#lieven

The Soviet regime placed its main hope on ideology and progress. Pride in being equal members of the world's most progressive, fair, and prosperous community would overwhelm the consciousness of ethnic difference. For a time between 1945 and the early 1960s it seemed that, for many Russians and non-Russians alike, the dream might actually come true. By the 1970s, however, the familiar dilemmas of Russian history were reasserting themselves: backwardness; the need for modernization from above; the necessity to square individual initiative with political order and the regime's survival; the problem of retaining the loyalty of non-Russians to an empire that they had never consented to join and that offered them less freedom and less prosperity than existed in the West. The whole point of Soviet communism was that it was supposed to release Russia from this historical conundrum. In a sense faith was supposed to move mountains. More than anything else the history of the Soviet Union is the story of this faith, of its impact on the land and peoples, and of the results of its failure. The basic point is that faith does not usually move mountains and the attempt to use it for this purpose generally causes great suffering and disenchantment.