The Aging Pioneer: Late Soviet Socialist Society, Its Challenges and Challengers

Once the Soviet Union was a beacon of light for communists the world over. It was the first and for a long time the only country that was governed by a communist party. To many European, Asian and Latin American intellectuals, such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Bernard Shaw, Leon Feuchtwanger, Mao Zedong and Pablo Neruda, the Soviet Union embodied the hope that societal relations could be changed for the better and capitalism defeated. Hidden away from the view of most who supported its ideas, the Soviet Union was seen as more just, free and progressive than anywhere else. (Ironically, in this regard, the Soviet Union was rivaled only by the pioneer image that clung to the United States until the Great Depression.) The Soviet Union carefully cultivated this image even when disturbing reports of violence, famine and terror reached the ears of outsiders. Yet within the Soviet Union, the light began to pale the moment the bolsheviki became the hegemonic power - the establishment - and revolutionary fervor began to slip away. The Great Fatherland War stoked the last burning fires of devotion, because everything was at stake. Yet once the upheaval of World War II had subsided and normality returned, there was no hiding from the fact that the Soviet Union was an aging pioneer. In 1967 the Russian Revolution was a half-century old. Its veterans, as much as they were still alive, represented not the parents but the grandparents of the current generation of youth. The Soviet project had seen every mode of politics, from reform to radical purge, from New Economic Policy (NEP) compromise to a desperate fight for survival in the struggle against Nazi Germany. Yet by the late 1960s it appeared to many to have come to a curious halting point. The era of the Thaw, which had generated so much hope as well as anxiety, had ended. The forceful crackdown on the Prague Spring in 1968 and the arrest of a number of prominent dissidents during that year - most notably those who had gone onto Red Square out of a sense of solidarity with the Czechoslovak reformists, with banners reading “For Your Freedom and Ours” - left little doubt about the current state of things.