A Crisis of Conscience
POWELL, DAVID E.
A Crisis of Conscience Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism By Paul Hollander Yale. 368 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by David E. Powell Shelby Cullom Davis...
...the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus announced the formation of a Commonwealth of Independent States...
...As much as I rejoiced in the collapse of Soviet Communism," Hollander writes, "it took me by complete surprise...
...Harvard University This is a gem of a book...
...The later horrors—agricultural collectivization, forced industrialization, the elimination of Lenin's closest colleagues plus other "purges" against real or imaginary enemies, the closing or destruction of churches and the arrest or murder of religious functionaries—all served to undermine the Communist desire for legitimacy...
...When Gorbachev replaced Dmitri Kunaev, an ethnic Kazakh who was First Secretary of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, with an ethnic Russian in 1986, he suddenly found himself confronting rampaging mobs of Kazakhs who rightly felt they were being treated like colonial subjects...
...Seventy-seven per cent of the population voted "yes...
...This is an important book precisely because it demonstrates how the absence of political will and personal belief ultimately brought down the Soviet Union and its East European satellites...
...At the same time, responding to a second question, an overwhelming majority endorsed the popular election of a president of Russia...
...at the same time, though, he was the leader, and it was his determination to engineer major reforms while keeping the political system authoritarian and the economic system Socialist, that caused the USSR's disintegration...
...In March 1991a referendum there asked, "Do you support the preservation of the union as a renewed federation of sovereign republics in which the rights of a person of any nationality are fully guaranteed...
...Virtually every previous study has attributed the USSR's implosion chiefly to economic stagnation, the increasing financial burden of trying to keep up with U.S...
...Two months later, with a vote imminent on a new "union treaty" designed to prevent the breakup of the Soviet Union, a group of Communist die-hards tried to engineer a coup...
...Second, did any of the Soviet regimes ever attain legitimacy, at least as that term is understood in the West...
...Political and economic considerations are not ignored...
...After all, the Bolsheviks seized power in a coup d'état, disbanded the Constituent Assembly when they received only 25 per cent of the popular vote, and then fought a civil war against the majority of the population...
...Yeltsin behaved heroically, and fissiparous tendencies accelerated almost everywhere in the USSR...
...Hollander's two central findings are what make his volume so intriguing...
...1) The leaders in Communist Europe suffered a crisis of conscience, especially after Nikita S. Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" at the 20th Soviet Party Congress in 1956, then again after the invasions of Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968...
...Years ago, in a wholly different context, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote about "the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts...
...On December 1, Ukraine voted for independence...
...First, shouldn't we assign greater responsibility to Gorbachev himself...
...Wheaton College...
...Can one imagine a more pathetic acknowledgment of failure...
...Moreover, while accepting the significance of the factors cited by other specialists in their explanations, he did not find them "quite satisfying...
...In June Yeltsin was elected to that office...
...before the week was out...
...There is room for disagreement here...
...We are in Hollander's debt for bringing together a rich array of quotations that reveal the doubts and concerns of the men against whom the Cold War was fought...
...Thus he decided to focus instead on "the attitudes and beliefs of individuals who were instrumental in both the maintenance and the disintegration of the Communist system," particularly in the Soviet Union, Hungary and Czechoslovakia...
...fellow...
...Yet even if one accepts that Soviet and East European leaders were cynical, that they generally used the ideology of Marxism-Leninism to rationalize (rather than to guide) their decisions, and did actually undergo an erosion of confidence in the final years of Communist rule, two questions remain...
...As a result, they lacked the conviction of their "true-believer" predecessors—and wavered in the face of challenges...
...As readers of his other works might expect, he also reasons persuasively and elegantly...
...military technology, ethnic friction, and the weakness and/or indecisiveness of Gorbachev...
...Some may have doubts about the author's reliance on books by former functionaries who defected decades ago, and by officials who were tossed on the trash heap of history more recently—including odious figures like Vladimir Pozner and Georgi Arbatov...
...Shortly afterward, responding to the demands of the Armenian minority in the Azerbaijani enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, Gorbachev invited representatives of the two sides to Moscow, thereby signaling that the USSR's internal borders were negotiable...
...Perhaps most important was the "nationality question...
...Similar problems affect any source, however, whether it be Pravda, a Central Committee resolution, or an interview with a Party or government official...
...Using the archives that have been opened and the memoirs prominent figures have written since the abortive August 1991 coup against President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, it examines the unraveling of the Communist regime in the Soviet Union from a highly unusual perspective...
...A backlash in Russia followed...
...2) Most of those who became disillusioned with the official ideology, or the contrast between official rhetoric and everyday reality (especially the privileges for the elite), had experienced or witnessed utterly unnecessary cruelties during the Stalin era...
...Davis Center for Russian Studies...
...The bloc nations, he observes, "seemed formidably strong, yet most of them collapsed like the proverbial stack of cards, confounding all of us grimly contemplating their stubborn persistence despite their unpopularity, inefficiency, and amorality...
...On December 25 Gorbachev resigned, and on December 31 the Soviet Union was formally dissolved...
...Possibly the victory over Nazi Germany and the transformation of the USSR into a Great Power lent some legitimacy to Kremlin rule, but in that case too the costs may have been greater than the gains that accrued to the leaders...
...During the era of glasnost and perestroika, Gorbachev frequently called upon his compatriots to make the Soviet Union a "normal" and "civilized" country...
...Indeed, Hollander has done a prodigiousjob of research, backing up written sources with interviews of many Party, government, police, and cultural officials...
...By the 1980s, more and more Communist officials were forced to confront the "brutal facts" for which they, or their predecessors, were responsible...
...Literally dozens of scholars have done so—not to mention Gorbachev himself and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin...
...In the process, it scrutinizes as well the decline and fall of the Soviet clones in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and, to a lesser degree, the other so-called satellite states...
...Individually and collectively, all of these factors played powerful roles in undermining the strength, stability and territorial integrity of the USSR...
...Reviewed by David E. Powell Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of Russian Studies...
...Subsequent demands for greater autonomy, then for independence, were led by Lithuania, but practically all Soviet republics echoed the Lithuanians' aspirations...
...Acting more like the Marx Brothers than Militant Marxists, they were humiliated...
...Such individuals are often more anxious to promote an image of statesmanship than acknowledge their weaknesses...
...To be sure, he is a perfect example of the phenomenon Hollander describes...
...But this book, as its title suggests, takes a new tack...
...But he devotes his primary attention to "the human beings who had to confront and deal with these problems and whose inability to do so was the most direct cause of the collapse...
...Nevertheless, Hollander's careful reconstruction of the confused mindset of various Communist leaders enhances our understanding of agreat experiment gone awry...
...He is, of course, right: Economic, political and ethnic difficulties were becoming increasingly grave, but it was the decline of faith, the reluctance to use coercion—the end, for a while, of ideology—that caused a decaying empire to crumble...
...Paul Hollander, a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, is of course not the first to address the collapse of the Soviet Empire...
...The unrelieved economic failures of the system," Hollander points out, "provide the background of both the critical loss of popular legitimacy and the drastically weakened political will of the leaders that led to the unraveling of the system...
...Political Will and Personal Belief, in short, is an attempt "to gauge the disaffection of those who held power and to compare the dynamics of disillusionment in elite groups in various Communist states...
...It was a fateful blunder that stimulated and reinforced "bourgeois nationalist" inclinations elsewhere in the country...
Vol. 82 • December 1999 • No. 15
