The Making and Breaking of the Soviet System: An Interpretation by Christopher s> Read (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS I53 I9I7, and a constant object of concern to the municipality,it was now subject wholly to the centralplanning agencies and industrialministriesin Moscow. Kuntzel argues that in the Soviet period Nizhnii lost its significance as a religious and commercial centre, and its lively cultural life was also undermined . Once a forum for internationalmeetings and exchanges, it became a closed city, and even passenger ships had to pass it at night if they had foreignerson board.During the Sovietperiod it gainedmany new educational institutions,but lost its lively theatre and the animated intellectualdiscussion groups. This historydoes not fulfilall the expectationsit might arouse. The Nizhnii archives are among the richest and best catalogued provincial collections in the Russian Federation. Unfortunately, the author has used them only sparingly, the former party archives not at all. Her list of sources does not referto archivematerials,and she does not provide a descriptionof the fonds she has used, though it would have been very useful to later scholars. Her account of institutions and economic life quite often relies on official handbooks rather than on the memoirs or oral recollections of real people. Not even Gor'kii is quoted as an eye-witness. There are strange omissions: thus, on page I56 we are told that there was no universityin Nizhnii before I9I6, but on page 226 we suddenlycome acrossa universityin the mid-I920S, with no explanation of its origin. On page 50 she states that in the I950S Khrushchev thought of making Gor'kiicapital city of the RSFSR, but gives no source for this interestingassertion.The index contains only the names of persons,so that it is difficultto follow the historyof institutions. All the same, Kuntzel's study offers a useful introduction to the modern historyof one of Russia'smost interestingand importantcities. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies GEOFFREY HoSKING University College London Read, Christopher. TheMakingandBreaking oftheSoviet System. AnInterpretation. European History in Perspective.Palgrave,Basingstokeand New York, 2001. X + 259 pp. Notes. Selectbibliography.Index. CI(3.99 (paperback). THIS is a stimulating and perceptive account of the rise and decline of the Soviet systema decade afterthe system'sdemise gave opportunitiesto analyse and interpretthe whole experience. The author's purpose was 'to study the formation and dissolution of the Soviet system the forces bringing it together and the contradictions which eventually blew it apart' (p. Ioo). Largelybased on establishedaccounts ratherthan presenting unknown facts or new archival materials, the study focuses on the essence of the system, relating its peak under Stalin to its Leninist, Marxist and tsarist roots, and interpretingits subsequentdecline and ultimatecollapse. A strikingfeature of the volume are its concise summariesof the system at various stages, and of the strengths, weaknesses and contributions of the principal protagonists. Thus, the following well summarizes Khrushchev's inheritance: 'Khrushchev's greatest strength was that he had identified the most dysfunctionalfeaturesof Stalinism -the cult of the leader, the power of I54 SEER, 8i, I, 2003 the political police, the eclipse of the party, the rigidity of the command economy, the stultifying cultural monotony, the dangers of the Cold War. However, he did not findsuitablesolutionsnordidhe move out of the strategic frameworkof Stalinism'(p. i 6I ). Similar is the succinct view of Stalin in the early I920S as 'the revolutionary leadership's chief backroom boy and dogsbody' (p. 46). Throughout the book, such pithy phrases characterize situations,actions, individualsand events. In places, conventional wisdom is plausiblychallenged. Read identifiesthe failure to capture Moscow as the turning-point of the Second World War, ratherthan the battle for Stalingrad.The idea of Hitler as the founder of the Soviet Union's easternempire (p. I15) bringsthe readerup with a start.And the portrayalof Stalin as wartimeleader not a psychopathicmonsterbut a nationalleaderwho had hiswits about him, and certainlynot crazy(p. I33) is supportedby many militarymen, and an antidote to views of Stalin as wholly evil. Indeed, throughout, Read presentsbalanced views, rejectingpoliticallyinspiredtendencies to caricature. Buildingsocialismand communism became reduced to 'productionism',in an attempt ultimatelyvain to outperformthe capitalismwhose universal overthrow provided the Bolsheviks with their purpose. That ideologicallydriven goal sustainedthe system'sdevelopment and its defence, and supposedly justified all the evil abuse of power by the Bolshevik leaders until Brezhnev. Under Brezhnev, ideological confidence and zeal was replaced by a 'crudely...