“The Silence in Russian Culture”

In a 1957 essay, the British philosopher and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin, who had spent his childhood in Russia, considered the nature of Soviet rule. He described Soviet leaders as ensnared by a destructive inertia: their country was struggling, but any attempt to change course could imperil the Communist Party’s grip on power.

Soviet life is constructed to strive for goals. It makes little difference what the particular goals may be—military or civil, the defeat of the enemy within or without, or the attainment of industrial objectives— announced goals there must be, if Soviet society is to continue to be . . . .

The leaders of the Soviet Union, for all we know, may by now be secretly hankering after the peaceful existence, to abandon the exiguous splendors and unending cruelties and miseries of the régime and subside into “normal” existence. If they harbor any such desires, they know that in the short run, at least, this is not practicable. For Soviet society is organized not for happiness, comfort, liberty, justice, personal relationships, but for combat. Whether they wish it or not the drivers and controllers of this immense train cannot now halt it or leap from it in mid-course without risk of destruction. If they are to survive and above all remain in power, they must go on. Whether they can replace parts of it while it is moving, and so transform it (themselves) into something less savage, less dangerous to themselves and mankind, remains to be seen. At any rate that must be the hope of those who do not think war inevitable.

In the meanwhile this caricature of dirigisme has discredited the tradition of social idealism and liquidated the intelligentsia connected with it, perhaps more decisively than unaided persecution could have done. Nothing destroys a minority movement more effectively than the official adoption and inevitable betrayal and perversion of its ends by the state itself. There are cases where nothing succeeds less well than success.