Peter Reddaway: Dictatorships Appear Stronger Than They Are

Last week Peter Reddaway, a remarkable political scientist, researcher of the USSR and Russia, and civil activist who did much to defend human rights in the USSR, passed away. Peter was not only a scholar, he was also a generous, insightful teacher, and always stood out among the scholars of the USSR by his understanding that the USSR was not just Russia. 

Born in Cambridge on the eve of World War II, Reddaway was educated at Cambridge University and then at Harvard, Moscow State University, and the London School of Economics. After moving to the United States in the 1980s, he headed the Kennan Institute from 1986 to 1989 and then became a professor at George Washington University. 

In 1964, Reddaway, who had studied the Soviet literary process and had lived in the USSR for just under a year, was expelled from the country. He was banned from entering the USSR for twenty-four years. There were many possible reasons for his expulsion: Peter had brought banned literature into the USSR, discussed Soviet realities with friends, and taken an interest in the first dissident trials. However, the immediate reason for the expulsion was his communication with the wife of a “defector,” a Soviet citizen who had remained in the UK, Reddaway writes in The Dissidents: A Memoir (2020). 

Reddaway’s first books dealt with human rights abuses in the USSR. Uncensored Russia: The Human Rights Movement in the USSR (1972) consisted of translations of the first eleven issues of Chronicle of Current Events, which documented human rights abuses by the Soviet authorities. After its publication, Reddaway edited translations of a further fifty issues of the Chronicle for Amnesty International. Cowritten with Sydney Bloch, Psychiatric Terror: How Soviet Psychiatry Is Used to Suppress Dissent (1977) and Soviet Psychiatric Abuse (1984) explored the Soviet practice of punitive psychiatry, the forced treatment of dissidents under false psychiatric diagnoses. 

In recent years, Reddaway had returned to the subject of the struggle of dissidents against Soviet power. The Dissidents is a competent account of the lives of intellectuals of the late Soviet Union. One of the striking themes of the book is how tightly the KGB infiltrated the lives of Soviet people. A second major theme is the belief that the truth will come out eventually, because you cannot impose blatant lies on society indefinitely. 

Activist Scholar

These days the FSB is reviving the practice of punitive psychiatry. There is growing evidence that those convicted in politically motivated criminal trials are being sent to psychiatric hospitals, where patients are constantly humiliated, tied to beds, and forced to take drugs that suppress the will and thinking. To avoid being sent there, it is enough to admit nonexistent guilt. 

Reddaway was a keen observer of events in post-Soviet Russia. In 2001, he published The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy (with Dmitry Glinsky), and in 2003–2004, The Dynamics of Russian Politics: Putin’s Reform of Federal-Regional Relations (with Robert Orttung). 

In 2018, Reddaway published a small book, Russia’s Domestic Security Wars: Putin’s Use of Divide and Rule against His Hardline Allies, which showed how Putin used feuds between intelligence agencies to consolidate his power in the 2000s. Reddaway predicted that this system would be replaced by greater consolidation of power with the strengthening of the military. Like Balint Magyar, Reddaway sees Putin’s system as a mafia regime based on personal loyalty, unbridled greed, and intimidation of political opponents.

Reddaway had no illusions about Russia moving toward democracy in the 1990s. Developments in the twenty-first century proved him right. The price of economic reforms was the monopolization of power by the authorities. 

From the Soviet experience, Reddaway knew, first, that the USSR was not collectivist but atomized, contrary to declarations, and second, was a deeply depoliticized society, despite the communists’ insistence on the opposite. The depoliticization was caused by the bankruptcy of Soviet ideology, which preceded the collapse of the USSR by a few decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, most Soviet people were only pretending to adhere to socialist ideology. In reality they were only interested in increasing their personal status and wealth.

The market reforms implemented in the early 1990s with Bolshevist determination, uncompromising self-confidence, and a messianic sense of entitlement led to Boris Yeltsin’s rapid loss of popular support, Reddaway shows. By pushing Russia into a deliberately unpopular “shock therapy” strategy, the United States and the IMF unwittingly prevented it from democratizing and adopting a Western identity. As a result, market Bolshevism killed the seeds of democracy by destroying the democratic movement and delegitimizing the system of power.

These policies ran counter to the Russian political and economic culture of the time and failed to take account of Russian values, vulnerabilities, and deficiencies. The antagonism between the reformers and the anti-reformers created by the economic shock therapy paralyzed society for more than a decade, plunging it into political apathy. Yeltsin abandoned democratization in favor of authoritarian modernization, and the pain of reform and the flourishing of corruption gave Russians the idea that democracy was evil.

In the 1990s, says Reddaway, Russia moved from embryonic democracy to chronic instability and disintegration. However, this situation could not continue indefinitely. As early as 1993, he predicted that this trend would be replaced by its opposite, an attempt to reunite the country, possibly on the basis of militant nationalism.

Accurate Prediction of Russia’s Course

Reddaway defined the era in a speech at the 1999 US Senate hearings on Russian corruption, which Joe Biden attended as a senator. Most Russians are alienated from the Russian state, to a considerable extent from capitalism, and even to some extent from democracy because of the ways those institutions appeared for the Russians, Reddaway said. Anti-American sentiment and resentment at the loss of superpower status were on the rise, Reddaway warned. “As in 1917, Russia could make another 180-degree turn, and instead of continuing to engage with the world community, it could shoot off in another direction and become a rogue state again,” he said. This is exactly what happened. 

The comparison of the post-Soviet tragedy with 1917 is more justified than might seem at first glance. In both cases, Russia experienced the collapse of an authoritarian imperial regime. This was followed by “intoxicating periods of freedom,” which may have paved the way for democracy and civil society. However, both after the collapse of the Russian Empire and after the collapse of the USSR, this was prevented by the logic of a tragically fractured political culture. People simply started to struggle with each other for survival. A hundred years ago, the Bolsheviks seized and consolidated power in about five years. The FSB took a decade to achieve the same.

However, the alternatives Reddaway offered were not always convincing. For example, he argued that economic transformation could have been achieved less chaotically with a stronger state leadership, and that political transformation could have been achieved more democratically. One of the reviewers of The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms noted that the possibilities for managed economic reform ended in 1985–1987, while democratic forces (albeit weak) did not crystallize until 1989–1991. It was therefore impossible to introduce reforms that would have moved Russia toward democracy and capitalism simultaneously.

Reddaway knew that authoritarian regimes appear stronger than they are. As early as 1967, he stated: "The Soviet regime is very rigid and cannot change and remain stable at the same time. It is therefore weaker than it looks and will eventually collapse. The Putin regime has inherited this rigidity.” Recalling his recent years at the helm of the Kennan Institute, Reddaway even suggested that Putin's dictatorship might not last beyond the 2020s, to be replaced by more liberal regime. However, he warned: "As in the Soviet years, the West should be patient while waiting for a new Russian Gorbachev. It will take even more time and effort for Russia to become a democracy. Nevertheless, long and hard does not mean impossible.”

The opinions expressed in this article are those solely of the author and do not reflect the views of the Kennan Institute