False Economy - Alan Beattie [137]
In England, for example, the monarch was transformed over the centuries from an autocrat to a figurehead by means of gradually increasing constraints on royal power. Notable landmarks included the revolt of the barons that led to the signing of Magna Carta in 1215 and the Bill of Rights that followed the overthrow of James II in 1688. Nothing comparable happened in Russia. Nor did Russia embrace the formal separation of powers between executive, legislature, and judiciary enshrined in the French and U.S. constitutions. Instead, after tsarism collapsed in the Russian revolutions of 1917, autocratic executive power was transferred almost intact from tsars to Communists.
Under Tsar Nicholas II in the early twentieth century, just as under Peter the Great, there had been some experiments with economic modernization. The rudiments of a market economy developed under some of the more reform-minded of the tsar's prime ministers. But politically, Russia remained largely an autocracy. The Duma, a parliament of sorts that had existed for centuries, was opened up to elections under Nicholas II, but he rapidly regretted allowing any challenge to his authority and repeatedly ignored and then disbanded it.
Russia's only real experiment with a freely chosen parliament was the Constituent Assembly. Elected in 1917 after the first (February) revolution had deposed Nicholas II, it had its first and only meeting in January 1918. By then, the "Bolshevik" Communists had already seized power in what was known as the October Revolution but was in effect an armed coup. Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, sent the assembly members home. And that, as far as parliamentary restraints on absolute centralized power went, was pretty much that.
After a brief "democratic parenthesis" during 1917, autocratic centralism was restored. Private property once again became subsumed to the authority of the state, though the rationale was now provided by the ideology of Soviet communism rather than the supreme personal power invested in the tsar. Any substantial institution standing between the Party leadership and the people was fiercely suppressed, with the exception of some entirely co-opted organizations like the official trade unions. The tsar's Okhrana, the secret police, was reborn in an even more powerful and sinister form—first as the Cheka, then, after a variety of name changes and reformulations, ending up as the KGB.
For a while, the Communists were forced by events to permit a limited market economy to function. After "war communism"—the centrally directed economic mobilization necessary to win the civil war that followed their seizure of power—the Communists eased up, allowing small private enterprises to exist and peasants to sell surplus produce. But the normal pace of progress for building up agricultural surpluses to fund investment was not fast enough. The Soviet Union wanted to become a military-industrial power as rapidly as possible. The market economy also created a political danger. The growth of the kulak class of richer farmers was a threat to Communist dominance. The result was forced state collectivization of farms and mass murder of those who opposed it, and thus the tentative growth of a class that might have asserted its rights against the state was savagely cut short.
Politically, the executive remained in charge, and the division of power between the legislature (the Supreme Soviet) and the government (the Council of Ministers) was merely decorative. The judiciary, which had begun to gain a measure of independence under Tsar Alexander II in the late nineteenth century, made sure to run its verdicts past local Communist Party bosses when any serious matter was involved. In one particularly blatant breach of natural justice in 1961, a sudden rash of illegal dealing in gems and foreign currencies enraged then Communist Party first secretary Nikita Khrushchev, who demanded examples be made. He ordered the death penalty to be introduced retroactively. Speculators were retried and executed.
Russia and the other republics that