John Barber

Where is the Soviet Union going? Despite the many striking changes since the death of Brezhnev in November 1982 and particularly since the election of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary in March 1985, it is still far from clear what their result will be. For all the turnover in the leadership, more extensive than at any time since Stalin’s purges of the late Thirties; for all the attack on corruption, with ministers, Central Committee members, regional party secretaries arrested and punished; for all the drive for discipline, with hard-hitting measures against alcoholism and a squeeze on unearned income; for all the innovations in industrial management, agriculture and foreign trade, it is too soon to tell whether the Soviet system is undergoing radical reconstruction or merely modest improvement.

Nothing in the history of modern revolution illustrates so vividly the contrast between the ideals of a revolution’s makers and the catastrophes it may be fated to endure as do the Great Purges of 1937-38 in the USSR. It was then that Stalin unleashed the NKVD in a murderous onslaught against all key sections of state and society: the Communist Party and the government apparatus, industrial management and the military, scientists and technical specialists, writers and artists, as well as ordinary workers and peasants. More Communists perished in the Purges, it has been remarked, than in the struggle against Tsarism, the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War combined – among them, many of Lenin’s closest comrades. The flower of the Soviet intelligentsia was destroyed and cultural life paralysed for two decades. Great damage was inflicted on both the Soviet Union’s economy and its defences. Meanwhile the last remaining vestiges of revolutionary Bolshevism were eliminated and a despotic regime created, buttressed by a grotesque cult of Stalin’s personality and by the powerful machinery of a police state.’

If success in predicting the future is any criterion of analytical accuracy, Sovietology must be among the least exact of social science disciplines. The record of Western specialists on Soviet affairs in forecasting the direction of change in the USSR has been remarkably poor. The imminent overthrow of Lenin’s government in 1917, the victory of the Whites in the Civil War; the natural reversion to capitalism in the 1920s, the impossibility of modernising through a centrally-planned economy in the 1930s, the weakness of the Red Army on the eve of the Second World War, and Soviet technological backwardness in the 1950s, before Sputnik and Gagarin inaugurated the space age, are only a few of the discarded orthodoxies about the Soviet Union over past decades. Predictions of leadership changes have been even less successful. On Lenin’s death the natural successor was held to be Trotsky or Zinoviev. (The inconspicuous Stalin was then and for some time regarded as a cautious moderate far more acceptable to the West than his more prominent rivals.) When Stalin died, the consensus of expert opinion was that more of the same individual despotism was likely, with Beria, Malenkov or Molotov as the new dictator. Surprise at the outsider Khrushchev’s rise to power was exceeded only by that at his sudden fall in 1964. Brezhnev, on the other hand, gave observers plenty of time to identify his successor. Shelepin, Suslov, Mazurov, Kirilenko and Chernenko were among the candidates favoured at various times by the Western media, though not as it happened by the Politburo. One name was notable for its absence from speculation about the succession until the very end of the Brezhnev era. The orthodox view was that the Soviet leader could not possibly be a man who had been head of the KGB for as long as Yuri Andropov.