Why Learn About the Soviet Union?
After wanting to do it for a very long time, I finally published to this
web site a long-ish paper I wrote in 1985 called An Overview of the Soviet Economy.
It probably took me longer to prepare it for the Web than it took to write in
the first place. I had converted the original WordStar* file on my old Osborne
computer years ago, just to make sure I didn’t lose it. (Although, as far as I
know, the old computer still works, if the rat droppings in the garage
haven’t gummed it up. I don’t know about the 5¼-inch floppy disks,
though.) The real time-eater was the two dozen tables and graphs; getting them
scanned and ready to display was a real effort.
Why did I bother? Was it worth the effort? Why are any of the things
I wrote on the USSR here on this web site? The USSR
is gone. The Communist Party isn’t
running Russia any more. What’s the point of reading this stuff now?
I think it was worth the effort. The reason is to
understand. I researched and wrote it so that I could understand,
and I put it in cyberspace so that others can understand, without having to do
their own research. Except for a few scholars, most people in the US never
knew much about the USSR, even if they thought they did. Even most scholars were so caught up in the Cold
War that their bias clouded their judgment. As a result, most of them never really understood it,
either (or they felt obligated to toe the U.S. party line to
keep their jobs),
and they were the ones on whom the rest relied for information about the Soviet Union.
Between that and the constant barrage of anti-Soviet propaganda aimed at the population in
this country, continued today by media idiots-without-a-clue glibly throwing off comments
about the West having won the Cold War and Communism being dead, it’s no wonder that most
folks don’t have a sense of what really happened there. They just know a few horror
stories, and don’t think that there is anything else worth knowing. In other
words, most people in the U.S. never had a feel for the USSR
being a real country with real people with the same kinds of
hopes and dreams that they themselves had. All most people in this country
ever got to hear about were the problems in the Soviet Union, and they even
got a distorted and exaggerated picture of those.
Despite those circumstances, there developed a new layer of scholars who were more
interested in gaining an understanding of Soviet history and culture, instead of doing
research mostly to beef up arguments that the Soviet Union was an evil empire. Their much
more objective and honest studies of the USSR has brought out much new
information about the Soviet period. At the time I wrote this
paper, I had read much about the USSR, out of a curiosity I
had developed when I was about 11 years old, after reading a biography of
Peter the Great, and I had a pretty fair personal library on the subject.
(Unbeknownst to my younger sisters and I, our parents had gone to the public
library as soon as we had moved into town and told the librarians that we kids
could read anything we wanted. As a result, we had the run of the library, and
we never got herded into the children’s section to read dumbed-down kiddie
stuff, but we could develop and satisfy our own curiosities.)
I learned from the non-Cold-War scholars that one could study and write about
the Soviet Union, and at least try to understand and tell the truth, and
neither inject personal bias nor bow to the political correctness of the time,
the way most Sovietologists of the era did. I was lucky to find some younger
professors at Brown to help guide my study, Louis Putterman in Economics and
Linda Cook in Political Science. They were scrupulously academic, but without
enforcing any ideology the way some older scholars did. However, age itself was
not a factor. History professor Abbott Gleason, who had been teaching very
popular courses on Russian history for years, somehow floated in the highest
circles of Sovietology without being ideologically oppressive to his students,
and was always very helpful. Moreover, I got in touch with scholars at other
universities whose work I had read in the journals. University of Southern Maine
professor Frank Durgin (now emeritus) I found particularly inspiring. He showed
no fear taking on the establishment to get at what he saw as the truth, and it
was Durgin Against the Dinosaurs in some journals. Also, Harry Shaffer of the
University of Kansas, also now emeritus, but still teaching at about age 90, was
kind enough to send me an unpublished paper to help with my research. All of
this was amazing attention to a lowly undergraduate in academia.
Still, why should people bother trying to understand Soviet history, unless they have a
special curiosity about it? For one thing, the Soviet economic system brought
a giant, backward, mostly rural and semi-feudal country to being a major
player on the world stage in only thirty years, and after thirty more years,
it was one of the world’s two superpowers. It took centuries for most other
world powers to get so highly developed. That in itself makes it worth
studying.
For another thing, one can’t really understand the United States
without understanding the USSR. The two countries’ interactions
shaped each other for the last ninety years, and the legacies of those
interactions will be with us for a long time. For yet another
thing, how can one try to make a better world for the future without understanding the
events that formed the present? How can we avoids the mistakes of the past if we don’t
understand them? And how can we build upon the successes of the past without understanding
them, too?
Since the Russian Revolution, the foreign policy and much of the domestic
policy of the United States has been geared toward countering and destroying
the Soviet Union. If one looks at the situation in the U.S.
today, one sees a country looking more and more the way the Soviet Union
looked, in many ways.
- Living standards and real wages have been declining.
- Elections are being stolen.
- Wars that the public opposes are being conducted.
- The government is lying to the electorate in an ever more blatant fashion.
- The news media are becoming less independent. (It is not a
state-controlled media, but the same corporate interests that are backing government
policies control the media, so it amounts to the same thing.)
- More and more rights are either being abridged or are under attack, by both
major political parties:
- Christian interests are attempting to force their ways onto the
general population with efforts to return prayer to public schools, get
religious ideologies like creationism/intelligent design taught in
public schools, evangelical harassment of others in the country’s
military academies, etc. (Is there any difference between attempts force
religion onto a population, or forcing atheism? I see none.)
- Individual privacy is threatened by government and corporate use of
personal information to their own ends, airport machines that see
through people’s clothing and national ID schemes.
- Second Amendment rights are threatened by all kinds of restrictive
legislation.
- Search-and-seizure and habeas corpus rights are being violated under
the guise of the “War on Terrorism.”
- Travel is being restricted by no-fly lists of people who have been
convicted of no crime. Of course air travel has become a misery both
because of corporate greed herding people into planes crowded in like
cattle, and by security regulations, so just the unpleasantness of it
all can be viewed as a travel restriction.
- Laws restricting flag burning and promoting “Internet decency”
have been passed by Congress and signed by a President. Thankfully, the
Supreme Court found them unconstitutional, at least for now.
Nevertheless, two out of three branches of government tried to foist
them on the population.
- Legislation ostensibly supporting restrictions on campaign
contributions by large donors have attempted to restrict speech by
individuals and organizations representing individuals. (See legislation
promoted by John McCain.)
- We face legions of government bureaucrats and “public servants”
who are “just doing their jobs,” said jobs often not involving even
common courtesy, never mind giving a damn about the folks whom they are
allegedly serving.
- Legislators at all levels, from city councils to Congress, spend their
time kowtowing to big contributors and looking out for themselves instead of
the voters whose welfare, security and interests they have sworn to guard.
- Government at all levels has aided and abetted an enormous corporate mafia
in the U.S. that has deindustrialized it, shipped jobs
overseas and generally raped the country. Is this any different from the
bureaucratic and Communist Party mafia that controlled the Soviet Union? If
there is a real difference, I don’t see it.
All of this is the result of elected officials running the United States to
be against something, i.e., socialism and its possible spread from the
Soviet Union, instead of being for something, i.e., the constitutional
ideals on which this country was founded. Beyond the domestic, the U.S.
has used (and squandered) its wealth and power invading, subverting and
overthrowing countries around the globe, allying itself with the worst, most
corrupt and despotic dictators on the planet. (It is interesting that those in
charge of the U.S. government have used the excuse of fighting
Soviet aggression and subversion, when the USSR never did
anything like that beyond the countries on its own border, and that only because
it had been invaded so many times, including by the U.S. The
Unites States hasn’t been invaded since the War of 1812, if one doesn’t
count a few million illegal immigrants.) Domestically, this attitude led to the
Palmer Raids, in which suspected leftist immigrants were summarily
deported, the purge of many of the leftists who built the big industrial unions
from those organizations, McCarthyism and a gigantic amount of government spying
on U.S. citizens.
One last point: if the above criticisms lead you to expect some apology for Stalinism or for the terrible
things that happened while it was in control of the Soviet Union, relax. You won’t find it here.
Neither will you find an any attempts to artificially blacken or whiten things in the USSR.
If you are used to the usual dark, bleak images of a USSR under the
totalitarian control of evil people, that are nearly the only thing one encounters in the
West, you might find some of this jarring. Instead of trying to emphasize the negative,
the attempt here is to show things in their real perspectives, the good along with the
bad.
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