Reflecting on the Soviet experiment

Exactly 100 years ago, representatives from the socialist republics of Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia (now Belarus) and Transcaucasia (Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia) signed a treaty that set up the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

- MAHIR ALI

The entity, expanded from the 1920s to the 1940s, lasted almost exactly 69 years.

The centenary — the treaty was formally ratified two days later by the Congress of Soviets of the USSR — is unlikely to be widely commemorated, notwithstanding the Soviet Union’s immense role in the shape and trajectory of the 20th century.

The Bolshevik Revolution was five years old by 1922, and had warded off the immediate military threat, including foreign intervention from the usual Western suspects, thanks in large part to Leon Trotsky’s ability to reorganise a ragtag fighting force into the brutally efficient Red Army.

The reprieve from conflict had made it possible to exchange ‘war communism’ for a ‘new economic policy’ that permitted small-scale private enterprise and to some extent conciliated the peasants distraught over the practice whereby a large proportion of their harvest was requisitioned for the cities, with poor recompense.

By 1922, though, the architect of the October Revolution was himself dismayed by its direction and coming up with ideas to redress its decline. But Vladimir Ilyich Lenin suffered two strokes that year, and his own descent eventually proved irremediable. He recovered partially from the first one and returned to work, but a second stroke led to exile from the helm of affairs in Moscow for medical reasons.