Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union

356. Howard Selsam, Socialism and Ethics, (New York: International Publishers, 1943), 92-99. Lenin held that the class values of the working class—solidarity, unity, cooperation, comradeship, etc., would become universal as socialist society became universal. The needs of the working class “create for it an ethics that is at one and the same time a class ethics and a human ethics embracing actually or potentially all men.”

357. Jerry Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-1991 (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1997), 192-196.

358. Ligachev, 132, 189.

359. Ellman and Kontorovich, “The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Memoir Literature,” Europe-Asia Studies, 49, no. 2 (March 1997): 265.

360. Robert Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumphs and His Failure (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 156.

361. Anthony Jones and William Moskoff, Koops: The Rebirth of Entrepreneurship in the Soviet Union (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), xv.

362. Jones and Moskoff, 78.

363. Victor Perlo, “The Economic and Political Crisis in the USSR,” Political Affairs, 70, (August 1991): 15.

364. Gregory Grossman, “The Second Economy: Boon or Bane for the Reform of the First Economy?” in Economic Reforms in the Socialist World (London: Macmillan, 1989), 83.

365. John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 5.

366. Brown, 166.

367. Anders Aslund, Gorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989), 32.

368. Ligachev, 318.

369. Hough, 154.

370. David M. Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution from Above (New York: Routledge, 1997), 97.

371. Nina Andreyeva, “I Cannot Forgo My Principles,” in Alexander Dallin and Gail W. Lapidus, eds., The Soviet System: From Crisis to Collapse (Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press, 1995), 288-296.

372. Leading proponents of this view are: Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs, 252-254; Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University, 2000), 153-160; Roy Medvedev and Giulietto Chiesa, Time of Change (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 189-206; Robert Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened (New York et al.: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 204-213; Yitzhak M. Brudny, “The Heralds of Opposition to Perestroika,” Ed A. Hewett and Victor H. Winston, eds., Milestones in Glasnost and Perestroika (Washington, D. C.: Brookings Institute, 1991), 153-189; Anthony D’Agostino, Gorbachev’s Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 191-197; David M. Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution from Above (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 67-68; Joseph Gibbs, Gorbachev’s Glasnost (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999), 66-73.

373. Medvedev and Chiesa, 190.

374. Brudny, 167.

375. Kaiser, 204.

376. Andreyeva, passim.

377. Kaiser, 204.

378. Andreyeva, 290-293.

379. Kaiser, 204.

380. Andreyeva, 294-295.

381. Gibbs, 67.

382. Stephen F. Cohen, “Introduction,” to Ligachev, x, xxxii.

383. Gorbachev, 252.

384. Medvedev and Chiesa, 192.

385. Andreyeva, 296.

386. Gibbs, 67.

387. Ligachev, 301.

388. Valery Boldin, Ten Years That Shook the World: The Gorbachev Era as Witnessed By His Chief of Staff (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 168.

389. Gibbs,68.

390. Medvedev and Chiesa, 193.

391. Ligachev, 302.

392. Ligachev, 304-308.

393. Ligachev, 308.

394. Medvedev and Chiesa, 193.

395. Medvedev and Chiesa, 194-196.

396. Kaiser, 213.

397. Medvedev and Chiesa, 196.

398. Chernyaev, 154.

399. Medvedev and Chiesa, 196.

400. Kaiser, 213.

401. Gibbs, 71.

402. Medvedev and Chiesa, 196.

403. Chernyaev, 156.

404. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment (New York, Oxford University Press, 1998), 461.

405. Ligachev, 152.

406. Hough, 106.

407. William Taubman, Khrushchev: the Man and His Era (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003), 587, 782. Alexander Yakovlev was a link between the Khrushchev and Gorbachev eras on the proposal to divide the Party, according to this biography, which seems likely to be the standard scholarly work in English for some time. Taubman interviewed Yakovlev, author of the party-splitting proposal to Gorbachev. Having worked in Moscow under Khrushchev in 1962, Yakovlev described to Taubman the CC Secretariat’s resistance to Khrushchev’s division of the Party into industrial and rural segments. Taubman states that, at the October 1964 Plenum that endorsed Khrushchev’s forced retirement, certain leaders characterized the party’s division as “the worst confusion our Soviet state has known since it was created.”

408. Brown, 106.

409. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 282.

410. William E. Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 209.

411. Brown, 101; Gorbachev, Memoirs, 605.

412. P. Fedosyev, ed., What Is Democratic Socialism? (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980), 18.

413. Norman Markowitz, “On Holz’s Defense of Leninism,” Nature, Society and Thought 6, no. 3, 354.

414. Brown, 42, 328.

415. Odom, 115.

416. Ligachev, 15.

417. Andrew Murray, Flashpoint: World War III (London: Pluto Press, 1996), 42.

418. D’Agostino, 117-118.

419. D’Agostino, 119.

420. D’Agostino, 119.

421. Odom, 151

422. Odom, 137.

423. Mikhail Gorbachev, October and Perestroika: the Revolution Continues (Moscow: Novosti Press Agency, 1987), 66-67.

424. Odom,102.

425. Sarah E. Mendelson, Changing Course: Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 111. A strongly favorable assessment of Najibullah can be found in Philip Bonosky, Afghanistan: Washington’s Secret War(New York: International Publishers, 2001).

426. Mendelson, 122.

427. Mendelson, 117.

428. Vladimir Shubin, ANC: A View from Moscow (Bellville, South Africa: Mayibuye Books, University of Western Cape, 1999), 340-341.

429. V. I. Lenin, Questions of National Policy and Proletarian Internationalism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 60.

430. David Lane, The Rise and the Fall of State Socialism (Cambridge: Polity Press: 1996), 124.

431. Ellman and Kontorovich, 134.

432. Ellman and Kontorovich, 145.

433. Ellman and Kontorovich, 188.

434. Ligachev, 339.

435. Ellman and Kontorovich, 2.

436. Ellman and Kontorovich, 150.

437. Ellman and Kontorovich, 189.

438. S. Frederick Starr, “A Usable Past,” in Alexander Dallin and Gail Lapidus, eds., The Soviet System from Crisis to Collapse (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 14-15.

439. Anne White, Democratization in Russia under Gorbachev 1985-91: The Birth of a Voluntary Sector (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 6-12.

440. Ellman and Kontorovich, 150.

441. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1975), 36.

442. Yuri Andropov, “In Celebration of the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” A Reader on Social Sciences (Moscow: Progress, 1985), 381; John and Margrit Pittman, Peaceful Coexistence: Its Theory and Practice in the Soviet Union (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 85.

443. Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1998), 17.

444. Odom, 407.

445. Ligachev, 143.

446. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-39 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 1.

447. Suny, 464.

448. D’Agostino, 178

449. Ellman and Kontorovich, “The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Memoir Literature,” 268-269.

450. Marshall I. Goldman, What Went Wrong with Perestroika (New York: Norton, 1991), 128-136.

451. Gregory Grossman, “Sub-Rosa Privatization and Marketization in the USSR,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 507, (January 1990): 49.

Notes for Chapter 6

452. Graeme Gill, The Collapse of a Single-party System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 78.

453. Stanislav Menshikov, Catastrophe or Catharsis? The Soviet Economy Today (London: Inter-Verso, 1990), 41.

454. Roy Medvedev, Post-Soviet Russia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 47.

455. Carl A. Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership: With an Epilogue on Gorbachev (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1990), 235.

456. Seumus Milne, “Catastroika has not only been a disaster for Russia: a decade on, enthusiasm for the Soviet collapse looks misplaced.” The Guardian (London), 16 August 2001.

457. John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 94.

458. Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 193.

459. Jerry Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-91(Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1997), 502.

460. Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2000), 135.

461. Chernyaev, 299.

462. Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: the Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 24. Volkov confirms that the bogus “co-ops,” created by the ill-named 1988 Law on Cooperatives, led to explosive growth in private business enterprise and corresponding growth in violent business protection rackets. In 1992, with Yeltsin in power, the less well-known Law on Private Protection and Detective Activity actually legalized private protection rackets and ”for several years formally sanctioned many of the activities already pursued by racketeering gangs….”

463. Hough, 503.

464. Hough, 260.

465. Robert Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumphs and His Failure (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 409.

466. Hough, 249.

467. William E. Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 439.

468. Chernyaev, 255.

469. Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 475.

470. Peter Schweizer, Victory! The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994), 14.

471. Odom, 474.

472. Hough, 432.

473. Hough, 502.

474. Pekka Sutela, Economic Thought and Economic Reform in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 5. Outside the Soviet Union, bourgeois economists stated bluntly that “socialist reform” economics aimed to incorporate capitalist elements into socialism until capitalism was fully restored. According to Sutela, “Seeing the inefficiency and indeed impossibility of such an [orthodox Communist, i.e., largely publicly owned and centrally planned] economic model, early reformers relaxed some of the orthodox assumptions and tended to see the capitalist corporation as their model. Further along the road, more and more characteristics of capitalism were added to the normative image of efficient socialism until—by the late eighties—a transition to genuine capitalism was advocated and also practiced in such countries as Hungary and Poland.” Dr. Sutela, a Soviet affairs specialist, worked for the Bank of Finland.

475. Chernyaev, 257.

476. Gill, 95.

477. Marshall I. Goldman, What Went Wrong with Perestroika? (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 193.

478. Brown, 184

479. Gill, 68.

480. Chernyaev, 173.

481. Gill, 74.

482. Chernyaev, 175.

483. Chernyaev, 179.

484. Yegor Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 91-93.

485. Vitali I. Vorotnikov, Mi Verdad: Notas y Reflexiones del Diario de Trabajo de un Miembro del Buro Politico del PCUS (Havana: Casa Editorial Abril, 1995), 486.

486. Gill, 78.

487. Gill, 79.

488. Gill, 79.

489. Dunlop, 79.

490. David M. Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution from Above (New York: Routledge, 1997), 102.

491. Dunlop, 81.

492. Dunlop, 79-81.

493. Dunlop, 106-7.

494. Kotz and Weir, 139.

495. Ligachev, 347.

496. Dunlop, 82.

497. Dunlop, 51.

498. Gill, 94-95.

499. Gill, 104.

500. Gill, 104.

501. Ligachev, 89.

502. P. N. Fedoseyev, ed., What Is Democratic Socialism? (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980), 127.

503. Gill, 115.

504. Gill, 115

505. Gill, 117.

506. Gill, 135.

507. Ligachev, 368.

508. Ligachev, 177-179.

509. Gill, 144.

510. Vorotnikov, 486.

511. Chernyaev, 189.

512. Chernyaev, 189.

513. Ligachev, xxiii.

514. Chernyaev, 270.

515. Ligachev, 44.

516. Valery Boldin, Ten Years That Shook the World: The Gorbachev Era as Witnessed by His Chief of Staff (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 258.

517. Boldin, 282.

518. Stephen Handelman, Comrade Criminal: Russia’s New Mafiya (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 311.

519. Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: the Soviet Collapse 1970-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), ix.

520. Medvedev, 47.

521. Alexander Dallin and Gail W. Lapidus, eds., The Soviet System: From Crisis to Collapse Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1995), 75.

522. Dunlop, 72.

523. Dunlop, 80.

524. Kaiser, 378.

525. Hough, 416.

526. George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 170.

527. Boris Kargarlitsky, Restoration in Russia: Why Capitalism Failed (London: Verso, 1995), 83.

528. Goldman, 128.

529. Hough, 208.

530. Ligachev, 339.

531. Kotz and Weir, 80.

532. Hough, 343.

533. William Moskoff, Hard Times: Impoverishment and Protest in the Perestroika Years. The Soviet Union 1985-91 (Armonk, New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1993), 28.

534. Moskoff, 43, 46.

535. Moskoff, 59.

536. Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich, The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System (Armonk, New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 22.

537. Hough, 359.

538. Kaiser, 378.

539. Abel Aganbegyan, The Economic Challenge of Perestroika (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988; Inside Perestroika: the Future of the Soviet Economy (New York: Harper and Row, 1989).

540. Michael Alexeev and William Pyle, “A Note on Measuring the Unofficial Economy in the former Soviet Republics,” William Davidson Institute Working Papers, University of Michigan Business School, no. 436, table #6, (July 2001): 19. The table is presented here as presented by Alexeev and Pyle. It seems doubtful, however, that their method yields estimates accurate to a tenth of a percentage point. We believe the estimates should be understood merely as a reasonable indicator of the order of magnitude of the second economy in each republic and a reasonable indicator of its growth rate. Thus, in Estonia and Uzbekistan, the exceptional cases, the slight decline in share should be interpreted as an indicator of little or no change in the second economy’s role in the total economy of those republics in the period under review.

541. Roy Medvedev, Post Soviet Russia (New York: Columbia, 2000), 170-171.

542. Steven L. Solnick, Stealing the State, Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 116.

543. Handelman, 56.

544. Handelman, 71.

545. Hough, 130.

546. Anthony Jones and William Moskoff, eds., The Great Market Debate in Soviet Economics, An Anthology (Armonk, New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1991), ix.

547. Hough, 134.

548. Hough, 139.

549. Hough, 360.

550. Hough, 363.

551. Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl and Melvin A. Goodman, The Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1997), 4.

552. Chernyaev, 83.

553. David Remnick, Resurrection: the Struggle for a New Russia (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 17.

554. Ligachev, 152.

555. Hough, 374.

556. Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000), 291.

557. Dunlop, 90.

558. Dunlop, 90.

559. Dunlop, 91.

560. V. I. Lenin, Selected Works, 1, (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 625. “From their daily experience the masses know perfectly well the value of geographical and economic ties, and the advantages of a big market and a big state. They will, therefore, resort to secession only when national oppression and national friction make joint life absolutely intolerable and hinder any and all economic intercourse.”

561. Geoffrey Hosking, The First Socialist Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 473.

562. Kaiser, 315.

563. Brown, 280-282.

564. Hosking, 473.

565. Dunlop, 55.

566. Hough, 388.

567. Odom, 351.

568. Hough, 406.

569. Kotz and Weir, 266.

570. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 501.

571. Chernyaev, 148.

572. Fred Coleman, The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire: Forty Years that Shook the World from Stalin to Yeltsin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 312.

573. Chernyaev, 320, 327.

574. Chernyaev, 297, 298.

575. Chernyaev, 305.

576. Chernyaev, 356.

577. Anthony D’Agostino, Gorbachev’s Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 310.

578. Hough, 428.

579. Hough, 439.

580. Hough, 455.

581. Hough, 429.

582. Dunlop, 196-197.

583. Odom, 320.

584. Hough, 431.

585. Dunlop, 217.

586. Dunlop, 253.

587. Amy Knight, Spies Without Cloaks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 18.

588. Dunlop, 253.

589. Hough, 431.

590. Knight, 18.

591. Hough, 432.

592. Dunlop, 199.

593. Dunlop, 201.

594. Dunlop, 198.

595. Odom, 342.

596. Knight, 18.

597. Hough, 433.

598. Hough, 432.

599. Odom, 353,354.

600. Odom, 355.

601. Hough, 436.

602. Dunlop, 186.

603. Dunlop, 195.

604. Odom, 341.

605. Vladimir Shubin, ANC: A View from Moscow (Bellville, South Africa: Mayibuye Books, 1999), 390.

Notes for Chapter 7

606. Fedor Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring: the Era of Khrushchev through the Eyes of His Adviser (New York: Scribners, 1992), 276.

607. Fedor Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring: the Era of Khrushchev through the Eyes of His Adviser (New York: Scribners, 1992), 276.

608. Alexander Dallin, “Causes of the Collapse of the USSR,” in Alexander Dallin and Gail Lapidus, eds., The Soviet System from Crisis to Collapse (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 686.

609. Fedor Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring; the Era of Khrushchev through the Eyes of His Adviser (New York: Scribners, 1992), 276.

610. “Socialism in the Soviet Union: Lessons and Perspectives. From the Program of the Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation,” 20 April 1997 in Nature, Society, and Thought, 10, no. 3 (1997): 421.

611. Jerry Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-1991 (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1997), 15.

612. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Avon Books, 1992), xiii.

613. Vladimir Treml and Michael Alexeev, “The Second Economy and the Destabilizing Effect of Its Growth on the State Economy of the Soviet Union: 1965-1989,” Berkley-Duke Occasional Papers, no. 36, (1993): 2.

614. Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina van den Heuvel, Voices of Glasnost (New York: Norton, 1989), 25.

615. Domenico Losurdo, “Flight from History? The Communist Movement between Self-criticism and Self-contempt,” Nature, Society, and Thought, 13, no. 4, (2000): 507.

616. Stephen F. Cohen, “American Journalism and Russia’s Tragedy.” The Nation 2 October 2000, 23 December 2000,

617. Leninism and the World Revolutionary Working-class Movement, (Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1971), 133.

618. John and Margrit Pittman, Peaceful Coexistence (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 69.

619. Albert Szymanski, “The Class Basis of Political Processes in the Soviet Union,” Science and Society, 62, (winter 1978-79): 426-457.

620. Since we speak of both egalitarian and non-egalitarian aspects of Soviet society, perhaps a clarification is necessary. A number of things were true at once. Wage-leveling increased in Soviet industry starting with Khrushchev and served to reduce worker productivity incentives which in turn reduced overall Soviet economic growth rate, though there were other growth-inhibiting factors too. Nevertheless, the general egalitarianism promoted by Soviet policies was a positive achievement. Though inequality caused by the ill-gotten gains in the second economy increased over time, it remained paltry by capitalist and especially by U.S. standards. Similarly, the material privileges of top Party and state officials were a reality, but they too were modest compared to elite privileges in capitalist countries. Still, the inequality caused by illegal money-making and official privilege were politically objectionable from a Leninist standpoint and were politically unwise because they became an easy target for domestic and foreign anti-Communists.

621. Boris N. Ponomarev, Communism in a Changing World (New York: Sphinx Press, 1983), 78.

622. Gus Hall, Socialism and Capitalism in a Changing World (New York: New Outlook Publishers, 1990), 50-53.

623. Gus Hall, “Marxism-Leninism in the World Struggle against Opportunism,” (speech at Political Affairs Forum, 28 February 1982) Political Affairs Reprint, 5.

624. Gus Hall, “The World We Preserve Must Be Livable,” World Marxist Review, 35, no. 5 (May 1988): 22-23.

625. Bertell Ollman, “Market Mystification in Capitalist and Market Socialist Societies,” in Market Socialism: the Debate among Socialists (New York: Routledge, 1998), 99.

626. David Laibman, “Editorial Perspectives, Socialism: Alternative Visions and Models,” Science and Society, 56, no. 1 (spring 1992): 4.

627. Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich, The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: an Insider’s History (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 34-35.

628. Anders Aslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1995), 13.

629. Treml and Alexeev, 25-26.

630. Bahman Azad, Heroic Struggle, Bitter Defeat (New York: International, 2000), 116.

631. Victor and Ellen Perlo, Dynamic Stability: the Soviet Economy Today (New York: International Publishers, 1980), 337.

632. Ronald L. Meek, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1973), 262.

633. Joseph V. Stalin, Selected Works (Davis, California: Cardinal Publishers, 1971), 324.

634. Maurice Dobb, Soviet Economic Development since 1917 (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 334; Meek, 282.

635. A. M. Rumyantsev, Categories and Laws of the Political Economy of Communism (Moscow; Progress Publishers, 1969), 225.

636. Anders Aslund, Gorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform (Ithaca: Cornell, 1989), 4.

637. David M. Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution from Above (New York: Routledge, 1997), 67.

638. Tatyana Zaslavskaya, The Second Socialist Revolution, an Alternative Soviet Strategy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), ix.

639. Stalin, 368.

640. Yuri Andropov, “Speech at the CPSU Central Committee Meeting,” June 15, 1983 (Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1983), 22.

641. Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds (San Francisco: City Lights, 1997), 60-61.

642. Arguably, Laos can be added to the list. Laos has a Marxist-Leninist government that seeks to maintain an orientation toward socialism, and over time, of course, it can develop into a socialist society. The development hurdles are enormous. Presently the country is characterized by the UN as among the “least developed” states, a status owing in part, no doubt, to savage U.S. bombardment during the Indochina War. By and large, since 1986, in step with its neighbor Vietnam, Laos, led by People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP), has pursued a renewal strategy to create a multi-tiered economy with a public sector, a foreign sector, and domestic private sector. Laos has sought partial integration into the world capitalist economy. See official website of Laos at

643. Carl Riskin, China’s Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 290.

644. Al L. Sargis, “Ideological Tendencies and Reform Policy in China’s Primary Stage of Socialism,” Nature, Society, and Thought, 11, no. 4, (1998): 396.

645. Jose Bell Lara, ed., Cuba in the 1990s (Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, Editorial Jose Marti, 1999), 111, 87.

646. Evelio Vilarino Ruiz, Cuba: Socialist Economic Reform and Modernization (Havana: Editorial Jose Marti, 1998), 16-17.

647. Rajan Menon, “Post-Mortem: the Causes and Consequences of the Soviet Collapse,” The Harriman Review, 7, nos. 10-12, (1994): 9.

648. Domenico Losurdo, “Flight from History? The Communist Movement between Self-criticism and Self-contempt,” Nature, Society, and Thought, 13, no. 4, (2000): 498.

649. Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Soviet Russia (New York: Norton, 2001), 208.

650. David M. Kotz, “Is Russia Becoming Capitalist?” Science and Society, 65, no. 2, (summer 2001): 157-181.

651. Roy Medvedev, Post Soviet Russia (New York: Columbia University, 2000), 51.

652. Ian Fisher, “As Poland Endures Hard Times, Capitalism Comes under Attack,” New York Times 12 June 2002, 14 July 2002, .

653. G. A. Kozlov, ed., Political Economy: Socialism (Moscow: Progress, 1977), 80-81.

654. “Mr. X” George Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs (July 1947): 566-82, quoted in Gregory Grossman, “Subverted Sovereignty: Historic Role of the Soviet Underground,” in Stephen S. Cohen et al., eds., The Tunnel at the End of the Light (Berkeley: University of California, 1998), 24-50.

655. Azad, 179.

656. Kenneth Neill Cameron, Stalin: Man of Contradiction (Toronto: NC Press Ltd., 1987), 7.

657. Mikhail Gorbachev, October and Perestroika: The Revolution Continues (Moscow: Novosti, 1987), 26.

658. Hans Heinz Holz, “The Downfall and Future of Socialism,” Nature, Society, and Thought 5, no. 3, (1992): 121.

659. Herbert Aptheker, “The Soviet Collapse and the Surrounding Capitalist World,” Science and Society, 62, no. 2, (summer 1998): 284.

660. Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds (San Francisco: City Lights, 1997), 77.

661. Parenti, 76-86.

662. Aileen Kelly, “In the Promised Land,” The New York Review of Books 68, no. 19, (November 29, 2001): 45.

663. Stephane Courtois et al., eds., The Black Book of Communism, Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

664. Yuri Krasin, The Dialectics of Revolutionary Process (Moscow: Novosti, 1973), 7.

665. Anthony Coughlan, “Social Democracy and National Independence,” (unpublished article, May 1993), 4.

Notes for Epilogue

666. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 264.

667. “Social Dimensions of Globalization,” ICFTU submission to the first meeting of the ILO World Commission on Globalization (25-26 March 2002) International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, Brussels, 2002, 1.

668. Fred Halliday, “A Singular Collapse: The Soviet Union, Market Pressure, and Interstate Competition,” Contention Magazine (1992).

669. We have adapted and supplemented the explanations identified by Kotz and Weir, David Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 3-5.

670. Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire (New York: Random House, 1995), 648.

671. See the summaries and critiques of Malia and Pipes in Walter Laqueur, The Dream That Failed (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), passim and Alexander Dallin, “Causes of the Collapse of the USSR,” Post-Soviet Affairs 8(1992): 279-282.

672. Dmitri Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore: The Free Press, 1998).

673. Roy Medvedev and Giulietto Chiesa, Time of Change: An Insider’s View of Russia’s Transformation (New York: Pantheon, 1989).

674. Elizabeth Teague, “The Fate of the Working Class,” in Robert Daniels, ed., Soviet Communism from Reform to Collapse (Lexington, Mass.: Heath and Company, 1995), 352-365.

675. Stephen White, “The Minorities’ Struggle for Sovereignty,” in Daniels, 216-229; Yitzhak Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953-1991 (Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1998), and Helene d’Encausse, The End of the Soviet Empire: The Triumph of Nations (New York: A New Republic Books, Basic Books, A Division of Harper Collins, 1994).

676. Anders Aslund, Gorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989), 4-5.

677. Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich, The Destruction of the Soviet System: An Insider’s History (Armonk, New York, and London, England: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 17.

678. Ellman and Kontorovich, 30-40.

679. Anthony D’Agostino, Gorbachev’s Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 272-273, 285, 296.

680. New York Times (February 26, 2001).

681. Andre Gunder Frank, “What Went Wrong in the ‘Social’ East?” Humboldt Journal of Socialist Relations 24, no. 1 and 2: 179-184.

682. Manuel Castells and Emma Kiselova, The Collapse of Soviet Communism: A View From the Information Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 3.

683. Laqueur, 58-59.

684. Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy that Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994); Sean Gervasi, “A Full Court Press: the Destabilization of the Soviet Union,” Covert Action 35(Fall, 1990): 21-26.

685. Peter Schweizer, Reagan’s War [Bound galley copy] (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 3-4.

686. Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (New York et al.: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

687. Fitzgerald, 474.

688. Ellman and Kontorovich, 57.

689. Ellman and Kontorovich, 59.

690. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Merit Publishers, 1965), 252-254.

691. David Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System (New York and London: Routledge, 1997.

692. Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-1991 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1997).

693. Steven L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1998).

694. Bahman Azad, Heroic Struggle Bitter Defeat: Factors Contributing to the Dismantling of the Socialist State in the USSR (New York: International Publishers, 2000).

695. Ellman and Kontorovich, 27.

696. Solnick, passim.

697. Azad, 115-118, 120, 129-134.

698. Azad, 162.

699. See the “Conclusion” for a full discussion of these positions.

700. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), 53.

701. C. B. Macpherson, The Real World of Democracy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), passim.

702. E. Ambartsumov, F. Burlatsky, Y. Krasin, and E. Pletnyov, Real Socialism…for a working class estimate (reprint from New Times) (New York: New Outlook Publishers, [1978]), 10.

703. For a good summary of studies of Soviet political institutions, see Albert Szymanski, “The Class Basis of Political Processes in the Soviet Union,” Science & Society (Winter, 1978-79): 426-457.

704. Stephen Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000), 41.

705. Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1996).

706. Robert V. Daniel, “Was Communism Reformable?” The Nation, 3 January 2000, 26.

707. Euvgeny Novikov and Patrick Bascio, Gorbachev and the Collapse of the Soviet Communist Party (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 39-44.

708. Anthony D’Agostino, Gorbachev’s Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1998), passim.

709. “1992 Castro Interviewed on Soviet Collapse, Stalin,” El Nuevo Diario [Managua] (3 June 1992).