CIAO DATE: 05/02

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

Volume 1, Number 1, Winter/Spring 2000

 

The Strange Death of the USSR
Review by William Wohlforth

 

Paul Hollander. Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, 352 pp. $35.00.

Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev: On My Country and the World. Trans. George Shriver. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, 352pp. $29.95.

The collapse of the Soviet Empire between 1989 and 1991 is the most important geopolitical event of the last half–century. If history has ended, as Francis Fukuyama famously argued, it has done so courtesy of the Soviet Union, which graciously exited history–stage left–with hardly a whimper. As intellectuals and pundits line up to follow Fukuyama and pronounce on the meaning of the new world order, it pays to remember that no one remotely foresaw how the old one might end, and no one has produced a compelling explanation of its demise even after the fact. The books under review, Paul Hollander’s Political Will and Personal Belief and Mikhail Gorbechev’s Gorbachev: On My Country and the World, offer some clues–not only to the Soviet collapse itself, but also to the failure to predict or explain it.

What startled onlookers and sparked the new wave of optimism about world politics was the simple fact that the Soviet rulers chose not to fight to preserve their state and its status as a world power. The reason scholars and policymakers could not foresee the course that events would take in 1989–91 was not due to blindness to the material decline of Soviet communism. They expected Soviet bloc elites to use force if necessary to preserve their grip on power. As Paul Kennedy put it in 1987–in words few would have questioned at the time: “There is nothing in the character or the tradition of the Russian state to suggest that it could ever accept imperial decline gracefully.”

Paul Hollander, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts who has written widely on communism, seeks to explain why ruling elites in the Soviet Union and its satellites confounded everyone’s expectations (including his own) and accepted decline so gracefully. He acknowledges that Soviet–style economies had been declining since the 1970s, but rightly points out that Soviet bloc regimes had ample coercive means to crush dissent and reestablish control had they been willing to spill blood. To be sure, any Soviet Tiananmen would have meant an end to financial credits from the West, a new Cold War, and sustained repression to exact further sacrifices from the populace. Communist true believers, Hollander argues, would not have thought twice about imposing such sacrifices. Why did that sense of self–assurance and entitlement to rule desert not just reformers like Gorbachev, but hard–liners in Moscow and Eastern Europe in 1989–91? (After all, when hard–liners got a chance to show their mettle in August 1991, they too proved unwilling to issue orders to fire on protesters.)

In search of answers, Hollander examines the biographies of two dozen former high–ranking officials in the Soviet Union, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. Marxist and Leninist ideologies, he finds, turn out to be the key. These alien, utopian, and profoundly false ideas inevitably produce human misery when put into practice. Those who run a communist system must perforce do evil. At some moment, this contradiction between utopian theory and immoral practice must produce a crisis of will. Hollander wants to know when and under what conditions this happened to former Soviet and Eastern European elites. This is a fascinating question, but it is extraordinarily hard to answer since it requires probing the innermost convictions of people who face strong incentives to justify their behavior to themselves and to history. Hollander’s main source is memoirs and interviews, which brings to mind Phillipe Petain’s response when asked whether he intended to write his memoirs. “Why should I write memoirs?” the French hero of World War I and villain of Vichy reportedly replied, “I have nothing to hide.” It may be asking too much to expect straight answers to Hollander’s question, which is essentially: “When did you realize that you had devoted your life to serving an evil, corrupt, dead–end system?”

Hollander is well aware of these challenges and is careful in extracting firm conclusions. Still, some tentative generalizations emerge. Some members of the ruling elite lost faith in the system when it turned on them, such as when they were fired or mistreated by corrupt, mean or incompetent bosses. However, the most common cause of a declining will to power was, by far, learning about the material failings of the system. Usually, this involved two processes: learning about the realities of life in the West, and discovering how bad things truly were for normal citizens behind the Iron Curtain (which, for pampered members of the elite, was often the greater revelation). Slowly the system’s growing inefficiency, against the backdrop of its manifold cruelties and inanities, corroded the confidence of those who led it. Of course, the true extent of the loss of will could only be known to them and to outsiders when circumstances demanded tough–mindedness. Mikhail Gorbachev unwittingly provided such a test when he tried to revitalize the system and thereby provoked its terminal crisis. Thus, Hollander neatly explains why the Soviet Empire collapsed, and why its collapse could not have been predicted.

Hollander wants to make the case for the power of ideas, but his analysis falls short because it is mainly poor economic performance that caused most of his subjects to question their convictions in the first place. If communist ideas only lost their power when the economy turned sour, is there any need to place ideas in the forefront? A far stronger case for the role of ideas in bringing the Soviet Empire down is made by Gorbachev himself, though perhaps unintentionally. His latest book, Gorbachev: On My Country and the World, is a collection of loosely connected ruminations in which Gorbachev argues that the socialist idea is alive and well; that the Soviet Union could have been preserved by peaceful means; and that “new thinking” will triumph over power politics. Unfortunately, Gorbachev is constantly disappointed by the realities he must confront. The socialist idea was hijacked by Stalin and millions died. Narrow–minded leaders like Boris Yeltsin defected from the Soviet Union in search of personal power and enrichment. The United States, Germany, and other major states have turned away from new thinking in pursuit of narrow power interests. But Gorbachev remains convinced that he has history and world politics figured out.

The reason for taking this book seriously is that Gorbachev faces strong incentives to portray himself in hindsight as a hard–headed realist. After all, he is constantly accused by Russian nationalists of having been a Kremlin dreamer who sold the Soviet Empire for a song. But here he plays right into their hands, affirming his faith in humanistic new thinking and a new world order based on a balance of interests and common values. Perhaps, just perhaps, this book (unlike his memoirs) shows the real Gorbachev: an idealist and an optimist despite all, lecturing us on right and wrong, totally convinced of his views, supremely unconcerned by all the evidence to the contrary. The fact that the reins of Soviet power fell into the hands of this confident, idealistic, and optimistic man may hold the key to some of the puzzles that elude Hollander. For while Gorbachev was unambiguously unwilling to use large–scale violence to preserve the system, he was self–confident enough to embark on the extraordinarily risky reforms that sent the system into its terminal crisis. His deftness at Kremlin intrigue, coupled with his rhetorical ability to rationalize his reforms in the terms of Soviet ideology, were the critical ingredients that prevented reformer and hard–liner alike from seeing that the game was up until it was nearly over. He managed to breathe enough life into the idealistic side of Soviet ideology to carry the Soviet Communist Party to its own self–destruction. Hence, by the time most of Hollander’s subjects faced their crucial test of will–1989–91–it was clearly too late to save the system.

Of course, it remains difficult to pin down the real Gorbachev. It is hard to reconcile the sometimes–tedious pontificator of these pages with the extraordinary figure who, intentionally or not, contributed more than any other individual to the peaceful demise of the Soviet Empire. Despite the thousands of pages he has written since his retirement, he remains elusive, and the events of 1989–91 remain fascinating but endless fodder for scholarly argument. Hollander’s book is a rewarding read. But it joins a long list of books on this subject–including some, like David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb, that are even more rewarding and entertaining for general readers–that raise more questions than they answer satisfactorily. As for Gorbachev’s treatise, it contains clues about the man, but often seems clueless about the world in which he lives. William Wohlforth is Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.