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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Destination in DoubtRussia since 1989By Stephen LovellFernwood Publishing and Zed Books LtdCopyright © 2006 Stephen LovellAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-84277-665-0ContentsAcknowledgments, vi, Introduction, 1, 1 What was Soviet socialism?, 11, 2 The state: death and rebirth?, 17, 3 Democratization?, 40, 4 Birth of a nation?, 67, 5 A free market?, 89, 6 Surviving post-socialism, 113, 7 Russia's war on terror, 136, Afterword, 160, Chronology, 163, Notes, 166, Guide to further reading, 176, Index, 179, CHAPTER 1What was Soviet socialism?Let's start with a rarely asked but vital question: What were the values that came closest to holding together the citizens of the Soviet Union on the eve of that state's collapse? After all, a state does not remain in existence for seventy years and become a superpower without creating some sense of commonality toward which members of society can gravitate.If we are looking for sources of unity in the late Soviet period, however, we should not expect to find anything so narrowly ideological as Marxism-Leninism. To be sure, every Soviet schoolchild was forced to learn the most celebrated dicta of the communist founding fathers. Leninist slogans were invoked everywhere in public life. Even quite independent-minded authors of works on recondite subjects such as medieval history or Renaissance sculpture would find themselves throwing in a couple of quotations from Lenin's Collected Works as a sop to the censors or their editorial committee. But I never met anyone in Soviet Russia who had any real interest in Marxism, and I met plenty who despised it. As everyone knows from their own brushes with boredom, the human brain develops defense mechanisms against the invasive repetition of dogma. "Ordinary" people tend just to switch off, while intellectuals react more feistily. Anti-Marxism is the closest thing to an orthodoxy that I have found in the academic circles of Moscow and St. Petersburg. As one Russian colleague asked me a few years ago, "Why are you all [i.e. Western Slavists] such lefties?" Post-communist Eastern Europeans, in my experience, are hugely suspicious of anything that smacks of state interventionism: they view political correctness with disbelief and have difficulty comprehending the soft totalitarianism of the audit culture.What, then, are we left with? Were there any commonly held values that emerged from the Soviet experience? I think there were, and I would group them in three main categories. First came a cluster of beliefs that were broadly socialist: an expectation of a strong redistributive state and some notion of social justice. Of course, opinion varied – from one era to another, and from one individual to another – about who exactly should be the beneficiaries of the state's redistributive largess. In the postwar decades the categories of beneficiary became more numerous and more elaborate, as more and more groups of Soviet citizens gained a sense of entitlement to housing, vacations, pensions, and so on. Some Sovietologists went so far as to speak of the "social contract" of the Brezhnev era. In general, however, there remained some clear differences between Soviet and Western social democratic notions of entitlement: for the Soviets, usefulness to the state tended to trump human or natural rights as a criterion for social provision.The second value that underpinned Soviet socialism as an active worldview was patriotism: the sense that the USSR was a great world power, that it had achieved great things (whatever crimes its leaders had perpetrated in the process), that it had saved Europe from the catastrophe of Nazism. World War II, for all the colossal collective trauma that it brought, may well have kept Soviet socialism in business as a belief system for longer than it would otherwise have warranted.The third key value was a commitment to the various forms of social and economic progress that can be termed
