- Welcome to "University Place Presents."
I'm Norman Gilliland.
It was Winston Churchill who famously described Russia as,
"a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,"
and over the 75 years or so since the end of World War II
relations between the United States and Russia
have certainly been mysterious,
have been dangerous at times,
on at least one occasion, approaching nuclear war.
We'll get some insight into what makes Russia tick
and what the future relations with the United States
might be from David McDonald, who is a professor
of history at the UW-Madison.
Welcome to University Place Presents .
- Hey, Norman, thanks for having me.
- We're going to scamper through some three quarters
of a century of Russian history but I think
even in this fly-by we'll get some sense
of the Russian point of view and the Russian background.
- I hope so.
- How it relates to us, so we'll start with this
iconic image from the end of World War II,
this, I presume, is Berlin, and the Soviet
meeting of the Allied Forces at Berlin.
- [McDonald] Yeah, it's an iconic moment,
that symbolizes the end of World War II.
These are Red Army soldiers,
have scaled the Reichstag and they've raised
the hammer and sickle flag, signifying the surrender
of the Third Reich and its destruction.
It's still celebrated as Victory Day
in the Russian Federation, and by many
veterans throughout the states in
the former Soviet space.
It was the climax, was probably the
crepuscular moment in the career of the Soviet Union,
the one legitimately patriotic touchstone to which
any Russian or member of the Soviet Socialist Republics,
Ukrainians, Belarusians, Georgians, Armenians,
Kazakhs, Uzbeks, on and on, could see themselves
as having come together in a truly national
or Soviet cause against what was recognized as evil.
And this moment by the 1960's becomes
the touchstone for talking about
a genuine Soviet patriotism, and of course
the war come at great cost, upwards of 30 million
civilian and military casualties and deaths,
the blockade of Leningrad, large tracts of
the western Soviet Union occupied, hundreds of
thousands if not millions taken prisoners of war,
some who become DP, displaced persons,
and move to other points don't return, others do.
But it was a period of rupture, blood and glory,
and of other combatants of incredibly rich
lived experience and memory, that different groups
would mine for different lessons.
- Well, perhaps a high point of relations
between the United States and the Soviet Union,
we'll make the distinction, I guess, between
the Soviet Union and Russia, as we go along...
- [McDonald] Sure.
- But 1945, to use a term that's way too simple,
but a feel-good moment for the Allies as well.
You know, whether it's Russians or English
or French or Americans.
- Well in retrospect it was the best of times,
it was the worst of times, right?
That sounds like a familiar phrase.
But here we see the successor to the so-called
Big Three of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill.
This is Attlee and Truman and Stalin at this meeting
at Potsdam, coming to a final agreement on the war.
And if the Yalta had been a celebration of triumph
among the three men who had led their
respective states and empires through World War II,
this, you can already see the fault lines starting.
And there's things about what Soviet initiatives
are in Eastern Europe, are starting to rise,
and it's right about the time that
the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
and so, the Soviets know about this,
and old suspicions that have been put aside during the war
but predate the war are already starting to take new shape,
and we can see that illustrated from
the Soviet point of view.
From an international point of view, we get a couple
of shots of, that on the left is the Berlin airlift.
- [Gilliland] Very familiar image of that place.
- [McDonald] Yes, which is one of the first
real confrontations between the former Allies
over the status of the Soviet-occupied sections
of Germany, and in this case that strange jurisdictional
island that Berlin was, in the very sectors of occupation.
They tried to blockade Berlin as a way of inserting
diplomatic pressure, and the Western Allies,
but particularly the United States,
had mobilized this airlift, and you can see people
down below in what is still bombed-out Berlin,
awaiting their delivery.
The next shot again, shows us, to the right, show us
the growing assertion of Soviet interest
in the new area that it had come
to occupy after World War II, a former
democratic republic of Czechoslovakia.
We start to see street demonstrations,
in this case by Communists trying
and ultimately succeeding in pressuring
the Czechoslovak government to become what the Soviets
would call a fraternal state, ultimately a satellite.
Then there's the domestic equivalent to this as well,
as many people had thought the war, within the Soviet Union,
the war would bring a lessening of the exactions
of state authority that had so characterized the 1930's.
- [Gilliland] Really? Why?
- Yeah, they thought that they had proven that,
this is the Soviet Union, had proven itself,
that finally we would, that the great enemy
that had stalked them in the late 30's was now gone,
to many it appeared that cooperation and prosperity
were around the corner, and of course,
this is a period where we see not just
the growing Cold War abroad, but increasing
and renewed assertion of authority at home,
and so, it starts off on the cultural front,
in 1946 with a set of initiatives by
Andrei Zhdanov, whom you see on the left.
Of course, the figure who characterizes the period,
Lavrenty Beria or Beria, is the head of the NKVD.
- [Gilliland] One of the most notorious of all
the Soviet operatives.
- Yes, in many ways, and a Georgian like Stalin,
and we see a series of concentrated episodes,
most notoriously the Doctor's Plot in the early 50's,
aimed at a set of Jewish physicians who
are ominously charged with having conspired
to poison various leaders, something that ignites
a certain amount of anxiety in the Jewish community
in the Soviet Union, a community that was very assimilated,
had advanced well socially, and that many others
reacted to as the type of signal that it,
foretold the advent of the purges of the late 30's.
And then also on the right we see Trofim Lysenko,
a cultural scientist who claimed in contravention
of anything that geneticists had known
since the days of Gregor Mendel,
he claimed he'd found a way,
a truly socialist genetics,
as a way to increase grain production.
Of course, agriculture was the chronic millstone
around the neck of the Soviet economy,
and his science, because it was ideologically correct,
was used as a way to Stalinize the upper rings
of the scientific establishment.
- Let's get a little bit into there with the psychology of,
let's say the Russian leadership or maybe even Stalin
at this point, are we talking about late 40's, early 50's,
the goal, one of the goals, was to what,
establish behind the so-called Iron Curtain,
another Churchill term.
- Yeah, 50 years ago, 60 years ago right now,
it's 70 years ago right now.
- And the idea was to establish buffer zones
between Russia, or the Soviet Union, and again,
possible future threats from Western Europe?
What was the point of it?
- I think that was part of it, I think part of it
was certainly with Germany there was a fair measure
of revenge, that there's a scholarship from
the last 15, 20 years that demonstrates that
the productive capacity of a lot of the western
Soviet Union had been absolutely annihilated by the Nazis,
by the occupation, by the bombing.
They more or less picked up a lot of the physical plant
of East German industry and moved it
to sites in the Soviet Union.
A lot of it was security-driven, a lot of it was,
not even buffers, was an attempt to pursue
the act of Sovietization of these areas.
- So it was still, to some extent,
it was an ideological goal.
- Well, there was always a very strong ideological--
- In the nationalism. - Yep.
- Ideological movement.
- Now interestingly, not strong enough for some.
I don't have anything on the Korean War up there,
but the Korean war, Stalin, his advisors at the outbreak,
come under big pressure from the leader
of the North Korean congress
but also from the new leader
of the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong,
who want him to chastise the arrogant imperialists
who are trying to kick the Communists out of North Korea,
and Stalin refrains, but at the same time,
we know that Soviets have already, through espionage,
cracked the secret of the atom bomb,
and are closely behind the United States--
- [Gilliland] 1949.
- Yep, yep, yep.
And then the hydrogen bomb closely thereafter.
So there is an ideological component that
reinforces understandable security components
based on this society that, this political establishment,
it's the last 25 years has been an experience
of almost constant threat from outside
from their point of view.
An intervention during the civil war,
the Allies try and support their opponents,
then economic isolation, diplomatic isolation,
a lack of interest on the part of the Western allies
as Hitler was rising,
to engage from the Soviet point of view,
to engage them seriously,
and then during the war itself,
a lack of sense of trust, a feeling of betrayal.
It took the Allies so long to open up a western front,
and a deep suspicion, some of it ideological,
some political, of attempts to
pervert or subvert the social and political
and ideological realm that the Stalin generation
had constructed since the 1930's.
- Voil?, you have the Cold War.
- That's one of many reasons for it, yeah.
- Well, speaking of Stalin, 1953--
- [McDonald] Not so good for Stalin.
- His Iron Grip relaxes, he dies,
so far as we know of natural causes.
- Well, there is a Wisconsin strand of that,
there are certain pathologists or medical historians
who have, I've read, and I don't know,
that suggests that somebody was feeding him Warfarin
(Gilliland laughs)
in a plethora, because he was given to
hemorrhagic strokes, apparently.
But yeah, here we see his body lying in state,
again what, 1953,
and this new country is like,
"What do you do after the old man's gone?"
This guy had dominated the lives
of all those people you see,
these are all the leaders looking on,
and as I recall you can Khruschev, Malenkov.
What's interesting is, Beria has been airbrushed
out of this shot, he was at the funeral.
- [Gilliland] He just disappeared, didn't he?
- [McDonald] Well, he's the first, by the summer of '53
he's been accused of, he's hoist on his own petard,
he is accused of espionage for hostile forces,
and he disappears discreetly but demonstratively.
- Then there appears to be this, of course,
by now, the Korean War is over.
- [McDonald] Yeah.
- But that had been a confrontation, in some limited ways,
a direct confrontation between
the United States and the Soviet Union,
you have combat pilots on both sides participating.
- There the Soviets show more restraint
than the Chinese and North Koreans would like.
There is a, I don't think that's primarily
strategically important to them, and looking ahead,
that's one of the moments that historians
trace the, what became the Sino-Soviet split of the 60's,
they trace it to--
- Soviets not being aggressive enough with the Americans
and the other Western powers.
- There was a period of some, then, instability
in the leadership of the Soviet Union
but at the same time they were engaging in what
Putin and the US would call,
sort of international adventurism
in Hungary in 1956, for example.
- East Germany in 1953, Hungary in '56,
then to a lesser extent, Poland in 1956.
- These uprising are popular uprisings that
they come in with military force to suppress.
- Exactly, and Hungary is very dramatic,
and for better or worse it more or less coincides
with the Suez crisis,
and so it's a test of the accommodation.
Of course, there are other factors too,
there is, to the west of Hungary there's Austria,
which is under sort of a condominium,
or had been until shortly before that.
- Yeah, I think 1955, the Soviets finally pulled out.
- But Austria was forbidden from joining NATO
or having any alliance under the terms
under which the Soviet evacuated,
and the same applied to Finland.
- Oh, to Finland?
Which had never strictly speaking
been part of the Soviet bloc,
although part of it was annexed--
- No, no, when the Soviet Union ultimately
broke up in the 90's, but other times,
they'd talk about Finlandization which,
you'd allow the people to have the government
that they chose, from our point of view,
but they had to stay neutral, and Finland
became actually a very interesting economic filter
for the Soviet economy, but in here we see Khrushchev--
- [Gilliland] So he becomes ultimately,
well, I guess you couldn't say, the heir apparent to Stalin
because there's styles for it--
- [McDonald] And there were so many, like,
he emerges at the top of the pile,
coming out of a period that got euphemized in Pravda,
in the Soviet press as collective leadership,
(laughter)
They're really, I think, the last functional collective
leadership convened in the mid-to-late 1920's,
and even then when we look back on it,
it was, just where this historical escalator
bringing Stalin up where Stalin was raising himself was,
it only gave the illusion of collectiveness.
But this obviously, you had old stalwarts
like Vyacheslav Molotov who lives,
lives, sees the collapse of Soviet power,
like he lives forever.
- [Gilliland] He lived into the post-Soviet era.
- Yeah, Old Ironpants, as they called him,
the American diplomats called him.
- The namesake of the famous cocktail.
- Yeah, yes, exactly.
Molotov, staunch loyalist we know
from a book of conversation interviews
he did with a reporter.
He was more Stalinist than Stalin.
He was the ultimate Soviet ideologue,
the true believer, very hardliner.
Georgy Malenkov.
One of the big debates in Soviet policy is,
sort of, guns or butter.
Do you spend money on armaments
or are we gonna give the consumers a break,
because it had always been expenditures
on heavy industry, military technology,
building roads and the like, and Manlenkov
represented late industry consumers,
the consumer services,
he was seen outside as generally more liberal.
And then Nicolai Bulganin,
who looked like the incumbent in the beginning
but sort of fizzled, and then Nikita Sergei Khrushchev,
who comes from very simple background
in Donetsk, an area that we know better
than we'd like to right now,
the collate area in Eastern Ukraine,
had been, come up through the ranks via
the Ukrainian Communist Party, and then is
brought to Moscow during the war,
and after the war emerges as a very folksy guy,
but is given the portfolio,
interestingly, a lot of governments,
if you want to disable somebody whose ambition you fear,
you give them a portfolio like the Ministry of Finances,
'cause they're the ones that have to deliver
all the tough news, right?
And make the hard decisions.
In Soviet practice, agriculture was the graveyard
of any sort of aspiration.
- [Gilliland] Because it failed so often.
- [McDonald] It failed so often, it was under-mechanized,
there was very little in the way of distribution system,
and Khrushchev came up with a plan.
He was given agriculture, let us plow all these
quote unquote "virgin lands" on the Kazakh steppe,
the northern part of what is presently
the Republic of Kazakhstan.
Now, great thing with virgin soil, you know,
it's like the sodbusters on the North American Great Plains,
first time you bust that sod and put a crop in,
it comes up gangbusters, right?
- [Gilliland] But you have to keep replenishing it.
- You have to keep replenishing it, tend it.
Well, this is a really interesting experiment,
that sees the Soviet state send in thousands of
student volunteers, volunteers in quote marks,
but also, non-criminal prisoners,
like non-felony-criminal prisoners,
and there's, the thing with these virgin lands was,
they were also grazing land for the indigenous
agriculturalists in the area, who were shepherds,
who were sheep farmers, and so, you get an awful lot
of sort of ground level social conflict,
plus, Kazakhstan had been a place for deporting
nationalities that Stalin was suspicious of,
suspected of treason, during the war,
especially German speakers from the Volga Basin,
a lot of Mennonites who were sent down there,
some Chechens from the Kazakh, from the Caucasus,
and it's as if people lost track of them
and you get all these new Russians and Ukrainian-speaking
people in this area, it turns into an extremely
contentious process, but the first three years,
the bottom line, what are the yields, fantastic,
and then, he's, Khrushchev is asked to give a speech,
as, sort of, one of the senior secretaries
in the Communist Party, give a speech at the
20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
February 1956, it's a secret speech
that soon becomes just spectacular news,
because Khrushchev uses the occasion,
supposed to be closed-session,
to denounce the crimes, quote unquote, of comrade Stalin.
- The beginning of de-Stalinization.
- Then he talks about a cult of personality,
he talks about the crimes against loyal Party leaders,
there's actually very interesting themes
because what he's done, is he still maintains
this adulation of Stalin, Stalin's very next to Lenin
in the mausoleum in the Kremlin.
Towns, cities, villages, all from Stalingrad
to Stalino to Stalina, Stalinabad,
all sorts of settlements all over the Soviet space
that are named after him, and Khrushchev is the
first guy to rip the mask off the man,
but in a very interesting way.
First, he does not question certain things Stalin did.
He does not question, above all,
the collectivization of agriculture,
which as much as anything hamstrung
Soviet agricultural productivity.
- Was that a fairly fundamental theory,
though, of Marxist-Leninist, of--
- Not of Marxist-Leninist, but Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist
thought, and you can look at collectivization as trying
to embody this Socialist-Communist fantasy world.
To other people it looks like it was simply a way
of taking care once and for all of the famously intractable
and, by their language, selfish peasant population.
There's a great scene at the opening of Burnt By the Sun,
the movie set in the early 30's, where you see
the Red Army doing military exercises and,
very powerful metaphor for what was happening
in rural Russia at the time.
- So they were what, just too
individualistic, those farmers?
- Well, they wanted to do things their own way,
they'd always been resistant to certain types
of central authority, and the state refused
to bargain with them in terms of letting them
farm their crops and trade and that,
they were supposed to work it like a factory, and also,
there were way more peasants, and way more space,
than there were people effectively to administer them.
And so it became a very draconian solution.
Well, you couldn't touch that,
that was a cornerstone of the Soviet order.
(both talking at once)
- There's a whole lot of things he doesn't touch.
What he does say, however, and people have buried
it in the back of their mind, Stalin downplayed
the centrality of the Party as the leading organ
in the Soviet state and it elevated the security services,
and all sorts of other forces, and the Party
could not let this happen, because the Party
was the class vanguard and the conscious vanguard
of the construction of Socialism.
- So why did he dare to make this speech, to the Party,
in effect, condemning or downgrading the Party?
- Knowing as little as I do about the internal politics
going on in this Party, I think a lot of it was
maneuvering for leverage in the contest with people
like Molotov, and I think he was starting to get
a generational succession, at least at local levels,
who would mean delegates of Congress, there were people,
like a lot of the people who were at that congress,
quite a few of them might have been at the 18th Party
Congress in, what would that be?
In the late 30's.
Or a few but not very many at the 17th Party Congress
in 1934, that they had seen the purge,
the purges sort of swathe through their predecessors,
and one thing that seems to set in after '39 and
definitely after '53, is the stakes for political failure
are no longer going to be violent and humiliating death.
- It's progress.
- It is!
- It is if you're Khrushchev.
- It's worth noting that Khrushchev,
as far as I can think, is beyond abdication at this point.
He is shown the door in '64, he is the first leader,
Soviet or Imperial, who actually walks off the job.
And actually it probably helps explain the tone
of his memoirs, but so, Khrushchev--
- And we'll get to those memoirs in a second, too,
as we'll be talking about other elements of dissidence.
- Absolutely!
And so, on the one level, I think gives Khrushchev
leverage within this struggle with Molotov,
and we know that to be the case
because July '57, he strips Molotov
and several others of these of their position
in the politburo in the anti-Party scandal
that dominates summer of '57, and then he seems
pretty strong in his position because we see an amnesty
for a lot of the people in prison under Stalin,
people that are loyal--
- [Gilliland] A lot of releases, yeah.
- And we see the onset of what they call The Thaw,
which in cultural policy, there's this interesting,
fascinating window where what had been
a rigid censorship seems to come loose,
and you've got, and it's not like people
weren't writing things or saying things in private
that were against, that were critical,
maybe not against the regime
but critical of the regime,
and we get this, the dramatic publication
of this fictional day in the life of a prisoner
in the Gulag, and this is--
- [Gilliland] The opening salvo of Solzhenitsyn.
- [McDonald] Yes, and it's the first appearance and debut of
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, a former math teacher
from the south of Russia, and he'd been in prison
towards the end of the World War for saying
vaguely critical things about Stalin, and--
- [Gilliland] He'd been an officer during the War, like
so many arrested and just sent off.
- Yeah, except, there were different types of arrests,
the military, the people who'd been POWs abroad,
a lot of them were just bundled off to camps when
they came back, for fear, the claim was that
they'd betrayed the Soviet Union by letting
themselves be captured, but others they kept,
they kept the serving personnel under very,
very close scrutiny, and Solzhenitsyn had run afoul
of that, but he gets amnesty, he writes this,
and it's a huge success.
- Where does he write it and where is he
when it comes out?
- He writes it, I think he writes it still
while he's in a ministry of exile, and I believe,
I'm not sure but I think he was likely in Moscow when he,
if he's not in Moscow when it comes out
he's in Moscow shortly thereafter.
- And he gets away with this why,
because it's a condemnation
of the Gulag system under Stalin?
- I think there is a, the feeling of arbitrary rule,
the tyranny of the secret police, obviously of Stalin,
and also, one thing I think Khrushchev did, and
Khrushchev wasn't anti-Soviet or anti-Communist as we,
as those who have watched him in action well know,
but he had the faith in, it's a strain in Soviet
and a lot of Russian types of political philosophy
or thought that there's a way that you can
create progresses and citizens who are gonna support
the regime because they understand how this
is for the common good, right?
And, but, he had also to recognize the abuses,
in a way you're setting off the Stalinist period
as one of exceptionally cruel and arbitrary rule,
but one way of doing that was giving critiques of it,
'cause it wasn't of the present, it was of the past regime.
But also the sense that this delayed,
this loosening up that people expect after the war,
you've giving them that, but you're enlisting their support,
you're making life better for them,
and you're enlisting a creative intelligentsia on your side.
Now this we know within the Party, this is already
starting to raise some eyebrows, there are sides
drawn up in the Party over how people receive
different things, or which editors they backed,
but you're getting similar things going on in
the national republics as well,
especially in towns like Lvov or Lviv in Ukraine--
- People are speaking out.
- Not speaking out, but they're more experimental art,
more critical of Socialism, and behind doors,
starting to speak out, the beginnings of a legitimate
underground, and a lot of the doors would have been--
- [Gilliland] (chuckles) Pretty shabby.
- [McDonald] Well, not at the time, they were brand
spanking new, these are, they come to be called
Khrushchevki or Khrushchevei, which is the Russian
word for 'hovel', which sounds very much like
the name of Nikita Khrushchev,
and the Soviet Union had industrialized
dramatically during the 1930's,
the so-called Five Year Plans, and had never
been able to maintain a residential infrastructure,
dwelling spaces, sufficient to absorb the huge influx
of rural Soviets who are dragged into Russia
in the Russian cities or in Soviet cities,
to do this crash industrialization.
And so, not everybody, but lot of overcrowding,
lots of collective apartments, and that toughened them,
and they keep saying Sergeyevich wants life to be better.
This is going on all over Europe, if you go through
London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, any,
they're done more elegantly in Scandinavia,
these huge housing projects, partly due to the Baby Boom,
and one of the great technologies is prefab, right?
And so a lot of these are prefab, they're panels and that,
but, they're done under very different
manufacturing and market auspices than they would be
in a place like Denmark or Scotland,
and the housing estates, you think of the
50's and 60's era's housing estates in urban Great Britain,
or a place like Chicago, right, or New York or that,
they have a, they're pretty good for about a decade,
and then they start to get,
and these Khrushchevei, they provide a temporary
alleviation, but then they eventually become
a symbol, a lot of these things become symbols,
of just the futility or the gimcrack nature
of Soviet technology, even when they're putting people
on the Moon, or not on the Moon but in orbit,
let's remember, Sputnik is what, '57, Gagarin was
aloft in '61, they're a viable competitor
in the Third World, Aswan Dam, they put together
the first non-aligned nations conference.
The Soviet Union is a force but inside,
it's coming at a certain domestic cost.
- They're better in space than they are on land.
- There is a lot of evidence that would suggest
that's not an unreasonable contention, yes.
- Now looking away from the domestic issues for a minute,
as we get into 1960, '62, 1960, it seems inevitable
with this kind of softening of the Soviet stance
that they're gonna have even more trouble
with the Chinese with the Sino-Soviet split,
but also in international politics,
missiles are locked over.
- Well, let's start off with Gary Powers, right?
- Yeah, in 1962, also.
- '60, I think, because I've been in Eisenhower prison
and Eisenhower and Khrushchev were supposed to have
a summit, they'd met in Geneva in '56, people
are sort of sidling towards the idea of disarmament.
Already the French got the bomb, now the British,
and there's this feeling that this is getting
out of hand, and both national leaders
have their own reasons for wanting to pursue
disarmament or some form of what we'll later call detente,
but Powers gets caught in that U-2 over the Soviet Union.
- [Gilliland] Shot down.
- Yeah, yeah, and this is a huge international scandal,
and then we get the Cuban revolution and Fidel,
sort of vacillates, again historical retrospect
makes it look like a much more certain process
than it was, but it's also at a time of very complicated
relations between the United States and the Caribbean
and the South American countries.
- It sure is, the big brother
relationship is questioned by those.
- And at a time after World War II,
where France and Great Britain have undergone
more gradually or less gradually and more or less violently,
have undergone decolonization, and so,
even as you're trying to set up security in Europe,
you're getting this ferment in the South
and we get this crisis over,
the Soviets adopt Cuba, and there's Fidel
and Nikita Sergeyevich down in the lower corner,
and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and a graphic from,
remember the Soviets want to put missiles in Cuba,
and Kennedy blockades the island, and we get
this very tense standoff.
I remember growing up in Western Canada,
well away from the action,
and people limbering up air raid sirens,
because our home town was gonna be on the path
where the ICBM's were gonna crash, were gonna collide.
- [Gilliland] (laughs) Between Havana and--
- Between Moscow, or between Siberia and northern Russia.
- [Gilliland] Oh, it was as tense as it got.
- Yeah, and there was a genuine apprehension of war,
this was the age of the fallout shelter, and--
- And confrontation at sea there as Kennedy
had put this so-called quarantine blockade around Cuba,
and Soviet ships with more missiles and missile parts
approaching, what's going to happen?
- Well, you know, we knew it was dangerous because
they kept interrupting Ed Sullivan, with both.
- You know it's dangerous when that happens.
- And something, you know it's real, right?
And so, both look into the precipice,
and both, it actually inaugurates a brief
but very interesting period of reconciliation.
Guarded and limited, but it shows, Khrushchev
thinks it shows to his colleagues, whom he's put
at terrible risk, the benefits of a certain policy,
Soviets experience it, the leadership experiences it
as a humiliation, and it is one of what becomes,
in certain circles, a litany of harebrained schemes,
quote unquote, that Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev
has unleashed on the Soviet public.
- He can't last much longer in leadership that way.
- No, no, and several of these strategies have failed,
he tries several reorganizations of the Party itself,
in order to ensure their loyalty, including
splitting the Party into industrial-technical wing,
and agricultural wings, and what this does
is it takes people out of what they would never say,
their comfort zone, but it disrupts a lot of
old alliances and a lot of old connections,
and it's obviously to Nikita Sergei's benefit.
Finally, a bunch of regional Party executives,
secretaries, first secretaries, they get together,
and these are the guys that have propelled into power
in October 1964, where they depose him,
and we see another interesting--
- Kind of a collective, or a loosely-knit
collective of successors.
- Exactly, exactly, we see right from the beginning
a duumvirate of Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin.
Kosygin's a Petersburger, light industry, there's hope.
And one thing Khrushchev had done
about which there was still angry dispute over,
was a set of economic reforms that promised
to improve productivity, it was hard to build
incentives into this system beyond simply realizing
the sheer quantity, and often a poorly measured quantity.
There's a Soviet satire paper called Crocodile,
where it was some religion humor they got one guy,
they show you this pit, and a crane pulling this huge spike
out of the pit, and it's a casting pit,
and one guy says to the other,
"Well, comrade, we've fulfilled our quota for the year."
How do you build incentives in?
Well, even that, there were tensions within the Party
over that, not over poor production,
but how do you build in incentives without
becoming capitalist, and really without jeopardizing
the security of our jobs and our routines
and the resources we control?
So by the end of the 70's, early 80's,
Kosygin has a moment of glory towards the end of the Johnson
presidency when he comes to Glassboro, New Jersey,
and there's a mini-summit there, and in Washington,
meets with Johnson about issues, but Kosygin
gradually moves the margins, and we see the rise
of Leonid Ilyich, another person from the same
area as Khrushchev, has the same very distinctive
southern accent--
- [Gilliland] Brezhnev.
- Yep, and the accent these guys have
Gorbachev will have a version of.
It becomes the accent of power.
- Oh, the southern accent.
- Yeah, of authority, yeah.
And Brezhnev, most of us who remember Brezhnev remember him
in his years of advancing failure, senescence,
he was very dynamic, vital, really loved life.
He develops, it's funny that the best international
relations, Richard Nixon develops are with,
or Henry Kissinger, are with Leonid Brezhnev,
and with Mao Zedong, and--
- [Gilliland] Yes, that's right.
- But all of them who see the world in a certain way,
who see politics as something brokered by great men
in great situations, and Brezhnev presides over
an attempt to reassert control, one poet refers to
the generation he represents as "Little Stalins."
These were what people called the Class of '38,
the people had been the ultimate beneficiaries
of the purges that had vacated the upper reaches,
and now it was their turn to rule.
And we see on one hand, a reassertion of Party
authority and orthodoxy, a definitive end to the Thaw,
which we'd already seen starting under Khrushchev,
trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel,
in a public trial for heterodox thought.
We see the threat posed by the Czech Spring in '68,
and there you see the streets of Prague
responding hostilely to the Soviet tanks.
There's even a small demonstration in Moscow.
- [Gilliland] Hard to believe, 1968.
- Yeah, very brave, and then Solzhenitsyn becomes
more important, and it's the rise to prominence of
Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner, his wife,
who becomes sort of a safe haven for a lot of,
we call them dissonances, a much more disparate movement
than that, it's its own, to use Solzhenitsyn's metaphor,
it's its own archipelago of all these
little isolated groups who meet,
as things would have it, at the table.
They try and organize loosely,
but the state tries to control that dissent,
but at the same time, we get all this,
what you'd call informal action,
that doesn't criticize the state,
but establishes realms outside the state's control,
because it's not in the state's interest.
And ultimately, one, you saw a picture of those kids
sitting there, there develops an interesting black market.
And it's generally tolerated as long as people
obey certain rules.
The farm economy comes to rely as much as ever
on the produce from two percent of the arable land
in the Soviet Union, that peasants are allowed
to farm for their own profit.
- [Gilliland] Free enterprise.
- [McDonald] And bring their grain to market, yeah.
- [Gilliland] Wouldn't dare call it capitalism.
- Well, they just call it the Kolkhoz, the collective,
seeing it's done by collective farmers.
And so as the Soviet Union moves out of the '70's,
on the one hand, when you look at Brezhnev at summits,
they've achieved what they've always wanted, it's parity.
You're starting to get these series of strategic arms
reduction talks, and the rest of it.
But within, you're getting these
very interesting accommodations.
Brezhnev's rule, people talk about dealing with Stalin's,
it's nowhere near as, it doesn't come close to anything
you would have seen under Stalin.
- [Gilliland] As repressive, you mean.
- Now, there are abuses, right?
This is where we start to see the misapplication
of psychiatric hospitals for imprisoning
wrong thinkers, and-- - [Gilliland] Dissidents.
- And we see the forcible expulsion
from the Soviet Union of people like Solzhenitsyn.
We see the beginning of third wave, so-called, immigration.
Jewish Refuseniki, who, because of the Soviet alliance
with the Arab states, following the Six Days War
against Israel, come under suspicion
and pressure and persecution for being Jewish
and talking about wanting to go to Israel.
This is where we start to see this huge, open migration
of a great deal of talent, and at the same time,
a sort of concession of a certain sphere.
And of different types of private enterprise, if you will,
to satisfy this growing consumer demand for a normal life.
And again, I'm not talking about the national republics
at all, where each of them is going through their own
version of these types of ferment, depending on what
kind of diaspora you're in contact with abroad.
And so, we see, by the mid-1980's, the Soviet Union
has become a visibly necrotic state.
Brezhnev reopening the Moscow Olympics
that everybody boycotts because of the
invasion of Afghanistan, of which I don't have a slide,
but there was a joke going around, and it's one of many,
Russians call them anecdotes, of Brezhnev reading
the pronouncement, the proclamation receiving
the Olympic athletes, and he says,
"Comrades, athletes, 0-0-0-0-0,"
and this aide whispers in his ear,
"Comrade Brezhnev, you just read the Olympic symbol."
And then who's he's succeeded by?
He's succeeded by Yuri Andropov.
Who's a Leningrader, an intellectual,
he's got the best degree, he was the head of the KGB.
And I remember I was a graduate student by that time,
and the fevered speculation about what,
he was pro-West 'cause he liked whiskey, scotch-whiskey,
he listened to jazz a lot.
- He's in poor health by the time he took the office.
- He was, they all were. It's the lifestyle.
A German physician released a study of the sort of
collective pathology of the Soviet leadership.
These people were living on three, four hours of sleep
a night, under conditions of incredible stress.
The selective process by which they rose,
most of them having experienced, indirectly or directly,
the '30's, and the war, World War II,
which demanded a great thing.
They smoked like chimneys, they drank like ten men,
and they kept this going on the whole time,
and that stress just took on them,
and the toll it took on them.
Like, okay, Andropov makes it what, six, eight months,
and then you get Konstantin Chernenko,
who, my Soviet friends would say,
'cause he'd read speeches to Party meetings,
and they were convinced they were
wheeling him out on a coat rack.
By the time he comes, he'd already obviously suffered
neurological problems or stokes, he was barely intelligible
when he read, it wasn't just his accent,
it was when he read, and he was the embodiment
of the moribund nature of the state, this gerontocracy.
And that slide you saw previously of Eduard Shevardnadze
and Mikhail Gorbachev and Yegor Ligachyov,
these were the three most visible of a rising generation
of Party secretaries, and we can talk about Gorbachev,
but Shevardnadze in Georgia and Ligachyov in the
western Siberian Urals, who had not experienced the war.
They had received good educations at a place like
Moscow State University, regional universities in the Urals,
were much more attuned to a different approach
to productivity, who were much more
impressed with new technology.
The way I would tell my students when I'm talking about it
is if you imagine May Day, the saying on Lenin's tomb,
watching the troops go by and the tanks and the missiles
and all the hardware show that they always used to
like to run, Brezhnev and his guys would say,
"Boy, didn't we do something."
And Gorbachev or Ligachyov would say,
"What a mess."
(Gilliland laughs)
And these guys, finally, Gromyko, Andrei Gromyko,
the forever minister of foreign affairs,
he nominates Gorbachev to take over for Chernenko in 1985.
- [Gilliland] Seen here with Reagan.
- Yes, and Gorbachev comes to power.
Nobody knows anything about him.
A lot of people thought, oh, he was just a well-dressed
usual guy, a normal Soviet.
- [Gilliland] Pretty clearly an original thinker.
- Well, that became quite clear, quite quickly.
He started talking about new thinking.
He started talking about perestroika,
the reconfiguration or restructuring, whatever.
One thing that was certain was,
one thing with two elements of which he was certain was,
this was still going to be a socialist state,
but it had to involve society, and it had to be under
the leadership of the Party that could control
a development that would make the economy vital,
and then make the Soviet Union vital internationally.
And so this was gonna mean a little bit of a breathing space
internationally, which meant working on getting troops
out of Afghanistan, healing all the foreign things,
and it's actually quite a traditional way
of balancing foreign and domestic needs.
He frees up the private sector.
We start to see him allow the formation of cooperatives.
He calls Sakharov in exile in what is now Nizhny Novgorod,
a place called Gorky, he gets to come back--
- Andrei Sakharov, the dissident physicist?
- Right, the physicist, the Nobel, yeah.
He encourages discussion of the so-called
White Spots in Soviet history.
He encouraged the election of congress
to the people's deputies.
He talks a lot about change, but he also
institutes a form of prohibition, the struggle against
the green snake, which was they called alcoholism.
I knew of a tenant in a hotel who says,
"Trouble with these battles?
"Green snake always wins."
But he tries other things, other measures
which are much less popular,
and he also tries to reach out
to intellectual society, and to people
who have always been pursuing their own lives, sort of
under the Soviet thing, but not engaging it directly.
But staying out of the way, because they weren't
doing anything offensive.
He tries to mobilize their support.
And he loses, well, part of what he's doing
is he's trying to build a new system,
you know, the old cliche, but building the plane
while you're in flight.
- [Gilliland] Right.
- Yeah, because the central committee, the sort of
controlling body of the Party, recognized that
he's a problem, and he's got to repopulate
with his people while he pursues more.
Chernobyl, his reaction to that, one of the things
he does is tries to use that.
He concedes greater autonomy to the national republics,
and their Party secretaries, in exchange for their
support in the central committee.
But then this puts them in touch with populations
and pressures, especially in the Baltics,
in a place like Ukraine and the Caucasus,
where they've always had their own agenda,
and how they're being allowed to pursue it publicly.
And so he finds himself increasingly isolated
at a time when he's trying to assert power.
And by the spring of 1990, huge demonstrations all over.
In the national republic capitals, but in Moscow.
These, yeah, the Alexander Garden around the Kremlin,
almost a million people out.
And this other demonstration on the right,
it says, "Today, Lithuania, Tomorrow, Russia,"
and when troops attack various positions associated with
Sajudis, a movement of national renewal in Lithuania,
with analogues in Latvia and Estonia,
and troops are set loose on these people.
Tens of people killed, big scandal.
And Gorbachev, in response to these, has to go back
to the people he knows, because he's tried building
alliances with social leaders, but still believes
in the primacy of the state and the Party
as the realistic directors and mobilizers
and strategists for this.
You don't concede authority to people
who don't know how to use it.
And of course, once these guys realize they're gonna be
junior partners, they say, "Mikhail Sergeyevich,"
or Mishka, which is like saying Mikey,
they turn on him.
And he finds himself isolated by the spring of '91,
especially when Yeltsin, nemesis hasn't spoken,
Boris Yeltsin, also one of this generation
of young secretaries, also a dynamic and relatively
free thinker, but very outspoken.
And confronts Gorbachev and that group publicly
for not moving fast enough, gets himself
thrown out of the politburo for his pinings.
- Another iconic photograph, though,
of Yeltsin facing the tank.
- Well, absolutely.
Well, he's elected president.
Finally, these characters on the left that the
extraordinary committee for the emergency,
Gorbachev, as you'll remember, in summer of '91,
is resting in the Crimea when the Nobel Prize
went out, and all of a sudden on TV in late August,
and I remember, it was my third year here,
they show up on TV.
And they announce, well, we're gonna have sort of
the equivalent of martial law.
At the same time as Soviet TV is showing this backdrop
of images of demonstrations and that,
new technology that these guys don't think about,
faxes, and rudimentary messages on the wire,
are pouring out of Soviet phone lines,
telling people what's happening,
and people from all over Russia gather in the Palace Square
in Petersburg, Red Square, by the White House,
and we see this dramatic showdown where Yeltsin
is standing on this tank, tank lining the divisions
have come out in support against the coup plotters,
the Putschers, and within three days, it's all gone.
They had tried a traditional assertion of authority,
and it had been, to use the Polish term,
like a knife in the water.
And Christmas day, we see the hammer and sickle
come down from over the Kremlin
to be replaced by the Russian tricolor.
And it's the beginning of the Yeltsin era.
An era that is still a subject
of huge controversy among Russians.
Liberals will say this was a time of real possibility,
we could have built a liberal democracy,
but others say this is a period of Russia's ultimate
degradation and humiliation, it's like 1916, 1917,
or the time of Troubles at the beginning
of the 17th century.
We were humiliated abroad, at home, Soviet socialism didn't
work, the planned economy didn't work, let's privatize.
The way they privatized, it worked well for
small economies like Poland and Czechoslovakia,
small economies with the infrastructures
dating to market economies, it led to absolute
ruin and catastrophe in Russia.
We see the emergence of the generation of oligarchs,
who more or less are people who know how
to adapt the best to these new conditions.
- Phenomenal entrepreneurialism.
- Yeah, in sort of a combination,
and Russians at the time use it,
wild west and robber-baron.
There's no law, the old security and law enforcement
apparat are totally gone, totally gone.
Corruption that we know flourished.
Way to think of the '90's was it ripped the lid off
a system that was already rotting inside, right?
And you saw, visibly, and if you were a Soviet citizen,
a Russian citizen by this time, you saw, palpably,
on your news, things that you'd always suspected
were going on, but now you blame it on the new order.
- And this new order, or new degradation, or new
disintegration, depending upon the point of view--
- Huge foreign component, it's an existential thing, right?
The events of 1985, I knew where my kids were going to
school, I had savings in the bank, I was going to go
to the sanatorium for my holiday down in Crimea,
or whatever, and when I looked on TV,
Soviet athletes, Soviet musicians, artists,
they were dominant, right?
Whatever the problems of the system were,
I was still in a serious country.
By 1995, I needed a passport to get to a sanatorium
in Crimea I can't afford, I don't know where our kid's
going to school, the school's not open,
they can't pay the teachers, my savings
all got evaporated by inflation,
I was giving some shares to some guy I knew
nothing about, I sold them, and then I realized,
I saw, I read it in the paper,
"Oh, so-and-so was amalgamating the Triple M."
And then abroad, the way Yugoslavia melted down,
an area that Soviet citizens felt was theirs,
NATO just pushed them aside,
NATO itself expands.
- [Gilliland] NATO encroachment.
- Well, from the point of view of a lot of Soviets,
A, when they allowed Germany to reunite in 1989,
it was apparently on a promise, I don't know if it was so,
but people remember it as this, that George Bush said
it wouldn't come at the cost of resecuritization
of East Europe, that it would honor old, traditional
Soviet spheres of interest.
This happens down in Yugoslavia, and NATO encroaches.
And there's no, your Olympic teams, they're lousy,
you got no money for anything, and it's this Yeltsin guy.
And look at him, and he, he's got beyond his booze problem,
he's got tremendous circulatory problems.
He runs for president in 1996, the cardiologists say
he has something like 12% flow capacity.
He knew he was risking his life to do it.
And the opposite, but people were still committed enough
that they would not vote communist.
The communists that develop the Communist Party are gonna--
- [Gilliland] They wanna stay that course.
- Voters would use, instead, this guy like
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, sort of a wild-eyed
nationalist who spoke in the most extremist language.
That was their prod, their goad, against this,
to protest the power.
- 1999, then, we start to see this guy.
- Well, it's funny too, 'cause this guy, who we see
probably in late 1999 before he assumes the role
of temporary president, Yeltsin actually resigns
the presidency, right?
But this guy, when he first came, he was just one
of a succession, a rapid succession of prime ministers
from 1997 on, Boris Nemtsov, Kasyanov,
there's a whole bunch of them,
who, for some reason for another,
fall afoul of the new, established interests, oligarchs,
new productive sectors or the like,
or maybe Yeltsin's entourage doesn't like them,
it's very unclear what's governing,
what's driving succession.
But Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who had been the protege
of Yeltsin's counterpart in Leningrad, Saint Petersburg,
a guy named Anatoly Sobchak, law student from Petersburg,
but had been in the KGB, had been counterintelligence
in East Germany, there's a British scholar who's theorized
that the trauma of watching Die Wende, the transformation
of East Germany, and the collapse of the wall,
sort of resolved Putin never to allow something
like that to happen in Russia.
But he takes over in 1999 with a speech that says
we're going to make this a better country,
and we're going to do it in ways
that respect our traditions, but also incorporate
democracy, 'cause that's what we want.
And our traditions are the state is
the necessary guide to this.
And he has, we've seen that he's turned out
some ways that we didn't expect,
and other ways that we were worried about,
and that is still an unfolding story, I'm afraid.
- David McDonald, thank you for sprinting through
some of the last 75 years of Soviet/Russian history with us.
- Well, it's a great Soviet performance-enhancing drug
that helped me do it, but thank you, it was a lot of fun. (laughter)
- I'm Norman Gilliland, and I hope you'll join me
next time around for "University Place Presents."