Counter-factual speculation can legitimately suggest how, under future circumstances similar to the past, one might act differently. The debates of historians over the decision to use the atom bomb on Hiroshima, for example, not only have changed the way educated people understand this event but also have reduced the likelihood of a similar decision in the future. After all, if history is to be more than a parlor diversion, it should and can teach us something about avoiding past mistakes.
The interpretation of the Soviet collapse involves a fight over the future. Explanations will help determine whether in the 21st century working people will once again “storm the heavens” to replace capitalism with a better system. They will hardly take the risks and bear the costs if they believe that working class rule, collective ownership, and a planned economy are bound to fail, that only the “free market” works, and that millions of people in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union tried socialism but went back to capitalism because they wanted prosperity and freedom. As the radical movement against globalism grows and the labor movement revives, as the long economic boom of the 1990s recedes, and capitalism’s lasting evils—unemployment, racism, inequality, environmental degradation, and war—become more and more evident, the questioning of capitalism’s future will invariably move to the foreground. But the youth and labor movements will hardly advance much beyond narrow economic demands, moral protest, anarchism or nihilism, if they consider socialism an impossibility. The stakes could hardly be higher.
As the significance of the loss of the Soviet Union sinks in, the opportunity for dispassionate discourse on Soviet history increases. Certainly, a lot of early notions about a peaceful and prosperous post-Cold War world have turned to bitter ashes. A bipolar world was replaced by a unipolar one dominated by American corporate and military power. Globalism replaced anti-communism as the governing ideology. Globalism insists that the domination of the world by a few transnational corporations, the spread of information technology, and the free movement of goods and capital in search of the lowest costs and highest profits represents an unstoppable force before which all other interests—those of weak states, national independence movements, labor movements, defenders of the environment—must give way. Without the Soviet Union as a viable alternative to capitalism—social welfare, the welfare state, the public sector, Keynesianism, the “third way”—have come under attack. In all countries progressive and social democratic parties have staggered under the pressure of an emboldened neo-liberal right. Since 1991, world poverty and inequality have grown by leaps and bounds.
In another crushed illusion, the idea of a post-Cold War peace dividend vanished. Instead of cutting the military budget, the George W. Bush and other American leaders frantically sought a rationale for increased spending and new weapons systems. They tried using a war on drugs, rogue states, and Islamic fundamentalism as rationales. Then the attack on the World Trade Center gave them the justification they needed—an unending war against international terrorism. For many people, these post-Soviet disappointments have diminished the triumphalist interpretation of the Soviet collapse.
Equally tarnishing to the triumphalist interpretation has been the disastrous human toll brought by gangster capitalism in the former Soviet Union. What a decade ago was touted as Russia’s “democratic transformation” and its rebirth as a “vibrant market economy” turned into a sick joke. A United Nations’ report in 1998 said, “No region in the world has suffered such reversals in the 1990s as have the countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.” People living in poverty increased by over 150 million, a figure greater than the total combined population of France, the UK, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. The national income declined “drastically” in the face of “some of the most rampant inflation witnessed anywhere on the globe.”11
In Failed Crusade, historian Stephen F. Cohen went even further. By 1998, the Soviet economy, dominated by gangsters and foreigners, was barely half the size it was in the early 1990s. Meat and dairy herds were a fourth of their size; wages were less than half. Typhus, typhoid, cholera and other diseases had reached epidemic proportions. Millions of children suffered malnutrition. Male life expectancy plunged to sixty years, what it was at the end of the nineteenth century. In Cohen’s words, “the nation’s economic and social disintegration has been so great that it has led to the unprecedented demodernization of a twentieth century country.”12 In the face of the catastrophic failure of Russia’s road to capitalism, smugness over the inevitable problems of socialism lost some of its traction.
Not only may more people be interested in understanding the Soviet experience than previously, but the raw material for analysis is more available than before. The first publications on perestroika and the collapse were dominated by the writing of Gorbachev partisans and anti-Communist war-horses. These included the memoirs and other writings of Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and their supporters, the memoirs of American Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, the essays of such often unreliable Soviet dissidents as Roy Medvedev and Andrei Sakharov, the reports of such Western journalists as David Remnick and David Pryce-Jones, and the work of such anti-Soviet historians as Martin Malia and Richard Pipes. Since then, however, a second wave of publications has appeared. These publications included a much expanded memoir literature of secondary leaders, including Yegor Ligachev, military men and academics. It also included a great number of monographic studies on particular aspects of the Gorbachev years including glasnost, nationalism, co-ops, economic policy, privatization of state property, Soviet policy toward the African National Congress, and Soviet policy in Afghanistan. An American Communist journalist who was stationed in Moscow, Mike Davidow, published Perestroika: Its Rise and Fall, and the Marxist economist Bahman Azad published Heroic Struggle Bitter Defeat: Factors Contributing to the Dismantling of the Socialist State in the Soviet Union. Also, various Communist Parties, leaders and theoreticians, such as Fidel Castro, Joe Slovo, Hans Heinz Holz, and the Russian Communist Party issued statements on perestroika and the collapse. We have drawn on all of these in our examination.
It goes without saying that the defeat of the Paris Commune after seventy days delivered a less telling blow to socialists than the eclipse of the Soviet Union after over seventy years. It may be impossible to end our analysis with the defiance with which Engels ended his remarks on the Commune: “Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” Nevertheless, it is possible to acknowledge the achievements of the Soviet Union, to estimate the size and consequences of the external forces arrayed against it, to assess some of the contending political views within Soviet socialism and to venture some judgments on the policies. It will, however, take much more than this book to reach a full analysis, so that in the future, men and women of the left can struggle for a socialism confident that they are not prisoners of the past. Then they can echo Marx’s words on the Commune, that the Soviet Union, too, “will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society.”13