RESPONSES TO "LENIN NYET!"-2

...Anthony D'Agostino Professor of History, San Francisco State University Democratic revolutions are wellknown to us...

...leaders from starting them...

...Market economies have generally grown gradually out of nonmarket economies...

...Unquestionably, the percentage of the population attracted to Western concepts is greater now than it was in the 19th century, yet is the increase sufficient to provide the victory of the new over the old...

...The 140-year-old intellectual civil war between Marxists and liberals is, for all practical purposes, dead and gone...

...The advice we tend to offer, therefore, is certainly not based on experience...

...into an Eastern context...

...Such approaches have limited predictive value...

...In this respect the herculean efforts of the Communist Party paid off, though not exactly as it had wished...

...We in the West may attach too much importancetothepresent Russian fashion of trashing Communist heroes and the Communist Party...

...But it was "in" during the reigns of Alexander I and Alexander II—and look how Russia ended up...

...The answer to that question depends for starters on whether there has been a fundamental change in the attitudes of the Russian masses...

...Now all our history will have to be rewritten...

...This socialist concept from the West is critical to building a democratic capitalist system in the East...

...What destroyed Communism was that capitalism proved to be so dynamic by comparison...

...They will not easily be turned aside, no matter how fervently some of us may wish it...

...Your contributors, however, tend to see in these battles a sweeping rejection of all of the Communist past...

...This, plus additional foreign assistance reformist republics would receive, is to produce a competitive edge other republics would want to emulate...

...Daniels, while pointing out its weaknesses, makes a persuasive case for retaining crucial aspects of So vietological analysis...

...Leonid I. Brezhnev's regime was not responsible for the failure to pay adequate attention to nonRussians as well as Russians, women as well as men, or factory workers as well as the ruling elites and prominent dissidents who were the focus of scholarly concerns over the past 70 years...

...George D. Jackson Professor of History Hofstra University Your reports on Lenin's death may be premature...

...by Robert V. Daniels, "Papa Knew Best" by A natole Shub, "Make the Bear Dance" by Andrei Shleifer, "Debating Democracy in Russia" by Peter Kenez, and "An Open Letter to Mikhail and Boris "from Publius...

...Peter J. Stavrakis Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Vermont Your Special Issue is a concise tour d'horizon of the political and intellectual ramifications of the Soviet empire's evanescence...

...Most Western experts have always been unwilling to acknowledge the successes of Communism and are now reluctant to see it as the victim of these successes...

...That is where Western advice can really be valuable—in sharing our experiences with worker participation...

...To be sure, if allowed, some sort of market economy will emerge...

...Daniels provides an especially illuminating perspective by using the term originally coined by Alexis de Tocqueville, "the revolution of rising expectations," though he does not follow it through to its logical conclusion...

...The Russian revolution of 1991, though, is unique for having dismantled not merely Communist ideology but the Russian state as seen on the map since the 17th century, when Russia acquired Ukraine...

...In our effort to understand current developments, we ought to look carefully at the actions and beliefs of ordinary citizens who have confounded the expectations not only of Mikhail S. Gorbachev but of reformers like Boris N. Yeltsin, Eduard A. Shevardnadze and Aleksandr N. Yakovlev...

...In its most evil form, fascism, we all denounce it...

...The West's objective cannot merely be the promotion of a market economy in yesterday's Soviet Union...

...In the era of glasnost some Soviet intellectuals had already given voice to the premonition that they were going to experience another "Time of Troubles," thinking of the period in the early 17th century when Swedish and Polish troops determined by turns the succession to the crown...

...As in 1917, an opportunity exists in 1991 to create a new, stable system of government, but leaders at the top lack vision and concrete ideas...

...David W. Hunter International consultant...

...At the same time, factionsof Georgians un willing to put aside personal rivalries have thrown the republic into chaos...

...Post-Communist transformation requires radically new ideas, not the recycling of old ones...

...The superficiality of this situation is obvious: Leadership is one element in the process of building new economic and political institutions...

...One historian, after glancing in 1985 at a few pages of the stenographic notes of the State Duma on the shelves near his desk in the Moscow Historical Institute, sneered that the members of the elected assembly "wasted their time talking on and on about such insignificant topics as alcoholism...

...Although the studies of Russia by Baron August von Haxthausen and the Marquis de Custine have a certain romantic or historical interest, interpretations that insist the Russian today is the same selfdeprecating serf they portrayed are overly deterministic about the flexibility of human nature...

...the command economy is dead, but there remains the search for a practicable plan to replace it...

...In place of a monolith there has emerged a virtual laboratory for the study of national conflict, bureaucratic transformation, political reform, privatization, the evolution of property rights, etc...

...Stalinism was too grim and dangerous, not only for the population but for its own enforcers...

...The social concerns are crooks and speculators, nomenklatura who are rapidly becoming the new ownership class, impoverished pensioners, kids without useful activities, the lack of money and guidance for schools, and a growing feeling among honest working people of all sorts, the intelligentsia included, that their lives are being muddled by ineffectual talkers and manipulated by scoundrels...

...Should Russians in Latvia (half the population) be required to live there 16 years and to speak Latvian before they can be considered for citizenship...

...Surely it is now time for us to "perestroyut" our own profession...

...nationalist...

...The deficiencies of imagination and understanding that resulted cannot be attributed to the closed censorship-ridden character of the Soviet political system...

...For in attempting to assess current trends of thought among Russian and other intellectuals of the collapsed Communist empire, or to comprehend the resurgence of long-subdued nationalist sentiments, Sovietologists will find themselves being drawn backward into the history of the late tsarist days: Literally every Russian and Georgian with whom I have had an extended conversation over the past three years, during two visits to the Soviet Union and in the course of hosting more than a dozen visitors from those republics to the U.S., has been seeking explanations for their erstwhile country's socioeconomic and spiritual failures by examining the events and ideas of fading tsarist Russia and the first two years of Bolshevik rule...

...Beyond this, however, the USSR's collapse presents a more alluring prospect: the integration of Soviet studies into mainstream social science...

...Having the state conjure up a market economy by a series of deliberate actions seems paradoxical...

...Dallin's analyses have always had the quality of heresy (of "the king has no clothes" type) among traditionalist, comfortable and sinecured Sovietologists...

...True enough, but the West became so fixated on the Soviet President (and his bittersweet relationship with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin) that other personalities and institutions received little attention...

...There seems little to add to what the writers represented in "Lenin Nyet...

...Had the Depression returned after World War II, the Soviet Union would not have been seen as a failure in the West or at home...

...In the Russian Republic, people debate whether Gorbachev might best be equated with the tsar or Aleksandr F. Kerensky...

...The point is that marketization can only succeed while democracy is maintained if it has considerable popular support, particularly the support of workers...

...The other bigissue is nationalism...

...It is hoped, too, that no longer will an American professor of Soviet history doing research in Moscow be subjected to the indignity of having a junior civil engineer pound him on the chest while loudly demanding, "But do you know our history CORRECTLY...

...As Alexander Dallin states, societies do change...

...The prevalent view has been that the division of Europe reflected more than the Cold War, and was in fact a balance of power that permitted Germany's neighbors to breathe...

...Foreign aid to individual republics is a laudable goal...

...With the former Soviet Union's past and present rushing toward each other, Sovietologists have to know the history of the tsarist empire, and historians of tsarist Russia have to expand their search beyond 1917 to look for continuities in life beneath the huge artificial structure erected to obscure reality...

...Rather than trying to "make the bear dance," it would be wiser for the West to promote the civilized and gradual dissolution of the world's last great empire...

...Dallin concludes that Mikhail S. Gorbachev was a reluctant reformer who underestimated the extent to which the Soviet system had disintegrated, and that subsequent developments rendered him irrelevant...

...If that happens, can it ever be reassembled, or are Georgians likely to end up the Kurds of Transcaucasia...

...Or not be eligible to become citizens at all...

...Almost everyone agrees that a market economy is necessary, but there is little agreement on the way to achieve it...

...Post-Soviet politics and society depend as much on volatile national sentiments and the unknown men in the independent republics' bureaucracies as on presidential personalities...

...As Robert V. Daniels points out in another article in your Special Issue: "Democracy is still at risk in the former East bloc...

...We need to introduce "new ways" of thinking about ex-Soviet citizens, including Russians— and prescriptions for the future of the currently floundering elements of the old empire...

...Even Britain did not extend the franchise to workers until about a century ago (and women of course got that right still more recently...

...It does mean, however, that we cannot present full marketization as a condition of democratization, as Andrei Shleifer says explicitly (and other contributors to your Special Issue seem to say implicitly)—unless we mean to suggest that they should forgo democracy for some time to come...

...David Ost Assistant Professor of Political Science, Hobart and William Smith Colleges The tendency of the West—and not merely Western governments but also their well-wishing liberal citizens—to look down upon the former Soviet Union from a position of haughty superiority reveals a marked shortsightedness...

...This does not mean we have no advice to give...

...The values fostered by 70 years of Communist dominance cannot be dismissed so easily...

...Safe stagnation supplanted murderous dynamism...

...Shleifer errs, along with so many others, in assuming that workers are a natural enemy of reform...

...Another common historical theme that one encounters in conversations with Russians and Georgians is a comparison of events from March to November 1917 with events from 1989 to 1991...

...It is important that students of whatever finally replaces the Soviet Union ask a wider range of questions of a far wider range of individuals than has previously been the case...

...They insist, though, that they not be the only ones to pay the price...

...Whatever new entity they agree upon, and whoever emerges as its dominant leader, the West should actively contribute to the building of this new structure...

...But Georgia is once again beset by ethnic strife, as the Abkhazian and South Ossetian peoples attempt to secede, while Georgians adamantly claim the territory those groups inhabit...

...The idea of a balance of power has been replaced by that of pan-European federation...

...How does Shleifer treat the threat of a mercantilist scenario...

...The market" versus Soviet socialism is no longer an issue...

...They remain as part of the "revolution of rising expectations...

...Perhaps the move to a "common market" can be made without the soggy middle step of bloody, retrograde anarchy sparked by primitive nationalism and ethnic rivalry within and among the newly liberated republics and autonomous regions...

...From the sizable contingents of Soviet seekers of knowledge who visited Washington as well as American universities and think tanks these past few years, it seems obvious that Westernization has been "in...

...But what is to be done with the huge and hugely inefficient industrial sector...

...Indeed, foreigners risk replacing the Communists as controllers of the "commanding heights...

...As yet no one knows...

...and the USSR...

...The Russians et al...

...Meanwhile, those of us on the outside can only watch with great interest and wish the peoples of the former Communist empire well...

...Before 1989 no one believed in this picture more firmly than Mikhail Gorbachev, who found the idea of German unity "far from being realpolitik, to use the German expression...

...Recent polls indicate a determined inclination toward "order," which seems all too likely to smack of a longing for the fleshpots of Egypt...

...have said about the prospects for democracy in the former USSR...

...This assumes that the political instability generated by the breakup of an empire with 30,000 nuclear warheads and centuries of ethnic hostility is unimportant to Europeans or Americans...

...A pathologist physician specializing in the growth of cancer cells has put forward the theory that "a new society will emerge from individual cells that, after being formed, will develop a memory as biological cells do, and will form clusters over time so that by the end of two generations, Soviet society (or what's left of it) will become organic like Russian society in the last years of the tsar...

...author, "Western Trade Pressure on the Soviet Union" Alexander Dallin's insightful observations in your "Lenin Nyet...

...The unknown is: How much has Russian society changed...

...In Riga, Russian officers have barricaded their apartment blocks and resist orders, from Moscow or from the Latvian government, to leave for a Russian "home" without housing...

...Only the outlier powers, the United States and Russia, rising to prominence as Tocqueville had foreseen, in the end kept Europe from being dominated by one state...

...The economic transition remains a puzzle...

...So we can think of theevents of 1989 and 1991 in terms of 1789,1848 or 1917...

...Dan N. Jacobs Professor of Political Science, Miami University Is a "new," more politically attractive Russia about to emerge...

...To evolve and express a reasoned and consistent moral position on ethnic nationalism, in the former Soviet empire and throughout the world, is a challenge worthy of The New Leader and its writers...

...Russian intellectuals are reading voraciously books and documents produced at the end of the tsarist period...

...One hopes," he says, "that the obvious consequences of trade wars will be sufficient to dissuade...

...it becomes more difficult when times are bad, as they are bound to be for some time...

...After all," as he says, "societies do change...

...Let us not miss the chance to save it...

...We are accustomed to saying that Communism was both a moral failure and an economic failure, yet by historical standards it was not such a big failure...

...If the tsar, is Yeltsin Kerensky or the new Stalin awaiting his cue to replay a terrible historical drama...

...Will Georgia become the prey of neighboring states and be dismantled as in 191821...

...Not Tocqueville but Oswald Spengler foresaw this best, in a striking passage in Decline of the West: "A United States of Europe, realized through Napoleon as a founder of a romantic and popular military monarchy, is the analog of the realm of the Diadochi [heirs of Alexander the Great...

...What he misses is that "totalitarianism" is an ideallike "democracy," and that neither can be fully realized in this world...

...Many Latvians consider Russians occupiers, colonial settlers...

...With so much going on today in the former Soviet empire, it is useful and reassuring to find the magazine maintaining its traditional role...

...Some independent republics, though, may prove unwilling to enjoy the benefits of free trade...

...Daniel Klenbort Professor of History, Morehouse College Robert V. Daniels explicitly rejects the position that the Soviet Union followed the traditional totalitarian model...

...The futureis, as always, unknowable...

...Finally, we would do well to consider whether the West really should put itself in the position of punishing and rewarding individual republics: Isn't that what the central government did for seven decades...

...Now that documents are being published and all topics are permitted in discussions between Western and Soviet scholars, we must not let pass the opportunity to explore the abiding significance of a rare historical moment...

...and then spewing out the standard set of statistics on the devastation of World War II...

...We need, in short, histories of industries, institutions, groups, and ideas that do not stop or begin in 1917...

...They want radical change too, and are not so stupid as to think there are not going to be costs...

...A sensitivity to the multicultural features of the USSR might have revealed a growing constituency for change and provided a better indication of the aspirations of its peoples...

...Russia was saved then only by a massive national rally...

...illuminate the inherent problems of traditional Sovietology...

...In its seemingly more benign form, "self-determination" (as in the Baltics), we are presumably all for it...

...The people ate, they were clothed and sheltered, and the Soviet Union was a superpower...

...The issue consisted of seven articles: "Soviet Communism (1917-1991)" by Robert Conquest, "Gorbachev: A Premature Postmortem" by Alexander Dallin, "Is Sovietology Dead Too...

...The economic premises of Shleifer's proposal are even more problematic...

...Developing a market economy in the West took hundreds of years, and was carried out in situations where most of the citizenry (particularly the individuals who lost out) did not have the right to vote...

...Chancellor Helmut Kohl's recent U.S...

...are admonished: "If only yougetwiseand turn to the market, if only you enshrine y our new democracy in concrete rules"—in other words, embrace the truths we have discovered long ago—"then you can become like us...

...He told us unequivocally that "there are and will be two German states with different social and political systems...

...it should use economic incentives and disincentives to mold the outcome of the interaction in what was the USSR...

...The Revolution of 1917 again almost liquidated the traditional territories, in the midst of a civil war and Allied intervention...

...But these threats proved to be a godsend for the Bolsheviks, who were able to raise the standard of Russian patriotism against "Entente Imperialism" and preserve the Russian lands more or less intact...

...The mistake of Hannah Arendt (and of George Orwell, whose image of the phenomenon was at least as influential as Arendt's) was to believe that totalitarianism was stable and could perpetuate itself...

...Such advice misses one essential point: The newly independent republics are trying to do something that has never been done anywhere in the world: to build a capitalist market economy and a democratic polity simultaneously...

...In this respect, Alexander Dallin's and Robert V. Daniels' contributions are stimulating entrees to the problems of the future...

...Evidence of this can be found in the fact that alcoholism, mental illness and suicide rates are up (the last by more than 76 per cent in Georgia...

...And without the benefit of a foreign challenge, rump nuclear Russia seems destined to lose its former European empire...

...The difference between Nikita S. Khrushchev and Mikhail S. Gorbachev was that Khrushchev still thought the Soviet economy was superior to that of the West, while Gorbachev saw that the Soviets were falling further behind and that this could no longer be hidden from the Soviet people...

...The old European balance was thought to have been fatally upset by the rise of Germany after 1870...

...In a free trade context, he has liberalizing republics gaining at the expense of their less reform-oriented counterparts...

...The Soviet Union under Stalin was a pretty good approximation of a totalitarian anti-utopia...

...In the West, ethnic nationalism has been fudged by both the Left and the Right...

...But Shleifer, perhaps inadvertently, also shows the way out of the dilemma when he notes that Lech Walesa's support was crucial for introducing market reforms in Poland...

...The drive for independence is political in nature, not economic, as the Ukraine's recent reluctance to enter into an economic union illustrated...

...Ironically, these great social, economic and political changes, in buffeting the body, have produced a malaise of the soul...

...If thecurrent Commonwealth of Independent States survives, I think it will end up with a democratic socialist coloration that owes much to the social concerns emphasized in the Communist era...

...What is new and live and vital is the rebirth of national cultures in the former Soviet Union amid economic and political disintegration...

...Painters, writers and others engaged in the arts read the journal of the World of Art Group and devour the democratically oriented essays of the Vekhi group, as well as the writings of Vladimir S. Soloviev and participants in the religious-philosophical societies of turn-of-the-century Russia...

...Ever since 1917, both scholars and media reporters have tended to use the words "Russian" and "Soviet" interchangeably, with extremely damaging impact on the American public's understanding of the diverse realities of Soviet society...

...There also has been a revival of fundamentalist religions...

...According to a poll conducted in Russia last May by the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press, the rank and file Russian citizen shows very little enthusiasm for private property, private industry and profiteering...

...After his death, Stalin's centralized terror gave way to a kind of totalitarian feudalism...

...Stagnation alone would not have brought down the Communist regime...

...and Israel, and the least creative thumbing their noses at those abroad from Moscow and Leningrad— is now formally merged, if not completely at ease with itself...

...visit brought this to mind, especially as he spoke repeatedly, and matter-of-factly, of the goal of forging a United States of Europe...

...Western experts are quick to exult over the demise of Communism —or as Francis Fukuyama has put it, "the end of history...

...it had to bemodified...

...But as both Alexander Dallin and Robert Daniels correctly point out, that diagnosis owes more to the moribund theory of totalitarianism than to Soviet reality today...

...How can the state create laissez faire...

...In contrast to Dallin's and Daniels' lucid essays, I found Andrei Shleifer's proposal for economic reform disappointing...

...If we simply urge going full speed ahead and firing all the "unnecessary" workers, then Russia may indeed develop a market economy, but it will surely not maintain democracy...

...A bifurcated culture—with the most creative individuals exiled or in emigration in Western Europe, theU.S...

...But Shleifer's exclusive preference for this sort of assistance fails to convince primarily because he does not consider political factors in his analysis, and because his economic reasoning is ultimately incoherent...

...As Robert V. Daniels suggests, Soviet area specialists were not sufficiently historical in their approach to studying the Soviet Union...

...In Alma Ata, nationalists carefully plan to reclaim Kazakhstan from Russian influence...

...Those politics have not simply changed, they have been superseded...

...Democracy is a difficult concept to pursue...

...The fact of the matter is that it's the same phenomenon—"we," defined by ancestry and culture, are different from "you," and "we" will make and enforce the rules here...

...We need to redraw the boundaries that divide us so that the transition itself—for instance, the period of 1900-1927—becomes a major focus of study...

...What Russia is trying to accomplish the West didn't dare to attempt...

...Esther Kingston-Mann Professor of History, University of Massachusetts, Boston I think it is important to consider why the Soviet movements for change that erupted in the mid-1980s took so many of America's experts by surprise...

...They want marketization and restructuring that draws on their knowledge to make enterprises more competitive, not privatization that delivers factories to the old elite and treats them as the enemy...

...I hope it will be followed by an issue focusing on the truly fascinating questions concerning the new domestic and international orders that must fill the void left by the end of seven decades of Marxism-Leninism...

...Virtually from its inception The New Leader has been an attractive place for Soviet affairs specialists to air their ideas...

...In Georgia, events raced forward from the massacre in front of the Parliament building in April 1989 to the republic's actual declaration of independence in April 1991...

...Russians, meanwhile, are reunifying their segmented existence...

...Now he spends many hours reading those same stenographic notes in search of ideas about reform through representative institutions superseding authoritarian rule...

...We need to show that workers can be a vital part of marketization, as the most modern and successful businesses in the West currently demonstrate...

...The concept presumes that revolutionaries act out of optimism, not pessimism, out of a belief that things will get better, not worse...

...Despite the obvious deficiencies of the totalitarian model that served as a foundation for the interpretations of practically all Soviet affairs specialists, it is hard to argue with Daniels' thesis that the unique experience of Communist rule will exercise a profound impact on the evolution of societies in the ex-union, leaving Soviet area specialists best positioned to "translate Western values...

...There is no doubt that substantial numbers of Russians, and of other former Soviet citizens, have been educated far beyond their parents and grandparents...

...Robert Daniels has it exactly right: The study of Soviet Communism is now a branch of history...

...when realized as a 21 st-century economic organism by a matter-of-fact Caesar, it will be the counterpart of the Imperium romanum...

...Seth Singleton Professor of Politics and Government, Pacific University The New Leader has always been immersed in the intellectual politics of the Western world (including both the U.S...

...A translator of English technical journals displays on the bathroom wall of the ancient Moscow apartment she surreptitiously rents to foreigners for hard currency an "Anti-Soviet Calendar" that has red stars marking such dates as the abolition of the Constituent Assemblyin 1918, the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...

...The nomenklatura became a privileged stratum with nothing to fear and no reason to make a great effort...

...Indeed, the empirical wave that swept through the social sciences three decades ago may reappear, with all its virtues and excesses, in Soviet studies...

...Charles Timberlake Professor of Russian History, University of Missouri, Columbia To understand the peoples of the former Soviet Union, Sovietologists will have to join forces with historians of tsarism...

...To be sure, there was no freedom, but how often do regimes collapse simply because there is no freedom...

...They hated the old system more than anyone else, as everyone who ever spent time in a Soviet (or East European) factory could plainly see...

...The revolution of Boris Yeltsin will not have this advantage...

...The cross at the site where the last Tsar and his family were killed, in Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk), is now a shrine at which wedding parties lay their flowers...

...The alternative is to passively sit on the fence, as in the past, and watch the specter of a massive new Lebanon or Yugoslavia arise before our eyes...

...Although I fervently hope the new will prevail, in Russian history patterns of reform followed by repression are predominant...

...The new leadership in Russia, even in most of the now independent republics, consists almost entirely of ex-Communist Party leaders...

...As Daniels notes, they have been blind to the progress made under Communism in improving the standard of living, industrial growth and urbanization—which whet the appetites of the Soviet peoples for a high consumption economy, intellectual freedom, and a share of political power through democracy...

...It was in this spirit that the intelligentsia fought for and won an end to the authoritarian centralized government, the terror, and the stultifying domination of the Communist Party...

...In other words, republic leaders would be persuaded by the economic benefits of free trade...

...and their followers are, by and large, educated and literate people who continue to want the social benefits attained during Communism along with democracy and some undefined measure of free market capitalism...

...No longer must a Russian intellectual be subjected to the indignity of robustly thanking an American host for showing him Sergei M. Eisenstein's movie, Ivan IV, Part II, in a stark auditorium of a Midwestern university with two dozen uninterested American students in a course on Russian civilization...

...We need today the opposite of historians encamped on two sides of the Great Wall of October 1917...

...But if economic advantage is to determine the republics' futures, it is hard to see why they opted for independence in the first place, since inter-republican trade patterns would leave only the Russian republic a net winner as an independent state...