good background. From his modest upbringing in a peasant family in Stavropol, an agricultural region in southern Russia, Gorbachev got the opportunity to study Law at the Moscow State University, the country’s most prestigious seat of higher learning. During his student years, he displayed extraordinary learning capabilities and joined the CPSU. After graduating from the university in 1955, he returned to his hometown, Stavropol, and joined as a functionary in the city unit of Komsomol, the Young Communist League. In 1956, he became the First Secretary of Stavropol City Committee of Komsomol and in 1961 rose to become the First Secretary of Stavropol Regional Committee of Komsomol. In this position, he drew the attention of the First Secretary of Stavropol Regional Committee of the CPSU, Feodor Kulikov, who offered him to switch his career from Komsomol to CPSU. In 1962, he became the regional party secretary responsible for administration of collective and state agricultural farms. Kulikov became Gorbachev’s political mentor. He helped him rapidly move up the ladder in party jobs in the Stavropol region. Later, as a member of the CPSU politbureau, Kulikov facilitated Gorbachev’s promotion to responsible positions in the Central Committee apparatus of the CPSU. It was the cream of Soviet bureaucracy. Thanks to his long experience of working with the issues of agriculture in the Stavropol region, Gorbachev was able to establish himself as an agricultural expert.  It allowed him to subsequently become CPSU’s chief ideologue in the field of agricultural development. In 1978, at the initiative of Yuri Andropov, Gorbachev was appointed as Secretary of the CPSU CC. He noted him as an extraordinarily educated and experienced specialist. In 1980, Gorbachev crossed the last barrier to reaching his sky-high ambitions becoming the member of the CPSU politbureau. Gorbachev’s thoughtful and critical analysis of the issues and challenges facing the country drew appreciation not only in the party ranks in his own country but also in the West.

The Central Committee of the CPSU held its extraordinary plenary session in March 1985, in which Mikhail Gorbachev was elected as General Secretary of the CPSU. Election of the youngest member of the politbureau (aged 54) bypassing more experienced senior candidates, such as Grigory Romanov and Vladimir Sherbitsky, was unprecedented in the history of the CPSU. Outwardly, it was shown that Gorbachev was elected unanimously whose name was officially proposed by none other than Andrei Gromyko, the long-term foreign minister held in high esteem across party lines. But it was the result of massive homework and conspiracy of the circle of supporters which Gorbachev deftly cultivated in the CPSU Central Committee since the death of Leonid Brezhnev. 

With the exit of the old guard leaders with chronic health issues, Soviet people were for a moment relieved seeing in youthful Gorbachev the energy and talent needed to provide a long-term stable leadership. It won’t take much time before many in the CPSU CC including his promoters became suspicious of his actions and real intentions. Hardly did they know that Gorbachev, the first of the third generation Soviet leaders, would emerge not in the role of constructive state builder but in the role of its annihilator which he would accomplish in just six years. The one simple reason he was not a communist, didn’t believe in Marxist ideals although he sneaked into CPSU and managed to quickly rise to the top. 

The USSR started its journey on the world stage in 1922 as a multinational federal state. It was a risky beginning for a country that occupied almost the same territory as the Russian Empire except Finland and Poland, which were granted independence after the revolution. The empire was a unitary state. For centuries it was built upon a single national Russian identity accommodating under its fold a diverse mosaic of ethno-cultural and religious groups as discussed in the chapter on “state building during NEP”. After successfully accomplishing the October Socialist Revolution, the Bolshevik leaders confronted the tough question of designing the organizational structure of the new state. It was impossible to evade the question of nationality in Soviet nation building because a key slogan that helped Bolshevik leaders mobilize masses in support of the revolution was "the right of nations to self-determination”. It was supposed to be the new formula for the relationship between ethnic and religious minorities and the state. But putting this formula in the design of the state was not an easy task and there was debate among the Bolshevik leadership on how to proceed. 

Although the revolution was directed at empowering the proletariat and suppressing the capitalists, it still didn’t have the same meaning to all ethnic groups inhabiting the Russian Empire. For the Russians and other Slavic people (Ukrainian/Byelorussian), the revolution’s appeal was mostly socio-economic and cultural upliftment. But for other nationalities ( Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kirgizia, Tajikistan and many more), the revolution was equally about emancipation from centuries-old political domination of Russians. Working class leaders from these nationalities didn’t want to lose sight of this fact and wanted accommodation with their Slavic comrades absolutely on the same political plane. Bluntly speaking, they wanted to see Russian domination go into oblivion along with the Russian aristocratic class and imperial dynasty. But some top Bolshevik leaders opposed this mindset.
 
If the purpose of the revolution was to create a new societal order where equal opportunities would be given to everyone regardless of ethnicity, culture and religious belief and gradually moving toward greater social cohesion by blurring distinct sub-national identities, then igniting nationalism by creating national republics was hardly a wise idea. They instead opted for providing autonomy to national entities within a single Russian Socialist Federation. 

But Vladimir Lenin through the lens of his idealism saw things otherwise. He believed granting equal rights and empowering all nations and nationalities would accelerate their development and help them catch up with Russians and other advanced nations which would then discourage national consciousness and help merge all ethnic groups into a single Soviet nationhood in an equal socialist society. But history would later prove that Lenin was more idealistic and inadvertently sowed the seeds of disintegration of the country by converting historical Russia into a federation of national republics. Lenin followed the principle of ethno-federalism which assumed that each nation would have its own territory with its state institutions – its own republic. Under this arrangement, depending on the size and the location of its territory, a republic could be either Union or Autonomous. 

The Union republics (there were 15 of them) had more rights, including the right to secede from the USSR. Autonomous republics were part of a particular Union republic. Smaller national entities had the status of autonomous regions and divisions. In short, almost all nationalities were endowed with some sort of distinct statehood. But carving the vast Russian landmass into dozens of statelets to provide each nationality with its own territory was done arbitrarily. Many minorities found their ancestral lands awarded to nationalities with whom they didn’t share any ethno-cultural commonality. This led to public discontent but so long as the USSR remained as one country, internal borders mattered little and diverse groups were cobbled to live together without major conflicts.

The Union and autonomous republics had their own bodies of power– the Supreme Soviet, the Council of Ministers, the police (but not the army). The Union republics shared some ministries with the Central USSR ministries. The Union republics had all the trappings of separate statehood and with the constitutional right to secede; it was only a matter of time that they would exercise this right triggering the collapse of the USSR. At the initial stage of the revolution, nationalism was in sync with trans-national solidarity and fraternity that bonded the nations and nationalities of the USSR. The official policy of Soviet nation building was based on the principle of “friendship between peoples" and "proletarian internationalism". It was assumed that the "class" interest of workers in all countries was immeasurably higher than the narrow nationalist interests of individual peoples. Proletarian internationalism was considered not only the basis of the friendship of the peoples within the USSR but also the main principle of Soviet foreign policy aimed at supporting national liberation movements throughout the world. 
As the Soviet society matured, Bolshevik revolutionaries exited the political centre stage. The second generation of Soviet leaders took charge, consciousness about national ethnic identity instead of fading away became more palpable. Under Lenin’s scheme of nation building, so much of sovereign power and authority was delegated to the Union Republics that the Soviet Union structurally became a weak federation, although it was not visible and felt on the world stage. 

For the Soviet Union to do business in the real world, particularly in advancing its leadership role in supporting national liberation and socialist revolutions worldwide, the ideological facade on its nation building based on “friendship between peoples" and "proletarian internationalism" had to be tempered by a range of governance tools. These were officially not declared because they were very much business-as-usual and didn’t sound romantic. These governance tools were inherited from the Russian Empire which held the view that the dominant nation in the USSR are the Russians; that Russian culture and the Russian language are important political factors that ensure the unity of the Union. This idea was reflected in the notion that the Russian people hold the status of elder brother in the family of the peoples of the USSR. 

And although the ruling party and the state elite (bureaucracy) were formed from representatives of different peoples, it mostly regarded the Russian people as holding a special status in the country. It was taken for granted that the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Union Republic (the actual head of the region) would be someone from the ethnic group and the Second Secretary was Russian (very rarely Ukrainian). This arrangement was made to show that socialism in the provinces was homegrown and the regional communist party was not just a provincial branch of the CPSU. But the Second Secretary was Moscow’s men in the provinces and his job was to ensure that republican communist parties were indeed regional branches of the CPSU. In addition, a resident KGB (Committee for State Security) head was posted in each republic to keep an eye on political developments and track internal dissent in the republics. These KGB heads with exceptions for Georgia and Armenia were all mostly Russians. 

This duality characterized the policy of the Soviet leadership with regard to nationalities. This was inevitable because nation building is a real world task and governance had limits to accommodating ideological postulates of socialism. It was inevitable also because a large chunk of the Soviet society, particularly in Central Asia, was transitioning directly to socialism from feudalism and tribal culture bypassing the capitalist stage of development, essentially a whole epoch was rapidly condensing within a couple of decades. So if there was some sort of duplicity in Soviet leadership’s policy toward ethnic minorities it was not entirely unjustified. 
The principle “Friendship of peoples” was the basis for supporting development of nations and culture of nationalities. Some USSR republics as were national peripheries in Tsarist Russia lagged behind in economic and cultural development. Therefore, considerable resources were invested in their economy and culture, in particular with a view to promoting the development of the working class, which the CPSU considered its support base. Forced industrialization stirred controversy among the local population. On one hand, it contributed to modernization of the economy, construction of cities and urban development, and the spreading of education. On the other hand, it contributed to erosion of local cultural traditions and environmental pollution because often it was conducted without regard for local conditions. The federal government encouraged and specially organized resettling of Russian administrative and military personnel, and workers into the union and autonomous republics. It was necessary for the creation of new industries, but also pursued the goal of controlling the territories inhabited by other peoples. 

These changes gradually morphed into the policy of Russification – the dissemination of Russian language and culture. It became more evident in the 1980s. National schools were frequently closed and the use of national languages was narrowed. For example, in the Republic of Byelorussia, teaching in the schools in Byelorussian language drastically declined, and in the universities teaching was conducted 90% in Russian language. The leaders in the Republic spoke only in Russian, most books were published in Russian. But this policy was not welcomed by the local population. 

Despite the trend of Russification, policies were also in place to support development of national cultures. These cultures were considered socialist in content and nationalist only in form. In the USSR, some national holidays along with traditional arts and handicrafts were encouraged. A network of ethnographic and local history museums was established and publication of books by local authors was encouraged. But the support for national cultures was limited in a narrow framework. All cultural initiatives that could jeopardize loyalty of the republics to the centre were declared bourgeois nationalism and brutally suppressed. For example, many historical events related to the struggle of peoples against the Tsarist autocracy, and the more so, the Soviet system, were stubbornly ignored or negatively assessed. Anyone who spoke of ethnic or religious discrimination was persecuted including imprisonment for “nationalist propaganda”, “Slander against the Soviet system” and “anti-Soviet activities”.  At the same time, the ethnic (national) belonging of citizens was an important factor determining their social status and influenced their life and career.

But overall Soviet leadership’s policy approach to nation building cannot be construed as a complete failure. The rapprochement of the level of development of many peoples constituting the USSR, their familiarization with each other’s culture and traditions were quite real results of the country’s development in the 1980s. The Russian language in which a large majority of USSR’s citizens spoke became a commonly accepted language of interethnic interaction. For many Soviet people, the sense of Soviet patriotism was no less strong than the sense of local patriotism (Russian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, etc.). They didn’t see a contradiction between these feelings except for relatively few nationalist-minded citizens where those groups exercised influence on public opinion, for example, in Western Ukraine. 

But no less real were the problems in inter-ethnic relations generated by forced inclusion in the USSR of a number of republics (for example, Baltic Republics); the policy of forced Russification and the leftover elements of inequality among people of different nationalities. In addition, problems inherited from Stalin’s rule continued to persist and vex inter-ethnic relations. As mentioned in the foregoing, the internal borders demarcating republics and regions were drawn arbitrarily in many places which created a fertile ground for ignition of future conflicts. However, the consequences of forced relocations-deportations-of whole peoples, which were repressed under Stalin, were especially severe. True, most of them were rehabilitated in the 1950s, but not all of them could return to their lands, already transferred to other peoples. It  created the ground for numerous ethno-national conflicts especially in the Caucasus and Central Asia.  These contradictions, of course, not only undermined the idea of the Soviet people as a new historical community, but also fuelled ethno-national conflicts that came to the surface at the very first signs of a weakening of the central power in the years of perestroika. 

In one respect, Soviet society had a close parallel to American society during this period. Both societies were dominated by the affluent middle class, that is people with incomes falling in the medium-income bracket. But because the American economy was run by private entrepreneurs, there was a considerable income gap. The richest with income levels falling in the top income bracket constituted around 1% of the population and popularly known as one percenter. The Soviet nomenclatura didn’t have the same level of income but they also became 1% of Soviet society due to their attitude, their privileged status and the rising income gap. It was a colossal ideological betrayal. The CPSU and the Soviet state drew their legitimacy on the promise of elimination of exploitation of humans by humans; establishing the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his work” and stressing the centrality of “work” for deriving income and livelihoods and banning all avenues for non-work related incomes. If this logic is to be applied in proper context, then the pay and benefit package for the members of the bureaucracy must not exceed that of the highest paid worker. Because bureaucrats by nature of their work were not producing anything tangible that can be sold and traded, their labour should not have been judged as more valuable than the labour of the worker. When a bureaucrat received far more than a worker, the difference could be attributed to exploitation of the worker. The emerging inequality was slowly becoming evident when the nomenclatura carved out special sets of privileges for itself at the cost of common people. Unfortunately, the ground realities of Soviet society in the late 1970s were in stark contrast with the picture Mikhail Suslov painted in his theory of mature socialist society. 

Concentration of power in the hands of bureaucracy was also facilitated by the failing health of Leonid Brezhnev. To be sure Brezhnev was never in good health partly because of various ailments accumulated over time throughout his political career. In early years despite his requests, Stalin seldom granted him leave of absence for prolonged treatment. Although he was looking young and energetic in 1964, he lost much of that vigour in the mid-1970s and was hardly capable of coping with the demanding schedule of official duties. It created an opportunity for a narrow group of party bureaucrats to exert influence on setting Brezhnev’s governance agenda and decision making processes at the highest level. To consolidate their hold on power, this group, as started above, carefully started building a sort of cult around the personality of Brezhnev. They spotted his vulnerability to flattery and deployed tools of sycophancy for portraying him bigger than his stature. 

The first opportunity appeared when Brezhnev disclosed to his close confidante Leonid Zamyatin, the Director General of TASS (Soviet news agency) from 1970 to 1978, his desire to record his war experiences. Soon a team of eminent journalists was assembled under the supervision of Zamyatin to write three books for Leonid Brezhnev with the goal of casting his literary intellect and highlighting his war achievements and contributions in post-war reconstruction. This initiative got enthusiastic support of Konstantin Chernenko, Brezhnev’s close friend in the politbureau. He saw in it value for use in ideological campaigns to train the young generation. The names of writing team members were held in secret. The bargain was that their names will not appear anywhere as contributing authors and they will be rewarded otherwise. The first book that the public saw bearing the name of Leonid Brezhnev was titled “Little Land (МалаяЗемля)”. During the Second World War, Leonid Brezhnev, in the rank of Colonel, was working as head of the political department of the 18^(th) army. Therefore, he had little combat role of any significance. 

The purpose of this book was to outsize the role of a limited military operation in the large canvass of the Great Patriotic War and present Leonid Brezhnev as a Great War hero. The Little Land was a small patch of land about 30 km^(2) in size, along the shorelines of Black Sea near Novorossiysk, a port town in the Krasnodar region occupied by the German army. In February 1943 a small contingent of Soviet airborne division of naval infantry captured this small patch of land to prepare a launching pad for mounting an all-out assault for liberation of Novorossiysk. Colonel Brezhnev was among the marines who defended this small patch of land for 225 days from artillery fire from the enemy which was sitting on higher ground before the Red Army went into a frontal attack. The book depicts everyday challenges the Soviet soldiers faced in holding on to their positions and preparing the supply routes for arms and ammunition for future operations. Actually written by Arkady Sakhnin, noted journalist working for “Izvestya” newspaper, the novel was indeed a good literary work. 

The second book in the series was “Virgin Land (Целина)” written by Aleksandr Murzin. This book highlights Brezhnev’s leadership role as Kazakhstan’s party secretary in bringing virgin grassland under cultivation which we have discussed in the chapter on “Performance of centrally planned economy.” The third book was titled “Revival (Возрождение)” written by Anatoly Agranovsky, one the country’s best journalists. It depicts Brezhnev’s experiences as he led post-war reconstruction efforts in the Zaparojhiye region of Ukraine. The three books known as “Trilogy” became a must-read component in ideological campaigns throughout the country highlighting the literary genius and leadership quality of Leonid Brezhnev. The trilogy was made compulsory in all schools, institutes and universities. It was also included in our course curriculum and we had to write exams on these books. The literary quality of these books was superb and we enjoyed reading these books. Although the entire state machinery was put into action to erase any doubt in public that Leonid Brezhnev had written these books, few people believed in it. But they were not hostile to Brezhnev because he was easy-going, avoided heavy handedness in decision making. He was perhaps the only leader in the post-Stain era most admired and loved by people. So people used jokes to mock him. One joke regarding the trilogy was like this: Brezhnev asks Suslov, “Have you read the Little Land? Yes, I did, and twice, in fact. I liked it very much. With his face glowing in satisfaction, Brezhnev utters “I need to read it too”. 

The grip of sycophants was becoming tighter. Soon after the publication of the trilogy, Leonid Brezhnev was awarded with the Lenin prize for his contributions to literature. Before that between 1976 and 1981, he was given the highest state award “Hero of the Soviet Union” three times which was unprecedented. In the late 1970s. During the prize giving ceremonies, he often looked frail and was led to the podium with assistance. Taking advantage of Brezhnev’s declining health, the shadow group of sycophants took effective control of the state.  The power of the party-state bureaucracy became overwhelming. 

The hallmark of Brezhnev’s 18-year rule (14 October 1964–10 November 1982), the second longest by any Soviet leader after Stalin, was stability. During this period, no major policy reforms were introduced. After the failure of Kosygin’s economic reforms, no significant steps were taken to improve productivity of the Soviet economy. Piecemeal adoption of material incentivization within the framework of central planning became the key strategy in economic management. The ruling elite's focus was on maintaining the status-quo and not trying something that could trigger large-scale social unrest. But the society was indeed changing and the signs of social discontent were becoming evident. The response of the authorities was either ignoring or suppressing this trend. 

Decades of structural imbalance of the economy in favour of heavy industrialization and defence spending was having its impact. The productivity of the country’s light industrial sector producing consumer goods, processed foods and other products and services that symbolize quality of the standard of living was below the level for fulfilling aspirations of the rapidly urbanizing affluent middle class. The domestic light industry belonging to different ministries was failing to catch up with the trend and respond to buyers’ demands. And therefore customers were offered goods which went out of fashion long ago. The state stores were full of foot wear, clothes and other locally produced goods. But very few would want to buy below standard goods. For the majority of Soviet people, purchase of good quality, comfortable and fashionable clothes and shoes turned into an intractable problem. If somewhere in any store – imported shoes, boots, clothes –  became available for purchase by common people, buyers immediately flocked from all corners of the town and stood in lines waiting for many hours. 

From the early 1980s, the deficit in market supply of quality consumer goods led to a rapid increase in idle money which households deposited in saving banks. In the first half of the 1970s, they grew 2.6 times and in the second half three times faster than sales of consumer goods. Significant funds were stored under the bed. In short most Soviet households were sitting on hordes of cash, which they were willing to spend as soon as the opportunity to buy the right product appeared anywhere anytime. 

This situation was aggravating simmering discontent. The party failed to notice that average Soviet citizens were no longer recipients of state handouts; by behaviour and outlooks they were looking more as customers with demand for variety and quality of products and services as everywhere in the world. The Soviet leadership ignored that the country sits next door on the borders of capitalist Europe.  The winds of change in lifestyle and the standards of living in those countries would not leave Soviet citizens unaffected for a long time. To drive home this point, the city of West Berlin, an Anglo-American protectorate, separated by a famous wall from East Berlin, the capital of socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR), was deliberately chosen to showcase western consumerism in the heart of the world socialist system. 

For many years, the exposure of Soviet citizens to the outside world was limited by allowing only guided group tours abroad and that too mostly in friendly East European countries. The situation started changing beginning in the late 1960s with the emergence of electronic mass media and the arrival of expatriates, including an increasing number of foreign students from developing countries for study in Soviet institutions of higher learning. The expatriates brought with them different culture, lifestyle, and attire which drew the attention of local people and ignited in them desire to acquire such stuff. But such longing of people was officially viewed with suspicion and censured. The Government opted for propaganda and sloganeering by party units at all levels to dissuade the young generation from being “contaminated” with western capitalist consumerist culture alien to the ideals of socialist society. 

But in the 1980s, the “patriotic propaganda” of the 1940s was hardly resonating with the public. Gone were the golden days when calls for leading modest and austere life could work. Persistent deficit of coveted consumer goods generated rush demand and people were becoming desperate to acquire quality goods by any means. This situation was deftly used by many workers in the retail sector and dealers of the slowly emerging shadow economy to fulfill unmet demand for quality goods. Despite official propaganda, few ordinary citizens could hardly afford not utilizing their services. In the youth community, it was by no means considered shameful to earn extra money on reselling branded jeans pants imported from abroad or bought in foreign currency shops “Beryozka” where ordinary Soviet citizens had no entrance. The gulf between demand and supply of quality products for everyday use was so wide that it was impossible for law enforcement agencies to suppress these black markets which started functioning semi-legally in designated spots. In Krasnodar, there were some which the public used to call “Tolchok”. Thus the constitutional definition of “advanced mature socialist society” was a mockery on many counts of the ground realities prevailing in Soviet society in the early 1980s. 

The process of people’s distancing from the party and their growing apathy to political processes paved the way for the government as well as the party bureaucracy to consolidate their stranglehold on the Soviet state and the economy. This is how “dictatorship of the proletariat” differed importantly from “dictatorship of the CPSU”. Opening membership of the CPSU to everyone willing to join its rank was premature and an ill-conceived idea. 
The CPSU probably calculated that the old class of exploiters, capitalists and large landowners were effectively destroyed, the industrial working class has established commanding heights in the society; the new collectivized farming class was, in fact, rural working class in the farm sector and basically same as their urban brethren; and the new Soviet intelligentsia was mostly children and grandchildren of workers and peasants who accomplished the revolution. Therefore, the entire Soviet society became working class or closely resembling working class and automatically subscribed to CPSU’s official ideology. But this was a grave mistake. 

The Soviet society in the 1970s was not the same as it was in the 1930s. Having moved up the ladder on socio-economic and human development, the Soviet people became an affluent middle class with different outlooks and varied aspirations. Not many had any intention to make further sacrifices which were indeed needed if the journey to communism were to continue. On the contrary, many decided to put a brake on collectivism, sit on and consolidate what has been achieved and look for opportunities for personal gain and enrichment. The rock-like social cohesion centered on revolutionary solidarity and egalitarian lifestyle was gradually falling apart. The trends of Soviet society during this period were quite the opposite of what was portrayed in the theory of “mature socialist society” discussed in the beginning of this chapter. But admittedly this was the direction in which Soviet society would have evolved had all Soviet leaders beginning from Khrushchev could have mobilized courage and foresight in providing leadership. 

But unfortunately that didn’t happen. The consistent upward trend of growth and productivity of the Soviet economy slowed in the late 1970s. If compared with advanced capitalist economies, this situation closely parallels the middle income trap in which countries remain locked for years. In the Soviet Union the situation became more difficult because fatigue gripped CPSU’s top leadership in ideological thinking. In private, many CPSU leaders stopped believing in Marxism-Leninism as a worthwhile ideology and in its capacity to deliver continued economic growth. With the exit of the first generation of Soviet leadership led by Lenin and Stalin, revolutionary spirit in the party dimmed considerably. The second generation ushered in by Khrushchev adopted a pragmatic and business-as-usual approach and saw little reason to risk their political career by needlessly emphasizing on Marxism-Leninism in policy making. In Marxist worldview, reaching socialism is half way on the road.  To keep advancing toward the goal of communism, the challenge was to keep focus on Marxism and to try to reinvent the Soviet working class. It was no longer proletariat in true sense, for a leadership role much in the same way as it was during the days of dictatorship of the proletariat. 

Obviously, it was a grandiose task. It required creative thinking to interpret Marxism in the era of advanced socialism and take big decisions in an ongoing nation building process. Not excluded it would have entailed heavy handed measures to quell dissent and blood letting at some point on the road. But this generation of Soviet leaders, having grown up after the October revolution, was a far cry from the founding leaders of the country. They neither had the same kind of intellectual calibre as Lenin had or the courage to take momentous decisions as Stalin did in navigating the country through difficult junctures. Having developed their political career under Stalin, they became adept at implementing directives, conducting routine businesses, engaging in conspiracies and rivalries to establish inner party control, etc. With such leaders at the helm, the fogginess surrounding the prospect of building communism became denser and this milestone receded farther in the distant horizon. They couldn’t rise beyond being foot soldiers and all they could do was pay lip service to the virtues of Marxism and Leninism. 

This mindset of the CPSU leadership was trickling down the country’s governance system. As stated in the chapter “Political system and governance structure”, loyalty to higher authority and readiness to implement directives were the unwritten criteria for performance assessment in the bureaucracy. Those who could establish rapport with higher authority along these lines were quickly promoted and moved to responsible positions. Slowly, demonstration of loyalty took the shape of sycophancy in the Brezhnev era. The same sort of personality cult for which Stalin was accused and his legacy was disowned started building up around Leonid Brezhnev. But since Brezhnev didn’t resort to repressive measures, his personality cult looked benevolent like a fatherly figure.  Many people often innocently adulated him. In national television’s nightly prime time news broadcast, there was a section of reporting stories of the agriculture sector. We often watched collective farm workers proudly reporting their achievements, particularly fulfilling their production targets, for example, number of eggs and liters of milk produced. Very often, they used to end their statement with a big grin by directly reporting to Comrade Leonid Brezhnev their achievements and ensuring him personally that they would continue to work selflessly in the interests of the motherland. 

The rotting of political culture was facilitated by infiltration of the CPSU by purely opportunistic individuals. They  had nothing in common with Marxist ideals and many even were discreetly hostile to socialist values. In absence of national civil service, smart people deftly used the Young Communist League, Komsomol, as stepping stone for entry into the country’s governing political stream. After working there for sometime they could qualify for full-fledged membership of the CPSU and after entering the party ranks they used to shift their focus on building relationships with party leaders. The most common approach was slavishly toeing the official party line and becoming aggressively vocal in advancing the party’s tool kit for ideological propaganda, often caring to know much about it. Their only goal was to draw attention of the superiors and secure a position in the administrative bureaucracy, nomenclatura. This was how the third generation of Soviet leaders including Mikhail Gorbachev was raised. 
While promising to do things to accelerate the dawning of communism, they were not shy of uttering non-senses. One such thing was the call “create new human beings (создание нового человека)”, with which all speakers in any party-organized event used to end their speech. No one had the guts to question what it really means and how it can be done. The audience pliantly listened to it as a matter of duty. Now in the hindsight, the fallacy of such sloganeering is self-evident. In all societies humans are born and with growth and development are exposed to various experiences in the external environment that shape their attitudes and worldview. To a limited extent, this can be influenced by imposing changes in the external environment. But attempts at total remodelling of a human being to fit Soviet ideology were utterly ridiculous but perfectly fit the political winds of that time. 

People fearful of openly expressing dissent were becoming cynical and distancing themselves from the party. Political jokes aimed at the party and its leaders mushroomed. The more CPSU was trying to force people into its policy agenda through intensification of ideological campaigns, the more people were becoming cynical. Having disconnected from the people and members of real working class pushed to the minority in the CPSU, the door was opened for moving up in the party hierarchy for those who had no faith in socialism and became engaged in sowing doubts in the party's policy making circle about the validity of the Soviet socialist economic model. They directed their focus on deepening market-based approaches in the socialist economy making re-emergence of capitalism irreversible in the Soviet Union. In this process, the CPSU virtually lost all important characteristics that defined it as the party of the working class, the proud inheritor of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) led by Lenin which accomplished the Great October Socialist Revolution. From a party it became a deep state with its army of bureaucrats sitting on the top of the economy who in all but name owned state property. 

At this time, the size of the Soviet bureaucracy exceeded all historical records. The total number of bureaucrats during Brezhnev’s rule was 1.75 million in a country of about 276 million people. Thus there was one bureaucrat for each 158 people. At the highest level of the state bureaucracy was the establishment of the CPSU Central Committee (CC), the economic and political nerve centre of the Soviet Union. In 1980, the CPSU CC bureaucracy consisted of 22,500 people. Party bureaucracy was complemented by the economics bureaucracy. The selection of cadres in the civil bureaucracy, as mentioned above, was based on their personal acquaintances with party leaders and the key factor was that these people were loyal to this or that leader. 

Technical competence was not the defining qualification. Nor was it actually needed in performance of routine functions. Because policy making of any sort was exclusively done by CPSU’s Central Committee and refined in the nucleus of the power structure, the Political Bureau of the CC of CPSU. Technical inputs of the bureaucrats and specialists were needed not for policy making but for providing objective justifications for the policies already enunciated. Soviet-strand intellectuals, officially designated as People’s intelligentsia, were different from their counterparts in the western world. After the elimination of the rich and aristocratic layer of the society underpinning imperial Russia’s civil service, the new generation of intellectuals rose up from the grassroots, from among workers, peasants and the poor. To fit them in the new societal order defined by classes under the domination of the working class, they were made to understand throughout their education and training that they were also workers engaged in intellectual labour as opposed to physical labour by their industrial worker brethren. In practice, it drew a limit to their creativity in thinking. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that Soviet intelligentsia was mostly half-captive minds. In speaking out, they were careful not to cross the invisible red line drawn by the authorities. But it was also true that many willingly imposed self-censorship out of gratitude because of the opportunity they got in reaching leadership positions in science and academia, arts and culture from humble origins. 

Formally a line of distinction was drawn between the party and the state by reaffirming in the 1977 constitution the status of the Supreme Soviet as the highest legislative authority of the country with its presidium as collective presidency. The President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Nikolai Podgorny during most of Brezhnev’s tenure, was officially the head of the state. As the (so-called) elected institutions, the Soviets, didn’t have any real authority.  Podgorny, in essence, was titular head of the State. In fact, the post of the President of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet was created to liken it to the post of President of the United States, France and other capitalist countries for maintaining equivalence in diplomatic protocol. The constitution assigned the CPSU real authority by emphasizing its status with just one word “nucleus” of the society; the choice of the word “nucleus” was not accidental ; it accurately pointed to the source of power. No illusion was left that General Secretary of the CC of the CPSU, Leonid Illych Brezhnev, wields the real power of the head of the State. But American presidents often didn’t feel comfortable signing diplomatic accords with General Secretaries. So, President Podgorny’s main job was to provide diplomatic cover for the all-powerful Leonid Brezhnev.

The mind of the average Soviet citizen was carefully choreographed to the notion that because the Politburo discussed any issues and the decisions taken thereafter, they were absolutely right decisions. No further debate at any level was needed. All that was sought in a new recruit was his/her unquestionable loyalty to a particular power centre in the party-state bureaucracy. Often, if any administrative personnel were not up to the challenge of the position assigned, he/she was transferred to other managerial jobs. Thus if any somehow managed to get into the bureaucracy, a comfortable life-long career was almost guaranteed. 

At the dawn of the October Revolution, V.I. Lenin, while dismantling the old bureaucracy, emphasized that his goal was to get rid of bourgeois elements working for the capitalists.  He set out to build from scratch a new bureaucracy runned by working people solely in the interests of the working people. But obviously putting inexperienced and illiterate workers overnight directly in charge of administration was not an option on practical considerations. So the strategy was to keep the salaries and benefits of the bureaucrats comparable to those of the workers. Lenin himself assigned a monthly salary of 500 roubles which was then equivalent to the mean salary of an average worker. Later a ceiling was established that set the rise of average salary of personnel engaged in administrative and intellectual labour not to exceed 100-150 percent of the average salary of industrial workers. But the gulf started widening after the exit of the first-generation of revolutionary leaders. In the post-Stalin era, beginning from Nikita Krushchev, salaries and emoluments of Soviet leaders started rising by leaps and bounds reaching the highest level under Brezhnev. The same trend was reflected in increase of pay and benefits of the members of the bureaucracy, the nomenclatura. 

In addition a wide range of benefits and privileges were introduced for them. A dedicated supply chain was put in place for providing members of the bureaucracy with goods, commodities and services, including those that were in short supply for which ordinary people would have to stand in lines for hours since the early 1980s. This supply chain included the 200th section of Moscow’s famous GUM, the State Departmental Store; Stores for provision of special customer services to elites located on Kutuzov prospect in Moscow and other such stores. All accredited members of the bureaucracy could purchase, often at much lower prices, goods inaccessible to the rest of the population. Separate and better quality medical care was in place for the nomenclatura. It had its own network of special polyclinics, hospitals and sanatoriums equipped with the latest technology, highly qualified specialists under the control of the fouth main directorate of the USSR Ministry of Health, popularly known as the number four. If all visible and invisible emoluments plus salaries were to be converted in dollar denomination even at real exchange rates, then the pay and benefit package of a mid-level Soviet bureaucrat in the 1980s was the envy of their western counterparts. Showering bureaucracy with so much material largesse and undue advantages resulted in emergence in Soviet society, officially characterized as mature socialist, of a privileged class, nomenclatura, which wielded enormous power and superseded in influence all three officially recognized classes in Soviet society – workers, cooperative farmers and people’s intelligentsia. 

In 1977, the USSR’s constitution was revised to reflect Suslov's theoretical construction and other changes that occurred in the post-Stalin period. In the preamble of the constitution, the building of a classless communist society was declared the highest goal of the state. The new constitution introduced major changes to highlight the contemporary status of the Soviet state, society and economy. Those aspects essentially dealt with the vision of the CPSU drawn by its chief ideologue Mikhail Suslov.  It  attempted to portray a picture which was more of a wishful thinking as the subsequent turn of events in the 1980s proved. The new constitution put forward the following definition of a mature socialist society 
(зрелое социалистическое общество).

• It is a society which has created robust productive forces, advanced science and culture and in which people’s standard of living is constantly rising and increasingly favourable conditions are emerging to support all-round development of individual personality.
• It is a society of mature socialist societal relations which paved the way for emergence of a new historical community of people drawing strength from the convergence of all classes and social strata, de jure and de facto equality of all nations and nationalities and their fraternal cooperation. 
• It is a highly organized society driven by ideology and consciousness of the working people - patriots and internationalists.
• It is a society where life is driven by the concerns of all for taking care of everyone and everyone’s concerns for taking care of all.
• It  is a society of true democracy and its political system ensures effective governance of all public affairs; facilitates increasing participation of workers in state affairs; combines real rights and freedoms of citizens with their duties and responsibilities to society.

A developed socialist society is a logical stage en route to communism
The deviation from the old constitution in defining the character of the Soviet economy was quite contrasting. In 1936 constitution, Articles 4 and 11 laid down the following principles:
Article 4: The economic basis of the USSR is socialist system of economy and socialist ownership of the tools and means of production, established as a result of dismantling of the capitalist system of economy, private ownership of the tools and means of production and elimination of exploitation of humans by humans.
Article 11: Economic life of the USSR is determined and directed by the national economic plan in the interests of increasing social wealth, steady rise in material and cultural level of the working people, strengthening independence of the USSR and strengthening its defense capability.
The 1977 constitution redefined the structure and functioning of the Soviet economy as follows:

Article 16: The economy of the USSR is a single national economic complex. It  encompasses all linkages of social production, distribution and exchange in the territory of the country. The economy is managed on the basis of state plans of social and economic development taking into account sectoral and territorial principles, combining centralized management with economic autonomy and initiatives of enterprises, associations and other organizations. This management widely uses self-financing, profit, production cost estimation, and other economic drivers and incentives (read tools of market economy).

As evident, despite the track record of failure of tailoring market-based approaches to running the socialist economy, these principles instead of being abrogated were enshrined in the new constitution. Hybridization of central planning and market economy and piecemeal muddled economic reform approach became irreversible in the USSR. The Soviet leadership missed the last realistic chance of taking a bold decision to put the Soviet economy on a sustainable growth path. Either central planning with all its rigour, coercion and rigid management approach; or a managed transition to state capitalism under CPSU’s supervision as it had been done in China. From this moment onward, in our view, the CPSU was on track to losing its legitimacy. 

Being the country’s sole governing party, its reluctance to address the real constraints of the economy, its indifference to addressing the real needs of the people, its indulgence in trumpeting unsubstantiated claims to advancing the goal of socialism and communism started bordering on sheer irresponsibility.

As noted above, the 1977 constitution also brought substantial changes in the country’s political system. Whereas the 1936 constitution defined the USSR as simply socialist state of workers and peasants, the new constitution lengthened the definition. In Article 1, it says “the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is an all-people socialist state expressing the will and interests of workers, peasants and intelligentsia, workers of all nations and nationalities of the country”. For the first time, intelligentsia was included as a distinct social group at par with workers and peasants. There was also an inherent contradiction. If the Soviet Union became an all-people state with a common national identity of “Soviet people”, then why was it needed to make a separate reference to all nations and nationalities. This reflected a dilemma the CPSUleadership was  confronting – it knew the concept of “Soviet nation” was imaginary and so it was balanced by making explicit reference to constituent nations and nationalities. 

The 1936 constitution proclaimed “All power in the USSR belongs to workers of cities and villages represented by Soviets of Working People’s Deputies”. Article 2 of the 1977 constitution replaced this with “All power in the USSR belongs to people. The people exercise state power through the Soviets of People’s Deputies, which constitute the political basis of the USSR. All other state bodies are under the control of and accountable to the Soviets of People's Deputies”.

Thus constitutionally the USSR was no longer a revolutionary state. Stalin put an end to “dictatorship of the proletariat” and Brezhnev ended whatever was left of the residual nominal dominance of “Working people”. From now on, everyone in the USSR, no matter what he/she did to make a living, became equal in terms of suitability for being elected to the Soviets. As the power base of the working people for exercising democratic rights, “Soviets” were gradually stripped of their influence when Stalin reorganized the hierarchy of the “Soviets” in a top-down fashion and changed voting procedures in the 1936 constitution. 

The CPSU’s influence and interference steadily creeping in elected state bodies led to emergence of dual power structures at all levels. It was felt but not recognized. It was formalized in the 1977 constitution with the introduction of the concept of “Democratic Centralism” in Article 3. It says “The organization and activities of the Soviet state are built in accordance with the principle of democratic centralism: electability of all units of state power from the bottom to top; their accountability to people; binding nature of the decisions of higher-level authorities for the lower level ones.

Democratic centralism combines leadership with local initiatives and creative activities, with the responsibility of each state body and official for the task entrusted”. But democratic centralism was a non-starter in political practice. It was designed to make the authoritarian mindset hidden in centralism palatable by hyphenating with democracy. In essence, it was a rigid top down approach in which decisions made at the top level of party leadership were handed down to local authorities for implementation. The elements of democracy reflected in “local initiatives and creative activities” were meant to play a second fiddle to centralized decision making. The authoritarian trend was further strengthened by making the presence of the CPSU pervasive in management of state affairs. 

The 1936 constitution formalized a constitutional role for the CPSU. But that was discreet and stressed in a general political context. But the 1977 constitution in Article 6 positioned the CPSU at the heart of the Soviet Union‘s political system without recourse to verbosity. It says “the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is the leading and guiding force of Soviet society, the nucleus of its political system, state and social organizations. The CPSU exists for the people and serves the people. Armed with Marxist-Leninist doctrine, the Communist Party defines the general perspectives of the development of society, the domestic and foreign policy of the USSR, directs grandiose creative activity of the Soviet people, and provides a systematic and science-based approach to its struggle for the victory of communism. All party organizations operate under the framework of the Constitution of the USSR”. Thus no illusion was left to signal that the USSR had emerged into a party state concentrating all sources of power into the hands of the party and subordinating all elected institutions of Soviet power. 

The right to nominate candidates for election to the Soviets belonged to the CPSU, trade unions, Komsomol, public organizations, labour collectives and meetings of military service personnel. But leadership and most senior-level leaders of all these organizations were also members of the CPSU and were subject to party discipline. This mechanism provided the CPSU with the opportunity for total control in nomination of candidates. In reality, Soviets of all levels since the adoption of the 1936 constitution didn’t have any real power and purely conducted routine functions for implementing directives. 

The real centres of decision-making in state bodies were not Soviets, but party committees of different levels from the Central Committee (CC) to local committees of the CPSU. Only they took all political decisions of any scale in the USSR which were subsequently approved by the Soviets. As a result people didn’t have much interest in elections; voter turnout used to be low but nonetheless nominated candidates used to win elections with 99.9 percent support of voters. During our stay in the USSR, elections to supreme and regional soviets were held several times. But we never saw people waiting in the queue for voting. Out of curiosity, when we reminded our friends that today is the voting day and if they’ve voted, they used to smile gently and say “don’t worry, at the request of the Secretary of the party unit of our institute, we all have signed on a paper confirming our support to the nominated candidate and our votes have already been cast”. This was how elections to state bodies were turned into a farce. People were effectively removed from having a say in running state affairs as they deem fit. In the late 1970s, the USSR looked more authoritarian than at any time in its history. 

Ironically, the “dictatorship of the proletariat",which was formally abandoned as a state policy in 1936 came back in a different context in the form of the “absolute dictatorship of the CPSU”in late 1970s. But there were important differences between these two forms of dictatorships. The former “dictatorship of the proletariat,” was a form of positive discrimination in favour of industrial workers and poor peasants aimed at their empowerment and lifting them from poverty at record speed. Under this dictatorship working-class people had considerable opportunity to choose their representatives to elected institutions of Soviet power through exercising their democratic voting rights. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” was a stepping stone into a bright future which was indeed heralded in the 1960s and 70s.

The Soviet working class during this period had few commonalities with their fellow proletariat comrades in less developed parts of the world. It was an affluent middle class (not in Marxist sense) with access to all comforts and amenities of modern urban life. An extensive social safety net from cradle to grave was in place. Education was free from kindergarten to university levels with a rich variety of options available for professional and skills development for everyone at any stage. The USSR out of the necessity to produce army of skilled workers to drive rapid industrialization built a highly efficient system of technical education and training centered on a vast network of vocation schools (профессинально-техническо еучилище) and technical schools (техникум) which was a distinct excellence of the Soviet Union’s education system. The technical schools offered a three-year course in various engineering and technical subjects after completing the secondary school. 
Soviet Union’s universities and institutions of higher learning were incubators of excellence producing the country’s best minds in science and technology, who built the nuclear shield, opened the frontier in space research and developed cutting-edge technologies for powering its industrial development.  In 1957, a whole new science city called Academic town (Академгородок) was built in Siberia where more than 25 research institutes and facilities were established for conducting advanced research and training  the best of the best young scientists. Health care was free for all citizens. The right to work was enshrined as a fundamental right in the constitution. Everyone had a decent job. 

Our Soviet classmates in the final year of the academic programme were notified about their job placements in their chosen fields of study. There was no need to write resumes, find interlocutors to support in job search and engage in the tedious battle of landing a job. In contrast to their peers in western countries. Young Soviet graduates didn’t have to worry about repayment of student loans, because education was free. On the contrary, many had savings from the income they used to earn from working in construction teams during two months of summer recess at the end of each term. So, with a job at hand and no financial burden to carry on, young Soviet men and women could start their own families early in their career.

It  had a positive impact on demographic trends of the country. In contrast to many European countries, the Soviet Union in the early 1980s was not an ageing society. As mentioned in preceding chapters, government housing in modern apartment blocks was provided free or on nominal rents. Public transport was very cheap. A ride in the Moscow subway would only cost 5 kopeeks (equivalent to cents) to any destination. Similarly surface transport on buses and street cars (trams) was also cheap. A ride would cost only 4 cents. Bread baked in bakeries used to cost between 6 and 20 kopeeks depending on the size. Other food products sold in state-owned grocery outlets were also proportionately cheap. In privately-operated cooperative markets, wider assortment of raw and processed foods was also available at slightly higher prices. These were the main goodies that the Soviet Government offered its citizens in exchange for depriving them of their voting rights and accepting dictatorship of the CPSU. 

This bargain had been working well with no visible social discontent so long as the economy was on a growth trajectory and people’s standard of living was rising. But this bargain came at a cost, at the cost of gutting the flame of revolutionary consciousness among the working class which was critically needed in order for Soviet Union to continue its journey on the road to the next goalpost, communism, solemnly reasserted in the preamble of the 1977 constitution. 

Having lost all avenues to exert their stake in the political system, a mindset of indifference gradually set in. People in the grassroots started alienating themselves from the party. It was in stark contrast to early years of building socialism when the working class and the poor, the majority of the population, identified themselves with the party seeing it as their own. In fact, this vast reservoir of people’s goodwill and readiness to rise up to calls of the party in challenging days of socialist nation building and fascist aggression enabled the CPSU and Soviet government to accomplish unparalleled marvels in socio-economic development propelling a peasant-dominated country in 1917 to a space-faring modern industrial country in 1960. Economists world over still argue about the real growth rates of the Soviet economy during this period trying to downgrade Soviet official statistics. But to many unbiased watchers of Soviet nation building, it was indeed achieved with rocket speed. And the people, their enthusiasm and solidarity with the Party were the rocket booster. 

Khrushchev’s 12-year rule should best be seen as a launching pad to break away from Stalin’s model of centrally planned economy, which was consistent with the true spirit of the Soviet constitution. As we have discussed in the chapter on “Structure of Soviet Socialist Economy”, the national economy was organized as a single unit and its performance was assessed as a sum total of performances of individual sectors of the economy. The industries and enterprises belonging to specific sectors under administrative control of sectoral ministries were not independent entities. They were treated as constituents of a particular sector, mutually interdependent and integrated in a supply chain producing goods, which were used as raw materials or spare parts by the next higher level of customer in the supply chain and ultimately transformed into finished products. Because the production system was oriented toward collective goods for equitable sharing of material gains, it was not considered that all production units in the supply chain must earn profits. Even zero profitability for some production units was not a concern, the focus rather was on lowering the cost of production at each link of the supply chain so that profit can be extracted at the point of end result – from the final product and still its price can be kept lower so as to improve material well-being of all citizens. In this production system, targets were set for each constituent enterprise for production of designated goods against the allocated quantities of material and labour resources. 

When these targets were added up by constituent industrial enterprises, they were supposed to meet or exceed the aggregate target set for the particular industrial sector by the State Planning Committee based on its analysis of macroeconomy and forecast of national demand. National production target disaggregated by sector used to descend top down to industries for fulfillment. During Stalin’s time, fulfillment of set production targets was sacrosanct with no excuse for non-compliance. Harsh measures of accountability were in place for industry directors for not being able to fulfill targets. This was how a centrally planned economy delivered its miracles during the period of industrialization and post-war reconstruction.

However, with expansion of the size of the economy and diversification of its industry since the 1960s, Stalinist-model central planning and administrative control started showing limitations particularly with regard to rational use of material resources, improving efficiency of supply chain management, boosting labour productivity and maintaining high growth rate of the economy. There was yearning among Industry managers to break free from strict central control and exercise autonomy in running their enterprises based on economic efficiency. Particularly acute was the question how to make a worker do his/her job more productively with the same amount of material resources when the threat of punishment for showing lethargy in work performance receded. 

But the crux of the question was how to do that when the Soviet socialist economy was supposed to work for the wellbeing of entire people and not for the enrichment of individuals. In other words, material wellbeing at individual levels was supposed to improve hand in hand with improvement at the collective level. When in the 1960s, the USSR having travelled a glorious path of socialist nation building was poised to move into the next stage of economic growth to power its transition to advanced socialism, there was indeed a need for reforms to modernize management of the economy. And those reforms must have been sought to improve the functioning of the centrally planned economy through eliminating structural bottlenecks. When internal debates were raging in top party leadership on how to proceed, there was a small group of economists who opted to deploy the country’s scientific and technological prowess to devise sophisticated systems for automatization to curtail bureaucratic overload of the planning process, improve resource allocation, rationalize use of material resources in production and overcome constraints in supply chain management. In short, the solution for improving efficiency of the economy should have come from boosting efficiency of central planning through the use of modern technology-based tools and approaches. 

There was no shortage of talents and resources in the USSR to do that but what was missing was the courage and political will of the Soviet leadership in the post-Stalin era to rise up to this challenge. And by this yardstick, Joseph Stalin brilliantly stands out among those who led the Soviet Union throughout its existence. He was both a dreamer and a true practitioner of Marxist socialist ideology. In the late 1920s, he realized where the transition-phase New Economic Policy would lead if allowed to continue for an indefinite period. He rolled back NEP before it could spread roots deep into the economy and firmly set course on the path to building socialist planned economy. 

Stalin truly believed in the superiority of the Soviet economic model which he proved by eliminating post-revolutionary Russia’s 100-year development gap from Europe’s developed countries in a matter of decades powered by the strength of the economy he built. The Soviet Union’s dazzling success in industrialization and its booming economy in the 1930s when developed capitalist economies of US and Europe were mired in deep recession led ideologues of capitalism to shed their prejudices and give serious consideration to the socialist economic model. It was a rare moment in history when the ideologues of market economy were on the defensive. But this flame of confidence and unflinching belief in the correctness of the development path was extinguished with Stalin’s exit from the Soviet political stage. 

Stalin’s death marked the end of the first generation of Soviet leaders. This was the generation which grew with the experience of enduring imprisonment and exile under the Tsarist regime; accomplished revolution and snatched victories in the Civil War and the Great Patriotic War. Nikita Krushchev became the first of the second generation leaders who grew up in the Stalin era, during the years of industrialization and the Great Patriotic War. This generation was basically a generation of practitioners and real politicking for whom building socialism ceased to be an ideological battle and turned to be a boring routine job. 

In a sense, the Soviet Union which  was great; the country that put the western world on notice both militarily and ideologically; the country that was both feared and respected by its adversaries existed for a brief period till Joseph Stalin was in charge. A sense of defeatism and moral decay gripped the next generation of Soviet leaders. They ceased to believe in the superiority of the socialist planned economic model, lost confidence in its ability to deliver continued economic growth at the advanced stage of building socialism. So, in choosing the path of economic reform, the overwhelming preference of the Soviet leadership was for market-based approaches repackaged as material incentivization (материальная заинтересованность).

This was what defined the reform programme introduced in 1965 by Alexei Kosygin, the new head of the Soviet government. The programme was officially formulated as a transformation of  the economic system and management of the national economy of the USSR. As part of the reform programme, Khrushchev’s policy of economic decentralization was rolled back, the CNEs were abolished, all sectoral ministries were restored which again assumed ownership of industrial enterprises. Organizationally, the concept of national economy as a single unit with industrial enterprises vertically integrated in a top-down chain of command was loosened. The focus was shifted on improving efficiency of the economy of enterprises with introduction of material incentives and delegating to the management limited autonomy in making decisions on planning and managing production in their respective enterprises. 

From the to-do list for enterprises, the number of economic indicators set by central planners was reduced to curtail bureaucratization of the production process and allow more flexibility for planning at enterprise level; a new approach to price formulation was introduced. The emphasis shifted on volume of sale of finished products, earning revenues and making profits. Industry directors were made accountable for utilization of funds for payment of wages as well as funds for capital investment. Overfulfilment of production targets was encouraged which was supposed to induce enterprise managers to maximize use of available resources. 

Enterprise directors were allowed to retain a part of the revenues earned to form the fund for material incentivization. It was thought that from the material incentive fund jointly managed by representatives of the labour collective, it would be possible to reward high-performing employees. In fact, additional payments were so small compared with the basic salary that they couldn’t motivate workers to work more productively. Gradually, material incentive payments became simply a bonus to salary not related to work performance of the employees. 

In short, Kosygin’s reform programme was an attempt to graft principles of market-economy onto the pillars of central planning. It was an attempt to tailor drivers of the capitalist economy to fuel economic growth within the confines of a socialized production system. This inherent underlying contradiction of the elements of the reform programme sapped its ability to deliver and consigned it to failure. Hybridization of central planning and market elements was proving more disruptive than creative because neither could perform at their optimum level because of the barriers erected and contradictions introduced. Kosygin’s reform programme was abrogated in 1970. 

For a market economy to flourish there must be entrepreneurs who own means of production; who what and how much to produce; who have the freedom to find suppliers of raw materials, hire and fire workers, set wages for labour, set the prices for their products and find the customer. Production relations in a market economy are based on the spirit of private entrepreneurship where nothing matters more than the producer and customer with limited role for the government in regulatory control and occasional interference to shape market behaviour. These elements were simply non-existent in the Soviet economy where production relations in theory were socialist but state-directed in essence. Trying to portray Soviet industry directors as entrepreneurs by providing them with some authority in management of business affairs was pointless. Neither they nor the labour collectives owned these enterprises.

That nobody owned anything was not an aberration. The goal of the October Revolution was not to create entrepreneurs focused on personal enrichment but on creation of conditions where individuals will be focused on common public good working with socialized means of production and producing according to individual competence and ability with entitlement following according to labour invested. Soviet industry managers had no control on prices and supply chain management. In reality, a Soviet industrial enterprise was a collection of various means of production and facilities assembled to produce a certain category of goods, where the job of the director was to provide administrative oversight on behalf of the sectoral ministry and the job of the workers was to invest their labour working with the tools and means of production. Then who owned the enterprises and their properties? The textbook answer was society through the state. 

But in reality, a Soviet enterprise was nobody’s property. It seemed no more than a workplace oriented to fulfilling collective good equally benefiting all in the society. Socialized ownership was opaque. It was lost in the maze of bureaucratic control of various state authorities. Indeed, a major shortcoming of the organization of socialist economy was to find an owner of socialized property with the same drive to work as an owner of private property. Aware of this constraint, the Communist Party invented  such slogans as “Бережливое отношение к социалистическому имуществу (A thrifty attitude towards socialist property), “Хозяйское отношение к труду (Master’s attitude to work )” to imbue in public consciousness that socialized property is your property too. 

The patriotic propaganda worked amazingly at the initial stage, at lower level of socio-economic development when the majority of workers indeed tied improvements in their income and standard of living with the need to work hard and selflessly in socialized workplace. Subsequently as incomes rose with a decent work opportunity for all, standard of living improved and the state provided a generous universal social safety net, the drive to work harder evaporated, people became indifferent and they ceased to see the same level of personal stake in public property as did the generation of their fathers and grandfathers. Everyone’s focus was now directed to maintaining the status quo with a belief that the Soviet state somehow would continue to deliver the goodies no matter how they work. In such an environment, socialized public property was relegated to the status of an orphan; its fate started looking like a child growing in an orphanage. 

As we have stated in the foregoing, having dithered throughout the 1960s, stark reality was facing the leadership of the CPSU. The country was sitting on the cusp of a change and time was running out for the leadership to come forward with a reform package to forestall the economy's descent into sluggish growth. The beginning of the 1970s was the moment for initiating radical reforms without drastically upsetting the status quo and triggering social upheavals. If the Soviet leadership genuinely wanted Kosygin’s reform programme to succeed, there was no alternative but to deepen the scope of the reforms and remove structural barriers that constrained growth of the market economy.  It would have been a growth path that would take the country to state capitalism instead of socialism. 

The CPSU leadership would have to be prepared to do the undoable – abandon Marxism-Leninism or defer its relevance to a distant future. For the interim period, it could embrace social democracy tinged with Marxist flavour to the extent possible and pay lip service to adherence to the ideals of Marx and Lenin at each party congress. Given the tradition it was quite possible. The reports that General Secretaries of the CPSU used to read for hours at party congresses were so voluminous that few people had interest in sifting through the pages to grasp the meaning. Many were content with key messages and slogans assuring endurance of the revolutionary ideals. 

In this approach, there was a danger. The legitimacy of CPSU’s hold onto power would come under question. Particularly fearful were party elites and a huge army of bureaucrats sitting at the top of the economy to exercise socialist ownership of the means of production and run the economy. But there was a way to fend off this danger – pull the economy out of sluggish growth and stagnation and maintain high growth rates of the economy with continuous improvement in people’s standard of living powered by market economy. The ability to deliver economic growth would have given the CPSU a new legitimacy. But the fear to drastically change the course and heading down into uncharted territory was so great that party elders abandoned this option. The other option obviously was to restore the Stalin-era Soviet economic model. The CPSU should have ended flirtations with market-based approaches and instead concentrated on eliminating roadblocks that lowered efficiency of the centrally planned economy with approaches and methods consistent with the drivers of the socialist economy. 

As described in the foregoing, the Soviet Union’s tremendous scientific and technological capacity could have been deployed to invent  modern technologies for automation and digitization of the entire range of the planning process and production management, supply chain management, and other crucial links in the chain of command for running the economy. With these interventions, significant untapped growth potentials of the planned economy could be unlocked by implementing a range of measures. 

Unnecessary bureaucratic control at different layers of the planning system could be drastically reduced. The feedback from the bottom level could be improved by orienting the planning process to consider opportunities and comparative advantages of the regions. Substantial post-production losses could be reduced  through improved targeting of the weaknesses in supply chain management; rationalizing use of raw material and other resources in production of designated goods according to the planned targets. There was also an opportunity for improving the quality of consumer goods to match rising expectations of people. The improvement of the planning process with regard to production quantity vis-a-vis set targets could also help setting strict accountability for industry directors for compliance with fulfillment of original production targets. The so-called material incentives could be replaced by providing for automatic increase in labour wages with increase in gross output of products. This would have better reflected adherence to the Marxist ideology “…To each according to his labour”.

However, this approach was also not palatable. Because it would have questioned the moral integrity of the leadership since all Soviet leaders in the post-Stalin era sought to build their career on steadfast refusal of “totalitarian” and “barbaric” methods of running the classic Soviet economic model and dismantling Stalin’s legacy. So, putting a “human face” on their doings was an overriding priority for both the ideologues and practitioners of the top echelon of the CPSU’s leadership. With failure of each hybrid reform programme, the CPSU leadership under Leonid Brezhnev became more desperate in search of approaches to put market mechanisms in driving the socialist planned economy. But it contributed to further deepening the woes of the economy and setting stage for moral disintegration of the society. 
In the beginning of the 1970s, fresh efforts were undertaken to revive reforms. A new form of induction of material incentive in the workplace was rolled out on a pilot basis. This was brigade or team contract (Бригадный подряд) also known as “Zlobinsky method” by the name of the builder who demonstrated the possibilities of this form of labour organization. In this method, the work team (brigade) agreed with the management and committed to performing a certain amount of work in a given time-frame, as a rule, ahead of the planned schedule, without additional budgetary expenses. The workers, team members, shared the wage bill fixed in advance among them according to how much each worked. In 1983, almost 2 million people worked under this scheme. 

But it also failed to make much of a headway because most workers preferred a guaranteed equalized pay that gave them an acceptable level of income to sustain a decent middle-class (not in Marxist sense) standard of living. This should have served as a warning to the Soviet leadership that there was little demand from the grassroots for the so-called material incentive-based economic reform programmes they were adamantly pushing from the top. Working people’s response was quite natural because in the half decade since the victory of the October revolution, a new generation was grown up in a society where the concept of private ownership and material consumerism was condemned. Ideological propaganda was directed at encouraging people to work for collective good and not for personal enrichment. So the lure of material incentive which was the same as stimulating greed was not producing the desired effect. 

The state of the agriculture sector after the failure of Khrushchev's innovations was dire. At the same time Kosygin’s reforms were launched in industry, policy measures were also announced for the agriculture sector. These included a very significant hike in government procurement prices of agricultural products and reduction of the quota for mandatory deliveries of the output to the state. Both the collective and state farms were allowed to sell surplus production after fulfilling the state quota at prices higher than the fixed procurement prices. Collective farmers began receiving a monthly wage, which replaced earnings based on the number of actual hours worked. However, even the provision of greater autonomy to agricultural enterprises in managing their commercial operations couldn’t eliminate constraints with adequate supply of food in the rapidly urbanizing country. Throughout the entire period of Brezhnev’s rule, capital investments in the agriculture sector steadily increased, but with exception of a few, collective and state farms failed to achieve self-financing, the coveted state goal. The government had to provide enormous subsidies from the national budget to keep them afloat. Meanwhile, grain imports from abroad increased to meet the deficit in domestic supply of food.

It was obvious none of the introduced reforms was working. Yet the Soviet Government was in no mood to retreat from its chosen path – endless quest for material incentive-based approaches to stimulate and sustain economic growth. Accordingly, the Government moved ahead with new policy approaches in this direction. With great fanfare and in an impressive setting in the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses in presence of invited delegates of Communist parties from around the world, the CPSU held its 25^(th) Congress from 25^(th) February to 5 March, 1976. In this congress, the party’s chief ideologue, Mikhail Suslov, announced transition of the Soviet society to the next level of nation building - dilution of national identities in the multinational state and their merger into a pan-Soviet composite nation, called Soviet people (Советский народ). It was also announced that the Soviet society entered the stage of mature socialism (Зрелый социализам).  It also signalled that  the “state of the dictatorship of proletariat (государство диктатуры пролетариата)” had evolved into a “state of all people (общенародное государство).”