‘Exit Stalin’ by Mark B. Smith review

‘Are you out of your mind? They don’t shoot people these days’, says a young man at the outset of Mark Smith’s new book. But he was wrong. His girlfriend had indeed heard gunfire in the next street, as soldiers fired at demonstrators breaking into the Party headquarters in Novocherkassk in protest against food shortages. It was June 1962, a decade after Stalin’s death.

Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev had been trying to curb Stalin’s legacy of terror and improve the lot of ordinary people. Mark Smith believes this ambition never had a chance of success. In the Soviet Union terror was fundamental to the system. Violence, like that at Novocherkassk, continued until the end. Lenin had been as determined as his successors to create a totalitarian state. Stalin may have taken things too far, but he was not an aberration. The secret police was an intrinsic part of the system, not an optional add-on. The Soviet system was incapable of making the political and economic reforms that could have saved it. When Gorbachev made the attempt in 1988-89 he doomed the system and did himself out of a job.

In 2018 Smith set out to turn these thoughts into a solid, scholarly book. He was well qualified. He had spent years working and studying in Russia, had a Russian wife, knew many Russians, had a vivid feeling for the quirks of the culture, both high and low, and had a job researching Russian history in Cambridge. Then disaster struck. First there was Covid, which prevented him from returning to Russia to do his research on the spot. Then his wife died. He was paralysed by grief. And in February 2022, a few weeks later, Putin invaded Ukraine.

Smith found himself thinking differently about the Soviet Union. He no longer saw it as a unified system centred on Moscow. The regions, their people, and their politics were crucial to the story. He had been inclined to share the idea that the Soviet collapse was inevitable, but the idea was false. Putin in Russia and Lukashenka in Belarus had demonstrated that a state prepared to use its coercive power without inhibition can survive indefinitely. He had to revise the whole thrust of his book.

Like the United States, Smith believes, the Soviet Union was born in revolution and claimed a unique mission to show mankind a better future. That differentiated it from Hitler’s Germany, to which it is often compared. But there are questions to be asked: could the Soviet Union have survived? And if so for how long? Was it never more than a brutal dictatorship? Could it ever have become a genuine attempt to better the lives of ordinary people? Smith places at the core of his book what he calls a ‘new analytical framework’ for looking at the Soviet Union. It was, he maintains, not a system or a regime. It was a whole collection of conflicting realities, the ‘civilisation’ of his title. His writing is fluent, unorthodox, emotional, and spirited. His arguments are often confusing and sometimes obscure. His book’s strength lies not in any new approach, but in the empathy with which he portrays a place that no longer exists.

We now see that time as a period of failure and decline; for many of us it has faded into an abstraction. But for those who lived there, it was the only place they had ever known. Every family had suffered directly or indirectly from Stalin’s murderous policies, and from the poverty and famine that accompanied them. But he had led them to beat the Germans. They were justifiably proud of that. They felt proud, too, as their country rose to challenge the US on land, at sea, in space, and in the hearts and minds of those who lived in what was then called the Third World. Once Stalin was gone most Russians were content to get on with their lives in what seemed like a new normality.

Smith sees Nikita Khrushchev as both the hero and anti-hero of this story. A henchman of Stalin, he too had blood on his hands, but he did passionately believe in socialism and its ideals: liberty, fraternity, equality. He did his best to implement them while he had the power.

The 1917 revolution transformed Khrushchev – ebullient, gregarious, barely educated, a shepherd boy from a poor family who became a skilled engineering worker – into a skilful and ruthless politician. His achievements included a housing revolution which gave millions of miserably housed people their own front door for the first time, the cobbling together of a reasonably comprehensive system of health and social services, and a steady improvement in the supply of consumer goods. These things may not have matched what was available in the West, but Soviet people appreciated them as an improvement on what they had before.

The Soviet Union set out to create a comprehensive education system which by Khrushchev’s time had transformed a largely illiterate people into one of the best educated in the world, even if the work of its brilliant scientists was disproportionately directed to military purposes. Despite its unrelenting demands for orthodoxy, the Soviet Union produced some of the greatest creative artists of the 20th century: writers such as Pasternak, Grossman, and Akhmatova, composers such as Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Khachaturyan. In one of his lurches towards openness, Khrushchev sanctioned, in 1962, the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s subversive Gulag novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

In the West many were convinced that the Soviet regime was secure because its people were politically passive, brainwashed into orthodoxy. We make the same mistake about totalitarian regimes today. Soviet people were as capable of thinking for themselves as anyone. They lived in a totalitarian state, so most of them sensibly kept their heads down and got on with their lives. Some discussed in private things which the authorities would have preferred them to leave alone. The bravest challenged the regime in public, but even they were not advocating the adoption of Western liberalism. Andrei Sakharov, the most distinguished of them all, described his views as ‘profoundly socialist’.

The Soviet Union reached the height of its international power under Khrushchev’s apparently boring but politically cunning successor, Leonid Brezhnev. He genuinely believed in the need to improve relations with the Americans in order to get some grip on the menace of nuclear weapons. It was under his aegis that the two superpowers negotiated some of their most significant nuclear arms agreements. He tried to improve the lot of his people by increasing the production of consumer goods. He also presided over a massive increase in corruption, from which he and many of his cronies benefited, and he was sick and dysfunctional in his later years. Even so, in the years of chaos which succeeded the Soviet collapse, many people looked back on his time as a golden age. By the time he died in 1982 the system was clearly failing to deliver both at home and abroad. The people at the top who succeeded him were not fools, and they could see that for themselves. They engineered Mikhail Gorbachev into the top job hoping he could stop the rot.

At first Gorbachev tried to reverse the trend by reviving what he had persuaded himself was Lenin’s original idea of a socialism without brutality. It didn’t work. His reforms only made the economy worse. He turned to social democracy, believing that if people could make their own choices an economic recovery would follow. But the regime was unable to cope with his reforms, nor with the growing unrest among the Union’s national republics. It fell apart, and Gorbachev lost his job in the ensuing mayhem.

Smith’s insight that the Soviet Union could not survive a whiff of democracy because of its totalitarian essence is still very relevant. The Soviet Union was after all only a brief interlude in Russia’s long history. Yet Russia has never yet managed to put together a lasting democracy. Unprotected by natural frontiers, it has for centuries attempted to secure itself by preying on its neighbours. Many of us believed that the end of Soviet communism would give Russia a chance to develop its own version of liberal politics and economics. Those hopes were disappointed. Russia is not the Soviet Union. Putin is not Stalin. But his government is brutal, authoritarian, and expansionist in the old tradition. Is that Russia’s unavoidable fate?

• Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991
  Mark B. Smith
  Allen Lane, 576pp, £40
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Rodric Braithwaite was British Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1988-91).