The spectre of Stalin's terror and the failure of Kremlin reforms

Seventy years have passed since the leaders of the communist world heard one of the most remarkable speeches in their dramatic history. It was delivered by Nikita Khrushchev on the last day of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, February 25, 1956. In a so-called "secret" speech, which remained secret only to the public in communist countries, while people in the West were able to read it shortly after it was delivered, Khrushchev condemned the crimes Stalin had committed against his fellow party members. It was the first attempt to introduce a kind of "communism with a human face" in the Soviet Union, which was no longer based solely on general fear and mass murder.

Communism was enforced in Soviet Russia by a radical party whose membership base constituted only a few per thousand of the entire society. The working class was backward, and most of the population worked in agriculture and believed in God rather than in the anti-religious teachings of Marx and Lenin. The consolidation of power in such a brutal form was not solely Stalin's fault, as Khrushchev claimed. Terror had been a fundamental prerequisite of communist politics since Lenin's time. Khrushchev's efforts to "humanize" the regime were a remarkable and positive step toward improvement, but they soon proved to be very problematic.

The democratization of domestic society began to lend an ear to critics not only of Stalin but of the entire Soviet system. The copying of de-Stalinization in other communist countries then led to the questioning not only of domestic forms of communist dictatorship but also to attacks on the ways in which those countries had been Sovietized. If Stalin was a criminal, how could the export of Stalinism from the USSR to Central and Eastern Europe during the liberation of this region from German Nazism be considered "non-criminal"? 

Khrushchev himself soon had to resort to violence. Those who "abused" democratization beyond the officially tolerated limits were punished both at home and abroad. The world was most starkly reminded of the clear limits of the new policy by the invasion of Soviet troops in Hungary in 1956, while on the domestic scene, "de-Stalinization" was ultimately ended by the brutal crackdown on the uprising in Novocherkassk in 1962 and the campaign against the liberal-minded intelligentsia that followed immediately thereafter.

Khrushchev's reforms thus ended during his reign, not after he was removed from the highest position in the country in October 1964. The most traditional way of periodizing the Soviet era, which assesses developments in the USSR according to the policies of its top leaders, still sees Khrushchev primarily as a "reformer," given the significantly more conservative conception of communism under his predecessor Stalin and his successor Brezhnev.

However, a deeper look at the efforts to reform the political system in the Soviet Union—and later in post-Soviet Russia—suggests a different dynamic. It was not only Khrushchev who spoke of the need for reform, but also all his successors, from Brezhnev to Gorbachev and Yeltsin to Putin. However, all of them—with the exception of Gorbachev—abandoned their initial ideas, which in the case of Brezhnev and especially Putin even led to the introduction of new methods of repression. 

Those who backed away from reform rhetoric realized the impossibility of economic reforms without parallel political reforms and the associated danger of the collapse of top-down centralized power. Gorbachev was ultimately the only one who did not reverse course, and his "weakness" led to the definitive collapse of the Soviet Union.

If the failure of Khrushchev's reforms meant the end of illusions about "reform communism" and the failure of Gorbachev's reforms brought about the end of the Soviet project, the failure of the reforms of the Yeltsin period called into question the possibility of democratization in Russia itself. In his "famous" speech to the Russian parliament in 2005, in which he described the collapse of the USSR as the "geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century, Vladimir Putin called for overcoming the crisis of the 1990s through further democratization of society, but in reality, he did the exact opposite. His vision of "democratization" was once again only a vision strictly controlled from above, and not the bottom-up democratization that neighbouring Ukraine was attempting at the time after the so-called Orange Revolution and that the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia had already implemented long before. Putin's inability and unwillingness to push through real and deeper democratization in Russia was finally revealed by the "punishment" of Ukraine after further revolts there in 2014 and the associated annexation of Crimea and some eastern Ukrainian territories.

The experience of failed reforms over the past 70 years raises the question of whether and to what extent it is even possible to truly democratize Russia while maintaining its territorial integrity. Deep political reforms, understood not as an opportunity, but demonized only as "chaos" and danger, are feared not only by the Kremlin but also by a significant part of Russian society, including a considerable portion of the intelligentsia.

For such Russians, it is undoubtedly easier to accept that their country is waging brutal wars against others than to admit the possibility of internal political conflicts and the danger of collapse on the home front. 

When the need for reform is once again discussed in Russia in the future, it will be very unclear and uncertain for democratic countries to know who to bet on in such a case. However, giving up hope that democratization from below is indeed possible would de facto mean accepting Putin's authoritarian vision. 

The consequences of such a capitulation could ultimately be even more unclear and uncertain.