Soviet Potpourri

By Laszlo Solymar

This book has been written for those who know already a lot about what happened in the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991. It is at times controversial, at times humorous, and, I hope, constantly provocative. My aim is for readers to say or at least think, Yes, I can now see things more clearly.

The principal events of Soviet history are discussed. The central thesis is that the Soviet Union was far from unique, that its ideology bore nearly exclusively the marks of a religion and most of its functioning was derived from the French Revolution, from Nazi Germany, and from Imperial Russia. There is a lot written about the purges, a prediction made in 1984 about the demise of the Soviet Union and a short play about the unsuccessful coup against Gorbachev. The book ends with a light touchjokes about the Soviet system.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: May 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524681234

Laszlo Solymar

Laszlo Solymar was born and educated in Hungary. In the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution he escaped to England. He joined the University of Oxford in 1966 where he is now an Emeritus Professor. During his career he had Visiting Professorships at the Universities of Paris, Copenhagen, Osnabruck, Berlin, Madrid, Budapest and London.

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Published by AuthorHouse 05/23/2017

ISBN: 978-1-5246-8124-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-8123-4 (e)

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Lenin’s Testament and the enigma of Trotsky. Was he aiming to lose?

Chapter 3: Plots and Purges

Chapter 4: Words and War

Chapter 5: Communism as a religion

Chapter 6: The French versus the Russian Revolution

Chapter 7: Nazism versus Communism

Chapter 8: Imperial Russia versus the Soviet Union

Chapter 9: A past prediction and a letter to Gorbachev

Chapter 10: A present prediction: the next five years in Russia

Chapter 11: The Anti-Gorbachev coup (a radio play)

Chapter 12: Jokes

Appendix: List of Full Members of the Politburo, 1917 - 1935

To Richard

for his lifetime

friendship and his interest

in

my works of fiction

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

W hy a new book about the history of the Soviet Union? There are plenty around. I might get away with the apology that this is not a history book. It describes historical events but it is just bits of history loosely sewn together. This kind of thing is known as a potpourri, and that is indeed in the title of this book. It is written for those who know already a lot about what happened in the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991. It is at times controversial, at times humorous and I hope constantly provocative. My aim is for readers to say or at least think yes, I can now see things more clearly. [I prefer things to events as the insights in this book are about far more than merely events]

I have always been intrigued by what happened in the Soviet Union. At the age of fifteen along with many of my contemporaries in Hungary I accepted Soviet propaganda at its face value. We were not alone. It happened to millions of people in East Europe, and not only in East Europe. The same line was toed by the powerful Communist Parties of Italy and France. They were probably able to distinguish between propaganda and truth but their hatred of capitalism was stronger than any other consideration.

I have only a few topics to discuss, my favourite topics, presented in the following 10 chapters. Chapter 2 is mainly about Leon Trotsky, although it touches on the succession after Lenin’s death and indeed Lenin’s Testament (in which he had not a kind word to say about any of the Communist leaders). Trotsky was born in 1879 in the Ukraine as Lev Davidovich Bronshtein. He personifies the concept of an enigma, had an extraordinary career and was probably the most maligned man that ever lived. His biography, briefly is:

1895 Start of his revolutionary activities as a schoolboy

1898-1900 Imprisoned

1900-1902 Exiled to Siberia

1902-1905 Emigration

1905 Returns to Russia to participate in the Revolution. Chairman of the St Petersburg Soviet

1905 Arrested after the failure of the Revolution

1906 Tried and sent to exile in Siberia

1907-1917 Escapes from Siberia, emigration again

1917 Architect of the October Revolution

1917-1918 People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs

1918-1925 People’s Commissar of Army and Navy Affairs (essentially, Commissar of War)

I take up the story in the autumn of 1924 when Trotsky published a piece looking back at history entitled the Lessons of October. After that Trotsky was quickly ousted from power. My contention is that by 1924 Trotsky wanted to quit the scene. None of the possible scenarios had any attraction for him. Socialism in one country? Surely not. I claim, he played to lose.

Chapter 3 has the title: Plots and Purges. If there is anything distinctive in the History of the Soviet Union, it is the massacre of the innocents. Never in history were so many innocent people tried, imprisoned and executed within such a short space of time. It is still difficult to grasp how that culture of suspicion came about. Propaganda and distortion of facts was a characteristic of the Nazi system of government as well but they never reached the dizzy perfection of their Soviet counterparts. The skill of the Soviet propaganda apparatus was astonishing. They even managed to influence some gullible American diplomats. One of them was Joseph Davies, US Ambassador to the court of Stalin (1936-1941). He was present at the Moscow trials and even wrote a book¹ about them. Were those trials genuine? Were they convincing? He had his doubts but on the whole he was prepared to accept the evidence. He wrote:

To have assumed that this proceedings was invented and staged as a project of dramatic political fiction would be to presuppose the creative genius of a Shakespeare and the genius of Belasco in stage production.

Davies had to assume that the trials were genuine because anything else defied reason. No country in Modern History even vaguely resembled the Soviet Union. Future generations will be baffled as to how such a social system could have existed in Europe for three quarters of a century. Since the archives have only been open only for a relatively short time and since much of the crucial evidence of what the Soviet Secret Service had done, was destroyed, nobody will ever have a faithful account of what had happened. This means that there is no definitive history and that gives a chance to look at events from a range of angles. Those events will never be sufficiently explained but that will not deter historians and amateurs from trying to explain them again and again, and that’s exactly what I am doing.

My contribution is partly a change in emphasis, I am willing to accept Arthur Koestler’s version that the main characters, the leaders of the country in Lenin’s time, confessed to the crimes because their past actions made it impossible for them to do otherwise. Rubashev, Koestler’s main character is incarcerated and is under interrogation. He is allowed to write a diary. He recognizes that all he was ever concerned about was the Cause, the Communist Cause. Ethics, morality did not come into it. He writes in his diary:

A revolution conducted according to the rules of cricket is an absurdity. Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

Rubashev recognises that in those critical times, in the second part of the 1930s, the unity of the Party is of paramount importance and that is embodied in the person of Stalin. From the same diary:

Anyone who weakened this unity was a traitor to the cause. And it was not sufficient just to pay lip-service to the cause of unity, to stand up at the Congress and to say that Stalin was the greatest living man. Take Zinoviev or Kamenev or Bukharin, did any of them have any doubt in his heart that perhaps Stalin was not the greatest after all? Did they give expression to this doubt by a glance, by a careless word dropped in a conversation? If they did they were objectively guilty. They confessed because they knew that according to their ethics, according to the rules they lived all their lives, they were guilty.

My further contribution is in providing some statistics, admittedly statistics collected by Russians, so their reliability may be questionable, but considering that those statistics were prepared for an entirely different purpose, namely to honour the revolutionaries of the October Revolution and of the Civil War, they are probably the best figures available. I looked at two encyclopaedias and simply noted the dates of death of those included. I came to the conclusion that about one half of the Old Bolsheviks were liquidated.

My fourth chapter is titled Words and War. Writing about the Soviet Union, the Great Patriotic War, (known elsewhere as the Second World War) cannot be ignored. This chapter looks at some of the salient events and some further crimes of Stalin’s leadership, such as the Katyn massacre.

By words I mean the diplomatic efforts after the emergence of Nazism that ended when the war broke out. This is a subject many textbooks sidestep or completely ignore. The usual view is that the French and the British tried appeasing Hitler with catastrophic results. The most often seen news clip shows Chamberlain arriving at Heston airport after the Munich meeting, waving a piece of paper in his hand with the signature of Herr Hitler. Peace for our time, he said.

It is by now widely acknowledged that British diplomacy could have done better. Churchill stated in his memoires² that the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet pact was the culminating failure of British and French foreign policy and diplomacy over several years. In a similar vein the distinguished modern historian³ A. J. P. Taylor wrote: The incompetence displayed seems to have had no equal since Lord North lost the American colonies.

There were certainly potent arguments for searching out an alliance in the East. If for nothing else, the existence of 35 Czech divisions and the high reputation of Skoda-made tanks should have been a cast-iron reason not to let Czechoslovakia fall. And that could have been achieved only with some agreement with the Soviet Union.

My contention is that Chamberlain was in a very tight spot. There were no good scenarios. To use a modern phrase, he was in a no-win situation. I shall discuss some of the Soviet diplomatic offers which remained on the table and analyse some possible scenarios.

Chapters 5-8 break new grounds in interpreting the working of the Soviet State. Well, it is not entirely new but it is packaged in quite a different way. We all know that there was oppression in Russia in tsarist times and there was oppression in the Soviet Union too, we know that Nazism and Communism had a lot in common, we know that Soviet ideology had all the hallmarks of a religion, we know that the Bastille was stormed in 1789 and that the revolutionaries managed to occupy the Winter Palace in 1917, but nobody has made consistent comparisons between the Soviet state and four analogous organisations: religion as embodied e.g. in the Vatican, Imperial Russia, German Nazism and the French revolutionary state. These comparisons will be made in Chapters 5 – 8. The technique is to put two columns next to each other, one represents the Soviet Union and the other one some similarities in the four objects of comparison. I give a few examples below:

Chapter 9 starts with a prediction of mine published under a pseudonym in the periodical SURVEY⁴ in the Spring of 1984 before Gorbachev’s accession to power. The paper argued that the Soviet system is incompatible with New Technology, that the Soviet authorities cannot allow the spread of computers because they cannot control what those computers will be used for. The weakness of the Soviet Union in the Art and Science of Electronics is reflected in the poverty of their