Conservative revolution in the USSR

Abstract

The history of the Soviet period is interpreted in the article as a history of conservative revolution (or conservative modernization). This revolution has transformed traditional, agrarian, rural, patriarchal, authoritarian, holistic society into industrial or post-industrial, urban, democratic, individualistic one. The principal idea of the article is that this universal revolution as well as its constituent particular revolutions in the USSR were conservative: they made possible rapid and rather efficient technical and other instrumental changes through the conservation of many basic elements of traditional social organization. It predetermined a contradictory, limited character of modernising changes and impossibility to complete them in the framework of the Soviet economic and political system.
Universal conservative revolution encompassed all aspects of the life of the Soviet society and in its turn was constituted by many particular revolutions among which the author singles out five the most important: economic, urban, demographic, cultural and political. The two revolutions last named receive primary attention in the article. The cultural revolution is interpreted as a modification of the type of personality and at the same time as a modification of the type of culture, the transformation of the holistic culture into individualistic one. The political revolution is the change of the type of elite and accession the new elite to power. The both revolutions began in the XlXth century and was sharply accelerated in the Soviet period. But as well as the other revolutions of this period they were conservative that is internally contradictory and by this reason they could not be completed. Their completion is the task of the post-Soviet period.