More than a century since the end of World War I, the two major European wars of the 20th century appear as a single decade-long conflict with a long truce in the middle. For all the clashes of ideologies, the overriding goal of this conflict was the need to contain emerging Germany.
It was finally defeated and divided, losing historic territory to Poland and Russia. However, Western allies allowed its western half to rise and rearm (albeit within NATO) — because a newly powerful enemy arose to the east, the communist Soviet Empire.
In the late 19th century and early 20th, when the German economy was growing by leaps and bounds, Russia too was developing strongly. Having shaken off feudalism only in 1861, by the start of World War I Russia had become a developed industrial nation, especially in the western part of the country.
Russia was hardly less aggressive than Germany. However, it was not a strong military power and it didn’t threaten major European states the way Germany did. Whenever conflicts did arise it backed down, as it did after its 1878 victory over the Ottomans. This would have likely changed after World War I, had the Russian monarchy or the Provisional Government endured. Being among the war’s victors, Russia would have claimed sizable strategic territories, including Istanbul and surrounding areas in Europe and Asia Minor and Slavic-speaking lands held by Austria and Germany. Containing Russia that would have expanded into the heart of Europe would have become a priority. The history of the 20th century would have been quite different then, and Germany, in particular, would not have been scapegoated for the war quite so severely.
Defeating Russia militarily — the way Nazi Germany was ultimately defeated and occupied — would have been an impossibility even before the development of nuclear weapons which took a major war with Russia entirely off the agenda. The Russian Empire was more than 50 times the size of Germany, with a population scattered over vast distances and connected by nonexistent infrastructure. Historically, invaders invariably found the early going easy, but got bogged down in an inhospitable landscape. On the contrary, invasions in the 19th and 20th centuries ended up weakening the invaders to the point of total defeat and leading to further expansion of Russia’s territorial empire.
However, Russia all by itself withdrew from global competition by staging the Bolshevik Revolution and adopting the communist system. This is ironic because according to the Marxist worldview, backward Russia actually leapfrogged developed industrial nations and entered the inevitable future of humanity ahead of everyone else. It was supposed to lead the way to communism, and indeed for a while Moscow became the pole of attraction for leftists around the world and a model for many post-colonial nations.
The Soviet economy also seemed to be doing well. Russians who revere Stalin claim that “he took over a country of the single-furrow wooden plow and left it armed with a hydrogen bomb.” Indeed, Stalin’s command economy, which relied on total mobilization, state terror, and slave labor, disregarded environmental and human costs and made widespread use of Western technology allowed the Soviet Union to build a large industrial base very quickly. Such a command economy could compete with Western capitalist nations in an industrial age, but it was extremely wasteful, heavily bureaucratized and could not innovate independently.
Moreover, while the communist emphasis on universal education and meritocracy allowed the state to tap the talents of the country’s diverse multiethnic population, the Red Terror destroyed countless bright talents and the collectivist system discouraged individual initiative.
When the former allies in the anti-Hitler coalition fell out, the Truman Administration initiated a policy of containing the Soviet Union. Direct confrontation would be avoided and the Cold War would take the form of a conflict of ideologies. The policy was based on the belief that the change in the Soviet Union would have to come from within. The Russians, like everyone else, would eventually want to live in a free, democratic and prosperous country if they were shown the way.
The inefficiencies of Stalin’s industrial base came into sharp relief when the industrial age ended and the postindustrial age dawned It was based on informatics and accelerating technological innovation, and successful economies prospered by saturating the consumer market with increasingly sophisticated products, The Soviet system was singularly bad in all of these areas. By the time the USSR collapsed, both its ideology and economic system were bankrupt.
However, the empire disintegrated not so much due to pressure from Russia as from the centrifugal forces in the 14 constituent nationalities. In Russia, its people’s desire to live in a free, democratic, and prosperous country proved sadly short-lived. Putin and his entourage were loyal communists in the waning years of the Soviet Union and the country of their youth remains their ideal. They are increasingly isolating Russia from the rest of the world, cracking down on dissent, spreading shameless lies as propaganda, and concentrating the economy in state hands.
There are some differences from the Soviet system. The state has been largely privatized by various security/criminal families and corruption throughout the system has become massive. Plus, Russia is no longer an autarky, its borders are open and free enterprise is tolerated. But these differences obscure the fact that in so many fundamental ways Putin’s Russia is the extension of the old Soviet Union — maybe the way it would have developed if Gorbachev’s perestroika had been allowed to run its course.
The decade from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s is known as a period of stagnation. It was the time when the decay of the communist system accelerated and became terminal. Gorbachev initiated some cosmetic reforms in the hope of rejuvenating the rotten system, and in the 1990s some structural changes were applied by the Yeltsin government, as well. Nevertheless, Putin is now facing much the same problems that used to bedevil the late USSR. Russia may be better at providing consumer goods and keeping store shelves stuffed, but its population remains among the poorest in Europe and starting to fall behind many countries in Asia. Worse, people are becoming poorer, the economy is stagnant and state revenues are falling as Russia’s oil and gas exports earn fewer petrodollars and new ways of increasing export earnings prove elusive.
The enormous Soviet-era bureaucracy has only grown on Putin’s watch, expanding due to the growth of its security apparatus. It has become even more corrupt and inefficient. Education, health care, housing, social services, the industrial and transport infrastructure are deteriorating further compared to the Soviet era — and catastrophically compared to the rest of the world.
As in the Soviet system, obedience and conformity are rewarded while the individual initiative is stymied. The best and the brightest, those who used to be shot or sent to the Gulag by Stalin, are now going abroad in search of better opportunities and end up settling outside the country.
Like Khrushchev and Brezhnev before him, Putin is frustrated by the unworkable system. In his attempts to jump-start the economy and improve living conditions for his countrymen And of course international competition has become much tighter with the emergence of India, South Korea, Brazil, and other newly developed nations — not to mention China on Russia’s southeastern border.
After four years of drift, when a US president refused even to acknowledge various crimes committed by the Kremlin, Joe Biden now faces the task of containing Russia once more. His best course of action will be to leave good enough alone, since Putin is following closely in Brezhnev’s footsteps, condemning Russia to continued stagnation and subsequent disintegration. A more principled stance by the Reagan administration in the early 1980s accelerated the Soviet collapse; Biden has an added advantage in being able to curb Russia’s lifeline to the international economy. Putin has already been driven into Beijing’s deadly embrace, and new and expanded sanctions by the United States and its allies will continue to build a wall between Russia and the West. Putin will be pushed ever closer to China — with likely deadly consequences for Russia’s future.
