A Documentary History of Communism in Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev

Preface (1993 Edition)

Preface (1993 Edition) This third, revised and updated edition of A Documentary History of Communism coincides with the amazing collapse of Communist rule in the Soviet Union. It follows the fall of Communist governments in Eastern Europe and the virtual demise of the international Communist movement, except for the People's Republic of China and a few other outposts of old-style Communism in the Far East and in Cuba whose days may be numbered. Thus the story of Communism as a worldwide phenomenon is now essentially closed, and there will be no need for further revisions of this work. While this new edition reflects the startling developments in the Communist world since the advent of reform under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, I have found no need to make other major changes either of concept or of content. Communism has become history, but that history is still a living background to post-Communist life. In fact, the historical understanding of Communism has become all the more important with the tendency since the collapse of the Soviet Union, among outsiders as well as among Russians and the other ex-Soviet peoples, to regard the entire Communist experience from 1917 to 1991 as an undifferentiated nightmare, better forgotten than studied. This attitude threatens to create a new historical "black hole" that could swallow up the true record as indiscriminately as the Communists themselves did when it came to their enemies. The post-Communist world can only be understood as Communism left it and as the end-product of a complex evolution , where verbal professions of reality, recorded in these documents, squared less and less with the actual course of affairs. Since 1985 mountains of new documentation about the history of Communism in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe have become available. After the collapse of Communist rule in Moscow following the August Putsch of 1991, the most sensitive party archives were thrown open to investigators, and an intriguing sample of these documents was exhibited by the Library of Congress in cooperation with the Committee on Archival Affairs of the Russian Government. None of these materials, however, fundamentally alters the picture of Communist reality that outside experts were able to form on the basis of the known record. At most they add detail—frequently gruesome—and bear out historians' conjectures. As of this writing, the post-coup revelations have not equalled in historical import the key documents published in Soviet journals and East European sources between 1987 and 1991, after Gorbachev gave the green light to historical reconsideration. I have added or substituted some of this newly available material, both published and unpublished, where it makes certain points more emphatically, but the basic record still stands. This story closes with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the resignation of President Gorbachev, following the effective suppression of the Communist Party xviii Preface (/ggj Edition) in all the Soviet republics. These events put an end to anything that could even nominally be called Communism in the former Soviet realm. What has happened since then and may happen in the future in Russia and the other formerly Soviet republics is no longer the history of Communism but of the post-Communist era, the subject for other books by other authors. For their help in initiating and executing this final revision of A Documentary History ofCommunism I am indebted to Thomas McFarland of UPNE (once again), to Dr. James Billington and his staff of the Library of Congress, to Doug Paton for research assistance on short notice, and to Mrs. Diann Varricchione, who processed the new portions of the manuscript. I have followed the rule here of capitalizing "Communism" and "Communist" when they refer to the political movement and system, using lower case when they refer to the theoretical ideal. Similarly, "Soviet," referring to the country or the system, "soviet," referring to the actual councils (except "St. Petersburg Soviet," etc.). ...