The Problem with Communism
There is a curiosity about communism. Normally, there is much to be said for Kierkegaard’s view that we live our life forward and understand it backward. This applies in many ways to communism, now that it has all but gone. But some of the intellectual tools hinting at why it was likely to fail were present before the communist regimes of the modern world were instituted at the end of the First World War. This, seen in the light of sociological theory and the historical record, is the initial concern of this chapter. The second half of the chapter uses the insight gained to comment on the character of communism and on the nature of its demise.
It is good to begin with Karl Marx’s utopian vision, so clearly influenced by romanticism, and, above all, by the view that human beings should be complete and unitary, that is, free from any sort of psychic splitting.1 This is made especially clear in his famous characterization of communist society:
As soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.2
It was once believed that this early romantic humanism was left behind, replaced later by “scientific” socialism. But these early attitudes remain implicit in the later thought. Why should we jump on the historical bandwagon; that is, why should we accept, rather than seek to delay, the various historical stages identified by the materialist conception of history? The answer to this question is surely that the earlier thought reveals an essential human nature that existed before class society, thereby assuring us that the process of history is creating something that is not just inevitable but also both practical and desirable.
Émile Durkheim wished to differentiate himself from Marx, so he gave lectures on early socialism that can be seen as an attempt to draw his students away from a false trail and toward the proper one: sociology. Everything in his view depends on the distinction drawn between communism and socialism:
One school labels as antisocial everything which is private property, in a general way, while the other considers dangerous only the individual appropriation of the large economic enterprises which are established at a specific moment in history. Therefore, their significant motives are not at all the same. Communism is prompted by moral and timeless reasons; socialism by considerations of an economic sort. For the former, private property must be abolished because it is the source of all immorality; for the latter, the vast industrial and commercial enterprises cannot be left to themselves, as they affect too profoundly the entire economic life of society. Their conclusions are so different because one sees the remedy only in a suppression, as complete as possible, of economic interests; the other, in their socialization.3
Durkheim suggests that the social carriers of communism are dreamers, isolated intellectuals unrepresentative of any broader social current. In contrast, he takes socialism much more seriously: it may well be that socialist ideas are produced by intellectuals, but their appeal is wide because the working class—the carriers of Marx’s vision—are not properly integrated into modern society. Nonetheless, Durkheim insists that socialism does not answer to their suffering because it stands far too close to the world that it seeks to replace. In particular, it seeks merely to spread material goods around, and so fails to regulate appetites. This is a recipe for disaster:
It is a general law of all living things that needs and appetites are normal only on condition of being controlled. Unlimited need contradicts itself. For need is defined by the goal it aims at, and if unlimited has no goal—since there is no limit. It is no true aim, to seek constantly more than one has—to work in order to overtake the point one has reached, with a view only to exceeding that point … an appetite that nothing can appease can never be satisfied. Insatiable thirst can only be a source of suffering. Whatever one does, it is never slaked…. In its normal state sexual desire is aroused for a time, then is appeased. With the erotomaniac there are no limits.4
As is so often the case, Marx and Durkheim have much in common, seeing social processes as being in large part derived from the bottom up. With Max Weber we enter an entirely different world, as can be seen first in negative and then in positive terms.
Weber did not feel that there was an inevitable link between the working class and socialism. Insofar as the working class had embraced socialist ideals, and this was by no means totally so, this was due, as noted in chapter 3, to the antisocialist policies of the state. Such policies prevented demands being made at the industrial level, thereby making it necessary for workers to “take on” the state. He makes similar points about the peasantry, especially outside the Occident.5 He follows Durkheim in arguing that modern communism seeks to manage the economy rather than to abolish it. But he insists against Durkheim that communism is “indifferent to calculation” and hence oblivious to any “consideration of means for obtaining an optimum of provisions”; what matters instead are “direct feelings of mutual solidarity.”6
Further, Weber’s positive analysis has a different spirit from that of his French contemporary. In particular, he specifies three social bases for premodern communism. Household communism is, so to speak, natural, and he held it to exist in some large financial houses even in his own day.7 This form of communism has no trace of any communistic practices concerning women, and it does not provide any sort of model for the larger society.8 This is not true of military communism, analyzed in the middle of a long section dealing with charisma:
The communist warrior is the perfect counterpart to the monk, whose garrisoned and communistic life in the monastery serves the purpose of disciplining him in the service of his other-worldly master (and, resulting therefrom, perhaps also his this-worldly master). With consistent development of the warriors’ community, the dissociation from the family and all private economic interests is found also outside the celibate knightly orders which were created in direct analogy to the monastic orders. The inmates of the men’s house purchase or capture girls, or they claim that the girls of the subject community be at their disposal as long as they have not been sold in marriage. The children of the Areoi—the dominant status group in Polynesia—are killed. Men can join enduring sexual unions with a separate economy only after completing their service in the men’s house—often only at an advanced age. The communist military organization, which is widely spread under conditions of chronic warfare and which requires warriors without home and family, may be reflected residually in several phenomena: differentiation according to age groups, which is sometimes also important for the regulation of sexual relationships; survivals of an allegedly primitive “endogamous promiscuity” or of a “primeval right” of all male warriors to all unappropriated women; likewise, abduction as the allegedly earliest forms of marriage, and above all the “matrilineal family.”9
But it is the third type that really matters. This is the sharing inside a charismatically bound religious group. Such sharing seems to be accepted because it is a temporary necessity. This leads Weber to a characteristic judgment when writing about early Christianity:
Work attained dignity much later, beginning with the monastic orders who used it as an ascetic means. During the charismatic period of a religion, the perfect disciple must also reject landed property, and the mass of believers is expected to be indifferent towards it. An expression of this indifference is that attenuated form of the charismatic communism of love which apparently existed in the early Christian community of Jerusalem, where the members of the community owned property “as if they did not own it.” Such unlimited, unrationalized sharing with needy brothers, which forced the missionaries, especially Paulus, to collect alms abroad for the anti-economic central community, is probably what lies behind that much-discussed tradition, not any allegedly “socialist” organization or communist “collective ownership.” Once the eschatological expectations fade, charismatic communism in all its forms declines and retreats into monastic circles, where it becomes the special concern of the exemplary followers of God.10
That egalitarian sharing was encoded in one of the key documents of the Western tradition, the Acts of the Apostles, matters greatly from a Weberian point of view: it provided a moral legacy available to later European radicals. Nonetheless, if Marx was but the last of a long line of intellectuals to make use of that legacy, Weber’s case remains that the generalized appeal of socialism in the modern world derives, as noted, from Old Regime politics—rather than being, as both Marx and Durkheim believe, an expression of society.
We can evaluate these theoretical claims by turning to the historical record with a definition in mind. Communism should be defined, first of all, as an attempt to institutionalize the sharing of land or women in the face of the complexity represented by agroliterate polities.11 Consequently, communism is neither equality nor communalism: it is a dream of moral unity, an example of what Freud called “the oceanic feeling,” in the face of complexities that are felt to be threatening. To stress all this is to disagree with Durkheim. This is particularly true of the distinction drawn between socialism and communism—a contrast that parallels that drawn by Élie Halévy between freedom and organization.12 Certainly, some socialists—notably Sidney and Beatrice Webb—were keener on the extirpation of waste than on freedom; and it is quite correct to say that modern socialism does habitually take the problem of organizing the industrial machine very seriously. Nonetheless, modern socialism in the end is an example of communism: differently put, socialism is inconceivable without the emphasis on solidarity, equality, and sharing. In practice, socialism proved, of course, to be a hugely Durkheimian affair: the Webbs, for instance, were driven by moral purpose far more than by a penchant for economic planning. The purpose of socialism was that of creating a new moral order. In other words, the very nature of Marx’s writings—the desire to abolish splitting and to have the benefits of advanced technology—makes nonsense of Durkheim’s basic distinction.
The historical record shows that there were in fact three types of communism in premodern circumstance, each of which deserves brief discussion before general analytic points are made. The Greek world remembered a simpler tribal past for all that it possessed private—or at least household—property. Perhaps this helps to explain—as does the endless constitutional thought consequent on experiments in colonization—why so many accounts of the communist practices of simpler peoples were produced.13 It may well be that those simpler peoples were not communist at all, as is often the case with societies to whom communism is imputed. Nonetheless, the texts themselves are evidence of admiration, even of longing for communist practices. Such dreams would have mattered little, however, but for the military communism of Sparta. This communism was necessarily based on regimentation rather than anarchy, given that the conquest was recent, that the Greek elite was a minority, and that fierce discipline was necessary in order to survive. This was a strange society, not least in the elite’s practice of waging war on its own Helots once a year.14 Nonetheless, Plato glorified Sparta, and his influence thereafter ensured a favorable hearing for the Spartan tradition.15
Far more important, however, than military communism was the sharing that occurred inside charismatic communities, a particularly clear example of which appears in the Acts of the Apostles:
All whose faith had drawn them together held everything in common: they would sell their property and possessions and make a general distribution as the need of each required. With one mind they kept up their daily attendance at the temple, and, breaking bread in private houses, shared their meals with unaffected joy, as they praised God and enjoyed the favour of the whole people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those whom he was saving.
The belief that the Second Coming was imminent makes this sharing comprehensible. The same consideration helps us understand the Taborites and several sects of Anabaptists, particularly those led by Jan Matthys and John of Leiden in Münster between 1534 and 1535.16 Nonetheless, there are examples of communism existing without millenarian expectations. One type of such “normal” communism seeks to establish new and pure societies. This applies to the Carpocratians of second-century Egypt who chose to expose the stupidity of earthly rules by systematic antinomianism. Still more striking were the Hutterites. Continual reinforcement of personnel within this group came from expulsion elsewhere, with measured discipline in the Bruderhof deriving from clerical rule. Even if this depended at all times on support from the Moravian nobility, it remains impressive that perhaps forty thousand people participated in a very severe form of communism. But there is a second variant within this general type, and it does not reject but rather works with established society. Monasticism represents differentiation, as Weber stressed, whereby a specialized elite renounces the world and lives in communist style. Such a division was probably necessary for medieval European society: primogeniture gave a rationale to monasticism by providing employment for younger sons. And Weber is probably right to stress that new attitudes to work derive more from monasticism than from primitive Christianity.
The third source of communist ideas and practices is that of isolated intellectuals. It is worth making a generalization here about the attraction of intellectuals to communist ideals, for in this matter we need to go beyond Durkheim’s realization that dreamers produce such ideals to explaining why this should be so. In Plato’s own case, modern scholarship has gone far in supporting Karl Popper’s contention that Plato was attracted to a closed world as the result of a sheer dislike of the way in which the advent of democracy undermined the position of the aristocracy from which he sprang.17 Similar displacements may explain the attraction of other intellectuals to communism. This is most obviously the case with Thomas More, the most famous of all “idle dreamers.” He had been deeply influenced by the monastic ethic, and in a sense disliked the secular world within which he had to operate. He is representative of a type of intellectual displaced by the Reformation’s assault on monasticism.
The nature of premodern communism lends most support to Weber’s social theory, although the last type identified—but not the reasons for its existence—derives from Durkheim. Two analytic points then force themselves upon us. First, communism in premodern circumstances was extremely rare. It requires a very considerable break in normal societal relations in order to institutionalize it. Conquest certainly creates a break of this sort, and it is this that explains the Jesuit communist communities in Paraguay quite as much as it does Sparta. Equally, millenarian expectations of religious charisma more generally so disrupt the normal as to induce social experimentation. The general point is reinforced by the aberrant case of early Iranian communism.18 Here the sharing of women was suggested by a ruler, Kavadh I, who was keen to discipline his nobility; once the idea had been put into practice and the nobility weakened, its ideology then came to be adopted by Mazdak, the leader of a peasant revolt. Second, it is worth underscoring the fact that the examples of communism have been derived from the Occident. Muslim and Confucian societies did not share the Greek admiration for primitive peoples, because they were utterly self-confident of their worth as civilizations, which makes examples of communist ideas and practices within these social worlds hard to find. The ethic of India is interestingly different, with renunciation taking a form that neither required nor involved sharing nor any sort of social organization.
Anthropology makes one aware of highly diverse social forms, with actions that seem strange to us making complete sense to those who inhabit these different realms. Nonetheless, some cultural patterns seem harder to maintain than others. Pure altruism is especially hard to maintain; this had been Montesquieu’s argument, as noted, against the tradition of civic virtue. In particular, practices that make sense when the millennium is expected prove contentious once it is necessary to live within a continuing social world. This is not to deny that such practices can be maintained by a virtuous elite, as in monasticism or in a vanguard party, but it is to insist that whole societies have difficulty supporting such generalized heroism and enthusiasm for very long. There is a clear link here to the nature of communism in the modern world. The background consideration to bear in mind is the account, given in chapter 3, of the undoubted but idiosyncratic emergence of a politicized working class, the result of the autocratic regime with which Russian workers had to interact. This class helped make a revolution, but the revolution would probably never have taken place without the opportunity presented by the regime’s defeat in war. After the heroic and brutal period of war, communism followed the period of the New Economic Plan, designed to secure the revolution by not disturbing social relations, especially in the countryside. Much of the radical intellectual elite hated this humdrum and boring world, wholly bereft of heroism. This elite embraced collectivization with enthusiasm once geopolitics suggested the need to build socialism quickly. Building something utterly new—a morally complete and economically productive society—was a world historical task that gave them a role, made almost more significant because it required the shedding of blood. Of course, hideous divisions among the elite then took place, leading to the purges and to the short period of genuine totalitarianism. Military victory then extended socialism. But slowly, normal politics and “normalization” processes after invasion made the people of the socialist bloc realize that they were living in a boring, shabby, and stagnant world. Accordingly, state socialist regimes can be judged to have placed excessive demands on their citizens: continual sharing requires too much effort. The revulsion to which this led could be seen in the total lack of interest in the “Swedish model” in the years immediately after 1989; any party then committed to socialism was doomed to electoral defeat.
But this claim does not take us all that far. For one thing, this general consideration does not explain why collapse took place at a particular moment, in 1989/1991, though it does help account for the weakness of attempts to recreate or restore the regime. Seeking an explanation requires recalling three general interpretations of state socialism. The first of these was totalitarianism. In authors such as Hannah Arendt, the revolutionary regime was seen as all-powerful, able at once to destroy existing social institutions and to rule effectively by means of sheer terror. The second position, modernization or liberalization, insisted that the moment of high totalitarianism had passed, and that a much more technocratic elite sought to gain the allegiance and cooperation of those key sectors of society that would help in economic development. Where these theories concentrated on elite politics, the third approach, which gained popularity in the 1980s tended to give priority to social forces operating from below. The notion of civil society, that is, of the increasing capacity of varied types of social groups to organize themselves in opposition to the state, was designed to address the fact that it was increasingly difficult for the party-state to arrange compacts between state and society.
For many years, good reasons existed for endorsing the second position. Central Europe was certainly a world without legitimacy, as was so graphically demonstrated in 1956, 1968, and 1981, and it seemed likely that it would somewhere, somehow, sooner or later change, essentially for social evolutionary reasons. The heroic period of Bolshevism had managed to industrialize, albeit in a brutal manner, but it was clearly proving to be less and less effective in economic terms everywhere, as a transition to more advanced levels of industrial society took place. The nature of computers seemed to make the point most effectively. Widespread possession of printers was surely necessary if society was to thrive in the late industrial era. But to accept this was to leave behind the days in which the attempt to break the bounds of censorship involved spreading samizdat documents produced by typing through several sheets of carbon paper at a time. Crucially, it was possible to see in most ruling parties a schizophrenic gap between technocrats and Bolsheviks, between those who wished to give the party new life by assuring economic growth and those who were prepared to maintain socialism as an ideocracy, a power system based on an unsullied and unquestioned total ideology. In a sense, the moment in 1968 when Kádár, himself imposed upon by the Russians in 1956, announced that the rules of the system had changed—so that it would be enough simply not to oppose the system rather than having to endorse it enthusiastically at every moment—signaled the formal start of softer political rule. Liberalization was thus under way, and the era of high totalitarianism finished.
It seemed very likely that liberalization would continue. Modernizing leaders might be able to work with the technically competent, who had enough sense of international comparison to know that their mobility had been blocked, to create a more vigorous economy in tandem with softer political rule:
An advanced industrial society requires a large scientific, technical, administrative, educational stratum, with genuine competence based on prolonged training. In other words, it cannot rely on rigid ideologies and servile classes alone. It is reasonable to assume that this kind of educated middle class, owing its position to technical competence rather than to subservience, and inherently, so to speak professionally, capable of distinguishing reality and thought from verbiage and incantation, will develop or has developed the kind of tastes we associate with its life-style—a need for security, a recognition of competence rather than subservience, a regard for efficiency and integrity rather than patronage and loyalty in professional life…. This class is large, and it cannot be penalized effectively without a cost to the economy which may no longer be acceptable.19
Great skill would be needed to make the most of favorable opportunity, to ask for reasonable change so that alliances could be made between frustrated, educated labor in society and technocrats inside the ruling elite; differently put, to ask too much too fast ran the risk of an endangered and reunified elite calling in Russian tanks. Here there was an overlap with the burgeoning literature of the early 1980s on transitions from authoritarian capitalist rule. This literature stressed the need to make pacts so as to reassure the powerful that change would not take place at their expense. In particular, successful transitions from authoritarian capitalism have been those initiated and controlled from above; in contrast, transitions from below have fared badly.20 Mere powerful societal self-organization would not be enough: civil self-restraint within oppositional groups was essential.
These considerations led me to a warm endorsement of the strategy adopted by Gorbachev. He seemed the perfect technocrat, keen to admit that he had been impressed by Western standards of consumption and with a wife whose abilities in that area were not open to question. One presumed that the attempt to reform must have received support from the leaders of the armed forces, and more probably from the military-industrial complex as a whole. Why else would such a conservative force allow reform? Most important, military spending had overstretched the Soviet Union and seriously impaired its economy. Crucially, it seemed as if this economic debilitation was beginning to have negative consequences even for the military. While skepticism may have been shown to the complete claims of Reagan’s Star Wars initiative, the fear that American high technology would have military applications that could not be imitated was very real indeed. It was clear that Gorbachev’s purpose was that of making the system work, but that pill was sugared by the prospect of softer political rule. Furthermore, by the late 1970s the geriatric and worried elite had perhaps lost its greatest virtue, that of the considerable circumspection that had been shown in foreign affairs. That Gorbachev seemed prepared not just to leave Afghanistan but to let Central Europe go turned endorsement into enthusiasm.
But liberalization failed. For a short period it seemed as if roundtable discussions leading to various types of pacts, habitually creating electoral rules designed to reassure the elite, were part of the classical scenario for controlled decompression. But this was merely a stage, and a very short one at that. What followed was an absolute and fundamental collapse. The long roundtable talks in Poland did produce rules designed to keep the party in power, but these were invalidated by the very first election. In general, what happened in Central Europe was that the removal of the Russian card meant that regimes simply crumbled. Once deprived of the capacity to repress their own people, party-states fell apart—with the notable exception of Romania, where much blood was spilled in the process of removing Ceauşescu.
Does this mean that we should accept the view from below? As it happens, the notion is far from clear, with striking differences being apparent between theorists in the West and in the East—the former hoping for new social movements to replace the proletariat, the latter often approving of the spread of capitalism. Nonetheless, there is some truth to the view from below. If civil society was a much-desired dream, the theory as a whole was not purely a matter of prescription. Solidarity provided the descriptive “beef” of the concept. This extraordinary movement, based on Christian mission and Polish destiny, changed the history of state socialism as a whole. Eastern Europe owed its freedom in part to the glorious Poles. It undermined the socialist project by leading to martial law, thereby removing any pretense that socialism was popular. That military rule was imposed by Poles rather than by Russian tanks presumably reflected the Kremlin’s calculation that the Poles would have been prepared to engage in armed struggle, whatever the cost. Furthermore, it seems that increasing corruption—clientelism, nepotism, and patronage, in addition to sheer graft—did quite as much to discredit the regimes in their last decade.
But if the view from below has some truth, its general direction misleads. Most obviously, Solidarity had been controlled by the mid-1980s, albeit at very great cost in terms of legitimacy, while no other regime was threatened from below. Additionally, the lack of positive new initiatives should not be taken to mean that socialist regimes were bound to break down: a very long and messy period of “muddling through” would surely have been possible before unfavorable social trends gained real bite. It is important to recall that collapse, when it came, was like that of a house of cards, with events in one place imitating those in another at ever greater speed. Once Russian control had been withdrawn, as it was when the Kremlin allowed Hungary to open its borders to East Germans who wanted to go to the West, the regimes of 1945 began to crumble. In general, forces from below did not so much cause collapse as occupy political space once it became available.
If none of the three theories identified works well, we must ask why liberalization failed in the crucial case of the Soviet Union. While errors of judgment were certainly made, the fundamental reason why liberalization could not work in socialist society was that civil society had been destroyed.21 States throughout history have been nervous about channels of communication that they can scarcely see. Accordingly, it has been very common to find that states ban horizontal linkages in society so as to privilege their own official means of communication. The reply of Trajan to Pliny (when he was the governor of Bithynia-Pontus) in response to his query as to whether to allow local organization of a fire brigade in Nicomedia is revealing: such organization should not even be contemplated, the emperor insisted, for once gathered together minds will drift from fires to politics.22 In fact, in the long run, perhaps because of the cosmopolitanism inherent in its empire, Rome could not contain those horizontal channels of Christians to which it had reacted so harshly—and so eventually chose to accept what it could not control.23 In contrast, China did perfect low-intensity rule in the agrarian era. The spirit of such rule, its preference for control at the expense of mobilized efficiency, was well understood by Tocqueville, who was well versed in the dead hand of French colonialism.24 But to be fair, one must note that the destruction of independent groups in Russia owes as much to autocracy as to totalitarianism. Czarism had been as suspicious of civil society as it was opposed to capitalism and the rule of law: what mattered was the possibility of isolated individuals being able to approach their Great Father.25 As is so often the case, revolution merely intensified existing social patterns: secret police, government inspectors, atomization, boredom, and privatization were familiar to late nineteenth-century Russians, albeit in infinitely milder form. Whatever the exact contribution of socialism rather than autocracy, there can be no doubt of the sterility, together with the weakness it caused, that was characteristic of socialist society. Not the least important problem was that those who might have been reformers were turned into dissidents, with inner emigration depriving state socialism of basic energy.
The literature on transitions to democracy depends completely on the striking of bargains, above all, of a reforming elite seeking to give a little, to receive in return a signal that this has been understood and accepted, so that more can be given without fear of any complete loss of position. What is necessary is a partnership in which forces from below discipline themselves so as to reassure those at the top. But Eastern Europe was not Latin America. Though the theory of totalitarianism exaggerated the powers of the state, it was right when stressing the destruction of civil society. Liberalization was accordingly never really possible in the Soviet Union: the absence of partners in society made orderly decompression impossible. The key analytic point to be made about institutions is that they control as much as express social forces, thereby allowing the regulation of conflict by means of rational bargaining. A further interesting speculation has suggested that the absence of discipline at the bottom reflects more than the simple destruction of civil society. Had forces at the top been organized and united, the threat of their return to power might have been so obvious as to create some discipline in society. But the elite was not at all like that. Very much to the contrary, party members—at least in some countries, most notably Hungary—had clearly decided before 1989 that the most secure route to privilege was through the economy rather than through political position.
A final point needs to be made about liberalization and collapse. One of Tocqueville’s great insights was that liberalization was difficult, that the moment of reform was that of the greatest potential weakness. Expectations tend to increase, and to run ahead of the ability to deliver them: the paradox is that the new regime may fall, even though it is more legitimate than the old one. Certainly Gorbachev felt these pressures. But he was by no means, as Western commentators imagined, the skillful master politician, making the best of the small amount or room in which to maneuver. The worst possible conduct during any liberalization process, as Tocqueville stressed when examining the policies of Louis XVI, is to dither. To raise expectations and then to dash them virtually inspires revolutionary feelings in energized people. What is necessary is consistency: a clear and absolute outlining of priorities, a listing of areas where change is permissible and where it is not, and fierce determination not to retreat from announced reform when difficulties arise. It is necessary, in other words, to take the long view, to realize that an increase in liberalism will eventually diffuse conflict: in the politics of decompression, it is vital to do what one announces and to be sparing in what one promises.
It was particularly mad illogic on Gorbachev’s part to offer much to the Baltic states, and then to threaten them. This is to say that the nationalities problem was partly created by Gorbachev. The legacy of distrust in the Soviet empire was, of course, extremely high, and any move to greater openness was likely to be treated with skepticism. But this meant that the only route for success lay through greater rather than lesser boldness. Early calling of union elections, which Gorbachev could not stomach, was vital.26 To say this returns us to the question of democracy. Was not democratization rather than liberalization inevitable if the nationalities question was to be solved? It is crucial to make a distinction. There is a great difference between democratization that follows collapse and democratization willingly given so as to ensure the continuity of structures that may thereby be shored up. Voluntary renunciation of power enables more of it to be retained: in other words, a firm, planned move toward elections could have been part of a liberalization strategy. In this sense, the handling of the nationalities question was the worst possible. There might have been logic to letting the Baltic states go and in being strict elsewhere; what was disastrous was to pretend to be tough to the Baltics and then to let them go, thereby giving occasion and precedent to other regions where nationalism to that point had been rather weak. This gave Yeltsin his cards, which he then played with consummate skill so as to destroy his great rival. One irony (among many others) deserves underscoring. In one sense, it was fortunate that proper sociological understanding was not available. That totalitarianism had so destroyed civil society as to rule out any careful decompression amounts to saying that it was nearly inevitable that socialist leaders would lose control. Had this been known in advance, it would have encouraged such bunker mentality that no change would have been attempted. Put differently, Gorbachev destroyed state socialism because he was blind. He did everything that Tocqueville warned against, and thereby became a veritable angel of destruction.
One concluding thought presses itself forward. Chinese communism has weathered the storm of the past years. Perestroika before glasnost may increase the chances of liberalization by creating partners with whom the state may eventually be able to work. But is it still communist?
1 L. Kolakowski, “The Myth of Human Self-Identity: Unity of Civil and Political Society in Socialist Thought,” in The Socialist Idea: A Reappraisal, ed. L. Kolakowski and S. Hampshire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974).
2 K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R. W. Tucker ([1846] New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 160.
3 E. Durkheim, Socialism, trans. C. Sattler ([1928] New York: Macmillan, 1962), 75.
4 Ibid., 239–40.
5 M. Weber, Economy and Society, ed. and trans. G. Roth and C. Wittich ([1922] Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 469–70.
6 Ibid., 42.
7 Ibid., 300.
8 Ibid., 363–64.
9 Ibid., 1153.
10 Ibid., 1187.
11 This definition is that of Patricia Crone, with whom I once organized a conference on premodern communism.
12 É. Halévy, “The Policy of Social Peace in England” and “The Problem of Worker Control,” in his The Era of Tyrannies: Essays on Socialism and War ([1938] New York: Penguin, 1967).
13 D. Dawson, Cities of the Gods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
14 P. Cartledge, The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2003).
15 E. Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).
16 N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961).
17 K. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1945), supported by E. M. Wood and N. Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); but see, too, the cautionary words in Dawson, Cities of the Gods, chapter 2.
18 P. Crone, “Kavad’s Heresy and Mazdak’s Revolt,” Iran 29 (1991).
19 E. Gellner, “Plaidoyer pour une Libéralisation Manquée,” Government and Opposition 14 (1979): 63–64.
20 T. Karl, “Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America,” Comparative Politics 23 (1990).
21 R. Bova, “Political Dynamics of the Post-Communist Transition: A Comparative Perspective,” World Politics 121 (1991).
22 The exchange is in Pliny, Pliny the Younger: Complete Letters, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), book 10, letters 33 and 34, 254–55.
23 M. Mann, Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chapter 10.
24 A. de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. S. Gilbert (New York: Anchor, 1955), 64.
25 T. McDaniel, Autocracy, Capitalism and Revolution in Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
26 J. Linz and A. Stepan, “Political Identities and Electoral Sequences: Spain, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia,” Daedalus 121 (1992).