This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Rediscovery of Politics, given by Geoffrey Hosking, was originally broadcast in 1988.

Visiting the Soviet Union today, one is tempted to believe that Russia's past has disappeared entirely.

Standing in a modern Soviet street, I sometimes feel as if I were in a society

afflicted by communal amnesia, disoriented, like an alcoholic who wakes to discover he can't

remember what happened the day before. The town may be old, but it now bears a brand-new name,

that of some Soviet hero, and the gigantic architectural monoliths in which most

Soviet citizens live have obliterated all traces of previous settlement. It does not seem possible

in the Soviet tabula rasa that any form of social institution or even memory can have survived

revolutions, wars, purges, and forced industrialization to offer a foothold

for a more pluralist mode of politics today. Yet if the Soviet Union is to evolve from

totalitarianism towards democracy, then it needs a reliable memory. In politics, the past is never irrelevant, for it contains the habits and

tendencies which will continue to affect the future. It also harbours the missed opportunities,

the embryonic forms which failed to develop to maturity. A people which values its autonomy

will periodically pause to reconsider them in order to gain a more secure grip on the forces which determine its future.

At the start of my career, I studied one of Russia's undeveloped embryos, the state Duma, which was the short-lived pre-revolutionary parliament.

The Duma had serious powers, it contained

a variety of political parties, and it debated the issues of the day in an unconstrained

and well-informed manner. At its birth, the British House of Commons sent it a telegram,

welcoming it to the international family of parliaments. Perhaps there I thought I might find a thread from the past,

the first rudiments of a democratic tradition.

But I soon discovered that today's Soviet intellectuals,

...