Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 by Stephen Kotkin Read Free Book Online Page B

initiative. Even so, the 1941 pre-invasion population of 200 million was not reached again until 1956. The war was an enduring catastrophe.
    Politically, the war broke the regime-imposed isolation.
    Millions of Red Army soldiers advanced beyond Soviet borders, and most were stunned by what they saw. ‘I was a member of the Communist party, I was an officer in the Red Army,’ wrote Peter Gornev. But ‘in Finland, Poland, and Germany, I saw that most people were better off than we were. Soviet propaganda had told us just the reverse.
    The Soviet government had always lied to us. Now I had a chance to escape from the lies.’ 1 Here was the classic disillusionment story, better known from the anthology ‘the God that failed’. 2 Among displaced Soviet subjects like Gornev, a few hundred thousand avoided return. But more than three million were repatriated from the US, French, and British occupation zones of Germany. This substantial population with first-hand experience of the outside world frightened the Soviet leadership. Even returning POWs and slave labourers, who somehow managed to survive German captivity, were made to pass through special screening; many disappeared in the Soviet camp complex colloquially known as the Gulag.
    Western annexations, following the Red Army advance, meant that several million people who had not lived under the Soviet regime during the ‘heroic’ 1930s mobilizations to build socialism found themselves incorporated into the USSR. Mass deportations sought to quell opposition 33
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    among them, but in the Baltic republics and western Ukraine partisans sustained guerrilla wars through the late 1940s and early 1950s. By this time, large-scale mutinies rocked the Gulag, which held close to three million convicts in labour camps alone, more than one-third incarcerated for political crimes, the rest for so-called common crimes (theft, drunkenness, rape, murder). Protesting camp inmates had engaged in hand-to-hand combat in the defence of Stalingrad; now serving twenty-five-year terms, they were not afraid of much. Shouting slogans such as ‘Long Live the Soviet Constitution!’, they demanded an eight-hour work day, unrestricted correspondence with family members, periodic visits, and judicial review of cases. They were strafed by Soviet warplanes.
    Few inhabitants inside the Soviet Union learned of the revolts in the Gulag or of the forest-dwelling anti-Soviet partisans. What they did know was that the country had withstood the Nazi war machine. Many hoped changes and a better life would follow. Unsolicited reform proposals poured forth, advocating competition among enterprises and private trade, but they were relegated to the archives. 3 Victorious, the Soviet dictatorship felt no imperative to change, and fell back upon familiar patterns of bureaucratic hyper-centralization and economics by command. Propagandists exhorted the weary populace to rebuild the country, which they did, brick by brick, despite the harangues. The state media revived the pre-war theme of hostile capitalist encirclement, and relentlessly demon-ized the West, casting Soviet deprivation, once again, as a 34
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    matter of heroic sacrifice. Heavy industry, as in the 1930s, received the bulk of investment, and the country regained—and, by 1950, surpassed—its pre-war Fordist-style industrial base. It also exploded its own atomic bomb.
    Stalin’s death in 1953 was a psychological blow, but Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign, launched in 1956, seemed to reinvigorate the system. The dream of the socialist revolution—to ‘catch and overtake’ the most advanced countries and, in the process, build a better, more just world—rose from the ashes for a new generation.
    The education of a true believer
    Born in 1931 in a village in Stavropol province, a fertile land of Russia’s multi-ethnic North Caucasus, Mikhail Gorbachev experienced a life trajectory resembling that of