Solidarity & the Soviet "Fall"

Why did the Soviet Union fall?
I received the letter about an article we ran in the December 2006 issue from one of Jim Hitchcock’s colleagues at St. Louis University, Charles Ford, a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. Below is the letter, my reply, and his response, followed by a few more comments of mine.
--Jim Kushiner

RE: the article by John Harmon McElroy, “Workers of Another World United” (December 2006).

A great strength of this article is its emphasis on the central role of Christianity in Solidarity and in the broader movement that led to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. I wish to comment on a statement near the beginning of his artlcle.

"[W]ithout Solidarity in Poland in 1980 there would have been no disintegration of the Iron Curtain nine years later, no crumbling of the Soviet empire, and no dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in 1991."

By the time of Solidarity, developments were under way in the Soviet Union that would bring the Soviet system to an end, even if there had been no Solidarity. By 1980, virtually all serious Russian literature produced in the Soviet Union was implicitly Christian. Komsomol and other Party organizations railed against this trend, but to no avail.

The leaders of the Party had come to the conclusion that they no longer wanted to live in the society communism had created. They chose Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Party in March 1985 for the express purpose of creating a society that would reflect Christian, not communist, ideals. Solidarity was a vibrant and visible expression of this trend and undoubtedly hastened it along. But developments in the Soviet Union were decisive in bringing the collapse of the Soviet system.

REPLY
Readers may be curious to know of a source for your astonishing (to me) claim. Otherwise, it may come across simply as a conjecture of some sort, an assertion made out of the blue.
--Jim Kushiner

REPLY
Jim, Yours is a fair question.

There are two parts to my response. The first discusses the policies pursued by Gorbachev. The second addresses the intentions of the party leaders in choosing him.

For most of Soviet history the regime categorically denied that the Church had any role to play in societal life other than “the satisfaction of the cult” for the superstitious elderly believers who were dying out. After 1945, the regime found it useful to have the Church engage in public campaigns on behalf of world peace, in which it expressly proclaimed the Soviet Union as the leader in international peace.

By 1980 I was studying Christianity in the Soviet Union carefully, from such sources as Keston College, Religion in Communist Dominated Areas, Voice of the Martyrs, and others. Once Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary in March 1985, I followed in specific detail his actions with respect to the churches. 

It became apparent that Gorbachev’s policies toward the churches, especially the Russian Orthodox Church, were designed to free them from state and party control. There were times when Gorbachev had to prod the churches, again especially the Russian Orthodox Church, which had long histories of conformity to Soviet control. I watched as his policy was followed consistently for the next five years. Gorbachev spoke frequently about the importance of things spiritual for society.

In 1990, on the first of my eight trips to Moscow, I asked my Moscow [colleague], an Orthodox Christian and historian of mathematics, about Gorbachev. He told me that the following story was circulating, while acknowledging that he could not independently verify it.

When Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary, a series of public figures were on hand to greet him. One of these was the representative of the Orthodox Church in charge of contacts abroad. He reportedly greeted Gorbachev as follows. “Congratulations Mikhail Sergevich, you can be sure that the Church will continue all its activities on behalf of world peace.” Gorbachev's response is reported as follows. “You know, world peace is the task of the state. Perhaps the Church can help create a new moral climate in our society.”

The evidence is clear that Gorbachev pursued a policy of promoting the independence of the churches and spoke of the importance of spiritual life for society.

The evidence that the Soviet leadership specifically chose Gorbachev for this purpose is less obvious. I do not remember where I first heard the assertion that they had, but a variety of things have seemed to support the possibility.

It is consistent with occasional reports I was reading in the 1980s, for example, about even prominent party officials being distraught at the cold, uncaring service their parents received in hospitals, and being moved by the merciful attitude of the nuns who worked at some care facilities.

The fact that Gorbachev spoke so publicly, from the very beginning of his appointment as general secretary, about promotion the independence of churches and the importance of the spiritual life for the people is evidence that he had the support of the top leadership. I never saw anything that indicated opposition to his program. The attempted coup in 1991 did not involve any of the top party leadership. It represented an extremely belated attempt by a tiny remnant of committed communists to stop the process and came far far too late.

I hope this offers some of what you are looking for.

Charles Ford
St. Louis, Missouri

Some final thoughts:
I have not read deeply on this issue at all, but I can see how it could be argued that too much attention has been given to external players and factors—Reagan, “star wars”, Thatcher, Polish Solidarity, and, of course the role of John Paul II, as important as all of this was, and less attention to internal factors.

What’s the explanation for the collapse of such a regime? The first place to look for primary causes would be inside the regime itself. Decisions in the Soviet Union surely had to be “decisive” for what transpired. But did top leaders really wish to open the country up to "Christian ideals"?

I recall the celebration of the millennium of Christianity in Russia in 1988 and being surprised at how much was being allowed, even promoted, by the Soviet government. (Of course one always suspects, at the same time, calculated political reasons for this.)

As to literature "by 1980", I cannot speak to that. As to film, Tarkovsky's films of the 1960s and 70s, I believe, are ultimately deeply Christian. And Repentance, the 1984 film by Tengiz Abuladze, initially banned in the Soviet Union, was released there in 1987, two years after Gorbachev. It has clearly Christian elements, ending with the line (from memory): What good is a road if it doesn’t lead to a church?

--Jim Kushiner

Comments

[James A. Altena]

As an undergraduate history major in the late 1970s I was a student of a leading historian of contemporary Eastern Europe, and learned much about (to quote the title of my mentor's book) "The Dynamics of Communism in Eastern Europe." (I also acquired a very large repertoire of hilariously scathing underground political humor from behind the Iron Curtain.)

I would briefly say that the fall of Communism was due to a combination of the internal and external factors. The system was rotting from within, and external pressure alone could not have brought about its downfall; but the willingness and ability of key leaders such as JPII and Reagan to apply pressure at specific points hastened the collapse and triggered it sooner rather than later. One must also not underestimate how much it meant to those suffering within the USSR to know that they had active and real support from the world outside.

[Ethan Cordray]

I am very interested in the subject, though I am too young to have any first-hand experience of the era. Can anyone point me to other Soviet or Eastern bloc (though I am especially interested in Russian) literature of the period that is particularly Christian? Besides Solzhenitsyn, with whom I am already somewhat familiar.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>I am very interested in the subject, though I am too young to have any first-hand experience of the era. Can anyone point me to other Soviet or Eastern bloc (though I am especially interested in Russian) literature of the period that is particularly Christian? Besides Solzhenitsyn, with whom I am already somewhat familiar.<<<

Check out any of the works of Father Alexander Men, an Orthodox priest of exceptional holiness (like Judy and me, he was born a Jew). He was murdered by unknown assailants shortly before the fall of the USSR. Not many of his works have been translated into English, but a good selection can be found in "Christianity for the 21st Century: The Prophetic Writings of Alexander Men", Elizabeth Roberts and Ann Shukman, eds., Continuum Press (New York) 1996.

[Stuart Koehl]

Also, read (or re-read) Boris Pasternak's "Dr. Zhivago", Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Marguerita", and Solokov' "Yonder Flows the Don" and "The Don Flows Down to the Sea".

[Judy Warner]

I haven't read Solokov, but I always understood him to be a craven party-line lackey. Wrong?

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>I haven't read Solokov, but I always understood him to be a craven party-line lackey. Wrong?<<<

If he was, the Party had an interesting way of showing its appreciation. But in fact, Solokov, like many writers of his day (and of Tsarist times, too) learned under the harsh hand of censorship (real censorship, not the craven stuff that causes our arty types to get the vapors) to be subtle, to employ irony, to expose by concealing. In our society, of couse, anything goes, and so our writers have forgotten that there are other ways of getting the message across other than by slamming the reader over the head with a 2 x 4.

[Judy Warner]

Well, there's this.

Letter of Mikhail Solokhov to the Secretariat of the Union of Soviet Writers

To the Secretariat of the Union of Soviet Writers:

I have read Solzhenitsyn's Feast of the Conquerors and In the First Circle.

What is striking--if one can use the expression--is the sickly shamelessness of the author. Solzhenitsyn not only makes no attempt to hide or somehow veil his anti-Soviet views; but he underlines them, puts them on display, taking the pose of a "truth-seeker", a man who, unashamed, "cuts into the heart of truth", and who--spitefully and in a frenzy--points out all the mistakes and all the blunders permitted by the Party and Soviet power beginning in the 1930s.
...
At one time I formed an impression of Solzhenitsyn (in part, after his letter to the congress of writers in May of this year), that he is an insane person, suffering from megalomania. That he, Solzhenitsyn, having served some time, did not withstand the harsh experience and popped a spring. I am not a psychiatrist and it is not my business to determine to what degree Solzhenitsyn's psyche has been infected. But if this is true, the man cannot be trusted with a pen; a malicious, insane person, who has lost control of his reason, living in the tragic events of 1937 and following years, poses a great danger to all readers, young ones in particular.

If Solzhenitsyn is psychologically normal, then he is, in essence, an open and malicious anti-Soviet person. In either case, Solzhenitsyn has no place in the ranks of the Union of Soviet Writers. I am unconditionally in favor of the exclusion of Solzhenitsyn from the Union of Soviet Writers.

M. Sholokhov
8.IX.67

Sounds like a craven party-line lackey to me.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Sounds like a craven party-line lackey to me.<<<

That's a pretty pro-forma denunciation by a guy whose own work had been denounced earlier. It is Solokov's work, not the statements he was coerced into making that show where his real sympathies were. I think Solzhenitsyn himself would be a bit more understanding towards his weaker brother having experienced the wrath of the system at first hand.

[Judy Warner]

Solzhenitsyn accused him of plagiarism. Excerpt (Time Magazine, 1979):

Solzhenitsyn, now living in exile in Zurich, notes that Sholokhov, a former laborer and clerk with scarcely any education, was only 23 years old when he published the first volume in 1928. Yet, Solzhenitsyn points out, "the book reveals the kind of literary power attainable only after many attempts by an experienced and accomplished writer." He also joins many critics in observing that Sholokhov's other fiction (Seeds of Tomorrow, Harvest on the Don) is strikingly inferior to The Quiet Don, which was completed in 1940. It became the best-selling Soviet novel in the U.S.S.R. (6 million copies translated into 40 different Soviet languages), and Soviet textbooks extol it as the supreme literary accomplishment of Communism. The book continues to be widely read in Soviet schools.

Solzhenitsyn's charge will doubtless prove embarrassing to the leaders in the Kremlin, where the 69-year-old Sholokhov reigns as a court novelist and hatchet man for cultural hardliners. In recent years, Sholokhov has frequently denounced liberal writers; in 1969 he characterized Solzhenitsyn as a "Colorado beetle" who deserved extermination as a noxious plant pest.

All right, court novelist and hatchet man for cultural hardliners, not craven party-line lackey.

[Stuart Koehl]

I have heard the rumors that Solokov plagiarized, but I haven't seen them sustained anywhere. My wife, who studied his work, may have an opinion. I will ask when she gets home.

[Judy Warner]

Yes, I'd like to hear her opinion. I have heard that he was vindicated from the charge of plagiarism, but I don't have the source, so it could be some old apparatchik.

[Charles Ford]

>>>I am very interested in the subject, though I am too young to have any first-hand experience of the era. Can anyone point me to other Soviet or Eastern bloc (though I am especially interested in Russian) literature of the period that is particularly Christian? Besides Solzhenitsyn, with whom I am already somewhat familiar.<<<

Not being a follower of literature, I consulted a primary source on Russian and Soviet History, Dimitry Pospielovsky, particularly the third volume of his ‘A history of Soviet athiesm in theory and practice, and the believer." Volume 3 is titled "Soviet studies on the Church and the believers response to atheism." It appeared in 1988.

On page 130 he lists a series of novelists, whom he terms "ruralist," who write about peasants, "favorably contrasting their often instinctive religiousness and Christian values by which they live, with the totally amoral, cynical, nihilistic new men and women of the athiest and materialistic Soviet urban civilization."

He names F. Abramov, V. Shukshin, S. Zalygin, V. Belov, V. Astafiev and Valentin Rasputin. He mentions two stories by Belov "There Was no Fire" and "The Eve," two by Rasputin "Farwell to Matriona" and "Fire," and one by Astafiev "A Sad Detective Story."

He also mentions other writers. Vladimir Soloukhin, who "has undergone a colossal personal evolution from his participation in the attacks on Pasternak in 1958," has written "Time to Gather up Stones." Vladimir Maximov, who was "expelled to the West in the same year as Solzhnitsyn," is the author of "Seven Days of Creation." And Vasil Bykov.

[david pence]

"Why did the soviet union fall?" A religious political consideration which might include 1) the internal dynamic of the Soviet Union represented by Gorbachev; 2) the reemergence of the Catholic nations represented by Pope John Paul and Lech Walesa, 3) the persistent muscular and articulate role of the Christian United States best articulated by John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Finally 4)the inexcusably forgotten but crucial military and religious role of the Moslem south. The Islamic martyrs in the bloody war of Afghanastan, the American dead of Vietnam and Korea, and the assassination of JFK(by an atheist Marxist-not LBJ)remind us never to say the Cold War was "won without a shot being fired".

[Charles Ford]

In remembering the "Islamic martyrs in the bloody war of Afghanistan" we should especially remember the most effective leader of the forces that resisted Soviet troops in Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud. When the Taliban tried to take over Afganistan in the mid 1990s Massoud led the fight against them.

In April 2001, Massoud addressed the European Parliament, warning that the Taliban had connections with Al-Qaeda, and that an important terrorist attack was imminent. The warning was ignored. Massoud was killed by a suicide attack on September 9, 2001, two days before the attack about which he had warned.

[Judy Warner]

That was very unfortunate; I remember it, Charles. Also unfortunate is the belief of the Islamic warriors that they drove the Soviet Union from Afghanistan unaided. That is one thing that led to their conviction that they could defeat the entire west.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>> The first discusses the policies pursued by Gorbachev. The second addresses the intentions of the party leaders in choosing him.<<<

Those who would like a slightly different perspective might want to peruse General William Odom's book, "The Collapse of the Soviet Military", which reveals how Gorbachev's attempts to reform the Soviet economy in order to compete with an increasingly technologically superior United States military had the unforeseen consequence of undermining the very military system which itself was both the bulwark of and rationale for the existence of the Soviet state.

[mike jose]

What an enormously encouraging forum and modestly excellent collection of mere comment. Having finally recently completed my education (in my forties) by reading 'Basic Economics' by Thomas Sowell, 2nd ed. (now in 3rd ed.), I am much struck by his complementary analysis of the USSR's economic inefficiency and essential incompetence that meant that the system in effect ate itself. (As the professor was a Marxist in his twenties, he is particularly valuable. His theory is essentially classical Austrian-school econs, which can be very technical, but he picks his examples so well, and employs no maths or graphs.) A favourite illustration: the Soviet central state decreed arable fields would conglomerated into huge sizes for efficiency, and that plowmen would be incentivised for completing ploughing rapidly, and the work quality supervised by officials with clipboards. In other words, the State-planners made all the decisions and the plowman would have no direct responsibility or link with the final result, as an farmer-owner would. The results were a farming disaster for some of world's richest arable lands. The plowmen ploughed the outer edges of the fields to the regulation 9", and to speed things up, as they got further into the field they raised the plow blades until in the centre of the field they were plowing 2" deep. The plowmen got their bonuses but the centres of the fields could not be checked by the men with clipboards. The harvests were dismal, an empirical disaster which caused famine. But Prof. Sowell's central point here is that economics is about information and its flow. The plowmen knew what would happen, but were incentivized to 'beat the system'. In crude terms, socialism underestimates that fact that information is money. So the essential justice of the free market is apparently inimical to atheistic communism, not that Sowell is so blatantly Christian, but he quotes the book of Genesis and CSL at will.

[Ethan Cordray]

Mr. Jose, is that the same Thomas Sowell of Black Rednecks and White Liberals fame?

[Judy Warner]

Ethan, Thomas Sowell has written dozens of books. Every single one of them is a gem that would teach a person more about the world than he probably learned in all of his college career.