The Writer Who Destroyed an Empire
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In my opinion, no single factor destroyed the empire. However, if I were to pick the most important one I'd say Gorbachev.
More importantly, it was humane. We sit in comfy chairs with Starbucks lattes in front of us arguing the pros and cons of Communism. But in Communism, people died for no good reason. People had no free will. People had no ability to express a thought freely. Gorbachev's policies (implemented from within the regime!) signaled a change. That's no small feat.
Similarly, in the USSR in 80s and 90s, there were different groups. In 1956 and 1968 the hardliners held majority, so no socialism with a human face for you. But 1991, thanks in some large part to Gorbachev, things were different.
Yes, he was a slow moving, verbose demagogue, and I hated him for that. But one has to admire that he held back enormous mass of the Soviet machine build around Communist Party, KGB, and the military, armed with thousand of nuclear weapons. One wrong step and the world might have been different today, with a Geiger counters drumming a happy beat.
I think we ought to give him credit for it. We owe it to him.
I think we overestimate the ability of elites to steer. They mostly react in a slow and inefficient way to changing environment. Remember fall of the Berlin wall? KGB and others were in state of shock. They were impotent. I am not saying that one moron couldn't have pressed red button, but there is always risk of that.
IIRC, this article also stated that the subsequent pains as even the dependable/reliable parts of society become unreliable tends to lead to a new oppressive regime, which is why truly straightforward oppressive->relatively democratic regime changes are so rare.
I'm likely torturing the actual article with my twisted memories (this would be, like, 15 years ago), but those are the points that stuck with me. If that article was accurate, you could then credit Gorbachev AND assume he wasn't intending the future that came about.
It is depressing though, because if true, it's an argument against incremental reforms.
https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Revolution-Crane-Brinton/dp/0...
But also, Congressional Representative Charlie Wilson, single-handedly helped to get appropriations (matched by Saudi Arabia) to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan with CIA funding of the Mujahideen in the Soviet–Afghan War [1]. This was the Soviet Vietnam.
Tom Hanks starred as Charlie Wilson in the 2007 movie, Charlie Wilson's War[2].
The movie was based on the 2003 book, "Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History"[3]
Both the film and the book are worth watching/reading. Truly an incredible story.
Public facing Charlie Wilson was a playboy. Privately behind he scenes he was on two Congressional subcommittees that doled out black-ops funding to the CIA.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Afghan_War
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Wilson%27s_War_(film)
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Charlie-Wilsons-War-Extraordinary-Ope...
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2016/01/21/oil-pric...
The Americans destroyed the Soviet Empire, that’s just a fact. Gorbachev was reacting, not acting. “Tear down this wall” — and that’s exactly what happened.
Look up Leonid Brezhnev's era. 18 years of rot and stagnation. It was all over except the crying before Reagan even took office.
It's not that long actually. For example, here is Solzhenitsin about western press (keep in mind, this is 1978):
Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislative power, the executive, and the judiciary. And one would then like to ask: By what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the communist East a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has granted Western journalists their power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives?
Any brief accounts of what his predictions were? I don't want to read The Gulag Archipelago. Something I could read, watch or listen to in 30 minutes would be ideal.
I have come across a few accounts of how the USSR collapsed. Some of them mentioned Solzhenitsyn briefly. As I recall, the major factors were political scheming and manipulation, followed by opposition of dissent, followed by opening up of the press, which finally showed the citizens how bad they really had it there. Gorbachev tried various measures to handle the situation, but they all proved ineffective. That's the version I know.
Solzhenitsyn may have been a great writer. But as far as I know, his role in the collapse of the USSR was minor. The end result would have followed pretty much the same timeline.
This is the best short explanation I have come across: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqt3U48MFcY
[0]: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2018/summer/statement/tiny-vi...
IMHO, this novel does a very good job at capturing one key aspect of gulag; It was not just all about "oppressor vs oppressed", but was a complex society with a particular set of rules.
If you likes the works of Primo Levi, I'd highly recommend you to take a copy.
I can also guarantee that after reading you are done believing Marxism will bring any good to civilization forever.
And also don't be surprised when you get some very heavy emotional responses while reading. Yes -- what he went through was that bad.
In any case, I very much recommend it to anyone flirting with socialism or communism, because it is a very sobering account of things that can go wrong, most of which most of us cannot begin to imagine.
My hypothesis is that the conditions imposed in the name of communism, and not communism itself, destroyed the USSR.
In particular, success - especially political or military success, became more dangerous to achieve than failure.
Not even Georgy Zhukov was spared a certain level of wrath, which was probably more of a warning to potential coup plotters than anything to do with Zhukov himself.
The hypocrisy he mentions in his work in Russia seems to be observed because he grew under communism. If he'd grown up in America, he might have written about some other injustices.
There's a sense in which that is true. The problem is, "the conditions imposed in the name of communism" are intrinsic to communism itself, because it is not a political system that works for human beings as they are. So the imposition of massive amount of force, and the subsequent second- and third- and so-on-order effects that come with that might as well be accounted as part of Communism, because otherwise people don't conform to Communism.
I can imagine hypothetical intelligent species for which Communism might work fairly well, based on looking at social structures seen on Earth and extrapolating to what they may look like if the species in question were human-level intelligent. But it would be something like bees or ants, writ large. Trying to impose a bee or ant system on humans is utterly doomed to failure. That's not a value judgment. Maybe it's a terrible thing. It's just a true statement; humans, fundamentally, aren't bees or ants. You need that aspect of direct relationship for this to be stable.
Fundamentally, a political system based on "you'll do this work happily, and you'll voluntarily send all these resources to people you are not particularly related to, and hopefully they'll be good enough to supply you in return" is just doomed, evolutionarily. It's pretty easy to see why it would fail if you try to imagine some animal species working that way; even if you somehow imposed that system onto a population of bacteria or something, I absolutely guarantee it would evolve away in a handful of generations. It's beyond unstable into the actively self-sabotaging. Adding lots of human intelligence doesn't really change that characteristic of communism.
(Now, when it gets really scary is when people start deciding they just need to remake people then. Getting people to conform to political systems rather than getting political systems to conform to people is one of the greatest evils of our time.)
Another point a Trotskyst might make is that Communism can only succeed if adopted all over the world. I don't think that a country like Cuba makes for a good data point on anything except embargoes.
> if adopted all over the world
Not a chance.
Neither is Norway a good data point from which we can extrapolate the viability of Communism. Norway has a population of 5.5 million - smaller than the San Francisco Bay Area. It's also swimming in oil money.
It's probably easier to motivate people to work for the benefit of the whole community if the community is defined as a small number of people with whom you share a culture and background and live close to you.
Maybe that's why communism works occasionally on communes, but anything more expansive requires the brutal application of force to keep people in line.
> The problem is, "the conditions imposed in the name of communism" are intrinsic to communism itself, because it is not a political system that works for human beings as they are.
And what would that be? The following?
>Fundamentally, a political system based on "you'll do this work happily, and you'll voluntarily send all these resources to people you are not particularly related to, and hopefully they'll be good enough to supply you in return" is just doomed, evolutionarily.
The short historical period where this could be somewhat true would be first few years after the Russian revolution and during the civil war where the Bolshevik government had nothing to give the farmers for their produce. They did however get rather useless money notes IIRC. The use of force that followed by the bolsheviks was in no way universally accepted among communists & socialist at that time or since.
> (Now, when it gets really scary is when people start deciding they just need to remake people then. Getting people to conform to political systems rather than getting political systems to conform to people is one of the greatest evils of our time.)
While I agree with this in some sense, I also think it's quite obvious that what's sometimes called human nature varies drastically, and are in fact nurture rather than nature. Some societies have no concept of money, some no concept of marriage, no concept of a nuclear family, some despise competitiveness, and so on.
...for starters, all family members other than the father would be locked at home 24/7, forbidden from speaking to people outside the family, and sometimes even from looking out of the window. They would be randomly abused for no reason. Every day they would have to sing a song about how their family is the best in the world... and because they would have no information about what happens outside the house, half of them would actually believe it.
People, please read The Gulag Archipelago and stop making such absurd analogies! Yeah, the book has many pages, but it explains a system that tortured millions of people to death, and has many sympathizers worldwide even today, so it's not like your time will be wasted on something irrelevant.