; A COGNITIVE APPROAC THE PATH AND THE: TASK TITLE H TO SOVIET HISTOR Y AUTHOR: LARS T. LIH THE NATIONAL COUNCI L FOR SOVIET AND EAST EUROPEA N RESEARC H TITLE VIII PROGRA M 1755 Massachusetts Avenue, N .W . Washington, D .C. 20036 PROJECT INFORMATION : 1 CONTRACTOR : Wellesley Colleg e PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR : Lars T. Li h COUNCIL CONTRACT NUMBER : 807-1 9 DATE : May 8, 199 5 COPYRIGHT INFORMATIO N individual researchers retain the copyright on work products derived from research funded b y Council Contract. The Council and the U.S. Government have the right to duplicate written reports and other materials submitted under Council Contract and to distribute such copies within th e Council and U.S. Government for their own use, and to draw upon such reports and materials fo r their own studies; but the Council and U.S. Government do not have the right to distribute, o r make such reports and materials available, outside the Council or U.S. Government without th e written consent of the authors, except as may be required under the provisions of the Freedom o f Information Act 5 U.S.C. 552,, or other applicable law . 1 The work leading to this report was supported in part by contract funds provided by the Nationa l Councilfor Soviet and East European Research, made available by the U. S. Department of State under Title VIII (the Soviet-Eastern European Research and Training Act of 1983, as amended) . The analysis and interpretations contained in the report are those of the author(s) . Executive Summary This report describes the ways in which my research into early Bolshevism can help u s understand difficulties facing Russia today . Both the Communists and today's reformers ar e forced to resort to similar excuses and evasions when confronted with unpalatable realities . A cognitive approach shows that this similarity is not due to some specifically Russian failing , but to the nature of political solutions in general. Any proposed solutions to societies ' problems such as Bolshevism or " market society" will have both strong sources o f plausibility and disquieting anomalies in practice . My research is aimed at discovering both the sources of plausibility for the Bolshevik solution and the anomalies it faced throughout Soviet history . In presenting my mai n conclusions, I also provide comparisons with Russian opinion today . I argue that the way to achieve a sympathetic understanding of the post-Communists is first to achieve a sympathetic understanding of the Communists . The strength of the cognitive approach is that it reminds us that the crucial struggle i n Russia today is a competition between stories . If we don't want malevolent or defensiv e stories to guide Russian policy, we should be careful not to associate ourselves with storie s that explicitly or implicitly relegate Russians to permanent second-class citizenship in the world community. This is sometimes hard to avoid because of our own psychological stak e in stories that confirm our right to world leadership . The dominant tendency in both the United States and Russia today is to dismiss the Bolshevik solution as obvious stupidity . This view of the Soviet past is presented in book s with titles like Utopia in Power and The Past of an Illusion . The danger is that we will overlook the very real problems that made it plausible in its time — problems that have far from vanished . Bolshevism was a failure, but if we can bring ourselves to look at it s strengths as well as its weaknesses, we might learn something that will help us foster stories with equally powerful sources of plausibility but less disastrous consequences . i THE PATH AND THE TASK A Cognitive Approach to Soviet Histor y Lars T. Lih Irony of the Present Moment The post-Soviet era has now lasted long enough to start having its own history . To an observer familiar with Soviet history, some ironies present themselves : people who earlier enjoyed themselves mocking the excuses and evasions of Communists, sympathizers, or "soft - liners" are now forced to adopt some of the same excuses and evasions in their defense o f Boris Yeltsin and the post-Soviet order . Ends and Means For example, we were often told that one indication of the Communists' moral depravity was their acceptance of the motto "the end justifies the means ." But now we are told that unpleasant means—the impoverishment of old-age pensioners, the bombing of the Russia n parliament, the collapse of law and order—are all necessary for the noble end of "reform ." It was instructive to observe the frantic attempt by some American commentators to distinguis h Yeltsin's attack on Parliament ("it was standing in the way of reform") from Lenin's attack on the Constituent Assembly in 1918, an act which has always been prominent on the list of Bolshevik "original sins ." Excuses are made for Yeltsin by pointing to pressure from hard- line nationalists, in a manner reminiscent of "Joe Stalin, prisoner of the Politburo . " Far-off Advantage s Another source of easy sarcasm was continual attempts by Soviet spokesmen to explai n away "temporary difficulties" and confident promises that the "worker's paradise" was jus t around the corner. But today such things as inflation and organized crime are similarl y explained away as inevitable growing pains. Just the other day I heard an economist say something like the following : "The privatization of business in Russia has been an outstandin g success . Of course, it will take a decade or even decades before this success is translated int o proper entrepreneurial behavior . " Holdovers from the Past " And when things go wrong—when people don't behave the way the reformers assured u s they would—the explanations sound very familiar to me . Again we are told that all problem s result from the psychology of the old regime ("Homo sovieticus"), the "sabotage" o f 1 unreconstructed apparatchiki, and the "cultural backwardness" of the Russian people . Al l these excuses come under the heading of the "holdovers from the past," an excuse often use d by the Bolsheviks . Nationalism, Lack of State Power Other standard accusations against the Communists, while no doubt just, also sound a little different when we see possible alternatives . The Communists repressed nationalism i n the name of centralism : very true, but the present flowering of nationalism is, how shall I say , also far from ideal . (The present waffling over Yeltsin's destruction of Chechnya shows ou r new-found ambivalence .) Again, a standard item in the litany of Communist faults wa s "statism"—yet "statism" doesn't look quite as bad now, when we are forced to contemplate th e possibility of a complete breakdown in governance . Chance for a New Look: Solutions and Problems How do we react to all the ironies that have begun to pile up? One way is to blame it o n the Russian national character: what else can you expect from such envious, aggressive types ? Another way preserves the purity of democratic reform by condemning the reformers : they ar e "neo-Bolsheviks" who have betrayed the democratic revolution . (Sound familiar? This is th e device used by Trotsky and others to save the purity of Bolshevism .) There is another way out, which I am convinced is the only way that leads to heightene d understanding, although it requires some humility and self-criticism. We must accept the fac t that our previous easy sarcasms, grand moral maxims, and confident solutions were designe d more for self-reassurance than for understanding . We never really believed that the end does not justify the means, we were always too glib in our dismissal of Communist excuses, and we never bothered to understand the problems to which the Communists were responding . We must understand that Soviet socialism was a powerfully plausible solution to Russia's problems . Paradoxically, the way to achieve a sympathetic understanding of the post - Communists is first to achieve a sympathetic understanding of the Communists . Cognitive Approach I believe the cognitive approach can help us achieve an understanding that is both critica l and sympathetic. The cognitive approach posits the existence of strong interpretiv e frameworks that are the brain's only tool for organizing the raw data of experience . The existence of such frameworks can be observed in everything from visual perception to the mos t exalted scientific theories . In everyday social life, as cognitive psychologists have shown , 2 narratives and scenarios are a particularly important framework for organizing perception an d memory . I propose to treat Bolshevism as such a framework, made up of two parts : a narrative of identity, plus a picture of the world within which that narrative made sense . The narrative I call "leadership on the path to socialism," and the picture of the world I call "the advantage s of socialism." Together these two make up the Bolshevik solution to the problems confrontin g Russia in the twentieth century . The Bolshevik solution, then, was a powerful framework that was hard to step outside , once adopted. There existed very solid grounds for believing in it as the best possible response to Russia's problems . Like any framework, it had strengths and weaknesses, and much of the impetus for change in Soviet history comes from various responses to perceive d weaknesses within the framework; revolutionary change came only when essential problem s were seen as insoluble within the old framework . Given these assumptions, four research questions arise . What were the specifics of the Bolshevik solution? what accounts for its original plausibility? what anomalies and weaknesse s did it have to confront in practice? what strategies were adopted in order to retain faith in th e original framework? I could go on at length about the trendy social science side of this approach, but mor e important for me is the moral/political aspect .