Dragons and Democracy - XI

This post continues an overview of Robert Conquest’s recent book The Dragons of Expectation (Norton, 2005).

In a final essay in the “Horrible Examples” series, Conquest examines “A Collapse of Unreality” – the collapse of the illusions produced by the mental distortions of the Soviet order. Both the confrontation with the West and the ruin of the economy were largely, he argues, symptoms of the mindset that prevailed. The “insane militarization” that Gorbachev spoke of stemmed from that mindset, which required “an unceasing struggle with all other cultures”:

And, above all, it was a militarization the Soviet economy was unable to make decisive, even though ruining itself in the attempt. So the only way the West could have been put in an impossible position was if it could have been prevented from responding with adequate armament. And since this was not physically possible, it would have to have been secured by other means – that is, by inducing the West not to respond to the real threat. This could only be done by in some way destroying or radically weakening the West’s will to respond adequately. And this was, of course, the aim of Soviet propaganda and diplomacy and the general effort to mislead the Western peoples and governments.

This was undertaken, with a long-drawn-out production of false claims of devotion to peace and, unbelievably, to freedom, goodwill, and all the other amicable evidence of progress and liberty. Though some elements in the West were sweetened, or silenced, by this ploy, it failed, just as the economy had failed to outmatch the West’s response. The main reason for this failure was, of course, that the realities of Soviet actions and intentions could only be concealed by an enormous and, as it turned out, inadequate effort.

And, turning to the present, and the increasingly pressing requirement to make some kind of definitive judgment on what really occurred in the Soviet period, both inside the Soviet Union and in the West – the notion of “learning from one’s mistakes” comes to mind here – the author presents a large question-mark:

The big question remains. In the Soviet bloc itself, all who reached any reasonable level of knowledge or judgment were aware of and repelled by the actualities. It was outside that zone that the Soviets had a measure of success. And this is, above all, fearful evidence of the murky mental atmosphere we have tried to analyze and detoxify in these pages.

This was in part owing to the whole Stalinist heritage, but most of all to the brain-numbing atmosphere; in addition to being the product of an abnormal mental setup, the Soviet establishment was, or the larger part of it was (at the highest level) stupid. It was the product of a party that had well under ten thousand members in 1910 and over the postrevolutionary years had been purged of all tendencies to see reality in terms other than dull fantasy.

Conquest says that it is not his purpose to examine the current and future state of Russia:

It is clear that the huge mental and physical distortions inflicted on the population, and the painful emergence from “Under the Rubble” [a reference to the title of Solzhenitsyn’s 1975 book] have not been anything like fully overcome. And it has been reasonably argued that the mental regression of most of the last century has left in much of the nation’s consciousness the remnants of earlier unprogressive cultural attitudes. Russia’s history, and with it its habits of thought, are not those of the West. Or rather, the flowering of civilization in the country, from Pushkin on, was largely confined to a nondecisive urban stratum (and that not in all cities).

Looking for historical parallels, Conquest casts an eye back to 1945, but sees some essential differences between then and now:

The current condition of Russia is deplorable in a number of ways, Yet we may note that a revolutionary transition took place without total disruption.

As Vladimir Bukovsky has often pointed out, there was no equivalent to the de-Nazification program that was instituted in West Germany after World War II. De-Sovietization did not take place:

In 1991, Russia was not in the position that Germany – West Germany – was in in 1945, when a democratic or open society could be built almost from scratch. One result of the less complete and more gradual changes in Russia is that a huge burden of both physical and mental trappings and actualities of the past remain.

So we have a Russia with thousands of warheads and a chauvinistic tinge. We coped, the world coped, with a much worse Russia.

It has been, and will continue to be, a long hard slog.

See also: Dragons and Democracy
Dragons and Democracy - II
Dragons and Democracy - III
Dragons and Democracy - IV
Dragons and Democracy - V
Dragons and Democracy - VI
Dragons and Democracy - VII
Dragons and Democracy - VIII
Dragons and Democracy - IX
Dragons and Democracy - X