Ideas of Revolutions and Revolutionary Ideas

Ideas of Revolutions and Revolutionary
Ideas
LEON ARON
Velikie Revolutsii ot Kromvelya do Putin [Great Revolutions from Cromwell to
Putin], Irina Starodubrovskaya and Vladimir Mau. Second, augmented edition.
Moscow: Vagrius, 2004. 511 pp.
n this magisterial, path-breaking book, which for the first time seeks to explain
Ithe origins and the course of the latest Russian Revolution by placing it in the
context of the great revolutions past, Irina Starodubrovskaya and Vladimir Mau
have produced an intellectual equivalent of a deliciously dense and rich multi-
layered chocolate cake: like its physical counterpart, it is both impossible to con-
sume in one sitting and hard to stop eating.
There are four conceptual layers, each containing the authors’ answers to one
of the four fundamental questions they pose: What are the commonalities in how
revolutions come about, unfold, and end? What are the deficiencies of scholarly
approaches to the study of revolutions, and how can they be synthesized and
amended? How can these amended causal schemes help explain what happened
in Russia between 1985 and 2004 and what will happen after? And finally, how
will the experience of the Russian Revolution contribute to the existing body of
theorizing on revolutions?
For those who have grappled with these issues as part of education or in their
own work, an overview of the literature undertaken to answer the first question is
an excellent refresher. The reader new to these topics will find this a fine intro-
duction to what is known as “structuralism” in history, the many variations of
which are centered on what might be called grand material (“objective”) causes—
be they, to cite a few examples given by the authors, Barrington Moore’s economic
imperative of “getting grain to the classes that ate bread but did not grow wheat”;1
Leon Aron is the director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is
the author of Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life, and is currently working on a book about the
ideas and ideals that inspired and shaped the latest Russian Revolution (1987–91). A much
shorter version of this essay appeared in Russian in Voprosy Ekonomiki, Russia’s premier
journal of economic theory, political economy, and economic history. Copyright © 2006
Heldref Publications
435

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436
DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
the state’s inability to react adequately to military pressure from other states and
to peasants’ mobilization in protest in Theda Skocpol’s explanation;2 Jack Gold-
stone’s demographic changes;3 or the emergence of rival groups claiming the
state’s political and economic resources and mobilizing the opposition, as
described by Charles Tilly.4 In turn, these underlying tectonic metafactors affect
the interests of multitudes (usually socioeconomic “classes”) whose defense of
their economic and, by extension, political interests, results in political upheavals.
Like the works of Skocpol and Tilly, The Great Revolutions falls into what
might be called the Marxist-statist subdivision of structural analysis. While they
reject Marx’s philosophy of history (with class wars and revolutions as stages
toward the inevitable triumph of classless communism) and emphasize the rela-
tive autonomy of state bureaucracies as political actors (in contrast to Marx’s
notion of their being nothing more than the “committees” for carrying out the
agenda of the economically dominant class), the key methods and the tools of
analysis are unmistakably those of Marxist historical materialism. (As Vladimir
Nabokov used to say in his Cornell lectures on Ulysses: “Joyce lost his religion
but kept his categories.”5)
Early on, Starodubrovskaya and Mau synthesize theories of revolutions in a
hypothesis that they continue to refine and validate throughout the book: “Revo-
lutions occur in the countries that come into collision with qualitatively new, atyp-
ical for them problems, engendered both by internal processes and by global ten-
dencies,” while they lack flexibility both in the institutions of the ancien régime
and the “psychological stereotypes” of the people do not allow for adjustment
and thus doom an evolutionary adaptation.6
The authors leave little doubt that the “problems” they have in mind are eco-
nomic. Indeed, when identifying major shortcomings in the “traditional
approaches” that account for the “unfinished” state of the theory of revolutions
and which their book was to amend, their diagnosis is centered around the neglect
of the “problems stemming from economic development and economic policy.”7
In addition to the authors’ natural scholarly predisposition (both are econo-
mists by education and profession), there are deeper reasons for their choosing
an essentially Marxist approach to the study of the latest Russian Revolution.
While Starodubrovskaya and Mau say that Marxism has long been used in the
West to analyze “social conflict, class war, and revolutionary violence,” Russian
scholars, brought up on an unrevised orthodox Marxism of the Soviet social sci-
ences, continue to use historical materialism for the analysis of the antecedents
(predposylki) of revolutions.8 In fact, the authors devote the entire last chapter to
an apologia for Marxist analysis, the explanatory power of which, a few caveats
notwithstanding, they find largely undiminished in the cases of the twentieth cen-
tury upheavals in general and the latest Russian Revolution in particular.9
Yet, although the authors see economic factors as the key antecedents of great
revolutions, their causality is richer, more contingent and far less linear than in
orthodox Marxism. As in the best works of other structuralists, the interaction
between the economic “basis” and the political and social “superstructure” is
complicated. It is the nature of the state and its behavior in response to a bur-

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Revolutionary Ideas
437
geoning crisis (for instance, the inability to collect taxes or manage the budget
deficit) that determine the speed of the disintegration and, in the end, whether a
revolution actually occurs.
It is impossible, even in a lengthy review, to elucidate all the elements of what
henceforth should be called the Starodubrovskaya-Mau theory of revolution, as
it emerges from the authors’ critical and imaginative reading of the vast literature.
A few examples will have to suffice to convey the scope, ambition, and acuity of
the authors’ effort.
Rapid Economic Development, “Crisis of Economic Growth” and a Weak
State
The authors arrive at quantitative parameters within which the “early modern-
ization” revolutions are likely to occur. Using Maddison’s pioneering estimates
of per capita GDP in major countries of the world between 1820 and 1992,10 Star-
odubrovskaya and Mau argue that the British, French, Mexican, and Russian
(1917) Revolutions occurred when the per capita national income was between
$1,200 and $1,500.
While the growing weakness of the state has been noted before (and has come
to be considered a sine qua non of prerevolutionary, revolutionary, and immedi-
ately postrevolutionary periods), Starodubrovskaya and Mau deepen our under-
standing of both the signs of this weakness and of its causes. Following Charles
Tilly, the authors emphasize the state’s increasing inability to wield competently
and decisively the fiscal and monetary instruments, with the resultant failure to
collect taxes, reduce budget deficits, and tame inflation.
Yet they also persuasively establish the seemingly paradoxical connection
between the weakness of the state and the preceding economic conditions by
demonstrating that revolutions are often ushered in by a period of rapid economic
development. The latter, they conclude, “undermines the foundations of the tradi-
tional social structure” and leads to the splintering of the elite along social, politi-
cal, and economic interests; redistribution of wealth; and the emergence of new,
economically “empowered” social actors. The resultant “fragmentation” of the
society, divergence of economic and political interests, and the appearance of new
“social forces” is the key cause of the structural erosion of prerevolutionary states.
Because of the social fragmentation of the social and political classes in the
prolegomena to revolutions, Starodubrovskaya and Mau revise the major postu-
late of historical materialism by rejecting class as the main unit of the analysis of
revolutions and advocate finer gradations of the categories of actors in prerevo-
lutionary and revolutionary situations to explain the complex, rapid, almost kalei-
doscopic changes, especially the formation and dissolution of political coalitions.
Of course, as most factors in social sciences, the rapid economic development
and the social and political transformation it brings, while a necessary condition
of a revolutionary outcome, is not a sufficient one. For it to result in a revolution,
it must, in the authors’ view, occur at the time when a country is entering (and,
thus, is buffeted by the social consequences of) one of the three stages of mod-
ern economic progress. They are “early modernization” (seventeenth century in

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DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
Britain, eighteenth century in France, the end of nineteenth century in Russia, and
twentieth century in China); “mature industrialism” (between the end of nine-
teenth century to the first half of the twentieth century up to the Great Depres-
sion in the West, Russia in the beginning of the twentieth century); and the “early
postmodernization” (postindustrialization) in the 1970s in Western Europe, and
Eastern and Central Europe in the 1980s and 1990s.
How does the latest Russian Revolution fit into this widened, refined, and
updated framework of the historical materialist approach to revolutions?
The evidence the authors provide in support of their central thesis of the essen-
tial similarity between the Russian transformation and the great revolutions of the
past (and, therefore, the applicability of the existing theories of revolutions both to
the analysis of the Russian Revolution and to the mapping of post-Soviet Russia’s
future) is among the book’s most fascinating and stimulating themes, in which well-
known facts are reorganized and interpreted in unexpected but usually convincing
and always intriguing ways.
First, the nature and the scope of the Russian transition are clarified by com-
paring the mode of the transformation and its results with those of the great rev-
olutions of the past. Russia shed “the three fundamental features” of the ancient
régime: a totalitarian political system; the absolute dominance of the state-owned
property in the economy; and the shortages of goods. Russia also left behind two
other core attributes of the Soviet Union: the domestic and Eastern European
empires and militarized economy, through voluntary divestiture of imperial hold-
ings and a demilitarization historically unprecedented both in the scope for a
country not defeated in a war. Hence, the author’s conclusion: “at the end of twen-
tieth century, Russia experienced a full-fledged social revolution.”11
Second, in the authors’ reading, the Russian Revolution has incorporated vir-
tually all key antecedents and passed through all the major stages they identify
as central to “classic” revolutions. Thus, they trace the beginning of the Soviet
revolutionary destabilization to the social tensions and fragmentation that result-
ed from the record high oil prices in the mid-1970s. The petrodollar “flood” in
the Soviet Union resulted in “uncontrollable re-division of resources; an artifi-
cial—by which the authors must mean “not caused by broader economic
growth”—rise in the population’s standard of living;” and “galloping” increase
in the USSR’s dependence on exports. Combined with the inevitable crisis that
everywhere attends the transition from industrial to postindustrial economic sys-
tem, the prices’ collapse a decade later became a catalyst of the revolutionary
transformation.12
Along the way, the authors powerfully contest arguments denying the revolu-
tionary essence of the Russian transformation. For instance, refuting the con-
tention that the Soviet totalitarianism “was not defeated by the revolutionary
heroes but died its own death” (174). Starodubrovskaya and Mau point out that
the disintegration of the ancien régime had always been the starting point of most
revolutions past (including the French, Mexican, and the 1917 Russian) and cite
Samuel Huntington’s observation that the collapse of political institutions is cen-
tral to the “Western” type of revolutions.

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Revolutionary Ideas
439
They also persuasively refute disallowing the revolutionary interpretation of
the Russian events because “revolutionary turning points require a power that is
strong and demonstratively concentrated power,” whereas in post-Soviet Yeltsin’s
Russia, “the power was . . . weak.”13 The authors remind us that the “chaotic,
unruly, and forced nature” of revolutionary policies, as well as the abrupt changes
of policies by revolutionary leaders fit “the description of any revolutionary
process, starting with seventeenth century Britain.”14
Similarly, the heavy presence of the old nomenklatura among the postrevolu-
tionary elite is hardly an anomaly; the change of elites in other revolutions,
including the English and French, was not as radical as is generally assumed.
Many of the king’s supporters in Britain, for instance, bought back confiscated
properties, while the French royalists likewise preserved their status as largest
landowners, and more than one-fifth of the Napoleonic nobility came from the
old privileged classes.
The authors also note that the absence of an instant democratic breakthrough
(another often-advanced case against the revolutionary nature of the Russian tran-
sition) does not contradict history, since revolution and democracy are not usually
compatible. On the contrary, in the short term, the great revolutions of the past led
to authoritarianism and, in any case, the latest Russian Revolution has “demon-
strated far more democratic achievements” (176) than its predecessors.
Similarly, as regards the absence of a quick economic turnaround as proof that
revolution did not take place —a contention which has been largely muted by the
Russia’s economic progress since 1999 but whose near-deafening prevalence in
the late 1990s is definitely worth recalling—the authors maintain that great rev-
olutions always result in a short- to medium-term economic decline. Their analy-
sis leads them to believe that revolutions alone do not speed up economic devel-
opment, although they may “eliminate institutional and socio-cultural barriers”
(28–29) to economic progress. Thus, we do not know today (and we may not
know for decades) if and to what extent the “genetic code” of the totalitarian sys-
tem and the economic near-collapse of the late 1980s–early 1990s are to handi-
cap Russia in forging a postindustrial economy.
Since the entire book under review is an extended argument for the inclusion of
Russia’s transformation in the pantheon of the great revolutions, the authors may
have felt justified in spending little time on the specific counter-revolutionary argu-
ments, reprised above. Yet given the spread, recurrence, and persistence of some of
the opinions above, they may have warranted a bit more exploration.
For instance, the heavy and continuing presence of the revolutionary elite was
common for all postcommunist countries where, as in Russia, civil peace was
judged to be more important than justice and retribution. In Hungary and Poland
(the countries where the anticommunist sentiment among the leaders of the tran-
sition was among the strongest) one-third of the apparatchiks in positions of
power in 1988 occupied the same office in 1993.15 (In 1999, Lech Wal˛esa told a
reporter: “I agree 90 percent with those who complain they made sacrifices that
former Communists have taken advantage of. The Communists had a taste for
action. They were better prepared for the new society.”16)

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DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
The Elites, the Masses, the Authoritarianism, and the Violence
In the Czech Republic, another leader of postcommunist transition, a prominent
social commentator noted in 2000 that “the current political system . . . [is] based
on an unspoken condominium with significant relics of the former Communist
establishment.”17 To which a Prague worker added: “I believed [Václav Havel]
would bring . . . justice but he really disappointed me. All the Communists who
stole were allowed to keep their wealth, and today they are captains of industry.”18
The authors omitted entirely another popular perspective that denies the revo-
lutionary nature of the Russian events because the “masses” played an inactive role
and because the leaders later disregarded and discarded many of their populist sup-
porters and movements that helped them to power. For instance, Reddaway and
Glinski argue that while the English Puritan Revolution of the 1640s, the French
Revolution of 1789, and the February 1917 Russian Revolution were determined
by “proponents of change from lower social strata,” the revolution of 1991 was by
contrast a top-down revolution and was “defined by the self-confident, almost
messianic vanguard mentality of a self-anointed elite that sees itself entitled to
impose ‘progress’ and ‘development’—according to its own understanding of
these terms—on the ‘backward’ majority.”19
Such a judgment is at variance both with the facts of the Russian 1985–1991
transformation and those of the great revolutions of the past. The Russian
upheaval became the first great social revolution in which the radicalization of
the “masses” could be traced in the results of the increasingly free and fair elec-
tions.20 Millions of Russians chose those who publicly espoused first reformist
and soon revolutionary agendas.
“Every free election,” observed a leading post-Soviet Russian historian, “—
in the spring 1989 (the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR), and in spring
1990 (the Congresses of People’s Deputies of the Republics), and in June 1991
(the Presidency of Russia)—demonstrated an inexorable decline in the populari-
ty of Gorbachev’s [moderate] supporters and the increase in the influence of his
opponents,— but not the conservatives but the politicians who called themselves
radicals.”21 (In elections to local Soviets in March 1990, pro-reform “democrats”
won in fifty Russian cities,22 including the three largest: Moscow, Leningrad, and
Sverdlovsk. In Moscow, the voters gave them fifty-seven out of sixty-five seats
in the City Council.) The “liberal-democratic and simultaneously anti-communist
revolution,” concludes the same historian, was “effected with the support of the
society and non-violently, mostly through (pri pomoshchi) electoral bulletins.”23
As a result of the elections, the “political leadership,” continues the same his-
torian, passed from Gorbachev to Yeltsin, who was campaigning “under anti-
communist pro-Western liberal banner,” and won a “decisive” victory in the
1991 election, while his “confederates,” (edinomyshlenniki) Gavriil Popov in
Moscow and Anatoly Sobchak in Leningrad, were elected mayors of the “dual
capitals” and, “as if to underscore the repudiation of socialism,” in the same elec-
tions, the Leningraders voted to change the city’s name to St. Petersburg.24
Punctuating many critical instances, when the fate of the revolution hung in
balance, huge but remarkably peaceful mass demonstrations in Moscow and, on

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Revolutionary Ideas
441
a smaller scale, in other cities, and the two national strikes of miners in 1989 and
1991, became another hallmark of the revolution “from below,”25 which culmi-
nated in the demonstrations and strikes against the attempted reactionary coup in
August 1991. As Harley Balzer persuasively demonstrated in these pages last
year, the protests took place in most of Russia’s largest cities, with an estimated
two hundred thousand demonstrating in Moscow and St. Petersburg and fifty
thousand taking part in the around-the-clock vigil around the besieged seat of the
Russian Federation’s government, the “White House.”26
It is hard to argue with Gavriil Popov’s tribute to these men and women:
But the main and decisive factor in the victorious revolution were people them-
selves. Thousands, hundreds of thousands citizens participated in the revolution.
Young and old, men and women, workers and students, Russians and representa-
tives of our other peoples. They voted in the elections. They, time and again, went
into the streets. Taking risks for themselves, their families, their loved ones. On
workdays and on weekends. In sunlight and in rain. They did not shoot. Or break
windows. Or storm the buildings. Or burn cars. And in this opposition, to use Tol-
stoy’s expression, won those who were stronger in spirit.27
As to the classic great revolutions, far from being “defined” by the “lower stra-
ta,” they, in fact, were less “democratic” than the anticommunist revolutions,
including that of Russia, with an active minority playing a decisive role in the
management of the process. According to Charles Tilly, a leading student of the
French Revolution:
Contrary to the old image of a unitary people welcoming the arrival of long-awaited
reform, local histories of the Revolution make clear that France’s revolutionaries estab-
lished their power through struggle, frequently over stubborn popular resistance. Most
of the resistance, it is true, took the form of evasion, cheating, and sabotage rather than
outright rebellion. But people through most of France fought one feature or another of
revolutionary direct rule.28
Furthermore, when in power, the radicals tended to “routinize” their control
and to contain “independent action of local enthusiasts”:
For a while those connections [between the state and thousands of communities
across the land] rested on a vast popular mobilization through clubs, militias and
committees. Gradually, however, revolutionary leaders contained or even suppressed
their turbulent partners.29
Familiar with this record, the authors conclude that the “authoritarianism” of
the revolutionary government in post-Soviet Russia was “normal.” Although cor-
rect as far as it goes, anyone familiar with the record is bound to see that the
alleged “radical-authoritarian stage” was of a most peculiar kind. In dealing with
political opponents, the Yeltsin revolutionary regime was extremely reluctant to
resort to extraconstitutional measures (let alone violence) even when such strat-
egy meant retreat from the crucial elements of the government’s declared eco-
nomic strategy: the tight monetary and fiscal policies in 1992–93; the privatiza-
tion implementation schemes; or the slew of vitally needed structural reforms (the
buying and selling of agricultural land, the pension reform and the breakup of
“natural monopolies” in gas, electricity, and utilities) blocked in 1997–99 by the

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DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
leftist plurality in the Duma; or painful compromises following the Duma over-
ride of presidential vetoes.
Even the undeniably authoritarian act, the 1993 dissolution of the Parlia-
ment—and the subsequent dislodgement from the upper floors of the Parliament’s
building, by that time abandoned by nine-tenths of the members,30 of several
detachments of the heavily armed leftists and nationalists who shot at a passers-
by in the center of Moscow—ended in a historically unprecedented manner. One
would search hard (and, most likely, in vain) for another revolution, in which, fol-
lowing the amnesty granted by a democratically and freely elected parliament,
the handful of unrepentant leaders of a counterrevolutionary rebellion (in essence,
losers in a mercifully brief postrevolutionary civil war) were released, unharmed,
after a few months in jail to the cheers of their comrades-in-arms. (One of the
amnestied, former vice-president Aleksandr Rutskoi, would soon be elected gov-
ernor of Kursk, a central Russian province.)
Russia’s was definitely a self-limiting revolution, tempered by the memory of
the country’s sanguinary history. It postponed or even sacrificied some of its key
objectives to uphold consensus and nonviolence. As the authors correctly note:
The coming to power of the radicals (in August 1991) did not cause the destruction
of the democratic mechanisms, [or lead to] dictatorship and terror. The the radicals,
who had neither opportunity nor desire to rely on violence and force their ideolog-
ical stereotypes on the society, were more active in engaging mechanisms of eco-
nomic and social maneuvering, in “buying” the support of various social segments.
Therefore their policies seemed less consistent and more compromise-oriented that
in the preceding revolutions. (431–32)
To explain this key deviation from the past practice—the absence of large-
scale and sustained violence—the authors suggest that Russia’s transition was the
first great revolution of the postindustrial era, whereas the “classic” revolutions
occurred in agrarian (or industrializing) societies. Greater urbanizations and edu-
cation and the presence of institutions (primarily elections and referenda) dra-
matically diminished the need for violence as means of implementing the will of
the politically active part of the “masses” and constraining the revolutionary gov-
ernment in implementing its agenda.
Extrapolating from Russia’s experience, Starodubrovskaya and Mau venture a
well-warranted proposition that future “postindustrial” revolutions also are likely
to be distinguished by violence on “limited scale.”
What, if anything, can the past revolutions tell us about the future of a post-
communist Russia? As is almost invariably the case with those who engage
deeply and continually with multifaceted social phenomena, the authors emerged
chastened and attuned to the fundamental unpredictability of the particulars in the
events of such scale and complexity.
The Future
Indeed, perhaps the only thing the authors seem certain of is the enormously long
road to stabilization and the political and economic volatility that accompanies
the journey. Starodubrovskaya and Mau have found that the results of revolutions

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Revolutionary Ideas
443
are never known in advance and may take decades to reveal themselves. Even the
“classic” revolutions, the effects of which, in retrospect, are as obvious as they
are enormous, unfolded for decades before stabilization. With the society “frag-
mented” and imbalanced, postrevolutionary polities pass through a number of dif-
ferent regimes, which may be ushered by minirevolutions.
In England, the authors suggest 1745 (or almost a century after the beheading
of Charles I), the year when last rebellion was suppressed, as the end of revolu-
tion. (One could note also that it took thirty years from the execution of the king
to implement the Habeas Corpus Act, a cornerstone of the future British democ-
racy.) In France, the first stable political regime that embodied the ideals of the
Revolution was the Third Republic, established in 1870, or eighty-one years after
1789. The gadfly of the French Revolution’s historiography, François Furet,
argued that the “open wound” did not close until de Gaulle’s 1959 coup d’etat
and the establishment of the “monarchical republic,” which finally reconciled
ancien régime and revolution. One is reminded of Chou Enlai’s famous quip in
response to a question about the French Revolution: “It is too early to tell.”
In the short run, the authors feel that Russia is likely to go through its own ver-
sion of postrevolutionary “bonapartism”: a seemingly “steady” but ultimately
“unstable” regime, liable to “oscillate” between various social groupings and to
forge new political coalitions to reproduce itself. Although, Starodubrovskaya
and Mau continue, “bonapartism” may acquire “democratic forms,” it is, an
authoritarian regime that sacrifices the democratic reconciliation of “deep” com-
peting interest to the short-term semblance of stability, thus making “possible (if
not, indeed, probable)” periodic political crises and “reproduction in instability.”
The authors corroborate their prediction by a quote from a contemporary Russ-
ian political observer whose 2002 assessment is both very much in line with the
“bonapartist” argument and remarkably prescient with regard to the evolution of
the Putin regime:
The system of power legitimization that is being forged—a de-facto appointment
of the successor of the President or a governor followed by plebiscitarian confir-
mation—strengthens a private character of power. . . . It is also the key factor of its
long-term instability, since in such an arrangement the elections stop being a mech-
anism for impersonal and public agreement among [conflicting] interests.31
One sign of important and lasting scholarship is that, in addition to prompting
application of its concepts and methods to areas outside the original design, it
suggests conceptual amendments by highlighting the limits of its own explana-
tions. Today, Velikie Revolutsii is the most comprehensive and definitive applica-
tion of multifaceted structural analysis to the latest Russian Revolution. Whatev-
er limits of the book’s explanations, they arise not from the authors’ oversight,
but from the limitations of the grand theoretical perspective itself.
The Gaps in the Structuralist Explanations
The unanswered questions are many and important. To begin, both the memoirs
of the most prominent reformers and the consensus among Western experts32
show clearly that until 1988–89, virtually no one perceived the Soviet situation

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DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
to be an urgent, life-threatening economic, political, or social calamity that would
warrant a “revolution from above” (as opposed to a slowly unfolding, “creeping”
crisis of which the Soviet leadership had been aware and with which it had learned
to live and manage in the past two decades). The Soviet Union had known far
greater predicaments and coped without sacrificing the totalitarian state’s grip on
society and economy, much less surrendering them. Thus, it is impossible to
explain the origins of the revolution (which, like every great revolution, started
“from above”) solely (or even mainly) as a response to an “objective,” “structur-
al” danger.
While the increasingly visible economic deficiencies, waste, and shortages
undoubtedly contributed to the reforming impulse, no matter how much the lead-
ership was preoccupied with the economy, the Soviet Union had enough
resilience to justify traveling the same road as before—perhaps only with louder
marching music and a more rigid protrusion of the goose-stepping leg. Such cer-
tainly appeared to be the essence of Yuri Andropov’s policies, which this author
labeled elsewhere “police renaissance.”33 Indeed, recast as “acceleration,” these
approaches were faithfully implemented by his protégé, Mikhail Gorbachev,
throughout the first eighteen months of his reign.
The history had bred confidence. There was far more to Gorbachev’s initial
pronouncements than the sterile and cynical propaganda of the official “line” or
willful blindness when, a few months after coming to power, he told a high level
meeting that the “strategic direction of the restructuring” ought to be “deep and
comprehensive utilization of the advantages of socialist economy” and, in poli-
tics, called for “further strengthening of democratic centralism,”34 a euphemism
for the rule of one party that brooks no internal dissent. In an apt quote repro-
duced by the authors, Gorbachev told the secretaries in charge of economy in the
Central Committees of the Warsaw Pact nations: “Some of you look at the mar-
ket as a life-buoy for your economies. But, comrades, you should think not about
the life-buoy but about the ship. And the ship is socialism.”35
In 1985, the Soviet Union possessed much of the same natural and human
resources it had ten years before. There was no devastation from a natural disas-
ter or epidemics. True, the oil prices had plunged but, adjusted for inflation, were
not lower than in early 1970s and needed only time to go up (as they surely did).
As Peter Rutland astutely put it:
Chronic ailments, after all, are not necessarily fatal. The weakness of [Soviet] econ-
omy is obviously a prime candidate in explaining the collapse. However, although
the economy experienced a declining rate of growth in the 1970s, it was still grow-
ing. The real breakdown only began after 1988, and this was as much a product of
political processes as their cause.36
Mass poverty was nothing new to the regime: things were much worse in the
1930s and 1940s. Food rationing, too, had been practiced before (and indeed, had
never stopped since the early 1930s in many provinces), and, while resented by
some, was accepted as normal by the generation that grew up during or after
World War II.
As Cuba, North Korea, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, in addition to Stalinist Rus-

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