N26 - The Rise of the Soviet Union
So, we’re about to embark on a multi-post series comparing the challenges facing the modern US to those facing the late Soviet Union. To start, I’ll attempt to establish a baseline of knowledge on the history of Russia and the USSR—this may be remedial for some, but will help to set the context for upcoming posts. This post covers pre-Soviet Russian history and that of the Soviet Union during the upward portion of its trajectory. The next post will cover the downward portion of its trajectory and post-Soviet Russian history, and subsequent posts will focus on analyzing the situation of the US today through the lens of Soviet history.
Pre-Soviet History
Early Russian states evolved under the influence not only of the European states to their north and west, but also of the Byzantine Empire to the south and of the Mongol/Turkic Golden Horde to the east. This resulted in a society that, while deeply rooted in the Christian tradition, was also heavily engaged with the economy and politics of central and east Asian civilization. Over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, Russia expanded eastward, taking enormous amounts of territory from various khanates and Siberian peoples until it reached the Pacific.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, it came to be regarded as a great power of Europe, participating in numerous wars and attempting to modernize in the mold of other European powers. By 1861 it had ended the institution of serfdom, and by the end of the 19th century it was experiencing significant pressure from various popular movements to shift the balance of political and economic power towards the masses. Russia’s defeat by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 undermined the public’s trust in the Tsarist regime’s competence, and the immense costs in both lives and money of Russia’s participation in World War I were the final straw leading to the Russian Revolution in 1917, which overthrew the Tsar and paved the way for the establishment of the USSR in 1922.
Rise of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (henceforth “the Party”) and its predecessors (the Russian Communist Party and the Bolsheviks) were created to enact a socialist revolution on behalf of the working class, which still lagged far behind its counterparts elsewhere in Europe in terms of economic well-being and wanted desperately to catch up. The urgency of this mandate allowed the Party to achieve a level of centralized control that, in retrospect, most modern readers will find inherently concerning as a feature of government. The Party considered itself the “vanguard” of the revolution, meaning that it saw itself as the natural leader of the less qualified members of the proletariat. As a result, Party leadership had little direct accountability to the broader populace. In case this system wasn’t already sufficiently skewed towards the bulldozer end of the axis, the Party’s 10th Congress in 1921 prohibited all dissent on a given topic once an initial decision had been made.
This degree of centralization did confer some advantages. Given that Russia had already observed the industrialization of its European rivals (Britain, Germany, etc), it had a clear idea of which industries it should focus on to catch up with them and was therefore able to industrialize more rapidly than earlier industrializers under the supervision of the state.1 In the late 1920s under Stalin, the Soviet government began forcibly reconfiguring the economy with a series of “five-year plans” that set specific production goals for key sectors of the economy (primarily agriculture and heavy industry). For instance, the first five-year plan, which lasted from 1928-1932 (it ended a year ahead of schedule), prioritized (a) collectivizing agriculture in order to boost agricultural output to feed more urban workers and to redistribute resources away from wealthy peasants and (b) developing heavy industry in order to support the Soviet military and to allow for the mechanization of agriculture.
This state-led economic transformation also came with enormous costs. Ukraine was a founding member of the USSR and contained some of the most productive agricultural regions in the country. It was therefore a prime target of the government’s forced agricultural collectivization programs. This collectivization was based on the idea that essentially all agricultural resources were the property of the state and could therefore be distributed as the state saw fit, with no regard for the preferences of its previous owners. Those who resisted faced imprisonment, torture, and death, and those who cooperated had little incentive to work efficiently. The ensuing productivity crash, combined with overly ambitious procurement requirements, resulted in mass starvation. Because of imprecise record-keeping and government secrecy, the exact death toll is not known, but modern estimates range from 3 to 7 million famine deaths in Ukraine alone and 6 to 9 million in the USSR overall.
Opposition to outcomes this devastating would be inevitable in any country, even one as authoritarian as the USSR, but Stalin used the assassination of a high-ranking Party official in 1934 to launch a campaign of repression known as the Great Purge that began with investigations into the loyalty of government officials, but eventually expanded to civilians in a campaign of terror that claimed the lives of roughly a million people. Use of the Gulag system of forced labor camps also intensified during this period. Political repression would continue throughout Soviet history (and to a lesser degree in post-Soviet Russia), but never again reached the levels seen under Stalin—some historians attribute as many as 20 million excess deaths to Stalin’s leadership.
Nevertheless, the Soviet Union established itself as a superpower under Stalin. It played a crucial role in the Allied victory in World War II, inflicting roughly four times as many casualties on Germany as did the rest of the Allies combined and suffering by far the most casualties of any participant in the war.2 It emerged from the war a fully-fledged industrial power, second only to the US in terms of both military and economic heft. By 1949, it had become the second state to develop nuclear weapons, and by 1957 it had beaten the US to become the first country to put a satellite into orbit. It had conquered the Baltic nations during the war and began forcibly collectivizing them a few years later. Much of the rest of eastern and central Europe, while not part of the Soviet Union proper, was under de facto Soviet control. This included East Germany (minus the Allied sections of Berlin), Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria (with Yugoslavia and Albania under communist governments outside of Soviet control).
So—in the span of half a century, Russia transformed itself from a predominantly agricultural society that lagged dramatically behind Europe, the US, and Japan in terms of its military capacity into the US’s only meaningful rival for global hegemony. The scale and rapidity of this transformation was enabled by the extreme centralization of authority in the Soviet government and by its willingness to accept enormous costs in human lives and freedom. As the next post in this series will explore, however, the Soviet system would quickly run up against limits imposed by this same structure and ideology.
This pattern, in which the speed and degree of state control of industrialization in a given country are inversely correlated with how early that country industrialized, was articulated by Russian-American historian Alexander Gerschenkron in his 1951 essay Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. Gerschenkron noted that the first countries to industrialize (i.e. the UK and the US) did so slowly and in a relatively decentralized, laissez-faire manner; since there was no model to guide their progress, the state lacked the requisite knowledge of the industries in question to impose top-down change. In the second wave of industrialization (primarily Germany and France, but also including most of continental Europe), states took a more active role, deliberately accelerating the progress of specific industries via financial support. Finally, in Russia (and later in other non-European authoritarian countries), the state took full control of major industries to achieve a specific vision of development/industrialization.
If you haven’t seen the linked video there, I’d strongly recommend taking the 18 minutes needed to watch it.