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a_kleberSEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET and GYORGY BENCE
George Mason University; Lorand Eotvos University, Hungary
(continued)
The pluralist model
The new model that became dominant and, to a large extent, replaced the model of totalitarianism in the 1970s, did not have a name as commonly accepted as the old one. The most successful candidates for a general label were "pluralism," with or without qualifications and adjectives like "quasi-;' "bureaucratic," "institutional," and "corporatist." The differences were not purely terminological, they expressed important analytical controversies.54 As to the empirical contents of the model, however, there was a fairly general consensus.
According to the pluralist model, to choose this label for the sake of simplicity, the different social and economic interests to be found in any modern society were not only present but also articulated and represented in a Soviet-type political system. The communist government, for its part, did not endeavor to transform or suppress these interests, which would have been impossible anyway, but tried its best to be responsive to them, and played basically a mediating role to maintain a balance within the general framework of the regime. As a result, it was successful enough to maintain a stable social arrangement, which was actually called a "social contract" by some authors. While leaving much to be desired, it offered hope for a peaceful satisfaction of any reasonable demands.
The drastic limitations on freedom of expression or the organizational monopoly of the party-state were not denied by the proponents of the pluralist model, nor were phenomena such as the chronic shortages of consumer goods ignored. The pluralists became, in fact, the earliest and most enthusiastic promoters of Gorbachev's reforms among analysts of the Soviet scene, having been very much aware that there was a lot to be reformed. They tended, however, to take a "realistic" approach to these difficulties and to the differences between Communist and democratic regimes in general.
The totalitarian model presented a system highly resistant to demands of change, no matter how pressing they were according to the pluralist model, but the Communist system was flexible enough to accommodate far-reaching shifts. The different judgments about the chances of meaningful reform did not depend, however, solely on differences in description and analysis. The adherents of the pluralist model applied a much lower standard of expectation about the responsiveness of a political system, of any political system, than their predecessors.
Jerry Hough, the most aggressive exponent of the pluralist school, even reckless to the point of exposing himself to the charge of being a Soviet apologist, made a sharp, and admittedly legitimate, distinction between the chances of an interest group to do politics on the input side (to make its demands public, to organize for promoting its demands, etc.) and the chances of obtaining favorable policy outcomes. He made, moreover, a theoretically less legitimate but politically highly significant distinction between demands that are relevant to the interests of ordinary people and those that are mainly the concern of intellectuals or politicians. In Hough's writings, this had the implication, sometimes quite clearly spelled out, that a liberal democracy might offer a better chance for interest groups to make a big show of their demands, and for intellectuals to work within their metier, but it is a matter of debate whether all this is of much help for disadvantaged groups.55
It would be as easy to single out extreme statements of the pluralist position as it was of the totalitarian model. Paragons of the pluralist school, looking for expressions of group politics, applied themselves to the study of letters to the editor in Soviet newspapers or of shades of meaning in scholastic discussions of Marxist-Leninist doctrine with a dedication worthy of more interesting subjects. Even the marginal differences in the number of ballots cast for the Communist list in various elections were analyzed in all seriousness.56
But the main problem created by the pluralists' approach was on a deeper level. By trivializing the differences between democratic and communist regimes, the new model impaired the sociological imagination to a larger extent than had the totalitarian model.57 While the latter made it hard to imagine how meaningful change might come about, the former made students of Soviet society insensitive to the need for systemic change.
It is again in Hough's work that we find the most symptomatic expression of this tendency. In the late seventies, Hough radically rewrote Merle Fainsod's classic monograph, originally an application of the totalitarian model, which was first published in 1953 under the title How Russia is Ruled. The new book, with the significantly changed title How the Soviet Union Is Governed, contained a final chapter, entirely from the pen of Hough, about "the future of the Soviet system."
The Soviet Union has an authoritarian political system, but it has a constitution and a set of party rules that correspond in large part to western conceptions of democracy, and it pledges allegiance to an ideology promising the establishment of full democracy and individual freedom....
Because of the ambiguous nature of the Soviet political tradition, any future evolution is highly likely to retain the framework of the present system in one sense or another.58
The return of the totalitarian model
However decisive it seemed on the academic playing fields of Sovietology, the victory of the pluralist school turned out to be hollow. It was one thing to write an epitaph on "totalitarianism" in a scholarly encyclopedia, or to apply the somewhat Orwellian strategem of eliminating the idea of totalitarianism from a leading academic textbook,59 but it was another to make the public oblivious of the danger of totalitarianism. "Totalitarianism" became a part of the political language, and due to its literary representations by such writers as Koestler, Milosz, Orwell, and Silone, the totalitarian model took a firm hold on the imagination of politically informed people in the West and, to an ever growing extent, in Eastern Europe, too. By the end of the 1970s when Sovietological pluralism seemed to be at its apogee, the second coming of "totalitarianism" was well on the way.
Jeane Kirkpatrick, a political scientist critic of President Carter's foreign policy who became an important political influence under Reagan, pushed the totalitarian model almost single-handedly into the center of public debate again. Applying a distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, well worked out in the scholarly literature but not much used in policy discussion,60 Kirkpatrick directed the attention to the fact that, while the history of twentieth century "provided no grounds for expecting that radical totalitarian regimes will transform themselves," there were many instances of right-wing authoritarian regimes having given up power.61
Kirkpatrick's efforts by themselves could have been, and in fact were, dismissed by political opponents as attempts to demonize Soviet communism and to excuse the bolstering of friendly right-wing dictatorships by the United States.62 At about the same time, however, tenacious adherents of the totalitarian model received a boost from unexpected quarters. After 1968 when, as it seemed, the last attempt to renew the Communist system on the basis of a revised version of its own ideology was defeated by the invading armies of the Warsaw Pact in Czechoslovakia, a continuously growing number of Soviet and East European dissidents had become interested in totalitarian theorizing.63 Jacques Rupnik, in his book on the transformation of Eastern Europe, gave a pertinent characterization of this process.
The concept of totalitarianism has been fraught with paradox and misunderstandings in East-West communication. At a time when the countries of East-Central-Europe were ... experiencing the "pure" totalitarianism of the Stalin era, they were, for obvious reasons, absent from the debate on the concept taking place in the West. Conversely, twenty years later, when the concept had been virtually banished from Western Sovietology as an unscientific product of the Cold War, it was reappropriated by all the independent thinkers in East-Central-Europe. The watershed year 1968 marked a political parting of the ways and was a catalyst which set the concept of totalitarianism on a separate course, East and West. In the West, 1968 marked the dawning of detente, which profoundly affected the way in which politicians, academics and journalists addressed the nature of the Communist system. For intellectuals of the Other Europe the Soviet tanks in Prague were seen as a final evidence of the failure of reform from within and of the existence of a permanent totalitarian "core" at the heart of the Communist system.64
And after the late 1970s, when the new wave of open dissent in Poland and Czechoslovakia had made its impact on Western public opinion, academic students of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe could not remain completely unaffected either.65
The new dissent in Eastern Europe grew out of the disillusionment with Marxist revisionism, reformist Communism, and human-faced socialism in their local versions. The dissident movements were attracted, paradoxically, by those features of the totalitarian model that implied that there could be no inner transformation of totalitarianism. What they needed first was to find a rationale for opting out of the system. This was, of course, not exclusively a matter of private morality for the typical dissident. Dissidents were by choice, or became by force of circumstances, political animals. They did not seek only to save their souls, they wanted to act.66 The initial paradox, therefore, had to be overcome by modifying the totalitarian model.
In the dissident's version of the model, full domination by the state was restricted to large-scale, formally organized political and economic activities. The intermediate space between these and the private life of family and personal networks, however, was left open to collective actions and even to collective formations of a more enduring kind, more or less independent of totalitarian controls. Official ideology was presented as a system of ritualized formulas and absurd lies people were forced to pretend to believe in, but no one actually took seriously.67
These were original and interesting assumptions and, as far as they went, opened up the possibility of an attractive new style of politics that was radically antitotalitarian in its aims and, at the same time, rational and moderate in its methods.68 But even the most optimistic among the dissidents, who also assumed that the totalitarian state eventually would be cornered by a vigorous civil society growing up under its shadow, did not expect the demise of the regime soon. They were therefore no less surprised, although perhaps better prepared for the next steps than Western observers of the Soviet and East European scene, when communism came to an end.69
We have traversed a full circle, starting from the classic totalitarian model, continuing with pluralist revisionism and finally arrived at another version of the totalitarian model. Each of these models, although in different ways and to different degrees, offered important insights into the possibilities of more or less radical changes within the Communist system. All of them, however, made it hard to imagine that the system itself might be transformed soon or at all. But if we step out of this circle and consider not only theories that were developed for the express purpose of understanding totalitarian systems, the picture becomes less discouraging. One is tempted to say that the failure of Sovietology was partly due to the fact that it had lost contact with the classic tradition of social theory.
Implications of grand theory
Much of the grand theory implied that Communism would produce a reactionary and oppressive society, and concluded that the system would fail. Here we are thinking of the writings of classical sociologists such as Max Weber, Robert Michels, the elite theorists such as Vilfredo Pareto, and in more recent times Raymond Aron, as well as Marx and Engels themselves. Classical liberal economics, of course, also produced major theoretical works attesting to the inherent failure of socialism. Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter all concluded that a socialist planning system and government ownership of industry were necessarily inefficient. They argued that a capitalist market system was inherently much more productive than its rival. These, of course, though eventually applicable to the Soviet Union, were about the functioning of statist systems generally, not about the U.S.S.R.
Max Weber, the great sociological critic of Marx, in his writings about socialism and capitalism, contributed important insights for understanding the nature of and subsequent failure of the Soviet Union.70 He was, in fact, the mentor of the young Michels and inspired Michels's study of socialist oligarchy. Weber emphasized bureaucracy as the charactertistic mode of large-scale social organizations in modern society, including both government and industry. Weber, however, generalized beyond politics to argue that whether the means of production were privately owned, as in capitalism, or publicly or socially owned, as under socialism, would make little difference for the position of the lower strata. The socialist revolution would, in fact, intensify the bureaucratic character of modern industrial society, resulting in the increased oppression of the working class and other repressed strata.71
Weber formulated a theory of alienation under bureaucratic conditions, which differed from Marx and was subsequently expanded in the writings of scholars like Erich Fromm, C. Wright Mills, and David Riesman. Weber emphasized that in a bureaucratic system the people lower in the hierarchy have to "sell" their personalities, rather than their manufacturing skills, to impress their superiors. Bureaucracy produces what was later to be called organization men or marketeers or otherdirected personalities. The theory implies that they are even more alienated from their true selves than is suggested by the Marxist analysis of alienation resulting from economic powerlessness.72 Weber, who lived to see the beginnings of the Soviet rule, argued with students in Germany about the future of socialism, predicting that it would not produce a decent or egalitarian system, but rather a more oppressive one than capitalism because it would be more bureaucratic. Shortly before his death, he concluded one of his lectures by saying "Let us meet again in ten years to see who is right."
While a member of the German Social Democratic Party, Robert Michels put forth a major critique of socialism that was to become extremely influential. His book Political Parties, which first appeared in 1911, emphasized inherent oligarchic tendencies within political parties, especially within the socialist parties and most notably within the most important of them at the time, his own German party.73 Michels noted that the socialists claimed to be the greatest advocates of democracy in the polity and the economy. Their coming to power would supposedly lead both to greater democracy and classlessness. Michels, however, documented in abundant detail that the internal structure of the socialist parties was not democratic, that the parties were controlled by an elite that was able, through its control of the organization and political resources, to dominate the membership. He also emphasized that the party bureaucrats were not workers, even if some of them had been such before they became party employees and leaders. Hence he argued, as did Rosa Luxemburg from a different perspective, that the program of the party reflected not the social situation of the working class, but the position and interests of the socially privileged party elites. Since this was particularly true of the socialist parties, Michels concluded that socialist parties might triumph and come to office, but that socialism as an egalitarian system could never materialize. There would always be control by the party bureaucracy, who would be the ruling class in socialist society.
While Michels's classic work was written years before the Russian Revolution, it was seriously discussed in what for a time was the major theoretical tome of the Russian and international Communist movements, Historical Materialism, written by Nikolai Bukharin in 1924.74 Bukharin, well versed in sociological theory, evaluated the writings of Durkheim, Weber, and Michels knowledgeably. Addressing the criticisms of Marxism by various bourgeois political scientists, he summarized Michels's argument, but then surprisingly did not reject it. Rather he acknowledged that the beginnings of a new ruling class or stratum could be seen in the Soviet Union. He stated, however, that it would not lead to the failure of socialism or to the growth of a new controlling class because one of the major variables that Michels stressed as making for elite dominance was in the process of being eliminated in the Soviet Union, namely, a proletariat lacking political competence or education.
Bukharin argued that the working class was being raised by a socialist society to a higher level of understanding, and consequently also of political participation, than had ever occurred before. These skills would enable the workers to resist what he accepted as the inevitable tendency of the dominant strata of a socialist society to try to become a new ruling class. Bukharin believed that a sophisticated proletariat would prevent this from occurring. It is obvious, however, that Bukharin was concerned that socialism might fail, that it might produce a new exploitative class. Historical Materialism, which was used as required teaching material in the Communist movement for a few years, was to disappear completely, and Bukharin himself, like almost all the Revolutionary fathers, was to be executed by Stalin as a traitor in the Second Moscow Trial in 1938.
Michels's Political Parties had, however, a considerable effect on young American radicals in the 1930s and early 1940s, including two who were to become sociologists, Philip Selznick and Seymour Martin Lipset. They had been Trotskyists, which meant that they were critically aware of the exploitative authoritarian character of the Soviet Union, but as they observed autocratic tendencies in the Trotskyist movement itself, they came to accept Michels's analysis that oligarchy and dictatorship seemed to be inherent in the organizational structure of revolutionary movements, a belief that was to lead them out of the movement and to be severely critical of the Soviet Union.
The writings of Weber and Michels were to have an influence on analyses of the Soviet system during and after World War II. James Burnham, who had been a leading American Trotskyist, wrote two books, The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians, which advanced the idea that the managerial bureaucracy was not only becoming the new ruling class of the Soviet system, but was also taking over throughout western industrial society, which he thought would become statist and managerial.75 Burnham argued that power lay in the hands of the managers of industry who would be the new ruling class of a post-capitalist society. These ideas had appeared earlier in the writings of another former follower of Trotsky, although not a member, Bruno Rizzi, and subsequently in the works of Max Shachtman, who had been a Trotskyist leader.76 Burnham was to give up his belief in the dominance of the managerially controlled state and become an advocate of pure market economies.
These views, it should be noted and acknowledged, did not conflict with those of the fountainhead of socialist theory and of Communist ideology, Karl Marx. Marxism is a materialist theory of society and history. The nature of society, the structural posibilities, are determined by the level of technology. Social structures, class relations, power systems, ideologies, are derivative from, are closely tied to, the productive apparatus. Marx, therefore, rejected as utopian proposals to build communism prior to the emergence of highly industrialized countries.
Marx and Engels distinguished between utopian and scientific socialism in The Communist Manifesto and in Engels's work, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. The concept of utopian socialism referred in part to efforts in the Middle Ages to create egalitarian communes and to the writings of men such as Fourier and Owen, who favored creating cooperative communities in the nineteenth century. And following from Marx's assumption, the major Marxist theorists did not believe that socialism could be built in a nonindustrialized country like the Czarist empire. These included, prior to the Revolution, Russians Lenin, Trotsky, Plekhanov, and Martov, the last two the theoreticians of the Mensheviks, and, outside Russia, major figures Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg.
Underdeveloped, primarily agrarian countries did not meet Marx's materialistic requirement for socialism. He consistently emphasized that socialism could only come to power and take shape in a society that produces economic abundance, i.e., has the appropriate material substructure. Marx was convinced that an exploitative class society is the inevitable consequence of scarcity. Managers have to be highly rewarded to motivate them to organize the society. Surplus value has to be extracted from the lower classes to produce economic growth and to support the institutions of the ruling class, of government, of political organization, of defense against natural and human enemies. To repeat, socialism can only emerge in a society in which technology is so advanced, so productive, that the goal of equality, a high standard of living for all, is a practical one. Utopian, unrealistic efforts to create socialism, to form an egalitarian society prior to abundance, must fail.
In Das Kapital, Marx noted that "the most advanced society would show to the less developed the image of their future."77 Ironically, this meant that the first socialist country would be the United States since it was the most developed country from the late nineteenth century on. Many Marxists, ranging from Friedrich Engels in Europe to Daniel DeLeon in the United States, Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law, in France, August Bebel in Germany, and Maxim Gorky in Russia, concluded that America had to be the first socialist country. They continued to believe this up to World War I, even when they saw large socialist movements developing in Europe, but not in the United States.78
The theory, of course, meant that Russia, not to speak of China, could not and would not be among the first socialist countries. The Russian Marxists, both Bolshevik and Menshevik, knew their Marx and believed this. They wrote that Russia first had to go through the stages of being a bourgeois society, a capitalist economy. Capitalism, a market economy, economic incentives, were necessary for growth under conditions of scarcity.
Prior to 1917, the only well-known Russian Marxist who argued that the working class, the socialist movement, should try to take power in Russia was Leon Trotsky. Trotsky did not believe this because he thought that the country was ready for socialism, but rather because, as he emphasized, Russia had missed the opportunity to develop along the lines that had occurred in the west. He argued that it was too late for the Russian bourgeoisie to take over their country and transform it into an economically developed capitalist democracy, like western Europe or America. Russia's weakness in the world market would prevent it from doing so. However, Trotsky did not propose that the party take office to erect a socialist system, but rather to lead the effort to industrialize the country using market or capitalist mechanisms.
The other Russian Marxists, both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, ridiculed Trotsky's theory and rejected the idea that the working class would come to power in an underdeveloped country. In 1917, however, the Bolsheviks did take over. The historical record documents that this happened because Lenin, who was a strategic genius, in effect decided that Trotsky was right, although he never acknowledged this openly. On his return from Switzerland in April 1917, he proposed that the Bolsheviks plan for the seizure of power. All the other leaders of the party thought he had lost his bearings and rejected his policy.
Lenin, however, was able to switch the party's orientation. He argued that Russia was the weakest link in the chain of capitalist nations as a result of the military defeats it had suffered in the war. He felt and hoped that a Russian revolution would provide the spark for the revolution in the industrialized west, particularly in Germany, but elsewhere as well. And it was his belief that if the working class, if the socialist movement, came to power in the more developed countries of western Europe, that Russia could be helped along by them. No one, certainly not he nor any of the other Marxists, thought that socialist institutions could be erected in the backward material conditions of the Czarist Empire. He did not really believe that the Bolsheviks would hold power unless the west joined in.
We do not know what went through Lenin's mind as it became clear that the revolution would not succeed in the west, that the Bolsheviks were isolated in what had become the Soviet Union. For the first few years, he and the other Bolsheviks kept looking for the revolution to emerge in the industrialized West, in harmony with Marx's anticipations. But as it became clear that this was not happening, that they were isolated in their economically backward territory, one that showed little evidence of response to the egalitarian norms introduced under War Communism, Lenin became increasingly pessimistic. He put the blame for domestic shortcomings, not only on war conditions and underdevelopment, but also on the low cultural level of the Russian people, on Asian traditions that made for passivity.
Marx's theory implied the effort to build socialism in a less developed society would result in a sociological abortion. If those words do not describe what happened in the Soviet Union, nothing does. Karl Marx anticipated that the premature creation of a socialist state would be a fetter on the means of production, not a goad, and would be repressive and reactionary. Marx would not have believed that the ruling class of the sociological abortion would give up as benignly as it has.
Some orthodox Marxists, focusing on organizational variables, came up with equally pessimistic predictions about the future of an effort led by an elite party, the Bolsheviks, to build socialism in Russia. Leon Trotsky, in the period after the Revolution of 1905, rejected the Mensheviks as too moderate, but regarded the Bolsheviks as too authoritarian. Analyzing the internal structure of their organization and Lenin's power within it, he predicted that a Bolshevik seizure of power would inevitably lead to an authoritarian regime, in which one party controlled everything, with a dictator who dominated the party. He of course gave up this analysis when he joined the Bolsheviks in 1917.
The Polish-German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg also debated with Lenin in the early years of the twentieth century. She rejected his idea that a small revolutionary elite party would lead the working class into socialism. In two articles published under the title, "Leninism or Marxism?" in 1904, she argued against Lenin's organizational views. She attacked Lenin's emphasis on a centralized elite party, one that she thought implied contempt for the working class, suggesting they could not come to revolutionary consciousness on their own. Like Trotsky, she anticipated a future in which the Party would dictate to the masses, the Central Committee would dictate to the Party and a leader would ultimately dictate to the Committee. After the Bolsheviks had come to power and established a dictatorship, she again polemicized against Lenin's views in a pamphlet on The Russian Revolution. She wrote, among other things: "Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party however numerous they may be is no freedom for all. Freedom is always and exclusively for the one who thinks differently."79 And she predicted that "without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly,
without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out of every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.... (The system becomes) a clique affair, a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians ... such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc."80
The idea that socialism could only emerge in an advanced industrial society, which was a fixed dogma of Marxism prior to 1917, almost disappeared afterward, given the existence of the Soviet Union. It should be noted, however, that the justly esteemed Italian theoretician Antonio Gramsci wrote from prison in the middle 1920s, in line with the traditional Marxist gospel, that his country, Italy, must "Americanize" to become socialist. That is, Gramsci argued Italy must first become an advanced bourgeois industrial country like the United States, before it could move on to make a socialist revolution.81 Gramsci did not refer critically to the situation in the Soviet Union; as a Communist he could not, but he may very well have had it in mind, since it was much more backward than Italy.
Theoretical insight, political judgment
Finally, we must note that some politicians and journalists on both the Right and the Left seem to have known what was happening in the Soviet Union and based their policies and writings on this knowledge. Perhaps the most accurate description and prevision came from a conservative journalist, Bernard Levin, writing in the (London) Times in September 1977. Levin thought the same nationalist, social, and political forces that had produced dissidence within the elites in Czechoslovakia and other parts of Eastern Europe would inevitably produce the same outcome in the Soviet Union itself by 1989. He wrote with uncanny prescience that in the Soviet Union, the eventual leaders of revolt
...are there, all right, at this very moment, obeying orders, doing their duty, taking the official line against dissidents, not only in public but in private. They do not conspire, they are not in touch with Western intelligence agencies, they commit no sabotage. They are in every respect model Soviet functionaries. Or rather, in every respect but one: they have admitted the truth about their country to themselves, and have vowed, also to themselves, to do something about it.
That is how it will be done. There will be no gunfire in the streets, no barricades, no general strikes, no hanging of oppressors from lamp-posts, no sacking and burning of government offices, no seizure of radio-stations or mass defections among the military. But one day soon, some new faces will appear in the Politburo, I am sure they have already appeared in municipal and even regional administrative authorities and gradually, very gradually, other, similarly new, faces will join them. Until one day they will look at each other and realize that there is no longer any need for concealment of the truth in their hearts. And the match will be lit.
There is nothing romantic or fantastic about this prognosis; it is the most sober extrapolation from known facts and tested evidence. That, or something like it, will happen. When it will happen it is neither possible nor useful to guess; but I am sure it will be within the lifetime of people much older than I ... let us suppose, for neatness' sake, on July 14, 1989....82
In four major speeches delivered in 1982, 1983, 1987, and 1988, Ronald Reagan said the system was going down. At Westminster in 1982, he noted as simple fact that "of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward, the Communist world," and he consigned Marxism-Leninism to the "trash heap of history." In 1983, he said Communism is a "sad, bizarre chapter in history, whose last pages even now are being written." In 1987, at the Brandenburg Gate, he stressed: "In the Communist world we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind too little food." And he proclaimed that his cold war policies were based on the assumption that the Soviet Union was a "basket case." Economics, Reagan believed, was the Soviet Union's primary failing. As a good pupil of the market economists, he explained that weakness as derivative from the fact that it is impossible for government planners, no matter how sophisticated, to ever substitute for the judgment of "millions of individuals," for the "incentives inherent in the capitalist system."83 These conclusions were out of line with the advice he had been receiving from experts in the C.I.A., the Defense and State Departments. Seemingly, the President had his own sources, some of whom were in the Defense Intelligence Agency and the RAND Corporation.
From the Left, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in a series of prescient statements, made from the late seventies on, gave even more emphasis to the terrible weakness of the Soviet Union. Asked to predict what would happen in the 1980s, he stated in 1979 that the Soviet system "could blow up." He pointed to the economic downturn, the "rise in mortality rates ... the nationality strains."84 In a speech in the Senate in January 1980, Moynihan noted: "The indices of economic stagnation and even decline are extraordinary. The indices of social disorder social pathology is not too strong a term are even more so. The defining event of the decade might well be the breakup of the Soviet Empire." In a commencement address at New York University in 1984, he pointed to the absence of legitimacy, "that the Soviet idea is spent ... it summons no loyalty." Again in that year he commented, "the Soviet Union is weak and getting weaker,"85 and in October 1984, before Gorbachev took office, Moynihan proclaimed: "The Cold War is over, the West won.... The Soviet Union ... has collapsed. As a society it just doesn't work. Nobody believes in it anymore." Moynihan differed from Reagan in drawing policy implications. His strategy "for dealing with the Soviets is to wait them out." They will collapse.86
Given these judgments of the Soviet future made by political leaders and journalists, the question is why were they right and so many of our Sovietological colleagues wrong. The answer again in part must be ideological. Reagan and Levin came from rightist backgrounds, and Moynihan, much like the leaders of the AFL-CIO, from a left-antiStalinist social-democratic milieu, environments that disposed participants to believe the worst. Most of the Sovietologists, on the other hand, were left-liberal in their politics, an orientation that undermined their capacity to accept the view that economic statism, planning, socialist incentives, would not work. They were also for the most part ignorant of, or ignored, the basic Marxist formulation that it is impossible to build socialism in impoverished societies.
The differences among the Sovietologists, however, also stem from responding to varying sets of questions. The scholars sought to explain how the system worked. They took the fact of the USSR's long-term existence for granted. Thus, they looked for institutions and values that stabilized the polity and society.87 Ideologically critical journalists and politicians, however, were disposed to emphasize dysfunctional aspects, structures, and behaviors, which might cause a crisis.
The distribution of emphases among the fourteen contributors to Brzezinski's 1969 collection, Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics, discussed earlier, is congruent with these assumptions. Two-thirds (four out of six) of those who foresaw a serious possibility of breakdown were, like Levin, Moynihan, and Reagan, nonacademics. Threequarters (six out of eight) of those who could not look beyond system continuity were scholars.
One may ask, what about Asian communism? Why is it surviving, as in China and Vietnam? We obviously do not have time and space to deal with this issue, but we would note that China and Vietnam are following the strategy advanced by Trotsky before World War I for revolutions in underdeveloped societies, to preside over market-driven economies. Most of the Chinese economy is now private and is becoming even more so. Its most successful regions are the most market oriented. Vietnam is predominantly a capitalist economy. Equally or more important is the fact that it is 43 years since the Chinese party came to power and only 17 years for Vietnam, as compared to the 74 years that the Communist regime lasted in the Soviet Union. The men who made the Asian revolutions are alive and at the summits of their power structures, they acknowledge implicitly the failure of Communism, but do not quit. Communism still has its revolutionary legitimacy for them, one that decrepitude and biology had reduced, if not eliminated, in the USSR.
Finally, we would note that although Marx was right about the failure of efforts to create socialism in pre-industrial societies, he was wrong in anticipating the socialist revolution in advanced industrial ones. The United States apart, they all have significant socialist or social democratic parties, but without exception all of these have now given up socialist objectives; they all endorse the market economy as the best means to produce increased productivity and a higher living standard for the underprivileged.88 Socialism and Marxism may be considered failures not because of developments in the formerly Communist world, but because of their inability to point the way for the advanced countries.
Does modern sociology have anything to contribute to the analysis of developments in the former Communist world? We hope we have shown that it does. But if you doubt it, may we note that while the party still held power, at a three-day conference on "The Party and Perestroika" at the Higher Party School in Moscow in 1989, attended by Communist scholars and intellectuals from all over the Soviet Union, a review of the stenographic record by S. Frederick Starr reports few references to Marx and Lenin, while statements by Max Weber and Talcott Parsons were invoked more frequently to analyze the situation and justify various proposals for reforms.89
Acknowledgments Portions of this article were presented by Lipset at the August 1992 meeting of the American Sociological Association in Pittsburgh and by Bence on 19 May 1993 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. We would like to express our gratitude to the Hoover Institution, the John Olin Foundation, and the Wilson Center for International Scholars for fellowships and research assistance. Various scholars made useful suggestions for which we are grateful. These include: Nancy Bermo, Abraham Brumberg, Valerie Bunce, Daniel Chirot, Charles Fairbanks, Robert Hutchings, Maria Kovacs, John Lampe, Blair Rubel, and Vladimir Tismaneanu.
Notes
1. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1.
2. Robert M. Solow, "The public dimensions of economics: Some pitfalls," Challenge 21 (March-April 1978): 39.
3. Rita Jalali and Seymour Martin Lipset, "Racial and ethnic tensions: A global perspective," Political Science Quarterly 107 (Winter 1992 -93): 137-158.
4. James Gleick, Chaos: Making of a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987), 23.
5. Cf. Seymour Martin Lipset, "Predicting the future of post-industrial society: Can we do it?" in Lipset, editor, The Third Century: America as a Post-Industrial Society (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1979), 1-18.
6. John Lewis Gaddis, "The Cold War's end dramatizes the failure of political theory," The Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 July 1992, 44; Gaddis, The United States and the End of Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 190.
7. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1937).
8. Daniel Bell, "Ten theories in search of reality: The prediction of Soviet behavior in the social sciences," World Politics 10 (April 1958): 358.
9. Donald R. Kelley, "Perestroika (book review)," Soviet Studies 44/2 (1992): 349.
10. Archie Brown, "The Soviet political scene: The era of Gorbachev?" in Lawrence W. Lerner and Donald W. Treadgold, editors, Gorbachev and the Soviet Future (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1988), 38-39.
11. William E. Odom, "How far can Soviet reform go?" Problems of Communism 36 (November-December 1987): 30.
12. Ibid., 33.
13. See William Odom, "The pluralist mirage," The National Interest 31 (Spring 1993): 99-100. The book is Zbigniew Brzezinski, editor, Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). See table on 157 in Brzezinski's "Concluding Reflections."
14. Robert Conquest, "Immobilism and decay," in Brzezinski, ibid., 72.
15. Martin Malia, "From under the rubble, what?" Problems of Communism 41 (January-April 1992): 96.
16. Murray Feshbach, "Population and manpower trends in the U.S.S.R.," paper prepared for Conference on the Soviet Union Today, sponsored by the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, held in Washington D.C., April 1978; Feshbach, "Issues in Soviet health problems," in U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Soviet Economy in the 1980s: Problems and Prospects, Part 2, 97th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 31 December 1982), 203-227; Feshbach, "Soviet population, labor force and health," in U.S. Congress, Joint Hearings of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and Joint Economic Committee, The Political Economy of the Soviet Union 98th Congress, 1st Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 26 July and 29 September 1983), 91-138.
17. It is interesting to note that Emmanuel Todd, who in his book The Final Fall: Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere (New York: Karz Publishers, 1979) drew an exceptionally stark picture of Soviet decline, was also trained in historical demography.
18. Nick Eberstedt, The Poverty of Communism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1988), ch. 3. This chapter was originally published as "Human factors: Quality of life," in Soviet Economy in the 1980s: Problems and Prospects, Part 2, 187-202. See also Eberstedt, "Health of an Empire: Poverty and social progress in the CMEA bloc," in Henry S. Rowen and Charles Wolf, Jr., editors, The Future of the Soviet Empire (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), 221-258 and Mikhail S. Bernstam, "Trends in the Soviet population," in ibid., 185-220.
19. Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 35.
20. Ibid., 33,41.
21. Ibid., 59,64.
22. Randall Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 187.
23. Ibid., 197.
24. Ibid., 203.
25. Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
26. For a systematic treatment of the state-society tensions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe see Walter D. Connor, Socialism's Dilemmas: State and Society in the Soviet Bloc (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), ch. 1. Blair A. Ruble described the long-term social changes in the Soviet Union as a "quiet revolution" preparing the way for Gorbachev's reforms in "The Soviet Union's quiet revolution," in George W. Breslauer, editor, Can Gorbachev's Reforms Succeeds? (Berkeley: Berkeley-Stanford Program in Soviet Studies, Center for Slavic and East European Studies, University of California at
Berkeley, 1990).
27. Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon, viii.
28. Ibid., 145f.
29. Richard Pipes, Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America's Future (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 199-200.
30. Ibid., 203.
31. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1973).
32. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956).
33. Ibid., part vi.
34. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, ch. 12, section 1.
35. For a fundamental criticism of the "atomization thesis" see Ralf Dahrendorf, "Totalitarianism revisited," Partisan Review 55 (Fall 1988): 541-554.
36. Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Concluding reflections," in his Dilemmas of Change, 162-163.
37. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America's Rule in the Technetronic Era (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 164-172.
38. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Scribner, 1989), 100.
39. Herbert J. Spiro, "Totaliarianism," in David L. Sills, editor, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: The Free Press, 1968), vol. 16,106, 112.
40. Abbot Gleason, "'Totalitarianism' in 1984," The Russian Review 43 (April 1984): 153.
41. Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Patterson, "Red fascism: The merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American image of totalitarianism, 1930s1950s," American Historical Review 75 (April 1970): 1046.
42. About the American side of the story, see Robert A. Skotheim, Totalitarianism and American Social Thought (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971). The most thorough historical treatment of the scholarly literature, covering both American and European developments, is to be found in Martin Jaenicke, Totalitare Herrschaft: Anatomie eines politischen Begriffs (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1971).
43. Irving Howe's generous and, at the same time, highly critical retrospective analysis gives a glimpse into the moral and intellectual turmoil behind early totalitarian theorizing: "Totalitarianism reconsidered: Yesterday's theories, today's realities," Dissent 38 (Winter 1991): 63-71.
44. Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 23-24.
45. Karl W. Deutsch, "Cracks in the monolith: Possibilities and patterns of disintegration in totalitarian systems," in Carl J. Friedrich, editor, Totalitarianism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964),
316-317.
46. Untitled discussion contribution in the Friedrich volume, 336.
47. "Some observations on the limits of totalitarian power," in David Riesman, Abundance For What? And Other Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), 80-83. This essay was originally published in 1952.
48. Raymond A. Bauer, Alex Inkeles, and Clyde Kluckhorn, How the Soviet System Works: Cultural, Psychological, and Social Themes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 218.
49. Raymond Bauer and David B. Gleicher, "Word-of-mouth communication in the Soviet Union," Public Opinion Quarterly 17 (Fall 1953): 297-310. Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), ch. vii.
50. Malia, "From under the rubble," 98-99.
51. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience, 7, 25.
52. Alex Inkeles, "Models and issues in the analysis of Soviet Society," Survey no. 60 (July 1966): 4-5.
53. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience, 25.
54. An overview of these debates is to be found in a Festschrift to H. Gordon Skilling. Skilling had been the first Sovietologist to initiate, in a cautious way, the analytical shift toward pluralism. Susan Gross Solomon, "pluralism and political science"; Jerry F. Hough, "Pluralism, corporatism and the Soviet Union"; Archie Brown, "Pluralism, power and the Soviet political system," in Susan Gross Solomon, editor, Pluralism and the Soviet Union: Essays in Honour of H. Gordon Skilling (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983). For Skilling's own retrospective view, see H. Gordon Skilling, "Interest groups and Communist politics revisited," World Politics 36 (October 1983): 1-27. For the corporatist version, see Valerie Bunce and John M. Echols, III, "Soviet politics in the Brezhnev era: 'Pluralism' or 'Corporatism'?" in Donald R. Kelley, editor, Soviet Politics in the Brezhnev Era (New York: Praeger, 1980).
55. The general discussion is to be found in chapters 8-10 of Jerry F. Hough's The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977). For some of the politically explicit statements, see 23f, 33f, 40, 42, 173ff, 180, 197ff.
56. Peter Rutland, "Sovietology: From stagnation to Perestroika? A decade of doctoral research in Soviet politics," Kennan Institute Occasional Papers no. 241 (Washington, D.C.: The Woodrow Wilson Center, 1990). Rutland, "Sovietology: Notes for a post-mortem," The National Interest 31 (Spring 1993): 109-123.
57. This general criticism does not imply that the pluralist school could not claim its share of predictive success too. Fairness demands that we mention, first of all, Hough's work on generational differences in Soviet top leadership. Having collated all the available biographical scraps and bits about Soviet leaders, he had firmly set his sights, already in the late seventies, on Gorbachev and a couple of other figures as harbingers of great changes: Jerry F. Hough, Soviet Leadership in Transition (Washington, D.C., The Brookings Institution, 1980), 154. Followers of the old school, on the other hand, dismissed Hough's high expectations on the grounds that all the new elites, however different were their educational and career backgrounds, "have ... been co-opted and socialized into a common mold of traditional values and attitudes associated with their dominant elite political culture." Joel C. Moses, "Soviet leaders: Roots of behavior," Problems of Communism 30 (JulyAugust 1981): 49.
58. Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 560. For Hough's predictions at the time of "Gorbachev's endgame" see Peter Reddaway, "The end of the Empire," New York Review of Books, 7 November 1991, 59.
59. Robert Conquest, "Academe and Soviet myth," The National Interest 31 (Spring 1993): 92-93.
60. Juan Linz, "Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes," in Fred Greenstein and Nelson Polsby, editors, Handbook of Political Science (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), vol. 3,175-411.
61. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 51.
62. As she followed the unfolding of events in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, Kirkpatrick was the first to acknowledge that she overestimated the staying power of communist regimes. See the articles and studies collected in Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, The Withering Away of the Totalitarian State ... and Other Surprises (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1990).
63. In professional Sovietology, the first call to take Soviet dissidents seriously, both as sources of information and providers of new theoretical insight, came from Peter Reddaway: Uncensored Russia (Washington, D.C.: American Heritage Institute, 1972). The best scholarly overview of early dissident thinking in Eastern Europe was given in the volume edited and introduced by Rudolf Tokes: Opposition in Eastern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1979). For later developments see Tony R. Judt, "The dilemmas of dissidence: The politics of opposition in EastCentral-Europe," East European Politics and Societies 2 (Spring 1988): 185-240. In the eighties, Timothy Garton Ash became such a close observer of East European dissidents that, for the time of the demise of communist regimes, he became a part of the scene he observed: Timothy Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of East Central Europe (New York: Random House, 1989).
64. Jacques Rupnik, The Other Europe (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989, rev. ed.), 224.
65. The Hungarian Pierre Kende and the Polish Smolar brothers played an important role in spreading the word in Western Europe. Cf. Kende and Krzysztof Pomian, editors, Varsovie-Budapest 1956 (Paris: Seuil, 1978). A symptomatic expression of the resulting change of mood was Claude Lefort's L'invention democratique: Les limites de la domination totalitaire (Paris: Fayard, 1981). For the general process see especially Walter Laqueur, "Is there now, or has there ever been, such a thing as totalitarianism," Commentary 80 (October 1985): 29-35 and Pierre Hassner, "Le totalitarisme vue de l'Ouest," in Guy Hermet, Pierre Hassner, and Jacques Rupnik, editors, Totalitarismes (Paris: Economica, 1984).
66. The classic statement of the paradox, with a hint at its resolution, was Leszek Kolakowski's "Hope and hopelessness," Survey 17 (Summer 1971): 36-52.
67. See, first of all, the two dissident classics: Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1986) and Vaclav Havel, Living in Truth (London: Faber, 1988). Also, from the enormous literature we want to draw attention to two recent works that try to utilize the dissident experience for Western democratic theory: Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Beyond Glasnost: The Post-Totalitarian Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).
68. East European dissident ideas found, in this respect too, a wider application in Western political theory. See especially Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).
69. Vladimir Tismaneanu, Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 280-281.
70. On Weber and other sociological critics of socialism, see Daniel Bell, "The postindustrial society: The evolution of an idea," Survey 79
(Spring 1971): 117-129.
71. Max Weber, Economy and Society vol. I (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968),
223-225.
72. For discussion see Seymour Martin Lipset, Conflict and Consensus (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1985), chapter 2, "Social stratification and social class analysis." Also: Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Dobson, "Social stratification and sociology in the Soviet Union," Survey 88 (Summer 1973): 114-185; Seymour Martin Lipset and Terry Nichols Clark, "Are social classes dying?" International Sociology 6 (December 1991): 397-410.
73. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1962).
74. Nikolai Bukharin, Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965).
75. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972); Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1970).
76. Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World (New York: Free Press, 1985). This was originally published in Paris in 1939. Max Shachtman, The Bureaucratic Revolution: The Rise of the Stalinist State (New York: Donald Press, 1962). See the discussion of these works in Bell, "The post-industrial society," 139-142.
77. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958), 8-9.
78. They looked to America as the country that would show others the way to socialism, in spite of the glaring weakness of socialist parties in the United States. As Howard Quint points out in The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 380, they "found the United States, of all the countries in the world, most ripe for socialism, not only in the light of Marxian law of economic development, but also by the express opinion of Friedrich Engels." Karl Kautsky, considered the leading Marxist theoretician in the German Social Democratic Party, announced in 1902 that "America shows us our future, in so far as one country can reveal it at all to another." He elaborated this view in 1910, anticipating "the sharpening of class conflict more strongly" in the U.S. than anywhere else. The British Marxist H. M. Hyndman noted in 1904 that "just as North America is today the most advanced country, economically and socially, so it will be the first in which Socialism will find open and legal expression." Quoted in R. Lawrence Moore, European Socialists and the American Promised Land (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 58, 102. Werner Sombart emphasized this point in his classic 1906 book, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (White Plains, N.J.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976), 15: "If ... modern socialism follows as a necessary reaction to capitalism, the country with the most advanced capitalist development, namely the United States, would at the same time be the one providing the classic case of Socialism, and its working class would be supporters of the most radical of Socialist movements." Maxim Gorky, who supported the Russian Bolsheviks from 1903 on, wrote in 1906 of his conviction that "socialism would be realized in the United States before any other country in the world." Quoted in J. E. Good, Strangers in a Strange Land: Five Russian Radicals Visit the United States (Ph.D. dissertation, Washington, D.C.: American University, 1979), 231. August Bebel, the leader of the German Social Democrats, stated in an interview in 1907 in the American socialist paper Appeal to Reason that: "You Americans will be the first to usher in a Socialist Republic." His belief at a time when his party was already a mass movement with many elected members of the Reichstag, but the American Socialist Party secured less than 2% of the vote was based on the fact that the United States was "far ahead of Germany in industrial development." He reiterated his opinion in 1912, when the discrepancy between the strength of the two movements was even greater, saying that America would be "the first nation to declare a Cooperative Commonwealth." Quoted in Moore, European Socialists, 78f. Paul Lafargue paraphrased Marx on the flyleaf of his book on America by asserting that "the most industrially advanced country shows to those who follow it on the industrial ladder the image of their own future." Quoted in Moore, European Socialists, 91.
79. Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism ? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 69.
80. Ibid., 71-72.
81. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 21-22, 272, 318.
82. Reprinted as Bernard Levin, "One who got it right," National Interest 31 (Spring 1993): 64-65.
83. Edwin Meese, "The man who won the Cold War," Policy Review 60 (Summer 1992): 36-39.
84. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "Will Russia blow up?" Newsweek (19 November 1979): 144,147.
85. "Senator to Reagan: 'We won the Cold War,"' Watertown Daily Times, 10 September 1984.
86. "Soviet Union is 'failed society' in need of clear policy from U.S., Moynihan says," Buffalo News, 15 October 1984.
87. A good example is Severyn Bialer's "Sources of Soviet stability," in Terry L. Thompson and Richard Sheldon, editors, Soviet Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1988).
88. Seymour Martin Lipset, "No third way: A comparative perspective on the left," in Daniel Chirot, editor, The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 183-232.
89. S. Frederick Starr, "Pooped party," The New Republic (4 December 1989): 20.
George Mason University; Lorand Eotvos University, Hungary
(continued)
The pluralist model
The new model that became dominant and, to a large extent, replaced the model of totalitarianism in the 1970s, did not have a name as commonly accepted as the old one. The most successful candidates for a general label were "pluralism," with or without qualifications and adjectives like "quasi-;' "bureaucratic," "institutional," and "corporatist." The differences were not purely terminological, they expressed important analytical controversies.54 As to the empirical contents of the model, however, there was a fairly general consensus.
According to the pluralist model, to choose this label for the sake of simplicity, the different social and economic interests to be found in any modern society were not only present but also articulated and represented in a Soviet-type political system. The communist government, for its part, did not endeavor to transform or suppress these interests, which would have been impossible anyway, but tried its best to be responsive to them, and played basically a mediating role to maintain a balance within the general framework of the regime. As a result, it was successful enough to maintain a stable social arrangement, which was actually called a "social contract" by some authors. While leaving much to be desired, it offered hope for a peaceful satisfaction of any reasonable demands.
The drastic limitations on freedom of expression or the organizational monopoly of the party-state were not denied by the proponents of the pluralist model, nor were phenomena such as the chronic shortages of consumer goods ignored. The pluralists became, in fact, the earliest and most enthusiastic promoters of Gorbachev's reforms among analysts of the Soviet scene, having been very much aware that there was a lot to be reformed. They tended, however, to take a "realistic" approach to these difficulties and to the differences between Communist and democratic regimes in general.
The totalitarian model presented a system highly resistant to demands of change, no matter how pressing they were according to the pluralist model, but the Communist system was flexible enough to accommodate far-reaching shifts. The different judgments about the chances of meaningful reform did not depend, however, solely on differences in description and analysis. The adherents of the pluralist model applied a much lower standard of expectation about the responsiveness of a political system, of any political system, than their predecessors.
Jerry Hough, the most aggressive exponent of the pluralist school, even reckless to the point of exposing himself to the charge of being a Soviet apologist, made a sharp, and admittedly legitimate, distinction between the chances of an interest group to do politics on the input side (to make its demands public, to organize for promoting its demands, etc.) and the chances of obtaining favorable policy outcomes. He made, moreover, a theoretically less legitimate but politically highly significant distinction between demands that are relevant to the interests of ordinary people and those that are mainly the concern of intellectuals or politicians. In Hough's writings, this had the implication, sometimes quite clearly spelled out, that a liberal democracy might offer a better chance for interest groups to make a big show of their demands, and for intellectuals to work within their metier, but it is a matter of debate whether all this is of much help for disadvantaged groups.55
It would be as easy to single out extreme statements of the pluralist position as it was of the totalitarian model. Paragons of the pluralist school, looking for expressions of group politics, applied themselves to the study of letters to the editor in Soviet newspapers or of shades of meaning in scholastic discussions of Marxist-Leninist doctrine with a dedication worthy of more interesting subjects. Even the marginal differences in the number of ballots cast for the Communist list in various elections were analyzed in all seriousness.56
But the main problem created by the pluralists' approach was on a deeper level. By trivializing the differences between democratic and communist regimes, the new model impaired the sociological imagination to a larger extent than had the totalitarian model.57 While the latter made it hard to imagine how meaningful change might come about, the former made students of Soviet society insensitive to the need for systemic change.
It is again in Hough's work that we find the most symptomatic expression of this tendency. In the late seventies, Hough radically rewrote Merle Fainsod's classic monograph, originally an application of the totalitarian model, which was first published in 1953 under the title How Russia is Ruled. The new book, with the significantly changed title How the Soviet Union Is Governed, contained a final chapter, entirely from the pen of Hough, about "the future of the Soviet system."
The Soviet Union has an authoritarian political system, but it has a constitution and a set of party rules that correspond in large part to western conceptions of democracy, and it pledges allegiance to an ideology promising the establishment of full democracy and individual freedom....
Because of the ambiguous nature of the Soviet political tradition, any future evolution is highly likely to retain the framework of the present system in one sense or another.58
The return of the totalitarian model
However decisive it seemed on the academic playing fields of Sovietology, the victory of the pluralist school turned out to be hollow. It was one thing to write an epitaph on "totalitarianism" in a scholarly encyclopedia, or to apply the somewhat Orwellian strategem of eliminating the idea of totalitarianism from a leading academic textbook,59 but it was another to make the public oblivious of the danger of totalitarianism. "Totalitarianism" became a part of the political language, and due to its literary representations by such writers as Koestler, Milosz, Orwell, and Silone, the totalitarian model took a firm hold on the imagination of politically informed people in the West and, to an ever growing extent, in Eastern Europe, too. By the end of the 1970s when Sovietological pluralism seemed to be at its apogee, the second coming of "totalitarianism" was well on the way.
Jeane Kirkpatrick, a political scientist critic of President Carter's foreign policy who became an important political influence under Reagan, pushed the totalitarian model almost single-handedly into the center of public debate again. Applying a distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, well worked out in the scholarly literature but not much used in policy discussion,60 Kirkpatrick directed the attention to the fact that, while the history of twentieth century "provided no grounds for expecting that radical totalitarian regimes will transform themselves," there were many instances of right-wing authoritarian regimes having given up power.61
Kirkpatrick's efforts by themselves could have been, and in fact were, dismissed by political opponents as attempts to demonize Soviet communism and to excuse the bolstering of friendly right-wing dictatorships by the United States.62 At about the same time, however, tenacious adherents of the totalitarian model received a boost from unexpected quarters. After 1968 when, as it seemed, the last attempt to renew the Communist system on the basis of a revised version of its own ideology was defeated by the invading armies of the Warsaw Pact in Czechoslovakia, a continuously growing number of Soviet and East European dissidents had become interested in totalitarian theorizing.63 Jacques Rupnik, in his book on the transformation of Eastern Europe, gave a pertinent characterization of this process.
The concept of totalitarianism has been fraught with paradox and misunderstandings in East-West communication. At a time when the countries of East-Central-Europe were ... experiencing the "pure" totalitarianism of the Stalin era, they were, for obvious reasons, absent from the debate on the concept taking place in the West. Conversely, twenty years later, when the concept had been virtually banished from Western Sovietology as an unscientific product of the Cold War, it was reappropriated by all the independent thinkers in East-Central-Europe. The watershed year 1968 marked a political parting of the ways and was a catalyst which set the concept of totalitarianism on a separate course, East and West. In the West, 1968 marked the dawning of detente, which profoundly affected the way in which politicians, academics and journalists addressed the nature of the Communist system. For intellectuals of the Other Europe the Soviet tanks in Prague were seen as a final evidence of the failure of reform from within and of the existence of a permanent totalitarian "core" at the heart of the Communist system.64
And after the late 1970s, when the new wave of open dissent in Poland and Czechoslovakia had made its impact on Western public opinion, academic students of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe could not remain completely unaffected either.65
The new dissent in Eastern Europe grew out of the disillusionment with Marxist revisionism, reformist Communism, and human-faced socialism in their local versions. The dissident movements were attracted, paradoxically, by those features of the totalitarian model that implied that there could be no inner transformation of totalitarianism. What they needed first was to find a rationale for opting out of the system. This was, of course, not exclusively a matter of private morality for the typical dissident. Dissidents were by choice, or became by force of circumstances, political animals. They did not seek only to save their souls, they wanted to act.66 The initial paradox, therefore, had to be overcome by modifying the totalitarian model.
In the dissident's version of the model, full domination by the state was restricted to large-scale, formally organized political and economic activities. The intermediate space between these and the private life of family and personal networks, however, was left open to collective actions and even to collective formations of a more enduring kind, more or less independent of totalitarian controls. Official ideology was presented as a system of ritualized formulas and absurd lies people were forced to pretend to believe in, but no one actually took seriously.67
These were original and interesting assumptions and, as far as they went, opened up the possibility of an attractive new style of politics that was radically antitotalitarian in its aims and, at the same time, rational and moderate in its methods.68 But even the most optimistic among the dissidents, who also assumed that the totalitarian state eventually would be cornered by a vigorous civil society growing up under its shadow, did not expect the demise of the regime soon. They were therefore no less surprised, although perhaps better prepared for the next steps than Western observers of the Soviet and East European scene, when communism came to an end.69
We have traversed a full circle, starting from the classic totalitarian model, continuing with pluralist revisionism and finally arrived at another version of the totalitarian model. Each of these models, although in different ways and to different degrees, offered important insights into the possibilities of more or less radical changes within the Communist system. All of them, however, made it hard to imagine that the system itself might be transformed soon or at all. But if we step out of this circle and consider not only theories that were developed for the express purpose of understanding totalitarian systems, the picture becomes less discouraging. One is tempted to say that the failure of Sovietology was partly due to the fact that it had lost contact with the classic tradition of social theory.
Implications of grand theory
Much of the grand theory implied that Communism would produce a reactionary and oppressive society, and concluded that the system would fail. Here we are thinking of the writings of classical sociologists such as Max Weber, Robert Michels, the elite theorists such as Vilfredo Pareto, and in more recent times Raymond Aron, as well as Marx and Engels themselves. Classical liberal economics, of course, also produced major theoretical works attesting to the inherent failure of socialism. Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter all concluded that a socialist planning system and government ownership of industry were necessarily inefficient. They argued that a capitalist market system was inherently much more productive than its rival. These, of course, though eventually applicable to the Soviet Union, were about the functioning of statist systems generally, not about the U.S.S.R.
Max Weber, the great sociological critic of Marx, in his writings about socialism and capitalism, contributed important insights for understanding the nature of and subsequent failure of the Soviet Union.70 He was, in fact, the mentor of the young Michels and inspired Michels's study of socialist oligarchy. Weber emphasized bureaucracy as the charactertistic mode of large-scale social organizations in modern society, including both government and industry. Weber, however, generalized beyond politics to argue that whether the means of production were privately owned, as in capitalism, or publicly or socially owned, as under socialism, would make little difference for the position of the lower strata. The socialist revolution would, in fact, intensify the bureaucratic character of modern industrial society, resulting in the increased oppression of the working class and other repressed strata.71
Weber formulated a theory of alienation under bureaucratic conditions, which differed from Marx and was subsequently expanded in the writings of scholars like Erich Fromm, C. Wright Mills, and David Riesman. Weber emphasized that in a bureaucratic system the people lower in the hierarchy have to "sell" their personalities, rather than their manufacturing skills, to impress their superiors. Bureaucracy produces what was later to be called organization men or marketeers or otherdirected personalities. The theory implies that they are even more alienated from their true selves than is suggested by the Marxist analysis of alienation resulting from economic powerlessness.72 Weber, who lived to see the beginnings of the Soviet rule, argued with students in Germany about the future of socialism, predicting that it would not produce a decent or egalitarian system, but rather a more oppressive one than capitalism because it would be more bureaucratic. Shortly before his death, he concluded one of his lectures by saying "Let us meet again in ten years to see who is right."
While a member of the German Social Democratic Party, Robert Michels put forth a major critique of socialism that was to become extremely influential. His book Political Parties, which first appeared in 1911, emphasized inherent oligarchic tendencies within political parties, especially within the socialist parties and most notably within the most important of them at the time, his own German party.73 Michels noted that the socialists claimed to be the greatest advocates of democracy in the polity and the economy. Their coming to power would supposedly lead both to greater democracy and classlessness. Michels, however, documented in abundant detail that the internal structure of the socialist parties was not democratic, that the parties were controlled by an elite that was able, through its control of the organization and political resources, to dominate the membership. He also emphasized that the party bureaucrats were not workers, even if some of them had been such before they became party employees and leaders. Hence he argued, as did Rosa Luxemburg from a different perspective, that the program of the party reflected not the social situation of the working class, but the position and interests of the socially privileged party elites. Since this was particularly true of the socialist parties, Michels concluded that socialist parties might triumph and come to office, but that socialism as an egalitarian system could never materialize. There would always be control by the party bureaucracy, who would be the ruling class in socialist society.
While Michels's classic work was written years before the Russian Revolution, it was seriously discussed in what for a time was the major theoretical tome of the Russian and international Communist movements, Historical Materialism, written by Nikolai Bukharin in 1924.74 Bukharin, well versed in sociological theory, evaluated the writings of Durkheim, Weber, and Michels knowledgeably. Addressing the criticisms of Marxism by various bourgeois political scientists, he summarized Michels's argument, but then surprisingly did not reject it. Rather he acknowledged that the beginnings of a new ruling class or stratum could be seen in the Soviet Union. He stated, however, that it would not lead to the failure of socialism or to the growth of a new controlling class because one of the major variables that Michels stressed as making for elite dominance was in the process of being eliminated in the Soviet Union, namely, a proletariat lacking political competence or education.
Bukharin argued that the working class was being raised by a socialist society to a higher level of understanding, and consequently also of political participation, than had ever occurred before. These skills would enable the workers to resist what he accepted as the inevitable tendency of the dominant strata of a socialist society to try to become a new ruling class. Bukharin believed that a sophisticated proletariat would prevent this from occurring. It is obvious, however, that Bukharin was concerned that socialism might fail, that it might produce a new exploitative class. Historical Materialism, which was used as required teaching material in the Communist movement for a few years, was to disappear completely, and Bukharin himself, like almost all the Revolutionary fathers, was to be executed by Stalin as a traitor in the Second Moscow Trial in 1938.
Michels's Political Parties had, however, a considerable effect on young American radicals in the 1930s and early 1940s, including two who were to become sociologists, Philip Selznick and Seymour Martin Lipset. They had been Trotskyists, which meant that they were critically aware of the exploitative authoritarian character of the Soviet Union, but as they observed autocratic tendencies in the Trotskyist movement itself, they came to accept Michels's analysis that oligarchy and dictatorship seemed to be inherent in the organizational structure of revolutionary movements, a belief that was to lead them out of the movement and to be severely critical of the Soviet Union.
The writings of Weber and Michels were to have an influence on analyses of the Soviet system during and after World War II. James Burnham, who had been a leading American Trotskyist, wrote two books, The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians, which advanced the idea that the managerial bureaucracy was not only becoming the new ruling class of the Soviet system, but was also taking over throughout western industrial society, which he thought would become statist and managerial.75 Burnham argued that power lay in the hands of the managers of industry who would be the new ruling class of a post-capitalist society. These ideas had appeared earlier in the writings of another former follower of Trotsky, although not a member, Bruno Rizzi, and subsequently in the works of Max Shachtman, who had been a Trotskyist leader.76 Burnham was to give up his belief in the dominance of the managerially controlled state and become an advocate of pure market economies.
These views, it should be noted and acknowledged, did not conflict with those of the fountainhead of socialist theory and of Communist ideology, Karl Marx. Marxism is a materialist theory of society and history. The nature of society, the structural posibilities, are determined by the level of technology. Social structures, class relations, power systems, ideologies, are derivative from, are closely tied to, the productive apparatus. Marx, therefore, rejected as utopian proposals to build communism prior to the emergence of highly industrialized countries.
Marx and Engels distinguished between utopian and scientific socialism in The Communist Manifesto and in Engels's work, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. The concept of utopian socialism referred in part to efforts in the Middle Ages to create egalitarian communes and to the writings of men such as Fourier and Owen, who favored creating cooperative communities in the nineteenth century. And following from Marx's assumption, the major Marxist theorists did not believe that socialism could be built in a nonindustrialized country like the Czarist empire. These included, prior to the Revolution, Russians Lenin, Trotsky, Plekhanov, and Martov, the last two the theoreticians of the Mensheviks, and, outside Russia, major figures Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg.
Underdeveloped, primarily agrarian countries did not meet Marx's materialistic requirement for socialism. He consistently emphasized that socialism could only come to power and take shape in a society that produces economic abundance, i.e., has the appropriate material substructure. Marx was convinced that an exploitative class society is the inevitable consequence of scarcity. Managers have to be highly rewarded to motivate them to organize the society. Surplus value has to be extracted from the lower classes to produce economic growth and to support the institutions of the ruling class, of government, of political organization, of defense against natural and human enemies. To repeat, socialism can only emerge in a society in which technology is so advanced, so productive, that the goal of equality, a high standard of living for all, is a practical one. Utopian, unrealistic efforts to create socialism, to form an egalitarian society prior to abundance, must fail.
In Das Kapital, Marx noted that "the most advanced society would show to the less developed the image of their future."77 Ironically, this meant that the first socialist country would be the United States since it was the most developed country from the late nineteenth century on. Many Marxists, ranging from Friedrich Engels in Europe to Daniel DeLeon in the United States, Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law, in France, August Bebel in Germany, and Maxim Gorky in Russia, concluded that America had to be the first socialist country. They continued to believe this up to World War I, even when they saw large socialist movements developing in Europe, but not in the United States.78
The theory, of course, meant that Russia, not to speak of China, could not and would not be among the first socialist countries. The Russian Marxists, both Bolshevik and Menshevik, knew their Marx and believed this. They wrote that Russia first had to go through the stages of being a bourgeois society, a capitalist economy. Capitalism, a market economy, economic incentives, were necessary for growth under conditions of scarcity.
Prior to 1917, the only well-known Russian Marxist who argued that the working class, the socialist movement, should try to take power in Russia was Leon Trotsky. Trotsky did not believe this because he thought that the country was ready for socialism, but rather because, as he emphasized, Russia had missed the opportunity to develop along the lines that had occurred in the west. He argued that it was too late for the Russian bourgeoisie to take over their country and transform it into an economically developed capitalist democracy, like western Europe or America. Russia's weakness in the world market would prevent it from doing so. However, Trotsky did not propose that the party take office to erect a socialist system, but rather to lead the effort to industrialize the country using market or capitalist mechanisms.
The other Russian Marxists, both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, ridiculed Trotsky's theory and rejected the idea that the working class would come to power in an underdeveloped country. In 1917, however, the Bolsheviks did take over. The historical record documents that this happened because Lenin, who was a strategic genius, in effect decided that Trotsky was right, although he never acknowledged this openly. On his return from Switzerland in April 1917, he proposed that the Bolsheviks plan for the seizure of power. All the other leaders of the party thought he had lost his bearings and rejected his policy.
Lenin, however, was able to switch the party's orientation. He argued that Russia was the weakest link in the chain of capitalist nations as a result of the military defeats it had suffered in the war. He felt and hoped that a Russian revolution would provide the spark for the revolution in the industrialized west, particularly in Germany, but elsewhere as well. And it was his belief that if the working class, if the socialist movement, came to power in the more developed countries of western Europe, that Russia could be helped along by them. No one, certainly not he nor any of the other Marxists, thought that socialist institutions could be erected in the backward material conditions of the Czarist Empire. He did not really believe that the Bolsheviks would hold power unless the west joined in.
We do not know what went through Lenin's mind as it became clear that the revolution would not succeed in the west, that the Bolsheviks were isolated in what had become the Soviet Union. For the first few years, he and the other Bolsheviks kept looking for the revolution to emerge in the industrialized West, in harmony with Marx's anticipations. But as it became clear that this was not happening, that they were isolated in their economically backward territory, one that showed little evidence of response to the egalitarian norms introduced under War Communism, Lenin became increasingly pessimistic. He put the blame for domestic shortcomings, not only on war conditions and underdevelopment, but also on the low cultural level of the Russian people, on Asian traditions that made for passivity.
Marx's theory implied the effort to build socialism in a less developed society would result in a sociological abortion. If those words do not describe what happened in the Soviet Union, nothing does. Karl Marx anticipated that the premature creation of a socialist state would be a fetter on the means of production, not a goad, and would be repressive and reactionary. Marx would not have believed that the ruling class of the sociological abortion would give up as benignly as it has.
Some orthodox Marxists, focusing on organizational variables, came up with equally pessimistic predictions about the future of an effort led by an elite party, the Bolsheviks, to build socialism in Russia. Leon Trotsky, in the period after the Revolution of 1905, rejected the Mensheviks as too moderate, but regarded the Bolsheviks as too authoritarian. Analyzing the internal structure of their organization and Lenin's power within it, he predicted that a Bolshevik seizure of power would inevitably lead to an authoritarian regime, in which one party controlled everything, with a dictator who dominated the party. He of course gave up this analysis when he joined the Bolsheviks in 1917.
The Polish-German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg also debated with Lenin in the early years of the twentieth century. She rejected his idea that a small revolutionary elite party would lead the working class into socialism. In two articles published under the title, "Leninism or Marxism?" in 1904, she argued against Lenin's organizational views. She attacked Lenin's emphasis on a centralized elite party, one that she thought implied contempt for the working class, suggesting they could not come to revolutionary consciousness on their own. Like Trotsky, she anticipated a future in which the Party would dictate to the masses, the Central Committee would dictate to the Party and a leader would ultimately dictate to the Committee. After the Bolsheviks had come to power and established a dictatorship, she again polemicized against Lenin's views in a pamphlet on The Russian Revolution. She wrote, among other things: "Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party however numerous they may be is no freedom for all. Freedom is always and exclusively for the one who thinks differently."79 And she predicted that "without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly,
without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out of every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.... (The system becomes) a clique affair, a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians ... such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc."80
The idea that socialism could only emerge in an advanced industrial society, which was a fixed dogma of Marxism prior to 1917, almost disappeared afterward, given the existence of the Soviet Union. It should be noted, however, that the justly esteemed Italian theoretician Antonio Gramsci wrote from prison in the middle 1920s, in line with the traditional Marxist gospel, that his country, Italy, must "Americanize" to become socialist. That is, Gramsci argued Italy must first become an advanced bourgeois industrial country like the United States, before it could move on to make a socialist revolution.81 Gramsci did not refer critically to the situation in the Soviet Union; as a Communist he could not, but he may very well have had it in mind, since it was much more backward than Italy.
Theoretical insight, political judgment
Finally, we must note that some politicians and journalists on both the Right and the Left seem to have known what was happening in the Soviet Union and based their policies and writings on this knowledge. Perhaps the most accurate description and prevision came from a conservative journalist, Bernard Levin, writing in the (London) Times in September 1977. Levin thought the same nationalist, social, and political forces that had produced dissidence within the elites in Czechoslovakia and other parts of Eastern Europe would inevitably produce the same outcome in the Soviet Union itself by 1989. He wrote with uncanny prescience that in the Soviet Union, the eventual leaders of revolt
...are there, all right, at this very moment, obeying orders, doing their duty, taking the official line against dissidents, not only in public but in private. They do not conspire, they are not in touch with Western intelligence agencies, they commit no sabotage. They are in every respect model Soviet functionaries. Or rather, in every respect but one: they have admitted the truth about their country to themselves, and have vowed, also to themselves, to do something about it.
That is how it will be done. There will be no gunfire in the streets, no barricades, no general strikes, no hanging of oppressors from lamp-posts, no sacking and burning of government offices, no seizure of radio-stations or mass defections among the military. But one day soon, some new faces will appear in the Politburo, I am sure they have already appeared in municipal and even regional administrative authorities and gradually, very gradually, other, similarly new, faces will join them. Until one day they will look at each other and realize that there is no longer any need for concealment of the truth in their hearts. And the match will be lit.
There is nothing romantic or fantastic about this prognosis; it is the most sober extrapolation from known facts and tested evidence. That, or something like it, will happen. When it will happen it is neither possible nor useful to guess; but I am sure it will be within the lifetime of people much older than I ... let us suppose, for neatness' sake, on July 14, 1989....82
In four major speeches delivered in 1982, 1983, 1987, and 1988, Ronald Reagan said the system was going down. At Westminster in 1982, he noted as simple fact that "of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward, the Communist world," and he consigned Marxism-Leninism to the "trash heap of history." In 1983, he said Communism is a "sad, bizarre chapter in history, whose last pages even now are being written." In 1987, at the Brandenburg Gate, he stressed: "In the Communist world we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind too little food." And he proclaimed that his cold war policies were based on the assumption that the Soviet Union was a "basket case." Economics, Reagan believed, was the Soviet Union's primary failing. As a good pupil of the market economists, he explained that weakness as derivative from the fact that it is impossible for government planners, no matter how sophisticated, to ever substitute for the judgment of "millions of individuals," for the "incentives inherent in the capitalist system."83 These conclusions were out of line with the advice he had been receiving from experts in the C.I.A., the Defense and State Departments. Seemingly, the President had his own sources, some of whom were in the Defense Intelligence Agency and the RAND Corporation.
From the Left, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in a series of prescient statements, made from the late seventies on, gave even more emphasis to the terrible weakness of the Soviet Union. Asked to predict what would happen in the 1980s, he stated in 1979 that the Soviet system "could blow up." He pointed to the economic downturn, the "rise in mortality rates ... the nationality strains."84 In a speech in the Senate in January 1980, Moynihan noted: "The indices of economic stagnation and even decline are extraordinary. The indices of social disorder social pathology is not too strong a term are even more so. The defining event of the decade might well be the breakup of the Soviet Empire." In a commencement address at New York University in 1984, he pointed to the absence of legitimacy, "that the Soviet idea is spent ... it summons no loyalty." Again in that year he commented, "the Soviet Union is weak and getting weaker,"85 and in October 1984, before Gorbachev took office, Moynihan proclaimed: "The Cold War is over, the West won.... The Soviet Union ... has collapsed. As a society it just doesn't work. Nobody believes in it anymore." Moynihan differed from Reagan in drawing policy implications. His strategy "for dealing with the Soviets is to wait them out." They will collapse.86
Given these judgments of the Soviet future made by political leaders and journalists, the question is why were they right and so many of our Sovietological colleagues wrong. The answer again in part must be ideological. Reagan and Levin came from rightist backgrounds, and Moynihan, much like the leaders of the AFL-CIO, from a left-antiStalinist social-democratic milieu, environments that disposed participants to believe the worst. Most of the Sovietologists, on the other hand, were left-liberal in their politics, an orientation that undermined their capacity to accept the view that economic statism, planning, socialist incentives, would not work. They were also for the most part ignorant of, or ignored, the basic Marxist formulation that it is impossible to build socialism in impoverished societies.
The differences among the Sovietologists, however, also stem from responding to varying sets of questions. The scholars sought to explain how the system worked. They took the fact of the USSR's long-term existence for granted. Thus, they looked for institutions and values that stabilized the polity and society.87 Ideologically critical journalists and politicians, however, were disposed to emphasize dysfunctional aspects, structures, and behaviors, which might cause a crisis.
The distribution of emphases among the fourteen contributors to Brzezinski's 1969 collection, Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics, discussed earlier, is congruent with these assumptions. Two-thirds (four out of six) of those who foresaw a serious possibility of breakdown were, like Levin, Moynihan, and Reagan, nonacademics. Threequarters (six out of eight) of those who could not look beyond system continuity were scholars.
One may ask, what about Asian communism? Why is it surviving, as in China and Vietnam? We obviously do not have time and space to deal with this issue, but we would note that China and Vietnam are following the strategy advanced by Trotsky before World War I for revolutions in underdeveloped societies, to preside over market-driven economies. Most of the Chinese economy is now private and is becoming even more so. Its most successful regions are the most market oriented. Vietnam is predominantly a capitalist economy. Equally or more important is the fact that it is 43 years since the Chinese party came to power and only 17 years for Vietnam, as compared to the 74 years that the Communist regime lasted in the Soviet Union. The men who made the Asian revolutions are alive and at the summits of their power structures, they acknowledge implicitly the failure of Communism, but do not quit. Communism still has its revolutionary legitimacy for them, one that decrepitude and biology had reduced, if not eliminated, in the USSR.
Finally, we would note that although Marx was right about the failure of efforts to create socialism in pre-industrial societies, he was wrong in anticipating the socialist revolution in advanced industrial ones. The United States apart, they all have significant socialist or social democratic parties, but without exception all of these have now given up socialist objectives; they all endorse the market economy as the best means to produce increased productivity and a higher living standard for the underprivileged.88 Socialism and Marxism may be considered failures not because of developments in the formerly Communist world, but because of their inability to point the way for the advanced countries.
Does modern sociology have anything to contribute to the analysis of developments in the former Communist world? We hope we have shown that it does. But if you doubt it, may we note that while the party still held power, at a three-day conference on "The Party and Perestroika" at the Higher Party School in Moscow in 1989, attended by Communist scholars and intellectuals from all over the Soviet Union, a review of the stenographic record by S. Frederick Starr reports few references to Marx and Lenin, while statements by Max Weber and Talcott Parsons were invoked more frequently to analyze the situation and justify various proposals for reforms.89
Acknowledgments Portions of this article were presented by Lipset at the August 1992 meeting of the American Sociological Association in Pittsburgh and by Bence on 19 May 1993 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. We would like to express our gratitude to the Hoover Institution, the John Olin Foundation, and the Wilson Center for International Scholars for fellowships and research assistance. Various scholars made useful suggestions for which we are grateful. These include: Nancy Bermo, Abraham Brumberg, Valerie Bunce, Daniel Chirot, Charles Fairbanks, Robert Hutchings, Maria Kovacs, John Lampe, Blair Rubel, and Vladimir Tismaneanu.
Notes
1. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1.
2. Robert M. Solow, "The public dimensions of economics: Some pitfalls," Challenge 21 (March-April 1978): 39.
3. Rita Jalali and Seymour Martin Lipset, "Racial and ethnic tensions: A global perspective," Political Science Quarterly 107 (Winter 1992 -93): 137-158.
4. James Gleick, Chaos: Making of a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987), 23.
5. Cf. Seymour Martin Lipset, "Predicting the future of post-industrial society: Can we do it?" in Lipset, editor, The Third Century: America as a Post-Industrial Society (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1979), 1-18.
6. John Lewis Gaddis, "The Cold War's end dramatizes the failure of political theory," The Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 July 1992, 44; Gaddis, The United States and the End of Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 190.
7. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1937).
8. Daniel Bell, "Ten theories in search of reality: The prediction of Soviet behavior in the social sciences," World Politics 10 (April 1958): 358.
9. Donald R. Kelley, "Perestroika (book review)," Soviet Studies 44/2 (1992): 349.
10. Archie Brown, "The Soviet political scene: The era of Gorbachev?" in Lawrence W. Lerner and Donald W. Treadgold, editors, Gorbachev and the Soviet Future (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1988), 38-39.
11. William E. Odom, "How far can Soviet reform go?" Problems of Communism 36 (November-December 1987): 30.
12. Ibid., 33.
13. See William Odom, "The pluralist mirage," The National Interest 31 (Spring 1993): 99-100. The book is Zbigniew Brzezinski, editor, Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). See table on 157 in Brzezinski's "Concluding Reflections."
14. Robert Conquest, "Immobilism and decay," in Brzezinski, ibid., 72.
15. Martin Malia, "From under the rubble, what?" Problems of Communism 41 (January-April 1992): 96.
16. Murray Feshbach, "Population and manpower trends in the U.S.S.R.," paper prepared for Conference on the Soviet Union Today, sponsored by the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, held in Washington D.C., April 1978; Feshbach, "Issues in Soviet health problems," in U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Soviet Economy in the 1980s: Problems and Prospects, Part 2, 97th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 31 December 1982), 203-227; Feshbach, "Soviet population, labor force and health," in U.S. Congress, Joint Hearings of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and Joint Economic Committee, The Political Economy of the Soviet Union 98th Congress, 1st Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 26 July and 29 September 1983), 91-138.
17. It is interesting to note that Emmanuel Todd, who in his book The Final Fall: Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere (New York: Karz Publishers, 1979) drew an exceptionally stark picture of Soviet decline, was also trained in historical demography.
18. Nick Eberstedt, The Poverty of Communism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1988), ch. 3. This chapter was originally published as "Human factors: Quality of life," in Soviet Economy in the 1980s: Problems and Prospects, Part 2, 187-202. See also Eberstedt, "Health of an Empire: Poverty and social progress in the CMEA bloc," in Henry S. Rowen and Charles Wolf, Jr., editors, The Future of the Soviet Empire (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), 221-258 and Mikhail S. Bernstam, "Trends in the Soviet population," in ibid., 185-220.
19. Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 35.
20. Ibid., 33,41.
21. Ibid., 59,64.
22. Randall Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 187.
23. Ibid., 197.
24. Ibid., 203.
25. Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
26. For a systematic treatment of the state-society tensions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe see Walter D. Connor, Socialism's Dilemmas: State and Society in the Soviet Bloc (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), ch. 1. Blair A. Ruble described the long-term social changes in the Soviet Union as a "quiet revolution" preparing the way for Gorbachev's reforms in "The Soviet Union's quiet revolution," in George W. Breslauer, editor, Can Gorbachev's Reforms Succeeds? (Berkeley: Berkeley-Stanford Program in Soviet Studies, Center for Slavic and East European Studies, University of California at
Berkeley, 1990).
27. Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon, viii.
28. Ibid., 145f.
29. Richard Pipes, Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America's Future (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 199-200.
30. Ibid., 203.
31. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1973).
32. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956).
33. Ibid., part vi.
34. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, ch. 12, section 1.
35. For a fundamental criticism of the "atomization thesis" see Ralf Dahrendorf, "Totalitarianism revisited," Partisan Review 55 (Fall 1988): 541-554.
36. Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Concluding reflections," in his Dilemmas of Change, 162-163.
37. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America's Rule in the Technetronic Era (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 164-172.
38. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Scribner, 1989), 100.
39. Herbert J. Spiro, "Totaliarianism," in David L. Sills, editor, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: The Free Press, 1968), vol. 16,106, 112.
40. Abbot Gleason, "'Totalitarianism' in 1984," The Russian Review 43 (April 1984): 153.
41. Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Patterson, "Red fascism: The merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American image of totalitarianism, 1930s1950s," American Historical Review 75 (April 1970): 1046.
42. About the American side of the story, see Robert A. Skotheim, Totalitarianism and American Social Thought (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971). The most thorough historical treatment of the scholarly literature, covering both American and European developments, is to be found in Martin Jaenicke, Totalitare Herrschaft: Anatomie eines politischen Begriffs (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1971).
43. Irving Howe's generous and, at the same time, highly critical retrospective analysis gives a glimpse into the moral and intellectual turmoil behind early totalitarian theorizing: "Totalitarianism reconsidered: Yesterday's theories, today's realities," Dissent 38 (Winter 1991): 63-71.
44. Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 23-24.
45. Karl W. Deutsch, "Cracks in the monolith: Possibilities and patterns of disintegration in totalitarian systems," in Carl J. Friedrich, editor, Totalitarianism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964),
316-317.
46. Untitled discussion contribution in the Friedrich volume, 336.
47. "Some observations on the limits of totalitarian power," in David Riesman, Abundance For What? And Other Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), 80-83. This essay was originally published in 1952.
48. Raymond A. Bauer, Alex Inkeles, and Clyde Kluckhorn, How the Soviet System Works: Cultural, Psychological, and Social Themes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 218.
49. Raymond Bauer and David B. Gleicher, "Word-of-mouth communication in the Soviet Union," Public Opinion Quarterly 17 (Fall 1953): 297-310. Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), ch. vii.
50. Malia, "From under the rubble," 98-99.
51. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience, 7, 25.
52. Alex Inkeles, "Models and issues in the analysis of Soviet Society," Survey no. 60 (July 1966): 4-5.
53. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience, 25.
54. An overview of these debates is to be found in a Festschrift to H. Gordon Skilling. Skilling had been the first Sovietologist to initiate, in a cautious way, the analytical shift toward pluralism. Susan Gross Solomon, "pluralism and political science"; Jerry F. Hough, "Pluralism, corporatism and the Soviet Union"; Archie Brown, "Pluralism, power and the Soviet political system," in Susan Gross Solomon, editor, Pluralism and the Soviet Union: Essays in Honour of H. Gordon Skilling (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983). For Skilling's own retrospective view, see H. Gordon Skilling, "Interest groups and Communist politics revisited," World Politics 36 (October 1983): 1-27. For the corporatist version, see Valerie Bunce and John M. Echols, III, "Soviet politics in the Brezhnev era: 'Pluralism' or 'Corporatism'?" in Donald R. Kelley, editor, Soviet Politics in the Brezhnev Era (New York: Praeger, 1980).
55. The general discussion is to be found in chapters 8-10 of Jerry F. Hough's The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977). For some of the politically explicit statements, see 23f, 33f, 40, 42, 173ff, 180, 197ff.
56. Peter Rutland, "Sovietology: From stagnation to Perestroika? A decade of doctoral research in Soviet politics," Kennan Institute Occasional Papers no. 241 (Washington, D.C.: The Woodrow Wilson Center, 1990). Rutland, "Sovietology: Notes for a post-mortem," The National Interest 31 (Spring 1993): 109-123.
57. This general criticism does not imply that the pluralist school could not claim its share of predictive success too. Fairness demands that we mention, first of all, Hough's work on generational differences in Soviet top leadership. Having collated all the available biographical scraps and bits about Soviet leaders, he had firmly set his sights, already in the late seventies, on Gorbachev and a couple of other figures as harbingers of great changes: Jerry F. Hough, Soviet Leadership in Transition (Washington, D.C., The Brookings Institution, 1980), 154. Followers of the old school, on the other hand, dismissed Hough's high expectations on the grounds that all the new elites, however different were their educational and career backgrounds, "have ... been co-opted and socialized into a common mold of traditional values and attitudes associated with their dominant elite political culture." Joel C. Moses, "Soviet leaders: Roots of behavior," Problems of Communism 30 (JulyAugust 1981): 49.
58. Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 560. For Hough's predictions at the time of "Gorbachev's endgame" see Peter Reddaway, "The end of the Empire," New York Review of Books, 7 November 1991, 59.
59. Robert Conquest, "Academe and Soviet myth," The National Interest 31 (Spring 1993): 92-93.
60. Juan Linz, "Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes," in Fred Greenstein and Nelson Polsby, editors, Handbook of Political Science (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), vol. 3,175-411.
61. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 51.
62. As she followed the unfolding of events in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, Kirkpatrick was the first to acknowledge that she overestimated the staying power of communist regimes. See the articles and studies collected in Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, The Withering Away of the Totalitarian State ... and Other Surprises (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1990).
63. In professional Sovietology, the first call to take Soviet dissidents seriously, both as sources of information and providers of new theoretical insight, came from Peter Reddaway: Uncensored Russia (Washington, D.C.: American Heritage Institute, 1972). The best scholarly overview of early dissident thinking in Eastern Europe was given in the volume edited and introduced by Rudolf Tokes: Opposition in Eastern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1979). For later developments see Tony R. Judt, "The dilemmas of dissidence: The politics of opposition in EastCentral-Europe," East European Politics and Societies 2 (Spring 1988): 185-240. In the eighties, Timothy Garton Ash became such a close observer of East European dissidents that, for the time of the demise of communist regimes, he became a part of the scene he observed: Timothy Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of East Central Europe (New York: Random House, 1989).
64. Jacques Rupnik, The Other Europe (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989, rev. ed.), 224.
65. The Hungarian Pierre Kende and the Polish Smolar brothers played an important role in spreading the word in Western Europe. Cf. Kende and Krzysztof Pomian, editors, Varsovie-Budapest 1956 (Paris: Seuil, 1978). A symptomatic expression of the resulting change of mood was Claude Lefort's L'invention democratique: Les limites de la domination totalitaire (Paris: Fayard, 1981). For the general process see especially Walter Laqueur, "Is there now, or has there ever been, such a thing as totalitarianism," Commentary 80 (October 1985): 29-35 and Pierre Hassner, "Le totalitarisme vue de l'Ouest," in Guy Hermet, Pierre Hassner, and Jacques Rupnik, editors, Totalitarismes (Paris: Economica, 1984).
66. The classic statement of the paradox, with a hint at its resolution, was Leszek Kolakowski's "Hope and hopelessness," Survey 17 (Summer 1971): 36-52.
67. See, first of all, the two dissident classics: Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1986) and Vaclav Havel, Living in Truth (London: Faber, 1988). Also, from the enormous literature we want to draw attention to two recent works that try to utilize the dissident experience for Western democratic theory: Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Beyond Glasnost: The Post-Totalitarian Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).
68. East European dissident ideas found, in this respect too, a wider application in Western political theory. See especially Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).
69. Vladimir Tismaneanu, Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 280-281.
70. On Weber and other sociological critics of socialism, see Daniel Bell, "The postindustrial society: The evolution of an idea," Survey 79
(Spring 1971): 117-129.
71. Max Weber, Economy and Society vol. I (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968),
223-225.
72. For discussion see Seymour Martin Lipset, Conflict and Consensus (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1985), chapter 2, "Social stratification and social class analysis." Also: Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Dobson, "Social stratification and sociology in the Soviet Union," Survey 88 (Summer 1973): 114-185; Seymour Martin Lipset and Terry Nichols Clark, "Are social classes dying?" International Sociology 6 (December 1991): 397-410.
73. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1962).
74. Nikolai Bukharin, Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965).
75. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972); Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1970).
76. Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World (New York: Free Press, 1985). This was originally published in Paris in 1939. Max Shachtman, The Bureaucratic Revolution: The Rise of the Stalinist State (New York: Donald Press, 1962). See the discussion of these works in Bell, "The post-industrial society," 139-142.
77. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958), 8-9.
78. They looked to America as the country that would show others the way to socialism, in spite of the glaring weakness of socialist parties in the United States. As Howard Quint points out in The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 380, they "found the United States, of all the countries in the world, most ripe for socialism, not only in the light of Marxian law of economic development, but also by the express opinion of Friedrich Engels." Karl Kautsky, considered the leading Marxist theoretician in the German Social Democratic Party, announced in 1902 that "America shows us our future, in so far as one country can reveal it at all to another." He elaborated this view in 1910, anticipating "the sharpening of class conflict more strongly" in the U.S. than anywhere else. The British Marxist H. M. Hyndman noted in 1904 that "just as North America is today the most advanced country, economically and socially, so it will be the first in which Socialism will find open and legal expression." Quoted in R. Lawrence Moore, European Socialists and the American Promised Land (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 58, 102. Werner Sombart emphasized this point in his classic 1906 book, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (White Plains, N.J.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976), 15: "If ... modern socialism follows as a necessary reaction to capitalism, the country with the most advanced capitalist development, namely the United States, would at the same time be the one providing the classic case of Socialism, and its working class would be supporters of the most radical of Socialist movements." Maxim Gorky, who supported the Russian Bolsheviks from 1903 on, wrote in 1906 of his conviction that "socialism would be realized in the United States before any other country in the world." Quoted in J. E. Good, Strangers in a Strange Land: Five Russian Radicals Visit the United States (Ph.D. dissertation, Washington, D.C.: American University, 1979), 231. August Bebel, the leader of the German Social Democrats, stated in an interview in 1907 in the American socialist paper Appeal to Reason that: "You Americans will be the first to usher in a Socialist Republic." His belief at a time when his party was already a mass movement with many elected members of the Reichstag, but the American Socialist Party secured less than 2% of the vote was based on the fact that the United States was "far ahead of Germany in industrial development." He reiterated his opinion in 1912, when the discrepancy between the strength of the two movements was even greater, saying that America would be "the first nation to declare a Cooperative Commonwealth." Quoted in Moore, European Socialists, 78f. Paul Lafargue paraphrased Marx on the flyleaf of his book on America by asserting that "the most industrially advanced country shows to those who follow it on the industrial ladder the image of their own future." Quoted in Moore, European Socialists, 91.
79. Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism ? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 69.
80. Ibid., 71-72.
81. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 21-22, 272, 318.
82. Reprinted as Bernard Levin, "One who got it right," National Interest 31 (Spring 1993): 64-65.
83. Edwin Meese, "The man who won the Cold War," Policy Review 60 (Summer 1992): 36-39.
84. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "Will Russia blow up?" Newsweek (19 November 1979): 144,147.
85. "Senator to Reagan: 'We won the Cold War,"' Watertown Daily Times, 10 September 1984.
86. "Soviet Union is 'failed society' in need of clear policy from U.S., Moynihan says," Buffalo News, 15 October 1984.
87. A good example is Severyn Bialer's "Sources of Soviet stability," in Terry L. Thompson and Richard Sheldon, editors, Soviet Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1988).
88. Seymour Martin Lipset, "No third way: A comparative perspective on the left," in Daniel Chirot, editor, The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 183-232.
89. S. Frederick Starr, "Pooped party," The New Republic (4 December 1989): 20.
