Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union

Epilogue–

A Critique of Explanations of the Soviet Collapse

What needs explanation is that an international system of states collapsed in the absence of the most evident forms of threat: it was not defeated in war; it did not face overwhelming political challenges from below, Poland being the only partial exception. It was not, despite its manifold economic and social problems, unable to meet the basic economic demands of its citizenry. It did not therefore collapse, fail or break down in any absolute sense. What occurred rather was that the leadership of the most powerful state in the system decided to introduce a radically new set of policies within the USSR and within the system as a whole: it was not that the ruled could not go on being ruled in the old way so much as that the rulers could not go on ruling in the old way. Fred Halliday666

Explanations for the collapse of the Soviet Union abound. They reflect every ideological shade and emotional nuance. They range from the fanciful to the ponderous, from the gleeful to despairing. Many have contributed to our own understanding, which differs from all of them. These theories fall into six categories667 according to the main cause:

1. Flaws of socialism

2. Popular opposition

3. External factors

4. Bureaucratic counter-revolution

5. Lack of democracy and over-centralization, and

6. The Gorbachev factor

In what follows, we shall explain our differences with these theories.

Proponents of the first theory believe that all socialist systems are doomed because they have a “genetic flaw.” Socialism came about illegitimately in the Soviet Union. It was inherently unworkable because it went against human nature and the free market. Jack Matlock, a Columbia professor who served as ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, said simply, “‘Socialism,’ as defined by Lenin, was doomed from the start because it was based on mistaken assumptions about human nature.”668 This theory with variations appears in the works of Martin Malia, Richard Pipes,669 and Dmitri Volkogonov.670

In truth, in spite of its achievements, the Soviet system did have many flaws in 1985. Some were problems associated with centralized planning—insufficient quantity and quality of some consumer goods, decelerating productivity, lagging local initiative, the slow diffusion of computers and other technology, corruption and illegal private money-making. Some were problems associated with the political system. Some methods that were helpful for seizing and holding power proved problematic for wielding power in the long run. These included the overlap of Party and government functions that both kept political initiative at the top and reduced lower bodies to advisory and consultative functions, a problem that similarly affected mass organizations, like the trade unions. There was also the persistence of forms and levels of censorship above and beyond what was necessary in a mature socialist society and of privileges that separated the Party and government elite from the working population. Some problems were clearly related to the Cold War that absorbed resources to maintain a credible military strength and support allies abroad. Some problems had to do with the challenge of maintaining a revolutionary elan, high Party standards, and a relevant Marxist ideology and education in the face of the relentless march of time and inevitable temptations of bureaucracy. The main point, however, is that these problems did not produce a crisis let alone a collapse.

Moreover, the trouble with this theory is that it views Soviet history as unfolding toward an inevitable demise because of its departures from human nature, private property and the free market. Though these views gained ascendancy in the U.S. during the Reagan era, few historians subscribe to an historical determinism based on human nature. In addition, this theory is utterly incapable of explaining how Soviet socialism survived the collectivization of agriculture and the German invasion of World War II, only to fall apart under the seemingly far lesser challenges of the 1980s.

The second theory is that popular opposition brought down Soviet socialism. This category is a bit of a straw man, since no writer of note holds that popular opposition alone brought down Soviet socialism. Nevertheless, some writers have stressed such aspects of popular opposition as the disenchantment of intellectuals,671 the protests of workers,672 the rise of nationalists,673 and the electoral successes of non-Communists. Certainly, the disaffection of intellectuals with the Soviet system was quite widespread. By the 1980s, for example, many prominent Soviet economists favored markets.674 Reform schemes proposed by academics influenced some of Gorbachev’s policies, and in this way intellectuals did contribute to the collapse.675 Other aspects of popular unrest also played a role. The riots in Baku, the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the nationalist protests in the Baltics, the strikes by miners, and the formation of a liberal opposition bloc in the Congress of People’s Deputies stood out as important moments in the unraveling of Soviet socialism. Still, the main defect of this theory is that popular discontent appeared toward the end rather than the beginning of the Gorbachev reforms. It resulted from Gorbachev’s policies rather than caused them. As one wag said, glasnost gave Soviet citizens the license to criticize, and perestroika gave them something to criticize. In 1985, however, at the start of the reform process, popular unrest did not exist. While some Soviet people complained about the quality and quantity of goods and about official privileges and corruption, most Soviets expressed satisfaction with their lives and contentment with the system. Polls showed that the level of satisfaction of Soviet citizens was comparable to the satisfaction of Americans with their system.676 Even in 1990-91, as their leaders moved toward private property, marketetization, and ethnic fragmentation, Soviet citizens by large majorities favored public ownership, price controls, and the maintenance of the Soviet Union.677 In the final analysis, popular opposition acted as a dependent rather than an independent variable, a by-product of Gorbachev’s policies rather than their cause.

According to the third theory, external factors rooted in the Cold War and global economy caused the Soviet collapse. The most extreme such view holds that the betrayal of Soviet socialism was due to the CIA’s penetration of the Soviet leadership. Admittedly, this penetration reached further than most outsiders realized. According to one later report, “by 1985, the C.I.A. and F.B.I. had developed the most impressive inventory of spies against Russia in American history” and had “riddled” the K.G.B. and G.R.U. (military intelligence) with moles.678 Still, unless future revelations show that Gorbachev or Yakovlev served as CIA agents, it stretches credibility to suppose that the CIA brought down Soviet socialism. Of course, more powerful external factors than the CIA were at work.

As many writers have suggested, external pressure generated by the world economy, technological changes, and the Carter and Reagan policies unquestionably figured in the Soviet difficulties. Andre Gunder Frank, for example, points out that the worldwide recession of 1979-82 encouraged Presidents Carter and Reagan to increase military spending and this compelled the Soviet Union to spend more. The recession also put a strain on socialist countries in Eastern Europe that had borrowed money from Western banks.679 Manuel Castells and Emma Kiselova argue that the main strain on the Soviet Union came from having to adapt to the “information society.”680 Aside from these economic and technological factors, the main external strain on the Soviet system was that imposed by the intensification of the Cold War in the early 1980s.

Soviet society never enjoyed the luxury of internal development free of the threat of outside aggression. The cost of defending itself and aiding its allies escalated yearly and drained resources away from socially useful domestic investments. By 1980, Soviet aid to its allies cost $44 billion a year, and arms spending consumed 25 to 30 percent of the economy. This drain on the Soviet economy exceeded by a factor of two to three what Western experts at the time estimated.681 The strain of the Cold War increased during the late Carter and early Reagan years. As both the conservative, Peter Schweizer, and the leftist, Sean Gervasi, have pointed out, Reagan opened up a second Cold War and initiated a multipronged strategy of destabilizing Soviet society. The strategy consisted of doubling military spending (“spending them into bankruptcy”), projecting the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”), aiding anti-Communists in Afghanistan, Poland and elsewhere, driving down the price of oil and gas on the world market (the Soviet’s main source of hard currency), as well as engaging in various forms of economic and psychological warfare.682

Certainly, the external factors pressing on the Soviet regime challenged the Soviet system in varied and powerful ways and have a place in a full explanation of the Soviet collapse. Still, that is a far cry from saying, as Peter Schweizer does, that it is “not possible to understand the collapse of the Soviet Union separate from Ronald Reagan,” who “won the cold war.”683 Frances Fitzgerald provides the most persuasive refutation of the decisiveness of Reagan’s policies. Fitzgerald argues that no clear cause-and-effect relationship existed between the external factors and an internal crisis.684 For example, Fitzgerald maintains that increases U.S. military spending under Reagan for Star Wars and other projects did not increase Soviet military spending.685 Many Soviet insiders likewise rejected the idea that the arms race caused either Gorbachev’s reforms or the collapse. A Soviet official in military intelligence said, “The notion that Gorbachev’s perestroika was started as a result of Reagan’s Star Wars was concocted in the West and is completely absurd.”686 A member of the Soviet Institute for the U.S.A. and Canada opined, “I am deeply convinced that neither SDI [the Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars] nor the arms race in general contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.”687 Authoritative opinion differs on the importance of the arms race. To a large extent the debate misses the crux of the matter. However great and in whatever form, the external pressure coming from the United States represented less of an external threat than earlier economic sanctions, sabotage, and foreign invasion. Moreover, the external pressure did not dictate the particular shape and direction of the Soviet response. In the end, Gorbachev’s particular responses to the external pressures and internal problems provided the most proximate and decisive cause of the debacle.

A fourth theory is that the cause was a bureaucratic counter-revolution. This theory bears a striking similarity to Leon Trotsky’s views of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Trotsky argued that the Soviet system was “transitional,” and that if a new socialist revolution did not overthrow the bureaucracy, then the bureaucracy itself could become the base for a capitalist restoration or could even transform itself into “a new possessing class.”688 The idea that the bureaucracy transformed itself into a new possessing class through a revolution from above is more or less the argument of David Kotz and Fred Weir,689 Jerry F. Hough,690 Steven L. Solnick,691 and Bahman Azad (though Azad does not regard this new group as a class).692 The accounts of Kotz and Weir and Azad deserve attention.

In Revolution From Above, Kotz and Weir illustrate matter-of-factly and convincingly the positive achievements of the USSR and the many democratic and humane features of Soviet life. They argue that the reform course launched by Gorbachev unleashed processes that created new coalitions of groups that favored replacing socialism with capitalism. Boris Yeltsin became the leader of the anti-socialist bloc. With the support of “the party-state elite,” he was able to push aside two rival groups, the Gorbachev social reformists and the CPSU “Old Guard.” The breakup of the USSR as a multinational federation occurred because of the specifics of the power struggle between the Yeltsin and Gorbachev forces. Yeltsin’s anti-socialists held power in Russia while the Gorbachev social reformists held most of the Union institutions. The Yeltsin forces concluded they could maintain power and pursue capitalist restoration only by withdrawing Russia from the Soviet Union. Hence, the USSR fell apart.

The Kotz and Weir thesis has several strengths. It can explain why most of the top managers and capitalists in present-day Russia are former Soviet officials, often former CPSU members. As Yeltsin increasingly signaled his intention to go down the capitalist road, the party-state elite concluded that its power and privileges could be maintained and possibly improved by a shift to private ownership, with its members as the new owners. The swift collapse of the so-called coup in August 1991 may, in this way, be explained by the elite’s shift of loyalties both to Yeltsin and capitalism. The absence of elite (as well as mass) support for either Gorbachev or the “coup” leaders is the chief reason why the “plot” fizzled and Gorbachev’s fortunes sank between August and December 1991. It explains the rapid and relatively peaceful nature of the capitalist restoration as well as the great difficulties in making the new capitalism work.

The “bureaucratic revolution from above” thesis is, however, not completely convincing. An authoritative study693 based on interviews with former members of the Party-state elite found “no evidence” for the “fashionable theory” that “the Soviet system was toppled by the Party and state officials in order to turn their power into private wealth.” Indeed, such officials were “incapable of collective action to defend the system and incapable of consciously hastening its demise.” The “top bureaucracy,” if it can be said to have enough substance to be judged an authentic social group at all, clearly was too heterogeneous and scattered to act as a cohesive political force. Moreover, if the interests of the party-state elite were determining the pro-capitalist direction of events, how can one explain that both Gorbachev’s perestroika and Yeltsin’s free-market initiatives slashed the central bureaucracy by tens of thousands? Kotz and Weir posit an elite with wholly arbitrary boundaries of 100,000. If the elite was capable of conscious independent action in its own self-interest, why did it back Andropov’s Marxism-Leninism in 1983, and Gorbachev’s revisionism in 1987, and Yeltsin’s free-market shock therapy in 1993? Were all three highly inconsistent ideologies in the bureaucracy’s self-interest? The stealing of state assets by the bureaucratic elite was embryonic in 1987694 as the dismantling of the CPSU began in earnest, and the stealing became fully developed only in 1990-1991, lending credence to the view that the developments elsewhere, not in the party-state elite, drove the collapse. The party-state elite was reacting to events, not initiating them. Some in the elite reacted opportunistically by seizing state assets to maintain their power and privileges, but they were not the protagonists of the process.

Several other aspects mar Revolution from Above. Kotz and Weir downplay the international situation; that is, the external imperialist pressure, as a contributing cause of the Soviet downfall. Also, they have illusions about the Gorbachev project. They call what was manifestly a counterrevolution a revolution, as if the distinction were trivial. They have no criticism of Gorbachev’s concessions and retreats before the domestic pro-capitalists and foreign imperialists, including the abandonment of Cuba and Nicaragua, and the support of the Gulf War. In the final analysis, blaming the bureaucratic elite exonerates Gorbachev, whom Kotz and Weir wish to support.

On the surface, Bahman Azad also supports the thesis that the bureaucratic elite fostered a counter-revolution. In Azad’s analysis, certain political developments in Soviet history prepared the way for the Gorbachev debacle, and these elements of his analysis remain compelling even if the ideas about a bureaucratic counter-revolution are stripped away. Azad offers a sympathetic and persuasive history of the accomplishments and limits of Soviet socialism—from War Communism, 1918-1921, to the New Economic Policy, 1921-1928, Rapid Industrialization, 1928-1945, World War II, and postwar rebuilding. Azad argues that the real problems began with Khrushchev. The “rapid consumption model” and wage leveling adopted by the 20th Congress in 1956 sapped incentives, created shortages, reduced economic growth, and fostered the black market and corruption. Khrushchev’s idea that the Soviet Union had begun “the full scale building of a Communist society” adopted by the 21st Congress in 1959 was overly optimistic, sowed illusions, and led to further wage leveling and stagnation. The adoption by the 22nd Congress in 1961 of the idea that the Soviet state had become the “state of the entire people” and the CPSU “a Party of the entire people,” signaled a weakening of the Party vis-à-vis the state and a growing predominance in the Party of intellectuals and bureaucrats. In short, Azad argues that the Soviet Union’s problems and Gorbachev’s policies were the aftershocks of the mistaken policies of the Khrushchev era.695

Azad treats the Gorbachev period as a footnote to Khrushchev’s mistakes, a part of the “hiatus of 25 years in failing to implement much-needed changes.”696 Azad does not see that Gorbachev extended and amplified Khrushchev’s policies and all of their weaknesses. In place of an analysis of the proximate policies and processes leading to the collapse, Azad simply telescopes the whole process: Andropov’s reform program was hijacked by state bureaucrats under Gorbachev, who betrayed socialism and restored capitalism. In our view, the real problem was not the bureaucracy as such but the second economy that had corrupted sections of the Party and state, fostered a petit bourgeois mentality outside as well as inside the bureaucracy, and turned some bureaucrats along with the second economy entrepreneurs into a base for Gorbachev’s opportunism.

The fifth theory argues that the Soviet Union collapsed because of a lack of democracy and an over-centralized administrative system. This view of the Soviet collapse has much in common with the theory of the flaws of socialism. The difference is that those who believe in the inherent flaw of socialism think all socialist systems are doomed, whereas the lack-of-democracy theorists believe that only Soviet-style socialism was so fated. For these theorists, the lack of democratic institutions and the over-centralization of the economy derived from Stalin, or Stalin and Lenin. This view is widely held by left social democrats and Euro-communists. Historian Stephen F. Cohen and the Soviet writer, Roy Medvedev, also reflect this view, and so do some contemporary Communist Parties.697

This explanation has a superficial attractiveness; it does not require any defense of Soviet socialism. To blame the Soviet collapse on a lack of democracy and over-centralization thus serves as a psychological or political distancing mechanism. It is a way of asserting that the socialist ideal remains pure and untarnished in spite of what happened in the Soviet Union. It says: “History does not matter. The actual experience of a socialist country does not count. The only thing that matters is what socialists or Communists say today. What happened in the Soviet Union was there and then; this is here and now. Those Soviet Communists messed up, but we are different and smarter. They were too bureaucratic, undemocratic, and over-centralized, but we either knew it all along or have learned it from their mistakes.”

However much this view may serve those who want to get on to the next leaflet, demonstration, lecture, book promotion or media interview, it leaves a lot to be desired as an explanation. As soon as one tries to apply its lofty phrases to actual events, its explanatory power vanishes. This theory so lacks precision as to elude either proof or refutation. To say that the Soviet Union collapsed because of a lack of democracy and over-centralization can mean one of two things: Either the collapse occurred because the Soviet Union lacked the political and economic forms and practices familiar in Western social-democratically governed countries like Sweden (i.e., a liberal democracy and a mixed economy), or it occurred because the Soviet Union failed to develop a new kind of socialist democracy and mixed economy hitherto unknown anywhere in the world. Both ideas fail as historical explanations because they rest on idealist constructs that attempt to explain history by the degree to which it conforms or fails to conform to an ideal. Though Hegel would have found this thought congenial, modern historians, Marxist or not, believe that historical explanations must adhere to the actual details and contradictions of history, the internal logic of events. This precludes understanding history by measuring it against an outside standard.

Moreover, those who think that the Soviet Union collapsed because it failed to follow European social democracy have an additional problem. It is clear that after a certain point, Gorbachev shared the same ideals as these theorists and tried to move the Soviet Union toward a liberal democracy with a mixed economy. Yet, these moves led to a political and economic meltdown that has still not been overcome. This is an embarrassment that none of the lack-of-democracy theorists have been able to explain away.

Those who think the explanation resided in the failure of the Soviets to develop a new kind of socialist democracy with a new kind of mixed economy also face a problem. First, a concession to this viewpoint is in order. Even the strictest of historical materialists would grant that Marxist-Leninists have ideals and believe that socialism should develop toward their ideal of communism. This ideal is a very general one: a society governed by the principle of from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs, a society of abundance where rationing will be unnecessary and where people will make their own history by replacing the exploitation of wage labor and the anarchy of private production and the market with the conscious control made possible by common ownership and planning; a society where classes, commodity production, and the state along with the divisions between mental and physical labor and town and country, will disappear. Thus, Marxist-Leninists have an ideal with which to guide and assess the development of socialism. Still, it is a quite different matter to suggest that the failure to approach an ideal will cause the collapse of a socialist society. This is what the lack-of-democracy theorists say, and this is why their idealism departs from a credible historical explanation.

More to the point, the lack of democracy theorists ignore the actual history of liberal democracy and socialist democracy. The meaning and evaluation of democracy have changed over time, and neither capitalism nor liberalism has an exclusive claim to it. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, democracy meant rule by the lower classes or the oppressed, and almost all major political thinkers from Aristotle to the founders of the United States opposed democracy. Above all, liberalism valued choice and competition—the choice and competition between parties in the political arena and between commodities in the market place. Democracy came to the United States and other liberal republics gradually and then not as rule by the lower classes as such, but as participation by the lower classes in elections, as the franchise was extended first to men without property and then to ex-slaves, women and youth.

Historically, socialism had a stronger claim to democracy than liberalism. Whereas liberalism only gradually claimed democracy as a value, socialism from the start embraced its classical meaning as rule by the lower classes. In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx said that “the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”698 Whereas liberal democracy venerated choice, socialist democracy valued equality, in the sense of the abolition of the capitalist class’ superiority, domination and exploitation. Just as liberalism assimilated democratic forms, so socialism developed democratic mechanisms. Lenin had argued that workers would not spontaneously develop socialist ideas and revolutionary organizations and that consequently a vanguard party had to lead a socialist revolution. Rule by a vanguard party, however, did not mean the same thing as rule by the workers and peasants themselves. Over time socialism had to develop ways to increase the participation and control by the workers and peasants, including broadening membership in the Communist Party and developing soviets, trade unions, and other mass organizations.699

Though the process of developing democracy was far from over, the Soviet Union had developed a variety of political institutions and practices designed to provide popular participation. Every subsequent socialist country adopted and adapted the Soviet innovations. The Soviet practices included using newspapers as ombudsmen as well as news sources, vesting trade unions with power over workers’ rights, production norms, and the disposition of social funds, and creating soviets, production committees, community assemblies, governing committees of living complexes, and other Party and government bodies. Though many of these populist institutions atrophied during the difficult years surrounding the Second World War, they revived in the 1950s and involved greater and greater numbers of working people. Even under Brezhnev, popular participation in government showed many signs of vitality. Writing in 1978, when the Soviet Union contained 260 million people, a group of Soviet writers gave the following figures on Soviet political activity: 16.5 million Communists, 121 million trade union members, nearly 38 million Young Communists, over 2 million Soviet deputies, 35 million people who work with the deputies in the Soviets of People’s Deputies, 9.5 million members of People’s Control bodies, and 5.5 million members of production conferences of industrial enterprises.700 Of course, participation in a socialist soviet, just as participation in a bourgeois election, provided no conclusive proof of popular control, but it nonetheless represented, however imperfectly, the striving for a kind of socialist democracy.

If Soviet democracy was developing in some areas, however, it was experiencing problems in other areas. The special Party stores and privileges, however modest, as well as the growth of some wealthy beneficiaries of the second economy, mocked socialist equality. The primary authority of the Party had the effect of making the soviets advisory bodies at best or rubber stamps at worst. The second economy corrupted some in the Party and government. The point is that socialist democracy had both strengths and weaknesses. The complexity of the actual situation is generally not acknowledged by those who assert that a lack of democracy brought down Soviet socialism. Of course, that a society that was suffering neither invasion, economic crisis, nor popular discontent fell apart makes for an arresting paradox. To this paradox, now another must be added: it fell apart in spite of political organizations in which millions of people participated.701

The idea that centralization played a pivotal role in the collapse is just as problematic as that of the lack of democracy. The Soviet Union was the first country in history to try to organize its economy around state-owned enterprises (with some elements of non-state enterprises) and centralized state planning (with limited markets). Only a strong central government with a planned economy could achieve the goals of socialism: socializing property, protecting the revolution from enemies within and without, achieving rapid electrification and industrialization, elevating education, health care, and housing for all, and developing the most backward and oppressed areas of the country. There was no blueprint for this, and no guarantees that this would work. The entire history of the Soviet Union involved constant experimentation with various kinds planning mechanisms, different price, wage, and investment policies, and degrees of centralization and decentralization within the context of state property and central planning. To say the Soviets were continually confronting problems associated with central planning is manifestly true. They repeatedly strove to find the proper role for decentralized decision-making within the context of a centrally planned economy. To say, however, that the problem was simply centralization itself is like saying the problem with socialism is socialism. Such a position, by the way, is pretty much where Gorbachev ended up when he scuttled the central plan and opened the door to private enterprise. In other words, to say that centralization caused problems is a truism, but to say centralization itself is a problem amounts to a rejection of socialism.

The proponents of the lack-of-democracy theory believe they hold one trump card. If the Soviet Union had possessed a vital socialist democracy that really expressed the will and interests of the working class, and if the Communist Party really represented the vanguard of the working class, then the workers, including the Communists themselves, would have resisted the overthrow of the Communist Party, the evisceration of socialism, and the restoration of capitalism. Since, according to this view, neither the working class nor Communists did resist, something was lacking in Soviet democracy. The actual history of the Soviet collapse escapes this logical net. As we show in Chapter 6, working class resistance did occur. Why this resistance was not great enough to stop the dismantling of socialism is, of course, a great puzzle. In a sense, however, the lack of democracy theory actually understates the puzzle. The vast majority of people in an advanced industrial society submitted passively while a small minority turned the common wealth into their private gain, impoverished the rest of the population, and de-modernized a society for the first time in history.702 The acquiescence of a people to policies that are demonstrably not in their own self-interest constitutes a deeply troubling phenomenon, well-known in capitalist countries, and much more common than we would like to suppose. That Soviet socialism did not manage to create citizens capable of transcending the kind of inertia, willful ignorance, and business-as-usual attitudes that immobilize most people most of the time may disappoint but should not surprise us. It is as much an indictment of liberal democracy as of socialist democracy.

Moreover, placing the responsibility for Soviet passivity solely on socialist political institutions contains another problem. Many of the traditional Soviet political forms—the newspapers, the soviets, and the Communist Party itself—were undermined by Gorbachev after 1985. Thus, while the majority Soviet people remained opposed to privatization of property, the elimination of price controls, and the break-up of the Soviet Union, the traditional modes of expressing political views were evaporating. In addition, such new institutions as the Congress of People’s Deputies proved entirely ineffective at enforcing such public sentiments. On top of this, every weakening of traditional institutions and re-establishing capitalism was spearheaded by Gorbachev and other Communist leaders with the befogging assurance that they were returning to Lenin and advancing to a better socialism. In other words, it is likely that part of the workers’ passivity occurred because at the very time that Gorbachev and other Communist leaders were eroding the people’s standard of living, economic security, and socialism itself, they were promising workers a better socialism and depriving them of the very institutions through which they had previously expressed their views.

The final theory is that the Soviet collapse was mainly due to Gorbachev. Quite naturally, almost all accounts give great weight to Gorbachev’s role. Some accounts, however, go further than others in placing responsibility on him. According to British historian, Archie Brown, the key to the unraveling of Soviet society was “the Gorbachev factor,” mainly Gorbachev’s departure from Communist orthodoxy.703 For Brown, this apostasy undermined the system in unforeseen ways, but Gorbachev nonetheless played the role of a heroic Westernizer, a modern-day Peter the Great. Others, who also see Gorbachev as the decisive factor, see him as more calculating than Brown does. Jerry Hough thinks that Gorbachev was a free marketeer.704 Euvgeny Novikov and Patrick Bascio suggest that Gorbachev was a Gramscian Eurocommunist.705 Anthony D’Agostino argues that Gorbachev was a Machiavellian, for whom ideas came second to getting and maintaining power.706

Though we agree with the common element of these views, that Gorbachev’s ideological deviations played a key role, we nonetheless disagree with several other elements. It is not just that where Brown sees a positive, we see a negative. Rather, accounts that over-emphasize Gorbachev obscure the extent to which he was not alone but operated in a historical and social context. When he first departed from Andropov, Gorbachev represented ideas that nonetheless had precedent in the Communist movement, namely in the ideas of Bukharin and Khrushchev, and ideas that had appeal to some in Soviet society. Such ideas as the weakening of the central power of the Party and the government, the legitimizing of private property, and allowing more freedom for markets had potency in the 1980s because they palpably reflected the interests of the dynamic (if parasitic) sector attached to illegal, private enterprise. Thus, Gorbachev was both a legatee of a certain tradition and the product of his times and not just a lone “factor” making history.

Moreover, in some writers, a stress on Gorbachev leads to seeing in his actions a longstanding, preconceived plan. The weight of evidence, however, seems to point more toward a shallow leader who acted rashly, impulsively, and contradictorily. Though Gorbachev’s policies eventually formed a pattern of capitulation to the petty bourgeois, liberal, and corrupt interests at home and imperialist pressure abroad, this was not evident at the start. Opportunism rather than a preconceived plan or aim provided the beacon that guided his steps.

In the end the story of the Soviet collapse was not the inevitable unfolding of a tragedy rooted in the impossibility of socialism. Nor was it a defeat brought about by popular opposition or foreign enemies. Nor was it due to Soviet socialism’s failure to match up to some ideal of socialism that embodied liberal democracy and a mixed economy. Nor was it primarily the story of the conscious betrayal of one man. Rather, it was the story of a triumph of a certain tendency within the revolution itself. It was a tendency rooted at first in the peasant nature of the country and later in a second economy, a sector that flourished because of consumer demands unsatisfied by the first economy and because of the failure of authorities to appreciate the danger it represented and to enforce the law against it. It was a tendency that had manifested itself in Bukharin and Khrushchev before Gorbachev. It was a tendency that believed that prosperity, democracy, and its vision of socialism could come quickly and easily without sacrifice, without struggle, and without strong central authority. It believed in making concessions to imperialism, liberalism, private property and the market. Some adherents of this tendency believed they were true socialists, though they allied themselves with others whose true sympathies were with money-making and private property. Not until Gorbachev had this tendency in the revolution held full sway and been carried to its logical conclusion. Only with Gorbachev was the full folly of this course realized, when it led not to a new kind of socialism but to new kind of barbarism.

At the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey, Zeus decries the way mortals blame the gods for their miseries, since “they themselves, with their own reckless ways, compound their pains beyond their proper share.” It is a long way from the destruction of Troy to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the temptation of men to blame gods, nature, or some other powerful, outside force remains. In the case of the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro decried this temptation in words more prosaic but no less apt than Homer’s. “Socialism,” Castro said, “did not die from natural causes: it was a suicide.”707 If our account has any lasting value, it will be in furthering a discussion of the “reckless ways” that wrecked the first socialist state.