LOST IN TRANSITION
THE SOVIET UNION has been gone for 30 years now, having passed away without ceremony as the red flag was lowered from the Kremlin on December 25, 1991. It was created by a small but disciplined and fanatical sect who saw their chance and made their move in October 1917, when Russia was broken and starving from World War I and nominally governed by a wobbly coalition after the overthrow of the tsar eight months earlier.
“Power was lying in the streets, and we picked it up,” said Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the revolutionary leader and founder of the Soviet state.
After promising “bread and peace,” Lenin launched one of the most repressive political and economic systems ever devised. Over a century later, its shadow still looms over Eurasia. For societies held in its grip, reform has proved risky and complex. In Russia, efforts to unravel Lenin’s handiwork are incomplete and have partly backfired, helping spur the creation of a new kind of authoritarian structure.
Lenin and his successor, Josef Stalin, conducted a strange and vicious experiment on the populations of Russia and an expanding realm of captive nations. Claiming that private enterprise inevitably leads to exploitation of workers, they sought to eradicate it, using all the violence and terror they could muster. Factories were nationalized. Farmland was confiscated. Livestock and seed were seized.
As his comrades routed the resistance, Lenin vowed that “we will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that sea.”
And so they did. Historians and statisticians debate the final tally of the dead from the terror campaigns, show trials, summary executions, induced famines, and concentration camps. But they are certainly responsible for one of history’s most lethal chapters of mass murder. Stalin biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore attributes about 20 million killings to the Stalin era alone. Yale historian Timothy Snyder estimated 6 million deliberate killings for Stalin, 9 million if other foreseeable deaths are included. Robert Conquest of Stanford put the total deaths for Lenin and Stalin at no less than 15 million.
The Soviet regime was built by men like Vasily Blokhin, awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his “skill and organization in the effective carrying out of special tasks,” most notably, delivering a bullet point-blank to the back of the head for 7,000 prisoners in just 28 days. Blokhin worked in a brown leather butcher’s apron. It helped with the mess.
The mass violence and terror served to build a new society, in which all significant assets were in the hands of the state and virtually all economic activity was supposed to be controlled by central command. All production, farming, and distribution for the largest country in the world, spanning 11 time zones, were directed from an office complex in Moscow, housing an economic planning super-agency called Gosplan.
Colossal waste and misallocations caused periodic famines and constant shortages. Even in the best of times, ordinary people waited in lines stretching around city blocks to buy necessities and bartered with family and friends to get by. Meanwhile, the communist elite were served by well-supplied shops with display windows discreetly covered in long gray curtains and with admission by invitation only.
Some of the greatest cruelties came after Soviet leaders discovered how much buried treasure there was in the country they ruled. The richest prizes of minerals and fossil fuels were locked tightly in the permafrost of the Arctic Far North and the Siberian . To break through the frozen ground and extract this treasure with ordinary wage labor would have required massive investment upfront in heavy machinery, transportation, housing, and facilities,
