Public CompanyV V: Berlin Wall, 1989 and after
All successful publishers and authors have an impeccable sense of timing and generate literature with an eye upon the calendar. So it isn’t surprising that we have a flood of books on the fall of the Berlin Wall that started the process of disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism in Europe. But what we have is an embarrassment of riches which try to unravel why such an all-embracing system that Alexander Solzhenitsyn described as “all pervasive, paranoid, oppressive, incompetent, lethal” in the latest edition of The First Circle (Harper, $18), came to an unexpected end. Almost everyone had expected that it would have to be killed; instead it collapsed, as if a house had fallen in on itself. What happened?
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If you add the backlist, that is post-1990 books, to the recent lot like Stephen Kotkin: Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (Modern Library, $24); Victor Sebestyen: Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (Pantheon, $30); Nick Thorpe: ’89: The Unfinished Revolution: Power and Powerlessness in Eastern Europe (Reportage Press, £12.99), the books fall into two distinct categories: journalistic accounts that provide a blow-by-blow account of the fall of the Berlin Wall laced with interviews with the leading players, good snappy reading, but that’s it.
Against these are the more substantive studies that provide a background of the Soviet economy and politics and what made the collapse inevitable. Of these, mention must be made of Mikhail Gorbachev: The August Coup: The Truth and the Lessons, Alexei Yurchak: Everything was Forever, Until it was No More; Padma Desai: Conversations on Russia: Reform from Yeltsin to Putin; Dmitri Volkogonov: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire — there are several others, especially Leszek Kolakowski: Main Currents of Marxism, Book Three: The Breakdown. (All three parts are now available in a single volume.)
To answer the question why Soviet communism collapsed, it is necessary to look at the more substantive studies, rather than the journalistic accounts of what happened when and where. The collapse was the culmination of seven decades of Soviet rule and misrule, and an analysis of the collapse generally takes the form of a catalogue of Soviet disorders — the imbalance between military and civilian production, the corruption and stultification of the bureaucracy, the nationalities question and the like. Yet no one expected that the time had come for a collapse. Something must have held the Soviet system together, whatever its fault lines.
Hence the question: How did Gorbachev tamper with the system in such a way that he totally unhinged it? It is truism that the system was held together by the total control of the Communist Party. The communists did not invent the institution of the Party; in their own words, they invented “a party of a new type” that was the only institution which controlled all the levers of power. Whatever ups and downs the Party had from Lenin to Stalin to Krushchev to Brezhnev, it alone kept the centrifugal forces of this immense, mosaic country from breaking apart.
Gorbachev started out by thinking that he could manage economic and political reforms with the cadres and within the traditions of the old Party, that is, “political liberalisation within a strong one-party system, with economic reform that remained within a socialist framework”. But was political liberalisation compatible with a one-party system and economic reform with what passed for socialism in the Soviet Union? Gorbachev realised that he had loosened the dead hand of the Party in order to move forward and so his first move was to substitute state machinery for the Party apparatus.
But the reforms divided and demoralised the Party to the extent it could no longer function as the only political bonding which held the centrifugal forces within the country from flying apart. Gorbachev tried to balance himself from all groups and tendencies but in the end he found himself isolated, as events and his own chosen colleagues turned against him. As an observer put it, “This man of contradictions had become in his last phase too much of a democrat to be a communist and too much a communist to be a democrat. There is something of the tragic hero in him, a victim of his success as well as of his failure.”
Many of the recent books on the collapse of communism in Europe have held that Gorbachev was primarily responsible for its disintegration or at least did nothing to stem the rot inside the system. But that is too facile a view because there were a whole string of factors — economic, technological backwardness, increasing bureaucratisation of the command economy that together made it impossible for the old model to carry on in its old ways. Gorbachev realised this and tried to reform the Party apparatus but failed. You are reminded here of Montesquieu’s comment on the decline of the Romans: “If a particular cause, like the accidental result of a battle has ruined a state, there was a general cause which made the downfall of this state ensue from a single battle.” That general cause has still to be figured out by historians.