Tell Me, Comrade, When Did Russia Go Bad?

There’s an old left-wing debate called When was the Russian
Revolution betrayed? (Like many leftist pastimes, this
can take the form of either a parlor game or a firefight, depending
on the circumstances.) The anarchists think the revolution
went sour when the Bolsheviks seized power and transformed the

soviets from bottom-up organs of worker control into
instruments of the state. The Trotskyists think things went bad
when Trotsky lost his power struggle with Stalin, though most of
them maintained that the USSR was a “workers’ state,” albeit a
“bureaucratically deformed” one. The “anti-revisionists”—that’s
Stalinist for “Stalinists”—think Khrushchev’s the man who put
things off the rails. (*) I’m sure there’s an old Communist Party
stalwart somewhere who thinks the last day of True Socialism in
Russia was December 26, 1991, the day the Soviet Union broke
up.

Twenty-two years later, there’s talk of a new Cold War
beginning. Large swaths of the West have given up on post-Communist
Russia. But no one’s gotten a good game going of When was the
Russian Revolution of 1991 betrayed? There’s a vague sense in
the American press that it happened not long after Putin took over,
which matches the personality-centric way that power tends to be
covered (as well as the fact that Yeltsin is widely seen as a U.S.
ally and Putin as an enemy). But while Putin has certainly made
thing worse, I remember the moment my pessimism about the new
Russia started to outweigh my optimism, and it arrived long before
he came to power. It was October 4, 1993, the day Yeltsin had
his tanks shell
parliament. I didn’t doubt that the new order was freer than
the Soviet system, of course, but it seemed to be stopping well
short of anything appealing.

In those days, setting aside some Bircher die-hards
convinced that the apparent fall of Communism was a ruse, my fellow
Yeltsin-skeptics tended to be on the left. Now Moscow’s most
vocal American opponents are the neocons, whose Cold War nostalgia
feels like a right-wing mutation of Ostalgie.
But my attitude hasn’t substantially changed, except for getting
bleaker.

If I’m pessimistic about Russian liberty, I’m relatively
optimistic when it comes to Russia’s place in the world order.
Two years before I was born, the Soviet Union sent tanks to a city
in the middle of Europe. Nowadays the big Russian foreign-policy
crisis involves a dispute over the control of a majority-Russian
enclave just over the country’s border. While I don’t for a moment
defend Putin’s actions in Crimea, I think I can safely say that in
the grand arc of history, this is a better problem to have. And
while I don’t have sympathy for those Americans eager to thrust
this country deeper into that dispute, I can see that they’re
spouting the
frustrated rhetoric of a faction that knows it isn’t setting
policy. On both sides of the old Cold War, things could be a lot
worse.

(* There’s probably only five or six people out there who’ll
agree with me about this, but I think the Encyclopedia of
anti-Revisionism On-Line is one of the most endlessly
entertaining sites on the Internet. The thing is like a TV Tropes
of Stalinism. I’m especially fond of this
document from 1980, in which an American Maoist sect’s loyalty
to Chinese foreign policy leads it to call for a “united front with
U.S. imperialism against Soviet imperialism.” It goes on to endorse
the draft, NATO, increased Pentagon spending, and an American
military presence around the globe—but not in Taiwan, since
that American base “represents support for a comprador,
counterrevolutionary separatist faction.” Seriously, this is
hilarious.)