ABSTRACT
Soviet communism was one of the most ambitious attempts at social engineering known to history. Coming to power in October 1917, the Bolshevik party under the leadership of Vladimir Il'ich Lenin sought to change every aspect of Russian politics and society. Armed with the ideology of Marxism, they launched the great communist experiment to build a society on fundamentally different principles from those that human history had hitherto seen. The ideology proclaimed the abolition of the market, the introduction of social, national and political equality, the direct and unmediated power of the working masses, and the spread of the revolution to all corners of the earth. In practice, of course, these ideals were tempered by the harsh realities of trying to build socialism in a relatively backward and isolated society. Communism in Russia was an experiment in the most profound sense, in that untested principles of social organisation were applied by one group over the rest of the community. The attempt to abolish the private ownership of the means of production, to overcome Russia’s imperial legacy by granting autonomy to many of the peoples making up the nation, and to repudiate the whole tradition of Western state and law to create a fundamentally new politics, all this was a measure of the grandeur of Bolshevik ambition. For seventy-four years, the Soviet Union sought to create an alternative social order, in effect an alternative modernity, to that predominant in the West. In the event, what was established was a mismodernised society, creating institutions that were modern in form but repudiating modernity’s spirit, above all political liberty and free thought. The Soviet system endured far longer than most of its early critics thought possible, but ultimately in 1991 came crashing down. The legacy of the failed experiment lives on in Russia today. Although the major formal aspects of the old system collapsed in 1991, great wedges of the old institutional and informal structure survived intact into the post-communist era. The successor regime did not enjoy a tabula rasa on which to build a new system. What emerged out of the fall of communism is a unique and fascinating hybrid. The bulk of this book is devoted to analysing the nature of this hybrid new political order, but this chapter will focus on the nature and fall of the communist system itself.
