Daniels - The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia

Robert V. Daniels

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College.

Copyright 2007 by Robert V. Daniels.
All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Set in Ehrhardt Roman by IBT Global.

Printed in the United States of America by IBT Global.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Daniels, Robert Vincent.

The rise and fall of Communism in Russia / Robert V. Daniels. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-0-300-10649-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. CommunismSoviet UnionHistory. I. Title.

HX311.5D38 2007

947.084dc22

2006022011

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In the late 1940s, when I began studying the history of Communism in Russia, it was already a thirty-year phenomenon of extraordinary complexity and moral ambiguity. By then, its most tumultuous, tragic, and ironic years lay in the past. The task I set myself was twofold: to explain how the realities of governing had shaped the early revolutionary regime and to analyze the ongoing character of the Soviet system in my own time. My dual subject proved to be one of deep paradox and contradictionthe formation and ultimate exhaustion of a postrevolutionary regime that steadfastly refused to admit its deviation from its own revolutionary ideals. Very early in my studies I observed that the development of Soviet society was not toward socialism but to quite another social order, rationalized with the obligatory socialist terminology. Attempts at reform from Nikita Khrushchev to Mikhail Gorbachev only underscored the difficulty, perhaps the futility, of correcting this inherently false basis of the system.

My quest to understand the evolution of the Soviet phenomenon resulted in The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (1960), expanding on my doctoral dissertation, and subsequent books, including A Documentary History of Communism (1960; 3rd ed. 1993), The Nature of Communism (1962), Red October: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (1967; repr. 1984), RussiaThe Roots of Confrontation (1985), and finally The End of the Communist Revolution (1993). Along with these works, over the years, I have written a series of articles and conference papers amplifying or extending my inquiry. The present work is designed to make these studies more broadly available and to highlight their significance by combining them in book form according to their logical and chronological connections, not necessarily in the order of their composition. This is, in fact, the nearest thing to a general narrative of the Soviet saga that I have attempted.

After the introductory essay on the main themes of Soviet history, part I of this book addresses the ideological background of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet experience. Part II analyzes the revolutionary process in Russia, including Leon Trotskys latter-day assessment of it, and part III treats the struggle of the Left Opposition against Lenin and then Stalin. Part IV examines Stalinism, central to the Soviet experience, and parts V and VI investigate the sequence of efforts to reform the system that Stalin bequeathed to his heirs. Finally, part VII presents some post-Soviet perspectives on the Soviet experience as a whole.

The particular publications and papers on which the respective chapters of the book are based are identified in the endnotes. I have edited the original texts to eliminate overlap, improve readability, and highlight the logical flow from one item to the next. However, I have not felt a need to redo their substance or revise my judgments, except to correct tenses as necessary from the present to the past. If I have had second thoughts, they would temper the optimism about Russia that I expressed in the late 1980s and again in the late 1990s.

Hopefully this collection can be read as a whole, as an analytical history of the Soviet experience from the Revolution of 1917 to the collapse of 1991. The work does not claim comprehensiveness and touches but little on social life, the national minorities, or foreign relations. This is not to minimize the significance of those spheres of Soviet history; it simply reflects the focus of my own interest in Russian national politics and political thought, the realm that I happen to feel was most crucial in shaping the destiny of the Soviet peoples. I hope that my studies in this area, as I have attempted to rework them into a coherent whole, make a worthwhile contribution to understanding the multifarious Russian past that still weighs upon everyone who has emerged from it.

Countless friends and colleagues helped me with their thoughts and comments as I formulated the original studies underlying the present collection. My research and writing were facilitated at various times by the generosity of a number of institutions, including the Harvard Russian Research Center (now the Davis Center for Russian Studies), the Project on the History of the CPSU at Columbia University, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, and the International Research and Exchange Board (IREX), together with periodic sabbaticals afforded me by the University of Vermont. In the work of organizing and revising my articles I have had helpful comments from Professor David Macey, Professor Mark Von Hagen, and my son, Professor Thomas L. Daniels. My wife, Alice M. Daniels, has backed me up throughout my years of struggle to produce the elements of this work. I am indebted to Jonathan Brent, Kate Shepard, and Sarah Miller of the Yale University Press for their editorial guidance in producing the present volume, to Debra Smail of the University of Vermont for the arduous work of putting my revisions into readable form, and to Robin DuBlanc for meticulous copyediting of the end product.

In transliterating Russian names I have employed a modified Library of Congress system, using more familiar forms such as the -sky ending in personal names (for example, Trotsky, not Trotskii). Place names accord with the usage of the moment (for example, Petrograd from 1914 to 1924 but Leningrad from 1924 to 1992). Dates are Old Style (thirteen days behind the West) until the reform of 1/14 January 1918. In style, my preference is to capitalize Communist, Communism, Left, Right, and so on when they refer to actual people and movements and to lowercase them when they refer to theoretical concepts and abstract political positions (like the American usage of Republican and republican and the like). Soviet is capitalized when it refers to the country or the system, lowercased when it refers to the governmental councils.