Suslov was as Much a Gravedigger of Soviet System as Gorbachev, Zhuravlev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 7 – Mikhail Suslov, who helped Stalin transform Marxism into a religion and then exploited Brezhnev’s willingness to defer to him on so many issues, reproduced the ideological construction of 1950, “made the ideology a dead letter,” and thus created “a murderous dissonance between ideology and life,” Dmitry Zhuravlyev argues.

            And by killing the ideology of an ideological system, Suslov left the system all but dead. By his insistence on Marxism as a religion, as a system of postulates that could never be questioned rather than a way of thinking about reality, Suslov ended by killing the USSR, the head of the Moscow Institute of Regional Problems says (realtribune.ru/news/authority/4597).

            As a result and despite his reputation as a defender of all things communist and Soviet, the Moscow analyst continues, Suslov turned out to be “just as much a gravedigger of Soviet power as Mikhail Gorbachev.” But unlike Gorbachev, Suslov destroyed the country precisely because of the means he was sure would save it, a lesson to all empire defenders of all times.

            Suslov, the party’s ideological leader for almost 30 years, has acquired a certain reputation because of his role, along with the KGB’s Filipp Bobkov, in controlling the Soviet intelligentsia. Since its members have written the history, they have treated him in only one way: “For mice, there is no stronger beast than a cat.”

            The provincial party official came to Stalin’s attention because of his “sincere and absolute faith in Marxism-Leninism,” not as an instrument guiding the construction of communism but rather “as a sum of postulates each of which carries within itself absolute truth.” In sum, “Suslov related to Marxism as to a religion.” 

            In Stalin’s last years, the process of the transformation or more precisely degeneration of Marxism into a religion was accomplished, and Suslov was the first high priest after of course Stalin. And he brought to that task not only faith but a willingness to work, a systemic approach and attention to details.

            But unfortunately for Suslov, Stalin died; and the man who succeeded him, Nikita Khrushchev was Suslov’s opposite number in almost all respects. Nonetheless, Suslov survived because the party leader also wanted Marxism-Leninism to be a religious faith rather than a method of figuring out how to act.

            And so paradoxically, Zhuravlyev says, Khrushchev needed Suslov to keep the ideology unchanging; but Suslov did not need Khrushchev to anything like the same degree. In fact, Suslov was appalled by Khrushchev’s antics and was one of the chief plotters against him in 1964.

            Some might have expected Suslov to come out on top as a result, but he preferred to exercise power from behind the scenes. And Brezhnev who wasn’t interested all that much in ideology and certainly was not a workaholic was content to have someone control ideology and use that control to keep order.

            But what Brezhnev did not anticipate or understand is that Suslov used his position to restore Marxism-Leninism to where it had been in 1950 when he began his meteoric rise. And that led the country ideologically and then practically into a dead end. Had someone else been in his position who saw ideology differently, perestroika and collapse might never have happened.