It becomes a matter of unconscionability to derive an image of a perceived enemy without hyperbole. The Soviet system is best described as an autocracy governed solely by the communist party elite. Through their new revolutionary social system, the Bolsheviks reinstated the same class enemy they ideologically detested. The ruling elite simply switched camps from landowning kulaks to the communist party apparat. Not a great deal is understood or appreciated for that matter about post-Czarist Russia before the Bolshevik seizure of power. The idea of a theoretical history arises which beckons the question of how much different Russia would have been if its federative socialist republic survived after the Czar’s overthrow. Nonetheless, there once was a time when the Soviet Union competing on an even playing field with the United States.
This occurred during the short lived Golden Age of the Soviet Union when Moscow led the world in the international space race. As time went on the overall quality of Soviet society began a process of rapid deterioration owed largely to its absolute centralization. The apex of which arrived during the Brezhnev era which returned to Stalinist revisionism. Citizens simply looked the other way knowing all too well that society was not getting any better. This compromised morale which enticed corrupt appetites. The arms race broke the Soviet Union which exacerbated discontent among its citizens awaiting promises that simply never arrived. The greatest revelation arrives when Solzhenitsyn exposes the chronic backwater undermining the continuance of the Soviet state despite any attempt at reform.
To the surprise of many Americans, the United States government played a direct role in the subsidization of the Soviet economy materializing largely in the form of agricultural and technological exports. Under the guise of an elusive autarky, the Soviet state could not exist without the systematic repression of its people. As long as something or someone was considered unsanctionable by the party apparat, it had no chance of survival.
Besides the arms race, Glasnost and Perestroika broke official narratives long since held sacred by the all-pervasive state only to be proved foundationally illegitimate to the basis supporting an otherwise open society.
-Image is Courtesy of Amazon.com-