From the Russian Past to the Soviet Present

JAMES CRACRAFT

What links the Soviet present with the Russian past? In one form or another this question is frequently put to historians—by their students in class, by colleagues and friends, by representatives of the media, and even by government officials.

One can point, in reply, to obvious linguistic and closely related cultural continuities: the Russian language, its roots reaching deep into the Middle Ages, is overwhelmingly the language of the Soviet Union, just as it was of the empire that preceded it; and language is never—cannot be—entirely value free.

There are fundamental geopolitical constants as well: the Russian state has been the largest territorial entity in the world since the seventeenth century, its borders have been the longest and most difficult to defend, and its principal neighbors—China and Europe—have been generally hostile to its pretensions, if not to its very existence. Plainly, these factors have always influenced the policies of Russia's rulers; and with the arrival of such powerful rivals as Japan and the United States, they will continue to do so indefinitely.

The natural environment in which the history of the Russian people has unfolded since the beginning of the present millennium—its northerly location and frequently poor soils, its erratic rainfall and extreme continental climate, its short growing season—has of course also helped to determine the course of that history. It will continue to do so, we can be sure, technological advances notwithstanding.

Moreover, these and other environmental, geopolitical, and cultural factors continuously at work in Russian historical development have helped to produce a tradition of centralized, authoritarian government supported by extensive armed forces. It is a tradition that is rooted in history—as was discovered by the revolutionary elite in Russia after 1917.

Or one could point to a persistent element of Russian national chauvinism—obviously pre-Soviet in origin (Lenin vigorously condemned it)—in Soviet domestic and foreign policies.

But the apprehensive and often strongly negative views of the Soviet Union generally held in the West ensure that the basic question before us readily assumes an urgent political and even moral aspect, an aspect that these professionally chaste replies fail to address. So historians are asked, in addition, to explain and even to judge contemporary Soviet political behavior in light of the Russian past, to predict its future course, to recommend—or justify—policy. It is a trap into which many of us, amateur and professional alike, have fallen.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for one, insists that "there is no continuity in the transition from pre-revolutionary Russia to the USSR. There is instead a fatal fracture of the spine [italics his], a break which nearly ended in complete national destruction." He could not be more emphatic: "Soviet development is not an extension of Russia's but rather its diversion in a completely new and unnatural direction." The terms "Russian and "Soviet," "Russia" and "USSR," not only are "not interchangeable, not equivalent, and not unilinear—they are irreconcilable polar opposites and completely exclude each other."

Solzhenitsyn's motive here is to explode the "distorted and biased picture of several centuries of Russian history" that he finds to be prevalent in the West and to be manifest, for example, in that "persistent and tendentious generalization about the 'perennial Russian slave mentality,' seen almost as a inherited characteristic, and about the 'Asiatic tradition.'" For Solzhenitsyn, understandably, national honor as well as the cause of historical truth is at stake. But for our purposes now, it is worthwhile to emphasize his more general point—namely, that the evil, Marxist-inspired Soviet system is an utterly alien imposition on a far older and different Russia, a Russia that still yearns to reassert itself.

Solzhenitsyn's pronouncements, with their sweeping denunciations of Western scholarship on Russia and the Soviet Union, naturally have provoked rebuttal. Specialists have condemned various factual errors, methodological shortcomings, and his alleged biases. Contrary to his assertions, many profound and often determinative continuities have been discovered, or rediscovered, by historians. Indeed, an aggressive, hard-line historiography, one seeking to explain the allegedly ugly Soviet present by reference to a more or less distant Russian past, has reemerged—part of the more general "neoconservative" revival in the United States that was abetted by the sharp downward turn in U.S.-Soviet relations that began in the late 1970s.

Reflections of this largely deterministic and negative view of Russian and Soviet history are to be found everywhere—and sometimes take an extravagant turn.

Edward L, Rowny, for instance, has declared that his experience of negotiating arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union "convinced me that the Soviets have not changed their inherited traits—they are still Russians." What are these "inherited traits"? An obsession with "seemingly picayune details" and with "their security," an "extreme penchant for secrecy" and an unwillingness to compromise, both a "serious inferiority complex" and a habit of bullying, duplicitous behavior in the ruthless pursuit of objectives laid down by their Kremlin masters. And General Rowny's authority for describing such traits as...