The Ghost of Communists Past

Merry Christmas to one and all! The season leads a lot of us to wax nostalgic about all kinds of things. Stephen Cohen, writing at The Nation, is still lamenting the death of the Soviet dream, two decades later.

Most Russians do not share the nearly unanimous Western view that the Soviet Union's "collapse" was "inevitable" because of inherent fatal defects. They believe instead, and for good empirical reasons, that three "subjective" factors broke it up: the unduly rapid and radical way—not too slowly and cautiously, as is said in the West—Gorbachev carried out his political and economic reforms; a power struggle in which Yeltsin overthrew the Soviet state in order to get rid of its president, Gorbachev, and to occupy the Kremlin; and property-seizing Soviet bureaucratic elites, the nomenklatura, who were more interested in "privatizing" the state's enormous wealth in 1991 than in defending it.

In addition, a growing number of Russian intellectuals have come to believe that something essential was tragically lost—a historic opportunity, thwarted for centuries, to achieve the nation's political and economic modernization by continuing, with or without Gorbachev, his Soviet reformation. While the Soviet breakup led American specialists back to cold war–era concepts of historical inevitability, it convinced many of their Russian counterparts that "there are always alternatives in history" and that a Soviet reformation had been one of the "lost alternatives"—a chance to democratize and marketize Russia by methods more gradualist, consensual and less traumatic, and thus more fruitful and less costly, than those adopted after 1991.

It's hard to think of anything more hopeless than defending the possibility that, twenty years ago, things might have gone better.

The life of Vaclav Havel is not something that puts Neil Clark at the Guardian in any mood to celebrate.

No one questions that Havel, who went to prison twice, was a brave man who had the courage to stand up for his views. Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place.

Havel's anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women's rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.

Actually, the question that needs to be asked is whether Clark's piece fills the Guardian's moron quota or if more noxious numbskullery like this is required.

One can only wish that Christopher Hitchens, whom Clark apparently distasted, were still around to skewer this nonsense. Again, Merry Christmas.

Comments

[Donald Pay]

I don't think anyone laments the death of the Soviet system. What they wonder, though, is whether an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary process would result in longer term stability. It's something to consider as the Middle East is going through a similar process now, as North Korean changes dictators and as China evolves slowly.

[DDCSD]

You missed this one from The Times (UK):

"North Korea, for all its faults..."

http://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2011/12/true-to-its-cultural-roots.html

[larry kurtz]

World literacy rates:

Cuba: #2
The United Snakes of Amerika: #45

[larry kurtz]

oops, my error. USA: #20

[caheidelberger]

I'm with you, Ken. The collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the most thrilling moments of my life. To suggest it should have happened any other way is just silly. To suggest Havel was supposed to look on the bright side of the oppressive regime that tried to break him is equally absurd.

[Ken Blanchard]

Donald: read the quote from the Neil Clark in my post again and tell me what part of it went past you. Then read the quote, also from the Guardian, in DDCSD's comment above. Then tell me that no one laments the Soviet System.

[Ken Blanchard]

Cory: once again we are in agreement. The system that, in Clark's words, "put the needs of the majority first" for some reason found it necessary to keep the majority in with an electric fence.

[Jimi]

"put the needs of the majority first"

The problem here is that....the quote is not even accurate. It did not put the needs of the majority first, because if it had then we would see a strong USSR today.

The Soviets made the same old mistake every Socialist seems to make, and that is, you can not control or change human behavior by force. Sure you can get away with it for awhile, but in the long run, humans must have free will to maintain a civilization.

[Dave]

Dmitry Orlov:Lessons From The Soviet Union http://youtu.be/zrz5ucQACo8