“The Collapse of the USSR: Insights After Twenty Years” Part II: The Loss of Moral Legitimacy

December 2011 marks the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the USSR. On December 31, 1991, the flag of the Soviet Union was lowered from the Kremlin flagpoles and replaced by the tri-color flag of the Russian Federation. This is the second in a series of “Reflections” on this momentous historical event.

The moral and spiritual upheaval in Russia that contributed substantially to the collapse of the Soviet Union is a phenomenon largely overlooked by Western scholars and policy makers. Western elites, who do not consider religion to be a major factor in a nation’s corporate life and who find people’s belief in transcendent values to be of little interest, have missed essential factors that helped to undermine the Soviet regime.

In my last “Reflections,” we reviewed Mikhail Gorbachev’s open and repeated statements about the need for a moral and spiritual revolution in the Soviet Union. When Gorbachev severed the link between Marxism-Leninism and atheism in 1988, this was a dramatic reversal in Communist Party ideology.

The USSR was the first nation in the 20th century to be specifically created as a secular state and its militant atheism was firmly grounded in Marxist-Leninist thought, which identified religion as “the opium of the people.” Gorbachev knew that the policy of militant atheism was a failure and he pushed through a new law in 1990 that “guarantees the right of citizens to decide and express their attitudes toward religion.” He realized that the Soviet state had failed to eliminate religion from Russian society and that Christians had made and were making important contributions to their country, as they were in the West.

On the occasion of the 1,000th anniversary of Christianity in Russia in 1988, Gorbachev honored the Russian Orthodox Church. Gorbachev recognized, more than many politicians in the US and Western Europe, that a new political and economic order could not be built without a moral foundation.

As Leon Aron (American Enterprise Institute) has pointed out, Gorbachev’s key advisers shared his strong convictions about the need for a moral revolution. Aleksandr Yakovlev, the “godfather of glasnost,” in an interview in 1989, said “Enough! We cannot live like this any longer. Everything must be done in a new way . . . . There has come an understanding that it is simply impossible to live as we lived before. . . .”

Gorbachev’s Prime Minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, noted that the “moral state of the society” in 1985 was its “most terrifying” feature. He boldly declared that Communist Party leaders “stole from ourselves, took and gave bribes, lied in reports, in newspapers, from high podiums, wallowed in our lies, hung medals on one another.” The Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, recalls telling Gorbachev in 1984-85: “Everything is rotten. It has to be changed.”

Mikhail Bulgakov

These radical changes in the perspectives of the government leaders in Gorbachev’s cabinet was a reflection of larger currents in society. Bottom-up changes were also underway. In my many trips to Russia in the early 1990s, I repeatedly asked Russian university students what their favorite books were. One book stood out with no challenger in sight – Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

This brilliant novel, written in 1940 but not published until 1967 because of the opposition of Soviet censors, creatively weaves together three stories. The first is a love story about an author (called “the Master”) and his girlfriend Margarita; the second is a delightful satire on life in Moscow in the 1930s in which a professor of black magic (who is Satan portrayed as Professor Woland) causes havoc through his supernatural powers; and the third story deals with the encounter between Jesus and Pontius Pilate leading up to and including Jesus’ brutal crucifixion.

I know a number of Russian students who have read this book 20-25 times! If I had to summarize a book as complex and intricate as The Master and Margarita, I would say one of its central messages is this: Only a fool believes there is no God! The brilliance of Bulgakov is that he used Satan’s testimony to prove the existence of God.

Chingis Aitmatov

There are many other examples in the creative arts and in the mass media that illustrate the basic crisis that Marxist-Leninist ideology was going through. Chingis Aitmatov, the popular writer from Kirghizia, wrote a remarkably pointed essay in Pravda in February 1987 in which he stated that 70 years of Soviet power succeeded in removing Christian values but failed to replace them with anything positive. He charged that Soviet society was devoid of “compassion” and dominated by ruthlessness in a way that raped the concept of social justice.

From the bottom-up and then the top-down, a moral and spiritual revolution was underway in the 1980s that contributed to the collapse of the USSR. The bottom line was this: Marxism-Leninism was a false ideology that lead to the creation of a corrupt society and a government that had no moral legitimacy. Just like the Romanov dynasty in 1917, the Communist Party of the USSR lost its moral legitimacy and had no defenders left in December 1991.

Twenty years ago, the Russian people decided that they had had enough of the lies and hypocrisy of the Soviet system and instead wanted dignity, freedom and true citizenship. Unfortunately this powerful moral impulse, as Leon Aron notes, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the successful remaking of a country. Reflections on this will follow.

“The Collapse of the USSR: Insights After Twenty Years” Part I: The Moral and Spiritual Dimensions of the Collapse

December 2011 marks the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the USSR. On December 31, 1991, the flag of the Soviet Union was lowered from the Kremlin flagpoles and replaced by the tri-color flag of the Russian Federation. This is the first in a series of “Reflections” on this momentous historical event.

Gorbachev addresses
a Communist Party rally

A number of foreign policy journals and think tanks have focused on the revolution in 1991 at its twentieth anniversary. As I have read through these articles and attended several seminars on this topic in recent months, I am surprised at how little we have learned.

Despite a dramatic increase in scholarly publications that highlight the importance of religion in international affairs, the leading Western scholars on Russia have not gotten the message. I attended a one-day seminar at the distinguished Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and listened to nine panelists who discussed the collapse of the Soviet Union without mentioning the role of religion and the impact of Russian Orthodox priests and other religious leaders. Even when several of us in the audience asked questions about this omission, the topic was largely dismissed.

The foreign policy elites in the West continue to operate as “genteel secularists” and this blind spot on religion is continuing to hamper their analysis, in my judgment. At the Kennan Institute seminar, a former U. S. ambassador to Russia described the three revolutions in Russia in 1991 – the political revolution that ended the one-party rule of the Communist Party, the economic revolution that replaced the centrally-controlled economy with a free market, and the military or imperial revolution that brought a dramatic reduction in the size of Russian armed forces and their pull-back from their former satellite states in Eastern and Central Europe.

This analysis focusing only on political, economic and military factors is the typical lens through which Western scholars and policy analysts view developments internationally. But this analysis is like viewing events with one eye closed. There were not just three revolutions taking place in Russia in 1991 -- there were five.! In addition to the political, economic and military revolutions, there were two others – a social revolution and a moral/spiritual revolution. This was a unique phenomena in modern history.

The social revolution involved the complete collapse of all the supporting mechanisms for families and communities. The Young Pioneers and their summer youth camps were disbanded, the various Communist Party social and cultural centers that provided training and childcare were closed, along with numerous other social networks.

These were an integral part of life throughout the Soviet Union, enabling parents to work while providing activities for their children. Their disappearance left families without the support they needed to endure the radical political and economic changes underway.

Overlooking the dramatic social revolution of the late 1980s was an unfortunate oversight, but missing the moral/spiritual revolution was egregious. While, on the one hand, the failure of Western scholars to understand the importance of dramatic changes in the moral and spiritual environment in Russia is not surprising because they view religion as unimportant, what is surprising is that moral and spiritual factors were overlooked even when Russian leaders involved in these dramatic events talked and wrote about them openly and frequently!

Mikhail Gorbachev’s bestseller, Perestroika, discusses the reasons for his and his colleagues’ “new thinking” related to the re-structuring of the Soviet Union. He describes how Communist Party leaders in the late 1970s began to realize that the country “began to lose momentum” – a kind of “braking mechanism” had formed affecting social and economic development. In addition to economic stagnation and deadlock, Gorbachev identified the “gradual erosion of the ideological and moral values of our people.” He noted how a “breach had formed between word and deed” which caused a “decay” in public morals.

To the author of Perestroika, the challenge was clear: to re-structure Soviet society, including its moral life. In his own words, Gorbachev makes this point: “Today our main job is to lift the individual spiritually, respecting his inner world and giving him moral strength. . . . Perestroika means the elimination from society of the distortions of socialist ethics, the inconsistent implementation of the principles of social justice. It means the unity of words and deeds, rights and duties.” Gorbachev was describing a moral and spiritual revolution! How did Western scholars miss this?

Gorbachev visits Pope John Paul II
at the Vatican (1989)

During his visit to the Vatican in 1989, Gorbachev again made his views explicit. He said: “We need spiritual values, we need a revolution of the mind. This is the only way toward a new culture and new politics that can meet the challenge of our time. We have changed attitudes toward some matters – such as religion – that, admittedly, we used to treat in a simplistic manner. . . . Now we not only proceed from the assumption that no one should interfere in matters of the individual’s conscience; we also say that the moral values that religion generated and embodied for centuries can help in the work of renewal in our country, too. . . .”

Western scholars and policy makers failed in their diagnosis of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and their failure to see and understand the moral and spiritual dimensions of Russian society will continue to limit the value of their analysis. Gorbachev saw something that Western scholars and policy makers continue to overlook – that the moral and spiritual foundations of Russian society need to be rebuilt before free and just political and economic institutions can be formed.

Russia’s Binary Character

In the introduction to his new survey of Russian history, Professor Geoffrey Hosking describes the geopolitics and the ecology of the Eurasian landmass and highlights features of the national character of the Russian people, features that have developed over their thousand-year history. One of these insights in particular stands out, as it is an insight I also observed during my years studying Russian history.

Peter the Great

Professor Hosking notes the “binary nature” of Russian culture, its tendency to seek extreme solutions to problems and to lurch from one set of cultural patterns to their diametric opposite. He gives three examples from Russia’s history to bolster this argument: the abrupt replacement of an eclectic paganism with Orthodox Christianity during the reign of Prince Vladimir toward the end of the tenth century; the radical reforms of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, when the young tsar forced Westernization on his people; and the Communist revolution of 1917, when radical Marxists announced the formation of a new socialist state with its “new Soviet man and new Soviet woman.”

Vladimir Lenin

Hosking then suggests that the post-Soviet transformation in Russia in the 1990s may come to be judged as yet another of these radical, binary actions. “In each case,” Hosking writes, “the new was presented as the complete supplanting of the old, the dismissal of absolute evil and the introduction of absolute good.” As he studied Russian history, Hosking observed the problems this caused over time. “In a society marked by such extreme discontinuities, the elites, animated by one kind of mentality, would try to introduce reforms, conceived as being for the benefit of everyone, but would come up against the mistrust and conservatism of the masses.”

For the bulk of the Russian population, struggling for survival in a harsh climatic and geographic milieu, novelty and experimentation could be hazardous, even disastrous. Their resistance caused conflict between the elite ruling classes and the masses, and, as a result, rulers resorted to force and violence to make the changes they wanted. Such a society, Hosking claims, tends to generate utopias and anti-utopias.

Hosking notes that the same duality is present in Russian folksongs and folktales. Very often, the tragedy or humor evident in folklore is the contrast between a world of order and culture and another world characterized by poverty, hunger, nakedness or disorderly conduct. In Russian popular culture, the world of darkness is often used as a device to shed light on the world of morality and convention.

Russia’s Cultural Life

Interestingly, Dr. James Billington, in his book The Face of Russia, makes a similar observation. Billington notes that the Russians produced “a culture of explosion,” of unpredictable outbursts – “flash fires in endless snow, sensational creativity amidst senseless suffering.”

Billington’s book analyzes five periods of Russian art and concludes that, in each period, Russian artists followed a similar binary pattern. First, without much warning, Russian artists took over some new type of creative enterprise from a more advanced foreign civilization that they previously reviled. Second, having taken over someone else’s art medium, they suddenly produced a stunningly original and even better version of their own. This often happened, Billington notes, at the same time people elsewhere had given up on the artistic medium suddenly embraced in Russia. Finally, after having established a new and higher art form, the Russians threw it down and broke it apart, leaving only fragments behind for later generations.

Billington’s book and accompanying video trace this pattern through the lives and work of five innovative Russian artistic pioneers – the medieval painter Andrei Rublev, the early modern architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli, the early 19th century writer Nicholas Gogol, the late 19th century composer Modest Musorgsky, and the 20th century filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.

Insights Gained

Understanding this characteristic of the Russian people provides helpful insights and may give us some hints concerning how Russians are addressing their current problems. Will the Russians, having taken over the democratic model of their previous enemy, create a new and distinctive Russian variant that will serve their country in the decades ahead? Or will they destroy their own experiment and revert back to the authoritarian tradition of the past?

After reflecting on these insights, I interpret them in a positive light. The Russians are the ones who will shape their own future. While outside forces can have limited impact on the margins, it will be the Russians themselves who will figure out what path to follow. If the West is waiting to see their institutions copied and transplanted in Russia, there will be much disappointment ahead. The most important change that is needed in Russia, in my judgment, is for the welfare of the people to be determined by the people themselves. Russia’s history has been one of “reform from above,” reform forced on the masses. When change begins to generate on the grassroots level, and slowly builds support among the people, then perhaps the extreme swings of Russia’s binary character can be moderated and a healthy civil society built.

References: Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians: A History (Harvard University Press); James H. Billington, The Face of Russia: Anguish, Aspiration and Achievement in Russian Culture (TV Books).

Originally circulated in July 2002