The Revolutions of 1989

Vladimir Tismaneanu, Vladimir Tismaneanu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134740000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Revolutions of 1989 is a collection of both classic and recent articles examining the causes and consequences of the collapse of communism in East and Central Europe, the most important event in recent world history. It includes discussion of:

* the economic, political and social nature of revolutions
* the role of dissidents and civil society in encouraging the breakdown of eastern
* European communist regimes
* comparisons with other revolutions
* the extent of the collapse of Leninist regimes in East-Central Europe.

European historians, scholars and students will wnat to make this an integral part of their studies.

Part I
CAUSES

1 WHAT HAPPENED IN EASTERN EUROPE IN 1989?

Daniel Chirot

American sociologist Daniel Chirot is well known for his writings on social change, modern revolutions and tyrannies. In this essay he offers a comprehensive interpretation of the main causes of the revolutions of 1989. While acknowledging the paramount importance of the economic decline of Leninist regimes, he identifies the major causes of the breakdown in the political and moral crises of these societies. Communist elites derived their spurious legitimacy from their selfdesignated role as exponents of historical progress. In other words, they were in power because they claimed to represent the interests of the working class, and therefore of humanity as a whole. Chirot correctly points out that the disintegration of elite self-confidence and the rise of anti-systemic movements from below led to the moral dissolution of the old Leninist order.

This essay proposes a useful discussion of the novelty of the revolutions of 1989 compared to traditional revolutions. Based on a profound analysis of these major historical convulsions, Chirot reaches an important conclusion regarding the nature of revolutions in the next century. Admitting that political and economic factors will continue to beget social turbulence, Chirot predicts that the “fundamental causes of revolutionary instability will be moral.” In this respect, his interpretation is convergent with other essays in this volume (S. N.Eisenstadt, Jeffrey Isaac, Ken Jowitt) and captures the long-term significance of the revolutions of 1989.

The world knows that in Eastern Europe communism collapsed in 1989, and that the USSR set out on a path that not only promises the end of socialism but threatens its very territorial integrity. But knowing this does not explain why it all happened. Nor are the implications of all these revolutionary events as clear as the immediate, short-run strategic effects that follow from the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.

There are many ways of looking at the “Revolution of 1989.” As with other great revolutionary events—the French Revolution of 1789, the European revolutions of 1848, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, or the Chinese Revolution of 1949—economic, political, cultural, and social analyses offer only partial insights. Everything was interconnected, yet no single analysis can entirely absorb all aspects of such cataclysmic events. Even after two hundred years, the French Revolution is still a subject for debate, and novel interpretations remain possible; and if the political controversy generated by that revolution two centuries ago has cooled somewhat, for well over a century and a half it remained a burning issue at the center of European and world politics.¹

We should not be surprised, then, if over the next several decades the events of 1989 form the basis of much passionate political and scholarly debate. Having said this, I should add that for those of us interested in social change, revolutionary periods offer the most important fields of observation. We cannot, of course, conduct controlled laboratory experiments that suit the needs of our research. But, in fact, revolutions are large-scale social experiments. Although they are not tailored to scholarly ends, or by any stretch of the imagination controllable, they are the closest thing we have to those major scientific experiments that have shaped our understanding of the physical world. Great revolutions, then, are better windows into how societies operate in the long run than almost any other type of historical event. Therefore, aside from being immediately and keenly interested in the events that took place in Eastern Europe in 1989 because they are reshaping the international political order, we also have a fascinating, unexpected, revealing glimpse into how seemingly stable, enduring social systems fail and collapse.

The underling causes

Economic problems

There is no question that the most visible, though certainly not the only reason for the collapse of East European communism has been economic. It is not that these systems failed in an absolute sense. No East European country, not even Romania, was an Ethiopia or a Burma, with famine and a reversion to primitive, local subsistence economies. Perhaps several of these economies, particularly Romania’s, and to a more limited extent Poland’s, were headed in that direction, but they had very far to fall before reaching such low levels. Other economies— in Hungary, but even more so in Czechoslovakia and East Germany—were failures only by the standards of the most advanced capitalist economies. On a world scale these were rich, well-developed economies, not poor ones. The Soviet Union, too, was still a world economic and technological power, despite deep pockets of regional poverty and a standard of living much lower than its per capita production figures would indicate.²

There is no need to go over the defects of socialist economies in detail. These have been explained by the many excellent economists from those countries, particularly the Poles and Hungarians—the two most famous of whom are Wlodzimierz Brus and János Kornai.³

The main problem is that investment and production decisions were based largely, though not entirely, on political will rather than domestic or international market pressures. To overcome the force of the domestic market, which ultimately meant consumer and producer wishes and decisions, the quantities and prices of goods and services were fixed by administrative order. And to exclude external market forces, which might have weakened domestic guidance of the economy, foreign trade with the advanced capitalist world was curtailed and strictly controlled, partly by fiat but also by maintaining nonconvertible currencies. The aim of curtailing the power of market forces was achieved, but an inevitable side effect was that under these conditions it became impossible to measure what firms were profitable and what production processes were more or less efficient. There were no real prices.

As the inefficiencies of socialist economies became evident, it proved impossible to reform them, largely because the managers were so closely tied to the ruling political machinery. They were able to lobby effectively to steer investments in their direction, regardless of the efficiency of their enterprises. Success as a manager was measured by the ability to produce more, maintain high employment, and attract politically directed investment, not by producing marketable goods more efficiently. Equally important, the very concept of profit as a measure of efficiency was foreign to these managers.⁴

Such systems developed inevitable shortages of desired goods. This was partly because production was so inefficient that it kept the final output of consumer goods lower than it should have been at such high levels of industrialization. And the very crude ways of measuring success, in terms of gross output, slighted essential services and spare parts, so that the very production process was damaged by shortages of key producer goods and services.

But whereas in some cases it was possible to carry out reform, most notably in agriculture and some services (the outstanding successes were the Chinese decollectivization of agriculture after 1976 and the Hungarians’ ability to privatize some services and small-scale agricultural production), in industries the power of the communist party and its managers was simply too strong to carry out real change. Furthermore, the sincere commitment to full employment and the maintenance of low food prices further damaged efficiency.⁵

But none of this would have made the slightest sense without the ideological base of communism. Some critics of communist economic arrangements have argued that the system was simply irrational. In strict economic terms, it may have been, but that hardly explains its long life. The key is that political will was ultimately the primary determinant of economic action, and this will was based on a very coherent world view developed by Lenin, Stalin, and the other Bolshevik leaders. This view then spread to other communist leaders, and was imposed on about one-third of the world’s population.

Lenin was born in 1870, and Stalin in 1878 or 1879. They matured as political beings in their teens and early twenties when the most advanced areas of the world were in the industrial heartland of Western Europe and the United States: in the Ruhr, or in the emerging miracles of modern technology being constructed in the American Middle West, from Pittsburgh and Buffalo to Chicago. It is not mere coincidence that these areas, and others like them (including the major steel and shipbuilding centers of Britain, or the coal and steel centers of northern France and Belgium), became, one hundred years later, giant rust belts with antiquated industries, overly powerful trade unions, and unimaginative, conservative, and bureaucratic managers. It has been in such areas, too, that industrial pollution has most ravaged the environment, and where political pressures resistant to free trade and the imposition of external market forces were the fiercest in the advanced countries. But in 1900 these areas were progressive, and for ambitious leaders from a relatively backward country like Russia, they were viable models.

Lenin, Stalin, and all the other Bolshevik intellectuals and leaders— Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, and so many others—knew that this was what they ultimately had to emulate. They felt, however, that they would make it all happen more quickly and more efficiently by socialist planning than by the random and cruel play of market forces. Despite the inherent inefficiencies of socialism, these astonishing, visionary men—particularly Stalin—actually succeeded. The tragedy of communism was not its failure, but its success. Stalin built the institutional framework that, against all logic, forced the Soviet Union into success.⁶ By the 1970s the USSR had the world’s most advanced late nineteenth-century economy, the world’s biggest and best, most inflexible rust belt. It is as if Andrew Carnegie had taken over the entire United States, forced it into becoming a giant copy of U.S. Steel, and the executives of the same U.S. Steel had continued to run the country into the 1970s and 1980s!

To understand the absurdity of this situation, it is necessary to go back and take a historical look at the development of capitalism. There have been five industrial ages so far. Each was dominated by a small set of “high technology” industries located in the most advanced parts of the industrial world. Each has been characterized by rapid, extraordinary growth and innovation in the leading sectors, followed by slower growth, and finally relative stagnation, overproduction, increasing competition, declining profits, and crisis in the now aging leading sectors. It was precisely on his observations about the rise and fall of the first industrial age that Karl Marx based his conclusions about the eventual collapse of capitalism. But each age has been followed by another, as unexpected new technologies have negated all the predictions about the inevitable fall of profits and the polarization of capitalist societies into a tiny number of rich owners and masses of impoverished producers.

The ages, with their approximate dates, have been: (1) the cotton-textile age dominated by Great Britain, which lasted from about the 1780s into the 1830s; (2) the rail and iron age, also dominated by Britain, which went from the 1840s into the early 1870s; (3) the steel and organic-chemistry age, one that also saw the development of new industries based on the production and utilization of electrical machinery, which ran from the 1870s to World War I, and in which the American and German economies became dominant; (4) the age of automobiles and petrochemicals, from the 1910s to the 1970s, in which the United States became the overwhelmingly hegemonic economy; and (5) the age of electronics, information, and biotechnology, which began in the 1970s and which will certainly run well into the first half of the next century. In this last age, it is not yet certain which economies will dominate, though certainly the Japanese and West Europeans are well on their way to replacing the Americans.⁷

Transitions have been difficult. Depressions and political turmoil from the 1820 to the 1840s, in the 1870s and 1880s, and in the 1920s and 1930s can be explained, in good part, by the complications of passing from one age to another. World War I—or more particularly the mad race for colonies in the late nineteenth century and the European arms race, especially the naval one between Germany and Britain—was certainly a function of the shifting economic balance in Europe. World War II resulted from the unsatisfactory outcome of World War I, and from the Great Depression of the 1930s. The shocks from the latest transition to the fifth industrial age have been mild by comparison, but the difficulties that attended past transitions produced many predictions about the imminent collapse of capitalism that seemed reasonable at the time.⁸ This brief bit of economic history has to be connected to the events of 1989.

The Soviet model—the Leninist-Stalinist model—was based on the third industrial age, the one whose gleaming promises of mighty, smoke-filled concentrations of chemical and steel mills, huge electric generating plants, and hordes of peasants migrating into new factory boomtowns mesmerized the Bolshevik leadership. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union found out that creating such a world was not easy, especially in the face of stubborn peasant and worker refusal to accept present hardships as the price for eventual industrial utopia. But Stalin persuaded the CPSU that the vision was so correct that it was worth paying a very high price to attain it. The price was paid, and the model turned into reality.⁹

Later, the same model was imposed on Eastern Europe. Aside from the sheer force used to ensure that the East European complied, it must also be said that the local communists, many of whom were only a generation younger than Stalin, accepted the model. Those who came from more backward countries particularly shared Stalin’s vision. In Romania, Nicolae Ceauşescu held on to it until his last day in power. It was based on his interpretation of his country’s partial, uneven, and highly unsatisfactory drive for industrialization in the 1930s, when he was a young man just becoming an active communist.¹⁰ To a degree we usually do not realize, because China remained so heavily agricultural, this was Mao’s vision too.¹¹ Today its last practitioner is Ceauşescu’s contemporary and close ideological ally, Kim Il Sung.

In the Soviet Union, in the more backward areas of Eastern Europe, in the already partly industrial areas of China (especially on the coast and in Manchuria), and in North Korea, the model worked because there were a lot of peasants to bring into the labor force, because this type of economy required massive concentrations of investments into huge, centralized firms, and because, after all, the technology for all this was pretty well worked out. Also, producer goods were more important than consumer goods at this stage. (It is worth remembering, too, that these were all areas where industrialization had begun before communism, either because of local initiatives, as in Russia or most of Eastern Europe, or because of Japanese colonial investments, as in North Korea and ...