The Soviet Legacy

The communist state-building project was devoted to maximizing the USSR's capacity for material production. To this end, the Soviet state's administrative capacities were designed primarily to extract resources, command-economy style. ("Take stuff to make stuff," one might say.) Under Josef Stalin, the state effectively stripped society of virtually all forms of private property and usurped authority over all productive assets.

With the CPSU running the state and the state running the economy, the highly centralized Soviet system governed fairly successfully in some important respects (these are what Huntington probably had in mind when he wrote so admiringly of the system in 1968). It was, after all, remarkably if often brutally successful in industrializing a largely rural economy in just three decades; it pushed adult literacy as high as 95 percent by the early 1990s; and it was able to mount a serious security threat to the United States through speedy adoption of nuclear-weapons technology. The Soviet system managed to undertake some of the most ambitious industrial projects that the world had ever seen, reversing the flow of rivers and building state-owned agricultural, mining, and manufacturing enterprises that employed hundreds of thousands of workers. While the costs, in terms of rights and freedoms trampled as well as living standards held down, were far too dear, the system's early accomplishments are matters of historical record.

The main institutional bulwarks of the communist state were always the CPSU and the centrally planned economy, with critical support from a vast security apparatus with huge coercive ability and the will to use it. In 2004, Putin plainly could not rely on these bulwarks, even if there were signs that the coercive apparatus was making a comeback. Whatever shape Putin's autocracy may take, it will not be that of the old Communist Party and its Five-Year Plans.

Putin openly admires the centralization that was a hallmark of Soviet life under the rule of the Party and the Plan. As Valerie Bunce notes, "the institutions that defined [Soviet] socialism produced strong regimes, weak societies and robust economic growth." The CPSU was fused to the state, and together they dominated society. There was little room, it would seem, for noncompliance with the center's political and administrative initiatives. At the height of Stalin's power, a still-potent ideology plus the grim presence of the KGB and other agencies of terror undergirded a rigid hierarchy.

In view of the speed with which the Soviet system collapsed, however, it is reasonable to ask how effectively it really governed as it matured. That is, the Soviet state may have had despotic strength, but administratively it appears to have been weak and to have lost governing capacity over time. By the time Gorbachev took over in 1985, the Soviet state was still "hard" in the despotic sense (though this capacity too was on the wane), but administratively it was growing less "strong," with its day-to-day governance abilities seriously in doubt.

Gorbachev's reforms, which were meant to shore up the system, in practice struck at its two main struts: the CPSU and the command economy. The top official was slashing away at Soviet rule by way of trying to save it. As Bunce and others have noted, communism's institutional framework made it highly sensitive to elites and dependent on complex hierarchies of authority. Gorbachev's reforms undermined these hierarchies and helped to implode the Soviet state "from within" rather than smash it "from above" via an elite coup or upend it "from below" via mass mobilization.

By loosening the CPSU's monopoly on power through the introduction of limited political competition at the same time as the economy was being deregulated through tentative market reforms in the late 1980s, Gorbachev weakened the longstanding ties that linked bureaucrats and party officials at the center to bureaucrats and CPSU functionaries in the regions and localities. When Gorbachev announced in early 1990 that the CPSU was giving up its monopoly on political power and later that year introduced limited but competitive elections, local Party secretaries found themselves no longer able to count on being in charge of regional legislatures. Newly elected provincial officials had to look to their local electorates first and to Moscow second-a vast change from high-Soviet days. The center of political gravity in region after region began to shift away from the local CPSU first secretary and toward elected regional governments, even as the vertical lines of authority within the CPSU itself were fraying. Gorbachev's reforms collapsed the bulwarks of highly centralized Soviet rule to the point where even the USSR's standing as a coherent nation-state could no longer be maintained. By the fall of 1991, little was left of the Soviet governing system. This was the legacy that Russian reformers found themselves facing in the winter of 1991-92.