Ronald Suny - Red Flag Unfurled

Every history is embattled in some sense, but perhaps none more than the history of Russia, particularly that of the Soviet Union. The history of the USSR in particular is public property in a way that histories of most other countries are not. As the American humorist Will Rogers said, Russia is a country that no matter what you say about it, its true. Even if its a lie, its true. If its about Russia. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and since the cause for which the USSR stood no longer holds its former potency, there appears less incentive to try to tell the story in its full complexity and moral ambiguity. The market appreciates the simplified anti-Communist version, complete with the dramas and tragedies of Stalinism, the Gulag and the Terror. The central metaphor for the Soviet experiment is the prison camp, and the central figure is neither the states founder, Vladimir Lenin, nor the well-intentioned reformer who unraveled the system, Mikhail Gorbachev, but Stalin, the heir of the revolution and, for many, its gravedigger. While academic historians might still engage in subtle and elaborate explanations of the ambitions, successes, and failings of the Soviet regime, their publications find a small professional audience, while most popular accounts range from indictments to flat-out condemnations. The monster must be killed over and over again, for, like the killer in slasher films, it may rise again, perhaps in a new form, authoritarianism-light, capitalist but statist, headed by a small, fit, dour policeman.

The past, it is said, is another country; they do things differently there.half a century ago, at the beginning of the 1960s, the present seems to be another planet! It is not the world we anticipated. Then the objects of our study, the Soviet Union and Communist regimes in East Central Europe, were alive if not well, and few imagined that Lenins utopian vision, even after its descent into Stalinist nightmare, would collapse so abruptly at a moment of neo-liberal triumph. In those heady years when change really meant change, the interest in varieties of socialism and the analytical potential of Marxist approaches, particularly in the emerging field of social history, invigorated a generation of scholars, not only to attempt to understand the mysterious Second World, but to question the orthodoxies and complacency of Cold War scholarship and even Western liberalism. When I was a young professor at Oberlin College, a liberal oasis in northeastern Ohio, a senior professor of religion came into my modest office, past the larger-than-life-size poster of Lenin on the door, and asked me, Is it true that you are a Marxist? In those youthful days, confident in my radicalism, I assured him I was. How quaint! he said. You know, he continued, you on the Left believe in the goodness of man and therefore are always disenchanted, while we who believe in Original Sin expect the worst and are never disappointed by what happens.

For the Left, in so far as a Left actually existed in the United States, and for liberals as well, certainly the next few decades were ones of disappointment and disenchantment. The last spasm of hope for many of us came with the Gorbachev experiment in radical reform from above that ended only too quickly, in the catastrophic collapse, not only of Soviet Communism but of any real third way alternatives to the triumph of neo-liberal economics and, eventually, neo-conservative politics. The Soviet studies profession limped along, trying to find its feet in a much-disparaged field called area studies. Sovietology was discarded on the trash bin of history; economics of non-capitalist societies evaporated as a field of study; though, it should be noted, other disciplines revivedhistory benefiting from the newly opened archives and anthropology and sociology now able to benefit from field work in regions hitherto closed to investigation.

A new teleology shaped Soviet historiography, since, for many historians, failure and collapse appeared to be written into the story, even into the genetic code of the revolution. More consequentially than how Soviet socialism was interpreted, the end of Communism and the Soviet empire in East Central Europe dragged down virtually any socialist alternative to Western capitalism. Almost every form, from mild European Social Democracy to Third World revolutionary movements, was weakened or discredited. To be sure, the erosion of the postWorld War II Social Democratic moment was already underway long before 1991, as neoliberal capitalism in advanced countries subverted unions and welfare programs in aid of a transnational competition that has been sanctified and naturalized as the inevitable, agentless force of history known under the anodyne rubric globalization. But the collapse of the USSR appeared to confirm the perversity of Marxism as political practice and a view of history. The principal critical analysis of capitalism and imperialism, the major opponent of Western capitalism in both Western socialist parties and in the Soviet support of national liberation movements and Communist partiesMarxismwas swept from politics in much of Europe and the United States, driven into universities where, enfeebled, it would occasionally be taught to freshmen through a process of inoculation: give them one short text to read, preferably a pretty dense one, and they will be immune to Marx for life.

In the absence of significant secular revolutionary or reformist alternatives to the new world order of Western capitalism and democracy, unanticipated new forces, much more conservative and religious, appeared, first in Iran in the revolution of the ayatollahs in 1979, in the Muslim Brotherhood movements in Egypt and elsewhere, in the mujahidin resistance to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, which metastasized into the jihadist radical Islamic movements of the present. A Green Menace replaced the Red. Enrollments in Russian and Soviet history courses dropped while professors scrambled to find hotter, more relevant topics to teach.