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Vladimir Shlapentokh - A Normal Totalitarian Society: How the Soviet Union Functioned and How It Collapsed

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A Normal Totalitarian Society: How the Soviet Union Functioned and How It Collapsed
Author:
Vladimir Shlapentokh
Publisher:
Routledge
Genre:
Books / Politics
Year:
2017
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A Normal
Totalitarian
Society

Non indignari, non admirari, sed intelligeri

Benedict Spinosa

First published 2001 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX 14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notices:
No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use of operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shlapentokh, Vladimir.
A normal totalitarian society : how the Soviet Union functioned and how it collapsed /
by Vladimir Shlapentokh.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-56324-471-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 1-56324-472-1 (pbk. : alk paper)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. CommunismSoviet Union. 2. Soviet UnionPolitics and government.
3. Totalitarianism. I. Title.

HX311.5 .S53 2001 2001032247
947.084dc21 CIP

ISBN 13: 9781563244728 (pbk)

ISBN 13: 9781563244711 (hbk)

To my father, Khaim (Emmanuil) Samoilovich Shlapentokh.
As the son of bourgeois parents,
he suffered greatly under the Soviet regime.
To his dying day, he never regarded the society as normal.

Contents

2. Two Components of Soviet Ideology:
Socialism and Russian Nationalism

6. Policy Toward Key Social Groups Workers and
Creative Intelligentsia

7. The Political System The Supreme Leader As
the Major Institution

I would like to extend a special thanks to Joshua Woods for his high intellectual contribution to this book. As my editor, he not only improved my English immensely, but offered numerous critical comments and suggestions that significantly enhanced the quality of the manuscript. Answering Joshuas perspicacious and often merciless questions, I was forced to rethink the logic of the narration, look for new arguments, and find more data to meet his concerns as my first and most demanding reader.

Thanks also to Emil Golin, Aron Katsenelinboigen, Vladimir Kontorovich, Mikhail Loiberg, and Dmitry Shlapentokh, who shared their deep knowledge of Soviet society and gave me excellent advice. Of course, none of them shared all of my views on the Soviet past. I would like to thank Jeffrey Brooks for reading and commenting on this manuscript prior to publication. I deeply appreciated Patricia Kolbs intellectual support of the project. My special gratitude goes to Rebecca Ritke for her exceptional and useful work as a copyeditor. I would also like to thank Vera Bondartsova for her help in preparing the manuscript.

When Harry Greenes book Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature hit the stands in 1997, nobody suspected him of emotional bias in his study of the history of snakes. As a herpetologist, Greene predictably discussed snake evolution, locomotion, adaptation, nomenclature, mimicry and habits. Circumventing emotional sympathies, he delved into the anatomy and physiology of his subject with scientific rigor. I hope my efforts in this text will be accepted as those of the herpetologist who views his subject without preconceived sympathies.

I admit that my attitude toward the Soviet state, in which I lived for roughly fifty years, was anything but affectionate. I spent much of my adult life loathing the Soviet system. In the late 1940s, I and my late friend and confidant Isaak Kantorovich realized that the totalitarian essence of Soviet society was no different from that of Hitlers regime. The deep anti-Semitism of the Soviet political elite deepened our hatred of the system. As students at Kiev University, however, we kept our conclusions about the system strictly to ourselves. In these years, we dreamed of leaving the Soviet Union, a fantasy that seemed as feasible as a voyage to Mars. We even invented a code name for this enterprise: the Dzungarian Gate (a mountain passage from Soviet Central Asia to Chinas Xinjiang Province).

I maintained my hatred for the system even after 1953, when mass terror disappeared. I never became a member of the Communist Party. In 1979, 1 emigrated from the Soviet Union with great joy. With a clear understanding of this emotional past, I have nonetheless attempted to examine Soviet society dispassionately.

Today, the analysis of twentieth-century Russian history is fraught with strong and conflicting opinions. It polarizes all branches of the social sciences, from history and economics to sociology. The concept of consensus is alien to this field; European, American, and even Chinese and Indian history look quite homogeneous in comparison. The lack of consensus can be attributed to the heavy influence of moral assessments in the analysis of Russian society. No other country in the world has been the object of such ideologically and politically opposed passions. The birth, life and death of Soviet society were unprecedented in world history. Those who study this society come from vastly diverse ideologies and positions, leaving even the simplest questions unsettled.

Scholars, historians, economists and sociologists who study Soviet society should take a lesson from the herpetologist and conduct their analysis without placing moral judgments on the subject. As scientists, they should drop the terms good and bad from their professional lexicon. They should also resist measuring the subject by preestablished criteria (i.e., true Marxist socialism, civilized capitalism, or ideal Russian society based on national traditions). Both Soviet and post-Soviet society should be approached as social animals (reptiles, for that matter). Our goal as scientists is to understand the anatomy and physiology of the subject, not to anchor our understanding in the endless circle of moral comparison. We should take this path even if it looks naive to the postmodern relativists, who reject historical reality in the same way the admirers of the class approach denounced bourgeois objectivity as a political sin in Soviet times. A different view on the role of morals in the study of Soviet society has been advanced by patriarchs of Sovietology such as Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest, who think that moral judgments should play an important role (Pipes 1993a, p. 512; Conquest 1994, p. 3).

If our aim is the objective analysis of the Soviet past, we must purge our feelings and delete the concepts of higher and lower. We should abandon the example of various Sovietologists of the past who expressed moral indignation toward Soviet society or who used a revisionist blueprint of Soviet society for a moral censure of the West. The time has come to retire the cold war paradigm that tainted the debates on the Soviet Union with pious ideologies of left and right.

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