Lewis H. Siegelbaum, PhD, Professor of History at Michigan State University. Author of the book “Cars for Comrades: The life of the Soviet automobile.”

Question: Let us talk about your last book “Cars for Comrades.” Why did you choose this topic for your research? What was the most interesting?

Siegelbaum: I was searching for a way of approaching Soviet history that would be different; not so much as it has been traditionally the case, from above, or as social historians including myself had written about Soviet history previously, from below, but, one could say, from the side. It seemed to me that cars were really quite fundamental to the tussle over what a modern Soviet society really should be, whether it would be qualitatively different from so-called “Western bourgeois societies” or whether it would try to compete with Western capitalism at its own game and do better.

Question: What do you think about Soviet cars? As I know, as a part of Soviet cars’ plans, Gorky and Tolyatti were built by Americans and Italians using Western technology in a Soviet state. How did it work?

Siegelbaum: If you are asking about the quality of Soviet cars, in some ways they were quite decent, they were in some ways appropriate to the environment, which is to say to the terrible road conditions that existed in the Soviet period, to severe climate conditions, and to the lack of effective consumer demand. They were produced for a distribution system that was state governed and that was short on comfort and long on the simplicity of repairs. People who obtained cars were for the most part expected to look after them themselves.

Question: They looked like Ford’s Model T, there was a principle of the Soviet Union to create a 4th car empire.

Siegelbaum: This is true of the first cars produced in Gorky, which after all were based not on Model T, but on the Model A Ford.

Question: Let us turn to your book about the social dimensions Stalinist industrialization. What surprised you the most when you started researching this very specific issue?

Siegelbaum: The most surprising thing about Soviet industrialization is how successful it was given the tremendous costs that were involved in reaching a level of industrial production. Despite making huge mistakes, and not really having any idea what they were doing in many ways (except that it wasn’t in any way capitalist), Soviet leaders nonetheless were able to reach a level of industrial development that saw them through, the “acid test” which was the invasion and occupation of a great deal of Soviet territory by the Nazis during World War II.

Question: Soviet power relied on very brutal and non-market methods to create an industrial base, and the same is true of cars. Some historians think that it is a part of Russian, not just Soviet, tradition, a way of life - the way authorities are dealing with current problems. What do you think about that? Was it an invention of Soviet power or is it a Russian tradition of several hundred years?

Siegelbaum: It is a hard question to answer in a short period of time. It is difficult to take the Russian historical component out of “Sovietness.” This is to say, what becomes Soviet is in itself a product of pre-Soviet Russian practices. But nonetheless there is something to the notion that a large country with underdeveloped resources, confronting foreign intervention and other dangers, organized its central control and central power. That is in a way irrespective of the ideological component; that the technique you could argue was appropriate to Russia, whether or not it was led by a communist party.

Question: Currently, one of Russia’s state TV channels started a project to elect the most popular Russian person in the history. Among the most popular are Joseph Stalin and Nicolas II, the last emperor. In your point of view, is it just a fashion? Does Stalinism exist in modern Russian life?

Siegelbaum: There are many Stalins; you can invent a Stalin to suit almost any purpose. This is largely a function of transforming the actuality of Stalin into wishful thinking about a strong leader who had the interest of Russia and Soviet Union at large and pursue those interests with directness and crudeness that was appropriate to the times. There is this one way of understanding Stalin, it is expressive of longing for a time, a nostalgia for  when it seemed people had a sense of purpose beyond their individual lives and were lead by someone they could have faith in.

Question: Probably the most difficult task for the Bolsheviks and communist power was creating new socialist society, new socialist people, “Soviet men.” How successful was this project in reality?

Siegelbaum: Historians continue to be in disagreement on this. There are those who say that it was all very cynical and that most people complied out of a sense of fear, concern for their lives, being lost otherwise. On the other hand, there are those who argue that there was an identification with this large project of building a new society. It comes through in diaries that people kept, in private correspondence and in other ways. There is something to this. It is easy and convenient to assume that people would never have this sort of degree of identification or belief in the project, but I think that’s probably historically inaccurate.

Question: A huge part of Russian society, a lot of influential historians and political scientists in recent years declared that without Stalin’s industrialization, without the process of creating new industrial base, army, new socialist society, Soviet Union would not survive the Second World War. It would be crashed by nazist Germany. How can we compare the power of Soviet Union at that time with a Western power or tsarist Russia?.. What do you think about the role of Stalin in this period of history?

Siegelbaum: It can’t be entirely positive and it can’t be entirely negative. There are qualities that were at least attributed to Stalin that gave to people this faith in the Soviet war effort. For example, Stalin staying in Moscow when the Nazi Wermacht was approaching Moscow. On the other hand, one can’t ignore the tremendous blunders that Stalin made as generalissimo being in charge of broad military strategy. So one could find a mixture of both as the best way to understand this.

Question: Let us return to present time, 20 years after the crash of the Soviet socialist state. The problem is that a part of this old state is still surviving in modern Russia, in modern republic that was created in the post-Soviet space. Do you see something “Soviet” and “socialist” in modern Russia?

Siegelbaum: Certainly I do. I just returned from Moscow a couple of weeks ago. Of course Moscow is special, it is not Russia. But even though, while watching television, reading newspapers or talking to people, one can observe the survival of certain kinds of mentality that I clearly remember from Soviet times. For example, the sense of expecting from authorities either solutions to problems, or expecting the worst - the opposite of solutions, but not thinking at all about taking initiatives either oneself or in collaboration with other people, starting movements, starting pressure groups. This is not the case in Russia, just as one saw it only very slightly at most in Soviet times. One could think of other examples and I would say the current mania for cars in some sense owes its existence to a kind of suppressed or severely restricted desire for cars that existed in Soviet times. This is not so much a continuation of Soviet mentality as something that we can trace back to Soviet times at least.

Question: What do you think about modern Russian leaders: is there a new type of politician or it is a pretty old model for rulers of Russia?

Siegelbaum: Since 1991 we have gone back and forth, haven’t we? Boris Yeltsin certainly represented something in a way of continuation but also as a quite conscious departure and “giving the state away” as the way some people have described it. Vladimir Putin is moving back towards a firm state control of the economy and other aspects of Russian society. And yet we are also seeing with each passing year the increasing distance from Soviet practices and mentalities. I think Dmitry Medvedev is the first genuinely post-Soviet leader that Russia has had. He is too young to really have been “marked” by Soviet practices.

Question: Are there any fundamentals in America’s foreign policy towards Russia, towards former post-soviet states? We are not specifically talking now about McCain and Obama. Are these fundamentals changing over time or do they still exist as they were created two decades ago?   

Siegelbaum: Certainly, for the most part it is a continuation. American foreign policy towards Russia is still characterized by a great deal of mistrust and simply unwillingness to extend to Russia a degree of control over that part of the world. And secondly, a genuine economic competitive dimension according to which Russia in its booming resource-based economy represents something of a challenge to the continuation of American hegemony and domination economically and otherwise. And this is irrespective of any sorts of ideological characteristics on the part of Russia. So unfortunately I think there is a huge distance to go before Russia and the United States can be regarded as genuine allies and friends.

Question: And the last question that we usually ask every expert in every sphere of interest is: If currently existing trends remain the same during 20 years, what would be the future of Russia and the US, how they will change in 15-20 years?

Siegelbaum: When I am pessimistic, I think that in 20 years from now, the current orientation of Russia to extract natural resources, exploit them and develop businesses associated with them, will continue to cause environmental damage and, in that sense, contribute to the world’s problems. But in my more optimistic frame of mind I see a Russia that is increasingly comfortable with its strong position in the world recognized as such, more confident and tolerant towards diversity of peoples and views, not necessarily copying forms of democracy that are preached, if not practiced, in the USA, but certainly less top-heavy when it comes to decision making and people being able to express their desires and needs.