There was a time, not long after the cold war ended, when it looked as though the vast investments the west had made in Kremlinology were about to be liquidated. Having failed to foresee communism’s collapse, the west’s Soviet experts faced grim prospects in a world that had apparently left them behind. How fast things change: today, Russia is back in the news, reprising for the internet era its familiar role as antihero to the freedom-loving west. Putin’s muscle-flexing has produced an old-fashioned territorial struggle in Ukraine and Crimea; the Kremlin’s newfangled cyberwar has generated a firestorm in the US and the results of the 2016 presidential election, far from calming relations between the two old superpowers, have made them tenser than they have been for years.
Yet amid this drama, the response to the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution has been curiously muted and not only in Russia itself. Fifty years ago, there was an outpouring of high-calibre work that testified to the west’s desire to understand its adversary. This year, there has been relatively little. One reason for this is obvious. Communism itself, as a system of thought counterposed to capitalism and private property, is more or less dead in Russia and moribund outside. And with communism gone, anti-communism has become meaningless. But not only communism. Socialism more broadly suffered a heavy blow after 1989. Most leftist parties tacked sharply to the centre, drawn by the dream of a new third way and only austerity economics has done anything to staunch the trend.
There is, I think, another reason for the strangulated response to 1917 and that is that the things that seemed to matter in the Bolshevik Revolution a couple of decades ago are no longer all that important today. Do we really care what the causes of the revolution were, now that we no longer believe in revolution at all? Does it matter how Lenin seized power or whether there was ever the chance of a western-style liberal democracy taking hold in Russia? To some, Russia still remains a way of thinking about liberalism, even if as a counter-example. Masha Gessen’s excellent and readable The Future Is History approaches the Putin years in this way, as a story of totalitarianism and repression returning after yet another brief moment of liberal hope. But given the pessimism that underlies her account, it isn’t really surprising that there seems to be zero interest in all the noble revolutions that didn’t happen in 1917, whether liberal or Menshevik.
In Serhii Plokhy’s Lost Kingdom, the Bolshevik years become merely one episode in a longer story of Russian nationalism. Boiling this down chiefly to the question of Russia’s tortured relationship with its western borderlands, Plokhy’s study reads like a background briefing on the current Ukraine crisis. Both books cast Russia as constantly succumbing to the totalitarian temptation and posit a western alternative that is always just out of reach.
If we want to try to get a handle on what totalitarianism once meant in Russia, we need to turn to two gargantuan studies focusing on the Stalin years. Yuri Slezkine has written a mammoth book about a mammoth building, the so-called House of Government, which was constructed at the start of the 1930s in central Moscow to house much of the new ruling elite. More than 2,000 people lived in it and the book takes well over a thousand pages to tell their stories.
A sprawling “saga of the Russian Revolution”, it has at its core a remarkably interesting subject: the domestic habits and habitat of the men and women who were turning Russia into a socialist society. Architecture often tells the truth where words lie and what was so striking about the House of Government were the assumptions built into its design. Its architect described it as “transitional”, but “traditional” might be a better word. Scores of prison-hardened former underground activists entered middle-age domesticity with their wives and children in rooms lined with handmade bookshelves packed with the treasures of world literature, elegantly furnished dining rooms, linen tablecloths and even space for a bunk bed for the maid. They read [incessantly], played tennis and attended the theatre.
In many ways, their lifestyle was not hugely different from their equivalents in the Dakota on Central Park West in New York, except that their maid’s family might be starving in Ukraine rather than living in poverty in Alabama or Oklahoma. This was totalitarianism committed to family life. Yet at the same time the old revolutionary ethics retained their force. Slezkine argues that Bolshevism was a kind of millenarian sect, but makes the point so often and at such length that by the end it no longer seems to explain very much.
For a more overarching and comprehensive understanding of what drove one old Bolshevik, the place to turn is Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler. This is the second volume in his projected biographical trilogy and it is a masterpiece, surely one of the most remarkable books on 20th-century history to have been published in many years. It is not only the depth of research that takes the breath away; it is the scale and range of Kotkin’s framing of his subject and the acuity of his observations.
The author made his name with a pioneering study of a Stalinist steel town but said little in it about the terror. In this book, the terror looms over everything and Stalin owns it. Never mind millenarianism – Stalin had been a believer for years before the terror – nor psychopathology, Kotkin is categorical: what led to the death of millions was the impact upon Stalin of a style of government, a conception of his own role in the building of socialism and the country’s geopolitical predicament.
Kotkin’s staccato, episodic narrative is enlivened by grim humour. What we get is the USSR as Stalin saw it; the view from his office in the Little Corner, his private offices in the Kremlin, or from the dacha in Sochi, where he liked to spend weeks at a time in the summer reading dozens of reports, or taking the waters. This is history as chronicle, a daringly old-fashioned genre for a very contemporary story, like turning the pages of an agenda as the files cross the despot’s desk. At one point, Stalin falls ill for some days. Nothing happens. The narrative resumes once he is better. Suspicious of his own guards, he nevertheless goes on a spur-of-the-moment jaunt on the Moscow subway, nearly giving his entourage a heart attack. Never seriously under threat of assassination, he comes close to death when a conscientious border guard opens fire on his boat as they are sailing on the Black Sea.
This is the story of the things Stalin cared about, which means thick accounts of NKVD infighting, a commitment to Marxist theory and tank technology and, above all, a view of the world that encompasses the threats besetting Soviet socialism from inside and out, east and west. The volume ends on a cliffhanger, a tour de force reconstruction of the last hours before Hitler invades on 22 June 1941. Tyranny on a world scale; a war that would provide its greatest test: the Bolshevik Revolution has things to teach us yet.