Book Review
Massovye Besporyadki v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve
Vladimir A. Kozlov, Massovye Besporyadki v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve (Mass Disturbances in the USSR Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev). Novosibirsk: Sibirskii Khronograf, 1999. 413 pp.
During the Cold War most Western scholars assumed that public protest in the Soviet Union was confined to dissidents imprisoned in labor camps for publishing criticism of the Soviet government or for seeking to practice their religious beliefs. The only mass disturbance widely publicized in the West was the June 1962 workers' strike in Novocherkassk. Vladimir Kozlov's important new book on mass protest in the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s sets the record straight. Using newly declassified archival documents, Kozlov demonstrates that mass anti-Soviet unrest was far more common and more violent than previously believed. [End Page 138]
Kozlov argues that most large-scale disturbances in the Soviet Union were not caused by political opposition to Communist rule. Instead the sharp increase in the number of incidents of mass violence in the mid-1950s, he claims, stemmed from the surge of disillusionment and uncertainty that followed the first wave of revelations about excesses and cruelty under Josif Stalin. Kozlov maintains that as belief in Communist ideology began to wane under Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union experienced a period of instability and social upheaval. The accompanying disillusionment led to an increase in the number of alcoholics, who were wont to take part in violent clashes among themselves and with police. At the same time, the introduction of excessive penalties for relatively minor crimes led to the criminalization of many elements within Soviet society. According to Kozlov, these criminals were socialized to act violently with little provocation and were crucial in transforming instances of mass discontent into violent disorders.
The mass disturbances described by Kozlov are of four types. In the period immediately after Stalin's death, mass unrest could be characterized primarily as disorganized violence, led by criminals, drunks, and other marginal elements. These riots occurred primarily in Kazakhstan and Siberia and were caused by the extremely rapid industrial and agricultural development of those regions, which brought about large-scale migration and urbanization. Poor living conditions combined with a large number of underemployed young men caused deep resentment against local authorities and occasionally gave rise to the destruction of property, looting, and attacks on neighboring groups. These riots proved difficult to control because the police presence had not kept up with the rapidly growing population. Disorganized riots sometimes grew into violent attacks on police or local government institutions, particularly when resentment focused on perceived abuses of power by the authorities. Both of these types of protests were characterized by a lack of organization and the absence of political demands of any kind.
Rapid migration also played a role in the third kind of mass disturbance: the ethnic riot. Ethnic disturbances resulted from a combination of economic uncertainty and unstable ethnic relations caused by mass deportations during the Stalin period. These riots generally were localized events, taking place primarily in the Caucasus, where returning ethnic minorities were met with resentment by the settlers who had taken over their lands and houses, and in Kazakhstan, where the bulk of the deportees had been forcibly settled in the 1940s. Kazakhstan also had been subject to a new population influx as part of Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign in the late 1950s.
Political demonstrations were the most serious form of mass disturbance from the standpoint of the Soviet authorities. Kozlov argues that political demonstrations under Khrushchev were sparked mainly by the leadership's own mistakes. The main cause of the Novocherkassk strike, according to Kozlov, was the poorly timed announcement of a national price increase, which came immediately after the pay of industrial workers had been cut. Similarly, the pro-Stalin demonstrations in Tbilisi and other Georgian towns in March 1956 resulted from the spread of rumors about Khrushchev's "secret speech" denouncing Stalin's personality cult. These events tended to be much better organized than the other forms of mass unrest and were usually led [End Page 139] by students or workers. In some cases, prosecutors suspected the presence of an underground organization, although such links were never uncovered in the documents discussed by Kozlov.
The wave of mass unrest began to die down at the end of the Khrushchev era, and by the early 1970s it had almost entirely disappeared. Kozlov attributes this trend to a combination of improvements in pay and working conditions and an increase in penalties for hooliganism. At the same time, he points out, the uncertainty that characterized the Khrushchev era was replaced by a new accommodation between society and the regime of Leonid Brezhnev. The ideology of building a better society for the future regardless of the cost was replaced by a focus on political and economic stability.
Although the title of the book might lead readers to expect coverage of mass unrest in the Soviet Union from 1953 through the early 1980s, Kozlov in fact concentrates almost exclusively on the Khrushchev period. He devotes sixteen pages to the four mass disturbances that occurred during the last two years of Khrushchev's tenure and only seven pages to a very brief summary of unrest under Brezhnev. It is unclear whether the scant coverage of events after 1962 is the result of a lack of space or the continued classification of key documents. The archival sources used by Kozlov also provide grounds for concern. He depends on materials from the USSR Prosecutor's Office and on correspondence between the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Central Committee of the Communist Party. As the author himself acknowledges when discussing the Novocherkassk protest, these documents are likely to be biased, presenting an account amenable to the Soviet leadership. Local officials may have sought to discredit the protesters in the eyes of their superiors by painting them as disorderly, drunken criminals and by minimizing or ignoring their legitimate grievances. Because no other sources are available for most of these protests, there is no alternative to using such biased accounts. Even so, Kozlov should have been more careful to prevent the bias of the sources from unduly swaying his interpretation of the evidence.
These limitations make clear that Kozlov's book is only the beginning of what one hopes will become a concerted effort to study mass unrest in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Subsequent work should expand the reach of this effort both chronologically, by focusing on the Brezhnev era and the mid- to late 1980s, and theoretically, by using the scholarly literature on protest movements to illuminate the historical narrative.
Dmitry P. Gorenburg, CNA Corporation, Alexandria, Virginia