How Soviet Communism Died

There was no serious interest in communism in the USSR after 1943-4. In those years, all of the sincerity people had put into the communist cause evaporated. Cynicism set in. It never went away after that.

So how did the Soviet people become disillusioned with communism?

The war was brutal. Horrific losses. Stalin’s army had prepared for an offensive, and defensive warfare was something it couldn’t do on any level. The civilian population sustained terrible damage. Hunger, terror, bombings.

And at that exact time, a very visible and in-your-face class divide appeared. People would evacuate their young, send them to school in the safe depths of Siberia. And in the same school or the hallways of the same university, some kids would faint with hunger  while others would throw uneaten salami sandwiches into the trash because they were too sated. If you want a literary depiction of this sudden class divide, I recommend Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle or his Cancer Ward.

In the 1920s, a party apparatchik would show off his worn coat and his shoes with holes in them. After 1943, he’d show off his expensive suits and his wife’s furs.

I keep saying 1943 because that when it became clear the war was won.

The war made it OK openly to want to be rich. It made it OK to despise people who didn’t have chic new things. It made the pursuit of material goods an obsessive and all-consuming game for the Soviet people.

By the time my generation came around, nothing but the most hardcore cynicism was possible for people who were neither very elderly nor mentally impaired. I can’t imagine anybody seriously bringing up Communist ideas after 1950 in my grandparents’ or my parents’ generation.

I still don’t use the words “sincere” and “earnest” as compliments. This is how many generations it took for people to recover from the early Soviet fervor.