Wu Enyuan: Was the Chief Cause of the Soviet Union's Collapse a "Failure to Keep Up with the Times"?
On November 25, 2021, Zheng Yongnian, Director of the Advanced Institute of Global and Contemporary China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, stated in an interview with an influential domestic newspaper that "the main reason for the disintegration of the Soviet Union was its inability to advance with the times [与时俱进]." This viewpoint is open to debate.
I. Did the Soviet model after the October Revolution fail to "advance with the times"?
Mr. Zheng Yongnian, on the one hand, admits that the Soviet Union was "such a powerful" country, yet on the other hand, claims that "after the October Revolution of 1917, the 'Soviet model' failed to advance with the times in terms of both its economic base and its political superstructure." How could a Soviet model that failed to "advance with the times" have made the Soviet Union "a powerful country"? Mr. Zheng is not alone in holding contradictory views on this logical relationship of "cause" and "effect"; many others have made similar assertions. Mikhail Gorbachev, while acknowledging the historical achievements of the Soviet system, simultaneously announced a break with the Soviet bureaucratic system that had existed for over 70 years. Some domestic scholars also do not deny the achievements of Soviet industrialization and the defeat of Fascism, yet they dismissively criticize almost the entire Soviet political and economic system, labeling it with terms like "one-party autocracy" or "highly centralized," [1] and so on.
If there had been no leadership by the Communist Party and no centralized planning and unified distribution of limited productive forces and consumer goods by the central authorities at that time, could the Soviet Union have achieved its goals of national industrialization and the defeat of Fascism? The methodological error in this understanding is the failure to dialectically analyze the Soviet system as a unity of opposites—one that both promoted social progress and contained flaws, even severe ones. To bifurcate this system, seeing only its defects and thus negating it entirely, is an obviously flawed cognitive method. It can neither clarify the reasons for the Soviet Union's successes nor find the true causes of its collapse.
Starting from his perspective of the "civilizational state," [2] Mr. Zheng believes that the Soviet "closed-door policy" [3] was due to its conservative and closed traditions. He thus asserts that compared to the essence of the old Russian Empire, the Soviet regime after the October Revolution saw "no fundamental change in either its economic base or its superstructure." This assertion is a common-sense error.
After the October Revolution, the first "Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic," formulated in 1918, defined the country's national form [4] and system of government: Russia was a Soviet Republic of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies; all power belonged to the Soviets; it established the dictatorship of the proletariat to ruthlessly suppress the resistance of the exploiters; and it established a socialist social organization, among other things. In 1936, Stalin revised the constitution based on the 1918 version. While retaining the previous basic principles, he added provisions regarding the status of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): the Party, formed voluntarily by the most active and conscious citizens from the working class, laboring peasantry, and laboring intelligentsia, was the vanguard of the laborers in their struggle to build a communist society and the leading core of all social organizations and state organs.
Regarding the economic base, after the October Revolution, the Soviet government announced the expropriation of the bourgeoisie's productive forces, abolished the private ownership of land from the Tsarist era, and turned factories, land, railways, and banks into the common property of all people. It eliminated the exploitation of man by man and completely abolished the phenomenon of social division into classes. Thus, the world's first socialist state was born—a state completely different from the autocratic regime of the landlords and bourgeoisie in old Russia, opening a new era in the development of human society.
After the founding of New China, how was the first constitution reflecting the national strategy to be formulated? Mao Zedong instructed members of the Central Politburo to reference and learn from the Soviet constitutions of 1918 and 1936. New China's first constitution, in terms of the national form, system of government, and basic principles for establishing a socialist economic base, drew upon these two Soviet constitutions, thereby laying the cornerstone for the development of the People's Republic of China. If one were to say there is no essential difference between New China and Old China, Mr. Zheng would likely not agree.
Clearly, compared to the thousand-year history of the Tsarist regime, the view that no fundamental change occurred in the Soviet economic base and superstructure does not hold up, even when explained from the perspective of a "civilizational state." The view that the cause of the Soviet collapse lay in "systemic ossification, conservatism, and dogmatism toward Marxism, failing to advance with the times" was once fashionable, but this judgment is not entirely accurate.
It was precisely Lenin who broke through and developed the Marxist theory that the socialist revolution could only break out simultaneously in developed capitalist countries. He put forward the thesis that due to imperialist wars, the socialist revolution could achieve "victory in one country" in Russia—an economically backward agricultural nation—thereby developing Marxism. Stalin continued the socialist cause pioneered by Lenin. Building socialism is an unprecedented undertaking with no ready-made models or dogmas to draw upon. This means that every day and every task in the Soviet Union, whether the decisions were correct or incorrect, was conducted through innovation and exploration.
After World War II, peace and development gradually became the mainstream of the era, and the world saw a new wave of technological revolution. Soviet leaders at the time, due to conservative and rigid thinking, failed to follow this trend in a timely manner, which seriously affected economic and social development. However, to conclude that Soviet society at this time only possessed a side of "stagnation" and could not "advance with the times" is too arbitrary. "Ossification and conservatism" and "reform and innovation" are two opposing sides. It was precisely the Soviet Union that initiated reforms of the highly centralized political and economic management system of socialist countries.
Shortly after Stalin's death, Georgy Malenkov comprehensively expounded a "New Course" for the further development of Soviet socialist construction. Its main contents included: first, noting the irrational structure of the national economy and proposing to develop light industry and the food industry at a speed comparable to heavy industry; second, devolving some central power and expanding the authority of various departments, localities, and enterprises; and third, opposing the "cult of personality," recognizing for the first time the problems existing in the political system.
Nikita Khrushchev continued Malenkov's "reform," and in 1957, he formally proposed the "reorganization of management in industry and construction." This involved changing the over-concentration of central power over the national economy, shifting major economic activities from the center to localities, further expanding local authority in enterprise operations, financial management, and planning. It included measures to expand enterprise autonomy and reduce central indicators sent to localities and enterprises, while fully utilizing various economic levers and strengthening economic accounting [5] through economic incentives to manage economic activity.
In 1965, the Soviet Union formally introduced the term "economic reform." Under the efforts of experts led by Alexei Kosygin, the Soviet Union launched an economic reform oriented toward economic accounting and self-responsibility for profits and losses. It utilized market tools that were then considered capitalist economic categories—such as price, value, and profit—and positioned the "cell" of reform within the enterprise, proposing the establishment of a more rational enterprise management system.
How should these reforms be evaluated today? First, the direction of these reforms should be affirmed, such as changing the irrational structure of the national economy, reducing the power of central ministries, expanding the production autonomy of localities and enterprises, and utilizing the role of the commodity economy and market laws. In the early stages, these measures played a certain role in promoting Soviet socio-economic development. Second, as mentioned earlier, it must also be admitted that because Soviet leaders at the time treated Marxism in an ossified and dogmatic manner, these reforms failed to fundamentally touch the defects of the old system, and thus the results were not very significant, even seeing reversals. But can we conclude, as some assert, that these Soviet measures and reforms were complete failures? Should they be totally negated? The answer is no.
Lenin once pointed out: "Historical services are not judged by what historical figures did not provide in respect of modern requirements, but by what they provided that was new compared with their predecessors." Reforms in socialist countries are unprecedented, and every step is difficult. However, the reforms that began in the Soviet Union quickly expanded to socialist countries in Eastern Europe—such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia—and also influenced China. Mao Zedong, in his work On the Ten Major Relationships, took full note of these Soviet measures. It can be said that if the Soviet Union had not advanced with the times and implemented such reforms to its highly centralized political and economic system, Soviet socio-economic development likely would not have maintained its subsequent growth rate (from the 1950s to the 1980s, the annual growth rate of the Soviet total social product was over 5%).
II. Was Soviet socialist construction "innovation behind closed doors"?
Mr. Zheng believes that the Soviet "whole-of-nation system," [6] which initially achieved some results in technology and industry, was difficult to sustain because it involved "innovation behind closed doors," closing itself off and eventually leading to total isolation and failure. But the actual situation was not like this.
After the October Revolution in 1917, the first socialist state faced armed intervention from 14 Western countries led by the United States. U.S. President Thomas Woodrow Wilson clamored to "strangle the first Bolshevik regime in its cradle," and the Entente powers announced an economic blockade of Soviet Russia. Even so, while facing Western encirclement and the near impossibility of conducting economic and technological exchanges abroad, Lenin still attached great importance to developing normal trade relations with Western capitalist countries. He believed that without stable foreign trade relations, solid domestic economic relations were impossible. He formulated the equation: "Soviet power + Prussian railway order + American technology and trust organization + American public education, etc., etc., ++ = the sum = socialism." This fully proves that the Soviet regime absolutely did not "build behind closed doors," but rather extremely valued exchanges with capitalist countries.
In 1919, as the civil war was coming to an end, Lenin predicted that a "period of coexistence between socialist and capitalist states" would inevitably emerge in international relations, stating a "willingness to grant concessions on reasonable terms as a means of obtaining technical assistance for Russia from more advanced countries."
In 1920, after the failure of the war launched by imperialism and domestic reactionaries to overthrow the Soviet regime, the Entente had to lift the blockade. Lenin said excitedly: "The fact that the blockade has been lifted is an event of major international significance; it shows that a new period of the socialist revolution has begun," and "our state of complete isolation from the advanced countries, this state caused by the blockade, has been broken."
In 1922, Western countries held an international economic conference in Genoa. Lenin required Communist Party members to attend as "merchants." He said, "We welcome the Genoa Conference and are prepared to attend; we know very well and do not hide that we are going there as merchants, because trade with capitalist countries (so long as they have not yet collapsed) is absolutely essential for us."
Lenin not only fully expounded the idea of developing trade and technical exchanges with capitalist countries but also put this idea into practice during the New Economic Policy period through the "concessions" [7] system. In 1921, Russia ordered thousands of locomotives and hundreds of tank cars from abroad, and exports reached 50 million poods. [8] Between 1921 and 1926, the Soviet government signed 144 concession contracts with capitalists (including 21 with Germany, 16 with Britain, and 10 with the U.S.); a year later, there were 73 active concession enterprises. By 1927, the Soviet government had obtained 16.11 million rubles from these enterprises. Through the concession system, the Soviet government successfully obtained a significant income, enabling it to begin importing large amounts of equipment, technology, and talent from Western countries starting in 1927. Certainly, due to the constraints of the era, the scope of Soviet opening to the outside world was not very large, but to assert that the Soviet Union at this time was actively "building behind closed doors" is completely inaccurate.
Stalin similarly adhered to Lenin's idea of strengthening external political and economic ties. As early as 1921, Stalin pointed out in his article "The Party Before and After the Taking of Power" that "Russia is an economically backward country, and if it does not exchange its own raw materials for machinery and equipment from Western countries, it will be difficult to organize transportation, develop industry, and electrify urban and rural industry solely on its own strength." He emphasized: "Before the proletariat has achieved victory in one or several industrial capitalist countries, Soviet Russia and our Party leading it will have to seek forms and methods of economic cooperation with capitalist groups from the West that are hostile to us, in order to obtain the necessary technical equipment." Stalin expounded on the inevitability and necessity of the Soviet Union developing economic relations with capitalist countries.
As if responding to Mr. Zheng’s question regarding the "closed-door" nature of the Soviet socialist economy, Stalin pointed out categorically: "To think that the economy is something absolutely closed-off and absolutely independent of the national economies of the surrounding countries is the height of stupidity." Stalin explained the reasoning behind this: the national economy of the Soviet Union relied on the world capitalist economy; simultaneously, this reliance was mutual, as capitalist countries also relied on the Soviet economy for resources such as oil, grain, and timber. Stalin believed that the relationship of interdependence between the Soviet and capitalist economies was determined by the objective process of human socio-economic development and was independent of subjective human will.
Guided by this thinking, the Supreme Council of the National Economy of the Soviet Union established a specialized Central Foreign Consulting Bureau in 1929, responsible for the introduction and utilization of foreign technology. Between 1929 and 1932, the Soviet Union purchased approximately 70% of all machine tools exported by the United Kingdom. Trade between the Soviet Union and the United States was highly active: in 1930, the Soviet Union was the second-largest importer of American machinery and equipment, and in 1931, it leaped to first place. During the same period, the Soviet Union became Germany's largest importer of machinery, with 43% of German exported machinery shipped to the USSR. In 1931, machine equipment purchased from abroad by the Soviet Union accounted for about one-third of total world equipment exports, rising to one-half the following year. At that time, the total volume of industrial equipment purchased by the Soviet Union ranked first in the world. From 1928 to 1931, the Soviet Union purchased 67.1% of the West's cutting machine tools, 52.6% of its turbines, and 69% of its tractors—testament to the massive scale of Soviet foreign trade. By early 1931, the number of technical assistance projects accepted by the Soviet Union from abroad increased to 124, with a total investment value of 83 million rubles. Between 1929 and 1945, the Soviet Union signed a total of 217 technical assistance projects with foreign companies.
At the same time, the Soviet Union actively engaged in scientific, technological, and cultural exchanges with foreign countries. The Soviet Union sent large numbers of leading cadres, management personnel, technicians, and university students abroad for inspection tours, while also accepting a large number of foreign experts and technicians to provide guidance within the USSR. By 1932, the number of foreign experts working in the Soviet Union reached over 20,000. Much equipment for the Soviet Union's largest steel plants, tractor factories, and hydroelectric stations was introduced from abroad, and many foreign experts worked in these enterprises. For instance, the Soviet Union's three largest steel plants—the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, the Kuznetsk Iron and Steel Works, and the Zaporizhstal plant—were all built with technical assistance from the United States and Germany. At that time, 250 American engineers worked at the world's largest plant, Magnitogorsk, and opened training classes to help Soviet engineers master engineering technology. The Kuznetsk plant was designed and built with American assistance, and its advanced equipment was entirely imported. The famous Stalingrad Tractor Factory was also built with the help of 80 American factories. This plant produced tractors in peacetime and a large number of tanks during World War II, arming the Soviet military to resist the German fascists. As the largest hydroelectric station in Europe at the time, the Soviet Dnieper Hydroelectric Station's generators and turbines were provided by American companies such as General Electric; several Americans supported the construction there, six of whom were awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor by the Soviet government.
It is evident from this that the CPC leadership at the time did not subjectively hold the idea of "closing the door" for isolated development, but instead strove to strengthen ties with the world, especially with developed capitalist countries. Of course, due to the objective hostility of the West toward socialist countries, this openness was subject to great limitations.
III. Was the Primary Cause of the Soviet Collapse "Decoupling" from the West?
Mr. Zheng’s starting point may be well-intentioned—hoping that China learns from the lesson of the Soviet "closed system" that led to collapse and absolutely refrains from "decoupling" from the world. So-called "decoupling" is a metaphor and not a rigorous academic term; during the Soviet era, terms more commonly used in the field of international relations were "blockade" [N] and "closure." After World War II, economic interaction between the Soviet Union and capitalist countries was greatly hindered, but this was not caused by the Soviet Union.
In 1946, the "Iron Curtain" speech delivered by British Prime Minister Churchill marked the beginning of the "Cold War" waged by the imperialist camp against the socialist camp. Western countries began their encirclement, suppression, blockade, and control of the Soviet Union. In 1949, seventeen Western capitalist countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Australia, formed the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM). Its purpose was specifically to restrict member states from exporting strategic materials and technology to socialist countries. More than 10,000 types of products were included in the embargo list across three major categories: military weaponry, cutting-edge technological products, and rare materials. Under these circumstances, the foreign economic and cultural exchanges of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries were extremely restricted.
Forced by these conditions, Stalin proposed the theory of "two parallel markets." He pointed out: "The single all-embracing world market disintegrated, so that now we have two parallel and opposed world markets," namely the capitalist and socialist markets. However, Stalin particularly emphasized that the occurrence of this situation did not lie with the Soviet side, but because "the United States, Great Britain, and France themselves facilitated the formation and consolidation of this new parallel world market," their aim being to "impose an economic blockade on the Soviet Union, China, and the European People’s Democracies, hoping thereby to strangle them." The Soviet Union absolutely did not "proactively decouple" as Mr. Zheng claims.
"When it is dark in the east, it is bright in the west" [N]. To break through the imperialist blockade, Soviet foreign economic relations were actually expanded in three directions. First, expanding economic and trade cooperation among socialist countries. One can imagine that, under the blockade by capitalist countries and until the abolition of the COCOM agreement in 1994, economic and trade cooperation between the Soviet Union and socialist countries was the mainstream of its foreign economic relations: from the 1950s to the mid-1980s, trade between the Soviet Union and socialist countries consistently accounted for more than 50% to 60% of its total foreign trade. Second, expanding economic and trade cooperation with developing countries. Economic and trade relations between the Soviet Union and developing countries developed rapidly; from the 1950s to the 1980s, trade with developing countries accounted for roughly 11% to 15% of the Soviet Union's total foreign trade. Third, utilizing the contradictions and needs among capitalist countries to strive to expand economic exchanges with Western countries. Although Western countries were hostile to the Soviet regime, out of economic considerations, they also had to do business with Soviet Russia. Lenin once profoundly revealed that the imperialist blockade policy could not be sustained and was destined to fail, arguing that "There is a force more powerful than the wishes, the will and the decisions of any of the governments or classes that are hostile to us. That force is world general economic relations. It is these relations that compel them to take this path of dealing with us."
After the signing of the COCOM agreement, some Western countries, for the sake of their own economic interests, continuously broke through COCOM's embargo restrictions to conduct trade with the Soviet Union. Thus, although in the early 1950s Soviet trade with developed countries accounted for only 15% of its total foreign trade, it rose rapidly year by year from the 1960s onward, reaching over 30% in the 1970s and 80s.
Stalin's theory of "two parallel markets" had both a side of forced response to the blockade of imperialist countries and the theoretical limitations of Soviet Russia’s years of dogmatic understanding of Marxism and neglect of the commodity economy. This had a significant impact on successive Soviet leaders after Stalin, thereby narrowing the level of Soviet opening to the outside world and the degree of economic and cultural exchange with foreign countries. Consequently, by the end of the 1980s, the Soviet Union's total foreign trade volume ranked only seventh in the world, which was disproportionate to its status as a global industrial and energy power, and which also hindered the further development of Soviet society and its economy.
The system of any country in the world today contains both factors that promote social development and defects that hinder social progress; however, the existence of defects does not mean a system is destined to perish—one must identify what the fatal defects are. The "reform" pursued by Gorbachev and the general line of "humanistic, democratic socialism" he formulated were the most primary and fundamental causes leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even Gorbachev himself admits this. The Russian history teacher's reference book A Modern History of Russia (1945–2006) notes that on Gorbachev's 75th birthday in 2006, someone asked him: "If you hadn't carried out reforms, what would you be doing now?" He replied that if his health were good, he would still be serving as General Secretary of the CPSU. This is because when he took over the Soviet regime, the state system was sufficiently stable: the Soviet system could 100% resist foreign invasion, and there was no major internal turmoil. The book emphasizes: "Neither the technological backwardness relative to the West nor the economic difficulties caused by the lack of economic efficiency could lead to a change in the Soviet system. The only possibility for change lay in the actions of the regime itself from the top down," namely the reforms launched by Gorbachev. Even Gorbachev had to admit that the cause of the Soviet collapse lay in the mistakes made by the reformers; it was caused by the errors of the Soviet leaders at the time, including his own (though he believed the error was primarily Yeltsin’s).
Multiple polls in Russia in recent years show that most people believe the collapse of the Soviet Union was not inevitable, and that Gorbachev's reforms were the primary factor leading to the state's demise. On December 12, 2021, the Russian news agency Sputnik published an interview with Nursultan Nazarbayev, the former president of Kazakhstan and Gorbachev’s closest aide. Discussing the reasons for the Soviet collapse, he also admitted that Gorbachev's mistakes led to the dissolution: "At that time, the Soviet economy was on the brink of collapse, the economic system had exhausted its own resources, and this was caused by the lack of political will among the Soviet leaders at the time." This proves once again that it was the so-called "humanistic, democratic socialism" reform line pursued by the Soviet leadership that led to the collapse.
Xi Jinping pointed out: "Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that the struggle in the ideological field was extremely intense; they comprehensively negated Soviet history and the history of the CPSU, negated Lenin, negated Stalin, engaged in historical nihilism [N], and threw their thinking into chaos. Party organizations at all levels had almost no function, and the military was no longer under the Party's leadership. In the end, the CPSU, as large a party as it was, whistled down the wind [N], and the Soviet Union, as large a socialist country as it was, fell apart. This is a lesson from the past!" This is the most accurate explanation of the causes of the Soviet collapse.
In summary, several conclusions can be drawn. First, due to the nature of imperialism in its pursuit of hegemony, its blockade and suppression of socialist countries will always exist. Even if socialist countries sincerely attempt to expand engagement with developed capitalist countries, the latter, out of their own interest, will always try every possible means to block and encircle socialist countries; we must harbor no illusions about this. The Trump and Biden administrations in the United States have brandished the "dharma vessel" [N] of "decoupling" to contain China in an all-round way.
Second, the imperialist blockade is a double-edged sword that harms others without benefiting oneself. Historical experience proves that the imperialist aim of hindering the pace of Soviet development through blockades did not succeed: by the 1970s and 80s, the Soviet Union eventually became a "superpower" on par with the United States (according to rankings of the comprehensive national power indicators of world powers, from the 1950s to the mid-1980s, the United States and the Soviet Union always occupied the top two positions). Similarly, after the founding of New China, the imperialist blockade and encirclement of China were unprecedented, yet China still developed intercontinental missiles and successfully developed the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb... History will also prove that the conspiracy of Western countries led by the United States to attempt to force China to "decouple" from the world today will eventually fail.
Third, as Mr. Zheng says, the Soviet Union did indeed have the defect of "engaging in construction behind closed doors" to a certain extent. Therefore, today we need to learn from its experiences and lessons, further expand the pace of reform and opening up, expand our circle of friends, find new and reliable friends, and thoroughly break the containment and suppression of our country by Western imperialism led by the United States.