The Strange Death of Soviet Communism

A Postscript

Nikolas K. Gvosdev

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412806978
• eBook ISBN: 9781351473194
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The collapse of communism marked the close of an era of world history. What took place in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1991, in the eyes of its proponents, constituted a "great experiment" in the application of new modes of organization to social life, the largest such experiment in history. The Strange Death of Soviet Communism, which first appeared as a special issue of The National Interest, brings together leading scholars of Soviet history, who show why the experiment failed and how it has destroyed the laboratory of socialist utopias.Francis Fukuyama considers the role of long-term social and intellectual modernization while Vladimir Kontorovich examines the related factor of economic stagnation. Myron Rush then analyzes the accidental and precedent-breaking accession and leadership of Gorbachev. Charles Fairbanks looks at the more general factors of change and rigidity within communist political culture. Chapters by Peter Reddaway and Stephen Sestanovich conclude this section by assessing respectively the role of internal pressure from Soviet citizens and external pressure from the West. The next chapters deal with why the West was surprised by the communist collapse. This involves a critique of Western Sovietology both for its scholarly failures and its ideological prejudices. Here, Peter Rutland and William Odom deal with social science interpretations of the Soviet Union while Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes reflect on historians' readings of Soviet history. Martin Malia then offers a comparative assessment of both. In the third section Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer discuss communism in relation to the intellectuals in the West.Although the authors are united in their anti-communist stance, the volume is diverse in its perspectives and assessments of Soviet communism. Taken together, these contributions show that the debate on the legacy of communism and a subsequent rethinking of modern history is just beginnin

Part 1

Why Did It Happen?

1

The Modern Polybius

Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr.

The Victorian historian E. A. Freeman once wrote of his great precursor, the Greek historian Polybius,

A man must have lived through a millennium in any other portion of the world’s history, to have...[experienced] with his own eyes and his own ears [as much history as Polybius] acquired within the limits of an ordinary life.

Freeman meant by this that when Polybius was born, a few years before Carthage was decisively defeated by Rome, the world was dominated, as it had been for thousands of years, by contending states and cultures. Within the lifetime of Polybius, all this changed. We are today almost precisely in the position of Polybius. Since 1985 we have lived through a transformation of world politics that in analogous cases, like the decline of Rome or of the Ottoman Empire, took hundreds of years.

The collapse of communism marks the close of an era of world history. Because the onset of the Cold War, in 1947-50, roused again the instincts and the debates previously stirred by the rise of Hitler, it is actually since the year 1933 that our awareness has been shaped by this question: What kind of phenomenon do the fascist and communist states represent and how should we respond to them? There has been great debate about these questions, and even the movements that protested the hold of the Cold War on political life have themselves been shaped by it. For nearly sixty years this division between opposing social-political systems has conditioned the complex process by which political, social and intellectual attitudes develop.

Charles Fairbanks is research professor of International Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute. This essay originally appeared in The National Interest, No. 31 (Spring 1993).

In intellectual life, we must go back a considerable distance to find analogies to our new, post-communist situation. Since the seventeenth century, intellectuals in Western societies have lived in a peculiar relationship to the societies surrounding them, a relationship quite different from that of other cultures and periods. In the modern age intellectuals have tended to find their societies radically at fault in the light of principles that can be discovered by the mind but also can be adequately actualized on this earth by human effort. This relationship is what Lionel Trilling called the adversary culture. Such a relationship between the life of the mind and the existing social order has always presupposed the existence of an alternative worldview (an “ideology”), a vision of the superior social order, and a political movement that seeks it. All three were first provided by the eighteenth century enlightenment that made the American and French revolutions.

In our own times, fascism and then Marxism have been the homes of the adversary culture. For long periods, Western intellectuals were attracted by dictatorial regimes like Italy, the USSR, Germany, China, Cuba, or Nicaragua. Not today. But what the existence of the Soviet bloc regimes still brought to the Western debate was the sense that other modern political and social arrangements were possible, that we were not living in a Roman empire.

When communism finally perishes, there will be for the first time in about three hundred years no strong alternative worldview to that undergirding the existing institutions, no vision of alternative political arrangements to sustain an adversary culture, and no strong ideologically driven movement to secure those arrangements. Our life both political and intellectual will proceed within an entirely new horizon. In the modern West it is probably only the weakening of absolute monarchy and of Christianity as political and social forces that can be compared to the collapse of communism. But the collapse of communism is happening very suddenly.

Although we have scarcely yet stepped into the post-communist era, we have already suffered one surprise after another. In world politics, we have been surprised by the “new world disorder,” especially by the sudden rise of ethnic, tribal, and clan hatreds, dispensing with the old state structures (the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Canada) that once seemed needed precisely to adjust the relations between ethnic groups. In some places, from Somalia to the Russian Federation, the institutions of the modern state, which seemed a permanent fixture of our world, are breaking down or have simply collapsed. Western dithering over Bosnia shows we are fundamentally adrift in dealing with these circumstances.

The collapse of communism has confused many issues that seemed to be settled, at home as well as abroad. At the same time, it has created throughout the West an impatience with old answers. We may have renewed energy, but we also have far less sense of where we are headed. After the collapse of communism we need greater intellectual clarity, but it is harder to have it because the axioms that led us to foresee the continued survival of the Soviet system have been called into question without being replaced by anything else. Where to start in rethinking these questions?

* * *

Perhaps the best place to start is with the collapse of communism itself. What took place in the USSR during the last seventy years was, in the eyes of its proponents, a “great experiment” in the application of new modes of organization to social life, the largest such experiment in history. The experiment failed, and in failing it seems to have destroyed the laboratory. This way of looking at things can alert us to how much we can learn from the collapse of communism. We, like Polybius, have the fortune to be alive at one of the hinges of historical change, when the nature of things is unusually visible.

We belong to a culture that believes itself to be the most empirical in history. More than any previous civilization we try to draw our beliefs not from holy books or intuition or abstract reasoning but from experience, from what happens when ideas are tested in practice. What is true of our civilization as a whole in a vague sense is very precisely true of social science. Social science, like natural science, prides itself on its rigorous and progressive character: we change our ideas only because of evidence, but we do change them when the evidence contradicts our earlier hypotheses.

Given this perspective, it is very strange how little we have questioned our earlier beliefs in the light of the unexpected experience of communism’s collapse. Only in the economic area has there been any major intellectual shift; we are less attracted to socialism and have more faith in the market. But the discussion remains within the limits set by the preexisting conventional wisdom. We have not begun to ask what, if anything, the failure of many major innovations of the Soviet system to take root shows about humanity. Instead, it is becoming a commonplace that communism and socialism “failed.” Beneath a show of insight this formula consigns communism to the museum, where only scholars will stir its dust. It stops discussion just when it ought to be setting forth.

It was the specific field of Soviet studies that had the greatest responsibility for grasping the fragility of the Soviet system and which has the most to learn from the reassessment that ought to follow its collapse. For us in Soviet studies the sad reflection must intrude: We were not ready for this. Soviet studies as a discipline did not anticipate, and still cannot easily account for, the changes that emerged from the Soviet system. Diverse as our perspectives were, none of us, until the very eve of the collapse, presented such a radical transformation of the system as a serious possibility. To put it bluntly, we were all wrong. Not, of course, about every aspect of Soviet reality, but about important aspects that generated or allowed the unexpected changes since 1985.

Of course, these intellectual failures cannot be limited to Soviet studies. Those studies have always reflected a larger intellectual context. The assumption that a system that had lost its ideological legitimacy could still tenaciously cling to power cannot be separated from the influential “realist” views of world politics or from Washington’s preference for “pragmatists” over “ideologues.” Our belief in the basic stability of the system cannot be seen in isolation from the wider culture’s long-standing belief in the plasticity of man, a belief also evident today in much of our talk about “lifestyles.”

This is precisely the attraction of an inquiry into the lessons of the collapse of communism that begins with its lessons for Soviet studies. It can begin with a clearly defined, finite body of conclusions from a definite set of data and proceed to fundamental philosophic questions in a way that is not completely speculative. In taking this path, we are in a better position than we were before the collapse of communism: we have much more evidence on the character of the Soviet system. Moreover, the political considerations that influenced both the totalitarian model and the rebellion against it are receding. Soviet communism now belongs to history. We can now look at it as we would any other interesting phenomenon in history.

We need a great debate about why our public understanding of Soviet communism did not contain within its range of possibilities the system’s fragility and death. If error still has any sting for us, we should be driven to this debate. But it is also, like every moment in history when old ways of thinking suddenly crack open, an enormous opportunity for fresh thinking. This special issue of The National Interest is intended to provoke such a debate.

* * *

To make a beginning, in 1990 a group of scholars and officials organized the Washington Seminar on the Collapse of Communism at the Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute, Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, to discuss these issues. Out of these discussions there emerged a collaborative project to study the collapse of communism. The William H. Donner Foundation, which had already identified these issues as important, has generously supported this effort. The first fruits of the project were contained in the issue of The National Interest on which this volume is based, along with additional essays by Robert Conquest, Nathan Glazer, and Irving Kristol. The cooperation of The National Interest has been immensely valuable in bringing this enterprise to birth.

The book falls into three parts. First are six essays (Fukuyama, Kontorovich, Rush, Fairbanks, Reddaway, Sestanovich) that deal with what actually happened in the USSR, especially after 1982, to produce the collapse of the system. There were obviously a number of factors that interacted in a way that was not simple. The six essays try to cover the most important factors that were involved: Fukuyama, the role of long-term social and intellectual modernization; Kontorovich, economic stagnation; Rush, the accident of Gorbachev’s leadership; Fairbanks, communist “political culture” or tradition; Reddaway, pressure from the public; Sestanovich, pressure from the West. We hope that readers will try to combine these explanations as they feel persuaded by them; we make no attempt to present such a synthesis, because we do not agree among ourselves about their relative weight and interrelationship. In the present early stage of the debate and the uncovering of the historical evidence, this seems the only honest approach. But it is essential to have the alternatives in view to discuss in any coherent way where we went wrong and what can be learned.

A second group of five essays deals with why we were so surprised by the communist collapse. This necessarily involves a critique of our Sovietology. Rutland and Odom deal more with social science interpretations of the USSR, Conquest and Pipes more with historians’ interpretations of Soviet history, Malia with both. Rutland and Odom assess social science “from the inside,” as practicing social scientists, while Malia and Conquest critique it from the outside.

In the third and final section Kristol, Glazer, and Bellow discuss communism in relation to the intellectuals in the West. The drama of communism and its shadows, anticommunism and anti-anticommunism, was not only a drama about “them,” but about “us.” Communism came from us, from the West, and returned after October 1917 to affect the life of the West in many ways both direct and indirect, ways difficult to spot and to define. Many of these elusive effects we are becoming aware of only as we experience the unexpected effects of communism’s removal from the scene. The final essays attempt to give some sense of the texture of personal life as it was affected by the existence of communism, both as it was experienced at the time and as it looks in retrospect.

The diverse answers in the following essays show that the debate is just beginning. They differ not only about the correct assessment of Soviet communism, but about the content of past assessments. Fukuyama, for example, criticizes the totalitarian model for ignoring development, Malia praises the totalitarian model for not being muddled by development theories, while Odom praises the totalitarian model for its compatibility with development theories. But the authors do have two things in common. First, we spent most of our lives as anticommunists. There were others who made a different choice, but what we have learned through glasnost has only reinforced our original unease with Soviet communism. Second, none of us takes the view, which certainly is voiced elsewhere, that the collapse of communism calls for no serious rethinking because our views of Soviet communism proved to be about right. All of this is a waste of breath unless you were surprised.

2

The Modernizing Imperative: The USSR as an Ordinary Country

Francis Fukuyama

The Gorbachev-era earthquake that led to the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet state was due in significant part to autonomous changes in Soviet civil society, changes that were in some respects no different from the type of social evolution going on in other regions and countries with no experience of totalitarianism. The failure of a large section of the Sovietological community to perceive these underlying changes accounts in some measure for their blindness in not being able to anticipate the coming revolution.

Before making the case that changes occurring in civil society were important factors both in the collapse and in our blindness about the collapse, let me state at the beginning a number of caveats and qualifications. It should be absolutely clear that the Gorbachev-era earthquake had fundamentally political causes, which were its sine qua non. Perestroika was in no way a revolution from below. Frederick Starr’s assertion that Gorbachev merely uncorked change rather than created it goes too far,¹ and those like Jerry Hough who argue that the USSR had become a pluralistic, participatory society prior to the late 1980s understand neither pluralism nor participation. It is perfectly possible to imagine substantially different and quite plausible outcomes to the events of the 1980s, given changes in the personalities involved. If Andropov or Chernenko had been younger and/or healthier men, perestroika most likely would never have happened. If Grishin had won the subsequent power struggle, if Gorbachev’s personality had been different, if he had been less adroit in political maneuvering or Yegor Ligachev more so, the entire sequence of events leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union would have been derailed and might never have happened. Moreover, to say that civil society was a factor is not to deny the myriad of other causes that contributed to the collapse, including pressures from the international system, and the United States in particular. One can argue that a healthy Andropov would have put off the collapse only for a decade or so, but the importance of such purely political factors is undeniable, and perhaps even central in explaining these events.

Francis Fukuyama is Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International political economy and director of the International Development Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. This essay originally appeared in The National Interest, No. 31 (Spring 1993).

On the other hand, political factors do not tell the whole story. For while the major mileposts of Soviet reform may have been initiated from above, they received crucial support, or at least acquiescence, from below. The Soviet intelligentsia did not react suspiciously to glasnost, but rather embraced it enthusiastically and proceeded to push the boundaries of the permissible in journalism and the arts. Soviet voters, when given a chance to express a preference, did not elect the old apparatus or neo-fascist Russian nationalists; they voted in 199091 for candidates from Democratic Russia and for Boris Yeltsin. Elites in the different Union republics organized themselves quickly into nationalist groups once given the chance, despite the fact that many Western Sovietologists believed they had been successfully assimilated as “new Soviet men.” And finally, perhaps the most important factor was not what happened in civil society, but what did not happen: the old system’s entrenched interests, particularly the Party, the army, and the police, did not act decisively to end the reform process, as they were designed to do. Clearly, something had happened “from below” to make all this possible.

To say that civil society played a significant role is to challenge one of the fundamental premises of classical Sovietology: namely, that the very uniqueness of communist totalitarianism as a political system la...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Why Did It Happen?
• Part 2: Sins of the Scholars
• Part 3: Intellectuals and Communism
• Epilogue
• Index