History has a way of taking its revenge on those who would violate it. It does not forget. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich are some of the few Soviet-born intellectuals who have studied how much current Soviet policies and propaganda abuse Russian history. Their book is an eloquent effort to set straight the historical record since the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917. It is thorough, balanced, and massively documented with primary sources from a broad range of scholarship. With apologies to Dr. Donald Treadgold (author of the classic Twentieth Century Russia), Utopia in Power is now the best general history of the Soviet Union available. A fourth of the book is devoted to the first five years of Communist Party rule, culminating in the death of Lenin, whose legacy is a key for understanding all that follows. Stalin is presented as the natural heir to Lenin, because he alone among the survivors grasped the fundamental truth: Marxism-Leninism is essentially an ideology to preserve and expand power. So long as this requirement is met, any expedient policy is justifiable.

In March of 1918, Lenin demanded that a peace treaty be signed with imperialist Germany at Brest-Litovsk, which would give the Germans the Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Baltic states—all of which belonged to Imperial Russia. Trotsky, Bukharin, and others were opposed to this compromise with capitalism, but Lenin reasoned that the treaty allowed the Communists to hold power, from which all else would follow.

In addition to leading the Soviet Union into the civil war and the famine of 1921-22, thereby causing over 15 million deaths, Lenin also created and presided over the Soviet secret police, the propaganda and censorship apparatus, the concentration camps, the state planning of the economy, and the structure of the party and government. With the exception of the 15 million, all of these achievements live on today, in the Soviet Union of Mikhail Gorbachev—including the sophistry and rationales for proposed reforms.

Heller and Nekrich make a compelling case that Stalin was the logical successor to Lenin. An instinct for power dominated his commitment to Marxism-Leninism. Killing and deporting Kulaks, collectivizing, and later starving the peasants, executing his fellow revolutionaries, decapitating his armed forces on the eve of World War II, and signing a pact with Nazi Germany all showed Stalin’s priority—the extension of power, even if it meant nearly destroying his country. As Hitler’s armies swept through the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 and the Baits, Belorussians, Ukrainians, and others escaped their Soviet masters, Stalin rallied his people with, of all things, an appeal to ancient Russian Orthodoxy and patriotism. The Soviet deaths from World War II (13.6 million soldiers; 7.7 million civilians) and citizens killed by the Soviet State (25-60 million) are some of the grim ingredients of Stalin’s omelette.

It is frequently asserted that the brutality of Lenin and Stalin was a necessary part of their attempt to modernize the Soviet Union. The facts are that in 1910 the Russians, with a population of 180 million, exported 40 percent of the world’s grain. Seventy years later they are massively importing it. Their housing, on a per capita basis, in 1940 was half of what it was before 1917. There is a good case to be made that the Bolshevik seizure of power actually set back industrialization.

Heller and Nekrich have a soft spot for Khrushchev. They do point out his brutality in 1956 in Hungary and his naiveté and amateurism in causing sudden policy changes in agriculture, the military, literature and the arts (his “Thaw” refroze almost as soon as it began). But Khrushchev did one redeeming thing: He exposed the evils of Stalin. Admittedly, he did it to implicate potential rivals to power, but he did do it.

In addition to providing a wealth of statistics on economic decline and growth during the different eras of Soviet power, Nekrich and Heller also bring to light the historical circumstances and policies toward the family, religion, culture, and education. They present detailed accounts of the artists and writers who chose to support and legitimize the regime: those like Gorky, Ehrenburg, Eisenstein, as well as of those who defied it: Zamyatin, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Solzhenitsyn, and many others. The whys and the hows of state control of social and cultural institutions are poorly understood in the West, with our basic premise of limited government. Soviet totalitarianism must weave everything together, in a web of total control.

In the United States there is now intense discussion of the extent to which education should teach the Judeo-Christian moral tradition as opposed to simply teaching mental skills. From Pravda of June 9, 1984, we learn a different idea: “Their (the schools’) job is to awaken the aspiration to become an exemplary soldier.” From Problems of Philosophy, again in 1984, we learn that: “It is as though the army at a certain stage takes the ‘baton’ from the family or the labor or educational collectives, and later, after active duty as a fighting man has been completed, the army returns it—now with a higher level of breeding—to the same or other collectives of the types mentioned above.” So much for the debate on values in education.

Sometimes, the authors speculate: The breakdown of the Soviet-American disarmament talks of 1960 due to the U-2 incident and other issues is interpreted as a capitulation to the Chinese, who distrusted a Soviet-American accord. It seems more likely that a Soviet desire to catch up in nuclear weapons had to be the prime motivator—not a concern for Chinese opinion.

The authors also believe that the Soviets sensed President Kennedy’s strong resolve through his meeting with Khrushchev in June of 1961, as well as his subsequent management of the Berlin Wall crisis of August 1961. More likely, Khrushchev saw Kennedy as young and inexperienced, especially after the Bay of Pigs fiasco of April 1961, which in turn led to the crisis of the Berlin Wall. The U.S. response to the Wall could hardly be called resolute, and it is likely that the June Summit contributed to the impression of weakness. These weak reactions probably led to the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, when we finally did stand up to the Soviets.

Given the nearly 70 years of the practice of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union, a time longer than the average span of life in that country, it would be reasonable to expect some proofs of a superiority of Soviet life over that of the West—the claim that had set the original Revolution in motion. Instead, Soviet living standards are those of the Third World; rates of alcoholism are the world’s worst; and the rate of imprisonment is more than 3.5 times greater than the U.S.

Nikita Khrushchev, dictating his memoirs in the late 1960’s, makes a point about emigration: “It’s incredible to me that after fifty years of Soviet power, paradise should be kept under lock and key.” Of course, if smiling Mikhail Gorbachev really did want to practice openness, he should simply join the international community and allow all of his workers the right to emigrate from his paradise. That would be a sure sign that the Soviet system is superior and that its leaders actually believe in it. If that idea were too radical, however, perhaps Gorbachev would first allow Soviet citizens an opportunity to read Utopia in Power.

 

[Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union From 1917 to the Present, by Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich; New York: Summit Books]