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 humanity had hitherto experienced. The ideology proclaimed the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production, the rejection of Russia’s imperial legacy by granting autonomy to many of the peoples making up the nation, the repudiation of the whole tradition of Western state and law, the introduction of the 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 a social experiment in the most profound sense, in that untested principles of social organisation were applied by one group over the rest of the community.2 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, economic entrepreneurialism 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 old system collapsed, great wedges of the old institutional and informal structures survived intact into the post-communist era. The relatively soft transition into the post-communist era meant that 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.
