The Soviet industrial assets by various brutally simple schemes were snatched into private control (admittedly a mild way of saying stolen) even before privatization was sanctioned by any legislation. Meanwhile national republics and city halls also became corporate property of the kind that Americans call “political machines.” Ironically, the liberal intelligentsia themselves suggested these new strategies along with their ideological justifications. The nascent “civil societies” (in practice, the networks of intelligentsia usually limited to capital cities) were now aspiring to turn their countries into liberal democracies bound to join the capitalist West on their own, bypassing Moscow and its mumbling, outpaced Gorbachev. This rapid ideological drift, from the erstwhile New Left and reform communism to the creed of Margaret Thatcher, reflected the radicalization of demands typical of any revolution. After 1989 the insurgent intelligentsia were demanding three things: free elections, national sovereignty, and markets. All three demands were construed as battering rams against ruling bureaucracy and the means of miraculously emancipating the popular initiatives. But the governors of the Soviet republics, who had witnessed 1989 in Eastern Europe, also realized that preemptive declarations of sovereignty could help to ensure them against removal by Gorbachev in his ongoing “rejuvenation of cadres” (read: purge). Early elections in the meantime often allowed the nomenklatura incumbents to outrun the loud but ideologically utopian intelligentsia. Market privatization then splendidly served the old/new presidents who doled out fabulous deals to their relatives and clients.
The mass defection of the former nomenklatura and their vertiginous self-recasting into capitalists and nationalists wrought havoc in state and economic structures. Ethnic wars flared up along the southern periphery of the collapsing Soviet Union. Even in the heartlands, amidst the breakdown of public order, the running nomenklatura had to fear for their lives or cut dirty deals with the Mafioso violent entrepreneurs. Such outcomes travestied Gorbachev’s intents. His aim was to negotiate from the position of superpower strength an advantageous collective inclusion in the capitalist networks of Western Europe. But the former Soviet republics rapidly lost the advantages of a strong military and international prestige, advanced science, and public order. The dramatic weakening of successor states made impossible any kind of directed industrial development.
The Soviet Union fostered a mono-organizational industrial society where all spheres of public activity were centrally directed. The loss of state integrity undermined all modern institutions and therefore disabled collective action at practically any level above family and crony networks. This condition became self-perpetuating. Individually the most rational and rewarding course of action now suggested looting the state assets and ferreting the loot abroad after a few lucky runs. The rulers themselves were eminently complicit in the weakening of their states because corruptible officials and impotent judiciary became the necessary conditions for looting and personalistic patronage. Such traditional concerns of state power as military strength and containing internal protests became largely irrelevant in the world geopolitics policed by the hegemonic America and institutions of global finance. All the former Soviet states compliantly proclaimed themselves market democracies, albeit with various “national specificities” clumsily excusing the primitive monopolism of their rulers.
Privatizations dealt a crushing blow to the once boisterous intelligentsias whose prestigious secure jobs and professional networks were embedded in state institutions. Liberal intellectuals, and even especially the social critics, found themselves shamefully impoverished, politically outmaneuvered, and ideologically speechless because their liberal and nationalist programs had been cynically hijacked. Moreover the shift of elite power strategies from state-run industrial production and military aggrandizement to private security, commodity exports, and financial speculation had the further perverse effect of insulating the postcommunist oligarchies from the rest of citizenry. The specialists and workers lost their collective leverage as productive labor and patriotic army recruits, or even as voters and taxpayers. What sense did it now make to organize strikes at bankrupt factories, march in the streets under the discredited slogans of national independence and market reform, or campaign for the politicians who would all become traitors? The perestroika-period atmosphere of public empowerment and optimistic anticipation abruptly changed to apathetic cynicism, preoccupations with economic hardship and criminality, and the desperate desire to emigrate. Instead of the promised land of Western Europe, the post-Soviets ended up closer to the harsher realities of the Middle East.
PREDICTIONS AND HISTORICAL PATHWAYS
Randall Collins and Immanuel Wallerstein overall correctly discerned the structural trends pointing to the imminent end of communism. Collins highlighted the paradox of geopolitical limitations to Soviet power when it appeared at the pinnacle of expansion. He was also right in predicting the pattern of collapse suddenly emerging from the massive defection of subordinate elites in the national republics and satellite states in reaction to the political incapacitation of imperial center. But the model of Randall Collins anticipated neither speed nor the direction of Moscow’s action on its superpower dilemmas.
Wallerstein went further in his analysis of available options and argued that the best possible destination of Soviet reforms would be a negotiated return to capitalism under a pan-continental European alliance. In the Cold War atmosphere virtually nobody including the Soviet reformers themselves seriously calculated on this possibility. Wallerstein, however, underestimated the burdens of institutional complexity embedded in the ethnic federalism and industrial ministries of the U.S.S.R. The fragmented successors did all revert to capitalism, albeit of a weaker peripheral variety. Instead of rationally bargaining on superpower advantages for a more honorable collective inclusion in the world capitalist hierarchy, the nomenklatura squandered and cannibalized Soviet assets in a panicked rush to protect the individual oligarchic positions against both Gorbachev’s purging and the prospect of popular rebellions. Wallerstein’s theory was fundamentally correct because of its macroperspective on world capitalism; and for the same macroscopic reason it failed to envision the embarrassing political failure of Soviet elites to act together in the pursuit of their best historical opportunity. This should serve us a stark warning: oligarchic elites, especially when institutionally disunited and blinded by ideological prejudice, can grievously botch their transitions.
Contrary to the dominant Left/Right beliefs of the time, measuring the Soviets against ideological yardsticks, the analyses of Collins and Wallerstein proved overall to be correct because they were systemic and relational. In other words, they considered the Soviet bloc as part of a larger world. Collins based his predictions on the long-term regularities of military geopolitics. Wallerstein focused on the dimensions of capitalist world-economy and political options accessible to the elites across its various zones. These are different but analytically meshing dimensions. In fact, the combination of two approaches best explains the structural factors of China’s lucky exit from communism.