In the Clutches of the Past

Book Review: Oreshkin D.B. (2019) Stalinphilia and the Soviet Statistical Epic, Moscow: Misl’ (in Russian).

Abstract

Citation: Smirnov S. (2020) In the Clutches of the Past. Mir Rossii, vol. 29, no 3, pp. 162–176 (in Russian). DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2020-29-3-162-176

The reinterpretation of the Soviet experiment during Perestroika failed by most accounts. Yet most Russians still have trouble recognizing the essential flaws of the economic and
political system that emerged in the USSR in the first years of Soviet power. These people still magically believe in the power of Stalin, whose name is, by no accident, used in the title of the book. Even the attempts to reform the regime in 1953 and, especially, after 1985 are considered by many as a crime, and their initiators (Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin) as state criminals who should be put on trial. This book argues that the primary reason behind this ‘magic’ is the masterful virtual reality that was created and maintained in the USSR on the basis of Communist ideology, a reality that was maintained using a wide range of tools, primarily statistical. The discrepancies between the planned indicators and the real achievements are investigated by the author using examples of railway construction, the collectivization of agriculture, laying of channels, etc. In cases when figures presented to the party leadership did not square well with the ideological guidelines, physical elimination was frequently used to get rid of those who fell out of favor (the most striking example concerns the repressions against the organizers of the population census of the USSR in 1937). These same people were also often blamed for the failures in economic and social policy. The author concludes that the continuing perception of the country’s past through the prism of such hagiography is an obstacle to the development of modern Russia.