Moreover, placing the responsibility for Soviet passivity solely on socialist political institutions contains another problem. Many of the traditional Soviet political forms—the newspapers, the soviets, and the Communist Party itself—were undermined by Gorbachev after 1985. Thus, while the majority Soviet people remained opposed to privatization of property, the elimination of price controls, and the break-up of the Soviet Union, the traditional modes of expressing political views were evaporating. In addition, such new institutions as the Congress of People’s Deputies proved entirely ineffective at enforcing such public sentiments. On top of this, every weakening of traditional institutions and re-establishing capitalism was spearheaded by Gorbachev and other Communist leaders with the befogging assurance that they were returning to Lenin and advancing to a better socialism. In other words, it is likely that part of the workers’ passivity occurred because at the very time that Gorbachev and other Communist leaders were eroding the people’s standard of living, economic security, and socialism itself, they were promising workers a better socialism and depriving them of the very institutions through which they had previously expressed their views.
The final theory is that the Soviet collapse was mainly due to Gorbachev. Quite naturally, almost all accounts give great weight to Gorbachev’s role. Some accounts, however, go further than others in placing responsibility on him. According to British historian, Archie Brown, the key to the unraveling of Soviet society was “the Gorbachev factor,” mainly Gorbachev’s departure from Communist orthodoxy.703 For Brown, this apostasy undermined the system in unforeseen ways, but Gorbachev nonetheless played the role of a heroic Westernizer, a modern-day Peter the Great. Others, who also see Gorbachev as the decisive factor, see him as more calculating than Brown does. Jerry Hough thinks that Gorbachev was a free marketeer.704 Euvgeny Novikov and Patrick Bascio suggest that Gorbachev was a Gramscian Eurocommunist.705 Anthony D’Agostino argues that Gorbachev was a Machiavellian, for whom ideas came second to getting and maintaining power.706
Though we agree with the common element of these views, that Gorbachev’s ideological deviations played a key role, we nonetheless disagree with several other elements. It is not just that where Brown sees a positive, we see a negative. Rather, accounts that over-emphasize Gorbachev obscure the extent to which he was not alone but operated in a historical and social context. When he first departed from Andropov, Gorbachev represented ideas that nonetheless had precedent in the Communist movement, namely in the ideas of Bukharin and Khrushchev, and ideas that had appeal to some in Soviet society. Such ideas as the weakening of the central power of the Party and the government, the legitimizing of private property, and allowing more freedom for markets had potency in the 1980s because they palpably reflected the interests of the dynamic (if parasitic) sector attached to illegal, private enterprise. Thus, Gorbachev was both a legatee of a certain tradition and the product of his times and not just a lone “factor” making history.
Moreover, in some writers, a stress on Gorbachev leads to seeing in his actions a longstanding, preconceived plan. The weight of evidence, however, seems to point more toward a shallow leader who acted rashly, impulsively, and contradictorily. Though Gorbachev’s policies eventually formed a pattern of capitulation to the petty bourgeois, liberal, and corrupt interests at home and imperialist pressure abroad, this was not evident at the start. Opportunism rather than a preconceived plan or aim provided the beacon that guided his steps.
In the end the story of the Soviet collapse was not the inevitable unfolding of a tragedy rooted in the impossibility of socialism. Nor was it a defeat brought about by popular opposition or foreign enemies. Nor was it due to Soviet socialism’s failure to match up to some ideal of socialism that embodied liberal democracy and a mixed economy. Nor was it primarily the story of the conscious betrayal of one man. Rather, it was the story of a triumph of a certain tendency within the revolution itself. It was a tendency rooted at first in the peasant nature of the country and later in a second economy, a sector that flourished because of consumer demands unsatisfied by the first economy and because of the failure of authorities to appreciate the danger it represented and to enforce the law against it. It was a tendency that had manifested itself in Bukharin and Khrushchev before Gorbachev. It was a tendency that believed that prosperity, democracy, and its vision of socialism could come quickly and easily without sacrifice, without struggle, and without strong central authority. It believed in making concessions to imperialism, liberalism, private property and the market. Some adherents of this tendency believed they were true socialists, though they allied themselves with others whose true sympathies were with money-making and private property. Not until Gorbachev had this tendency in the revolution held full sway and been carried to its logical conclusion. Only with Gorbachev was the full folly of this course realized, when it led not to a new kind of socialism but to new kind of barbarism.
At the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey, Zeus decries the way mortals blame the gods for their miseries, since “they themselves, with their own reckless ways, compound their pains beyond their proper share.” It is a long way from the destruction of Troy to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the temptation of men to blame gods, nature, or some other powerful, outside force remains. In the case of the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro decried this temptation in words more prosaic but no less apt than Homer’s. “Socialism,” Castro said, “did not die from natural causes: it was a suicide.”707 If our account has any lasting value, it will be in furthering a discussion of the “reckless ways” that wrecked the first socialist state.
Endnotes
Notes for Introduction
1. Anthony D’Agostino, Gorbachev’s Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 9.
2. Alexander Dallin, “The Causes of the Collapse of the Soviet Union,” Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1992), 279.
3. Fidel Castro quoted by Andrew Murray, Flashpoint: World War III (London: Pluto Press, 1996), 38.
4. Victor and Ellen Perlo, Dynamic Stability: The Soviet Economy Today (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980), passim; USSR: 100 Questions and Answers (Moscow: Novosti, 1977), 60, 63; Albert Szymanski, Class Structure: A Critical Perspective (New York: Praeger, 1983), 590.
5. Perlo, 144; USSR: 100 Questions and Answers, 65-66, 71.
6. Szymanski, 586-592.
7. Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France” and Frederick Engels, “Introduction,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Selected Works in Two Volumes (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), 473-545.