Russia: Nationalism and Economy

Moshe Lewin is one of the leading scholars of Soviet history in the United States, currently professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include The Gorbachev Phenomenon, Lenin’s Last Struggle, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, and The Making of the Soviet System. Dissent co- editor Mitchell Cohen interviewed him recently.

Cohen: Was there an inherent contradiction in perestroika? Restructuring, but especially decentralizing, almost naturally had to bring forth the problem of nationalism and threaten a breakup of the Soviet Union.

Lewin: You are right, but decentralizing is not the correct word because a country like the USSR could not really be decentralized without coming apart. After all there cannot be a structure as large as the USSR was without a strong central government. One must distinguish between effective central government and over-centralization. The problem was to shift away from Soviet over-centralization. Over-centralization was a key both to Soviet achievement and to the death of the USSR. The overwhelming concentration of power in Moscow—the monopoly of the economy, politics, culture, and so on—was the illness. Simply weakening the central government could not have worked; it was necessary to find a different form of central government.

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