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.