“We’re now living in a new world,” Gorbachev said forlornly last week as he finally announced his decision to “discontinue my activities” as Soviet president. The union did not outlast him by long. The next day a remnant of the country’s first freely elected legislature held a sad little meeting and pronounced itself dead. The Soviet regime passed into history at the age of 74, unmourned by millions of survivors, who were more absorbed with building new nations-or finding something to eat.
The collapse was so swift and complete that some Westerners may wonder now why the Soviet Union obsessed and frightened them for decades. Could Moscow ever have been the expansionist menace that inspired so much cold-war defense spending and so many bomb shelters and set off so many political and military confrontations? The perception that worldwide communism was a monolithic and perhaps unstoppable force turned out to be mistaken. Khrushchev’s boast-“We will bury you”-has been neatly reversed. But any regime that could sacrifice its own people by the millions had to be considered lethally dangerous to others. The West stood up to the challenge. Containment, the strategy articulated by George Kennan in 1947, worked in the end.
Yet the fall of the Soviet state struck few notes of triumph overseas. “Democracy has prevailed in its worldwide struggle against tyranny; why are democrats not dancing in the streets?” asked conservative columnist William Safire. Perhaps it was because Gorbachev gave up the ghost on Christmas Day, while many Westerners were distracted. Perhaps it was because the Soviet collapse had been anticipated for so long, and its consequences were soberingly difficult to control or even to predict (page 17). Or perhaps there was a realization that the failure of Soviet communism was not necessarily a victory for multiparty democracy and free enterprise, alien ideas that have not yet taken deep root in the frozen soil of the newborn Commonwealth of Independent States. The system invented by Lenin and Stalin was destroyed by its own inner contradictions-as Marxist theorists might say in some other context. The state depended for its existence on total, centralized political and economic control by the Soviet Communist Party. But that leaden hand eventually produced a country that was simply too backward to compete with the rest of the world and too weak politically to hang onto its empire in Eastern Europe. The result was a crisis of self-confidence in Soviet communism. The controls had to be relaxed. Dictatorship turned wimpish, and reform quickly made tyranny untenable.
The Soviet system was an epochal social experiment that captured the imagination of half the world while it appalled and frightened the other half. On the ruins of autocracy, world war and civil strife, it built a new society based on the principle of equality and the abolition of private property. “I have been over into the future, and it works,” radical American journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote in 1931, after a visit to the Soviet Union. Marshaling raw resources, both human and material, the Soviet state built a huge industrial base. Despite vast suffering, it summoned up the fighting spirit to defeat the Nazi juggernaut. It produced stunning scientific achievements: a Soviet atomic bomb in 1949, sputnik in 1957, Yuri Gagarin’s first manned spaceflight in 1961. “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side,” Khrushchev bragged in 1956.
From almost the beginning, however, the Soviet system betrayed its own ideals in the most violent and sordid ways. Beginning in 1929, Stalin reintroduced a kind of serfdom when he forced most of the country’s peasants onto collective farms. When the peasants resisted, millions of the more prosperous farmers, known pejoratively as kulaks, were stripped of their property and exiled to Siberia. Then the state wiped out lingering defiance through a deliberate “terror famine” in 1932. All told, as many as 11 million people died during collectivization. Millions more perished in Stalin’s great purges in the late 1930s, when the dictator’s critics and opponents-real or imagined-were marked for extermination or disappearance into the gulag. “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,” Stalin was quoted as saying. His crimes were denounced by Khrushchev in 1956 and later, more effectively, by Gorbachev. But the sycophants who survived the purges furnished the presiding deadwood for Leonid Brezhnev’s regime.
Western socialists began to turn against Soviet communism as early as the 1930s, when Stalin’s show trials made gorges rise. By Brezhnev’s heyday, genuine belief in communism had all but died out in the Soviet Union itself. It was replaced by bitter cynicism and by a deadly form of egalitarianism that unconsciously prefers shared misery to individual advancement. Rigid central authority was stifling the economy and papering over the ethnic conflicts that would eventually help tear the country apart. A gigantic military buildup-prompted by Khrushchev’s humiliation in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962-was impoverishing the nation. After successful interventions in a number of “fraternal socialist” countries, including Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Kremlin went one bridge too far and tried to subdue unruly Afghanistan, miring itself in a rocky quagmire.
That set the stage for Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985 and the well-meaning reforms that within a few years would destroy the system rather than save it. “He didn’t know how to make sausage, but he did know how to provide freedom,” the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda said of Gorbachev, not unkindly. But for the moment, at least, most citizens of the former Soviet Union were more concerned with obtaining sausages than freedom. Gorbachev himself insisted that his policies were “historically correct,” though he admitted to “certain mistakes and blunders” in execution. He said he would remain in politics somehow–“I have big plans,” he told reporters enigmatically-and he warned President Bush: “Watch out for Russia. They will zig and zag. It won’t all be straightforward.”
The principal successor to eight Soviet leaders is Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who gave up on the Communist Party only in 1990, after it gave up on him. Yeltsin thwarted the communists’ final use of force during the coup last August. “We are sick and tired of pessimism,” he said the day Gorbachev quit. “The people … need some faith, finally.” It has been decades since the Soviet Union gave its own people something worthy of their faith, if it ever did. Rebuilding their hope may be Yeltsin’s toughest challenge.
