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Many Soviets believe the monstrous calumny that the decision to drop atomic bombs on the helpless populations of Hiroshima (here) and Nagasaki was a political one designed to intimidate the Soviet Union to acquiesce to U. S. global designs.
To understand the Soviet Union in 1984, we must turn to history. And we must begin with the history that is taught to the Soviet people.
Modem Soviet historiography does not take the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 as its origin. Instead, it proudly refers to the centuries-long historical record of the Russian people.
Although historical records of Russian government and politics refer to only as far back as the 9th century A.D., Soviet archaeologists have done extensive work on tracing the origins of the Eastern Slavic tribes, the peoples over whom the first Russian state rose. Intensely sensitive to the historic question of whether any good thing has come from Russia, Soviet historians reject a predominant Western interpretation that Russian government and law, if not all of Russian culture, were imports brought by Scandinavian marauders called Varangians. While the pagan Vikings, Danes, and Normans descended to loot, pillage, and then colonize Christian Western Europe, the Varangians, who were attracted to the wealth of the trade routes that passed through Russia, used superior military technology to impose a “protection racket” over the Russian lands. Thus, the Varangians inadvertently created the first Russian government, the “Kievan Rus’.”
Even though pagan Kievan Russia, when it converted to Christianity in 988 A.D., became Orthodox, rather than Roman Catholic, there was reason to believe that this Russia would become an integral part of European civilization. The ruling Kievan family intermarried across Europe—Sweden, Norway, Poland, France, Hungary, and Byzantium. But the Mongol invasion which began in 1237 destroyed that ancient Russian state and reshaped subsequent Russian history.
The impact of the Mongol invasion on Russian history cannot be overemphasized. Our political ancestors, the English, were allowed to develop their peculiar domestic political institutions undisturbed by outsiders in the centuries following the last successful invasion of the British Isles by the Normans in 1066. In contrast, the ancient Kievan political institutions were suppressed by the Mongol invaders, and a non-European style of politics was imposed upon the Russians.
European history tends to focus on its misfortunes. It tells us that in 1241, two Mongol armies under Batu swept out from the steppes of southern Russia: one defeated a combined army of Poles and Germans, the other occupied Hungary. Fortuitously for Europe, the death of the Great Khan induced Batu to return to the Russian steppes, which was a more favorable location for his playing a role in the succession politics of the Mongol Empire.
Soviet historians hasten to point out that in the four years prior to Batu’s invasion of Europe, Russians had been fighting the Mongol hordes and dying. Almost every city of ancient Russia had been leveled by the Mongols; their inhabitants had been either slaughtered or carried into slavery. Soviet citizens are convinced that their Russian ancestors, by their sacrificial suffering in those gruesome years, had so weakened and delayed the Mongol hordes that the death of the Great Khan was able to spare Western civilization from the disaster that befell the Russians.1
For the next 240 years, a dark age descended upon Russia. During this period, which the Soviets call “the Tatar Yoke,” the once politically and culturally unified Russians broke into three ethnic groups. The Ukrainians shaped their language and culture under the domination of Catholic Poles. The Belorussians were happily associated with the Lithuanians, until the latter were converted to Catholicism. And the Russians, sometimes called Great Russians, retreated from the steppes into the forests of northern Russia where, although under the direct domination of the Tatars, Moscow grew to become the unifying force of a resurgent Orthodox Russia, which came under attack by the Catholic West.
In the process of gathering in the various Russian lands, the Muscovite princes used methods which Americans would find reprehensible, but which were effective in re-
creating an independent ethnic Russian homeland. To assure central control over the affairs of state, news became a state secret. The possession of land became dependent on military service to the crown, and the peasants became possessions of the landholding nobility—a social order that assured a permanent economic base for the military power of Moscow. Also useful in the reunification of Russia under Moscow was the church-originated myth of Moscow as “the Third Rome.” According to this myth, Russian Orthodoxy, headquartered in Moscow and dependent on Muscovite secular power, was the only true church remaining on earth. Russian Orthodoxy, backed by the might of the Russian state, would be the sole source of mankind’s universal salvation.
The restoration of Russia under Moscow’s leadership was accomplished at great cost. Alexander Solzhenitsyn tells us that at the battle of Kulikovo Field, nine of ten Russians died to achieve their first major victory over Tatar troops. The surviving 10% took eight days to bury perhaps 200,000 dead. When Solzhenitsyn writes, “It was a battle not merely between principalities or nation-states, but between continents,” the reader is again forced to see an image of Russia as savior of European civilization.2
We know that today the Soviet Union is a multinational state, only three-quarters of whose population consists of the closely related Eastern Slavic groups: Great Russians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians. If the objective of Moscow’s princes was merely to gather in the lands of ancient Kievan Russia, why did their successors, the tsars, incorporate so many non-Russian peoples within the Russian Empire? The answer lies in Russia’s perpetual search for security. While the desire to convert the world to Orthodoxy was an integral part of Russia’s imperial ideology, the Russians understood that their survival depended on the acquisition and use of military power. History taught the Russians that no one victory in war could assure their security. For instance, only two years after Kulikovo Field, the Tatars were back and for another century reasserted their rule over the once-victorious Russians. The only security available to the Russians in this world was to conquer those neighbors who insisted on warring upon them or who were too weak to prevent other warlike peoples from crossing their lands to attack Muscovy.
In their quest for security, the Russians often paid for their technological inferiority with their blood and their land. This was especially true in their relations with the West. In the 16th century, the Polish king urged Queen Elizabeth to join in the imposition of a European boycott of military technology against Moscow. In urging sanctions against the Russian tsar, “the enemy of all liberty under the heavens,” whose purpose was “the open destruction of all Christian and liberal nations,” the Polish king reminded Elizabeth of the “tyranny he uses against his subjects.” Significantly, this Western leader admitted that his only advantage over the Russian numbers was advanced military technology.3
As one traces Russian history, one never loses sight of two themes—the Russians’ preoccupation with national security and their perceived role as saviors of Western civilization. In June 1812, a technologically superior all-European army, the Grand Army, struck massively and deeply into Russian territory, seizing the ancient capital of Moscow in three months. But Russia, unlike the European nations, did not mistake the loss of its capital for the loss of the war. Moreover, the Russians did not fight like the other Europeans.
For the first time, Napoleon faced the resistance of an entire nation, not merely that of its ruling classes. Not only had the Russian armies withdrawn in good order from their frontiers, fighting when required with great ferocity, but they evacuated the cities, villages, and farms, and devastated the land as they retreated. Russian peasants who had organized themselves into guerrilla bands ambushed Napoleon’s troops when they set out to forage for food from unbumed Russian lands. Thus, the man who had subjugated all Europe to French power found that this position in Moscow was militarily untenable. Unfortunately for Napoleon, he delayed too long; his retreating Grand Army was crippled by an early Russian winter and was decimated by Russian forces, both regular and irregular.
In 1813, it was the turn of the Russian tsar to strike west, to free Europe from French domination, and to lead victorious allied troops into Paris in March 1814. Again, as Soviets understand their history, Russia was Europe’s savior.
One hundred years and a few months after the tsar had entered Paris, the tranquility of Europe was again shattered by war. The motives that led almost all of the Russian leaders and the members of the opposing intelligentsia to enthusiastically support their country’s participation were varied. On the conservative side, the image of a Germanic Empire, Austria-Hungary, assaulting a fraternal, though distant Slavic state, Serbia, triggered the emotion needed to plunge into the abyss. Among liberals, who were resolutely opposed to the tsarist autocracy, the alliance with the Western democracies, Britain and France, in opposition to the German and Austro-Hungarian empires placed the might of Imperial Russia on the side of democracy. Fatefully, only one political party stood opposed to the war from its start, the most radical of the Marxist parties, the Bolshevik Party led by Vladimir Lenin.
In less than three years of bloody war, an inept tsar, his hysterical wife, and the thoroughly debauched and selfserving mystic, Rasputin, had turned all segments of Russian society against the imperial couple. Because of the tsar’s incompetent management of the war effort and resolute refusal to share power with more capable individuals, the revolution that toppled the archaic autocracy in February 1917 was relatively bloodless. Fortunately for Russia’s allies, the liberal politicians, who found the reins of government dropped into their laps, could not bring themselves to extricate their gravely wounded country from the war and to leave the Western democracies to face Imperial Germany alone. By tying down hundreds of thousands of German troops on the Eastern Front for several fateful months, Russian sacrifices saved the Western Allies while the United States made its decision to intervene and then dispatched the fresh forces which tipped the military balance in Europe against Germany. But by that time, bleeding Russia had been wracked by another revolution, one
that swept away the all-too-idealistic liberal politicians and placed a realistic Lenin and his Bolsheviks in power.
The Bolshevik Revolution, “the dawn of a new era in the history of mankind,” was not as revolutionary as it might first appear. It is true that the old, now obsolete Russian nobility, having lost any legitimate claim to privilege by forgetting its historic obligation of service to state and people, was extirpated. But it has been replaced by a uew nobility, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a Party of political activists whose ideally selfless work for the establishment of a just socialist society earns them the respect of the Soviet people.
It is also true that Russian Orthodoxy was dethroned as the state religion; but one can also suggest that, despite constitutional provisions against the establishment of religion, a new orthodoxy, Marxism-Leninism, has replaced *t- The official Russian Orthodox Church was unchanging, corrupt, and intellectually sterile. Marxism-Leninism, on the other hand, was vibrantly alive, morally puritan, and addressed to the hardships of working peoples confronted hy the social dislocations of industrial development. Officially atheistic, the new state religion (or ideology) has its °wn pantheon of saints—Marx, Engels, and Lenin. In Practical terms though, one must recognize, first, that the Marxist vision of utopia is not that far from the Christian 'deals for the Kingdom of God on earth, and, second, that this vision is one which will sustain its followers through great adversity. But the most radical departure from the Preceding Russian social system is the unregulated Soviet Political process that ensures that far more competent poli
Whether the invaders were Mongol hordes, Napoleon’s Grand Army, or, as in these photographs, Nazi Germany, the Russian people resisted, endured, and eventually prevailed—always at great cost in human lives and destruction to the motherland. And in each case, Soviet history says, their efforts preserved European civilization.
ticians rise to leadership roles in the new symbiosis of party and government in the Soviet Union.
When one studies the historical transition from Russian to Soviet government, one finds that the first document of the revolutionary Bolshevik regime is Lenin’s “Decree on Peace.” Every Soviet citizen knows that this seminal decree was an attempt to extract a badly wounded nation from the seemingly endless slaughter of World War I. Soviet people also know that warfare did not end for them with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which the Central Powers stripped the Russian Empire of a quarter of its farmland and population. Nor did warfare cease on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918. Not until 1922, when Japanese troops withdrew from Vladivostok, do Soviet historians view the end of the civil war and Allied intervention.4 They resolutely reject the Western interpretation that the Allies intervened in Russia to prevent war materiel from falling into German and Austrian hands. They further note that Western support of the counterrevolutionary White Russian forces escalated after the guns fell silent in Western Europe. No, it was capitalist/imperialist intervention against the new socialist socio-economic order—an attempt to crush their revolution, to extinguish “a beacon for all peoples.”
As the Mongol invasion was crucial for shaping the course of Russian history, so the Allied intervention is crucial to understanding the Soviets’ view of their recent history. Certainly, there can be no doubt that without material support for the counterrevolutionary White Russian forces and direct military intervention of 14 capitalist
A little girl in the United States recently wrote to the head of the Soviet Government—and she was invited to the Soviet Union and treated with great warmth. No Soviet citizen bears hatred toward the American people, because everyone in the Soviet Union is told that it is our officials in Washington who are the true arch-demons of Marxist-Leninist ideology with a plan to dominate the world.
countries, the Russian Civil War would have ended sooner and with much less devastation of Soviet Russia. Encircled and assaulted from all directions with hostile interventionist forces crossing almost every border of the old Russian Empire, the Communist Party formed the Red Army and led the Soviet people to victory over counterrevolution. Can there be any reason to wonder why present-day Soviets are suspicious of capitalist states?
A Soviet historian will state that with the end of the intervention and the realization by aggressive imperialist circles in the West that suppression of the Soviet people’s revolution was impractical (for the time being), the Communist Party was able to turn its attention to the work of restoring economic activity in Russia and to building the material base for the development of a socialist society and the means for its defense. After a brief period, however, militarism in Japan, fascism in Italy, and Nazism in Germany, “the most virulently aggressive forms of capitalism,” combined and posed the most severe threat to human civilization. Recognizing this threat, the Soviet Union sought to create an anti-fascist alliance with the so-called Western democracies. However, leadership circles in these Western states, blinded by hatred for socialism, underestimated the threat that Nazism posed to their countries and sought to turn Hitler against the Soviet Union. Rebuffed by Western statesmen and ignored during the Munich crisis, Soviet leadership, conscious of its historic duty to preserve the world’s only socialist country, was forced to look to the security of the Soviet state. The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 deflected Hitler from making war on the Soviet Union and gave the Soviet Government nearly two years to prepare its defenses against the technologically superior Nazi war machine.
World War II looms large in Soviet national consciousness. Events from that period are celebrated annually. More important, most of the present top Soviet leadership are veterans of that cataclysmic period.
On 22 June 1941, a new Napoleon, having subjugated Europe, unleashed a massive assault on the Soviet Union. “A battle unprecedented both in scope and scale unfolded between the striking force of imperialism and the world’s first socialist power.”5 During the next three years, until the Allied invasion at Normandy, virtually the only war front was the one defended by Soviet soldiers. On this front, during nearly four years of war, Soviet armed forces accounted for 85% of German war casualties and 75% of German materiel losses. Fair-minded persons are forced to the conclusion that the Soviet people, in defense of their socialist homeland, played the major role in destroying the
German Wehrmacht, liberating Europe from the Nazi yoke and preserving European civilization.
During the four years of European war, the Soviet people suffered 20 million dead. Twenty-five million Soviet citizens were rendered homeless, and nearly one-third of the wealth of the Soviet Union was destroyed. Having shouldered the greatest burdens of the anti-Hitler coalition, the Soviet Union looked for assistance from its wartime allies in rebuilding its devastated economy. Instead, the administration of Harry Truman cut economic aid (Lend Lease) to the Soviet Union as soon as the war in Europe ended, even before the Soviet people could finish burying the 300,000 who had lost their lives in the capture of Berlin.
A Soviet history will go on to relate that, faithful to its pledge at the Yalta Conference, the Soviet Union struck against the Japanese Empire with a force of 1.5 million men, three months to the day after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Blockaded by sea, bombed from the air, and now facing powerful formations of the Soviet Army, the defeat of Japan was imminent. At this point, American imperialists unleashed atomic bombs on the helpless civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Soviets see it, the atomic bombs which were demonstrated over Japan were politically aimed at the Soviet Union.6
According to Soviet historiography, the United States, having conducted the entire war with an eye to allow the Soviet Union to assume the main burden of land warfare, emerged from World War II relatively unbloodied, with its military-industrial plant undamaged, and in possession of the atomic bomb, a ‘‘trump card” for U. S. diplomacy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. With such an international position, the United States sought to remake the world in its own image, to create an ‘‘American Century.” Recognizing that only the Soviet Union stood in the way of such an imperialist design, the United States stubbornly refused to accede to the Soviet proposal, made in 1946, for the destruction of all nuclear weapons. Ruling circles in Washington, bolstered by superior military technology, hoped to be able to intimidate the Soviet Union to acquiesce to U. S. global designs.
In the years since World War II, the Soviet Union not only rebuilt its war-shattered economy, but also pushed its economic development forward to the stage of ‘‘devel-
°Ped socialism.” To protect these socialist gains and those °f the socialist community of nations that has emerged since World War II, the Soviet Union has had to develop nuclear forces to counterbalance those of the imperialists. At nearly every step of the way, the United States has been |he first to develop the new technologies of nuclear war- nre. Despite the Soviet people’s repeated demonstration of the will needed to attain and then maintain a balance of orces, reactionary circles in the West continue to entertain fne illusion that it is possible to attain military superiority 0Ver the Soviet Union, in the vain hope of halting the Progressive development not only of the world socialist Movement, but also of the national liberation movement. As every Soviet citizen knows, the Soviet people bear hatred toward the American people, with whom they ought shoulder to shoulder in World War II. Indeed, they roake a sharp distinction between the American people and | e ruling circles in Washington, the imperialists—those arch-demons of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Certainly, the oviets know that the American people are peace-loving, ut the imperialists, through their hirelings in the Ameri- c.an media, whip up anti-Soviet hysteria in order to con- hnue the arms race so that the military-industrial complex may continue to reap super-profits from the production of armaments and weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, Soviet citizens know that, contrary to Western propaganda, these reactionary ruling circles, focusing entirely or> their private interests, are following an adventuristic Policy in a vain attempt to halt the progress of history. No actic is too base, no strategy is too risky—even the danger of a genocidal thermonuclear war, which is the essence of the so-called deterrent policy—for the imperialists to employ against the socialist nations. Given these acts, the Soviet Union, the bulwark of the socialist community and the defender of socialist humanism, has been °rced, against its innermost desires, to divert scarce resources from peaceful economic construction into the pro- uction of counterbalancing defensive armaments.
This is the historical perspective from which the Soviet People, including their leadership, look upon a largely ostile world. This is a people who have suffered, enUred, and survived some of the harshest blows of history, Population of 270 million survivors who, except for the m century catastrophes of war, famine, and self-in- jt‘cted massacre, should number 375 to 400 million souls, ■s naive, and dangerously deceiving, for Americans who avc n°t fought a single modem war on their own soil for nearly 120 years, to assume that the Soviet people share cur view of recent history. It is even more dangerous to jlSsUrne, as many hard-line “experts” do, that the Soviet eldership knows the historical “truth” and shields itself u its nefarious grand design behind a gross distortion of ct- ^ne must remember that the socialist revolution and lee subsequent civil war virtually eliminated Russian intel- cjuals who shared the West European understanding of dedication to democratic institutions and traditions. ^ 0 is there in the Soviet Union to teach the “truth” as see it? More than that, how many busy American in- inf^13' or political executives, living in a country where Ormation is far more accessible to the public, could give
a coherent and reasonably accurate account of American, much less world, history for the last 65 years?
What we find in the Soviet Union is not an all-powerful, all-knowing dictatorship. Rather, the Soviet Union is ruled by a committee or oligarchy of wizened old men who have, for the most part, risen to the top, not by concentrating their attention on world events, but by deftly and continuously playing the domestic political game. Generally, those Soviet experts who are most knowledgeable about the outside world are not in positions of power; and clearly, they are not in the Soviet military, 90% of whom are members either of the League of Young Communists (Komsomols) or of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
In Fundamentals of Political Science: Textbook for Primary Political Education, the Soviet communist learns that although ”... imperialism has suffered major setbacks in the recent decades” and, “on the whole, the balance of forces in the world is becoming less and less favourable for the capitalist system, ... the successes of the forces fighting for radical reorganization of society are causing modern imperialism to fight back with mounting fury.”7 Given this perspective on the present, the historical experience of the Soviet people, and the assigned, sacred duty to defend not merely one-sixth of the planet’s surface along the longest borders of any country on earth, but also mankind’s last, best hope for peace and social justice, it is not surprising that the Soviet leaders will prefer to err on the side of safety. Having made the intellectual distinction between the peoples of Western countries and their “imperialist leaders,” it is not hard to justify the almost schizophrenic approach which Soviet diplomacy takes toward its arch-rival, the United States. Welcoming Samantha Smith as a representative of the American people in July 1983 is not inconsistent with the delivery of a “worthy rebuff” to encroachments on Soviet airspace by the forces of U. S. imperialism—i.e., the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007—two months later. Such behavior has little to do with the philosophy of Marxism- Leninism; it is far more closely associated with the collective historical memory of today’s Soviet citizens.
'USSR Academy of Sciences, Institute of History, History of the USSR (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), vol. I, p. 56.
2Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “Zakhar-The-Pouch” (1966), The Penguin Book of Russian Short Stories, cd. David Richards (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 352. '“A Letter from King Sigismund of Poland to Elizabeth I. 1559,” Medieval Russia, ed. Basil Dmytryshyn, 2d. ed. (Hinsdale, Illinois: Dryden Press, 1973), pp. 229-31.
JFor example, Yuri Polyakov, The Civil War in Russia (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981), p. 112.
5A. N. Yakovlev and others. Fundamentals of Political Science, trans. David Fid- Ion (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979), p. 181.
6Nikolai V. Sivachcv and Nikolai N. Yakovlev, Russia and the United Stales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 209.
’Yakovlev and others, pp. 417-18.
A former naval officer and an occasional contributor to the Proceedings, Dr. Bruins is a member of the political science faculty at California State University, Fullerton.