Is Sovietology Dead Too?
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
IS SOVIETOLOGY DEAD TOO? BY ROBERT V. DANIELS The spectacular collapse of Communist governments from the Elbe to Vladivostok is also going to have an earthshaking effect in those Western,...
...How far this antiauthoritarian reflex may go and what it will do to the former Soviet republics we cannot yet say, but a soviet ologjcal and historical perspective can at least alert us to the problem...
...Their experience critiquing ideologies also puts them in a position to filter out the Utopian promises of Western free-marketers...
...Social Democrats have never had any trouble distinguishing between Communist propaganda and Communist reality (so often confused on the Left), or between the Soviet model and the real issues of social reform in Western societies (so often obfuscated on the Right...
...Keeping a focus on the nuances of Communism's evolution and their relationship to ideals of social change may at first glance strike many people as ararefied academic exercise...
...Now its reason for being has been wiped out...
...and the multifarious factors in international conflict that antedate and survive the USSR...
...On a small scale the defiant outburst, the "bunt," was the endemic prerevolutionary peasant revolts and urban riots...
...Of course, given the death of the Soviet Union and the satellite regimes we will not be speaking of "Sovietology" anymore...
...Yet there remains the matter of consigning the substance of Sovietology to history, where it can live on like any other ghoulish curiosity in the museum of the past...
...The resulting revolution of rising expectations was met with corrupt indifference and immobilism on the part of an aging Stalinist and neo-Stalinist leadership...
...The mood in the West today, with good reason, is one of self-congratulation on the seeming triumph of our values over Communism...
...We can see in our own society and around the world that ethnic distinctiveness has taken the place of the class struggle as the current wellspring of political radicalism...
...Whatever the name, though, the game will be much the same...
...No, Sovietology is not dead yet, and should not die...
...So the new societies of the East have nothing to guide their quest for human betterment— other than narrow nationalism and the tender mercies of the free market, a utopia of another kind...
...we need historical insight in order to understand the former Communist bloc and the transformation it is going through...
...For decades the discipline has been a thriving academic industry...
...it was managed by a centralized bureaucracy in which power-hungry individuals battled for primacy behind the facade of official unanimity...
...And the transference will require a rethinking of the sovietological model, a recasting of it from seeming permanence into a time dimension (a mode of thinking not especially congenial to American social science...
...In retrospect, perhaps Sovietology's greatest fault was grossly overestimating the strength of the Soviet bloc— its physical and economic capabilities as well as its political cohesion and psychological stamina...
...They can translate Western values, institutions and advice into the Eastern context, and explain the inevitable limitations and perversities of the East to hesitant aidgivers in the West...
...The totalitarian model, popularized by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, drew more from the Nazi experience than from the Soviet...
...to help prevent a new anti-Communist orthodoxy in Eastern Europe and the Soviet republics from leading to its own distortions and oversimplifications...
...The tradition of Sovietology, by contrast, has been to probe the basic differences between East and West and try to explain them in terms of institutions, cultures and ideologies...
...To say that Communist totalitarianism has moved into the realm of history (apart from some of its Asian and Third World variants) is not to suggest that it has become exclusively a subject of ivory tower contemplation...
...BY ROBERT V. DANIELS The spectacular collapse of Communist governments from the Elbe to Vladivostok is also going to have an earthshaking effect in those Western, and particularly American, academic circles devoted to the sometimes occult discipline known as Sovietology...
...PostStalinist Communism was a stultifying shell, waiting to be pushed off its wall...
...To cite one example, an experimental "classical" high school opening in St...
...It targeted an odious, presumably immutable adversary of the Western way of life, and explained the phenomenon by constructing a rigid schematic model of its characteristics and behavior: The Soviet system was totalitarian, like the Right-wing dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolini, except more so...
...Petersburg will not teach the history of the Soviet period at all...
...The urge to assert old national identities is not unique to Eastern Europe...
...We will have to follow with great care the newly released passions of ethnicity and nationalism, with their potential for regression to the worst of pre-Communist times, witness Yugoslavia...
...Sovietologists, in their new identity as experts in Russian and East European studies, can help to bridge the continuing cultural gap between West and East...
...Here was the old recipe for rebellion, the Soviet system sowing the seeds of its own destruction...
...Nor will it be very enlightening merely to invoke the background as the source of every pain and difficulty post-Communist societies may experience...
...But in the old Communist universe ethnic conflicts have a special history, and probably only outsiders can head off interethnic recriminations and apologetics...
...how the seeds of revolution sprout when a country's social and economic development strains its government...
...We can breathe now," was the universal response once Mikhail S. Gorbachev set democratization in motion and shattered the old restraints...
...But the theory distorted the appraisal of Soviet reality...
...Having taken its share of grief from misguided apologists for Moscow bent on equating Communism with social change, The New Leader would surely not agree that the collapse of Communism means the end of debate "about such grand questions as the way to organize society," as Richard Bernstein of the New York Times put it in a recent feature...
...Sovietology took seriously the "New Soviet Man," whom we now know to have been a total fiction of Communist propaganda...
...Tensions grew everywhere between the expanding professional and intellectual class and the bullheaded controllers of the Communist Party nomenklatura...
...It is not that Russians and their neighbors do not want political and economic freedom —they do, desperately, so desperately that they risk turning its advent into their own undoing...
...We now have to understand totalitarianism, ideology, bureaucratic behavior, and international confrontation as political patterns rooted in specific situations that rise, flourish and then—under altered circumstances—decline and expire...
...Their problems and prospects cannot be properly understood, either by them or by outsiders, without ongoing reference to this background...
...The importance of rethinking Sovietology's propositions in historical terms is further heightened by the emotional desire of more and more people in Eastern Europe and the Soviet republics to purge themselves of the entire experience of Communism since 1917...
...For years Sovietologists charged themselves with the additional responsibility of keeping alive the true historical record of the Communist countries...
...The challenge is to sustain critical thought under all circumstances...
...Totalitarianism was supposed to mean themaximum mobilization of anation's resources to crush opposition, sustain the regime and support its international adventures...
...The Russian Revolution, animated by socialism, ultimately generated a disgusted rejection of anything bearing that designation...
...Many Easterners, steeped throughout their lives in the ideological pretenses of Soviet-style regimes, look back on that period in the same way many Sovietologists have, as the undiluted reign of a perverse ideology...
...That the Mensheviks and other Social Democrats in the United States and in Europe provided the earliest accurate appraisals of Communism was no accident: After doing battle with the Bolsheviks, The New Leader's progenitors could see how personal fanaticism plus Russian backwardness led step by step to the total departure of the Soviet dictatorship from its initial revolutionary inspiration, saving the latter only as a cynically imposed "false consciousness" (to borrow Friedrich Engels' famous expression about ideology...
...practitioners of that art will henceforth be referred to as specialists in "Russian and East European Studies...
...It has remained capable of cleareyed criticism of the status quo at home while refusing to yield in its denunciation of the pseudorevolutionary despotism and imperialism that distinguished the USSR and its minions...
...the only "new" types were the grafters, sycophants and bribe-takers in the bureaucracy...
...Democracy is still at risk in the former East bloc...
...they simply occupy a far lower level of concern than they did during the period of the nuclear standoff with what we used to think of as the Soviet superpower...
...Sovietology erred, too, by not taking sufficient account of the changes wrought in Soviet society under totalitarian rule, including industrial growth, urbanization and mass education...
...Our problems with yesterday's Communist countries have not evaporated...
...A major case of the already evident historical blindness is the abandonment of any distinction between Lenin's revolution and Stalin's, between the Bolsheviks' original Utopian drive, however fanatic and misguided it may have been, and the reactionary militarized despotism Stalin later created in the name of that utopia...
...It does have to recognize, though, that many of its most cherished propositions are time-bound and have been shunted from the foreground into the background...
...Now we may be seeing the pattern repeat again, in the radical decentralization and defiance of authority triggered by the failed conservative coup...
...the changing meaning and function of Marxist ideology over the era of Communism...
...Much of that error resides in the unhistorical totalitarian model and its ideological corollaries...
...They thus risk creating anew, mammoth "blank spot" in their nations' historical consciousness, possibly equaling the blank spots and black holes that marked the Communists' version of the past...
...it was locked in an unyielding contest with the West for world supremacy...
...Today an analogous task is presenting itself: to preserve an objective understanding of the Communist past and its relevance to the post-Communist present...
...it was driven by a relentless ideology of Utopian transformation...
...This more skeptical approach, leavened with a strong measure of history, will stand us in good stead if and when democratic experiments in the East begin to go awry—as they already have in Transcaucasia and in the Balkans...
...Thanks to its lineage, The New Leader has similarly not had any difficulty avoiding the fallacies of Left-wing fellow-traveling or of Right-wing Red-baiting...
...Sovietology has become the victim not only of events but of its own rigorous conclusions...
...We will need to track the political and economic systems being fashioned in the ex-Communist lands, to assess whether they are adapting to Western notions of democracy and market economics or lapsing into authoritarianism and autarchy...
...This journal was incubated between the Wars in the milieu of Menshevik émigrés that included individuals like Raphael Abramovich, David Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky, who were key figures in explaining to Americans what was happening in the Soviet Union...
...They do not want to concern themselves with the circumstances that contributed to the Soviet model's creation, development and decline...
...Students of Russia have often noted its tendency to break out in ungovernable fits of anarchy whenever the hand of the authoritarian center is lightened, and to passively submit between times...
...Discipline sagged everywhere...
...Moreover, Sovietologists and their special lore, now expanded, will continue to be invaluable as we strive to communicate with a part of the world that has won our sympathy and admiration but may yet try our patience, our compassion, and our generosity...
...With all that gone, the whole school of sovietological analysis appears bereft of anything to do...
...Without denying the horrors of purges, slave labor camps and genocide, scholars as diverse as Moshe Lewin of the University of Pennsylvania and J. Arch Getty of the University of California at Riverside have demonstrated how clumsily and erratically totalitarian controls functioned at the everyday level of Soviet life...
...The issues that will most test our skill and our intuition are not hard to delineate...
...By the end of Leonid I. Brezhnev's era, the vast majority of citizens at all levels and among all nationalities were utterly fatigued by the system, and consumed with disbelief...
...We have to recognize the connection between totalitarianism and revolution, for instance...
...In carrying out this mission, Western scholars may have to restrain the temptation to exult over the demise of the Old Regime and indiscriminately embrace its successors...
...This may be defined as the study, in political science and closely related fields, of the Soviet system of power and of other Communist regimes planted by Moscow or copied from it...
...It has bequeathed a unique and complex legacy to the formerly Communist countries...
...Yet the very role of The New Leader ? ver the last seven decades shows otherwise...
...on a grand scale it was the "Time of Troubles" of 1604-13, and the revolutions of 1905 and 1917...
...These nations will not easily resolve the political, economic and ethnic troubles that confront them as they emerge from the pressure-cooker of neo-Stalinist Communism...
...That is not to diminish the role of Russian and East European studies...
...German culture was in fact far more adaptable to efficient performance under strict control than was Russian, and we know from post-World War II studies that even the Nazi Administration was quite inefficient...
...Understandably, the former sufferers of Communism would prefer to regard that epoch as one long dark night that suddenly fell and just as suddenly lifted...
Vol. 74 • September 1991 • No. 10
