A Faulty Critique

...In this and other ways, the dichotomy Laqueur maintains between "critics" and "revisionists" is fundamentally misconceived...

...There are fine chapters on the dissolution of East Germany and on the revival of ethnic nationalism in the non-Russian Socialist Republics...

...Some observers did try to apply Western political categories—lobbies, elitism—to the analysis of Soviet affairs, but this method, helpful in overcoming the standing myth of a monolithic regime, held no implications of convergence...

...That's simply inaccurate, even if we leave out such historians as Martin Malia and Richard Pipes, whom he generally feels closest to despite differences on particular points...

...Much more could be said about La-queur's faulty critique...

...Elsewhere, he blithely dismisses several recent articles that essentially defend the profession against attacks such as his...

...All this remains true of Laqueur's latest volume of wide-ranging "reflections...

...Some of his observations on this score are sound, but many are, at best, highly debatable and, at worst, totally untenable...

...Among Western academics, journalists and observers specializing in the USSR there has been significant disagreement on virtually every major issue...

...The revisionists' cardinal sin, in Laqueur's judgment, was overestimating the USSR's stability and power...

...Right or wrong, he was invariably conversant with the full array of issues and players, and good at comparing events and currents of thought in the Western and Soviet worlds...

...Accident, after all, plays a considerable role in his version of Soviet history—and as he himself ably remarks, there is much that we still do not understand about the causes of the Soviet collapse...

...And he sensibly rejects the notion of historical inevitability, explicitly with regard to the 1917 Revolutions, implicitly in the case of the Soviet Union's demise in 1991...

...When all is said and done...

...Its strength was widely overrated, as the author himself acknowledges, "by critics of the Soviet regime and revisionists alike...

...Reviewed by Alexander Dallin Senior Fellow, Institute for International Studies, Stanford WALTER LAQUEUR has long been a prolific commentator on the Soviet scene and on Soviet studies in the West...

...Laqueur stresses instead the role of per-sonalities and simple accident—a corrective to the dehumanized theories of political science ("organizational weapon," "rational choice," "world system," "institutionalism...

...No one objects to morality, but why would it give you a more accurate reading of Soviet reality...

...Given Laqueur's own approach to the Bolshevik era, he should hardly chastise anyone who did not foresee the disintegration of the USSR...

...All too often he seems to equate Sovietologists with "revisionist" historians and commentators, and writes as if both groups (or are they one...

...Unfortunately, the author has also been an inveterate ax-grinder, and the major thrust of this series of essays is to pillory the sinful tribe of Sovietologists who failed to predict the USSR's collapse...

...were homogeneous in their views...

...Furthermore, not everyone who challenged Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski's model of totalitarianism in the 1960s was acting out of sympathy with the Soviet system...

...What any Sovietologist thought carried mighty little weight in the Reagan years...

...Though Laqueur has said much of this before (as have others), it deserves reiteration in the new light of the post-Soviet era...

...Another of Laqueur's misconceptions is that the Sovietological mainstream succumbed to "convergence"—to the notion that the Communist and democratic societies would grow more and more alike over time, evolving perhaps toward a common system...

...neither are the individuals working today to introduce social history into Sovietology intent on justifying Stalin's policies...

...Scholarship and apology are regrettably fused together in this book—and then the social historians are blamed for failing to apply "morality" to their studies...

...As for Jerry Hough's testimony to a Congressional committee shortly before the August coup, he stood alone in his misreading of Mikhail S. Gorbachev's omnipotence and omniscience: Certainly the profession can take (and need take) no responsibility for his views...

...Indeed, a good case can be made that predictive accuracy is never a proper test of scholarship...

...The field did address that theory, long ago, and the consensus was quite clear: The appearance of a few functional similarities—urbanization, bureaucratization—did not make for a corresponding alignment in politics or values...

...In treating the Gorbachev years, for instance, he virtually ignores the sense of promise felt by many Soviet citizens: Their hope would presumably undercut his claim that the system was beyond transformation...

...It would be difficult, if not impossible, to sustain Laqueur's assumption that the revisionists influenced America's Soviet policy...

...J. Arch Getty and Roberta Manning, two of Laqueur's betes noires, had no discernable impact on Washington or on American public opinion...

...Many of his previous works, such as Russia and Germany and Black Hundred, were interesting and original contributions to a competitive field...

...They were not alone, however, in believing the empire to be stronger than it was...

...The Dream That Failed once more offers an impressive display of Laqueur's knowledge and intellectual powers, but his assessment of Sovietology is disappointing...

...Nor can the "Cold War revisionists" be lumped with those seeking, lamely, a new rationale for the purges...

...Surely scholars like Moshe Lewin, Alec Nove and Stephen Cohen (regardless of one's opinion of their arguments) cannot be seen as uncritical apologists for Stalinism...

...We are reminded, too, that there was a measure of sympathy, even enthusiasm, for the Soviet experiment in its early years...