The Strange Death of Soviet Communism: A Postscript PDF
Preview The Strange Death of Soviet Communism: A Postscript
ii The Strange Death of Soviet Communism The National Interest Series China in The National Interest Owen Harries, editor Russia in The National Interest Nikolas K. Gvosdev, editor The National Interest on International Law and Order R. James Woolsey, editor The Strange Death of Soviet Communism: A Postscript Nikolas K. Gvosdev, editor Preface iii iv The Strange Death of Soviet Communism Originally published in The National Interest Published 2008 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2008 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2008001820 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gvosdev, Nikolas K., 1969- The strange death of Soviet communism : a postscript / Nikolas K. Gvosdev. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4128-0697-8 (alk. paper) 1. Communism—Soviet Union—History. I. Title. HX311.5.G86 2008 335.43—dc22 2008001820 ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-0698-5 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-0697-8 (hbk) Preface v Contents Introduction vii Nikolas K. Gvosdev Part 1: Why Did It Happen? 1. The Modern Polybius 3 Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr. 2. The Modernizing Imperative: 9 The USSR as an Ordinary Country Francis Fukuyama 3. Fortune and Fate 21 Myron Rush 4. Did the West Undo the East 31 Stephen Sestanovich 5. The Economic Fallacy 45 Vladimir Kontorovich 6. The Nature of the Beast 61 Charles H. Fairbanks,, Jr. 7. The Role of Popular Discontent 77 Peter Reddaway Part 2: Sins of the Scholars 8. 1917 and the Revisionists 91 Richard Pipes vi The Strange Death of Soviet Communism 9. A Fatal Logic 109 Martin Malia 10. Academe and the Soviet Myth 125 Robert Conquest 11. The Pluralist Mirage 137 William Odom 12. Sovietology: Notes for a Post-Mortem 151 Peter Rutland Part 3: Intellectuals and Communism 13. Did We Go Too Far? 173 Nathan Glazer 14. My Cold War 183 Irving Kristol Epilogue 15. The Arithmetic of Atrocity 191 Peter Rutland 16. The Long Goodbye—And Eric’s Consoling Lies 199 Neil McInnes 17. Judging Nazism and Communism 213 Martin Malia 18. Clinging to Faith: 235 Public Intellectuals and the God that Failed Paul Hollander Index 245 Introduction It has been nearly twenty years since the Berlin Wall came down—and that date—the inverse of 9/11—is for many the official time of death for Soviet communism (with the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later its internment and burial). Less than four years after the fall of the Wall, and a little more than a year after the red hammer and sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin, The National Interest published a special issue—“The Strange Death of Soviet Communism.” As Owen Harries, then editor of the magazine, noted in his introduction: …in the fall of 1985, Robert Tucker and I confidently asserted that ‘the Soviet Union constitutes the single greatest threat to American interests, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.’ We were, of course, half-wrong. Along with virtually everyone else, we failed to anticipate that the first six years of The National Interest would also be the last six years of the Soviet Union. Despite this astonishing coinci- dence, we claim no casual connection. As with all sudden deaths, that of Soviet communism raises questions: Was it a case of fatal disease, accident, suicide or murder—or some unusual mixture of these? What is to be said for and against the various explanations on offer? When did death become inevitable? What part did Western policy play? Why did it take virtually everyone—and especially most of the supposed experts—by surprise? How, in ret- rospect, does the behavior of Western intellectuals stand up? These are questions that continue to be worth asking today—in the wake of intelligence failures in other parts of the world and our seeming inability to understand the dynamics of other closed societies. One might add that the prevailing fantasy among many Western poli- cymakers about how the Soviet Union would collapse—a revolt of the periphery against the center—turned out not to be the case at all. One of those “ignored voices” was a Marine lieutenant named David Moro who wrote in a 1988 Policy Review who argued that it would be the growth of a Russian nationalism de-linked from the Soviet state that would delegitimize the USSR—that when the Russian core no longer saw the Soviet state as being in the Russian national interest, then holding the empire together would become untenable. One of the themes of this col- vii viii The Strange Death of Soviet Communism lection is the extent to which people substituted what they believed—in place of critical analysis of the facts on the ground in approaching the Soviet reality. The original essays are presented in this collection are unaltered from when they first appeared—a “snapshot,” as it were, of reactions in the immediate aftermath of those events which marked the end of the Cold War. Certainly, the USSR and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union are both dead and beyond revival. The reader, however, can judge to what extent the legacy of Soviet communism has been uprooted and extirpated—and whether or not, in 1993, there was too much optimism about how easily and quickly the specter of Marxism-Leninism could be laid to rest—not only in Russia itself but throughout Central and East- ern Europe. At the time these authors were writing, Boris Yeltsin, Lech Walesa, and Vaclav Havel were all in power—before the heroes of the “fall of communism” were themselves swept from office, often replaced by ex-communists who had shown much more facility in adapting to the changed conditions. And as recent political scandals in Central Europe demonstrate, the ghosts of the past have a way of sneaking back into the present. As I noted in a review of Moshe Lewin’s The Soviet Century, “The Soviet Union was not a temporary blip, an unwelcome interruption be- tween a pre-Revolutionary past and post-Soviet future, but a juggernaut that rolled over everything in its path. Nothing was left unaffected, from political culture to economic infrastructure, language, religion and social habits. This book is a direct challenge to those who believe that the im- pact of the Soviet period can be minimized or exorcised and that either an utterly new path can be paved from its wreckage or a pre-Soviet path picked up again.”1 This issue, of course, was devoted to the death of Soviet commu- nism, but did not address as much the survival and evolution of the Chinese variant of Marxism-Leninism, nor predict that the pragmatic approach to reform taken by Mao Zedong’s successors might create an economic and political model to rival the attractions of Western liberal democracy—particularly when, by the end of the decade, the hope and promise of rapid reform not only in Russia but in many of the succes- sor states of the former USSR was dashed. Nor was there a sense that a renewed ideological challenge from the Islamic world to Western values was in the making. To some extent, therefore, this issue went to press during what turned out, in Charles Krauthammer’s formulation, to be a Introduction ix “holiday from history”2—and now, the United States finds that the era of “unchallenged unipolarity is over.” The question then remains—will other ideologies and powers take up the mantle of the departed Soviet Union in mounting a challenge both to the power of the United States as well as to its values? Since this special issue was published, subsequent articles in The Na- tional Interest have examined the lingering ghosts of Soviet communism as well as new, insidious ideologies that might arise from its corpse. These have been collected into a special “epilogue” section. Nikolas K. Gvosdev Editor, The National Interest Notes 1. “Writing Off Stalin,” Moscow Times, March 4, 2005. 2. “After September 11: A Conversation: Foreign Policy,” National Interest, No. 65-S (Thanksgiving 2001).
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