If the world had gone down this pathway, Gorbachev would now appear the political “sphinx” astutely placating different constituencies with his opaque messages. The visionary pragmatist then would have been praised for taking his country “across the river feeling with his foot one stone at a time” to the shores of capitalist prosperity. The river-crossing metaphor is, of course, Chinese, and it refers to Deng Xiaoping. It is perhaps worth remembering that until the end of 1989, or even later, Gorbachev was universally praised as democracy promoter and the bold unifier of Europe, while Deng was vilified as the butcher of Tiananmen Square. The difference between the Chinese and Soviet exits from communism, however, was not only in the leading personalities and their political styles. There existed plenty of structural differences, the majority of them historically inherited, contingent, and generally unrelated to communism.
In two very different ways, the year 1989 marked the extinction of communism. The Soviet Union fell even faster than China rose. The People’s Republic of China also had experienced its close call in the spring of 1989 when an emergent factional split at the top of communist hierarchy had provoked the student movement symbolically associated with Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The student movement displayed the same strengths and weaknesses as the contemporary antiauthoritarian movements in the Soviet Union or, for that matter, the western New Left in 1968 and the Arab Spring of 2011. The spontaneous protest delivered a huge charge of youthful emotional energy directed primarily at the hypocritical and self-serving elders. But the movement lacked an extensive autonomous organization, short-term political goals, and robust connection to provincial towns, let alone the countryside. In 1989 the Chinese party cadres closed their ranks against the movement because the previous episode of upper-echelon factionalism provoking student militancy, the ultra-Maoist Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, was very much in their memory. Perhaps more importantly, senior Chinese cadres remained the veterans of armed struggle—unlike Gorbachev and his comrades who were career apparatchiks two generations removed from revolution and civil war. For people like Deng Xiaoping, the notion of power growing from a gun barrel was not merely a metaphor.
The suppression of the Tiananmen protests, however, came at a steep ideological cost. The activist students laid claim on the same ideals that legitimated the Communist party itself. The leftist attack on a leftist regime produced a turn to the right even if nobody from the top ever dared to officially acknowledge it. In effect, 1989 marked the end of Chinese communism, too. The ruling CCP quietly put aside its dangerously double-sided ideology and shifted instead to what might be called performance-based legitimacy. This was in fact a well-known move in the policy repertoire of communist regimes. As early as in 1921 the Russian Bolsheviks, ever mindful of past revolutionary precedents, had been coyly admitting that their market-driven New Economic Policy (NEP) meant the necessary phase of “auto-Thermidorean restoration” in revolutionary sequence. In other words, we better liberalize ourselves, as temporary retreat and ahead of the class enemies. Also recall the once famous examples of Tito’s Yugoslavia and Janos Kadar’s Hungary in the 1960s that combined various market experiments with targeted political repression. Even the uneventful reign of Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Union, in retrospect nostalgically remembered as the “good decades,” in fact meant a conservative reaction to the boisterous and unsettling period of Khrushchev’s Thaw. In the 1970s Soviet leaders, however, ended any talk of market socialism because the export earnings from oil and natural gas afforded them the transient luxury of a risk-free bureaucratic inertia.
Post-Maoist China, of course, had little oil to export. Instead, the CCP could draw for its latter-day NEP from the human ocean of industrious peasants and provincial artisans as well as the market knowledge of the Chinese diaspora. The immediately political rationale for admitting market forces into the Chinese countryside and export zones was clear and simple: to let the peasants feed themselves and the cities in order to defuse tensions. By making this first defensive step, the Chinese communists stumbled on the long road that led them to bypass the political crisis of 1989. Still nominally communist, China essentially reproduced at a greater scale the earlier pattern of anticommunist developmental states in East Asia, such as South Korea and Taiwan, which had grown under the Cold War patronage of American hegemony.
The inadvertently lucky escape of Chinese communism helps us to pinpoint the causes of the Soviet inadvertent disaster. It was, overall, a colossal failure of collective action on the part of nomenklatura. The avalanche of political events in 1989 caused panic and numerous defections from the ranks of Soviet officialdom. It was they who actually undid their own state—not the romantic nationalists in the non-Russian republics, nor the democratic intelligentsia in Moscow and Leningrad. The antinomenklatura insurgents, for all their emotional appeal, had not yet gathered force to overthrow communism on their own. In 1989 and still in 1991 they were lacking serious organizational bases to rapidly mobilize and intercept the falling political power.
Surprisingly enough, neither could the Soviet nomenklatura rely on any legitimate overarching networks to coordinate their self-defenses at a critical moment. During the years of perestroika in 1985–1989, Mikhail Gorbachev had been astutely using his supreme powers as General Secretary to safeguard himself from the bureaucratic backlash of the kind that had buried Nikita Khrushchev. Gorbachev’s maneuvering, conducted both in public (i.e., glasnost) and in the insider apparat intrigues, in which he was reputedly so adept, confused and immobilized all three institutional pillars of Soviet regime: the Communist Party, central ministries, and secret police. But in 1989 Gorbachev’s inevitable sacrifice of the satellite communist regimes in Eastern Europe suddenly revealed to the embattled nomenklatura their true stakes in this big and uncertain game. Following 1989, the Soviet oligarchic elite fragmented exactly along the lines of bureaucratic turf in the industrial sectors and national republics. For the first time since the legendary 1920s, various political factions appeared within and around the Communist party. But these factions, progressive and reactionary alike, proved short-lived because in the rapidly unwinding chaos they had very little time to pull themselves together. By default, the nomenklatura were left with what they actually knew very welclass="underline" the elementary personalistic networks of corruption and collusion. At the time, this process seemed utterly chaotic—yet it was not entirely random.
The nomenklatura represented the top echelon of bureaucratic administration. This is why they were all hierarchically subordinated and in principle removable. As in any big managerial bureaucracy, the secrets of survival had always been extending the insider networks of patronage connections, accruing lobbying weight, and protecting the turfs. After 1989 these survival strategies were opportunistically pushed to a totally new scale. The nomenklatura existed in three intersecting hierarchies: territorial governments (including ethnic autonomies), economic branch ministries, and the central controlling apparatus of the secret police and the party’s ideological “inquisition.” Among the three, the controlling hierarchy had been preeminent, yet it also proved the most difficult to privatize. After all, a secret police without a state becomes a mafia, and ideological “inquisition” without a ruling party is reduced to a sulking sect. The territorial and economic units of the former U.S.S.R., by comparison, proved fabulously endowed for the self-aggrandizing separatism. Who could now remove a national president for life or a private capitalist oligarch with his assets stashed away in an exotic tax haven?