1991 Marked Not Collapse of Sovietism but Rather Moscow’s Latest Forced Turn to a NEP to Save Elite’s Power, Savvin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 5 – Again and again in Soviet times, the communist regime sought to control everything in order to maintain its power and wealth but constantly found that this pursuit led to crises which forced it to liberalize even though objectively that threatened its position and so could not be tolerated for long, Dimitry Savvin says.

            In a presentation to a Riga conference this week on War, Ideology and Power, the editor of the Riga-based conservative Russian Harbin portal argues that post-Soviet Russia has continued that pattern rather than broken with it, something that explains regime actions and public propaganda since 1991 (harbin.lv/ideologiya-i-politika-neosovetskogo-revanshizma).

            That cycle in Soviet history was first outlined by Vasily Shulgin, the conservative Russian politician at the end of imperial times who was taken back to the USSR at the end of World War II. He argued in the early 1960s that the Soviet Union would eventually have another Brest Peace followed by another NEP and so on, Savvin says.

            Because the post-Soviet elite did not break with the past but rather consisted of people who overwhelmingly were part of that past, he continues, “everything which has followed became logically and alas objectively necessary.” That means in turn that “’the collapse of the USSR’ was in fact not a collapse but the next NEP cycle” in Soviet Russian history.

            The most striking development in 1991 was the de-ideologization of the country, but “in order to adequately assess this process, one must first clearly understand the basic structure of Soviet ideology and how it was formed in the framework of the Stalinist model of socialism,” Savvin argues.

            As the late Russian émigré Roman Redlikh argued, Soviet ideology consisted of exoteric and an esoteric elements, the first directed toward the outside world and based on Marxist-Leninist propaganda but the second reflecting the real views of the leadership. After 1991, the first changed but the second did not.

            As a result, the Russian conservative argues, “we can characterize the Russian Federation as the very same USSR which has lost part of its territory and underwent a forced liberalization for the preservation of the apparat’s power over ‘the commanding heights,’ that is a Neo-NEP” rather than a revolution.

            Despite having dispensed with the exoteric ideology, the Russian Federation retained fro the Soviet past a social organization and an esoteric ideology which has led Moscow to operate just as the Soviet leadership did.

            In fact, Savvin says, “post-Soviet” Russia and many of the post-Soviet republics around it have typically “structured themselves as models of Stalin’s post-war ‘peoples’ democracies.’” There is a dictator, a ruling party, and minor parties which are purely decorative because the entire system is designed to boost the power and wealth of the ruling stratum.

            This kind of regime was formed most rapidly in Turkmenistan but did not take final shape in Russia until after 2011. Moscow wants to maintain similar regimes elsewhere in the post-Soviet region and has adopted a kind of Brezhnev Doctrine according to which it has the right to intervene against any that deviate from that.