On January 21, Vladimir Putin presided over a meeting of the Presidential Council for Science and Education. On the same day in 1924, Vladimir Lenin died. Perhaps for this reason, Mikhail Kovalchuk, the president’s old friend at the Ozero cooperative and now head of the Kurchatov Institute, recalled “Lofty Malady,” Boris Pasternak’s poem about the October Revolution, in which the poet said this about Lenin: “Having actually seen him then, I thought and thought without end about his authorship and his right to dare to act in the first person.” The member of Russian Academy of Sciences drew the following conclusion: “He [Lenin. – Author] guided the course of thinking and, only because of this, ruled the country.” After this he suggested finding scientific organizations capable of guiding the course of thinking “in specific directions.”
Putin interrupted Kovalchuk with a resentful retort which triggered hundreds of thousands of Internet comments the next day. Here it is: “As for the claim that guiding the course of thinking is the main thing… It is, of course, right, Mr. Kovalchuk, to guide the course of thinking. But it is important that this thinking produce the right result – not as it was in the case of Vladimir Lenin. But the idea itself is right. In the long run, what this thinking resulted in was the collapse of the Soviet Union. There were a lot of ideas there – autonomization, and so on. They planted an atomic bomb under a building called Russia, and it went off later.”
One retort of the Russian leader and hundreds of thousands of responses in a day! What is the crux of the matter? Mikhail Sokolov, political observer of Radio Liberty’s Russian service, responded a day after the Presidential Council’s meeting with a small essay, “Between Lenin and Kadyrov,” in which he wrote: “It is worthwhile to look into the claim about an ‘atomic bomb’ planted under Russia and ‘autonomization.’ Vladimir Putin used to confuse the German revisionist Eduard Bernstein (“The movement is everything, the final aim is nothing”) with the revolutionary Lev Bronstein (Leon Trotsky). Now he is confusing Lenin with Stalin. Lenin opposed and Stalin favored autonomization. Under Stalin’s plan, all the then republics (Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasian Federation) were to become autonomies as part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. After a heated debate in the elite, the USSR was formed under Lenin’s plan as a more stable structure. It was a union of pseudo-sovereign states based on the ethnoses that were already turning into nations. Weaker ethnoses received the status of autonomies.”
Putin may have confused Bernstein with Bronstein – he is not a historian and has the right to make a mistake. Stalin really wanted to make the conglomerate of independent Soviet republics a single country by turning nation states into autonomous, i.e., deprived of statehood, parts of the Russian Federation. Incidentally, not only Stalin but, as Sokolov put it, “the entire Moscow elite” wanted this. However, the leaders of the national republics, whom Lenin ironically called “independents,” held a different opinion. They did not exactly wish to become regional leaders, although they understood – as much as central apparatchiks did – the illusory nature of the national republics’ statehood. And then Lenin came up with a completely novel design – a “second-storey federation,” when Russia and all the other independent republics will form a union of the equal Soviet socialist republics of Europe and Asia. To prevent the former communist “independents” from grieving about the lost status, the constitutions of the USSR and the constituent republics were complemented with a provision that a republic may withdraw from the union if it wishes to do so. Of course, like the previous status of independence, this provision was pure fiction. When Levko Lukianenko attempted to refer to it in 1961 in support of his desire to achieve independence of Ukraine, the investigator explained to him in an easy-to-grasp form: “The Constitution exists for foreigners to see!” Lukianenko was accused of high treason and given a death sentence, which was commuted to a long prison term.
In contrast to Sokolov, what I saw in Putin’s retort was not confusion about Lenin and Stalin in the question of autonomization but a deep-rooted aversion of the present-day Kremlin leaders to autonomy and federation as forms of a political system, which ensure or just declare political rights for non-Russian nationalities in the constitutional field. Putin’s ideal is the guberniya-based system of pre-revolutionary Russia, whose population consisted of Russians (Great Russians, Little Russians, and White Russians) and non-Russians (“inorodtsy”). Had Lenin not reformatted the Russian political and administrative system, there would have been, in Putin’s view, neither the collapse of the Soviet Union, nor the two Chechen wars, nor the danger of a split in the Russian Federation by the efforts of Tatar, North Caucasian, and all the other separatists.
The seemingly clumsy and accidental retort of the Kremlin leader about Lenin fully complies with the guideline Putin chose in 2000. When I guessed this, I was horrified. To make my horror understandable, I will briefly repeat the main characteristics of Soviet power, which I have often done on the pages of Den.
During the 1905 Revolution, Lenin understood the way his party could overthrow the tsar and win political power. He viewed this power as “dictatorial, i.e., absolutely not limited by or bound with any laws or rules,” as one that “rests directly on violence.” The Bolsheviks were to spearhead the revolutionary proletariat, bring down the autocracy, which the Romanov dynasty’s subjects had got accustomed to for hundreds of years, and transfer power to working-class organizations known as Soviets (councils). At the same time, they were to oust all the other political parties from the Soviets and fill the latter with their own representatives and non-party members who sympathized with them. Owing to this, the Bolshevik party based on the principles of “democratic centralism” (which called for unconditional subordination of the lower organizations to the upper ones) began to exist as two ostensibly different political forces: firstly, as a party that exercised the dictatorship of its leaders under the guise of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and, secondly, as Soviets that were elected by the people, performed governmental functions, but were deprived of the functions of dictatorship. Therefore, this resulted in a government that was tied up to the grassroots but, at the same time, was independent of the people. The very name of Soviet power, as well as the first Soviet constitutions, found no place for the party. The Soviets were assuming governmental powers only because they were merging with the party structures. The party was assuming governmental powers owing to its merger with the Soviets.
It was always emphasized, not unfoundedly, that the power of Soviets was formed by and was inseparable from the people, and was drawing cadres from the grassroots. The label “Soviet” was being attached to everything around – the epoch, the country, the state, the authorities, culture, and, finally, the people itself. But the party was never recognized as governmental, and all propagandist materials placed it somewhere next to the government. But, in reality, it stole (just the right word) from the people the sovereignty they had won in the February 1917 Revolution. The Bolshevik leaders took over the functions of the toppled autocratic tsar.
The party dictatorship was immediately materialized by the formation of state security bodies, which were named differently in various times, but ordinary people called them briefly – “the organs.” Resorting to dictatorship, party committees formed the Soviet bodies of power as they pleased – on the basis of social status, age, gender, party membership, or ethnicity. Voters had to vote for a single candidate of the “bloc of Communists and non-party members” indicated in the ballot papers.
As far as Soviet bodies are concerned, the dualism of power allowed building the state in any possible way – as a conglomerate of independent republics, a united state composed of constituent republic, or a federation that included autonomous republics and ethnic areas. As far as party bodies are concerned, there was always a unitary state with power being centralized as much as possible.
To overcome a systemic crisis of the Soviet system, the last CPSU Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev began to carry out economic reforms, which only worsened the situation. Then he got down to political reforms, venturing a surgical dissection of the “Siamese twins,” i.e. Party committees and executive committees of Soviets. A constitutional reform was carried out under the slogan of turning the Soviet Union into a rule-of-law state and establishing a “complete authority of Soviets.” The Soviets were vested with real powers, while the Party was left to exercise the ideological supervision over “communist construction.” The people gained sovereignty for the first time in many centuries. The distribution of free food packets at polling stations prove that many people still do not know what to do with this sovereignty.
Delegates at the 19th USSR Party Conference, which approved in June 1988 the idea of the independence of Soviet governmental bodies from Party committees, and USSR Supreme Soviet members, who easily supported a constitutional reform in December of the same year, were unaware of the way Soviet power functioned, for they were third-generation Soviet people. The Party and Soviet nomenklatura had got accustomed for many decades to the fact that a high Party office simultaneously guaranteed membership at various-level Soviets. They viewed the secretary-general-proposed transition of real power from Party committees to Soviets’ executive committees as something unexpected but not unusual. To enlist support for the reform from non-public functionaries, the initiators found a loophole: one could be elected a Soviet member not only in a constituency, but also by being nominated by non-governmental political organizations.
The CPSU won the first post-reform elections to the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies in March 1990, although ballot papers included this time several candidates for one seat and self-nominees were also allowed to take part in the race. But, a year later, the elections to republican parliaments revealed a radical difference between Lenin-style and true democracy. Boris Yeltsin began to blackmail the USSR center with the constitutional provision on free withdrawal of republics from the federation. Ivan Frolov, full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Gorbachev’s assistant in 1987-89, and CPSU Central Committee Secretary and Politburo member from 1990, thus described the disruption of links between the Party and the Soviets, i.e., abolition of the dictatorship of Party leaders: “The most powerful bombs – thermonuclear or God knows which ones – were planted in the shape of Party structures and these Soviets, etc. They will eventually destroy our federation as a whole.”
A bogus “second-storey federation,” which the Soviet Union really was, could not exist without the dictatorship of leaders. Having assumed leadership of the Russian Federation, Yeltsin also had problems with the autonomous republics, which resulted in a war in the case of Chechnya. The figurative image of an atomic bomb planted in the foundation of Russia which Putin identifies with the Soviet Union is very eloquent. I do not think the Russian leader knows about Frolov’s CPSU Politburo speech. He just used the same symbol. Putin is aware that a multiethnic country, in which the essence of political power is at variance with its form, can only exist in a dictatorship-generated field of force. Once the CPSU ceased to be the bearer of state sovereignty, the Soviet Union disintegrated. The Russian Federation also faces a similar lot. It positions itself as a federation but is not one in reality, for a federation is a political system in which the subjects enjoy constitutionally-guaranteed rights which the central government cannot challenge.
What Putin considers an ideal is the political setup of pre-Revolutionary Russia. At the same time, he wants Russia to be as close to the former empire’s borders as possible because he does not understand that the era of empires is over. The danger to humankind, and particularly to Ukraine, is that this person is keeping a finger on the nuclear button. The annexation of Crimea was accompanied by the talk about a “radioactive desert.” Will the West choose to intervene if Putin continues a course towards seizing by force the post-Soviet countries, applying the same tactic? The question remains open.
The next day after the “historic” meeting of the Presidential Council, Radio Liberty’s Russian service requested me to take part in a roundtable. A Skype debate is an ungrateful thing: you sit at home, hear the conversation, but don’t see the interlocutors. You can only respond if you are asked. Yet I agreed because the coincidence of Frolov’s and Putin’s figurative image of a thermonuclear bomb in state’s foundation astonished me.
Those present in the studio were the host Vladimir Kara-Murza Sr., Viktor Aksiuchits, and Igor Chubais, then the human rights advocate Nikita Petrov also joined on Skype. Answering concrete questions, I still tried to explain the abovementioned factors that caused the collapse of the USSR. Unfortunately, I found no understanding – this part was not even included into the verbatim report on Radio Liberty’s website. The discussion revolved around Lenin, although I hoped they would speak about Putin. In particular, Aksiuchits drew the following conclusion: “After all, the Russian national political organism has digested the communist utopia.” Rejecting this optimistic assurance, I would like to sum up what I have said in this article by means with a few pessimistic phrases.
Until now, the Russia of Yeltsin and Putin has been taking an equally enthusiastic approach to nationalists and communists. If this enthusiasm filled the head of a concrete individual, he or she would go schizophrenic. However, the state found it convenient to use pre-revolutionary flags, pander to the patriotism of nationalists, and make the Soviet anthem’s tune please the ears of people. The Kremlin leader’s seemingly casual and accidental retort shows a turn to the “Russian national political body” that perished in 1917. A schizophrenic coexistence of pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary slogans, symbols, and values was possible in the years of material affluence. But Russia is in for hard times. It is only possible to retain power in such a situation by mobilizing the population. This requires creating the image of an enemy – both foreign and domestic. The image of a foreign enemy does not need to be invented, for it has lingered in the public mind since the Cold War. And now Putin has sided with nationalists, thus raising the degree of aggressiveness throughout the post-Soviet state.
The Ukrainian state has been trying to overcome the Red challenge for a quarter of a century. It seems to have overcome it, the proof of it is both the “Leninfall” and the absence of communists in the highest legislative body. But now we are facing a tricolor challenge. We must be aware of all the seriousness of this situation.
