Welcome to the real Soviet Union - primitive, brutal and racist

Mark B. Smith's magnificent new history, Emerging from Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991, [Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991] exposes the reality of everyday life during the Soviet Union's death spiral

By: Simon Heffer / The Telegraph
Translation: Telegrafi.com

For most of us in the West, “Russia” was synonymous with the Soviet Union until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Of the 15 constituent states of the communist empire, Russia was always the most important. It had the USSR’s capital, Moscow, and the other major city, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg); it accounted for the bulk of the union’s economic and industrial output.

However, it did not necessarily provide for leading Soviet figures. Stalin was Georgian. Khrushchev’s family came from what is now Ukraine, and there he spent most of his formative years. Brezhnev’s passport listed his ethnicity as “Ukrainian.” Although Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev were all Russian, they came from such remote and provincial parts of the empire—Chernenko from Siberia, the other two from Stavropol on the edge of the Caucasus—that they and other Politburo figures of similar origin are classified by historian Mark B. Smith as “outsiders.” The exit from Stalin, Smith's excellent book, is partly about how Sovietism ended badly - in different ways - for most of them.

Stalin, with whose death Smith begins the work, had become a cult figure of fear and loathing – though this remained hidden until Khrushchev’s “secret” epoch-making speech in 1956. Khrushchev himself was dismissed by his colleagues in 1964, but at least he was allowed to die in bed seven years later and not forcibly sent to the gulag. Brezhnev’s form of repression was milder, at least domestically – the Czechs in 1968 would have had a less sympathetic view – but he was long gone by the time he died in 1982. His successors, Andropov and Chernenko, took power as ailing old men and together held office for little more than two years. Gorbachev, only 54 when he took power, managed to bury the Soviet project.

Analyzing Gorbachev's six-year rule, it now seems like a golden age before the USSR collapsed and the drunken clown Yeltsin became Russia's first president. The latter would pave the way for a return to tyranny under Putin. This is the tragic story, and Smith tells it magnificently.

However, The exit from Stalin is not simply a political history of a country that struggled for decades before finally earning its place as one of the world’s two superpowers. As the book’s subtitle suggests, it is a study of the Soviet Union “as a civilization.” Smith focuses on cultural and social history, ensuring that we understand the bleak state in which the people existed and the climate of fear in which, even after 1956 and the liberation from the specter of Stalin, they had to live.

For example, large families were crowded into poorly constructed apartment buildings. Sometimes they had to pack into two rooms or even share space with other families. Smith writes about a Soviet actress who, growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, shared a single room and bathroom with 43 other people. Dissidents were locked up in psychiatric hospitals, for no other reason than that they had the courage to come out and protest. Some, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, were sent to the gulag.

Only in the Brezhnev era would things improve: Andrey Sakharov and his wife, Elena Bonner, were sent into internal exile in a provincial apartment. The exit from Stalin never leaves us with any impression other than that life in the Soviet Union, whether by absolute or comparative standards, was terrible, while he presents Stalin, in particular, as someone who, for the crimes of his rule and for the shadow he left for decades after his death, fully deserves to be equated with Hitler.

Focusing on the daily lives of Soviet people, their pop stars, the films they watched, their access (or lack thereof) to consumer goods, and their bleak living conditions, Smith depicts a society not so much in the midst of a collective nervous breakdown—though aspects of it seem to have prevailed in the final days of the Soviet empire—but in the grip of a collective and chronic mental illness.

Everything had to be justified in terms of revolution, although no one was exactly sure what revolution meant. Stalin's death, and Khrushchev's erasure of his legacy, at least allowed a partial relaxation of the horrors of the gulag, of the endless internment or execution of ranks of political prisoners, and the acceptance of some degree of modernization.

The most extraordinary advance - and such was its remoralizing effect on Soviet society that Smith rightly gives it great emphasis - was Yuri Gagarin as the first man in space in 1961. It was an event that placed this country - otherwise still primitive, brutal, deprived, savage - at the forefront of futurism.

The fact that the Soviets also failed to land a man on the moon shows how the nature of their society hindered the rapid and effective evolution of technology. Their educational system produced a surprisingly large number of advanced mathematicians, but the contributions they could make to the future were suppressed - in part because the authorities were concerned that most of these brilliant mathematicians were Jewish.

Brezhnev, ruling from 1964 to 1982, had the smarts to start worrying about international opinion on the Soviet Union, and the era of to relax brought the Helsinki Accords, progress toward arms control, and the space link-up of American astronauts with Soviet cosmonauts. But real reform was too slow to come. Beyond Soviet borders, the world was changing rapidly, and within them, more Soviet citizens were beginning to resent what they knew to be not only freedom but also the higher standard of living of the despised capitalist economies.

Change became inevitable, and the generational shift to Gorbachev accelerated it. He studied Lenin and other revolutionary texts but gave up trying to relate them mechanically to the world. When the security forces for which he was responsible applied traditional methods of brutality to opponents of the state, Gorbachev condemned the harshness. His economic advisers told him to move toward a market economy. This was not simply a matter of the Soviet people wanting more freedom: there were food shortages and technological failures, most notably in April 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Lives were endangered by the government’s slowness to acknowledge the disaster, in keeping with the traditional Soviet way of hiding unpleasant truths. The old model was clearly broken.

Smith's account of the chaotic and rapid decline of those final years is sobering and interesting. Whether or not he intended it, Gorbachev emerges as a figure of true greatness. How disappointing that his legacy has been squandered in the way it is now. This hugely important book presents a story of idealism that failed because of its own internal lack of freedom, oppression and corruption. It now seems that, in Russia at least, history is in the process of repeating itself. /Telegraph/