GreyAtlas’s Reviews > The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union > Status Update

Some argue to this day that Stalin was not Lenin's legitimate
heir, but the creator of a pathological and grotesque caricature of Leninism.
While Stalinism was certainly not foreordained, it is difficult to
imagine any regime after Lenin's death that would not have been a harsh
dictatorship

Although American media did not pay much attention to the DDR,
interest among scholars was substantial. There were regular country-wide
seminars in New Hampshire, meetings in Madison, and conferences in
San Francisco and elsewhere. Scores of experts met, exchanged views, and
spoke about their findings, which, with a very few exceptions, were not
different from those of the West German Germanologists

How long will the
appeals to nationalism remain effective if the political systems in these
countries are unable to justify at least some of the hopes originally placed
in them? Europe has learned the bitter lessons of two world wars caused by
aggressive nationalism; hence the movement towards unity

By
1990, it was obvious that the Soviet Union was not an effective melting pot,
in contrast to what Lenin, Stalin, and their successors had assumed.

The events in the USSR bear little resemblance to 19 and 20 century revolutions in Europe. They were
not uprisings by a political opposition but a revolt of the
periphery against the center. These events have to be seen in the context of
global ethnic conflicts and instability rather than revolution, and this leads
one back to the question of ethnicity and nationalism and their mainsprings
and manifestations

Gerhard Simon, a leading student of the non-Russian republics, noted
in 1986 that the representation of Ukrainians and White Russians in the
Kremlin consistently exceeded their percentage in the population,19 There
were no purges among the local officials, and generally speaking these
republics received preferential treatment

Most of the Moscow party bosses failed to understand
the mainsprings of the resistance to Russification.18 There was not much
tolerance in Moscow with regard to the wide use of native languages, local
environmental concerns, or the resentment caused by the cadres policy and
the appointment of Russians to key positions

The KGB was a far larger institution than the Gestapo;
in 1940 it accounted for some 13 percent of all capital construction in
the Soviet Union. It could have expanded further, if necessary. Given the
remote location of the camps and the enormous difficulties of escaping,
these guards could have guarded with equal ease 2 or 8 million prisoners

Zemskov argued that the figures he discovered must be correct
because if they were not, it would mean that the KGB employed two sets of
statistics all along-a true set and a set designed to mislead. Although this
assertion stretches credulity, there is a time-honored tradition of faking
statistics in the Soviet Union, and such practices are by no means unthinkable.