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a_kleberAnticipations of the failure of Communism
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET and GYORGY BENCE
George Mason University; Lorand Eotvos University, Hungary
One of the questions that social scientists have to deal with in reacting to the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union is why they, and other nonacademic experts such as the intelligence agencies of the great Western powers, as well, did not anticipate that this would happen, or even that it could occur. The evidence is fairly clear that the world was taken by surprise by the transformations that emerged under Gorbachev and even more by the outlawing of the Communist party after the coup against him. There was, of course, an equivalent failure to expect that the East European Communist regimes would give up power.
From among the myriad relevant statements made by concerned social scientists and political analysts, we cite only one by the political scientists and neo-Marxist Adam Przeworski: "The Autumn of the People' was a dismal failure of political science. Any retrospective explanation of the fall of communism must not only account for the historical developments but also identify the theoretical assumptions that prevented us from anticipating these developments." This essay attempts to deal with the second part of the question. Rightly or not, we pay much less attention at this time to the comparative historical issues that, given problems of space, must be treated separately. Hence, we ignore some of the important issues raised by Motyl, Suny, Szporluk, and Tapas.
The limits of social science
To come to terms with this failure of anticipation, or to pass a considered judgment on how serious it really was, we have to face a general limitation of social science, its inherent inability to predict the particular, such as the collapse of specific Communist regimes. The predictive
Theory and Society 23: 169-210, 1994. @ 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
successes of sociology and political science, on this macroscopic level, have been admittedly rather meager. Social scientists are good historians. They are able to understand the processes involved in what has already happened. But they have not been good forecasters. Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate in economics, has called attention to the failures of his discipline by this dramatic question: "Why should anyone who forecasts so badly be expected to have worthwhile opinions on other subjects?"2
The most striking example of a generalized failure of sociologists and political scientists to anticipate developments may be found in the field of ethnicity. Until recently, Marxist and non-Marxist scholars agreed on a standardized set of generalizations about ethnic and national minorities. The latter argued that ethnicity reflected the conditions of traditional society, where people lived in small communities isolated from one another and in which mass communications and transportation were limited. Most scholars anticipated that industrialization, urbanization, and the spread of education would reduce ethnic consciousness. Universalism would replace particularism. This argument found its corollary in the belief of Marxists that socialism would result in a decline of ethnic tension and consciousness. Assimilation of minorities into a larger integrated whole was viewed by both groups of analysts as the inevitable future.3
As we know, the opposite has occurred, both in the Western and Communist countries, and in the less developed world as well. The Achilles' heel of Communism has turned out to be nationalism, not only that of Poles, Czechs, or Hungarians vis-h-vis the Soviet Union, but also the rising, and sometimes rabid, national feelings of the various ethnic groupings within Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union and, since the collapse of the latter, in Moldavia and Georgia as well. In recent years, most of the multilingual, binational or bireligious states that have persisted for many decades, if not centuries, have been in turmoil. Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, and Lebanon all have had crises of national existence created by the demands of minorities for autonomy or independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have faced division, while ethnic rebellion has been suppressed in Nigeria and other parts of Africa.
Predictions made by social scientists are often comparable to weather forecasts. Meteorological forecasting remains, to a large extent, a matter of trained judgment and intuition because there are too many variables to be controlled and the relations among the variables are too complex. Moreover, the new mathematical insights of chaos theory have posited that this cannot be helped, either in meteorology or in any other science dealing with complex phenomena, by feeding more and more data into computers of ever growing capacity. "In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos (in the sense taken by chaos theorists like Edward Lorenz) meant that such points were everywhere. They were pervasive. In systems like the weather, sensitive dependence on initial conditions was an inescapable consequence of the way small scales intertwined with large."4
In citing the failures or, more accurately, the inadequate predictions of the various social sciences, it is not our intention to suggest that they are unable to analyze social and economic phenomena.5 Clearly, all the disciplines have done much to explain the ways in which economy, society, and individuals behave. Social science, however, is still at its best in advancing what Robert Merton has called "middle-range" theories, and in explaining developments limited in time and space particularly in the past where at least there is some possibility of analyzing real data. As social science moves outward to deal with systemic trends and tendencies, its capacity to explain diminishes. Economists are able to avoid some of the methodological consequences of this problem by focusing on analytically closed systems based on limiting sets of assumptions. They are, however, no more able than other social analysts to comprehend total system behavior or to understand the behavior of particular economies.
It is not surprising, therefore, that discussions of the failure of students of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to anticipate the collapse of the Communist regimes sometimes invoked those limitations of human prevision inherent in the very subject matter, social life itself.
Seeking objectivity, legitimacy, and predictability, social scientists in the United States set out after World War II to embrace the traditional methods of the physical and natural sciences... But they did so at a time when physicists, biologists, and mathematicians, concerned about disparities between their theories and the reality they supposedly modeled, were gradually abandoning old methods in favor of new ones that accommodated indeterminacy, irregularity, and unpredictability precisely the qualities that the social sciences were to leave behind. There was, in effect, a methodological passing of ships in the night: The "soft" sciences tried to become "harder" just as the "hard" sciences were becoming "softer."6
But there are reasons to assume, as we are going to argue in this article, that although this is a good occasion to raise questions about the overall limitations of social science, the sources of failure are to be sought in our case, first of all, on another level. Students of Soviet and East European societies did not exploit to the fullest extent those theoretical sources of anticipation that have been available to the social sciences even given the most cautious methodological assumptions. This underutilization took the form either of not taking into account some general trends of social change that sociologists and political scientists are generally quite good at recognizing in other contexts or, more often, of not drawing the conclusions from them that, under other conditions, would have seemed to be obvious.
Failures of anticipation
The basic problem with the analyses of the Soviet Union, both academic and nonacademic, is that like social-science research generally, and even more than most, it is fraught with ideology and politics. Both the Left and the Right made judgments about the Soviet system that derived from their political beliefs. The Right believed that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire," that it was an oppressive totalitarian regime ready to use all resources under its control to retain and even to extend its power. Given its strength, including complete domination of means of communication, propaganda, and education, and the willingness to spend considerable funds on repressive institutions, the military and the secret police in particular, as well as the apparatus and ideological commitment of the Communist Party, there seemed no way the system could be overthrown from within.
The Right was certain that Communism was exploitative, that it violated the logic of economics and human nature, that there was considerable opposition to the regime, but few thought the conditions would produce a breakdown. The Right also believed that the system was militarily efficient, that morale in the armed services was reasonably high because they were treated well, and that therefore the Soviets were a serious threat.
The Left differed in its assumptions or beliefs about the nature of Soviet society. At one extreme, the various wings of the Communist movement, the Trotskyists apart, agreed that the system basically was a good one, a progressive one that was leading to improvements in productivity and the standard of living of the population and that the people supported Communism. Trotsky, however, while emphasizing the inefficiencies of the Soviet Union and the exploitation of the masses, believed the system was progressive, i.e., inherently anti-capitalist as long as the major means of production remained state owned.7 The non-Communist Left varied considerably in its judgments, from assessments that were close to those of the Communists to much more critical ones, and in some cases evaluations that were not far from those of the Right.
Basically, most parts of the Left saw the Communist world as on their side, as representing some form of socialism, as efforts to create a more egalitarian and ultimately freer social system. Many felt that this attempt was distorted and severely corrupted, but the Soviet system was regarded essentially as part of their world, as on the left. In interpreting the reasons for the Cold War, the Left put much more of the responsibility on the West. They did not believe that there was a Soviet military threat. Regardless of feelings about the nature of the system, the Left agreed with the Right that the Soviet regime would not be overthrown and that any consideration of its breaking down from within was a near impossibility.
It would, however, be unfair to portray serious students of the Soviet Union and the East European countries, whether they leaned to the left or to the right, as having unthinkingly translated their political preferences into projections of the future. One could, in fact, argue that there have not been many other fields of social and political study where the methodological problems of anticipating large-scale developments were given such serious consideration as in the field of Soviet studies. Daniel Bell was able to draw one of his most interesting conclusions of the possibilities of prediction in social science from an examination of Sovietological analyses.
There should be a clear distinction between types of change which take place: between changes in Soviet society (the social system) and in Soviet politics, although in crucial moments one is dependent on the other. The difference is one of distinguishing between a process and an event; or, to revive an old distinction of the crusty sociologist William Graham Sumner, between crescive and enacted change. Crescive changes are those which surge, swell, go on willy-nilly, and develop with some measure of autonomy....
Enacted changes are the conscious decisions or intents of legislators and rulers (e.g., the declaration of war, the collectivization of agriculture, the location of new industry, etc.). Those who enact change have to take into account the mores of the people and the resources at their disposal, but these serve only as limiting, not determining, factors.
Sociological analysis is most sure when it deals with crescive changes. These can be identified, their drift charted, and, like iceberg floes, their course and even their break-up specified more readily than others. But sociological analysis often fails in predicting political decisions. There are in history what Hegel called the "unique moments," and, in calling the turn, not pure reason but practical judgment (that unstable compound of information, intuition, and empathy) has to take hold....
The nature of the changes which one describes conditions the kinds of predictions one can make. One can define, and predict, the limits of broad crescive changes (e.g., if one knows the resource pattern of the Soviet Union,... one can make a guess about the slowdown in the rate of economic growth), but in predicting the short-run policy turns one comes up against the variabilities of accident, folly and simple human cantankerousness.8
In the next section we have occasion to refer to some other interesting discussions of the problem of anticipation in respect to the development or eventual transformation of the Soviet system. Here, it is enough to rely on Bell's basic distinction to give a more precise characterization of what the general failure of anticipation consisted of in the Soviet case. According to Bell, it would have been unreasonable to expect social scientists to be more successful in predicting the "unique moment" of transition than political commentators, journalists, or statesmen were. The judgments of some of the latter turned out, in fact, to be better than the presumably more informed guesses of social scientists, as we show in the concluding section of this article.
The series of events and the decisions of key political figures leading to the liberation of the East European countries from the Soviet bloc and then to the abolition of the Soviet Union and the banning of the Soviet Communist party had been so rapid that social scientists, used to deal with slower processes of change and relatively safe generalizations, were at a special disadvantage in coming to grips with them.
Even if we forget for a moment the political prejudices and particular theories of Sovietologists, it seemed to be inherently implausible, to any social scientist with some knowledge of the Soviet system, that leaders who had made their way to the highest positions in the Communist hierarchy were capable of such daring or, for that matter, revolutionary initiatives as a Gorbachev or Yeltsin proved to be, that the bulk of Communist hierarchy was not able to put up a stronger resistance against these initiatives, and that the process of transition has been, relatively speaking, such a peaceful affair.
With the advantage of hindsight, it is easy to point out that some of the reformist or revolutionary leaders have not been so successful in shedding their Communist habits, that the conservative part of the Communist hierarchy has found better ways to resist the changes than to stage a full scale counter-revolution, and that the process of transition may still lead to violent conflicts on an immense scale. But even if events move, from now on, according to the worst-case scenario in all these respects, this would not change the exceptional character of the transition process as it has taken place.
What we could have reasonably expected from the social scientists working on the Sovietological field was, consequently, something more modest than a prediction of the actions of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, or their opponents. Rather they should have produced, on the basis of mapping out the broad, gradual social and economic changes, a description of the conditions on the eve of the great transition that would have left open, at least implicitly, the possibility of what actually happened, leaving specific predictions for daring spirits, scholars, or outsiders, who were willing to make risky bets. Most Sovietologists, however, assessed the situation in the 1980s in ways that did not allow for the coming revolutionary changes. What they did was, in fact, no less daring than to expect a revolution. They expected, to wit, just the opposite of what happened.
Before entering into a more detailed discussion of why Soviet specialists failed to anticipate the end of the Communist regime, even in the minimal sense indicated above, it seems to be useful to take a look at a couple of snapshots showing how Sovietologists judged the chances of a systemic change in the Soviet Union at the time when the revolutionary process, as we now know, was about to start. As a writer of a review of some Sovietological works remarked, to look at such snapshots in time is like opening an old family album. The figures on the pictures seem to be quaint and the viewer marvels at the lack of any sign of the fate awaiting them.9
In 1987, as the widespread extent of perestroika became evident, virtually all Western experts on the Soviet Union believed that Gorba
chev's reforms could not but remain within the framework of the Communist regime. They differed only about how much change was possible. The Gorbachev enthusiasts were quite optimistic about the possibilities, while their more skeptical colleagues were stressing ultimate limits. Archie Brown, a leading British Sovietologist was a typical representative of the first tendency.
Much depends, of course, on the extent of the change we have in mind. If, domestically, any economic reform that falls short of a full-fledged market economy is to be discounted in advance, and if, in foreign policy, the criterion of significant movement is to be that the USSR ceases to proclaim the superiority of its socioeconomic system and stops trying to extend its influence, then those in the West who hold that no change in the Soviet Union is likely should have little difficulty in proving to their own satisfaction that they were right.
It would appear, though, that change which fails to satisfy such unrealistic criteria may be important, difficult to achieve, and yet worthy of attainment. Domestically, this would apply to a reform that substantially increased the devolution of responsibility within the system, introduced elections with choice within the party or for soviets, reduced the power of the ministries, and made far more concessions to the market than the existing economic mechanism while changing, rather than abandoning, the role of party and state institutions in economic life.... Important, too, would be a change of Soviet foreign policy that sought to establish clearer and safer "rules of the game" for superpower competition.'?
William Odom, a high-ranking Soviet analyst in the U.S. Army, was less enthusiastic about the scope of Gorbachev's initiatives than Archie Brown. A reader of their statements today, however, is mostly struck by their basic agreement on what Gorbachev could not possibly do or even desire.
It seems more and more clear that Gorbachev himself does not intend systemic change. He is exercising with remarkable energy and cunning the system bequeathed him by previous general secretaries. He is struggling to regain the vitality once possessed by the system.... If what one means by reform is a significant improvement in the standard of living for Soviet citizens and increased protection of their individual rights under law, that kind of reform cannot go very far without bringing about systemic change the kind of change that Gorbachev cannot want."
Is Gorbachev bent upon a fundamental change in the system? If he is, the chances that he can control it are small, virtually nil.... One is forced, therefore, to infer a more limited aim on Gorbachev's part, namely, a revitalization of the old system.'2
Some who were right
Not all efforts at Sovietology were wrong about the future of the system. Journalists, political scientists, sociologists, historians, demographers, and economists produced many useful studies that pointed the way to the transformations after 1989. More than a few analyses have withstood the test of the subsequent developments.
A book edited by Zbigniew Brzezinski that appeared in 1969 contains fourteen articles dealing with the future of the Soviet Union. Six of them, by Brzezinski, Robert Conquest, Merle Fainsod, Eugene Lyons, Giorgio Galli, and Isaac Don Levine, considered "collapse as a serious possibility although not immediately."'3 One, Robert Conquest, saw "the USSR as a country where the political system is radically and dangerously inappropriate to its social and economic dynamics. This is a formula for change change which may be sudden and catastrophic...."14 Brzezinski himself, as we shall note in more detail below, repeatedly emphasized that collapse was a realistic possibility.
Most Sovietologists, however, did not agree with these judgments, in part because they thought that the system was improving, that conditions of life were better for the masses. Relying to a large extent on Soviet data, they concluded that the Soviet economy was doing so well to the point where "by the 1970s, the conventional wisdom (shared also by the CIA) came to be that the Soviet GNP was some 60 percent of the American."5 These estimates, as we now know, were misguided and untenable as revealed by the Soviet authorities and scholars after Gorbachev took office. But that information had been available much earlier.
One of the most significant set of such reports is by Murray Feshbach, a demographer who has been interested in health statistics. Feshbach, in a number of important papers written in the 1970s and 1980s, brought together a variety of data, drawn from Soviet sources, demonstrating how miserable Soviet living conditions were. Particularly noteworthy was his stress on the fact that infant mortality had been going up in the Soviet Union while adult longevity declined.16 Such tendencies could not be found in any other country. While there are many countries that are low on both, the direction in industrialized countries has always been upward, except under Communism. Feshbach also noted and documented the tremendous extent of alcoholism in the Soviet Union.17 Another demographer, Nick Eberstedt, drawing in part on Feshbach's work but also on his own, noted in the early 1980s evidence of considerable alienation, particularly in work, within Soviet institutions.18
A devastating critique of the Soviet system was presented by a Soviet emigre, Andrei Amalrik, in his 1970 essay, Will The Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? Amalrik wrote during an earlier period of liberalization, that of Khrushchev. He suggested that the "liberalization" was a function of "the growing decrepitude of the regime, rather than its regeneration," that "the logical result will be its death, followed by anarchy."19
Basically, Amalrik argued that the strata who most benefited from the system, largely the educated professionals, want democratic reforms, greater freedom, and the rule of law. The masses, the workers without rights, the collective farmers, all exhibit "pervasive discontent" with their lot. Although the 1960s showed a slow growth in the standard of living, Amalrik predicted that "a halt or even a reversal in the improvement of the standard of living (such as was to occur from the seventies on) would arouse such explosions of anger, mixed with violence, as were never before thought possible." Such developments would take place because of the "ossification" of the system, and would affect industrial output. He saw the regime becoming "progressively weaker and more self-destructive."20
Beyond changes in class relations, Amalrik noted that the Stalinist expansion into Eastern Europe and its "fostering of international tension" created a danger for the Soviet rulers. More importantly, the USSR would not be able to hold down the forces of nationalism. Any event which undermined domestic stability "will be enough to topple the regime."21 He anticipated a breakdown in the 1980s.
Awareness that the nationality question, ethnic tension, would undermine the system, is at the heart of the 1980 analysis by sociologist Randall Collins. In an article that he had difficulty in publishing in academic journals because it went so much against the accepted scholarly wisdom, until it finally appeared in his own book of essays in 1986, Collins wrote that the Soviet Union "had already reached its limit ... and was entering a period of ... decline ... with the likelihood of extensive decline becoming very high before the 21st century."22 He concluded that the country was overextended economically, militarily, and politically, that it simply would not be able to control "the Baltic, the Ukraine, the Caucasus and the Central Asian Moslem territories."23 These would follow on the "breakdown of the central power of the Russian state."24 As a Weberian, he emphasized legitimacy, and suggested that the Soviet Union had major legitimacy problems, since its failures had produced a loss of faith in Marxism, in Communist ideology. Not only the masses and the intelligentsia, but the privileged generally no longer had faith.
The social historian Moshe Lewin in a book published in 1988, produced an illuminating interpretation of the early Gorbachev era, which if widely noted would have prepared us for the momentous transformations soon to come. Following a quasi-Marxist (but not socialist) approach, much like Roman Szporluk and Alexander Motyl, he pointed to dialectic tensions among the various parts of the system, some of which were more advanced than others, some of which acted as a brake on the development of others, some of which were declining while others were growing, that would lead to a breakdown.25 As we argue in the next section of this article, such a dialectical approach, sensitive to internal variations, based on a strand of an important macrotheoretical tradition in modern social thought had a definite advantage for understanding the long-term processes underway in communist societies. It may be contrasted with those, dominant in Sovietology, which relied almost exclusively on theories specifically developed in or taken over from systems analyses in other fields to explain the peculiarities of the communist system.26
In 1987, Lewin wrote: "Whenever some aspects of the system seriously lag behind others for example, if the political institutions are too sluggish crisis and turmoil, reform or stagnation, if not worse, invariably ensue. This is the story of the Soviet Union in the twentieth century." While noting symptoms of decline and decadence, he also pointed to "vast changes in the Soviet social system (urbanization, industrialization, the growth of intellectual and professional classes)."27 Lewin's particularistic and dialectical approaches did not make him a better prophet about political outcomes than the bulk of his more narrow and inward-looking Sovietological colleagues who concentrated on developments in Moscow, but he deserves recognition for anticipating the need created by structural changes for moves toward a more open society, which made the transformations of the early 1990s possible.
Although considerably reformed and strongly diluted, the anachronistic autocratic features have now come under pressure from the social environment. The apparaty, not too alert to the call of history, has [sic] been reminded that the muzhik (the implicit, sometimes explicit justification for the crude dictatorial regime) is no longer at center stage. Today well educated urban citizens, not backward peasants, are the largest demographic group.
...the dimensions and potential of this novel society, especially its political aspects, are still poorly understood. But one thing is clear: Soviet society needs a state that can match its complexity. And in ways sometimes overt, sometimes covert, contemporary urban society has become a powerful "system maker," pressuring both political institutions and the economic model to adapt. Through numerous channels, some visible, some slow, insidious, and imperceptible, Soviet urban society is affecting individuals, groups, institutions, and the state. Civil society is talking, gossiping, demanding, sulking, expressing its interests in many ways and thereby creating moods, ideologies, and public opinion. At the same time, the impersonal, structural features of the social system create hard facts, define reality, and set limits. Both the personal and impersonal factors disregard controlling devices such as censorship, police controls or the nomenklatura (nomination process).28
The Harvard historian Richard Pipes, a scholar of a more conservative political persuasion than Lewin, also used some quasi-Marxist ideas in his anticipation of the Soviet crisis. In 1984, before Gorbachev took office, Pipes called attention to the possibility of the emergence of a "revolutionary situation," and used Lenin's famous description of the conditions that produce one: "...a condition of stalemate between the ruling elite and the population at large: the former no longer could rule, and the latter no longer would be ruled in the old way."29 He left open, however, both reformist and revolutionary outcomes, depending on the behavior of the Soviet establishment: "The nomenklatura is not the first ruling elite to face the choice between holding on to all power and privilege at the risk of losing all of it, or surrendering some of both in the hope of holding on to the rest."30
The totalitarian model
Western academic study of the Soviet Union and other Communist countries had been guided and indeed dominated by the totalitarian model from the 1950s to the 1970s. Given its widespread impact on academic and extramural analyses of the Soviet system, it seems worthwhile to set forth some general features of the original position, even at the risk of restating points that over the decades have become commonplace.
The totalitarian model was meant to be applied not only to the Soviet Union or Communist countries in general, but to other modern dictatorial political and social systems too, and above all, of course, to Nazi Germany. Although much maligned by Sovietologists in the 1970s and 1980s, it has proven to be the most fruitful of the paradigms. Totalitarianism is called "a novel form of government" in both of the two most systematic and influential expositions of the model, Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism31 and Carl J. Friedrich's and Zbigniew Brzezinski's Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy.32 While an ideal-type construct, it was drawn from the empirical reality of different fascist and Communist states.
The novelty of this form of government derived from four features. First, under this type of rule, all organizations and associations, whether economic, political, cultural, educational, or purely social, were supposed to be integrated into a single hierarchy of control. Parallelism and organizational rivalry, however, were not to be eliminated; totalitarian government thrived on them. But all the competing groups were ultimately subordinated to a single center of command, embodied in the person of a dictator.
A second set of characteristics included in the original model related to methods of governing. Exponents of the totalitarian model stressed the importance of terror, but put a distinct emphasis on those methods of control, such as mass propaganda, state-managed rituals of mobilization, and systematic surveillance, which were based on modern developments in technology and organizational technique.
Third, all this formidable machinery operated under the guidance of an ideology that envisaged a total transformation of human nature and society. And fourth, as a consequence of its structure, methods, and ideological aspirations, totalitarian government had to become, inevitably, more than a political regime or system of rule by the common use of the term. Totalitarianism involved an unprecedented penetration and transformation of the social system, too. At this point, however, the focus of analysis shifted to a different level.
Although the first three points referred, albeit in an ideal typical way, to an actual state of affairs, the total transformation of society was seen as a utopia that might be, at tremendous human cost, approximated but never realized. Proponents of the model made different judgments about the degree of success of individual totalitarian regimes in this respect, but no one accepted the idea that totalitarianism could ever become total. In Friedrich's and Brzezinski's book, for example, those institutions that had not undergone a radical transformation, such as the family, churches, and some professional communities including the officer corps, were treated as residual "islands of separateness."33 Hannah Arendt, however pessimistic about the resilience of human bonds under totalitarian pressure, took note of the fact that such regimes were constantly using some traditional institutions, like rational bureaucracy and the legal system, as a facade to legitimate their sinister realities.34
As time went on, the model started to lose its original plausibility and seemed to be more and more in need of overhaul or replacement. After World War II, the horrors of Nazism gradually receded into the past and the glaring parallels between the Nazi and Stalinist regimes became blurred. The Soviet regime, having survived intact the convulsions of war, had taken on a modified character since Stalin's death, especially since the mid-1960s.
The keystone of the old system, personal dictatorship, had not been replaced and was now missing. The relations among the branches of totalitarian government, the party, the state, and the security apparatus, became more entrenched. Bureaucracy, a mere facade according to the original model, was more and more seen as the mainstay of the regime.
Methods of governing became milder. Although systematic surveillance and monitoring of political behavior remained in place, or were even perfected, the scale of intimidation was significantly reduced and, what was no less important, repression became a predictable consequence of nonconformist or dissident behavior. The official doctrine of Marxism-Leninism was not given up until the very end of the regime, but it was replaced in daily practice to a large extent by pragmatic considerations and even traditional values in the thinking of new leaders.
Penetration and transformation of society turned out to be much less successful than envisaged in the totalitarian model. The family, an island engulfed and threatened by the waves of terror according to the original analysis, gathered new strength and, of course, went through all the usual processes of transformation concomitant with modernization. Private bonds among individuals, assumed to have been largely destroyed by totalitarian pressures, were retied. Formal organizations, although not allowed to slip out of the control of central bureaucracy, were permeated and deflected from their original purpose by networks of personal or "informal" relationships, as they have been called in Soviet and East European parlance. The result was a social landscape quite dissimilar to Hannah Arendt's evocative picture of a sandy wasteland of atomized individuals who could be whipped up to frenzies of mobilization.35
But the general institutional and ideological framework, however undermined and overgrown by new social relations, remained in place. There was more than enough continuity to make an adaptation of the old theoretical paradigm to the new realities possible. This is what followers of the totalitarian analytical model had actually done, although sometimes without retaining the old label. Classic Stalinism was reinterpreted as a preparatory phase of a more mature, or ossified, or degenerated and corrupt bureaucratic regime of a special character determined by its origins. Adherents of the old model could point out moreover, in agreement with the prevailing political opinion within the communist countries, that there had been always a danger, sometimes more than a danger, of a relapse into some kind of neo-Stalinism.
It was especially due to the efforts of Brzezinski who, in a long series of impressive works, continued the line of thought started with Friedrich's and his 1956 classic that the totalitarian interpretation never lost touch with Soviet developments. From the early sixties until 1989 when The Grand Failure was published, Brzezinski always worked with the alternative of "transformation and degeneration."
In 1969 Brzezinski put the question in the following way: "Is Russia at the end of the highly motivated energetic period in its history and at the beginning of the sterile bureaucratic phase? Such energetic and bureaucratic cycles have been typical of Russian history: a major challenge gives rise to a major national response, coercively and collectively organized; the organized response then in turn becomes fossilized and bureaucratically stagnant, leading to a period of decay."36 A year later, in a book on the "technetronic era," his version of the knowledge-based post-industrial changes that had emerged in the West, Brzezinski concluded that the rigid centralized systems of control in the Soviet polity and economy had become dysfunctional because the "scientific-technological revolution," to use Brezhnev's term, required greater flexibility and pluralism than the Party could accept. One possible consequence would be "political disintegration."37 Almost twenty years later, he saw the following five options facing the regime: (1) success of perestroika, (2) "protracted but inconclusive turmoil," (3) "renewed stagnation," (4) "a regressive and repressive political coup, in reaction to either Option 2 or 3," (5) "fragmentation of the Soviet Union, as a consequence of some combination of the above."
Among these options, Brzezinski deemed Option 2 the most likely alternative "for the next several years." He did not expect a quick end to the totalitarian regime, but he was certain that the moment of failure was close. Perestroika, i.e., revitalization of the system without a radical break with the totalitarian institutions and ideology, could not succeed. Turmoil and chaos could not last forever. The genie was out of the bottle, and there was not much chance that it could be put to sleep by renewed stagnation or put back into the bottle by a coup.38
Revisionism in Sovietology
The totalitarian model elaborated by Brzezinski and others remained quite fruitful when judged in the 1990s by the ultimate test of anticipating major changes. This, however, did not enable the totalitarian school of thought to maintain an important position in academic Sovietology as the turbulent 1960s drew to a close. The model lost much of its appeal to younger and more left-oriented scholars. Herbert J. Spiro, felt confident enough to write the epitaph of the concept in a 1968 article in the authoritative International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.
Totalitarianism is a twentieth-century term that did not come into general or academic use until the late 1930s.... The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1930-1935), for instance, has no entry entitled "totalitarianism"....
As the social sciences develop more discriminating concepts of comparison, as the developing political systems discover that the invention of new methods of modernization may obviate their need for slavishly copying more coercive methods from models whose experience is no longer relevant, and as, hopefully, the more glaring differences between the major parties in the cold war begin to wither away, use of the term "totalitarianism" may also become less frequent. If these expectations are borne out, then a third encyclopedia of the social sciences, like the first one, will not list "totalitarianism."39
This brusque rejection came mainly from a new generation of scholars entering the field of Soviet and East European studies in the 1960s. They did not know the fear of totalitarianism that had been ingrained into many of their elders. They had different experiences from those of their academic predecessors who were refugees from Communism or
Nazism or whose first-hand contacts with totalitarianism came from
military or diplomatic service. They were able to visit the Soviet Union as honored guests, and found a country that did not appear totalitarian. Abbot Gleason, a professor of Russian history, described this aspect of the situation in a judicious way.
With the establishment of academic exchanges in the course of the 1960s, American professors and (even more important) graduate students were able to spend relatively long periods of time in the Soviet Union. They were able to meet ordinary Soviet citizens and understand their lives in ways that foreigners had found extremely difficult for decades. Impressionistic evidence suggests that, although two years in the Soviet Union usually had a devastating effect on leftist pro-Soviet opinions, it also undermined the totalitarian model. The state was surely intrusive, but the gap between that intrusiveness and the nightmare vision of 1984 was obviously great and not diminishing. Not only had the state not eliminated "private life," the hospitality of Soviet citizens and the store they set on friendship often impressed Americans and on occasion made them wonder if they were not the people who had become atomized.40
This was a generation, furthermore, whose belief in the moral superiority of Western democracy and American foreign policy was thoroughly shaken by the Vietnam War. Although those opposed to the war usually did not glorify the achievements of communism as liberal fellow travellers and communists in the 1930s did, a principled rejection of communism was suspect in their eyes. They took any criticism of the Soviet system, if it was based on liberal or conservative values, as an indirect apology for Western democracy or, even worse, as cold-war propaganda. This political conflict between the previous generation of writers on communism and the new one of revisionist Sovietologists was played out, to a large extent, in the debate about the totalitarian character of Soviet-type society.
The revisionists rejected, first of all, the parallel between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Patterson, in an influential article on "The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism," contemptuously dismissed the analogy.
Americans both before and after the Second World War casually and deliberately articulated distorted similarities between Nazi and Communist ideologies, German and Soviet foreign policies, authoritarian controls, and trade practices, and Hitler and Stalin. This popular analogy was a potent and pervasive notion that significantly shaped American perception of world events in the cold war. Once Russia was designated the "enemy" by American leaders, Americans transferred their hatred for Hitler's Germany to Stalin's Russia with considerable ease and persuasion.41
There was, in fact, nothing casual in the way this analogy between the Soviet and Nazi regimes had been worked out and used by serious political writers and social scientists of the referenced period. Tremendous intellectual and moral effort would be a more apt description.42 This applies especially to the non-communist and anti-Stalinist Left that was, typically for the New Left's forgetfulness about the Old, ignored by Adler and Patterson.43
Another line of argument was aimed at the presumed sociological emptiness of the totalitarian model. Stephen F Cohen in his book on Rethinking the Soviet Experience, the best-argued statement and a veritable compendium of the revisionist position, spoke about the "totalitarianism school's inability to imagine any authentically social dimensions of Soviet politics."
Analyzing mutual influences and interactions between state and society is at the center of most historical and political study. Not Soviet studies, which saw only a brutal one-way, decades-long process in which the party-state "imposed its ideology at will" upon an inert society. The favored analytical imagery was a "permanent civil war between the rulers and ruled," a "regime with no links to the people." Mistaking Stalinist despotism and mass terror, the "linchpin of totalitarianism," for the whole of Soviet political and social life, most Sovietologists forgot a basic truth. Even such despotic conditions "in no way" mean, as a Soviet dissident later explained, "that Soviet society is like a raw lump of clay that yields to any sort of pressure."44
Although it is easy to glean extreme statements from the literature, the social dimension of Soviet politics was never left out of the study of communist systems even in the heyday of the totalitarian model. At the 1953 conference on totalitarianism organized by the American Academy of Sciences, the proceedings of which became one of the key texts on the subject, Karl W. Deutsch spoke about the "cracks in the monolith." He spoke about cracks that could not be closed up because of the social constraints under which the system operates.
To elicit full identification and loyalty,... a government must be to a considerable extent accessible and predictable.... Totalitarian governments need at least the appearance of accessibility and predictability if they are to hold the active support of their subjects.... (But) the more predictable and expectable a government becomes, the less totalitarian is it likely to remain.... Obviously, these inherent conflicts in the basis of the political support of totalitarian regimes can be sustained for considerable periods of time; but as these periods lengthen into generations the fate of most totalitarian regimes should become increasingly dubious.45
To tell the truth, Hannah Arendt found Deutsch's rather tentative conclusions "overoptimistic,"46 but there were other voices too. David Riesman, who was not exactly inattentive to the "totalitarian temptation," to use a term that became fashionable later, wrote as early as 1952 about the "limits of totalitarian power."
Twenty and even ten years ago, it was an important intellectual task (and one in which, in a small way, I participated) to point out to Americans of good will that the Soviet and Nazi systems were not simply transitory stages,... that they were, in fact, new forms of social organization, more omnivorous than even the most brutal of earlier dictatorships.... Yet it seems to me that now the task of intellectual and moral awakening has been pretty well performed, and stands even in danger of being overperformed....
I think we can become so fascinated with the malevolence of Stalinism that we may tend to overestimate its efficiency in achieving its horrible ends.... Overinterpretation is the besetting sin of intellectuals anyway, and even when, with Hannah Arendt, we rightly point to the need to cast traditional rationalities aside in comprehending totalitarianism, we may subtly succumb to the appeal of an evil mystery; there is a long tradition of making Satan attractive in spite of ourselves. And the more practical danger of this is that we may... misjudge not so much the aims as the power of the enemy and be unduly cowed or unduly aggressive as a result.
Consequently, I want to open up a discussion of some of the defenses people have against totalitarianism. Not that these defenses I shall discuss apathy, corruption, free enterprise, crime, and so on threaten the security system of the Soviets....47
These pertinent critical observations were only skirmishes compared to the massive invasion of Sovietology by sociology and social psychology led by Alex Inkeles and his coauthors, Raymond A. Bauer and Clyde Kluckhorn. All the themes dear to the heart of revisionists are to be found in their books and papers, such as the "importance of informal mechanisms in the operation of a society that, on the surface, appears and pretends to be highly centralized and controlled,"48 or the private networks of communication making possible the formation of, at least partially, independent opinions.49
Inkeles and his coauthors did not throw the totalitarian model overboard but, as Martin Malia recently remarked, "fleshed out the model with concrete analyses of its multiple structures."50 Inkeles, however, was no less sparing in his criticism of an exclusive and one-sided application of the totalitarian model than the revisionists of the next generation who, characteristically, did not acknowledge his contribution.51
This totalitarian model had great strength. It answered too many of the really basic and distinctive characteristic facts of the situation....
This model also had certain weaknesses. One of the difficulties was that it was relatively insensitive to the sources of social support for the Soviet regime. It represented a screen which did not permit the intrusion of this kind of information, because, naturally, such information was a challenge to the adequacy of the model....
I suggest we get some new themes, new ideas, new models, into the discussion ... because we are really dealing with a system which is in an important degree changing. But even in our interpretation of the past, new models of analysis may enrich and correct interpretations we have already made.52
A third argument marshalled by the revisionists against the totalitarian model was directed at the old school's lack of predictive success. This argument was formulated by Stephen Cohen in terms quite similar to those we used in the previous section. Ironically, however, it is quite obvious that the same kind of criticism can be levelled against the new model that resulted from all this revisionist criticism.
Predictions should not be the main purpose of scholarly political analysis, but understanding change is central to that enterprise. Having imagined ... a Soviet political life without social factors, and a "monolithic regime" without meaningful internal conflicts, Sovietology was left with a static conception of a frozen system....
The field could not conceive of what was already under way in the 1950s gradual change away from Stalin's terror-ridden despotism.... Sovietologists actually discussed, and generally ruled out, the prospect of such change....53
(continued)
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET and GYORGY BENCE
George Mason University; Lorand Eotvos University, Hungary
One of the questions that social scientists have to deal with in reacting to the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union is why they, and other nonacademic experts such as the intelligence agencies of the great Western powers, as well, did not anticipate that this would happen, or even that it could occur. The evidence is fairly clear that the world was taken by surprise by the transformations that emerged under Gorbachev and even more by the outlawing of the Communist party after the coup against him. There was, of course, an equivalent failure to expect that the East European Communist regimes would give up power.
From among the myriad relevant statements made by concerned social scientists and political analysts, we cite only one by the political scientists and neo-Marxist Adam Przeworski: "The Autumn of the People' was a dismal failure of political science. Any retrospective explanation of the fall of communism must not only account for the historical developments but also identify the theoretical assumptions that prevented us from anticipating these developments." This essay attempts to deal with the second part of the question. Rightly or not, we pay much less attention at this time to the comparative historical issues that, given problems of space, must be treated separately. Hence, we ignore some of the important issues raised by Motyl, Suny, Szporluk, and Tapas.
The limits of social science
To come to terms with this failure of anticipation, or to pass a considered judgment on how serious it really was, we have to face a general limitation of social science, its inherent inability to predict the particular, such as the collapse of specific Communist regimes. The predictive
Theory and Society 23: 169-210, 1994. @ 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
successes of sociology and political science, on this macroscopic level, have been admittedly rather meager. Social scientists are good historians. They are able to understand the processes involved in what has already happened. But they have not been good forecasters. Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate in economics, has called attention to the failures of his discipline by this dramatic question: "Why should anyone who forecasts so badly be expected to have worthwhile opinions on other subjects?"2
The most striking example of a generalized failure of sociologists and political scientists to anticipate developments may be found in the field of ethnicity. Until recently, Marxist and non-Marxist scholars agreed on a standardized set of generalizations about ethnic and national minorities. The latter argued that ethnicity reflected the conditions of traditional society, where people lived in small communities isolated from one another and in which mass communications and transportation were limited. Most scholars anticipated that industrialization, urbanization, and the spread of education would reduce ethnic consciousness. Universalism would replace particularism. This argument found its corollary in the belief of Marxists that socialism would result in a decline of ethnic tension and consciousness. Assimilation of minorities into a larger integrated whole was viewed by both groups of analysts as the inevitable future.3
As we know, the opposite has occurred, both in the Western and Communist countries, and in the less developed world as well. The Achilles' heel of Communism has turned out to be nationalism, not only that of Poles, Czechs, or Hungarians vis-h-vis the Soviet Union, but also the rising, and sometimes rabid, national feelings of the various ethnic groupings within Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union and, since the collapse of the latter, in Moldavia and Georgia as well. In recent years, most of the multilingual, binational or bireligious states that have persisted for many decades, if not centuries, have been in turmoil. Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, and Lebanon all have had crises of national existence created by the demands of minorities for autonomy or independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have faced division, while ethnic rebellion has been suppressed in Nigeria and other parts of Africa.
Predictions made by social scientists are often comparable to weather forecasts. Meteorological forecasting remains, to a large extent, a matter of trained judgment and intuition because there are too many variables to be controlled and the relations among the variables are too complex. Moreover, the new mathematical insights of chaos theory have posited that this cannot be helped, either in meteorology or in any other science dealing with complex phenomena, by feeding more and more data into computers of ever growing capacity. "In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos (in the sense taken by chaos theorists like Edward Lorenz) meant that such points were everywhere. They were pervasive. In systems like the weather, sensitive dependence on initial conditions was an inescapable consequence of the way small scales intertwined with large."4
In citing the failures or, more accurately, the inadequate predictions of the various social sciences, it is not our intention to suggest that they are unable to analyze social and economic phenomena.5 Clearly, all the disciplines have done much to explain the ways in which economy, society, and individuals behave. Social science, however, is still at its best in advancing what Robert Merton has called "middle-range" theories, and in explaining developments limited in time and space particularly in the past where at least there is some possibility of analyzing real data. As social science moves outward to deal with systemic trends and tendencies, its capacity to explain diminishes. Economists are able to avoid some of the methodological consequences of this problem by focusing on analytically closed systems based on limiting sets of assumptions. They are, however, no more able than other social analysts to comprehend total system behavior or to understand the behavior of particular economies.
It is not surprising, therefore, that discussions of the failure of students of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to anticipate the collapse of the Communist regimes sometimes invoked those limitations of human prevision inherent in the very subject matter, social life itself.
Seeking objectivity, legitimacy, and predictability, social scientists in the United States set out after World War II to embrace the traditional methods of the physical and natural sciences... But they did so at a time when physicists, biologists, and mathematicians, concerned about disparities between their theories and the reality they supposedly modeled, were gradually abandoning old methods in favor of new ones that accommodated indeterminacy, irregularity, and unpredictability precisely the qualities that the social sciences were to leave behind. There was, in effect, a methodological passing of ships in the night: The "soft" sciences tried to become "harder" just as the "hard" sciences were becoming "softer."6
But there are reasons to assume, as we are going to argue in this article, that although this is a good occasion to raise questions about the overall limitations of social science, the sources of failure are to be sought in our case, first of all, on another level. Students of Soviet and East European societies did not exploit to the fullest extent those theoretical sources of anticipation that have been available to the social sciences even given the most cautious methodological assumptions. This underutilization took the form either of not taking into account some general trends of social change that sociologists and political scientists are generally quite good at recognizing in other contexts or, more often, of not drawing the conclusions from them that, under other conditions, would have seemed to be obvious.
Failures of anticipation
The basic problem with the analyses of the Soviet Union, both academic and nonacademic, is that like social-science research generally, and even more than most, it is fraught with ideology and politics. Both the Left and the Right made judgments about the Soviet system that derived from their political beliefs. The Right believed that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire," that it was an oppressive totalitarian regime ready to use all resources under its control to retain and even to extend its power. Given its strength, including complete domination of means of communication, propaganda, and education, and the willingness to spend considerable funds on repressive institutions, the military and the secret police in particular, as well as the apparatus and ideological commitment of the Communist Party, there seemed no way the system could be overthrown from within.
The Right was certain that Communism was exploitative, that it violated the logic of economics and human nature, that there was considerable opposition to the regime, but few thought the conditions would produce a breakdown. The Right also believed that the system was militarily efficient, that morale in the armed services was reasonably high because they were treated well, and that therefore the Soviets were a serious threat.
The Left differed in its assumptions or beliefs about the nature of Soviet society. At one extreme, the various wings of the Communist movement, the Trotskyists apart, agreed that the system basically was a good one, a progressive one that was leading to improvements in productivity and the standard of living of the population and that the people supported Communism. Trotsky, however, while emphasizing the inefficiencies of the Soviet Union and the exploitation of the masses, believed the system was progressive, i.e., inherently anti-capitalist as long as the major means of production remained state owned.7 The non-Communist Left varied considerably in its judgments, from assessments that were close to those of the Communists to much more critical ones, and in some cases evaluations that were not far from those of the Right.
Basically, most parts of the Left saw the Communist world as on their side, as representing some form of socialism, as efforts to create a more egalitarian and ultimately freer social system. Many felt that this attempt was distorted and severely corrupted, but the Soviet system was regarded essentially as part of their world, as on the left. In interpreting the reasons for the Cold War, the Left put much more of the responsibility on the West. They did not believe that there was a Soviet military threat. Regardless of feelings about the nature of the system, the Left agreed with the Right that the Soviet regime would not be overthrown and that any consideration of its breaking down from within was a near impossibility.
It would, however, be unfair to portray serious students of the Soviet Union and the East European countries, whether they leaned to the left or to the right, as having unthinkingly translated their political preferences into projections of the future. One could, in fact, argue that there have not been many other fields of social and political study where the methodological problems of anticipating large-scale developments were given such serious consideration as in the field of Soviet studies. Daniel Bell was able to draw one of his most interesting conclusions of the possibilities of prediction in social science from an examination of Sovietological analyses.
There should be a clear distinction between types of change which take place: between changes in Soviet society (the social system) and in Soviet politics, although in crucial moments one is dependent on the other. The difference is one of distinguishing between a process and an event; or, to revive an old distinction of the crusty sociologist William Graham Sumner, between crescive and enacted change. Crescive changes are those which surge, swell, go on willy-nilly, and develop with some measure of autonomy....
Enacted changes are the conscious decisions or intents of legislators and rulers (e.g., the declaration of war, the collectivization of agriculture, the location of new industry, etc.). Those who enact change have to take into account the mores of the people and the resources at their disposal, but these serve only as limiting, not determining, factors.
Sociological analysis is most sure when it deals with crescive changes. These can be identified, their drift charted, and, like iceberg floes, their course and even their break-up specified more readily than others. But sociological analysis often fails in predicting political decisions. There are in history what Hegel called the "unique moments," and, in calling the turn, not pure reason but practical judgment (that unstable compound of information, intuition, and empathy) has to take hold....
The nature of the changes which one describes conditions the kinds of predictions one can make. One can define, and predict, the limits of broad crescive changes (e.g., if one knows the resource pattern of the Soviet Union,... one can make a guess about the slowdown in the rate of economic growth), but in predicting the short-run policy turns one comes up against the variabilities of accident, folly and simple human cantankerousness.8
In the next section we have occasion to refer to some other interesting discussions of the problem of anticipation in respect to the development or eventual transformation of the Soviet system. Here, it is enough to rely on Bell's basic distinction to give a more precise characterization of what the general failure of anticipation consisted of in the Soviet case. According to Bell, it would have been unreasonable to expect social scientists to be more successful in predicting the "unique moment" of transition than political commentators, journalists, or statesmen were. The judgments of some of the latter turned out, in fact, to be better than the presumably more informed guesses of social scientists, as we show in the concluding section of this article.
The series of events and the decisions of key political figures leading to the liberation of the East European countries from the Soviet bloc and then to the abolition of the Soviet Union and the banning of the Soviet Communist party had been so rapid that social scientists, used to deal with slower processes of change and relatively safe generalizations, were at a special disadvantage in coming to grips with them.
Even if we forget for a moment the political prejudices and particular theories of Sovietologists, it seemed to be inherently implausible, to any social scientist with some knowledge of the Soviet system, that leaders who had made their way to the highest positions in the Communist hierarchy were capable of such daring or, for that matter, revolutionary initiatives as a Gorbachev or Yeltsin proved to be, that the bulk of Communist hierarchy was not able to put up a stronger resistance against these initiatives, and that the process of transition has been, relatively speaking, such a peaceful affair.
With the advantage of hindsight, it is easy to point out that some of the reformist or revolutionary leaders have not been so successful in shedding their Communist habits, that the conservative part of the Communist hierarchy has found better ways to resist the changes than to stage a full scale counter-revolution, and that the process of transition may still lead to violent conflicts on an immense scale. But even if events move, from now on, according to the worst-case scenario in all these respects, this would not change the exceptional character of the transition process as it has taken place.
What we could have reasonably expected from the social scientists working on the Sovietological field was, consequently, something more modest than a prediction of the actions of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, or their opponents. Rather they should have produced, on the basis of mapping out the broad, gradual social and economic changes, a description of the conditions on the eve of the great transition that would have left open, at least implicitly, the possibility of what actually happened, leaving specific predictions for daring spirits, scholars, or outsiders, who were willing to make risky bets. Most Sovietologists, however, assessed the situation in the 1980s in ways that did not allow for the coming revolutionary changes. What they did was, in fact, no less daring than to expect a revolution. They expected, to wit, just the opposite of what happened.
Before entering into a more detailed discussion of why Soviet specialists failed to anticipate the end of the Communist regime, even in the minimal sense indicated above, it seems to be useful to take a look at a couple of snapshots showing how Sovietologists judged the chances of a systemic change in the Soviet Union at the time when the revolutionary process, as we now know, was about to start. As a writer of a review of some Sovietological works remarked, to look at such snapshots in time is like opening an old family album. The figures on the pictures seem to be quaint and the viewer marvels at the lack of any sign of the fate awaiting them.9
In 1987, as the widespread extent of perestroika became evident, virtually all Western experts on the Soviet Union believed that Gorba
chev's reforms could not but remain within the framework of the Communist regime. They differed only about how much change was possible. The Gorbachev enthusiasts were quite optimistic about the possibilities, while their more skeptical colleagues were stressing ultimate limits. Archie Brown, a leading British Sovietologist was a typical representative of the first tendency.
Much depends, of course, on the extent of the change we have in mind. If, domestically, any economic reform that falls short of a full-fledged market economy is to be discounted in advance, and if, in foreign policy, the criterion of significant movement is to be that the USSR ceases to proclaim the superiority of its socioeconomic system and stops trying to extend its influence, then those in the West who hold that no change in the Soviet Union is likely should have little difficulty in proving to their own satisfaction that they were right.
It would appear, though, that change which fails to satisfy such unrealistic criteria may be important, difficult to achieve, and yet worthy of attainment. Domestically, this would apply to a reform that substantially increased the devolution of responsibility within the system, introduced elections with choice within the party or for soviets, reduced the power of the ministries, and made far more concessions to the market than the existing economic mechanism while changing, rather than abandoning, the role of party and state institutions in economic life.... Important, too, would be a change of Soviet foreign policy that sought to establish clearer and safer "rules of the game" for superpower competition.'?
William Odom, a high-ranking Soviet analyst in the U.S. Army, was less enthusiastic about the scope of Gorbachev's initiatives than Archie Brown. A reader of their statements today, however, is mostly struck by their basic agreement on what Gorbachev could not possibly do or even desire.
It seems more and more clear that Gorbachev himself does not intend systemic change. He is exercising with remarkable energy and cunning the system bequeathed him by previous general secretaries. He is struggling to regain the vitality once possessed by the system.... If what one means by reform is a significant improvement in the standard of living for Soviet citizens and increased protection of their individual rights under law, that kind of reform cannot go very far without bringing about systemic change the kind of change that Gorbachev cannot want."
Is Gorbachev bent upon a fundamental change in the system? If he is, the chances that he can control it are small, virtually nil.... One is forced, therefore, to infer a more limited aim on Gorbachev's part, namely, a revitalization of the old system.'2
Some who were right
Not all efforts at Sovietology were wrong about the future of the system. Journalists, political scientists, sociologists, historians, demographers, and economists produced many useful studies that pointed the way to the transformations after 1989. More than a few analyses have withstood the test of the subsequent developments.
A book edited by Zbigniew Brzezinski that appeared in 1969 contains fourteen articles dealing with the future of the Soviet Union. Six of them, by Brzezinski, Robert Conquest, Merle Fainsod, Eugene Lyons, Giorgio Galli, and Isaac Don Levine, considered "collapse as a serious possibility although not immediately."'3 One, Robert Conquest, saw "the USSR as a country where the political system is radically and dangerously inappropriate to its social and economic dynamics. This is a formula for change change which may be sudden and catastrophic...."14 Brzezinski himself, as we shall note in more detail below, repeatedly emphasized that collapse was a realistic possibility.
Most Sovietologists, however, did not agree with these judgments, in part because they thought that the system was improving, that conditions of life were better for the masses. Relying to a large extent on Soviet data, they concluded that the Soviet economy was doing so well to the point where "by the 1970s, the conventional wisdom (shared also by the CIA) came to be that the Soviet GNP was some 60 percent of the American."5 These estimates, as we now know, were misguided and untenable as revealed by the Soviet authorities and scholars after Gorbachev took office. But that information had been available much earlier.
One of the most significant set of such reports is by Murray Feshbach, a demographer who has been interested in health statistics. Feshbach, in a number of important papers written in the 1970s and 1980s, brought together a variety of data, drawn from Soviet sources, demonstrating how miserable Soviet living conditions were. Particularly noteworthy was his stress on the fact that infant mortality had been going up in the Soviet Union while adult longevity declined.16 Such tendencies could not be found in any other country. While there are many countries that are low on both, the direction in industrialized countries has always been upward, except under Communism. Feshbach also noted and documented the tremendous extent of alcoholism in the Soviet Union.17 Another demographer, Nick Eberstedt, drawing in part on Feshbach's work but also on his own, noted in the early 1980s evidence of considerable alienation, particularly in work, within Soviet institutions.18
A devastating critique of the Soviet system was presented by a Soviet emigre, Andrei Amalrik, in his 1970 essay, Will The Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? Amalrik wrote during an earlier period of liberalization, that of Khrushchev. He suggested that the "liberalization" was a function of "the growing decrepitude of the regime, rather than its regeneration," that "the logical result will be its death, followed by anarchy."19
Basically, Amalrik argued that the strata who most benefited from the system, largely the educated professionals, want democratic reforms, greater freedom, and the rule of law. The masses, the workers without rights, the collective farmers, all exhibit "pervasive discontent" with their lot. Although the 1960s showed a slow growth in the standard of living, Amalrik predicted that "a halt or even a reversal in the improvement of the standard of living (such as was to occur from the seventies on) would arouse such explosions of anger, mixed with violence, as were never before thought possible." Such developments would take place because of the "ossification" of the system, and would affect industrial output. He saw the regime becoming "progressively weaker and more self-destructive."20
Beyond changes in class relations, Amalrik noted that the Stalinist expansion into Eastern Europe and its "fostering of international tension" created a danger for the Soviet rulers. More importantly, the USSR would not be able to hold down the forces of nationalism. Any event which undermined domestic stability "will be enough to topple the regime."21 He anticipated a breakdown in the 1980s.
Awareness that the nationality question, ethnic tension, would undermine the system, is at the heart of the 1980 analysis by sociologist Randall Collins. In an article that he had difficulty in publishing in academic journals because it went so much against the accepted scholarly wisdom, until it finally appeared in his own book of essays in 1986, Collins wrote that the Soviet Union "had already reached its limit ... and was entering a period of ... decline ... with the likelihood of extensive decline becoming very high before the 21st century."22 He concluded that the country was overextended economically, militarily, and politically, that it simply would not be able to control "the Baltic, the Ukraine, the Caucasus and the Central Asian Moslem territories."23 These would follow on the "breakdown of the central power of the Russian state."24 As a Weberian, he emphasized legitimacy, and suggested that the Soviet Union had major legitimacy problems, since its failures had produced a loss of faith in Marxism, in Communist ideology. Not only the masses and the intelligentsia, but the privileged generally no longer had faith.
The social historian Moshe Lewin in a book published in 1988, produced an illuminating interpretation of the early Gorbachev era, which if widely noted would have prepared us for the momentous transformations soon to come. Following a quasi-Marxist (but not socialist) approach, much like Roman Szporluk and Alexander Motyl, he pointed to dialectic tensions among the various parts of the system, some of which were more advanced than others, some of which acted as a brake on the development of others, some of which were declining while others were growing, that would lead to a breakdown.25 As we argue in the next section of this article, such a dialectical approach, sensitive to internal variations, based on a strand of an important macrotheoretical tradition in modern social thought had a definite advantage for understanding the long-term processes underway in communist societies. It may be contrasted with those, dominant in Sovietology, which relied almost exclusively on theories specifically developed in or taken over from systems analyses in other fields to explain the peculiarities of the communist system.26
In 1987, Lewin wrote: "Whenever some aspects of the system seriously lag behind others for example, if the political institutions are too sluggish crisis and turmoil, reform or stagnation, if not worse, invariably ensue. This is the story of the Soviet Union in the twentieth century." While noting symptoms of decline and decadence, he also pointed to "vast changes in the Soviet social system (urbanization, industrialization, the growth of intellectual and professional classes)."27 Lewin's particularistic and dialectical approaches did not make him a better prophet about political outcomes than the bulk of his more narrow and inward-looking Sovietological colleagues who concentrated on developments in Moscow, but he deserves recognition for anticipating the need created by structural changes for moves toward a more open society, which made the transformations of the early 1990s possible.
Although considerably reformed and strongly diluted, the anachronistic autocratic features have now come under pressure from the social environment. The apparaty, not too alert to the call of history, has [sic] been reminded that the muzhik (the implicit, sometimes explicit justification for the crude dictatorial regime) is no longer at center stage. Today well educated urban citizens, not backward peasants, are the largest demographic group.
...the dimensions and potential of this novel society, especially its political aspects, are still poorly understood. But one thing is clear: Soviet society needs a state that can match its complexity. And in ways sometimes overt, sometimes covert, contemporary urban society has become a powerful "system maker," pressuring both political institutions and the economic model to adapt. Through numerous channels, some visible, some slow, insidious, and imperceptible, Soviet urban society is affecting individuals, groups, institutions, and the state. Civil society is talking, gossiping, demanding, sulking, expressing its interests in many ways and thereby creating moods, ideologies, and public opinion. At the same time, the impersonal, structural features of the social system create hard facts, define reality, and set limits. Both the personal and impersonal factors disregard controlling devices such as censorship, police controls or the nomenklatura (nomination process).28
The Harvard historian Richard Pipes, a scholar of a more conservative political persuasion than Lewin, also used some quasi-Marxist ideas in his anticipation of the Soviet crisis. In 1984, before Gorbachev took office, Pipes called attention to the possibility of the emergence of a "revolutionary situation," and used Lenin's famous description of the conditions that produce one: "...a condition of stalemate between the ruling elite and the population at large: the former no longer could rule, and the latter no longer would be ruled in the old way."29 He left open, however, both reformist and revolutionary outcomes, depending on the behavior of the Soviet establishment: "The nomenklatura is not the first ruling elite to face the choice between holding on to all power and privilege at the risk of losing all of it, or surrendering some of both in the hope of holding on to the rest."30
The totalitarian model
Western academic study of the Soviet Union and other Communist countries had been guided and indeed dominated by the totalitarian model from the 1950s to the 1970s. Given its widespread impact on academic and extramural analyses of the Soviet system, it seems worthwhile to set forth some general features of the original position, even at the risk of restating points that over the decades have become commonplace.
The totalitarian model was meant to be applied not only to the Soviet Union or Communist countries in general, but to other modern dictatorial political and social systems too, and above all, of course, to Nazi Germany. Although much maligned by Sovietologists in the 1970s and 1980s, it has proven to be the most fruitful of the paradigms. Totalitarianism is called "a novel form of government" in both of the two most systematic and influential expositions of the model, Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism31 and Carl J. Friedrich's and Zbigniew Brzezinski's Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy.32 While an ideal-type construct, it was drawn from the empirical reality of different fascist and Communist states.
The novelty of this form of government derived from four features. First, under this type of rule, all organizations and associations, whether economic, political, cultural, educational, or purely social, were supposed to be integrated into a single hierarchy of control. Parallelism and organizational rivalry, however, were not to be eliminated; totalitarian government thrived on them. But all the competing groups were ultimately subordinated to a single center of command, embodied in the person of a dictator.
A second set of characteristics included in the original model related to methods of governing. Exponents of the totalitarian model stressed the importance of terror, but put a distinct emphasis on those methods of control, such as mass propaganda, state-managed rituals of mobilization, and systematic surveillance, which were based on modern developments in technology and organizational technique.
Third, all this formidable machinery operated under the guidance of an ideology that envisaged a total transformation of human nature and society. And fourth, as a consequence of its structure, methods, and ideological aspirations, totalitarian government had to become, inevitably, more than a political regime or system of rule by the common use of the term. Totalitarianism involved an unprecedented penetration and transformation of the social system, too. At this point, however, the focus of analysis shifted to a different level.
Although the first three points referred, albeit in an ideal typical way, to an actual state of affairs, the total transformation of society was seen as a utopia that might be, at tremendous human cost, approximated but never realized. Proponents of the model made different judgments about the degree of success of individual totalitarian regimes in this respect, but no one accepted the idea that totalitarianism could ever become total. In Friedrich's and Brzezinski's book, for example, those institutions that had not undergone a radical transformation, such as the family, churches, and some professional communities including the officer corps, were treated as residual "islands of separateness."33 Hannah Arendt, however pessimistic about the resilience of human bonds under totalitarian pressure, took note of the fact that such regimes were constantly using some traditional institutions, like rational bureaucracy and the legal system, as a facade to legitimate their sinister realities.34
As time went on, the model started to lose its original plausibility and seemed to be more and more in need of overhaul or replacement. After World War II, the horrors of Nazism gradually receded into the past and the glaring parallels between the Nazi and Stalinist regimes became blurred. The Soviet regime, having survived intact the convulsions of war, had taken on a modified character since Stalin's death, especially since the mid-1960s.
The keystone of the old system, personal dictatorship, had not been replaced and was now missing. The relations among the branches of totalitarian government, the party, the state, and the security apparatus, became more entrenched. Bureaucracy, a mere facade according to the original model, was more and more seen as the mainstay of the regime.
Methods of governing became milder. Although systematic surveillance and monitoring of political behavior remained in place, or were even perfected, the scale of intimidation was significantly reduced and, what was no less important, repression became a predictable consequence of nonconformist or dissident behavior. The official doctrine of Marxism-Leninism was not given up until the very end of the regime, but it was replaced in daily practice to a large extent by pragmatic considerations and even traditional values in the thinking of new leaders.
Penetration and transformation of society turned out to be much less successful than envisaged in the totalitarian model. The family, an island engulfed and threatened by the waves of terror according to the original analysis, gathered new strength and, of course, went through all the usual processes of transformation concomitant with modernization. Private bonds among individuals, assumed to have been largely destroyed by totalitarian pressures, were retied. Formal organizations, although not allowed to slip out of the control of central bureaucracy, were permeated and deflected from their original purpose by networks of personal or "informal" relationships, as they have been called in Soviet and East European parlance. The result was a social landscape quite dissimilar to Hannah Arendt's evocative picture of a sandy wasteland of atomized individuals who could be whipped up to frenzies of mobilization.35
But the general institutional and ideological framework, however undermined and overgrown by new social relations, remained in place. There was more than enough continuity to make an adaptation of the old theoretical paradigm to the new realities possible. This is what followers of the totalitarian analytical model had actually done, although sometimes without retaining the old label. Classic Stalinism was reinterpreted as a preparatory phase of a more mature, or ossified, or degenerated and corrupt bureaucratic regime of a special character determined by its origins. Adherents of the old model could point out moreover, in agreement with the prevailing political opinion within the communist countries, that there had been always a danger, sometimes more than a danger, of a relapse into some kind of neo-Stalinism.
It was especially due to the efforts of Brzezinski who, in a long series of impressive works, continued the line of thought started with Friedrich's and his 1956 classic that the totalitarian interpretation never lost touch with Soviet developments. From the early sixties until 1989 when The Grand Failure was published, Brzezinski always worked with the alternative of "transformation and degeneration."
In 1969 Brzezinski put the question in the following way: "Is Russia at the end of the highly motivated energetic period in its history and at the beginning of the sterile bureaucratic phase? Such energetic and bureaucratic cycles have been typical of Russian history: a major challenge gives rise to a major national response, coercively and collectively organized; the organized response then in turn becomes fossilized and bureaucratically stagnant, leading to a period of decay."36 A year later, in a book on the "technetronic era," his version of the knowledge-based post-industrial changes that had emerged in the West, Brzezinski concluded that the rigid centralized systems of control in the Soviet polity and economy had become dysfunctional because the "scientific-technological revolution," to use Brezhnev's term, required greater flexibility and pluralism than the Party could accept. One possible consequence would be "political disintegration."37 Almost twenty years later, he saw the following five options facing the regime: (1) success of perestroika, (2) "protracted but inconclusive turmoil," (3) "renewed stagnation," (4) "a regressive and repressive political coup, in reaction to either Option 2 or 3," (5) "fragmentation of the Soviet Union, as a consequence of some combination of the above."
Among these options, Brzezinski deemed Option 2 the most likely alternative "for the next several years." He did not expect a quick end to the totalitarian regime, but he was certain that the moment of failure was close. Perestroika, i.e., revitalization of the system without a radical break with the totalitarian institutions and ideology, could not succeed. Turmoil and chaos could not last forever. The genie was out of the bottle, and there was not much chance that it could be put to sleep by renewed stagnation or put back into the bottle by a coup.38
Revisionism in Sovietology
The totalitarian model elaborated by Brzezinski and others remained quite fruitful when judged in the 1990s by the ultimate test of anticipating major changes. This, however, did not enable the totalitarian school of thought to maintain an important position in academic Sovietology as the turbulent 1960s drew to a close. The model lost much of its appeal to younger and more left-oriented scholars. Herbert J. Spiro, felt confident enough to write the epitaph of the concept in a 1968 article in the authoritative International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.
Totalitarianism is a twentieth-century term that did not come into general or academic use until the late 1930s.... The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1930-1935), for instance, has no entry entitled "totalitarianism"....
As the social sciences develop more discriminating concepts of comparison, as the developing political systems discover that the invention of new methods of modernization may obviate their need for slavishly copying more coercive methods from models whose experience is no longer relevant, and as, hopefully, the more glaring differences between the major parties in the cold war begin to wither away, use of the term "totalitarianism" may also become less frequent. If these expectations are borne out, then a third encyclopedia of the social sciences, like the first one, will not list "totalitarianism."39
This brusque rejection came mainly from a new generation of scholars entering the field of Soviet and East European studies in the 1960s. They did not know the fear of totalitarianism that had been ingrained into many of their elders. They had different experiences from those of their academic predecessors who were refugees from Communism or
Nazism or whose first-hand contacts with totalitarianism came from
military or diplomatic service. They were able to visit the Soviet Union as honored guests, and found a country that did not appear totalitarian. Abbot Gleason, a professor of Russian history, described this aspect of the situation in a judicious way.
With the establishment of academic exchanges in the course of the 1960s, American professors and (even more important) graduate students were able to spend relatively long periods of time in the Soviet Union. They were able to meet ordinary Soviet citizens and understand their lives in ways that foreigners had found extremely difficult for decades. Impressionistic evidence suggests that, although two years in the Soviet Union usually had a devastating effect on leftist pro-Soviet opinions, it also undermined the totalitarian model. The state was surely intrusive, but the gap between that intrusiveness and the nightmare vision of 1984 was obviously great and not diminishing. Not only had the state not eliminated "private life," the hospitality of Soviet citizens and the store they set on friendship often impressed Americans and on occasion made them wonder if they were not the people who had become atomized.40
This was a generation, furthermore, whose belief in the moral superiority of Western democracy and American foreign policy was thoroughly shaken by the Vietnam War. Although those opposed to the war usually did not glorify the achievements of communism as liberal fellow travellers and communists in the 1930s did, a principled rejection of communism was suspect in their eyes. They took any criticism of the Soviet system, if it was based on liberal or conservative values, as an indirect apology for Western democracy or, even worse, as cold-war propaganda. This political conflict between the previous generation of writers on communism and the new one of revisionist Sovietologists was played out, to a large extent, in the debate about the totalitarian character of Soviet-type society.
The revisionists rejected, first of all, the parallel between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Patterson, in an influential article on "The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism," contemptuously dismissed the analogy.
Americans both before and after the Second World War casually and deliberately articulated distorted similarities between Nazi and Communist ideologies, German and Soviet foreign policies, authoritarian controls, and trade practices, and Hitler and Stalin. This popular analogy was a potent and pervasive notion that significantly shaped American perception of world events in the cold war. Once Russia was designated the "enemy" by American leaders, Americans transferred their hatred for Hitler's Germany to Stalin's Russia with considerable ease and persuasion.41
There was, in fact, nothing casual in the way this analogy between the Soviet and Nazi regimes had been worked out and used by serious political writers and social scientists of the referenced period. Tremendous intellectual and moral effort would be a more apt description.42 This applies especially to the non-communist and anti-Stalinist Left that was, typically for the New Left's forgetfulness about the Old, ignored by Adler and Patterson.43
Another line of argument was aimed at the presumed sociological emptiness of the totalitarian model. Stephen F Cohen in his book on Rethinking the Soviet Experience, the best-argued statement and a veritable compendium of the revisionist position, spoke about the "totalitarianism school's inability to imagine any authentically social dimensions of Soviet politics."
Analyzing mutual influences and interactions between state and society is at the center of most historical and political study. Not Soviet studies, which saw only a brutal one-way, decades-long process in which the party-state "imposed its ideology at will" upon an inert society. The favored analytical imagery was a "permanent civil war between the rulers and ruled," a "regime with no links to the people." Mistaking Stalinist despotism and mass terror, the "linchpin of totalitarianism," for the whole of Soviet political and social life, most Sovietologists forgot a basic truth. Even such despotic conditions "in no way" mean, as a Soviet dissident later explained, "that Soviet society is like a raw lump of clay that yields to any sort of pressure."44
Although it is easy to glean extreme statements from the literature, the social dimension of Soviet politics was never left out of the study of communist systems even in the heyday of the totalitarian model. At the 1953 conference on totalitarianism organized by the American Academy of Sciences, the proceedings of which became one of the key texts on the subject, Karl W. Deutsch spoke about the "cracks in the monolith." He spoke about cracks that could not be closed up because of the social constraints under which the system operates.
To elicit full identification and loyalty,... a government must be to a considerable extent accessible and predictable.... Totalitarian governments need at least the appearance of accessibility and predictability if they are to hold the active support of their subjects.... (But) the more predictable and expectable a government becomes, the less totalitarian is it likely to remain.... Obviously, these inherent conflicts in the basis of the political support of totalitarian regimes can be sustained for considerable periods of time; but as these periods lengthen into generations the fate of most totalitarian regimes should become increasingly dubious.45
To tell the truth, Hannah Arendt found Deutsch's rather tentative conclusions "overoptimistic,"46 but there were other voices too. David Riesman, who was not exactly inattentive to the "totalitarian temptation," to use a term that became fashionable later, wrote as early as 1952 about the "limits of totalitarian power."
Twenty and even ten years ago, it was an important intellectual task (and one in which, in a small way, I participated) to point out to Americans of good will that the Soviet and Nazi systems were not simply transitory stages,... that they were, in fact, new forms of social organization, more omnivorous than even the most brutal of earlier dictatorships.... Yet it seems to me that now the task of intellectual and moral awakening has been pretty well performed, and stands even in danger of being overperformed....
I think we can become so fascinated with the malevolence of Stalinism that we may tend to overestimate its efficiency in achieving its horrible ends.... Overinterpretation is the besetting sin of intellectuals anyway, and even when, with Hannah Arendt, we rightly point to the need to cast traditional rationalities aside in comprehending totalitarianism, we may subtly succumb to the appeal of an evil mystery; there is a long tradition of making Satan attractive in spite of ourselves. And the more practical danger of this is that we may... misjudge not so much the aims as the power of the enemy and be unduly cowed or unduly aggressive as a result.
Consequently, I want to open up a discussion of some of the defenses people have against totalitarianism. Not that these defenses I shall discuss apathy, corruption, free enterprise, crime, and so on threaten the security system of the Soviets....47
These pertinent critical observations were only skirmishes compared to the massive invasion of Sovietology by sociology and social psychology led by Alex Inkeles and his coauthors, Raymond A. Bauer and Clyde Kluckhorn. All the themes dear to the heart of revisionists are to be found in their books and papers, such as the "importance of informal mechanisms in the operation of a society that, on the surface, appears and pretends to be highly centralized and controlled,"48 or the private networks of communication making possible the formation of, at least partially, independent opinions.49
Inkeles and his coauthors did not throw the totalitarian model overboard but, as Martin Malia recently remarked, "fleshed out the model with concrete analyses of its multiple structures."50 Inkeles, however, was no less sparing in his criticism of an exclusive and one-sided application of the totalitarian model than the revisionists of the next generation who, characteristically, did not acknowledge his contribution.51
This totalitarian model had great strength. It answered too many of the really basic and distinctive characteristic facts of the situation....
This model also had certain weaknesses. One of the difficulties was that it was relatively insensitive to the sources of social support for the Soviet regime. It represented a screen which did not permit the intrusion of this kind of information, because, naturally, such information was a challenge to the adequacy of the model....
I suggest we get some new themes, new ideas, new models, into the discussion ... because we are really dealing with a system which is in an important degree changing. But even in our interpretation of the past, new models of analysis may enrich and correct interpretations we have already made.52
A third argument marshalled by the revisionists against the totalitarian model was directed at the old school's lack of predictive success. This argument was formulated by Stephen Cohen in terms quite similar to those we used in the previous section. Ironically, however, it is quite obvious that the same kind of criticism can be levelled against the new model that resulted from all this revisionist criticism.
Predictions should not be the main purpose of scholarly political analysis, but understanding change is central to that enterprise. Having imagined ... a Soviet political life without social factors, and a "monolithic regime" without meaningful internal conflicts, Sovietology was left with a static conception of a frozen system....
The field could not conceive of what was already under way in the 1950s gradual change away from Stalin's terror-ridden despotism.... Sovietologists actually discussed, and generally ruled out, the prospect of such change....53
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