Evil Empire 101Germany had. It had more benign and more pathological phases, the
later decades reflecting a steady softening since Stalin’s death in 1953.
Most importantly, the Nazi analogy broke down because the Soviet
Union itself was attacked in 1941. It bore the brunt of Nazi brutality,
enduring the worst of the war, and contributing more than any other
country to Hitler’s defeat. Many Russians today cannot associate
their Soviet past with evil primarily because of the Great Patriotic
War, their great victory against evil. The contradiction of Stalin’s rule
was—and remains—formidable for those with a family connection
to it. The tyrant who killed with the same abandon Hitler did is also
the man who defended the homeland from Hitler. In light of this
contradiction, good and evil fall along multiple axes in Soviet history,
especially in the Soviet history Russians themselves have retained.
These antipodes can oppose one another—good versus evil—and they
can reside in one another.
For all the repressiveness, all the tyranny, and all the madness of the
Soviet political economy, the Soviet Union was still a place of everyday
life: a place of families and customs, and even a place that gave many of
its subjects the gift of time and the unhurried, uncommercial banality
of Soviet life. Over its seventy-four years, these little things gathered
in a vast storehouse of Soviet sentiment and memory, a storehouse that
did not disappear in 1991. In Russia and even in places that had chafed
against Russian domination, people found aspects and elements of the
Soviet past that they wished to hold on to.
Reagan’s blanket declaration of an evil empire hid these emotions
from view. For many U.S. observers, there was only one thing to say
about the Soviet past: good riddance. This was their right as observers but,
in saying good riddance to the Soviet Union, they adopted a schematic
attitude toward the post-Soviet region. That which had broken away
from the Soviet legacy was deemed good, that which remained of the