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The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States. By Ronald Grigor Suny. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 540p. $35.00.
Eugene Huskey, Stetson University
"Stalinist culture established what was acceptable or possible, but within that permissible range art could provide emotional and aesthetic pleasure, bring people to tears or laughter, and make them feel good about the lives they lived" (p. 274). One could ban saxophones-as the Soviet Union did in the late 1940s-but not the spirit that leads men and women to make music. In these and other observations in The Soviet Experiment, Ronald Grigor Suny reveals the humanity of a population subjected to a century of lawlessness and indignity. To be sure, episodes in Soviet history, such as those recounted in Varlam Shalamov's chilling tales of the Kolyma death camps, could destroy the spirit as well as the lives of individuals. But Russian society exhibited a remarkable resilience and instinct for survival in the face of the relentless campaigns of a messianic state.
If the Soviet experiment bequeathed at least some "usable history" with which to build a new, postcommunist culture and society, it could contribute little of value to a revival of politics in the 1990s. Unlike in Latin America and southern Europe, the transition from authoritarianism in Russia and the other post-Soviet states requires the razing of the entire edifice of political and economic relations. During the last decade, reform-minded Russian leaders have found it immensely difficult to dispose of a history conditioned by a command economy, by the Communist Party's monopoly of political organization and...