The Bolsheviks, Soviet Union & its End

The Soviet Union may have passed, but the Soviet system remains. It is not a political system; rather, it is and was an intrinsically Russian system of autocratic rule (Lowenhardt 52-53). Styled Soviet by the Bolsheviks in 1917, it was the natural 20th century evolution of Czarist Russia. Its current incarnation as a democratic political system is still safely within the autocratic mold of Russian tradition. What changed with the October Revolution on through the perestroika era of last-stand Sovietism continuing still today was only the succession of subsystems, each bearing the stamp of a different autocratic leader: Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin (Brzezinski 69). The Czarist system was hereditary; these latter-day autocrats each had a specific reason behind their ascent to power. When that reason ceased to matter as the dominant issue, that autocrat's subsystem deteriorated or was pushed asi

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retaining the commune/feudal orientation, but improving delivery systems, throwing out communist growing theories, promoting corn as a useful crop and, in general, removing the Stalinist terror that had inhibited the nation's farmers and society in general. It was a limited success: The Soviet Union's delivery system remained unreliable; Western grain needed to be imported in bad years. But the general perception was one of progress domestically (Hough & Fainsod 224-229). On the international level, Khrushchev's autocracy was considered a limitation by the other Soviet autocrats. Precisely because his subsystem had lessened the internal economic pressures and power-play terror of Stalinism, when Khrushchev successively lost face at the United Nations in the famous shoe-pounding incident and with the Cuban Missile Crisis, his subsystem collapsed as former supporters deserted the central autocrat. The troika of autocrats that Leonid Brezhnev led to depose Khrushchev had a new purpose: maintenance of the Soviet status quo internally and internationally. If Khrushchev's subsystem had a transitional character, Brezhnev's subsystem of Sovietism took on a caretaker quality (Hough & Fainsod 237-274). As stability among the inner
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