12 minute read
Back in the USSR: Sovietologist Dr. William
Back in the USSR.
On October 15, Dr. William Taubman— Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science Emeritus, at Amherst College— visited campus as the 16th annual Jarvis International Fund Lecturer, a series named for the Reverend Tony Jarvis, who for 30 years led Roxbury Latin as its 10th Headmaster. Dr. Taubman has a long and illustrious academic career as a “Sovietologist,” focused on the former Soviet Union, its politics and foreign policy. He has earned a number of awards and honors over his career, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships. His biography of Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, was the first comprehensive and scholarly biography of Stalin’s successor. The book won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. His latest book, Gorbachev: His Life and Times, chronicles Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise and how his liberal policies ended the Cold War. He delivered the following remarks to students and faculty in Hall:
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I’m delighted to be here, especially since your headmaster was a former student of mine at Amherst College where I taught for almost 50 years. Kerry asked me to talk about Russia—how the Soviet Union came to be the Russia that we know today, the role of key figures like Gorbachev and Putin, and U.S.- Russian relations today under Putin and Trump.
To understand this, you have to go way back, to Russia before it became the Soviet Union in 1917, to the rise and fall of the Soviet Union itself, to the early hopes in post-Soviet Russia for democracy and a partnership with the United States, to the way Putin led the way back to authoritarianism at home and a new cold war abroad. This is a lot to cover. I’ve taught several courses at college that tried to cover all of this, but this morning I’m going to do it in 20 minutes. I think. We’ll see.
I’m going to start in the present. A week ago Sunday, there was an article in The New York Times called “Welcome to Eastern Europe, America,” and the first paragraph reads this way: “The message of much Kremlin propaganda is not to showcase Russia as a beacon of progress, but to prove that Western politics is just as rotten as Vladimir Putin’s. We may have corruption, so the argument goes, but so does the West. Our democracy is rigged, but so is theirs.”
This was written by a former Russian now in immigration living in London. The piece continues, “Putin encourages the Russian public to trust nothing and yearn for a strong leader to guide it through the murk—a tactic much as common in Washington these days as in Moscow.” And then one more quote from this article: “When the Russian president,”— Putin, that is— “went on international television during the annexation of Crimea to smirk and say that there were no Russian soldiers on the peninsula and that the soldiers the world could see were just locals who happened to have bought Russian military uniforms, he wasn’t so much lying as demonstrating that he doesn’t care at all about facts, and by extension the rules governing his behavior.” Sound familiar?
We’ll get back to this at the end, but let’s go back to Russian history before 1917. There are two big things I want you to know about Russian history over those many centuries. The first is that Russia was ruled by an authoritarian regime. A czar at the top; no rule of law; no constitutional norms until the very end and then they weren’t observed; practically no experience with civic activity; hardly any tradition of democratic self-organization. And the second thing about Russia is the effect on the Russian people’s view of themselves—that they themselves couldn’t really be trusted to govern themselves and needed to be governed by a strong czar. How do we know this? There were no public opinion polls in those days, so I’m going to quote to you from a series of Russian peasant proverbs. Peasants formed 90 percent of the Russian population in those days.
Listen to these proverbs. “Great is the Holy Russian land and there is no room for the truth.” “Russian people are a stupid people.” (These are Russian proverbs!) “In Russia, thank God there is a hundred years’ supply of fools.” “It’s a sin to steal, but how to avoid it.” “Fear your friend as you would an enemy.” And here’s my favorite. “Politics is a rotten egg.” Politics, in other words, a dirty game, rule of law won’t work here, we need a strong czar to keep order. Now, Soviet Communism introduced in 1917 was supposed to change all of this, but actually it had the effect of intensifying it. The aim was to create Communism—full equality, full democracy, in effect heaven on earth—but Russia wasn’t ready for that. (If any place actually is—that’s a big question to discuss.)
After the revolution, the civil war began. Lenin, the first leader, resorted to force and dictatorship, and Stalin perfected a totalitarian system. Let me linger for a moment on the difference between authoritarianism under the czars and totalitarianism under Stalin. Under Stalin, the dictator used the Communist Party and the secret police to liquidate millions of real and imagined enemies. Probably very few real enemies. Most of them were imagined. An ideology, Marxism, Leninism dictated what citizens could and could not do, and people were encouraged to turn each other in. This had a devastating psychological effect on them, informing on one another—getting the people they didn’t like picked up by the secret police, taken away to the death chambers in the middle of the night.
How many innocent victims perished under Stalin? We don’t know, but it could have been tens of millions. Let me just give you some numbers. Collectivization of agriculture. Peasants herded into collective farms between 1929 and 1932, which involved driving 10 million peasants from the farm land where they lived. Many of them perished. The famine of 1932 to 1933 killed five million more. The great terror of the late 1930s? One million executed, most of them shot in the back of the head in police cellars. Four or five million sent to labor camps where many died, and these were only the highlights—or, I should say, the low lights.
And you can imagine what the effect of this must have been on the view of politics of Russian people. After Stalin died in 1953, we get Nikita Khrushchev, about whom I wrote that biography. He was in power until 1964. He denounced Stalin in 1956 in his famous secret speech. He hoped to reform the Soviet Union, but he encountered resistance and eventually retreated.
Let me say a word or two about Khrushchev and the Cold War. The Cold War began, of course, before Khrushchev took over, during and at the end of World War II. Khrushchev actually wanted to ease the Cold War, but it was actually on his watch that the two most dangerous crises of the Cold War occurred in Berlin and in Cuba in October 1962. Why did this happen? Well, the U.S. actually played a role, but Khrushchev
was, I think, the primary instigator of those crises because he operated according to a slogan. It wasn’t a slogan, it was a belief of his. He was in effect saying to the West, “Be my friend, or I’ll break your neck,” and so he threatened to oust the Western powers from Berlin. He sent missiles to Cuba. He was crude, rude, impulsive, explosive.
Let me give you a couple of examples. In 1958, Khrushchev received Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, who later became vice president of the United States under President Johnson. They had an all-night meeting practically, and at one point Khrushchev was threatening to bomb the United States if it came to that. I’m now quoting from my book. “Smiling slyly, Khrushchev asked Humphrey what his native city was, then got up from the table, approached a large wall map of the United States, and drew a circle around Minneapolis with a fat blue pencil. ‘That’s so I don’t forget to order them to spare the city when the rockets fly,’ he said. Humphrey apologized that he wouldn’t be able to reciprocate and spare Moscow.”
At another such occasion, when Averell Harriman, a senior Democratic statesman and negotiator for Kennedy, came to Moscow, Khrushchev told him Germany could be destroyed in 10 minutes. “Bonn and the Ruhr, that’s all of Germany. Paris is all of France. London is all of England. You have surrounded us with bases, but our rockets can destroy them. If you start a war, we may die, but the rockets will fly automatically.”
Khrushchev was succeeded in 1964 by Leonid Brezhnev, and the Brezhnev period—especially toward the end, when Brezhnev died in 1982—was characterized by stagnation. That means economic growth slowed. There were shortages of consumer goods. People stood in long lines to get food. Brezhnev himself was old and doddering and could barely understand anything by the end. Let me tell you a Brezhnev joke. This is not my joke. This was a Soviet joke that Soviets would tell each other and Westerners like me: There are 5,000 delegates at a Soviet party congress in the Kremlin. Brezhnev is droning on, and an agent comes up to Brezhnev and says, “There’s an imperialist agent in the hall.” And Brezhnev says, “Go get him.” And the agent walks 63 rows forward and 57 seats to the left and grabs the guy by the collar and brings him up to the podium. Brezhnev said, “How did you know he was the imperialist agent?” The Russian policemen says, “As the great Lenin said, ‘The enemies of communism never sleep.’” You got it? Think about it.
Gorbachev comes in 1985 until 1991 and, in my view, he is a hero. He introduced the first democratic elections. He introduced the first functioning parliament. He gave Russia free speech, and—with a little help from Ronald Reagan and George Bush—he ended the Cold War, but when he took the lid off the system with these reforms, all hell broke loose. The economy crashed even further than it had under Brezhnev because he eliminated the state controls that
had been managing it, but was afraid to try to introduce a market. Nationalism and ethnic separatism exploded in the constituent republics of the Soviet Union, especially the Baltic states—Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania—and political polarization exploded, too. Hardline Communists attempted a coup against him in August 1991, and radical Democrats led by Yeltsin, who turned out to be not-so-democratic, as we’ll hear in a moment, forced Gorbachev from power.
Jane [Amherst Professor of Russian Emerita, Dr. Jane Taubman] and I interviewed Gorbachev eight times for two hours each and met him many other times, and we concluded that he is a kind of tragic hero. Tragic because he was trying to democratize a country that had never known democracy and was still not ready to be democratized.
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Yeltsin became the president from 1991 to 1999. As I said at the beginning, hopes were high for democracy and partnership with the West, but it didn’t work out once again. The remnants of the Communist Party resisted, and at one point, Yeltsin grew so angry with them and so threatened by them that he actually bombed the parliament in order to save it. The economy crashed in 1998; Yeltsin resigned in 1999; appointed Putin as the acting president; and he won the election in 2000. At first, Putin sounded as if he were committed to democracy, and he was the first one—you may have heard—who called
“I certainly hope two things will happen: That the U.S. returns to a more traditional way of conductingourdemocracy, and that in Russia we will see what Gorbachev hoped for but never saw under his rule—that the democratization process will resume and continue and maybe even succeed. Butwhoknows?Itcould takealongtime.”
President Bush after 9/11 with support for the United States after that terrible day. But gradually he came to return to the kind of authoritarianism that had dominated Russia under the czars, and a new cold war abroad—interfering in the 2016 American elections, annexing Crimea, invading Ukraine. Hence the beginning of my talk, the references to Russia today under Putin. What about U.S.-Russian relations today? What about Trump and Putin? As we all know, Trump seems strangely fond of Putin, strangely determined to appease him in one way or another. Why? We don’t know. Could it be that somehow the Russians have blackmail information on him? What is motivating Trump? Well, I go back to that quote from The New York Times in the beginning. It seems to me that Trump and Putin are very similar in their attitude toward the truth, toward the facts, and even toward elements of democracy. Trump has been openly admiring of other dictators in Hungary and Poland, in Brazil, in the Philippines, maybe one even developing in Britain. So Russia is reverting to the Russian pattern. Putin and Trump are cooperating in a strange way. What about the future?
Relations between Russia and the United States depend on what happens in each country. Will the United States turn back to its more traditional way of operating before 2016? Will Putin leave office when his fourth term as president ends in 2024? (By that time, he will have been in power longer than Joseph Stalin.) I certainly hope two things will happen: That the U.S. returns to a more traditional way of conducting our democracy, and that in Russia we will see what Gorbachev hoped for but never saw under his rule—that the democratization process will resume and continue and maybe even succeed. But who knows? It could take a long time. //
Established in 2004, the F. Washington Jarvis International Fund Lecture has brought to campus many distinguished public servants and thinkers on foreign affairs. The fund is a generous benefaction of Jack Hennessy, Class of ’54, and his wife, Margarita. The Hennessys have, throughout their lives, represented an unusual engagement with other nations and cultures and have generously provided the philanthropic wherewithal so that others might come to know and appreciate our broader world. Through their generosity, hundreds of Roxbury Latin boys and masters have been afforded the opportunity to travel to foreign countries over the years, developing new perspectives on many political, economic, historical, and cultural issues.
